war & death: remembering Manny Babbitt - "we disown them"

Now's a good time to take a look at some sobering facts about homeless and incarcerated veterans in America, and to revisit the story of Manny Babbitt, while Dana Priest's article has the overwhelmed VA & the care returning veterans require on everyone's minds. Manny, the son of Cape Verdean immigrants, was an African-American Vietnam vet with a Purple Heart who was executed by the State of California in 1999.

First, from the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans:

The U. S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) says the nation's homeless veterans are mostly males (4 % are females). The vast majority are single, most come from poor, disadvantaged communities, 45% suffer from mental illness, and half have substance abuse problems. America’s homeless veterans have served in World War II, Korean War, Cold War, Vietnam War, Grenada, Panama, Lebanon, Operation Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan), Operation Iraqi Freedom, or the military’s anti-drug cultivation efforts in South America. Forty-seven percent of homeless veterans served during the Vietnam Era. More than 67% served our country for at least three years and 33% were stationed in a war zone.

How many homeless veterans are there?

Although accurate numbers are impossible to come by -- no one keeps national records on homeless veterans -- the VA estimates that nearly 200,000 veterans are homeless on any given night. And nearly 400,000 experience homelessness over the course of a year. Conservatively, one out of every three homeless men who is sleeping in a doorway, alley or box in our cities and rural communities has put on a uniform and served this country. According to the National Survey of Homeless Assistance Providers and Clients (U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness and the Urban Institute, 1999), veterans account for 23% of all homeless people in America.
. . .

In January 2000, The Bureau of Justice Statistics released a special report on incarcerated veterans. Following are highlights of the report: "Veterans in Prison or Jail."

Over 225,000 veterans [were] held in [the] Nation’s prisons or jails in 1998.
Among adult males in 1998, there were 937 incarcerated veterans per 100,000 veteran residents.

1 in every 6 incarcerated veterans was not honorably discharged from the military. [i.e. 5 of every 6 were honorably discharged]

About 20% of veterans in prison reported seeing combat duty during their military service.

In 1998, an estimated 56,500 Vietnam War-era veterans and 18,500 Persian Gulf War veterans were held in State and Federal prisons.

Nearly 60% of incarcerated veterans had served in the Army.

Among state prisoners, over half (53%) of veterans were white non-hispanics, compared to nearly a third (31%) of non-veterans; Among Federal prisoners, the percentage of veterans who were white (50%) was nearly double that of non-veterans (26%).

Among State prisoners, the median age of veterans was 10 years older than other prison and jail inmates.

Among State prisoners, veterans (32%) were about 3 times more likely than non-veterans (11%) to have attended college.

Veterans are more likely than others to be in prison for a violent offense but less likely to be serving a sentence for drugs.

About 35% of veterans in State prison, compared to 20% of non-veterans, were convicted of homicide or sexual assault.

Veterans (30%) were more likely than other State prisoners (23%) to be first-time offenders.

Among violent State prisoners, the average sentence of veterans was 50 months longer than the average of non-veterans.

At year-end 1997, sex offenders accounted for 1 in 3 prisoners held in military correctional facilities.

Combat veterans were no more likely to be violent offenders than other veterans.

Veterans in State prison reported higher levels of alcohol abuse, lower levels of drug abuse, than other prisoners.

Veterans in State prison were less likely (26%) than other State prisoners (34%) to report having used drugs at the time of their offense.

Nearly 60% of veterans in State prison had driven drunk in the past, compared to 45% of other inmates.

About 70% of veterans, compared to 54% of other State prisoners, had been working full-time before arrest.     [thanks to liberal catnip for the pointer]

 Those figures don't even try to delve into the realm of veterans returning with PTSD. All indications seem to indicate that the domestic incoming from the current war are going to make those statistics look trivial. The life of Manny Babbitt was one of institutional failure at every turn, leaving numerous victims in its wake. It still fills me with sorrow and rage.

Manny Babbitt

Manny Babbitt was executed in California on 4 May 1999. He was a 51-year-old decorated Vietnam veteran whose capital crime appears to have been linked to combat-induced post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Manny Babbitt's first taste of active service after joining the US Marines in 1967 was the siege of Khe Sanh, the longest and bloodiest battle of the Vietnam war. On his return to the USA, he experienced severe difficulties adjusting to civilian life and slid into serious alcohol and drug problems. He spent eight months in a mental hospital where conditions at the time were described by a federal judge as "shocking" and "unconstitutional." His declining mental health was diagnosed, but never treated. A leading expert on Vietnam combat-related PTSD concluded that Babbitt was suffering from a combat-related flashback, aggravated by hallucinogenic drugs, when he killed Leah Schendel in 1980, and hid and tagged her body as soldiers had hidden and tagged their fallen comrades in Vietnam. Many Vietnam veterans campaigned to save Manny Babbitt from execution, including one ex-Marine who identified him as the soldier who had saved his life at the siege of Khe Sanh. link

How many people have, continue to, and will in the future fall through the proverbial "cracks" in the system?

Suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, he lived with his brother, Bill, and Bill's wife in Sacramento, Calif. One day in 1980, Bill came across evidence that Manny had perpetrated a break-in robbery and beaten an elderly woman, who died of a heart attack afterward. Bill made the agonizing decision to turn his brother in to the police, so that he couldn't harm others. The police assured him he had done the right thing, that his brother would be given treatment for his problems in prison and would not be subject to the death penalty.

The authorities lied, Bill Babbitt said. They arrested Manny, who confessed. Manny later told Bill, "What they said I did, I must have done it." He was tried, convicted and given the death penalty. His first lawyer took Bill's money and dropped the case. His second, a court-appointed lawyer, refused to allow blacks on the jury, drank heavily and was later disbarred and sued for racism. Manny's military heroism and mental problems were not disclosed during his trial.

Bill Babbit, who once supported the death penalty, tried to work within the system to save Manny's life, until "everybody -- the DA, the police -- didn't want to deal with me anymore," he said. The system didn't bend. link

PTSD was a controversial theory in those days; while it's legitimacy as a condition goes unchallenged today, one does hear about the VA disputing individual diagnoses, sometimes going so far as to accuse vets of faking & malingering, all in order to reduce their benefits & costs of treatment.

Babbitt's childhood was traumatic and impoverished. At an early age he was sent out to do back-breaking work. He left school at 17 unable to read. His alcoholic father beat and brutalized both him and his mentally ill mother. Babbitt and his other siblings were ridiculed daily with racist taunts from members of their community. Babbitt's father died a slow death from cancer, forcing extra responsibility on Babbitt, who became a surrogate parent to his siblings. Psychiatric and neurological disorders ran rampant in the family.

