Author Archives: Sean Swain

A12M Update and Fuckweaselry at OSP

Update on the A12M Frame Up…
The state has filed an answer to the lawsuit, which far as we can tell, summarily denies every allegation without evidence or argument, claims that Sean is not allowed to sue them, and requests that the court charge Sean extra fees for even trying. At the same time, the paralegal at OSP is making up reasons to not give Sean access to legal materials he needs to work on his response. A total coincidence, we’re sure. See Sean’s correspondence below for details on that.

In summary, the prisoncrats are scared, belligerent and desperate. As usual.

Wanna help ratchet up the pressure?

If so, you can:
1. Call OSP at 330-743-0700 and request to speak with Darnell Brady, politely ask them why Sean is being denied access to legal materials while working on a lawsuit against the ODRC.
2. Call the Warden at the above number plus extension 2600 and politely ask why Darnell Brady is refusing to give legal materials to prisoners. Remind the Warden that he and other OSP staff are currently not parties in Sean’s lawsuit, because, up until this point, we don’t have evidence that they have participated in the coordinated targeting and violation of Sean’s rights.
3. Call the ODRC legal services boss Stephen Gray and politely ask him (or his secretary) if Trevor Clark, the key orchestrator of repression against Sean Swain is still working there. If they say “yes,” then ask “why?” Stephen’s number is 614-752-1765.
4. Contact the Ohio Attny General, (614) 466-4986 and politely request that they demonstrate the thinnest pretense of respecting constitutional rights or the rule of law by getting their pants sued off fair and square. Tell them that you enjoy the game where we pretend this is a democratic country and that, by breaking all the rules of that game they are making your feelings hurt. If they ask what you’re talking about, you can say something like… “well, everything you do really, but particularly how you’re cheating at SWAIN v MOHR, ET AL. Case #4:14-cv-02074.”

Whatever you do, don’t email anything unpleasant to thomas.miller@ohioattorneygeneral.gov from an anonymous email account. That would be rude, and we know the rules of the game are we’ve always gotta be polite while communicating with our oppressors.

Enjoy Sean’s correspondence on the subject… Continue reading →

The Islamic State

First aired on The Final Straw

I’ve given a lot of thought to the issue of the Islamic State militants. Everyone in the world seems to have an opinion on this. The general consensus is that the Islamic State is violent, brutal, oppressive, patriarchal and sectarian. The general consensus is that they need to be stopped. Having an opinion on this seems to be the thing to do, so let me open my big mouth.
Anonymous issued a statement opposed to the Islamic State back in June. They pointed out that these militants have highjacked the idea of what Islam is, excluding all who disagree with them. Anonymous deferred to a cleric who issued a fatwah against the Islamic State.
I’ve got an issue with that. By deferring to a fatwah issued by a cleric, Anonymous is saying it’s okay for Muslims to kill Muslims who kill Muslims. This approach is exactly the problem. For decades, outside interests cheer on “good” Muslims to exterminate “bad” Muslims and, of course, these various outside interests always find a cleric’s fatwah to justify the bloodbath. I would suggest to Anonymous that we need to stop participating in that.
And please don’t melt down my website.
Look, the emergence of the Islamic State is our collective sins of the past making up for lost time. They didn’t pop up out of nowhere. These are people who grew up crawling through the rubble of U.S. extermination policy. Madeleine Albright, Clinton’s Secretary of State, told them that the murder of half a million of their children under the age of six was a small price to pay for toppling some minor despot. This is a generation that lost loved ones, autonomy, and dignity to an imperial colonizer. The group’s leader, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, spent time in U.S. custody and was released. One can only assume that his experience of Abu Ghraib ass-pyramids provoked his current resolve. Continue reading →

Bomani Shakur

This originally aired on The Final Straw

Earlier this month, the United States Sixth Circuit Court heard oral arguments in the appeal of Ohio death row prisoner Bomani Shakur who’s government name is Keith LaMar. Bomani is one of the five prisoners prosecuted as the Lucasville Five. Targeted as leaders of the weeks long prison uprising that occurred in the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility that occurred in Lucasville Ohio in 1993. If you do the math you realize, this is a twenty one year old legal battle, so far.

