The case is one of guilt by association. The men are targeted not for any illegal action but for where they have traveled, for their religious beliefs, and for the company they keep. The open-ended accusations give prosecutors a freer hand to use circumstantial evidence and innuendo.

Such attacks on U.S. citizens build on the sweeps unleashed by cops against immigrants from the Mideast and South Asia after Sept. 11, 2001. Hundreds have been rounded up in a so-called terrorism investigation, although the deportations and jailings have centered on violations of immigration law.

Federal jailers continue to hold at least two other citizens, Yasser Esam Hamdi and Abdullah al-Muhajir, using the argument that they are "enemy combatants." On this basis the government claims it is under no obligation--and no deadline--to bring them to trial.

These actions trample on basic constitutional safeguards such as protection against unlawful search and seizure and the right to due process. Such guarantees are the by-product of struggles by workers and farmers for social progress in the face of the employers, their cops, and their courts.

Workers’ rights go much broader, and deeper, than what has been codified in bourgeois law. They include the ability of workers to organize unions, to strike, and to take political action, as well as to be shielded from the arbitrary brutality and injustice of the exploiters and their agents. It is those rights that are in the sights of the U.S. rulers today as they move in anticipation of the social struggles and class combat the crisis of their system will engender.

It is important for class-conscious workers to explain what is behind these attacks and to demand the release of the six men in Buffalo, as well as the hundreds of other detainees rounded up by the FBI and immigration cops; to protest the incarceration under subhuman conditions of hundreds at the U.S. prison camp at the Guantánamo naval base on Cuban territory; and to oppose Washington’s imperialist drive to war abroad. Taking such a stance strengthens our ability to fight the increasing assault by the bosses and their government on workers and farmers.
 
 
Related article:
Jailing of U.S. citizens in ‘al Qaeda’ raid sparks outrage  
 
 
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