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Information from the Free Leah website was just posted on Facebook that indicates Pacific Northwest grand jury resister Leah-Lynn Plante has been released from prison. The statement is relatively short and quite alarming, despite what should be very good news. I don’t want to just cut and paste the whole thing; please go to the link. It begins as follows:
First and foremost, do not panic.
Leah wanted for us to express these points to you with this news:
- She is extremely traumatized and experienced a lot of very, very bad things, but she is alive. The state of her mental health is also very bad.
- She asks that people do not jump to wild conclusions about her release because they do not apply.
- She spent her whole time in SHU / Administrative Detention (solitary confinement) and was told that that is where she would stay for the duration of her incarceration, up to 18 months. She was classified as “different” from Matt and Kteeo.
For anyone unfamiliar with Leah, Kevin wrote about her just a few days ago here.
Google and bing searches turn up no additional information; I’ll update if/when more becomes available.
UPDATE 1: This appears to be another site where Leah posts. I say “appears” because I can’t say for sure that this was posted by Leah. I’m taking everything with a grain of salt until more information becomes available on the Free Leah page, which seems to be a little more official. In the meantime, Leah, if you are indeed reading what the internet has to say about you, let me say this: I am holding you in my heart today, along with that “new world” that so many of us are trying to make possible. Whatever happened to you, please know that you are not alone. There are a whole bunch of us out here who have your back.
29 Comments
My God, hotflashcarol. I’d missed Kevin’s report, and coupled with this news, I’m alternately chilled to the bone and aflame with rage.
I remember the term ‘administrative detention’ dodge from a post I did on solitary confinement, an evil that this nation uses as a political tool to chill dissent. And we do it to children for some incomprehensible reason.
More than ever, we need to bring a people’s democracy to America, and we know what that will take in the end. Rebuilding from the ground up.
Hang in there; I can feel your feelings from here.
And: rec’d.
Thanks Wendy. I posted this the minute I saw it and during the past hour or so have been mulling it over. I’m guessing the “don’t jump to wild conclusions about her release” means “don’t assume she caved and decided to cooperate.” I couldn’t possibly judge this brave young woman no matter what happened, except to say that so far she has been nothing short of heroic.
I don’t want to jump to wild conclusions about any of it, but it appears that, at the very least, she was held for a week in solitary confinement with the threat of 18 months of the same hanging over her head. Among the possibilities are that they tortured her to the point that she made some sort of deal, or they tortured her to the point that someone stepped in and made them stop.
It’s hard to know where the lines are anymore. What with the eight-hour-long “disappearing” of Stein and Honkala and this – whatever this is – with Leah, it’s clear that we are quickly descending into madness.
Add in the Parisian on Grey Dog’s post. I’d echo timesthree’s saying that ‘Anarchist’ is the new smear, but adding that it’s another boogeyman to DHS. Not to mention, the dangerous peace activists who require monitoring by the state spying apparatus. So many dangers, so many ways to provide cautionary tales for those who dare to defy ‘the new normals’.
I won’t leap to any conclusions, but I hope the young woman does find folks to debrief her, and help her traumas.
Madness. Yes.
Haven’t had a chance to read Grey Dog’s posts yet but I am sad to hear that Paris is also on our list of outrages (is there something more outrageous than “outrage”? Because that word just ain’t doing it for me today).
First they came for the anarchists . . . that phrase has been overused a lot lately, but in my lifetime, it has never felt more true. The scariest thing for me is that the horrors I can imagine seem not just possible, but almost likely. The fact that they are singling out so many young people is very, very depressing.
We live in an authoritarian police state where the putative protections of political speech and activity enshrined in the Constitution are contemptuously ignored with impunity and where the press is a complicit party. The gratuitous brutality and sadism employed no longer surprises me.
This is where lesser evilism leads, Obamabots.
If Romney gets elected, we’ll end up with a DOJ and FBI that routinely terrorizes people for their political beliefs.
That would never happen under a Democratic administration.
Oops…
It may be wishful thinking on my part, but that’s the way I read it.
What’s left of my idealism makes me hope that our few brave “progressives” in Congress might stand up to a President Romney if he started acting like Obama. But probably not.
I hope that Leah didn’t cooperate but much more than that, I hope she recovers from whatever happened to her.
Gratuitous really gets to the heart of it, doesn’t it. I guess it’s what we should expect from a commander in chief who makes jokes about predator drones.
Carol, thank you so much for bringing us this news. My body hurts for her and I certainly hope that her story gets plastered across the globe!
They’d make a show of standing up to him. Gotta have fodder for the fundraising appeals to the gullible.
In they end, they’d let him have his way, much the same as they did with Bush, but at least they’d slow him down with their posturing. Not that that is necessarily a good thing, but at least it would keep a counter-narrative, albeit a weak one, alive in the media.
.
Me too.
File it under: “Questions Americans need not ask anymore.”
Thanks, hfc. I appreciate the news.
Just have to say, BEST name on the tubes!!!
HotFlashCarol
Thanks for the news, hotflashcarol. Makes me sad and angry to imagine of what that poor girl may have been put through. The shredding of the constitution continues, unabated. Our government, all 3 branches, is fast becoming illegitimate. I hope the public-at-large will begin to recognize this soon.
Thanks for reading and for caring, everyone. I hope there is more news soon. I just searched again and there certainly isn’t anything from the MSM or, more significantly, the Feds – which leads me to believe (or at least hope) that they don’t have anything to brag about and they’d rather this just go away. Of course, they are still holding two other people. There have been numerous solidarity actions for the grand jury resisters, and I suspect there will be more once we have more details on Leah’s ordeal.
I’ve been looking, too, off an on, and have only followed some false leads. The healthy and empathetic thought/prayer energy directed toward Leah-Lynn can only help, imo. My questions about what happened in court the various times seem…almost irrelevant.