Bomani was identified, targeted, prosecuted and condemned to death, strictly on the testimony of other prisoners. There existed no security footage, no DNA, no fingerprint evidence. Only the accounts of other convicted felons, who may or may not have had their own motives to lie, who may or may not have attributed their own criminal behavior to Bomani. While hundreds of prisoners were involved in the uprising, investigators only collected the statements it seems from less than a hundred of them. So we must conclude that hundreds of prisoners have no idea what occurred, suffering mass amnesia, or investigators simply chose not to take note of their accounts.

Bomani himself has written extensively. His account was published last year, entitled, Condemned. It’s an excellent read, and very revealing with regard to the tactics the state used in its frame up of targeted prisoners in the aftermath of a riot. I sent my copy to Governor JWow, who never even had the courtesy to write me back and tell me what he thought of the book. What an ingrate. Continue reading →

Prisoner Letters Interview

From PrisonerLetters.noblogs.org
10thSep. × ’14
By Prisoner Letters
(A): Hey Sean, it’s you buddy (A) here. Would you like to start off by giving a little bit of personal background (how old you are, what growing up was like, what your interests are)?

Sean: I grew up in a suburb of Detroit, Michigan. Anchorville. It’s gone now. It was “annexed” away, split between two other townships or whatever. I lived in a trailer park surrounded by woods, and when I returned in the late 80’s, all the woods were gone.

It’s as if my childhood was annexed away and chopped down. As if the Matrix occasionally erases our histories, our pasts, everything that anchors us to a place or time.

That area of Michigan is where the idea of “Reagan Democrats” came from- working class communities filled with totally class-unconscious mall zombies. I was a boy scout. Played Baseball. I stuttered and was painfully shy until about 11th grade when I guess I just decided I was tired of living in constant fear of rejection or of others’ opinions. Until then, I worked very hard at being invisible and unnoticed. I lived totally terrified until 11th grade. Continue reading →

Response to Blocking Everything

Someone sent Nine Points on Why it is Neccessary to Block Everything to Sean. Here’s his response:

This is an awesome and practical idea when we consider that the flows of product and labor create sprawling and indefensible systems, both in the physical and cyber worlds. Every blockage creates a chokepoint that prevents a flow to other places, thereby shutting down production in all of those secondary areas. That is, when you leave stolen cars blocking both sides of a major highway in and out of an urban area at rush hour, and you puncture the tires on those stolen cars and yank out the parking brake and light the interior on fire, and walk away, you don’t just block that traffic into work– the absence of those workers halts production of widgets… Which later impacts all the products requiring those widgets.
So, each time you leave dozens of bowling balls in the highway, or steal department of transportation cones and signs, and randomly block off major thoroughfares, or pull fire alarms at the point of production, there are primary, secondary, and tertiary impacts on an already unraveling system.
Related, in a story on 60 Minutes recently— there are thousands of bridges and roads on the verge of collapse. Pennsylvania has the most. Imagine if those bridges began failing… The impact on transport of goods in the U.S. and the impact on the global system of trade… And, then, the impact when the U.S. must immediately divert billions from wars to rebuild bridges.
Not that I would suggest locating those essential bridges and roads for purposes of helping along their collapse. That would be illegal.
What kind of security is there, anyway, at department of transportation depots where they have drills and trucks and heavy machinery for chunking up concrete?… Just asking.
Don’t know if it’s true or not, but someone once told me you could buy a preloaded phone at WalMart and, using a recording to disguise the voice, someone could call in fake bomb threats to every single bank holding company and every insurance holding company, in one day, and if you watched C-Span, you could watch the stock market flutter and begin dropping…
// Just mentioning in order to provide an example to prove anonymous’ assertion is correct. One WalMart phone and a phone list and a scrambled voice message could bottom out the economy.
The system is very vulnerable to blockages. Not that I would advocate that, especially with my communication heavily monitored. Doing stuff like that would probably be illegal.
–Anarchist Prisoner Sean Swain
OSP, Ohio’s supermax facility
(The next revolution will not be televised but it’s already online at seanswain.org with weekly bombthreats at ashevillefm.org/the-final-straw… If you’re listening, you ARE the resistance…)
* * * Continue reading →

Post-Script, November 4

For anyone awaiting the election results for Ohio on November 4th, I have some good news and some bad news. The bad news first.

It would appear that the corporate mainstream media would have you believe that John Kasich won the election for Ohio Governor by a landslide. Personally, I’m skeptical. I noted that the vote tallies didn’t even include me, but only listed Kasich and Fitzgerald, the corporate party candidates.

