BK/NY – Tuesday, September 29th – Birthday Cards for Imprisoned Comrades

WHAT: Political Prisoner Letter-Writing Dinner
WHEN: 7pm sharp, Tuesday, September 29th, 2015
WHERE: The Base – 1302 Myrtle Avenue Brooklyn, New York 11221 (directions below)
NOTE: The Base is on the ground floor, is wheelchair accessible, and has a gender neutral toilet.
COST: Free

It’s no secret that winter is the baby-making season and that leaves October as the month with the most birthdays. As we know, our imprisoned comrades are folks coming from the same movements as us, not some rare breed of super-human. As a result a disproportionate number of them also share October births. In fact, there are so many upcoming political prisoner birthdays that NYC ABC is focusing our entire upcoming political prisoner letter-writing dinner on sending cards to them. So come join us for some good food and sign a whole grip of cards. We’ll see you for supper.

BK/NY – Tuesday, March 31 – Letter-writing to Y12 Plowshares Prisoners

WHAT: Political Prisoner Letter-Writing Dinner
WHEN: 7pm sharp, Tuesday, March 31st, 2015
WHERE: The Base – 1302 Myrtle Avenue Brooklyn, New York 11221 (directions below)
NOTE: The Base is on the ground floor, is wheelchair accessible, and has a gender neutral toilet.
COST: Free
March is one of those months where NYC ABC is lucky enough to host three letter-writing dinners. This upcoming Tuesday, we will be writing a trio of radical Catholics. We know what you’re  thinking— is this some kind of April Fool’s joke? Radical Catholics exist? Let us assure you that they do and they have been trespassing at military sites and smashing up equipment belonging to the military and war profiteers for over 25 years now.

We will be joined by Carmen Trotta of the Catholic Worker, who will speak about the case. Carmen has served on the National Committee of the War Resister’s League and is a founding member of Witness Against Torture.

The three activists we are writing– Sister Megan Rice, Michael Walli and Gregory Boertje-Obed, are from the Plowshares movement. In 2012, the three cut holes in the fence of  the U.S. Department of Energy’s nuclear weapons facility at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.  Once inside the “secure” area, they hung protest banners on a uranium storage site, poured human blood and spray-painted the walls with anti-war slogans. In May 2013, the activists were convicted on the charges of damaging property & intending to injure, interfere with, or obstruct the national defense of the United States. Walli and Boertje-Obed were sentenced to just over 5 years in federal prison, while Sister Megan is serving a 3 year sentence at nearby MDC Brooklyn.
More information: transformnowplowshares.wordpress.com

We expect to see you on Tuesday. If you can’t make it, please take the time to write letters (and send books) to the prisoners:
Megan Rice #88101-020
MDC Brooklyn
Post Office Box 329002
Brooklyn, New York 11232

Michael R Walli #92108-020
FCI McKean
Post Office Box 8000
Bradford, Pennsylvania 16701

Gregory Boertje-Obed #08052-016
USP Leavenworth
Post Office Box 1000
Leavenworth, Kansas 66048

BK/NY – Sunday, April 12 – Jake Conroy On Activism, Repression, and Imprisonment

WHAT: Former Political Prisoner Jake Conroy
WHEN: 7pm sharp, Sunday, April 12th, 2015
WHERE: The Base – 1302 Myrtle Avenue Brooklyn, New York 11221 (directions below)
NOTE: The Base is on the ground floor, is wheelchair accessible, and has a gender neutral toilet.
COST: FREE

NYC ABC is happy to co-sponsor this event with the National Lawyers Guild’s NLG-NYC Animal Rights Activism Committee, who, among other things, provide legal support and resources to animal rights activists.

Jake Conroy is a long-time activist, designer, and writer based in San Francisco, California. As a co-founder of Ocean Defense International, he helped lead the first ever disruption of a whale hunt in US coastal waters, putting himself between the hunter and the hunted. He also helped build the foundation of Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty USA (SHAC USA), one of the most successful grassroots animal rights campaigns in history. Due to his involvement with SHAC USA, he was a co-defendant in the SHAC7 case and was sentenced to 48 months in federal prison. Jake is currently working at an international environmental non-profit campaigning against corporate polluters. He can also be found speaking around the US, and working on the projects he helped co-found— Bite Back Magazine, the Animal Defense League San Francisco, and the blog Plant Based on a Budget.

Jake will speak about his involvement in SHAC USA and the repression they experienced from the US government and corporate investigators, as well by the Bureau of Prisons while incarcerated. He will discuss being the target of a multi-agency terrorism investigation, learning he was on a high-profile prisoners list, and navigating living a life branded as a terrorist in post-9/11 society.

BK/NY – Wednesday, April 9th – FOIA Street Fighter Ryan Shapiro at The Base

WHAT: Ryan Shapiro on Fighting to Expose the U.S. Government’s War on Mandela, Occupy, Animal Rights, & More
WHEN: 8:00pm, Wednesday, April 9th
WHERE: The Base – 1302 Myrtle Avenue Brooklyn, New York 11221 (Directions below)
COST: Free, but donations are appreciated.
Come join NYC ABC and The Base for a discussion with “FOIA Street Fighter” Ryan Shapiro.

Will Potter has called Ryan Shapiro “The FBI’s Worst Nightmare,” and a recent article about Shapiro’s work opened by declaring, “Depending on whom you ask, Ryan Shapiro is either the country’s ‘FOIA superhero’ or a ‘threat to national security.’” Shapiro is a longtime radical social justice activist and now also a PhD candidate in MIT’s Department of Science, Technology, & Society (HASTS). Shapiro’s research focuses on the political functioning of national security and the policing of dissent. To this end, he currently has over 700 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests in motion with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and National Security Agency (NSA), as well as numerous ongoing lawsuits against these agencies for failure to comply with his FOIA requests. The FBI is even now arguing that Shapiro’s dissertation research on FBI campaigns against animal rights and environmental protesters is itself a threat to national security.

A recent revelation resulting from Shapiro’s research is the FBI monitoring of Occupy Houston. As important as the monitoring itself, is the fact that the FBI uncovered a plot to assassinate Occupy “leaders,” yet did not share this information with potentially endangered activists.

Additionally, through his FOIA research and lawsuits against the FBI, Shapiro has exposed FBI attempts to bring Animal Enterprise Terrorism charges against animal rights activists conducting undercover investigations of factory farms. Notably, Shapiro is also one of the plaintiffs in the federal lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act.

And just last week, Shapiro and his attorney filed a law suit against the NSA, FBI, CIA, and DIA for their failure to comply with Freedom of Information Act requests filed shortly after the death of Nelson Mandela. In this particular series of FOIA requests, Shapiro is trying to determine the role the United States played in Mandela’s 1962 arrest, and to answer why the U.S. government kept Mandela on a terrorist watch list until 2008 and what qualified him as a terrorist in the first place.