Nathaniel Mackey: "the work-in-progress we continue to be"

"Raw-throated / singer beating time with a / dry stick. . ."

(from "Song of the Andoumboulou 16: cante moro," Whatsaid Serif, City Lights, 1998)

Last week the National book awards announced that Nathaniel Mackey is one of this year's poetry finalists for his latest book, Splay Anthem (New Directions, 2006). Quite a long journey to the A-list tier of independent publishing from the self-published chapbooks Four For Trane (Golemics, 1978) and Septet For The End Of Time (Boneset, 1983), gathered in his first full-length collection Eroding Witness (U of Illinois, 1985).

This well deserved recognition outside the insular world of contemporary avant garde poetry follows a recent article on Mackey in The Nation by John Palattella, "Poetry, From Noun to Verb" (there is a nice bio early in the piece). He notes of the "Septet" series that "The circumstances are hardly tranquil. The section's title alludes to the 'Quartet for the End of Time,' written by the French composer Olivier Messiaen in 1941 in a prisoner-of-war camp, and in each poem a persona drifts into fragmentary recollections of his or her past after waking up into, rather than out of, horrifying dreams. But the personae aren't necessarily trapped in a nightmare from which they never awake. Instead, they are simultaneously constrained by history and compelled by musical powers to test its limits. . . . The overall outlook of the series, however, is not apocalyptic but Sisyphean: Loss is inexorable, and the test is how one manages to endure it."

                                        Bittersweet kiss
of this my tightlipped muse, puckered
          skin of the earth as though
                                               its orbit
      shrunk.
                 Shrill hiss of the sun so
   much a doomsday prophet gasping voiceless,
                                                               asking,
                When will all the killing
                                              stop?

     As though the answer were not so visibly
                                                             Never.
            As though the light were not all but
        drowned in the Well to the uncharted
            East I sought...

(from "The Phantom Light of All Our Day," Eroding Witness)

Sweet bitter, Anne Carson tells us, would be the literal translation of Sappho's epithet for eros, driving throughout Mackey's work an elaborate, nuanced poetics of loss and becoming, longing and desire. Two open-ended serial poems twine throughout his four full-length poetry collections. One, "Mu," echoes the title of two 1969 Don Cherry/Ed Blackwell live duet recordings: "numbed / inarticulate / tongues touching / down on love's endlessly / warmed-over thigh" (from "Irritable Mystic - 'mu' fifth part").

The opening syllable in music, "mu" conjures "the Greek form of muthos," "myth and mouth," "also lingual and erotic allure, mouth and muse, mouth not only noun but verb and muse likewise, lingual and imaginal process, prod and process. It promises verbal and romantic enhancement, graduation to an altered state, momentary thrall translated into myth. . . . carries a theme of utopic reverie, a theme of lost ground and elegiac allure recalling the Atlantis-like continent Mu . . . Any longingly imagined, mourned or remembered place, time, state, or condition can be called 'Mu'" ("Preface" to Splay Anthem). 

Its sense even splays to include the Papua New Guinea Kaluli's myth of poetry & music's "origin & essence," the cry of the boy turned into a muni bird. The new book opens with "Andoumboulus Brush—'mu' fifteenth part—":

       He turned his head,
    spoke to my clavicle,
     whispered more than
 spoke. Sprung bone
                            the
       obtuse flute he'd
    long wanted, blew
     across the end of it
                                sticking
  up... Blew across its
    opening. Blew as if
cooling soup... Someone
 behind him blowing
                          bigger
     than him giggled,
    muse whose jutting
       lips he kissed as he
   could... "Mouth that
         moved my mouth,"
                                  he
     soughed, hummed it,
       made it buzz... Hummed,
    hoped glass would break,
   walls fall. Sang thru
                              the
         cracks a croaking
                                 song
        to end all song,

      tongue's tip seeking
         the gap between her
       teeth, mouth whose
          toothy pout made
                                  "mu"
        tear
     loose

"Song of the Andoumboulou" also takes its title from a musical recording of Dogon music from Mali, and refers to mythological ancestors in the villagers' cosmology who are "not simply a failed, or flawed, earlier form of human being" but also "the work-in-progress we continue to be":

Francis Di Dio, in the liner notes to Les Dogon, his 1956 recording of Dogon music for Disques Ocora says the song of the Andoumboulou is addressed to the spirits. Part of the Dogon funeral rites, it begins with sticks marking time on a drum's head, joined in short order by a lone laconic voice gravelly, raspy, reluctant—recounting the creatioon of the world and the advent of human life. Other voices, likewise reticent, join in, eventually build into song, a scratchy, low-key chorus. Song subsided, another lone voice eulogizes the deceased, reciting his genealogy, bestowing praise, listing all the places where he set foot while alive, a spiral around the surrounding countryside. Antelope-horn trumpets blast and bleat when the listening ends, marking the entry of the deceased into the other life, evoking, Di Dio writes, "the wail of a new-born child, born into a terrifying world."
. . . The poems' we, a lost tribe of sorts, a band of nervous travelers, know nothing if not locality's discontent, ground gone under. Sonic semblance's age-old promise, rhyme's reason, the consolation they seek in song, accents of transit. . . . Glamorizations by the tourist industry notwithstanding, travel and migration for the vast majority of people have been and continue to be unhappy if not catastrophic occurrences brought about by unhappy if not catastrophic events: the Middle Passage, the Spanish Expulsion, the Irish Potato Famine, conscripted military service, indentured labor systems, pursuit of asylum. . . .

("Preface" to Splay Anthem)

from "On Antiphon Island—'mu' twenty-eighth part— :

                                           Where we
    were was the hold of a ship we were
                                                     caught
       in. Soaked wood kept us afloat... It
  wasn't limbo we were in albeit we
     limbo'd our way there. Where we
    were was what we meant by "mu."
                                                   Where
     we were was real, reminiscent
   arrest we resisted, bodies briefly
                                               had,
 held on
to

In an Introduction to his first volume of essays, Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing (Cambridge, 1993), Mackey writes:

The title of this book . . . is an expression coined in reference to practices that, in the interest of opening presumably closed orders of identity and signification, accent fissure, fracture, incongruity, the rickety, imperfect fit between word and world. Such practices highlight - indeed inhabit - discrepancy, engage rather than seek to ignore it. Recalling the derivation of the word discrepant from a root meaning "to rattle, creak," I relate discrepant engagement to the name the Dogon of West Africa give their weaving block, the base on which the loom they weave upon sits. They call it the "creaking of the word." It is the noise upon which the word is based, the discrepant foundation of all coherence and articulation, of the purchase upon the world fabrication affords. Discrepant engagement, rather than suppressing or seeking to silence that noise, acknowledges it. In its anti-foundational acknowledgment of founding noise, discrepant engagement sings "base," voicing reminders of the axiomatic exclusions upon which positings of identity and meaning depend.
. . .
Discrepant engagement, rather than suppressing resonance, dissonance, noise, seeks to remain open to them. Its admission of resonances contends with resolution. It worries resolute identity and demarcation, resolute boundary lines, resolute definition, obeying a vibrational rather than a corpuscular sense of being, "a quality," as [Clarence] Major puts it, "of which sharp contact is / the qualification, a remarkable verb quiver." To see being as verb rather than noun is to be at odds with hypostasis, the reification of fixed identities that has been the bane of socially marginalized groups. It is to be at odds with taxonomies and categorizations that obscure the fact of heterogeneity and mix. [The essay] "Poseidon (Dub Version)" brings discrepant engagement to bear upon questions of representation, naming, and identity in a context of cultural mix inherited from colonizing projects, arguing that it dispels or seeks to dispel the specter of inauthenticity that haunts post-colonial hybridity, dislodges or seeks to dislodge homogeneous models of identity and assumptions of monolithic form. But, as I have already indicated and by titling the book as I have, discrepant engagement is relevant not only to writers from recently decolonized regions such as [Wilson] Harris and [Edward Kamau] Brathwaite. It pertains to and is symptomatic of a postmodern/postcolonial suspicion of totalizing paradigms . . .

Paul Naylor begins his essay, "The 'Mired Sublime' of Nathaniel Mackey's Song of the Andoumboulou" with a 1981 quote from the Martinican poet, Édouard Glissant (who also provides one of Splay Anthem's two epigraphs):

"We are aware of the fact that the changes of our present history are the unseen moments of a massive transformation in civilization, which is the passage from the all-encompassing world of cultural Sameness, effectively imposed by the West, to a pattern of fragmented Diversity, achieved in a no less creative way by the peoples who have today seized their rightful place in the world."

Fray was the name where we came
   to next. Might've been a place,
 might not've been a place but
      we were there, came to it
                                         sooner
    than we could see... Come to
 so soon, it was a name we stuck
   pins in hoping we'd stay. Stray
was all we ended up with. Spar
      was another name we heard
                                            it
    went by... Rasp we also heard it
                                                was
       called... Came to it sooner
 than we could see but soon enough
    saw we were there. Some who'd
  come before us called it Bray...