By not even listing me, the mainstream media would have you believe that thousands of voters didn’t write me in on their ballots, which is totally inconceivable. I mean, think about it. If given the choice, what voter wouldn’t vote for an anarchist prisoner held at a supermax facility promising to abolish the State forever?

Exactly. Continue reading →

Reformists Part III: The Third Option

Third part in a series. Here’s part 1 and part 2
Sometimes bad news is good news. When you come to the conclusion that reformist action is impractical, unreasonable, and futile, it doesn’t foreclose on resisting completely. Every steel door that slams shut should always provoke us to contemplate how to cut the bars windows. Slamming the steel door of reformism liberates us to consider direct action, which is what anarchists WANT to do in the first place.

In the prison context, that again leads back to a discussi Monkeys. Now, before going any further, please kee that I wa the super-duper-uber-mega-ultra-hyper-tur the pretext of bei the Army of the 12 Monkeys– an accusation I have consistently denied. My counsel, Richard Kerger, has action, SWAIN VS. MOHR, now posted at seanswain.org, challenging this frame-up. Having said that, I was a witness to what occurred at Mansfield Correctional when the Army of the 12 Monkeys happened, and I think I’m fairly qualified to present an analysis of what this event implies for anarchists and for direct action in and outside of prison. Continue reading →

BAT-ISHT CRAZY

This first appeared on The Final Straw

I’m nuts. Totally bonkers.

I just found out last month. And, quite frankly, I was relieved. Up until the mental health people brought my file for my review and I saw the diagnosis, I thought everything I was seeing in the world was really happening… And I mistakenly thought I had a good grasp of what it all meant.

Turns out, I’m just a fruitloop. I can sleep much better now. It’s not the WORLD that’s gone mad, it’s just ME. I’m as mad as an 18th century glue sniffer in a hat factory. The mental health professionals of the Ohio Department of Retribution and Correction said so. So, I can stop worrying about the state of our world and the evil designs of the privileged few, the reign of terror we all face under a global tech-surveillance police state. I can better spend my time skipping naked around my cell or sculpting busts of dead presidents out of piles of my own harvested boogers. In fact, that’s probably what’s expected of me. Continue reading →

Another Open Letter to the Delusional Hierarch Mental Health Worker… Blah, Blah, Blah

“The more completely the place of confinement eliminates sensory stimuli, the more deeply will the [subject] be affected. Results produced after weeks or months of imprisonment in an ordinary cell may be duplicated in hours or days… An early effect of such an environment is anxiety… [Captors] can benefit from the subject’s anxiety… The deprivation of stimuli induces regression by depriving the subject’s mind of contact with an outer world and thus forcing it in on itself… in /the simple torture situation/ the contest is one between the individual and /his tormentor/…”
–/The KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation Manual/, from the Central Intelligence Agency

Dear Mental Health Therapist(?),
In early October, I sent you a kite communication with a lengthy “Open Letter” that was also posted at seanswain.org. I looked forward to your response but still haven’t received it. Also, since the open letter’s publication, you have stopped calling me out of the cell block to speak with me, and during rounds you say, “Mental health rounds, how are you doing?,” but by the time I respond, you are already down the range, out of earshot.
If I didn’t know better, I would almost think you are trying to avoid me. Continue reading →

A12M Lawsuit update.

On September 17th, Rick Kerger filed a civil suit on Sean’s behalf suing the ODRC for violating his civil rights when they targetted him at a participant in the Army of the 12 Monkeys prison insurrection solely based on his anarchist beleifs.

First, we need to thank all of the generous donors for helping make this happen. Kerger isn’t asking for any fee, but the cost of simply filing the lawsuit was $400, and wouldn’t have been possible without support from the @ team accross the country. Thank you.

You can find the full text (the complaint) and all of the exhibits to the lawsuit through these links:

Complaint

Exhibits

We’re awaiting the state’s response, which seems to be approaching it’s deadline. If they don’t file a response soon, or if they do but lose, we’ll win summary judgement, Kerger will be able to get attorney fees, Sean may be able to sue for damages on account of the torture he endured at the hands of ManCI officials, and most importantly, he’ll be transfered down to medium. He’ll be out of solitary confinement at the supermax. Wouldn’t that be nice?