Juneteenth

1.  Today is Juneteenth and President Biden has made diversity a priority within his administration.  Would you care to speak to the meaning of Juneteenth from the perspective of someone who has been advocating for the rights of the FBI's "targets of interest" for years?

Answer:  I believe that diversity represents one of America's greatest strengths.  And I feel certain President Biden holds this belief as well.  We benefit immensely from a multiplicity of perspectives, of voices, of concerns, of backgrounds, of beliefs.  And if we are attentive, we are likely to find that this diversity also offers us a multiplicity of discoveries, inventions, solutions to problems, ways of working together, resilient teams, and culturally enriched communities.  We need to seek out those whose stories are different from our own.  And we need to listen to them.  Because democracy requires the extension of this courtesy, respect, and mutual regard.

2.  Is Juneteenth as a celebration of emancipation, meaningful in other than a historical context?

Answer:  It absolutely is.  We think about emancipation historically as associated with The Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the Civil War -- but we also need to ask -- and ask rigorously -- about the manner in which our freedoms as Americans are currently at risk of being abridged.

How are our civil liberties at risk of being imperiled?  

If our neighbors are not free, then we ourselves are not free either.

Our deeply fraught history in the realm of human slavery taught us this truth.

3.  What is your definition of American freedom?

Answer:  On the one hand, freedom looks the same everywhere in that individuals retain the right to dignity, sovereignty, and self-determination.  But on the other hand, American freedom has been hard won.  Our Revolutionary War and our Civil War, both, were wars which sought to claim the rights of full personhood for those who had been unwillingly disenfranchised from the dream of self-governance.  In other words, it wasn't merely that King George wanted to tax the American colonies usuriously.  It was also that he was denying American colonists their full rights as sovereign people.  Likewise with the Civil War, in which millions of Americans were being denied their full personhood in the face of an economic system which defined them as property, not as human beings.  So American freedom includes a declaration of individual sovereignty and worth within the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.  That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

After the Civil War, we agreed that all men really meant ALL MEN, not those subdivided by race.

So, American freedom includes a unique insistence on full personhood, complete sovereignty, and individual worth as a sacred gift which cannot be separated from life itself.

4.  You have sometimes observed that the "target of interest" program represents a form of human trafficking or enslavement.  What do you mean by this?

Answer:  The FBI has established and expanded the "target of interest" program as one which is highly profitable for those manifesting it, and deeply grief-stricken for its victims.  We can talk at another time about the manner in which "targets of interest" become objectified as property, not full human beings.  But their struggle for freedom echoes those we have seen before.

5.  Is freedom possible for "targets of interest"?

Answer:  It is my hope that President Biden will render it possible by allowing the OIG Hotline to release my FOIA reports and the affiliated investigations by the OIG Hotline and the ODNI.  If so, he will be insisting on the chance of freedom for those wrongfully designated as "targets of interest."  And that is a stance that I heartily appreciate and approve.

6.  You have said previously that minorities and women are over-represented by the "target of interest" population.  

Answer:  I am told by the FBI that this is the case.  So, we need to examine those allegations carefully in light of the manner in which "targets of interest" can lose their properties, their families, and their health.

7.  Are "targets of interest" full human beings?

Answer:  They are our mothers, our nephews, our cousins, our spouses, our aunts, and our children.  They are our neighbors, our leaders, our ministers, our teachers, and ourselves.  Their dignity, their nobility, their sovereignty, their humanity, their integrity, their loyalty and their faith cannot be taken from them.

8.  You insist on their humanity.

Answer:  I do, yes.  And I believe that President Biden and Vice President Harris insist right alongside me.

Lane MacWilliams