(from "Song of the Andoumboulou: 50")

Naylor:

Discrepant engagement, then, not only denotes a theory of cross-culturality; it enacts one in the structure of its definition. The crossing traditions of Dogon and Western cosmologies and philosophies of language allow Mackey to present a second crossing, one in which traditions of sense and nonsense, noise and word, encounter one and other. Mackey uncovers in this second opposition the cross-cultural moment shared by both traditions, although the judgment concerning that moment's value is clearly not shared. This opposition animates most of Mackey's writing and generates the cross-cultural recognition embodied in the moment of song. . . . For Mackey, the cultural judgment concerning the value of song coincides with the way a given culture reacts to the opposition between noise and word, with how much "creaking" a culture tolerates in its words. If we recall Mackey's contention that the "founding noise" of language also serves to remind us of a tradition's "axiomatic exclusions," then it follows that a culture's definitions of and judgments about noise have political as well as aesthetic implications.

Or in the words of the fictional Aunt Nancy in his first novel, Bedouin Hornbook:
 
". . . the culture you're calling 'whole' has yet to assume itself to be so except at the expense of a whole lot of other folks, except by presuming that what they were up to could be ignored at no great loss . . . What makes you feel excluded by our sources if not the exclusionistic biases of the culture you identify as 'whole' boomeranging back at you? . . . You may want something different, something more modest maybe, but your modesty betrays its falseness, shows itself to be the wolf-in-sheep's-clothing it is, when you saddle up your high horse to tell the rest of us we have to likewise lower our sights."

Palattella:

Mackey is equally sensitive to how the history of the diaspora has been cheapened. In an essay on the Guyanese novelist Wilson Harris, a writer second only to Robert Duncan in Mackey's personal canon, Mackey writes that it is "customary to speak of the West Indies almost wholly in terms of cultural deprivation or cultural parasitism." Following Harris, Mackey notes that the novels of V.S. Naipaul epitomize this tendency by judging the West Indies according to European cultural standards. Naipaul clings to the conventions of European fiction to insulate himself against the islands' "conventionlessness." Harris, on the other hand, writes about the West Indies in a way that avoids "imprison[ing] it in its deprivations." "The insularity of the various African peoples brought to the New World," Mackey argues, "was broken or dislocated by the Middle Passage. Harris views this breakage, this amputation, as fortunate, an opportune disinheritance or partial eclipse of tribal memory that called creative forces and imaginative freedoms into play."

. . . In The Odyssey the wandering Odysseus returns home because of his ability to respond to circumstances that continually change. In the epic of the Andoumboulou poems, the only dwelling the wandering tribe can hope to inhabit is amid continuous change.

As Mackey knows, to write such an epic is to risk cultivating a macabre obsession with wounds, a habit that is all too common, whether it's Oprah touring Auschwitz or a literary theorist fixated on trauma. In "Gassire's Lute," a book-length essay on Duncan's Vietnam War poems based on his dissertation, Mackey notes that Duncan walks a tightrope between "humanist outrage and a cosmologizing acceptance of war.... The outrage has to do with the suffering of actual men and women and the cosmology, the poetics, with our being other than the suffering part of ourselves." Throughout the Andoumboulou poems Mackey walks a similar tightrope, one stretched between the poles of humanist outrage and a cosmologizing acceptance of the diaspora. He favors neither pole, instead spending most of his time at the tightrope's midway point.

from "Song of the Andoumboulou 16: cante moro," (Whatsaid Serif, City Lights, 1998):

                        tight
    flamenco strings
 distraught...

                      Some
      ecstatic elsewhere's
   advocacy strummed,
unsung, lost inside
        the oud's complaint . . .
     The same cry taken
  up in Cairo, Cordoba,
                              north
          Red Sea near Nagfa,
       Muharraq, necks cut
           with the edge
                              of a
   broken cup...

and later in "Song of the Andoumboulou: 58":

  Rummaged around on all fours to
bug accompaniment. What we wanted
    we couldn't have. Multiple the
  names it went by, legion, wars
                                           over
  which one fit broke out, nation of
     none though we were... Not yet
nation of Nub that we were, said to've
   been born with barbs in our skin,
 anaesthetic nation of Nuh... Said
                                              to've
    been born in beds made of glass,
                                                "Bed,
  be our balafon bridge," we exhorted,
"bed, be our rhythm log."

[...]

. . . We were never all there. Raw knuckles
     pounding the dirt bled rivers. Bloodrun
                                                        carried
  us away

It's a tough, insistent lyricism, a poetry that aspires, like the Dreamtime, the altjeringa, of Australia's Aranda, to also be "an awakening to rather from dream . . . a way of challenging reality, a sense in which to dream is not to dream but to replace wakening with realization, an on-going process of testing or contesting reality, subjecting it to change or a demand for change" ("Preface," Splay Anthem). In a paper delivered at a 1990 Poetry Project panel, Poetry for the Next Society, Mackey asks: "What basis do we have for believing that poetry's marginality in this society will end in any near future? In what sense can we speak of "poetry for the next society"? My sense of it is that for quite a while poetry will continue to be against the society and we would need to talk about what kinds of changes would have to take place for that to not be the case." He concludes:

So, what kind of society will the next society be? And what are the implications of that for poetics? It doesn't seem that you can answer the one question without answering or trying to answer the other. . . . I'd like to . . . remind us of Reverend David Garcia's pointing out that the word ecclesiastes means a "calling out," and think about the way in which several times during the symposium we've had people lament the loss of ritual, meaning, myth and the sorts of things that can make for a collective calling out and coming to one another. We have to ask will there be a society that we can be for and, if so, what kind of society that would be. I kept thinking of Robert Duncan's line "would-be shaman of no tribe I know." I wonder what kind of tribe we're going to bring about in the next society.

One whose dreamers, fully awakened to our current nightmare, "the imperial, flailing republic of Nub the United States has become, the shrunken place the earth has become, planet of Nub" ("Preface" to Splay Anthem), find themselves members of (as in the book's final poem, "Song of the Andoumboulou: 60") a ". . . first unfallen church of what might've / been. Let run its course it would have / gone otherwise, time's ulterior bequest . . .":

     Day late so all the old attunements gave
  way, late but soon come even so... A
   political trek we'd have said it was
albeit politics kept us at bay,    nothing
                                                      wasn't
      politics we'd say. Wanting our want to
   be called otherwise, kept at bay though
    we were, day late but all the old stories
                                                          echoed
  yet again, old but even so soon come... A
   mystic march they'd have said it was,
    acknowledging politics kept us at
  bay,    everything was mystical
they'd say. Wanting our want to be
                                                so
    named, kept at bay as we were,
                                                what
     the matter was wasn't a question, no
                                                       ques-
  tion what
it was.

_______________________________________
poems online:

Academy of American Poets (3 poems)

"Song of the Andoumboulou: 48" [pdf]

On Antiphon Island—"mu" twenty-eighth part—

Groove Digit (poems, prose, interviews, essays about)

audio online:

PennSound

U of Chicago: reading & lecture
Somehow in his busy schedule, this man finds time to do a two hour radio program, Tanganyika Strut. The playlists show the musical range he covers: Andalusia to Africa, american jazz, Brazilian, Caribbean, and south Asian musics. The programs aren't archived, but can be heard Sundays, 3:00 - 5:00 PST, via a live stream.
Good luck with the award, Nate.

Neo-lib reality show: class war as spectacle

from the Independent:

Up to five million Colombians from the Caribbean coast to the outskirts of the Amazon have been tuning in every night to watch a gruelling contest between three teams: "the privileged", the "middle class" and the "down and outs". . . . loosely modelled on the US programme Survivor. Initially, contestants were treated in the style to which they were accustomed. The rich were assigned luxury air-conditioned lodges with chilled white wine and lobster; the middle class, a featureless beach with enough clothes for three days; while the poor were deposited in a cave with little food and told to fend for themselves. The "down and outs" could win the right to upgrade their quarters while the rich could be demoted and the in-betweens, rise or fall. Participants and viewers vote out individuals.
. . .
"Everyone can identify with one of the social groups and relate to what they go through," said Beatrice Martinez, a Desafio fan. "It's fascinating to see how the poor successfully fought to get better food and shelter while the rich got to experience what it's like to go to bed on an empty stomach."

yea, fascinating . . . (Webster's: [Latin fascinare, to bewitch, to charm; Greek baskainein, to bewitch]

Raul Garcia, continuity director of the reality show, said: "The show offers a rare opportunity to witness different classes forced to compete with each other to survive which is entertaining and illuminating. People know what social class they belong to and everyone wants to see whether different classes can really get on, understand and live with each other."