In June 1967, Babbitt joined the US Marines. He initially failed the screening exam, but with 'help' from the recruiter he passed on the second attempt. Upon arriving in Vietnam in December 1967 he went straight into active service in the siege of Khe Sanh, the longest and bloodiest battle of the war. On 17 March 1968 Babbitt was wounded in action but returned to his unit almost immediately because the policy at the time was to keep returning men to the field until they had been wounded three times. Promoted to Corporal, Babbitt was awarded the Cross of Gallantry, the Purple Heart and other decorations. He returned to the USA in August 1969, remained in the Marines but had severe difficulties adjusting to life outside combat. After taking unauthorized leave he was finally discharged after being deemed 'unsuitable'.

Babbitt has a severe, chronic case of combat-induced Post Traumatic Stress Disorder ('PTSD'). A leading expert on Vietnam combat related PTSD concluded 'to a reasonable medical certainty that [Babbitt] was suffering from severe chronic post-traumatic stress disorder, aggravated by alcohol and drug abuse, resulting in his experiencing... a dissociative state at the time of the offense.' PTSD, a now- recognized debilitating disorder, was neither understood nor officially recognized until the end of the 1970s. The symptoms of PTSD include dissociative states during which the individual relives the original traumatic event. For those trained in combat, re-experiencing the event may cause unpredictable explosions of aggressive behaviour. From 1974 Manny Babbitt suffered from increasing periods of mental instability, spending eight months in a mental hospital and attempting suicide. A psychiatrist diagnosed Babbitt as suffering from 'schizophrenic reaction, paranoid type, who shows tendencies toward self-destruction'. A federal magistrate described the conditions in the mental hospital that treated Babbitt as 'shocking' and 'unconstitutional' one month after Babbitt was released from it.

Before he was sent to Vietnam, Babbitt had no history of serious criminal or violent behaviour, but from 1973 onwards he was increasingly involved in crime. His declining mental health was diagnosed but never treated. After taking hallucinogenic drugs, Babbitt is said to have experienced a combat-related flashback which lasted for two days and resulted in amnesia. During that time he killed Leah Schendel and tried to rape another woman, Mavis Wilson. The body of Schendel was hidden and tagged as soldiers hid and tagged their fallen comrades in Vietnam.
. . .

In a comment to the press, the prosecuting authorities showed no understanding or sympathy for suffers of PTSD. A deputy district attorney was recently quoted as stating: 'It's spin that's put on the case to take advantage of the national sense of guilt over Vietnam. The event [the murder] occurred 12 years after Khe Sanh and 10 years after he was discharged.' link

from War and the death penalty, by Russell Neufeld:

The death penalty is something we impose on the people we send off to war, who get terribly messed up and then come home and do terrible things.

War traumatizes the people in it. Soldiers are trained to kill. They kill others and see their own comrades killed and wounded. They may narrowly miss death themselves. They come home with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)--known in earlier wars as "shell shock" or "combat fatigue." They use drugs and alcohol to self-medicate--to deaden the awful feelings and thoughts. The Vietnam War was a major cause of the drug plague that swept this country during the 1970s and 1980s.
. . .

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are producing a whole new generation of traumatized GIs, returning home with many of the same problems as their predecessors. The New England Journal of Medicine recently reported on a study of U.S. forces in Iraq. One in six self-report being traumatized. It is believed that self-reporting results in some underreporting, and that the true figure is closer to one in four.
And many of these young people go from being cannon fodder to grist for the capital punishment mill. In 2002, three Special Forces soldiers who had fought in Afghanistan returned home, and within six weeks, each killed their wives.
. . .

There is a biblical admonition that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the sons. The story of one of my capital clients is a good example. His father went to Vietnam; another young, Black man, and, just like Manny Babbitt, he was at Khe Sanh. Assigned to an artillery unit, he saw his best friend get blown up, standing right next to him. He returned with PTSD. He took to drinking and drugs and violent fights with his wife, which my client witnessed.

When my client was nine years old, his father would take him with him to buy drugs. When my client was 13, his older sister started dating a drug dealer. This man appeared to my client as everything his father wasn't: successful and together. He looked up to him and soon started helping deal drugs. A few years later, they were both charged with capital murder for drug-related homicides.

So we send young people to war—to its horrors. It messes them up terribly, and when they do terribly messed up things—beat or kill their wives, steal to support their drug habit, and then kill someone in the course of a robbery—we disown them. We deny our own culpability as a society.

War is the great creator of the "other." War creates a moral numbness, allowing us to kill totally innocent human beings. War, therefore, not only creates killers who face the death penalty, it also creates the moral climate that allows jurors to think it's okay for the state to kill the killers.

left behind

Caitlin G. Johnson:

UNICEF is best known for its work on behalf of children in the developing world, but its latest report turns an eye to the well-being of children in 21 wealthy nations including the United States, which ranks second to the bottom overall.

The UNICEF Innocenti Research Center Report Card, "Child Poverty in Perspective: An Overview of Child Well-Being in Rich Countries," looks at six dimensions of child well-being: material well-being, health and safety, educational well-being, family and peer relationships, behaviors and risks, and young people's own perceptions of their well-being.

"[Child well-being] is a bell weather for where we'll end up in the global market 20 years from now--more than, say, how we're spending our money in other areas, and what we're doing in Iraq and Afghanistan. It impacts our global security," says Laura Beavers, research associate at the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which sponsors the Kids Count project to track child well-being in each U.S. state.

. . . the United States fared particularly poorly. It ranked last in health and safety, primarily because of high rates of infant mortality, low birth weight, and deaths from accidents and injuries. The United States also showed significantly higher rates of obesity and overweight teenagers, and even the teen birth rate--which has declined dramatically in the past decade--remains higher than in other rich countries.
. . .

America's childhood obesity epidemic, increasing child poverty rates, and an average on-time high school graduation rate of only 70 percent (and as low as 50 percent in at least 11 urban areas) continue to drive down overall child well-being.

"If we had our resources directed in the right way, we wouldn't be where we are. We have the resources to do it, but we haven't had the political will to do it, especially over the last five years," says the Annie E. Casey Foundation's Laura Beavers.
. . .

The United States is one of two countries that have not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child, an international treaty that protects children's rights and access to services and under whose mandate the new study was produced. Somalia is the other country that has not ratified the treaty.

Largest most expensive military on the planet. Period.

