Donate to the Save Our Civil Liberties Campaign

Last November, 283 activists were brutally arrested and another 250 were injured in a shocking paramilitary suppression of free speech and assembly at the 2003 Free Trade Area of the Americas meetings in Miami. Within several days of the conclusion of the Ministerial, members of global justice, labor, faith, environmental, community, and legal groups responded by forming the Save Our Civil Liberties Campaign.

Since its formation, the Campaign has organized public media responses to the attacks, created action alerts and initiated grassroots appeals to officials and decision makers to demand accountability of the police and that charges against FTAA protesters be dropped, led gatherings at and challenged members of Miami's Civilian Investigative Panel and Institutional Review Panel, and launched this web portal to serve as an information clearinghouse for groups and individuals interested in civil liberties in the aftermath of Miami.

Please help save our civil liberties from the onslaught of violent repression by making a tax-deductible contribution to the Campaign via our non-profit sponsoring organization, the Thomas Merton Center. You can donate in one of three ways.

Donate On-Line. You can make a secure online donation using a credit card via Network for Good. The process is relatively painless. Please enter "Save Our Civil Liberties" into the form where it asks for your donation's designation.

Call with your contribution. If you prefer to donate by credit card without using the Network for Good system, you can call the Thomas Merton Center at (412) 361-3022. When giving your contribution over the phone, please indicate that your contibution is for the Save Our Civil Liberties Campaign.

Mail your check. You can also mail your check or money order to:

Thomas Merton Center's Save Our Civil Liberties Campaign
5125 Penn Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15224

Please make the check payable to the Thomas Merton Center and write "Save Our Civil Liberties Campaign" on the comments section of the check.

Your contribution would be used to produce and distribute an organizer's Tool Kit along with a comprehensive report on the "Miami Model" of homeland defense. The purpose for these materials is threefold:

1. Raise public awareness generally of what happened in Miami. We believe that the Miami experience is a cautionary tale of the increasingly violent measures taken by the State to silence dissent and the complicity of the corporate media in criminalizing it.


2. Help global justice and anti-war activists better understand the convergence of logic of the "war on terror" and the push for free trade policies that has given rise to "embedded journalists," "information dominance" and other militaristic propaganda strategies that further corporate interests.


3. Help activists take steps to prevent the types of attacks on free speech that occurred in Miami and to offset the lop-sided media coverage at future mobilizations, particularly at the G8, the DNC and the RNC.

Read more: about our report | about the Thomas Merton Center | or return to the home page.