He added that in more developed countries where social divisions are less pronounced, groups based around gender, sexual orientation and ethnicity would be more relevant.

Bullshit. Class is a huge verbal taboo in the US. It's the great divide society goes to great pains to not acknowledge. Gender, orientation & race are the diversionary conflicts — the old, familiar tactics of divide & conquer used by the corporatocracy — and are most readily bridged within one's class, which in turn reinforces narratives that would have us believe these conflicts are largely matters of the past. Dramatizing its reality isn't going to happen anytime soon on US networks — but they did just try a reality show based on race. A class-based show is possible in a society like Columbia, where there's no denying the gulf between the rich minority & impoverished plurality. The US propaganda apparatus in full swing more or less successfully denies the reality in evidence that surrounds us everyday. A norm not so different from:

Juan Camacho, a wealthy stockbroker from Bogota admitted, "I've never been near people as poor as those I met on the programme."

"The trick of class war is not to let the victims know they're under attack. That's how, little by little, the owners of the planet take away what little we have." Greg Palast

space is the place for the new arms race - full spectrum dominance

manifest destiny reaches for the stars, from the Independent:

A new policy recently signed by President George Bush, asserts that his country has the right to conduct whatever research, development and "other activities" in space that it deems necessary for its own national interests.

The new policy further warns that the US will take those actions necessary to protect its space capabilities "and deny, if necessary, adversaries the use of space capabilities hostile" to those interests. The document adds: "Space activities have improved life in the United States and around the world, enhancing security, protecting lives and the environment, speeding information flow serving as an engine for economic growth and revolutionising the way people view their world and the cosmos."

"Freedom of action in space is as important to the United States as air power and sea power."

In some respects the policy represents the space equivalent of the "Bush Doctrine" national security policy initially outlined by Mr Bush in a speech at West Point military academy in June 2002. At that event - and later more formally codified - Mr Bush said the new US policy would place more emphasis on military pre-emption and unilateral actions.
. . .
In part the new directive builds on the space policy of the Clinton administration. But some believe its new, hardline rhetoric will increase international suspicions that the US is seeking to develop and deploy weapons in space.

"The Clinton administration opened the door to developing space weapons but that administration never did anything about it. The Bush policy now goes further," [said] Michael Krepon, of the Stimson Centre . . . In 2004 . . . the US Air Force published a highly controversial plan for establishing weapons in space, amid speculation that advanced lasers, spacecraft and space-based weapons firing 100kg tungsten bolts were being developed. And earlier this year it was revealed that the Pentagon was seeking hundreds of millions of dollars from Congress to test and develop space weapons. . . . the policy . . . claims that national security is "critically" dependent upon space capabilities. As a result it calls on the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and the Director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte, to "develop and deploy space capabilities that sustain US advantage and support defence and intelligence transformations".
. . .
When proposals to ban the weaponisation of space have been put forward at the UN, the United States has routinely abstained. But last October the US voted against a UN resolution calling for the banning of weapons in space. Likewise, the US has repeatedly resisted efforts to hold negotiations on the issue of banning the placement in weapons by the Geneva-based Conference on Disarmament.

Wade Boese of the Arms Control Association said the language in the new policy was "much more hard line" than any that previously existed. He added: "We believe that this allergy to treaties is counter-productive. The US has the most to lose if there is an arms race in outer space in the long run. If the US [puts weapons in space], other countries will respond in some way."

. . .

The Clinton administration in 1999 revived Ronald Reagan's "star wars" space-based anti-missile shield as the Pentagon pushed for a more aggressive military posture in space amid warnings that North Korea, Iran and Iraq could obtain nuclear weapons. The programme became known as "son of star wars". Space weapons could include lasers that can shut down rival satellites and "killer" satellites that could ram others.

The new Bush policy calls for space-based capabilities to support missile-warning systems, and "multi-layered and integrated missile defences" that could lay the groundwork for the militarisation of space.

data-mining "sentiment analysis" & academia

Chris Floyd has the lowdown on the government's latest data-mining venture:

Why is the United States government spending millions of dollars to track down critics of George W. Bush in the press? And why have major American universities agreed to put this technology of tyranny into the state's hands?

. . . a modest $2.4 million Department of Homeland Security grant to develop "sentiment analysis" software that will allow the government's "security organs" to sift millions of articles for "negative opinions of the United States or its leaders in newspapers and other publications overseas," as the New York Times reported earlier this month. Such negative opinions must be caught and catalogued because they could pose "potential threats to the nation," security apparatchiks told the Times.

This hydra-headed snooping program is based on "information extraction," which, as a chipper PR piece from Cornell tells us, is a process by which "computers scan text to find meaning in natural language," rather than the rigid literalism ordinarily demanded by silicon cogitators. Under the gentle tutelage of Homeland Security, the universities "will use machine-learning algorithms to give computers examples of text expressing both fact and opinion and teach them to tell the difference," says the Cornell blurb.
. . .
For those with concerns about civil liberties, Cornell assures us that SAP will be limited strictly to foreign publications. Oh, really? Hands up out there, everyone who believes that this technology will not be used to ferret out "potential threats to the nation" arising in the Homeland press as well. After all, the Unitary Executive Decider-in-Chief has already decided that the nation's iron-clad laws against warrantless surveillance of American citizens can be swept aside by his "inherent powers" if he decides it's necessary. Why should he bother with any petty restrictions on a press-monitoring program? And wouldn't dissension within the ranks of the volk itself actually be more threatening to government policy than the grumbling of malcontents overseas?

. . . we must ask: who is the "Sentiment Analysis" program aimed at? It can't be the major news and opinion drivers in the international and national media; these are already being monitored. And it hardly requires a deus ex machina to determine the political sentiment behind news stories and opinion pieces. Why then would you need multimillion-dollar computer whizbangery to tell you whether a story casts a favorable or critical light on Bush and his policies? And how could critical "sentiment" in the kinds of stories that Cornell, Pitt and Utah are examining in their tests pose any kind of "potential threat" to the nation? Again, there must be something else behind the program because, as with warrantless surveillance, it is clearly redundant on its face.

The key to this conundrum mostly likely lies in the envisioned scope of the program: "millions of articles" to be processed for "sentiment analysis." This denotes a fishing expedition that goes far beyond the "publicly available material, primarily news reports and editorials from English-language newspapers worldwide" that Claire Cardie, Cornell's lead researcher on SAP, says that her team will be using in developing the software. The target of such a scope cannot be simply the English-language foreign press, or the foreign press as a whole, or indeed, every newspaper in the world, from Pyongyang to Peoria. It must also be aimed at other modes of textual communication, in print and online.
. . .
It is part of a larger Homeland Security push "to conduct research on advanced methods for information analysis and to develop computational technologies that contribute to securing the homeland," as a DHS press release puts it, in announcing the formation of yet another university consortium. This group - led by Rutgers, and including the University of Southern California, the University of Illinois and, once again, Pitt - has pulled down a whopping $10.2 million to "identify common patterns from numerous sources of information" that "may be indicative of" - what else? - "potential threats to the nation."

This research program will draw on such areas as "knowledge representation, uncertainty quantification, high-performance computing architectures" - and our old friends, information extraction and natural language processing. It is in fact closely associated with the "sentiment analysis" work being done by the Cornell group - and note that the Rutgers consortium is designing its info-gobbling software to deal with "numerous sources" of information. Do we sense some synergy going on here?

The Cornell and Rutgers groups are two of four "University Affiliate Centers" thus far established by Homeland Security. All of the consortiums are geared toward the amassing, storing and analysis of unimaginably vast amounts of information, gathered relentlessly from a multitude of sources and formats. They are in turn just part of a still-larger panorama of "data mining" programs being developed - or already in use - by the security organs.

These include the "Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight and Semantic Enhancement" (ADVISE) program, which can rip and read mountains of open source data - such as web sites and databases, as analyst Michael Hampton reports. Two Democratic Congressmen, David Obey of Wisconsin and Martin Slabo of Minnesota, have asked the General Accounting Office to investigate the program for possible intrusions on privacy rights, Hampton notes.

odds 'n ends - a process deeply ingrained

Chomsky:

. . . The number of the Latin American officers being trained by the US is going up very sharply. By now, for the first time (it never happened during the cold war) the US military aid is higher than the sum of economic and social aid from key federal agencies- that’s a shift. There are more air bases all over the place. Keep your eyes on Ecuador, there’s an election coming up in about a week, the likely winner, [Rafael] Correa is an interesting person, he was recently asked what he would do with the big Manta US airbase in Ecuador and his answer was, well he’d allow it to stay if the United States agreed to have an Ecuadorian airbase in Miami.
. . .
The Military training has been shifted. Its official focus now is on what’s called radical populism and street gangs. Well, you know what radical populism means, like the Priests organizing peasants or anyone who gets out of line.