Steve Lendman: UN peacekeeping paramilitarism

Don't miss it!

The world community calls them "Blue Helmets" or "peacekeepers," and the UN defines their mission as "a way to help countries torn by conflict create conditions for sustainable peace" by implementing and monitoring post-conflict peace processes former combatants have agreed to under provisions of the UN Charter. The Charter empowers the Security Council to take collective action to maintain international peace and security that includes authorizing peacekeeping operations provided a host country agrees to have them under Rules of Engagement developed and approved by all parties. At that point, the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations enlists member nations to provide force contingents to be deployed once the Security Council gives final approval.

Once in place, Blue Helmets are supposed to help in various ways including monitoring the withdrawal of combatants, building confidence, enforcing power-sharing agreements, providing electoral support, aiding reconstruction, upholding the rule of law, maintaining order, and helping efforts toward economic and social development. Above all, "peacekeeping" missions are supposed to be benevolent interventions. They're sent to conflict areas to restore order, maintain peace and security and provide for the needs of people during a transitional period until a local government takes over on its own.

Far too often, however, things don't turn out that way, and Blue Helmets end up either creating more conflict than its resolution or being counterproductive or ineffective. In the first instance, peacekeepers become paramilitary enforcers for an outside authority. In the second, they do more harm than good because they've done nothing to ameliorate conditions or improve the situation on the ground and end up more a hindrance than a help. This article focuses mostly on the former using Haiti as the primary case study example after reviewing peacekeeping operations briefly in six other countries. In each case, the examples chosen show people on the ground as helpless victims of imperial exploitation (usually US-directed) with UN Blue Helmets used by outside powers for social control and domination, not keeping the peace. more

check mark, please [torture files]

. . . He was handed a form and asked to place a check mark next to the sentence that best described how he had been treated:

“I didn’t go through any abuse during detention,” read the first option, in Arabic.

“I have gone through abuse during detention,” read the second.

In the room, he said, stood three American guards carrying the type of electric stun devices that Mr. Ani and other detainees said had been used on them for infractions as minor as speaking out of turn.

“Even the translator told me to sign the first answer,” said Mr. Ani, who gave a copy of his form to The New York Times. “I asked him what happens if I sign the second one, and he raised his hands,” as if to say, Who knows?

Who knows indeed?

Legacy of Torture & the San Francisco 8

Forcing the men to strip down to their underwear, police placed plastic bags tightly over the men's heads and beat them with an enhanced form of a blackjack known as a slapjack. Electrical cattle prods were used on the men's genitals, anuses, and necks. One of the interviewees can barely hold back tears as he recalls the details of his torture.

Eventually, wanting to end the torture, the three men agreed to confess to the police murders, even though they continue to insist to this day that they were innocent.

An old tale that could come from almost anywhere. Iraq? Afghanistan? Syria or Iran? No: NO (New Orleans, 1973). As America continues its obscene discourse on the acceptable use, suitability, and bounds of torture, a common refrain is how torture goes against the nation's core values (one of our many core beliefs founded on profound amnesia). Alfred McCoy's work documenting the history of the CIA's torture programs, & the protests against the teaching of torture techniques by the US at the School of Americas have received some attention; stories of the domestic practice of torture even less so and they are all too quickly forgotten.

Any hint of a dark side at the core of our society gets swept away to burgeoning trash heaps of 'a few bad apples.' Bad apples have cores too. This nation's moral righteousness that so readily demonizes others when convenient, whether the topic be torture, terror, or aggression, is rooted in and can only be sustained by exceptional denial in the face of factual event, a necessary facade to feel good about ourselves. We generally prefer to imagine ourselves as incapable of brutality and injustice, although tales of police brutality are commonplace and well-known. So, of course it's a given that we don't torture people in America.

American poet Ammiel Alcalay, in the forward to the world's embrace: selected poems by Abdellatif Laâbi (a Morroccan poet who was himself tortured in prison), sketches the past half century of America's cultural landscape, noting that:

. . . [f]rom our present perspective, as the media bombards us with an insidiously violent form of ignorance and misinformation and the United States government continues to reapportion the boundaries of the Middle East, it is almost inconceivable to think about the cultural space occupied from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s by texts sympathetic to and emerging from the cauldron of decolonization . . . [which] were readily available and formed a critical mass of resources related to a contentious political reality that could be neither ignored nor theorized out of existence.

Some of our last stabs at radical internationalism may have been the efforts of the Black Panther Party, following in the footsteps of Malcolm X after his pilgrimage to Mecca, to establish diplomatic and cultural ties with newly independent states in Africa. It is tremendously ironic that, while the FBI's COINTELPRO program worked tirelessly to place an irreconcilable wedge between Jews and black Americans in the United States, the Moroccan Jewish theorist and future political prisoner Abraham Serfaty delivered a "salute to the African-Americans" at the 1969 Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algeria, a festival that Archie Shepp played at along with Tuareg musicians, long before the marketing strategies of World Music. But by this point, American soldiers were fighting amongst themselves almost as fiercely as they fought the enemy in Vietnam. Alliances splintered as the country divided itself bitterly over the ever more pointless last years of the war. Many veterans would return home to the charred ruins of deindustrialized cities and towns, drifting into drugs, drink, and homelessness. United States policy shifted completely toward Israel following the June war of 1967—from that point on, almost everything coming into the United States from the Middle East would be viewed through the filter of the Zionist narrative. Identity politics and nationalisms of all stripes came to dominate North American discourse, eventually settling into a version of autistic multi-culturalism effectively cut off from access to useful forms of democratic power at the national level. The covert wars of the 1980s gave way to the first made for televison, fought at prime time bonanza, the Gulf War. From 1990 until 9/11 and the assault on Afghanistan, Islam was reshaped to fit the mold of a ubiquitous and unyielding enemy. The new crusades were upon us.

. . . we remain incalculably impoverished because of the lingering and deep-seated effects of the Cold War's highly successful recategorization of knowledge arranged according to the priorities of the military-industrial complex and the needs of American exceptionalism.

[A more amplified version of Ammiel's observations can be found within another piece that's been posted on-line, No Return, which is well worth taking the time to read.]

There's little doubt that the Black Panthers were sucessfully marginalized & demonized in the popular imagination. One result is that although we know about some of the brutal and illegal things that were done at the time, as a nation we've buried and never really come to terms with the means by which power is willing to protect and maintain itself. What happened in the past is all too easily imagined to be something we're past, irrelevant to the present.