She (or her comrades in her name) asks us not to jump to conclusions; that works for me.
Indeed. It’s probably also wise to remember that so many of the people who turn up in the news – at least our news – were not seeking attention and may have no experience in dealing with it. It must be bizarre and frightening to have people online talking about you all of a sudden. I didn’t really know anything about Leah until I saw some of the posts on FB early on that just referred to the grand jury resisters, and I didn’t pay attention to the names until I read Kevin’s article last week. But her video statement left me in tears. What kind of monster tortures young women like that?
Me too, timesthree – following this story, as I have been (although I didn’t see this yet, since I was away from the interwebs all day) one of the things I recall was a discrepancy in the dates of when the we looking into her, vs. the date of the mayday action they claimed was the reason they began looking into her. Or some such. In short, I suspect that “they” discovered that they were without much of a legal leg to stand on and thus had to release her.
Perhaps, I am too optimistic. Always something for me to keep in mind. I tend to lean for the lightest shade of dark that is in view. But let us trust that it is more akin to that than anything else.
Apoplectic? Outrage-2.0?
I am of the opinion that solitary confinement is a passive form of torture. Don’t get me started on the subject wendydavies mentions about doing this to children who are incarcerated, I would have to start pouring glasses of wine.
Thank you for the post. I had missed it, although I have been following it. No time to day to log onto the computer. Like you, I hold her in my heart – my fervent wish being that there is one in her world, who opens their arms and says,”Tell me all of it. Leave nothing out”. Because only in the telling of the story of what happened to us, can we hear our story, and thus with time, move beyond it. Scary times, eh, that we find ourselves in?
rec’d.
I need to do more research, but I am not sure that they ever had anything on Leah, other than her refusal to testify against others at a grand jury.
I avoided wine tonight out of fear I’d drink the entire bottle.
She at least hadn’t been charged with any crime, if that’s what you mean.
In Natasha Lennard‘s piece at Salon, she mentioned Leah’s statement at tumbler. I hadn’t scrolled down on it yesterday to catch her message, a portion of which was railing against commenters who chose to objectify her because of her looks, calling them her ‘enemies’.
At the tag end of Kevin’s piece, a commenter had said at the end of his comment that she ‘is a hottie’, which was pretty disturbing.
Good morning, wendydavis. Yeah, that’s what I was thinking of when I said she probably had no intention of ever being the talk of the internets. Patriarchy still reigns supreme – I thought maybe our generation would raise up less chauvinistic children, but some twenty-something men act like they were born in 1950.
Hmmmm – the MSM appears to be behind the curve on this one. This story in the LA Times was published yesterday but it makes no mention of the fact that Leah has been released.
Some interesting quotes, to say the least. Emily Langlie saying that they were jailed to compel testimony: ‘it wasn’t punitive, it was coercive’.
Was this ‘a mistake’? :
Had I seen Leah’s message, I would have gotten your drift about being thrown into the internet spotlight. Many people have evolved on that issue, and I should be glad there was just the one sexist comment on Kevin’s thread.
I know, that “coercive” comment freaked me out too.
I don’t know whether the release of that affidavit was a mistake or not; are you thinking they did it on purpose to scare the protestors? I assume everything I write online is monitored or at least collected; I have no idea where we inconvenient women fit on the hierarchy of terra. I’ve been scared ever since we discovered that OPD had a Binder of Occupiers. :)
I was also thinking about Leah and her friends and family just having to deal with the press (not that the press is very interested!), especially given the threat she is under. I imagine that the NLG or somebody is advising them, but still, how terrifying to think that one wrong word might land you back in jail.
Yes, the ‘mistake’ seemed hardly that. That the fusion centers seem to amount to TIA without all the real-time cameras (or are there?), and NDAA laws, not too many civil liberties protections any longer/s, the ‘monitoring’ of the ‘several Portland activists’ proved they were the black-clad, tra la las…would be threatening and coercive in itself. Especially as Leah says she wasn’t even *in Seattle* on May Day.
I’m making myself crazy trying to find a comment stream on one of the links that had a comment asking about her (supposed) attorney, and I thought the last name was Meira, but I can’t find the stream, nor the name. Googling her name and NLG brought up this page, but of no probative value.
Part of my confusion was what Plante did at the various GJ hearings: did she refuse to take the stand, did she cite her rights under X,Y,Z amendments, or what. May have been I read wrong, but of course you have the right to refuse, then a judge decides…uh-oh. But I thought time ran out *before* she could be accused of contempt. ….and I have no idea why I’m gargling on about it, since, the law becomes what a judge (or panel of judges upstream to SCOTUS) says it is.
Meanwhile, there are her two comrades still in prison, at least one *may be* in solitary.
But gadzukes, I seriously thought that cat on the one tumbler page was a stuffed animal at first.
And yup; terrabytes are being stored, and that 8 million acre facility in Utah will be one major mofo of a depository. But ya know what? In the end, if they don’t have evidence, they just make shit up anyway, claim your attorney can’t see it on ‘national security’ grounds, and Bob’s Yer Uncle.
‘Binder of Oakland Occupiers’. (love it)
“I don’t know whether the release of that affidavit was a mistake or not; are you thinking they did it on purpose to scare the protestors?”
Exactly, hotflashcarol. These crackdowns are meant to scare off any who would want to do such. And we’ve seen that it does have an effect on those subjected to this torture.
This is of the sort of terrorism by example that happened in Chile, until the mothers of the Disappeared began their marches. I hope we do not have to respond to that level of terrorism. It already happened at Guantanamo as an example for rebels ‘on the other side of the world’. Didn’t work then, either.
It is all of a piece.