~

"More than half of the 13 million population live in poverty, many of them indigenous communities that still speak Quechua language before Spanish." Listen to the weight of that word "still" in this WaPo sentence in a Reuters bylined article on the Ecuador's election, where speaking Quecha is equated with being backward. It is the same assumption & host of associated prejudice we hear in the US about Spanish speaking citizens vis a vis the dominant language.

[Update 16.10.06] The Independent reporter uses the exact same sentence in today's paper: "More than half of the 13 million population live in poverty, many of them indigenous communities that still speak Quechua language before Spanish." Let's assume this is the result of using the same unacknowledged stringer (Reuters?) and not outright plagiarism. He goes on to write: "Although he has a middle-class background, Mr Correa is fluent in Quechua." While understanding that most of Latin America's indigenous populations haven't 'achieved' middle class status, must there be such surprise expressed that a middle class politician would also speak the language half his country uses in evyday speech? Is "although" really necessary?

~

Ron Kovic:

You’ve been taught to follow orders, to obey and not question, to go along with the program and do exactly what you’re told. You learned that in boot camp.

You learned that the very first day at Parris Island when the drill instructors started screaming at you. It is "Yes sir" and "No sir," and nothing in between. There is the physical and verbal abuse, the vicious threats and constant harassment to keep you off balance. It is a powerful conditioning process, a process that began long ago, long before we signed those papers at the recruit stations in our hometowns, a process deeply ingrained in the American culture and psyche, and it has shaped and influenced us from our earliest childhood.

~

Independent:

It is highly unlikely that the US soldiers who killed the ITN correspondent Terry Lloyd and two members of his team during the invasion of Iraq in 2003 will be brought to justice.

Lloyd was injured in crossfire between Iraqi troops and American tanks outside Basra. He was picked up by a makeshift ambulance. As it drove away, the Americans fired on it and Lloyd was killed. His translator, Hussein Osman, and his cameraman, Fred Nerac, whose body has never been found, were also killed.

At last week's inquest on Lloyd's death, there was a verdict of unlawful killing. His daughter, Chelsey, said his death amounted to murder; his widow, Lynn, called it a war crime. The coroner will ask the Attorney-General to press charges.
. . .
Both the Pentagon and the Ministry of Defence wanted reporters to be "embedded" with their forces during the invasion. Embedded journalists were subject to censorship, and it was hard for them to get an independent view of what was going on.

The Pentagon and the MoD disapproved of the so-called unilaterals like Lloyd. By the time this atmosphere of disapproval has filtered down to the front-line soldiers, it can occasionally seem like a licence to kill.
. . .
Since the First World War, every war in which the Americans have fought has been marked by unnecessary civilian deaths and wholly avoidable "friendly fire" incidents. Now, it seems, there may be a new distinguishing feature of American wars: the killing of journalists.

~

Guardian:

In a jail cell at an immigration detention center in Arizona sits a man who is not charged with a crime, not suspected of a crime, not considered a danger to society. But he has been in custody for five years [at the Florence Correctional Center, a privately run detention center in Arizona]. His name is Ali Partovi. And according to the Department of Homeland Security, he is the last to be held of about 1,200 Arab and Muslim men swept up by authorities in the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. There has been no full accounting of all of these individuals. Nor has a promised federal policy to protect against unrestricted sweeps been produced.
. . .
In his lawsuits - there have been seven so far - Partovi claims he is a victim of civil rights abuses and demands between $5 million and $10 million in restitution. The most recent was filed in July.

The staff at the jail where he was first held "poured hot coffee on my body, they also poured cold ice water on my body,'' he wrote in one, claiming that staffers also cuffed his hands and feet, which caused "my ankle and lower extremities to swell abnormally.''

"It is my firm belief that I am constantly subjected to physical abuse (because) of my ethnicity, I am Iranian of Persian birth,'' he wrote in another, filed this summer. In that lawsuit he claimed that immigration officers forced him to kneel while handcuffed, and then kicked and punched his stomach and kidneys. "As you can imagine, this is very, very painful when you are cuffed from behind,'' he wrote. . . .Partovi doesn't have a lawyer, and he told the AP he doesn't want one, choosing instead to represent himself, gleaning expertise from the prison library.

~

Guantanamo:

The Pentagon's Inspector General's office said that it had ordered the Miami-based Southern Command to investigate after Marine Lt Col Colby Vokey, who represents a detainee at the US naval base in eastern Cuba, filed the "hotline" complaint last week.

Col Vokey attached a sworn statement from his paralegal, Sgt Heather Cerveny, 23, in which she said several guards in a bar at Guantanamo Bay bragged about beating detainees and described it as common practice. "Others were talking about how when they get annoyed with the detainees, about how they hit them, or they punched them in the face," Sgt Cerveny said during a telephone interview Thursday.

"It was a general consensus that I [detected] that as a group this is something they did. That this was OK at Guantanamo, this is how the detainees get treated."
. . .
In her complaint, she wrote: "From the whole conversation, I understood that striking detainees was a common practice . . . Everyone in the group laughed at the others' stories of beating detainees."
. . .
The Red Cross has recently completed a two-week visit to the prison, meeting the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] and 13 other high-profile detainees who were transferred there weeks ago from CIA custody. The encounters apparently mark the first time the 14 detainees have spoken to anyone other than their captors since they were arrested. They had been held in CIA custody at secret locations . . .

homeland security interrogates 14 year-old girl - a vivid civics lesson

". . . Julia Wilson . . . learned a vivid civics lesson Wednesday when two Secret Service agents pulled her out of biology class at McClatchy High School to ask about comments and images she posted on MySpace."

She is described as ". . . a 14-year-old girl with a heart on her backpack and braces on her teeth, a freckle-nosed adolescent who is passionate about liberal politics and cute movie stars."

The Bee reporters say it was two Secret Service agents in the sentence above, but later write that "Julia's mother, Kirstie Wilson, and an assistant principal at [Sacramento CA's] McClatchy High said two agents showed them badges stating they were with the Secret Service and the Department of Homeland Security. Federal law prohibits making serious threats against the president, and Julia and her parents say what she did was wrong."

Her "serious threat against the president" that both she and her parents all now agree was terribly "wrong?" It looks suspiciously like a young girl's exercise of what used to be known as an american's 1st amendment rights. She moderated an anti-Bush MySpace page which at some point during the past year posted an objectionable image/text:

Beneath the words "Kill Bush," Julia posted a cartoonish photo-collage of a knife stabbing the hand of the president.
. . .
The MySpace page under question was a group page, similar to an online club. Most of the groups Julia is a part of are fan clubs for movie stars like Jake Gyllenhaal and Ewan McGregor. The group that got her in trouble was called something like "People who want to stab Bush" -- Julia said she doesn't remember the exact name because she soon changed it. After an eighth-grade history lesson in which she learned that threatening the president is against the law, Julia said she changed the group name to "So Bush is an idiot but hey what else is new?" The group primarily consisted of her teenage friends who share her liberal political interests, Julia said. She deleted the group page over the summer when she decided that MySpace was juvenile and taking up too much time.

That's it. 'Threatening' artwork that appeared at some unspecified date for an unspecified short period of time, that was clearly no longer on the web — this requires two agents from the secret service and homeland security to take time for a school visit in order to adequately investigate & assess the degree of threat involved?

No.

They need two thugs-in-suits to send a warning to those who dissent with but the flimsiest pretense for an excuse. A message. Big Brother is watching . . .

A talking-to. Which was heard loud and clear. Which can come at any time after the 'offense' — it's never too late. Her parents' major complaint seems to be that the agents didn't wait for Julia to come home, but went to her school, yanked her out of class, and interrogated her outside their presence:

"I was more than happy to have them talk to her about the severity of what she did. But I wanted to be here with her," Kirstie Wilson said.

McClatchy Assistant Principal Paul Belluomini said he usually does not notify parents when law enforcement officials come to school to interview students. "Parents usually interfere with an investigation, so we usually don't notify them until it's done," he said. Sacramento City Unified School District policy calls for parents to be notified but doesn't say whether it should happen before or after a student is interviewed. State law doesn't require parental notification.

After asking the agents to come back in an hour, her mother sent a"text message instructing her to come straight home from school".

"... there are two men from the secret service that want to talk with you. Apparently you made some death threats against president bush. Dont worry youre not going to jail or anything like that but they take these things very seriously these days," Kirstie Wilson wrote.

"Are you serious!?!? omg. Am I in a lot of trouble"? . . .

Kirstie Wilson called her husband. While they were on the phone, she received another text message from her daughter: "They took me out of class."

It was a 15- to 20-minute interview, Julia said. Agents asked her about her father's job, her e-mail address, and her Social Security number. They asked about the MySpace page she had created last year as an eighth-grader at Sutter Middle School. "I told them I just really don't agree with Bush's politics," Julia said Thursday. "I don't have any plans of harming Bush in any way. I'm very peaceful; I just don't like Bush."