The subsequent rendering from any relation to the body politic of those "last stabs at radical internationalism" has largely prevented an articulated awareness of the connections between war & repression abroad and the "wars" on poverty, drugs, crime, and illegal immigration at home. Martin Luther King's surety shortly before his death "that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes" seems woefully unsupported almost 40 years later. Most, it would appear, rest quite content indeed.

Ron Jacobs:

In today's world, the US government's use of torture and complicity in its clients' use of it is part of the headlines on a regular basis. Yet very few US citizens believe that methods like waterboarding, beating, and electrical shocks could be—and have been—used on US citizens. Indeed, revelations concerning US agents' treatment of Jose Padilla as a so-called enemy combatant barely made the news.

Legacy of Torture, recently released on DVD by the Freedom Archives of Oakland, California, should shake Americans out of complacency. The film vividly describes government criminality and three men who refuse to give in. It is a brief report on the case of three of the fifteen Black Panther Party members who were arrested in an FBI dragnet in 1973: John Bowman, Ruben Scott, and Harold Taylor in New Orleans. The arrests were supposedly in connection with the shooting deaths of two San Francisco police officers in 1971. Two officers flown in from the San Francisco Police Department, Frank McCoy and Ed Erdelatz who were working with the FBI, would ask Bowman, Scott, and Taylor intimidating questions, hoping to get confessions. When the three men refused to go along, McCoy and Erdelatz would leave the room. The men were then tortured by New Orleans officers. This went on for days.

In 1975, only after a federal court found in 1974 that both San Francisco and New Orleans police had engaged in torture to extract a "coerced" confession, a San Francisco judge dismissed the charges against the three men.

Jacobs again:

It's a little hard to believe, but in 2003 the two SFPD investigators in the original case, McCoy and Erdelatz, were deputized by the federal government and began investigating the 1971 killings along with the FBI. They were also investigating the Panthers' linkages with the Weather Underground. This time around, they were working as part of a grand jury investigation. When that grand jury ran its course, the State of California opened another one. Five former Panthers were called before the panel. All five refused to testify. Consequently, they were sent to jail until the grand jury investigation ended. They were released on October 31, 2005. This film is an introduction to their story and a call to support these men and other activists currently being investigated in what can only be described as fishing expeditions. FBIWitchHunt.com, set up to provide information and garner support for the folks who have become the victims of the expeditions, lists four ongoing grand juries focusing on issues related to animal liberation, medical marijuana, protests against the G8 in San Francisco, and the so-called Green Scare investigations having to do with alleged Earth Liberation Front activities.

On January 23, 2007, 8 men were arrested for the 1971 cop slaying, prompting the Center for Constitutional Rights to issue this press release:

Authorities in San Francisco announced the arrests and indictments of former Black Panthers in the 1971 killing of police officer Sgt. John V. Young despite the use of torture to obtain confessions. Attorneys with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) compared the documented torture by law enforcement of Black Panthers arrested in New Orleans in 1973 to the documented torture the U.S. government has practiced recently at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo.

CCR Legal Director Bill Goodman said, "The case against these men was built on torture and serves to remind us that the U.S. government, which recently has engaged in such horrific forms of torture and abuse at places like Bagram, Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, has a history of torture and abuse in this country as well, particularly against African Americans."

CCR Attorney Kamau Franklin said, "These indictments are an attempt to rewrite history – the history of the Black Panthers, the history of COINTELPRO, and the history of the Civil Rights Movement."

In 1973, New Orleans police employed torture over the course of several days to obtain information from members of the Black Panthers who were stripped naked, beaten, blindfolded, covered in blankets soaked with boiling water, and had electric probes placed on their genitals, among other methods.

In 2005 it was revealed that in Illinois:

. . . for nearly two decades beginning in 1971, [what was known as "Area 2"] was the epicenter for what has been described as the systematic torture of dozens of African-American males by Chicago police officers. In total, more than 135 people say they were subjected to abuse including having guns forced into their mouths, bags places over their heads, and electric shocks inflicted to their genitals. Four men have been released from death row after government investigators concluded torture led to their wrongful convictions.
. . .

. . . over 60 cases of torture, and when I say “torture,” I mean electric shock, I mean suffocation with bags, I mean mock executions, I mean racial attacks, that kind of thing. And they were all coming out of the same station, and they were all headed up by this man, Jon Burge, who came out of Vietnam, started out as a detective and quickly rose in the ranks through sergeant, lieutenant and commander. This went on -- the actual documentation now shows that this went on for over 20 years, from 1972 to 1992, when in fact Burge was finally, after community outrage, suspended and fired from his job.

. . . the torture has never been resolved. No one has ever owned up to the torture. So we have hundreds of individuals who have psychologically been warped, been destroyed. There's never been any clinical resolution to the torture. No one has owned up to it. Democracy Now!

Not one person has ever been prosecuted for these acts committed in the Homeland. The San Francisco cops who were involved are not only still on the job, they're still on the case!

Would prosecutors ever try to bring charges based on a coerced confession?

FBI agents ultimately obtained confessions from Bimenyimana, Karake and Nyaminani, who were brought to the United States and indicted in 2003.

The men, who initially denied killing the Americans, later claimed they were tortured by Rwandan officials until they confessed. Last year, U.S. District Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle listened to five weeks of testimony before deciding in August to throw out the confessions because they were obtained by torture.

Prosecutors at first appealed but then reversed course. news link, here's the opinion

Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! spoke with the attorney (who "also worked for 25 years on the case of Black Panther leader Geronimo Pratt") for one of the men, Herman Bell, arrested last month in the SF shooting:

Stuart Hanlon, I wanted to ask you about court papers filed in the case that were released Thursday, indicating a fingerprint on a cigarette lighter, shotgun shells, an informant helped to lead to the arrests this week. An affidavit filed with the court said in 2004 an FBI investigator matched five of the fifteen shotgun cells recovered from the crime scene to spent shells recovered from a shotgun found at Herman Bell’s New Orleans home in ’73. But police are now saying they have since lost the shotgun allegedly found at Bell's house. Your response?

STUART HANLON: It’s fabricated evidence. What they're really saying is, “We found a gun in Herman Bell's house, and we took it to New Orleans, and we test fired it, and we sent the shells to San Francisco 30 years ago, and all of a sudden we found out they match. But you can't test it -- you can't test the truth of our allegations, because we lost the gun, we lost the paperwork, we lost the proof of where we got it, we lost everything but the result. And just trust us that we're not biased, that we're fair, that we're going to produce real evidence in court. Trust us.” And it's a joke. It really was for the media and the public, and not for court, because --

AMY GOODMAN: The San Francisco Chronicle is reporting that ex-Black Panther, Ruben Scott, is expected to testify against the arrested men. He was arrested with Harold Taylor and John Bowman in ’73 in New Orleans. In the mid-’70s, Scott said he only agreed to speak to the police after he was repeatedly tortured. Can you talk more about Scott and his expected testimony?

