We brought on John Keough and Tom Marino from This Week In Worcester to rehash the council’s very deflating meeting Tuesday on the Department of Justice’s pattern and practice investigation into the Worcester Police Department. Short answer: don’t expect to hear too much more about this, and if ever a civilian review board proposal makes its way to the council floor, expect a split vote. The meeting was, however, the first time we’ve had the police chief on record answering questions about this report, and that provided some interesting glimpses into the internal machinations of the police department.
Keough and Marino have both followed the DOJ report and city’s response closely over the past several months. Some good examples: “Worcester City Council Ready to Do Nothing on Police Reform” by Tom Marino; “Thoughts from Tuesday Night at Worcester City Hall” by John Keough.
Before the interview, we talk about the news on everyone’s minds: Rumeysa Ozturk, the Tufts University PHD candidate who was abducted outside her Somerville apartment Tuesday by masked federal agents, then shipped to the same Louisiana detention center holding Mahmoud Khalil. (Watch the video here)
Chris prepared a statement to open the show, copied here in full:
We talked a few weeks ago about the illegal abduction of Mahmoud Khalil, a student at Columbia who was taken into custody from his home in the presence of his 8 months pregnant wife. A few days after, Badar Khan Suri, an Indian national who was a postdoctoral researcher at Georgetown, was also abducted by agents of the state. His wife is an American citizen of Palestinian descent. Tuesday, we learned that Rumeysa Ozturk, a doctoral student and Fulbright scholar at Tufts University, was abducted by federal agents right here in Massachusetts, in Somerville. They kidnapped her outside of her apartment as she left to go break her Ramadan fast with friends. She is a Turkish national. In each case I have seen footage of, these people were surrounded suddenly by plainclothes agents masking their faces, stuffed into an unmarked vehicle, and disappeared.
All three of these people have been taken over a thousand miles away to a federal detention center in Louisiana. Khalil was taken from New York to New Jersey and then to Louisiana. Ozturk has apparently been transported to Louisiana in defiance of federal judges order that she not be removed from Massachusetts.
From Masslive “Ozturk was sent to Louisiana even after U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani ordered Ozturk to remain in the state and that the government give 48 hours’ notice before moving her”
“Over twenty-four hours after her arrest, Rumeysa has yet to be processed to her final detention facility and during this entire time, I have been unable to speak with my client,” Ozturk’s attorney, Mahsa Khanbabai, said in a statement Wednesday evening. “It was only a few hours ago that I learned that she was sent to Louisiana, despite a federal court judge’s order that she not be removed from the state,” Khanbabai said.
I think we have a friendly audience, but I don’t entirely know. I do know that I have people I’ve called friends, and people in my own family, who might never speak to me again because of where I stand on this. I do not fucking care, because the right place to stand is the right place to stand: The state of Israel is in the process of a genocidal campaign against the people of Palestine, and it has openly been doing so for going on a year and a half now. We are now not only supporting that genocide with money and weapons, just as we did under the Biden regime, we are now actively hunting down any vulnerable activist on a student visa that the grossest scumbags on Earth can identify, and those people are being ripped from their homes and families and being thrown in jail to face deportation. To be clear, that is what is happening here: The government isn’t plucking these names out of the air, it is being fed these names by Zionist organizations like Betar US and Canary Mission
None of these people have been accused of committing a crime. The government has had ample opportunity to articulate any crimes they have committed, and they are not doing that. That’s the point, I think, actually. These people have been arrested and put into deportation proceedings for speaking out against a genocide being perpetrated by Israel. That’s it.
I don’t want to argue with anyone about the finer points of a visa, or what was the speech. It’s really fucking simple: People who are in our country from various nations to learn and to educate and to research are being black-bagged and shipped out for rendition because they have voiced opposition to a genocide that is ongoing right now, today.
If you have been hesitant to speak up on this issue, I would encourage you to consider that it’s now-or-never time, because it’s not going to stop with Rumeysa Ozturk and it’s not going to stop with student visa holders either: These cretins have already said they intend to target naturalized citizens, imminently. The time is right fucking now to tell your friends and your neighbors and definitely your representatives in Congress that this cannot stand, and that you do not intend to let it stand, and that Congress needs to pull all support from this or any other state committing a genocide. Get in the streets. Make noise. Do whatever you can.
Further reading on the Ozturk case…
WBUR story about protests demanding her release
Marco Rubio confirms Ozturk’s student visa has been revoked
The op-ed that led to her kidnapping
The court order this rendition disregards
For updates on demonstrations, Somerville for Palestine Instagram
Other links...
DOJ Report
Nga Truong/Anatomy of a Bad Confession
Original documentary on the Barkley Marathons, and a feature story in The Guardian
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