Imagine yourself as a suburban mom receiving a text-message from your 14 year-old daughter in this context that reads they took me out of class.

Who are we?

"I don't condone what she did, but it seems a little over the top to me," said Julia's father, Jim Moose. "You'd think they could look at the situation and determine that she's not a credible threat."

. . . Ann Brick, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, Julia Wilson's post did not sound like a "true threat" to the president, making it political speech that is protected by the First Amendment. "The courts have to distinguish between political rhetoric and hyperbole and a real threat," Brick said. "A reasonable person would have to interpret what was said as indication of a serious intent to commit harm."

Peter Scheer, executive director of the California First Amendment Coalition, said in the current political climate, "the threshold that brings (agents) in has gotten lower . . . It's a cautionary tale for kids who are on MySpace that putting something on MySpace like 'Kill the President' is not the same as saying it on e-mail or over the phone," Scheer said. "The government is not systematically listening to all phone calls or going through e-mails, but it probably does search the Internet."

probably???

If this sends them into such a paroxysm of paranoia, just imagine what Gabriel Range, the British writer/director of the film Death Of A President must have done to their sphincters. While ". . .a White House spokesman said: 'This does not dignify a comment (sic)' [on the movie]" one wonders if an investigation or at the least an 'open file' dignifies it.

This isn't the first Sacramento area child taken out of class by two federal agents. On Sept 27, 2005, 16 year old Munir Mario Rashed was pulled out of his computer class & sent to his school's main office where two FBI agents were waiting to question him about terrorism (from A Nation of Snitches?):

In a private room, the agents asked the student to recount an incident that had occurred two years earlier in a math class. He told the agents that his teacher had reprimanded him for having scrawled the letters ‘PLO’ on his binder. The teacher said that anyone who supported the PLO was a terrorist.

During math class that spring, another student saw the letters "PLO" doodled on a piece of paper in Rashed's three-ring binder. Rashed, whose grandfather came to the United States from the West Bank in the 1930s, said he told the student PLO stood for Palestine Liberation Organization. "I was trying to explain what it means," Rashed said Thursday. "The teacher butted in and said it's a terrorist organization and anyone who supported them was a terrorist. I took offense to that. I don't belong to the PLO, but I believe what they are doing is the right thing.

"I felt that I have the right to draw whatever I want," Rashed said of the doodle.

How does a drawing rate a humiliating school visit by the FBI?

After the June arrest of suspects in a terrorist investigation in Lodi, the FBI received a complaint alleging not only that Rashed had the letters "PLO" on his binder, but that there were pictures of suicide bombers on his cell phone. That prompted the FBI to act, said Karen Ernst, a special agent with the Sacramento office. . . . The agents asked him a series of questions, Rashed said, including whether he was born in the United States, whether he knew what "PLO" stood for and whether he was aware of the arrests in Lodi.

"I said of course I know. I said, 'If you watch the news, you know.' I told them in that school we read the newspaper every day," he said. He said Thursday the only pictures he has on his cell phone are ones of a mosque.

Torture Inc, America's prisons - "the brutality has become customary"

The prison guards stand over their captives with electric cattle prods, stun guns, and dogs. Many of the prisoners have been ordered to strip naked. The guards are yelling abuse at them, ordering them to lie on the ground and crawl. ‘Crawl, motherfuckers, crawl.’

If a prisoner doesn’t drop to the ground fast enough, a guard kicks him or stamps on his back. There’s a high-pitched scream from one man as a dog clamps its teeth onto his lower leg.

Those are images captured in British Channel 4 reporter Deborah Davies' documentary Torture: America’s Brutal Prisons:

Another prisoner has a broken ankle. He can’t crawl fast enough so a guard jabs a stun gun onto his buttocks. The jolt of electricity zaps through his naked flesh and genitals. For hours afterwards his whole body shakes. Lines of men are now slithering across the floor of the cellblock while the guards stand over them shouting, prodding and kicking. Second by second, their humiliation is captured on a video camera by one of the guards. The images of abuse and brutality he records are horrifyingly familiar. These were exactly the kind of pictures from inside Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad that shocked the world this time last year. And they are similar, too, to the images of brutality against Iraqi prisoners that this week led to the conviction of three British soldiers. But there is a difference. These prisoners are not caught up in a war zone. They are Americans, and the video comes from inside a prison in Texas.

Taking advantage of state regulations that require filming to be able to prove proper procedures & levels of force are being used, Davies finds that "[i]n fact, many of them record the exact opposite." She continues:

Frank Carlson was one of the lawyers who fought a compensation battle on behalf of the victims. I asked him about his reaction when the Abu Ghraib scandal broke last year and U.S. politicians rushed to express their astonishment and disgust that such abuses could happen at the hands of American guards.

‘I thought: "What hypocrisy," Carlson told me. ‘Because they know we do it here every day.’

All the lawyers I spoke to during our investigations shared Carlson’s belief that Abu Ghraib, far from being the work of a few rogue individuals, was simply the export of the worst practices that take place in the domestic prison system all the time. They pointed to the mountain of files stacked on their desks, on the floor, in their office corridors – endless stories of appalling, sadistic treatment inside America’s own prisons.

All the hand-wringing by liberals that torture is un-american has to stop until this society as a whole is prepared to really look at itself & how it has behaved these past 60 years.

It’s terrible to watch some of the videos and realise that you’re not only seeing torture in action but, in the most extreme cases, you are witnessing young men dying.

In one horrific scene, a naked man, passive and vacant, is seen being led out of his cell by prison guards. They strap him into a medieval-looking device called a ‘restraint chair’. His hands and feet are shackled, there’s a strap across his chest, his head lolls forward. He looks dead. He’s not. Not yet. The chair is his punishment because guards saw him in his cell with a pillowcase on his head and he refused to take it off. The man has a long history of severe schizophrenia. Sixteen hours later, they release him from the chair. And two hours after that, he dies from a blood clot resulting from his barbaric treatment.

The tape comes from Utah – but there are others from Connecticut, Florida, Texas, Arizona and probably many more. We found more than 20 cases of prisoners who’ve died in the past few years after being held in a restraint chair.

Two of the deaths we investigated were in the same county jail in Phoenix, Arizona, which is run by a man who revels in the title of ‘America’s Toughest Sheriff.’ His name is Joe Arpaio. . . . We uncovered two videotapes from surveillance cameras showing how his tough stance can end in tragedy.

The first tape, from 2001, shows a man named Charles Agster dragged in by police, handcuffed at the wrists and ankles. Agster is mentally disturbed and a drug user. He was arrested for causing a disturbance in a late-night grocery store. The police handed him over to the Sheriff’s deputies in the jail. Agster is a tiny man, weighing no more than nine stone, but he’s struggling. The tape shows nine deputies manhandling him into the restraint chair. One of them kneels on Agster’s stomach, pushing his head forward on to his knees and pulling his arms back to strap his wrists into the chair. Bending someone double for any length of time is dangerous – the manuals on the use of the 'restraint chair’ warn of the dangers of ‘positional asphyxia.’ Fifteen minutes later, a nurse notices Agster is unconscious. The cameras show frantic efforts to resuscitate him, but he’s already brain dead. He died three days later in hospital. . . . His mother, Carol, cried as she told me: ‘If that’s not torture, I don’t know what is.’
. . .
The second tape, from five years earlier, shows Scott Norberg dying a similar death in the same jail. He was also a drug user arrested for causing a nuisance. Norberg was severely beaten by the guards, stunned up to 19 times with a Taser gun and forced into the chair where – like Charles Agster – he suffocated.
. . .
Not all the tapes we uncovered were filmed by the guards themselves. Linda Evans smuggled a video camera into a hospital to record her son, Brian. You can barely see his face through all the tubes and all you can hear is the rhythmic sucking of the ventilator. He was another of Sheriff Joe’s inmates. After an argument with guards, he told a prison doctor they’d beaten him up. Six days later, he was found unconscious of the floor of his cell with a broken neck, broken toes and internal injuries. After a month in a coma, he died from septicaemia. ‘Mr Arpaio is responsible.’ Linda Evans told me, struggling to speak through her tears. ‘He seems to thrive on this cruelty and this mentality that these men are nothing.’