STUART HANLON: Yeah. Ruben Scott was tortured in the same way Bowman and Taylor were. They tortured him and broke him. He wouldn't testify at first, and then they went and got him again and threatened him on a case in New York. And he agreed finally, as a broken man and a tortured soul, who had been the victim of torture, to testify. We have statements from him that media took and he gave to lawyers, where he contradicted everything he was going to say in court, where he said he said it because he was tortured. And in the document you talked about, they admit he was tortured, so I don't think we're ready in San Francisco to convict somebody or a group of people, where there are political motivations for the case on a witness who’s been the victim of torture . . .

Democracy Now! also played an excerpt of the documentary Ron Jacobs mentioned above, Legacy of Torture: The War Against the Black Liberation Movement:

AMY GOODMAN: The documentary includes interviews with Harold Taylor and John Bowman, about being tortured by police in New Orleans, as well as dramatized scenes depicting the abuse they suffered. Taylor was arrested Tuesday for the killing of the San Francisco police officer. Police allege the late Bowman was also involved in the killing. He died in December. This excerpt begins with Harold Taylor.

HAROLD TAYLOR: I was in there for maybe five minutes, when the door opened. Three police officers of New Orleans came in, dragging me out by my heels, took me to a chair, where they handcuffed me to the chair and handcuffed my ankles, my feet, to the bottom part of the chair. Without asking any questions, they commenced beating me. They beat me, they punched me, they kicked me, they spit on me. They called me a lot of vile names. And then they told me that they was going to kill me if I didn't cooperate with them.

JOHN BOWMAN: The New Orleans Police Department would come into the room. A hot blanket would be taken from the bucket, dripping, hot and wet, placed over my head, held there for -- I can't say whether it was minutes or seconds. It felt like forever.

HAROLD TAYLOR: They came out with a plastic bag, put it over my head, and they started beating me with the bag over my head. About the time I was about to lose consciousness, about to pass out, they would snatch the bag off, and while I’m trying to catch my breath, they would start beating me again. So I asked them, I said, “Well, what do you want?” You know, they just continued to go on whipping. They didn't ask me any more questions. They didn’t ask any questions, really.

Then, they came out with this cattle prod. I knew what it was, because being off of a farm when I was a kid. My family used to go to Louisiana every year to work on the family farm, and my uncles, they had a couple -- we had some cows, and they used cattle prods to move those cows up chutes and stuff like that. So I’d seen that, and I knew what it was.

JOHN BOWMAN: The cattle prod was placed on my genitals, placed in my [expletive]hole, placed under my feet, placed under my arms.

HAROLD TAYLOR: Down on my private parts, under my neck, behind my ears, down my back. I think I passed out one time, and they woke me back up, and they had taken me to another room. Two detectives had me by one arm -- by each arm, and a detective came out of nowhere and he just cold-cocked me and knocked -- I mean, he knocked me straight out. I was unconscious.

JOHN BOWMAN: Another instrument that was used during the questioning was a ledger law book, and this ledger law book was used to hit me upside my head at times when I was not giving the right answers that was script for me.

HAROLD TAYLOR: They took me to a holding cell. They threw water on me. I was soaking wet. It was cold. Pulled me out of there, maybe by 6:00 or 7:00 in the morning, and told me they had somebody they wanted me to talk to and I better cooperate, and if I didn’t, I was going to get more of the same. So they put me in there. There was two detectives from San Francisco. I later found out it was McCoy and Erdelatz. They started asking me questions. They told me they had a script. I’m sure I saw a recorder there, too. And they was reading to me about what they said took place in San Francisco. I told them I had no knowledge of it.

It was back again with the plastic bag. This time they had a blanket. I don't know what they soaked it in, but it was really, really hot, and they just covered me with that blanket and put that plastic bag over my head. And I couldn't scream, I couldn't holler. I couldn’t get my hands up to poke a hole in the bag, because I was handcuffed to the chair and my legs were tied to the chair. And they kicked the chair over and let me just suffocate. I was just about to pass out. They would snatch it off, spit in my face, and they left me sitting there for a little while.

McCoy and Erdelatz, they started asking me questions. I had no knowledge of the things they were asking me, so I couldn't answer them, you know. So they said, “Well, we’ll” -- they turned off the recorder or whatever they had and said, “We'll tell you what happened. And then after we tell you, this is what we want you to say.”

JOHN BOWMAN: So I did make statements. I did waive my rights to an attorney, which means I waived my Miranda rights. I did all of this because of the physical aggression and the brutality that was being put upon my body.

HAROLD TAYLOR: One got behind me, and he took his hands and he slapped them like that over my ears. I couldn't hear nothing. My ears were just ringing so bad. I could feel fluid running down the side of my face. And they were talking to me, but I couldn’t hear them. All I could hear was the ringing. Whenever they stood me up to make me walk, I couldn't walk. They had to just kind of just carry me back into the other room. And when they’d get me back in there, they would start again. And they beat, and they beat, and they beat. Then Erdelatz and McCoy would come back in, and they would kind of grin and laugh. They were all laughing. They thought it was a lot of fun. I was a big joke. They started asking me questions, so I started talking to them, telling them just like they -- I followed their whole script. Everything they told me to say, I said it just like -- whatever Ruben told them, I repeated what Ruben said.

Watch Legacy of Torture on an Internet stream in RealMedia format from DishTV

Upcoming screenings of Legacy of Torture, including:

Free Speech (satellite) TV, Tuesday February 20
(times are PST) 3:29 a.m. 6:29 a.m. 10:29 a.m. 5:29 p.m. 10:29 p.m. Additional dates to be announced. Daily schedule for February 20.

Berkeley, CA, Sunday February 25
6:00 PM - 10:00 p.m. at The Long Haul, 3124 Shattuck Ave, (at Woolsey St.), $5-up sliding scale (no one turned away). A screening of Legacy of Torture will be followed by the classic Battle of Algiers. People will be on hand to answer questions on the SF 8, as well as offer an update Eric McDavid. All proceeds will be split between the SF 8 & Eric McDavid.

Santa Barbara, February -date and time to be announced.

