benefit thursday night!

Come out tomorrow night to this benefit half of whose proceeds will go to help Tortuga House.

 

Follow us on Twitter!

Tortuga House is now tweeting!

Get updates on our legal situation, whether or not we were raided on any given day, and how Sahara the Dog is doing!

Go here: http://twitter.com/tortugahouse

Ruling Expected on Twittering Anarchist Raided Under ‘Rioting’ Laws

(from Wired Magazine)

An anarchist social worker raided by the feds wants his computers, manuscripts and pick axes back. He argues that authorities violated the U.S. Constitution and the rights of his mentally ill clients while searching for evidence that he broke an anti-rioting law on Twitter.

In a guns-drawn raid on October 1, FBI agents and police seized boxes of dubious “evidence” from the Queens, New York, home of Elliott Madison. A U.S. District Judge in Brooklyn has set a Monday deadline to rule on the legality of the search, and in the meantime has ordered the government to refrain from examining the material taken in the 6 a.m. search.

(read the whole article)

Under The Shell: After G20 Arrests And FBI Raid, Tortuga Anarchists On Edge

(A nice article from the Queens Tribune)

By Vladic Ravich

Tortuga house, featuring the amazing Sahara Dog...

Elliott Madison opened the door with a lit cigarette between his fingers and invited me into his living room, which is warmly lit, topped with an antique tin ceiling and has a portrait of anarchist founding father Mikhail Bakunin hanging on the wall.

But when he shut the front door behind us, it did not quite close. It’s the same door that was kicked in by the first of 20 FBI agents at six in the morning on Oct. 1, after which they raced up and down the stairs, guns drawn, to search the apartment.

(read the whole article)

We Know That We Don’t Know: A Tortuga House Update

Oh, how the days have flown. Oh, what the days have shown? It is now over two weeks since the raid on Tortuga House, and we are mostly left holding conjecture as to what is going on—the proceedings against us are secretive.

After the injunction (to legally prevent the State from fishing through our belongings) was granted on October 2^nd, the court required the government to show probable cause for the search. We anticipated this document and hoped to learn why FBI and NYPD thugs had descended on our house. Instead, we received a document that listed items confiscated from our home during the raid to support the validity of the search warrant that authorized the raid—which included photos taken by the FBI of anarchist stickers, posters, and emergency preparedness items (modeled by a housemate in this YouTube video) we had in the house. The reasoning for such illogic? That the raid is not connected to the arrest of our two housemates in Pittsburgh during the G-20 protests, but rather was spurred by an ongoing federal grand jury investigation—and questions as to the validity of the search can be addressed after any indictments are handed out! Furthermore, the document maintains that the supporting affidavits actually used to authorize the search should remain sealed because “the affidavits here concern an ongoing investigation, and unsealing them would compromise that investigation…[which is] complex and multi-state.”

The Twitterest Pill By Jack Z. Bratich

http://www.counterpunch.org/bratich10092009.html

Ahh, remember the Summer of Tweet-Love? Those heady days in June 09, when pundits and cable news anchors sang the praises of their beloved social media platform Twitter? Remember how we changed our Facebook profile pics to Green in solidarity with Iranian protestors?

Perhaps Eliot Madison was feeling that techno-optimism in late September, when he was arrested in Pittsburgh during the G20 protests. Police stormed his motel room, where Madison and others had set up a communications node (as part of the Tin Can Comms Collective) to gather and distribute information about the demonstrations. This hub contained hardware like police scanners, phones, computers and involved, yes, tweeting. Madison was charged with criminal use of a communication facility, hindering apprehension or prosecution, and possession of instruments of crime. The following week, police raided his home in Jackson Heights, Queens and he and his roommates were detained while the premises were searched for sixteen hours.

So where is all the journalistic gushing over social movement media now? It’s as though the corporate media collectively woke up after a sordid affair and agreed that, “What happens in Tehran, Stays in Tehran.”

Multi-use flyer for all of your Tortuga House benefit needs!

Thanks MC Sub-Zero Permafrost!

The Twitter Double Standard

When They Kick Out Your Front Door (Português)

Keep the translations coming!

Quando eles chutam a tua porta da frente, como você vai ficar?

No dia 1º de outubro, às 6 da manhã, o Joint Terrorism Task Force (um sindicato de departamentos policias locais e o FBI), chutou as portas de nossa casa – uma casa coletiva anarquista no Queens, Nova Iorque, afetuosamente conhecida como Tortuga. Os primeiros desastres da batida foram rapidamente seguidos por mais brutalidade, na medida em que a polícia sujeitava três pessoas que estavam dormindo, destruindo as portas do quartos que estavam destrancados.

Ler Mais

NYC Anarchist Black Cross Statement of Solidarity with Tortuga House

On October 1st, 2009, at 6:00 am, the Joint Terrorism Task Force kicked down the front door to an anarchist collective house in Queens, New York, affectionately known as Tortuga. This much you know. And while we of the NYC Anarchist Black Cross slept, our comrades were being subjected to the type of humiliating treatment that is typical from the state. The cops claimed to be searching for evidence related to rioting. We know better. These Federal rioting charges are not new to us, they were used to target the Chicago Seven in 1968. They beat the charges then and we’ll beat them now.

Read More