In some of the tapes it’s not just the images, it’s also the sounds that are so unbearable. There’s one tape from Florida which I’ve seen dozens of times but it still catches me in the stomach. It’s an authorised ‘use of force operation’ – so a guard is videoing what happens. They’re going to Taser a prisoner for refusing orders. The tape shows a prisoner lying on an examination table in the prison hospital. The guards are instructing him to climb down into a wheelchair. ‘I can’t, I can’t!’ he shouts with increasing desperation. ‘It hurts!’ One guard then jabs him on both hips with a Taser. The man jerks as the electricity hits him and shrieks, but still won’t get into the wheelchair. The guards grab him and drop him into the chair. As they try to bend his legs up on to the footrest, he screams in pain. The man’s lawyer told me he has a very limited mental capacity. He says he has a back injury and can’t walk or bend his legs without intense pain. The tape becomes even more harrowing. The guards try to make the prisoner stand up and hold a walking frame. He falls on the floor, crying in agony. They Taser him again. He runs out of the energy and breath to cry and just lies there moaning.
. . .
One of the most recent video tapes was filmed in January last year. A surveillance camera in a youth institution in California records an argument between staff members and two ‘wards’ – they’re not called prisoners. One of the youths hits a staff member in the face. He knocks the ward to the floor then sits astride him punching him over and over again in the head. Watching the tape you can almost feel each blow. The second youth is also punched and kicked in the head – even after he’s been handcuffed. Other staff just stand around and watch.

More incidents are related in the article. Tasers are a little less controversial than the use of attack dogs that Human Rights Watch recently criticized. Davies notes the siege mentality guards work under, and one guard readily admits about beatings: "We cover up. Because we’re the good guys." One prison reformer she talked to says:

"We’ve become immune to the abuse. The brutality has become customary."

criminalizing Ghandi - AETA

Kurt Nimmo:

. . . Imagine Mahatma Gandhi arrested for engaging in satyagraha—the philosophy and action of nonviolent resistance—and disappeared to a torture dungeon. Under AETA, coupled with Bush’s detainee bill, all of this will not only be possible, it is more than likely a done deal, considering the long and sordid track record of the state.

In 1930, Gandhi initiated the Salt March to Dandi in opposition to the British salt tax. The British did not arrest Gandhi because he did not incite others to follow him. However, under the AETA, Gandhi would be considered a terrorist because his activity resulted in a "loss of profits" for the British Raj.

AETA? Nimmo explains:

In the not too distant past, when activists blocked driveways or staged sit-downs in federal offices, they were routinely arrested and charged with misdemeanors. Soon, however, as a result of H.R. 4239, the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, they may be considered terrorists.

Any questions as to where this trend is headed? That if succesful this will be limited only to animal rights activists? Not that it would be ok if it were. The Senate passed its version last week unanimously, with language written by California democrat Diane Feinstein (supposedly in response to civil liberties concerns). The house has yet to act on the legislation; their current version is even worse than the Senate's.
Will Potter explains that:

It’s clear that Feinstein’s revisions were a direct response to civil liberties concerns. That’s a good thing. But let’s take a closer look at the “fixes” in this legislation, and the problems that still remain.

For reference, you can download pdf files of S.3880 and H.R.4239.

MINOR CHANGES IN THE SENATE BILL

The Senate bill spells out that activists must damage “real property.” S.3880 says the law targets anyone who

intentionally damages or causes the loss of any real or personal property (including animals or records) used by animal enterprise, or any real or personal property of a person or entity having a connection to, relationship with, or transactions with an animal enterprise.

Compare the same clause to the existing House version, which targets anyone who “intentionally damages, or causes the loss of any property…”

At best, this is a baby step in the right direction. It shows that lawmakers have heard civil liberties concerns that the overly broad language in the bill could sweep in basic First Amendment activity that threatens corporate profits. This language is a bit more specific, bringing the law more in line with its alleged intent: targeting illegal, underground actions in the name of animal rights.

The Senate bill rewrites the “civil disobedience clause” in the penalties section of the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act.

The previous Senate version, and the current House version, spell out:

(1) for an offense involving exclusively a non-violent physical obstruction of an animal enterprise or a business having a connection to, or relationship with, an animal enterprise, that may result in loss of profits but does not result in bodily injury or death or property damage or loss–
(A) not more than $10,000 and the length of imprisonment shall be not more than 6 months, or both, for the first offense; and
(B) not more than $25,000 and the length of imprisonment shall be not more than 18 months, or both, for a subsequent offense; [emphasis added]

The revised Senate version entirely cuts out this penalty section, including all references to “non-violent physical obstruction,” undoubtedly a response to public outrage that a “terrorism” bill could target non-violent civil disobedience.

Instead, the revised penalties section goes straight into the second penalty item, which says punishment shall be:

(1) a fine under this title or imprisonment not more than 1 year, or both, if the offense does not instill in another the reasonable fear of serious bodily injury or death and–
(A) the offense results in no economic damage or bodily injury; or
(B) the offense results in economic damage that does not exceed $10,000;

Cutting the civil disobedience clause was a very minor improvement. But ultimately it is meaningless because other language in the penalties section can achieve the same result. The law still spells out penalties for actions that don’t “instill in another the reasonable fear of serious bodily injury” and “results in no economic damage.” No reasonable person would consider activity like that to be “terrorism.”

The house "legislation expands the types of activism wrapped up in the bill to include anything 'interfering with' business." It includes a

. . . clause, 'loss of profits,' [which] would sweep in not only property crimes, but other activity like undercover investigations and whistleblowing. It would also include campaigns of non-violent civil disobedience, like blocking entrances to a laboratory where controversial animal testing takes place.

Those aren’t acts of terrorism. They are effective activism. Businesses exist to make money, and if activists want to change a business practice, they must make that practice unprofitable. That principle guided the lunch-counter civil disobedience of civil rights activists and the divestment campaigns of anti-apartheid groups. Those tactics all hurt profits. And those tactics, if directed at an animal enterprise, would all be considered “terrorism” under this bill.

The penalties in this version for "'non-violent physical obstruction,' also known as civil-disobedience, could earn an activist 18 months in prison, plus fines . . ."

Remember, we’re looking at a terrorism bill here, that industry groups say is needed to combat “violent” animal rights “extremists,” and we’re still only dealing with non-violent crimes that don’t even “instill” a “reasonable fear.”

The penalties go up from there, predictably . . . What’s most important to note is not the specific amount of years in prison, but the fact that the penalties revolve around money. They operate in terms of corporate property and profits. That’s what this bill is about. It’s not about stopping “violence,” because violence hasn’t taken place. It’s about classifying “non-violent physical obstruction,” crimes that do not “instill in another the reasonable fear of serious bodily injury,” and property crimes as “terrorism,” in order to demonize and silence dissent.

Potter writes yesterday: "Get ready for it. Come November 13, industry groups, corporations and the politicians that represent them will likely throw everything they’ve got into pushing the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act through the House."

Just as the opening shots of the assault on habeas corpus were embedded in the 1996 "Anti-Terrorism & Effective Death Penalty Act" (the precursor to the Patriot Act signed by Clinton), rights & liberties are readily restricted with stealth language in bills 'combating terror' that have nothing to do with terrorism.

Stop AETA has info on current efforts to oppose this legislation.

freedom from torture . . .

"Freedom from torture is an inalienable human right. Yet torture continues to be practiced around the world by rogue regimes." George W. Bush, 23.06.06

Edward S. Herman:

Crucial to Bush's success has been the further collapse of the Democratic Party leadership and its failure to afford the public a serious alternative to the Bush-Cheney Republicans and torture regime. The Democratic leadership supported the Iraq invasion and occupation and continues to squirm to avoid a support of withdrawal even though that is the position now held by a solid majority of the public. These leaders have competed vigorously with the Bush team in genuflection to Israeli demands and support of Israel's attack on Lebanon, its renewed assault on and further immiseration of Gaza, and its continued ethnic cleansing on the West Bank. They are outdoing Bush in inflating the Iran threat and calling for forcible action to meet it.

Given these mini-collapses it was to be expected that the Democrats would be exceedingly quiet in the modest and mainly intra-Republican controversy over the Bush attempt to gain legal sanction for his right to torture. For the Democrats, this campaign, and the torture program, and the serial aggressions and efforts at regime change, don't make Bush a moral outcast or "thug," let alone a "devil" as Hugo Chavez recently called him. The Democrats take umbrage at such a designation, and it is Chavez himself, whose government does not torture, aggress, or pursue regime change elsewhere, who House Minority leader Nancy Pelosi calls a "thug." She and Bush may be power rivals, but she and her Democratic colleagues regard and treat Bush as their leader and agree with him on basic foreign policy issues. They are not going to make torture and the torture gulag a big issue.

["According to Pelosi, "Hugo Chavez abused the privilege that he had speaking at the U.N. In doing so, in the manner which he characterized the president, he demeaned himself and he demeaned Venezuela. Hugo Chavez fancies himself as a modern day Simon Bolivar, but all he is is an everyday thug." Democratic Rep. Charles Rangel said: "[Chavez] has to understand that while we have problems politically sometimes with President Bush, that he is still our president and that we resent foreigners coming and condemning our president, whether it is at the United Nations or whether it is in my congressional district." ("Democratic Lawmakers Blast Venezuelan Leader for Bush Insults," Voice of America News, September 21, 2006.)"]