Monterey March 13 evening (to be confirmed)
The Monterey Peace & Justice Center will show the film at the California State University Monterey Bay as part of their New Directions Film Series. Mel Mason, former member of the Black Panther Party, will speak.

Info on how to support the SF 8 at the Committee for the Defense of Human Rights

private prison bulls

As mentioned in dollars in the bars, capital demands growth and 'get tough' immigration policy is currently serving the private prison industry and its investors very well. Business is booming again. By the numbers:

Corrections Corp. of America [CCA], which operates prisons and detention facilities [& whose documented infractions include "routine abuse of basic prisoner rights, mental and physical abuse, denial of health care and medical treatment, prison overcrowding, and a lack of working showers, and toilets" -A], said Thursday its fourth-quarter profit climbed 37 percent, as inmate populations rose and new contracts went into effect.

Quarterly earnings rose to $32.2 million, or 52 cents per share, from $23.4 million, or 39 cents per share, during the same period last year.

Results beat Wall Street's expectations. Analysts polled by Thomson Financial forecast a profit of 44 cents per share.

Revenue increased 10 percent to $349.6 million from $317.2 million in the year-ago quarter.
. . .

The company said results were driven by strong demand from both federal and state prisons.

Revenue from managing federal facilities grew 13 percent to $141 million, helped by new contracts at the T. Don Hutto Residential Center in Texas and Eloy Detention center in Arizona, which experienced increased detainee populations from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The Northeast Ohio facility also experienced increased inmate populations from the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

At the state level, revenue increased 9 percent to $168.5 million in the quarter, as inmate populations rose in Colorado, Minnesota, Hawaii, Wyoming and Washington.

Overall, occupancy in prisons increased to nearly 97 percent in the quarter, from 93 percent in the year-ago period.

For the full fiscal year, Corrections Corp.'s profit more than doubled to $105.2 million, or $1.71 per share, from $50.1 million, or 83 cents per share in 2005.

Revenue rose 12 percent to $1.33 billion from $1.19 billion in the prior year. link

A 97% per bed occupancy rate (the hotel industry must be jealous). A 4 percent increase that translates into a doubling of profits. A numbers game with human pawns.

gay Latino accuses Fresno cops of sexual assault

A 30-something Fresno [CA] gay man has filed a lawsuit in federal court against Fresno police chief Jerry Dyer and four unidentified officers who allegedly handcuffed him, bent “him double” and then penetrated his anus with a foreign object—a thumb or finger.

According to the civil complaint, four Fresno police officers showed up at Cain Gonzalez’s home in a Southeast Fresno gated community on November 7, 2005 where they detained and handcuffed him. The officers claimed he had drugs in his possession.

Gonzalez’s attorney, Bruce Nickerson, says the accusation was false and no charges were ever filed against Gonzalez in the incident.

The complaint then alleges that one of the officers “perceived that” Gonzalez “was gay and said: ‘I know where you faggots keep your shit’.” That officer “then and there” shoved a finger into Gonzalez’s anus, searching for drugs. According to Nickerson, “the invasive act ruptured the lining of” Gonzalez’s “rectum causing him excruciating pain.”

When Gonzalez’ mother Soila attempted to come to his aid, Nickerson says the officers ordered her into her house.

Nickerson says Gonzalez then began bleeding “profusely” from his rectum. He said officers later took Gonzalez to a local hospital for treatment.

Nickerson says that the officers made comments to Gonzalez that leads Nickerson to believe Fresno police “have a policy and practice of assaulting gay Hispanic men.”
. . .

In the Gonzalez case, Nickerson says Gonzalez missed a court appearance on an unrelated drug charge in Madera because he was being held in the Fresno County Jail. When he failed to appear, a Madera judge issued a bench warrant for his arrest on November 15th.

When Gonzalez was released without any charges from the Fresno County Jail during the third week in November, he was then arrested on the Madera County warrant and transferred to the Madera county jail where he was initially placed in protective custody because of his sexual orientation.

Nickerson alleges in the lawsuit that four days after arriving at the Madera jail, Gonzalez was moved into the “open prison population and was immediately assaulted by gang members, who slashed his ear and broke his eardrum.” The lawsuit claims Gonzalez was placed in ‘general population’ in order to intimidate him so that he would not file a complaint against Fresno police. The suit names Madera County sheriff John Anderson and the County as defendants.

Gonzalez seeks unspecified damages, a judgment that the practices described in the suit violate the U.S. Constitution and an injunction stopping police from “targeting, harassing and/or arresting” Latinos “who are minding their own business.”

According to Nickerson, Fresno police refuse to identify the four officers who allegedly assaulted and arrested Gonzalez. He said that Fresno police will not release any reports. link

illegal US covert ops in Somalia prepared Ethiopia's invasion

Looking for something else in old notes, I came across this item from the Observer from last fall. Note the prominent role of private mercenaries ("firms") providing, one supposes, an added layer of deniable distancing while reporting to CIA. The invasion by Ethiopian troops can now be understood as their attempt to prevent "a replay of Dien Bien Phu."

All obscured by screaming al Qaeda as the gunships let loose last month.

US accused of covert operations in Somalia

Emails suggest that the CIA knew of plans by private military companies to breach UN rules

September 10, 2006, The Observer

Dramatic evidence that America is involved in illegal mercenary operations in east Africa has emerged in a string of confidential emails seen by The Observer. The leaked communications between US private military companies suggest the CIA had knowledge of the plans to run covert military operations inside Somalia - against UN rulings - and they hint at involvement of British security firms.

The emails, dated June this year, reveal how US firms have been planning undercover missions in support of President Abdullahi Yusuf's transitional federal government - founded with UN backing in 2004 - against the Supreme Islamic Courts Council - a radical Muslim militia which took control of Mogadishu, the country's capital, also in June promising national unity under Sharia law.

Evidence of foreign involvement in the conflict would not only breach the UN arms embargo but could destabilise the entire region.

One email dated Friday, 16 June, is from Michele Ballarin, chief executive of Select Armor - a US military firm based in Virginia. Ballarin's email was sent to a number of individuals including Chris Farina of the Florida-based military company ATS Worldwide.

Ballarin said: 'Boys: Successful meeting with President Abdullay Yussef [sic] and his chief staff personnel in Nairobi, Kenya on Tuesday ... where he invited us to his private hotel suite flacked by security detail ... He has appointed is chief of presidential protocol as our go to during this phase.'

She refers to one 'closed-door meeting' with a senior UN figure and mentions there are 'a number of Brit security firms' also looking to get involved.

