Wednesday Night Links: No Laughter In A Police State Edition

-InTheseTimes.com reports today about the "RNC 8," the activists arrested outside the RNC in St. Paul who face up to nearly eight years in prison on terrorism charges for their protest activities in late August and early September. Further corroborating the fact that the police-state tactics outside the RNC were not an isolated incident, Maryland State Police admitted yesterday that they have officially classified 53 non-violent anti-death penalty and anti-war protesters as terrorists. These activists, or "fringe people" as the former State Superintendent of Police called them in testimony yesterday, were spied on over the course of 14 months in 2005 and 2006, a program that led Maryland State Police to add their names to searchable state and federal terrorist suspect databases. To apprise the activists of their new status as enemies of the state, Maryland's finest mailed them letters last week in which the police invited them in to review their files. -While the efforts (and names) of non-violent activists are being crushed in Maryland, the Treasury, according to the editor of the Financial Times, is actively (and lawfully) being looted by its own Secretary in order to enrich his personal friends and allies. -Dennis Kucinich on The Bailout: “This was the largest single act of class warfare in the modern history of this country.” -According to a press release from Veterans for Peace, four US military women stationed at Fort Bragg in North Carolina have been murdered in the past nine months, three of them since June. "Military men have been accused of the murders." Tonight NOW of Fayatteville, Veterans for Peace, and Quaker House are hosting a vigil for the latest victim, US Army Sergeant Christina Smith, 29, who was stabbed in the neck on September 30, 2008. These four murdered women are part of a larger, insidious trend of violence (including rape and murder) against women in the military that has yet to be stemmed or even seriously accounted for.