Because the Democrats are on the Bush team and cannot or will not challenge him forcefully on torture, mainstream media challenges are muted as well. The increasingly powerful rightwing echo chamber positively supports Bush on torture, and the centrist ("liberal") media treat the subject in low key and with balance between supporters and opponents of torture, with a sharply critical editorial or two, but without great passion and not hammering away at the topic as of great moral urgency (and of course without the intensity of coverage or moral fervor displayed in the Clinton-Lewinsky case).

. . . There is no list of acceptable and unacceptable "methods of interrogation"-none of the horrible abuses used in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib are explicitly prohibited. The legislation keeps methods of interrogation open-ended and subject to final decision by the Decider, not even explicitly repudiating water-boarding, and it makes these looser (and torture-protective) rules the ones applicable in interpreting Chapter 3 of the Geneva Conventions."
. . .

A remarkable feature of this legislation is the great scope it gives the Bush administration for interpreting the meaning of words, including those specifying the intensity and scope of permissible violence against prisoners. Andrew Cohen, noting the "horrible record" of the administration "when it comes to identifying 'enemy combatants' and then detaining them here in the states" (he refers to the Yaser Hamdi and Jose Padilla cases), asks "Do you believe the Administration has over the past five years earned the colossal expanse of trust the congress [has given it] in the name of fighting terrorism?" He states that the public's answer may well be negative, "But your answer doesn't matter. And neither does mine. To Congress, the answer is 'yes, sir'."

Stephen Rohde, Los Angeles Daily Journal

. . . The problem is compounded by the White House's refusal to explain which practices are barred. In fact, National Security Adviser Steven Hadley refuses to state whether even waterboarding would be prohibited.

Over the past several years, documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union and information disclosed by the International Committee of the Red Cross show that federal employees have engaged in appalling acts such as soaking a prisoner's hand in alcohol and setting it on fire, administering electric shocks, subjecting prisoners to repeated sexual abuse and assault, kicking and beating prisoners in the head and groin, putting lit cigarettes inside a prisoner's ear, force-feeding a baseball to a prisoner, chaining a prisoner hands-to-feet in a fetal position for 24 hours without food or water or access to a toilet, breaking a prisoner's shoulders and using abusive methods that contributed to several deaths.

[torture files] Jose Padilla's "Motion to dismiss for Outrageous Government Conduct"

"[W]e may some day be presented with a situation in which the conduct of law enforcement agents is so outrageous that due process principles would absolutely bar the government from invoking judicial processes to obtain a conviction . . ." Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist


Almost 4 years after he was arrested, Jose Padilla is finally getting his day in court. His attorneys cite this Rehnquist dicta in their motion to dismiss all charges, "based on the government's outrageous conduct in bringing him to court." It can't be repeated often enough that we are talking about a US citizen held in a US Navy "brig" (quaint word that) on US soil.

In so urging, he is fully cognizant that motions to dismiss premised upon outrageous government conduct are rarely justified, and thus rarely granted. . . . He is also aware that the relief he requests is extraordinary and the dismissal of his indictment would be seen in certain quarters as a calamity. However, Mr. Padilla is steadfast in his assertion that in a Nation of laws and of respect for the dignity of all persons, his prosecution is an abomination. The treatment of Mr. Padilla, a natural born citizen of the United States, is a blot on this nation's character, shameful in its disrespect for the rule of law, and should never be repeated. As such, the government's myriad and sundry due process violations visited upon Mr. Padilla have divested it of jurisdiction to prosecute him in the instant matter.

Here's how they describe to the court his imprisonment & torture:

In an effort to gain Mr. Padilla's "dependency and trust," he was tortured for nearly the entire three years and eight months of his unlawful detention. The torture took myriad forms, each designed to cause pain, anguish, depression and, ultimately, the loss of will to live. The base ingredient in Mr. Padilla's torture was stark isolation for a substantial portion of his captivity. For nearly two years - from June 9, 2002 until March 2, 2004, when the Department of Defense permitted Mr. Padilla to have contact with his lawyers - Mr. Padilla was in complete isolation. Even after he was permitted contact with counsel, his conditions of confinement remained essentially the same. He was kept in a unit comprising sixteen individual cells, eight on the upper level and eight on the lower level, where Mr. Padilla's cell was located. No other cells in the unit were occupied. His cell was electronically monitored twenty-four hours a day, eliminating the need for a guard to patrol his unit. His only contact with another person was when a guard would deliver and retrieve trays of food and when the government desired to interrogate him. His isolation, furthermore, was aggravated by the efforts of his captors to maintain complete sensory deprivation. His tiny cell B nine feet by seven feet B had no view to the outside world. The door to his cell had a window, however, it was covered by a magnetic sticker, depriving Mr. Padilla of even a view into the hallway and adjacent common areas of his unit. He was not given a clock or a watch and for most of the time of his captivity, he was unaware whether it was day or night, or what time of year or day it was.

In addition to his extreme isolation, Mr. Padilla was also viciously deprived of sleep. This sleep deprivation was achieved in a variety of ways. For a substantial period of his captivity, Mr. Padilla's cell contained only a steel bunk with no mattress. The pain and discomfort of sleeping on a cold, steel bunk made it impossible for him to sleep. Mr. Padilla was not given a mattress until the tail end of his captivity. Mr. Padilla's captors did not solely rely on the inhumane conditions of his living arrangements to deprive him of regular sleep. A number of ruses were employed to keep Mr. Padilla from getting necessary sleep and rest. One of the tactics his captors employed was the creation of loud noises near and around his cell to interrupt any rest Mr. Padilla could manage on his steel bunk. As Mr. Padilla was attempting to sleep, the cell doors adjacent to his cell would be electronically opened, resulting in a loud clank, only to be immediately slammed shut. Other times, his captors would bang the walls and cell bars creating loud startling noises. These disruptions would occur throughout the night and cease only in the morning, when Mr. Padilla's interrogations would begin.

Efforts to manipulate Mr. Padilla and break his will also took the form of the denial of the few benefits he possessed in his cell. For a long time Mr. Padilla had no reading materials, access to any media, radio or television, and the only thing he possessed in his room was a mirror. The mirror was abruptly taken away, leaving Mr. Padilla with even less sensory stimulus. Also, at different points in his confinement Mr. Padilla would be given some comforts, like a pillow or a sheet, only to have them taken away arbitrarily. He was never given any regular recreation time. Often, when he was brought outside for some exercise, it was done at night, depriving Mr. Padilla of sunlight for many months at a time. The disorientation Mr. Padilla experienced due to not seeing the sun and having no view on the outside world was exacerbated by his captors' practice of turning on extremely bright lights in his cell or imposing complete darkness for durations of twenty-four hours, or more.

Mr. Padilla's dehumanization at the hands of his captors also took more sinister forms. Mr. Padilla was often put in stress positions for hours at a time. He would be shackled and manacled, with a belly chain, for hours in his cell. Noxious fumes would be introduced to his room causing his eyes and nose to run. The temperature of his cell would be manipulated, making his cell extremely cold for long stretches of time. Mr. Padilla was denied even the smallest, and most personal shreds of human dignity by being deprived of showering for weeks at a time, yet having to endure forced grooming at the whim of his captors.

A substantial quantum of torture endured by Mr. Padilla came at the hands of his interrogators. In an effort to disorient Mr. Padilla, his captors would deceive him about his location and who his interrogators actually were. Mr. Padilla was threatened with being forcibly removed from the United States to another country, including U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he was threatened his fate would be even worse than in the Naval Brig. He was threatened with being cut with a knife and having alcohol poured on the wounds. He was also threatened with imminent execution. He was hooded and forced to stand in stress positions for long durations of time. He was forced to endure exceedingly long interrogation sessions, without adequate sleep, wherein he would be confronted with false information, scenarios, and documents to further disorient him. Often he had to endure multiple interrogators who would scream, shake, and otherwise assault Mr. Padilla. Additionally, Mr. Padilla was given drugs against his will, believed to be some form of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) or phencyclidine (PCP), to act as a sort of truth serum during his interrogations.

Throughout most of the time Mr. Padilla was held captive in the Naval Brig he had no contact with the outside world. In March 2004, one year and eight months after arriving in the Naval Brig, Mr. Padilla was permitted his first contact with his attorneys. Even thereafter, although Mr. Padilla had access to counsel, and thereby some contact with the outside world, those visits were extremely limited and restricted. . . .

The cause of some of the medical problems experienced by Mr. Padilla is obvious. Being cramped in a tiny cell with little or no opportunity for recreation and enduring stress positions and shackling for hours caused great pain and discomfort. It is unclear, though, whether Mr. Padilla's cardiothoracic problems were a symptom of the stress he endured in captivity, or a side effect from one of the drugs involuntarily induced into Mr. Padilla's system in the Naval Brig. In either event, the strategically applied measures suffered by Mr. Padilla at the hands of the government caused him both physical and psychological pain and agony.