Ballarin claimed she has been given 'carte blanche' to use three bases in Somalia 'and the air access to reach them'.

She then suggests that the CIA have been kept informed of the plans. Ballarin states: 'My contact whom we discussed from the agency side requested an in-person meeting with me. I arrived in New York at 2340 last night and was driven to Virginia - arriving at 0200 today.'

According to the highly respected newsletter, Africa Confidential, which originally published extracts of the emails last week, Select Armor started its operation planning in Kampala, Uganda. The emails suggest that the Ugandan government were willing to help secure arms supplies for any operation although this is denied by security officials in Kampala.

In one reply to Ballarin, Farina said: 'A forced entry operation [into Mogadishu] at this point without the addition of follow-on forces who can capitalise on the momentum/initiative of the initial op will result in a replay of Dien Bien Phu'. This is a reference to the defeat of French colonial forces in Indochina in 1953.

The website of Farina's company ATS boasts it 'can execute operations in support of host national indigenous forces'. ATS claims it uses former US and British special operations personnel.

One email discussing funding of any operation sent from Farina to Ballarin states: 'We may have to re-focus our efforts in the US among the DOS [State Department] and DOD [Defence Department] to bring any forward movement to this effort.'

recruiting canon fodder - "not putting a hammer in their hands"

Over 10% of last year's recruits had felony records.

NYT:

The number of waivers granted to Army recruits with criminal backgrounds has grown about 65 percent in the last three years, increasing to 8,129 in 2006 from 4,918 in 2003, Department of Defense records show.

During that time, the Army has employed a variety of tactics to expand its diminishing pool of recruits. It has offered larger enlistment cash bonuses, allowed more high school dropouts and applicants with low scores on its aptitude test to join, and loosened weight and age restrictions.

It has also increased the number of so-called "moral waivers" to recruits with criminal pasts, even as the total number of recruits dropped slightly. The sharpest increase was in waivers for serious misdemeanors, which make up the bulk of all the Army's moral waivers. These include aggravated assault, burglary, robbery and vehicular homicide.

The number of waivers for felony convictions also increased, to 11 percent of the 8,129 moral waivers granted in 2006, from 8 percent. . . .

The Army enlisted 69,395 men and women last year.

That's over 800 felons recruited into the armed services in one year.

Aaron Belkin, director of the Michael D. Palm Center, a research institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara, that focuses on the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy regarding homosexuality, obtained the most recent data from the Department of Defense. . . .

Since more than 125,000 service members with criminal histories have joined the military in the last three years, Mr. Belkin said, "you have a sizeable population that has been incarcerated and is not used to the same cultural norms as everybody else."

"The chance that one of those individuals is going to commit an atrocity or disobey an order is higher," he said. "Many of those individuals can be good soldiers, but in some cases they have special needs. The military should address those needs rather than pretending they don't exist."

Of course there's no "moral waiver" for the guy who tells 'em he likes to suck cock. That's simply unacceptable.

John D. Hutson, dean and president of the Franklin Pierce Law Center in New Hampshire and former judge advocate general of the Navy, said the military must tread carefully in deciding which criminals to accept. There is a reason, he said, why allowing people with criminal histories into the military has long been the exception rather than the rule.

"If you are recruiting somebody who has demonstrated some sort of antisocial behavior and then you are a putting a gun in their hands, you have to be awfully careful about what you are doing," Mr. Hutson said. "You are not putting a hammer in their hands, or asking them to sell used cars. You are potentially asking them to kill people."

And of course there's no 'moral waiver' available to any ex-felon who might want to vote.

Josh Wolf — live from federal prison, Dublin, CA

broadcast 12 jan 2007 on Democracy Now!:

JOSH WOLF: . . . my fear is that instead of having the effect of making people wake up and realize that we need to do something about the impending police state that we're living in that will send a journalist to jail for six months, who was accused of doing nothing wrong, that instead of causing people to stand up, that it's scaring people into not speaking out at all, and that's a very frightening concept that reminds me of what happened during World War II or the lead-up to World War II in Germany, in that all these people saw what was coming their way and could have decided to react, to resist, but were too afraid. And I’m worried that America is too afraid, and even though maybe my situation has helped them realize what's coming down the pike, that instead of jolting them out of bed, it's just lulled them deeper into sleep and helped them pull the covers over their head in the hopes that maybe, just maybe, if they don't see it, it will all go away.
. . .

AMY GOODMAN: Do you plan to continue to be a journalist, Josh Wolf, once you are freed?

JOSH WOLF: Absolutely. This has just made me more determined to get the stories that are not being covered out than ever before, because someone needs to cover this. There's a lot of people that are, but we need more. Every single person that can stand up and document injustices they see around them is one more person that will help lead towards an understanding and enlightenment of our society about what's really going on.

AMY GOODMAN: If people want to reach you, where can they write? Can they email you? Can they write you letters?

JOSH WOLF: If they visit my website [. . .] my blog that they can read about what's going on, there's a resource page that explains the situation a little better. And at the bottom, it says, “mail me.” Right there is my address. And if you don't want to send snail mail, you can just click the email button and send an email to freejosh(at)joshwolf.net, and those will get printed and sent to me. But please do include your snail mail address, because I can't email you back.
. . .

AMY GOODMAN: When we interviewed you for the brief respite that you got out of jail in September, live in studio at the Link TV studios in San Francisco, we also talked to the San Francisco Chronicle reporter—two reporters there also face imprisonment for not revealing sources in exposing the steroid Barry Bonds case, what you were talking about, but they have not gone to jail. What's the difference?

JOSH WOLF: The legal difference is not much. It clearly shows how the government's deciding to deal with corporate media versus an independent journalist, is that they've said, well, we're not going to make you go to jail until the Ninth District rules one way or the other, and then the Ninth District's hearings have been pushed back and pushed back and pushed back. Mine, on the other hand—I was escorted into custody from the courtroom the day I was ruled in contempt. The Ninth Circuit ruled, while I was in custody—or actually the Ninth Circuit spent a month waiting to determine whether or not to grant me bail -- granted me bail, passed it on to the next panel. That panel ruled, and then immediately they said I needed to go back into custody while we still had another level of Ninth Circuit appeals pending. So it's definitely a divergence between how the government’s handled my situation as an independent journalist and how they've dealt with the corporate media, who has also been found in civil contempt.
. . .