. . . Toward the end of Mr. Padilla's captivity in the Naval Brig he was provided reading materials and some other more humane treatment. However, despite some improvement in Mr. Padilla's living conditions, the interrogations and torture continued even after the visits with counsel commenced.

the reply brief should be an outrageous doozie . . .

attack dogs used in US prisons

"Obviously a dog is more of a deterrent [than a Taser gun]. You get more damage from a dog bite. I think it’s right up there with impact weapons . . ."

— Mike Knolls, Special Operations Unit, Utah Department of Corrections, October 26, 2005


Human Rights Watch today released a report detailing the use of dogs to "extract" uncooperative prisoners from their cells. They note that currently, "There is no jurisprudence on the constitutionality of using dogs for cell extractions."

from the summary:

One of the iconic pictures from Abu Ghraib shows an unmuzzled German Shepherd straining at his leash a few inches in front of a detainee, who is crouched in terror. Two Army Sergeants have been convicted in courts-martial of using their dogs to harass, threaten, and assault detainees. Yet five U.S. state prison systems — those of Connecticut, Delaware, Iowa, South Dakota, and Utah — continue to authorize the use of large unmuzzled dogs to terrify and even attack prisoners to secure their compliance with orders to permit themselves to be handcuffed and removed from their cells. While the prisoner tries to fend off the dog, officers move in to take hold of him, apply restraints and then remove him from his cell.

The use of dogs to threaten and attack prisoners to facilitate cell extractions has been a well-kept secret, even in the world of corrections. Human Rights Watch has spoken with more than two dozen current and former correctional officials who had no idea dogs were authorized, much less ever used, for this purpose. Many were, as one said, "flabbergasted."

In three of the five states that authorize use of dogs in cell extraction, the policies appear to be used rarely if at all. In Connecticut (20 cases in 2005) and Iowa (63 cases between March 2005 and March 2006), use of dogs for this purpose is far more common.

Human Rights Watch knows of no other country in the world that authorizes the use of dogs to attack prisoners who will not voluntarily leave their cells. Dogs are often used in prisons in the United States and elsewhere to patrol perimeters and to search for contraband, a use that does not raise human rights concerns.

When Human Rights Watch began this research in 2005, two additional states, Massachusetts and Arizona, also permitted the use of dogs in cell extractions. In 2006, however, corrections departments in those states instituted new policies prohibiting such use of dogs.

a few choice bits:

". . . in some prisons, however, the institutional culture permits cell extractions simply to show inmates “who’s in charge” or to retaliate against defiant inmates, even if there is no real emergency."

The dogs used for cell extractions typically are German Shepherds or Belgian Malinois—both large breeds of dog that usually weigh well over sixty pounds and stand over two feet high.3 The dogs are usually imported from Europe and often undergo preliminary training with breeders or those selling the dogs. Prison handlers continue the training, using decoys to train the dog in "apprehension" — i.e. biting on command and releasing on command. Usually, a dog lives with its primary handler, and the two develop a close bond.

When a handler and his dog enter a cell block in connection with a possible cell extraction, the dog barks loudly and continuously, jumping up against the cell door and scratching at the window, as seen in two videotaped cell extractions with dogs that are available on the Human Rights Watch website. The dog’s barking and presence outside the prisoner’s cell is intended to terrify and intimidate the prisoner into compliance with the order to "cuff up." If the prisoner continues to resist, he knows the dog will be loosed on him. Some prisoners will wrap blankets, towels, and even toilet paper around their limbs to try to protect themselves from dog bites. When the guards open the cell door, the leashed dog enters the cell first. The dog handler is supposed to maintain his hold on the dog’s leash while it attacks the prisoner. But this is not always the case. As one prisoner in Connecticut described his experience: "The dog was barking uncontrollably and jumping up and out towards me. The k-9 officers released the dog leash, and the dog, a German Shepherd, charged me."

The dog is trained to bite whatever part of the prisoner it can grasp first. According to an Iowa corrections official, "[The dogs are] taught a deep—a full-mouth bite. The dog opens his mouth real wide and gets as much as [he can] whether it’s a thigh or whatever in his mouth."

While the prisoner tries to fend off or wrestle with the dog, officers enter the cell, use whatever force remains necessary to subdue him, and put restraints on him. At some point, the dog handler will call off the dog, although the dog may remain in the cell.

Arizona's procedures were different:

Instead of going into the cell with the dog, the dog handler would remain outside holding on to a thirty foot leash attached to a harness on the dog. The dog would be let into the cell, jump up on the prisoner, and bite him. Once the dog had a hold of the prisoner, the officers would pull on the dog’s leash and drag the dog and the prisoner, gripped by the dog’s jaws, out of the cell. A training video formerly used by the Arizona Department of Corrections shows a simulated cell extraction using this method; it is available on the Human Rights Watch website

One Connecticut prisoner wrote:

I freed my leg from the dog’s mouth and I fell backward to the floor. The dog charged me again while I was down. I raised my left hand to block the dog’s bite and it sank its teeth completely through my hand . . . My left hand has suffered permanent damage. I lost a lot of feeling in my middle and ring fingers and I have a "pin & needles" feeling in my index finger and thumb. This is due to multiple nerves being severed from the dog bite.

Curiously, two controversial civilians involved in US prison operations in Iraq were hired after being forced out of the state prison systems of Connecticut & Utah.

According to SourceWatch:

In the May 21, 2004, New York Times, Fox Butterfield and Eric Lichtblau, write in "Screening of Prison Officials Is Faulted by Lawmakers" that the "use of American corrections executives with abuse accusations in their past to oversee American-run prisons in Iraq is prompting concerns in Congress about how the officials were selected and screened."

On May 20th, Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, sent a letter "to Attorney General John Ashcroft questioning what he described as the 'checkered record when it comes to prisoners' rights' of John J. Armstrong, a former commissioner of corrections in Connecticut." The letter "requested that the Justice Department conduct an investigation into the role of American civilians in the Iraqi prison system."

Armstrong is now "assistant director of operations of American prisons in Iraq" and is "apparently working under contract" for the Department of State.

Armstrong "resigned last year after Connecticut settled lawsuits brought by the American Civil Liberties Union and the families of two Connecticut inmates who died." Armstrong had sent the inmates "to a supermaximum security prison in Virginia," where one "of the inmates, a diabetic, died of heart failure after going into diabetic shock and then being hit with an electric charge by guards wielding a stun gun and kept in restraints."

Lane McCotter, "another official" who "was dispatched" by Ashcroft to "reopen" Iraq's prisons, "was forced to resign as director of the Utah Department of Corrections in 1997 after an incident in which a mentally ill inmate died after guards left him shackled naked to a restraining chair for 16 hours."

Following "his resignation in Utah," McCotter "became an executive of a private prison company, the Management and Training Corporation, one of whose jails was strongly criticized in a Justice Department report just a month before the Justice Department sent him to Iraq." McCotter was the first to identify Abu Ghraib "as the best site for America's main prison." McCotter "helped rebuild the prison and train Iraqi guards, according to his own account, given to Correction .com, an online industry magazine."

Butterfield and Lichtblau write: "Speaking of the two cases in an interview, Mr. Schumer said: 'One might be an aberration. Two is getting awfully close to a pattern. ... Of all the people who have experience running prisons in this country and haven't run into trouble, how did they pick these guys?'"

According to the "Justice Department official, ... McCotter's role in overseeing prison operations in Baghdad was limited to what are regarded as civilian prisoners, rather than military ones. But the unclear chain of command at Abu Ghraib has made it difficult to distinguish between the two groups."

"'What is the civilian side?' Mr. Schumer asked. 'Many of the people who were abused were civilians.'"

HRW notes that:

International human rights law illuminates why the use of dogs in cell extractions is wrong. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which the United States has ratified, mandates that "[a]ll persons deprived of their liberty shall be treated with humanity and with respect for the inherent dignity of the human person." Human Rights Watch believes that deliberately instilling terror into an inmate by exploiting the primal fear of aggressive dogs and deliberately permitting a snarling, barking dog to bite the inmate cannot be squared with fundamental human dignity.

The Covenant, as well as the Convention against Torture (also ratified by the United States), both affirm the right of inmates to not be subjected to treatment that constitutes torture or is otherwise cruel, inhuman or degrading. We believe that the use of dogs in cell extractions is degrading and could even be inhuman, depending on the extent of injury from the dog. The use of a fierce animal to control an imprisoned person is inherently humiliating, denying an inmate’s personhood.

Terrifying an inmate into compliance also denies his personal integrity. It reduces the inmate himself to an animal crouched in fear in the face of attack.