Look around you. If they're sending me to jail for essentially no charges, what's next? We need to wake up. We need to come to terms with the government we have right now and demand a change, demand a free media that's not encumbered by interference, that doesn't force journalists to act as agents of the state, that truly is free, both in terms of corporate control and government control, and hopefully if we demand it, we'll have it.
. . .

MARTIN GARBUS (Wolf's attorney): I think that what he said, namely, that they're investigating what may have been an attempt -- may have been an attempt to set fire to a police car, you don't set up grand juries in order to see whether or not there was a crime or not. You have a grand jury to investigate something that is a crime. I think the significant thing here is that the grand jury subpoena has been issued by the Joint Terrorism Task Force, so I think that you should put the Josh Wolf stuff aside, in a way, namely whatever happened at that particular demonstration, I think it's an attempt to get at people who were critical of the Bush administration. There is no crime—there is no grand jury sitting right now in the state court. There is no crime being considered in the state court. The whole question of whatever happened to a policeman is a state court problem. You could not issue a subpoena out of the federal court to investigate what is a state court problem. There is no investigation of any kind going on, so far as we know, in the federal court. So there's no reason to hold him, and we have made this argument, and the argument has been rejected.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you think is going on?

MARTIN GARBUS: I think basically it's an attempt by the government—the Joint Terrorism Task Force is controlled out of Washington. I think it's an attempt, as Josh said, to learn the identity of people who are hostile to this administration. And the people who were at the demonstration, in addition to demonstrating about the subject of the demonstration, also had anti-Bush signs, also had anti-Iraq signs. Now, this subpoena was issued, as we know, early last year. I think that what you see is an attempt by the Bush administration to crack down on its critics.

2 by Lorine Niedecker - "the recommended melon"

The radio talk this morning
was of obliterating
the world

I notice fruit flies rise
from the rind
of the recommended
melon




J.F.Kennedy after
the Bay of Pigs

To stand up—

black-marked tulip
not snapped by the storm

'I've been duped by the experts'

—and walk
the South Lawn


(1963, Lorine Niedecker)

the Shanghai Cooperation Organization - is the world order becoming irreversibly multipolar?

M K Bhadrakumar:

Russia is not in competition with Iran in tapping the South Asian market for gas. It is expedient for Russia if Iran gets deeply engaged in the Asian market (which includes two energy guzzlers - China and India) and, that, too, with Russian equity participation in the actual construction of Iran's pipeline to South Asia. That could lead to Gazprom's participation in the highly lucrative distribution and retailing of Iranian gas in Pakistan, India and China.

In geopolitical terms, what merits attention will be the prospects of an "energy club" taking shape within the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) framework. Significantly, the foreign ministers of India, Russia and China are to meet in New Delhi in a trilateral format this month. Meanwhile, the Indian foreign minister has just concluded a visit to Iran, setting the requisite political climate for accelerated energy cooperation.

Russia sees advantages in developing an "energy club" within the SCO. Putin proposed such an idea at the SCO summit last June. The Russian objective is to bring together major energy producers and key consumers within the ambit of SCO, which would not only lead to coordination of efforts in joint energy production and transportation projects but also strengthen regional security on the whole, apart from reinforcing the multipolarity of the world order. The SCO consists of China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgystan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Iran has observer status.

Alarm bells must be ringing in Washington. Has the clock begun ticking for a SCO "energy club"? Is the world order becoming irreversibly multipolar? To be sure, the tensions around the Iran nuclear issue that Washington has ratcheted up are proving counterproductive. They have prompted Tehran to draw close to Moscow and, arguably, to expedite the Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline project.
. . .

The specter of a nuclear arms race being forced on Russia haunts the Kremlin. Nothing brings this home more than the Russian proposal to Washington to conclude a non-aggression pact ("legally binding agreements guaranteeing that their military potentials will not be targeted against each other"). Russia-Iran cooperation seems to gather pace almost in direct proportion to the deterioration of Russian-US relations. Moscow's post-haste delivery of Tor-M1 air-defense systems to Iran in December was extraordinary.

Former Russian prime minister Yevgeni Primakov last week summed up the calculus: "Russia is on the way to becoming one of the pillars, if you like, one of the centers, of the multipolar world and one should reckon with Russia ... The Americans will have to retreat, they are at a dead end, and they don't know how to back out of it. They understand it and they are now turning to the United Nations ... Our task is, together with Europe, together with China, together with India, to make sure that a world order that emerges is based on stability."

Primakov added, "You see, we want the American hegemonistic aggressiveness to be blunted. Objectively, things will be moving in this direction because giants such as China and India are rising. By the way, the combined GDP [gross domestic product] of China and India is exceeding that of the United States and they are growing 2.5 times faster than the United States."

Significantly, the adviser to Iran's Supreme Leader on international affairs and former foreign minister Ali Akbar Velayati arrived in Moscow on Thursday for follow-up consultations over Ivanov's talks in Tehran. Velayati played a key role, along with then-Russian foreign minister Yevgeny Primakov, in laying the foundation for Iran-Russia strategic cooperation in the mid-1990s.

dollars in the bars - the private prison industry - "the war on drugs has . . . become a war on immigrants"

Deepa Fernandes, "This Alien Life: Privatized Prisons for Immigrants":

As the government invokes national security to sweep up and jail an unprecedented number of immigrants, the private-prison industry is booming. In the aftermath of the September 11th attacks on New York, immigrants have become the fastest growing segment of the prison population in the U.S. today. In fiscal year 2005, more than 350,000 immigrants went through the courts. "A growing share of them committed no crimes while in the United States - 53 percent this year, up from 37 percent in 2001 - even though Bush administration officials repeatedly have said their priority is deporting criminals," the Denver Post reported.

The Clinton-era ushered in a private prison boom. Catherine Austin Fitts, in “Dillon Read & Co. Inc. & the Aristocracy of Prison Profits,” explains:

Paradigms of Republican vs. Democrat or Conservative vs. Progressive have been designed for obfuscation and entertainment. An endless number of philosophies and strains of religious and “holier than thou” moralism are really put on and taken off like fresh make-up in the effort to hide from view a deeper, uglier face. One person who may have described it more frankly during the Clinton years was the former Director of the CIA, William Colby, who writing for an investment newsletter in 1995 said:

“The Latin American drug cartels have stretched their tentacles much deeper into our lives than most people believe. It’s possible they are calling the shots at all levels of government.”

The Clinton Administration took the groundwork laid by Nixon, Reagan and Bush and embraced and blossomed the expansion and promotion of federal support for police, enforcement and the War on Drugs with a passion that was hard to understand unless and until you realized that the American financial system was deeply dependent on attracting an estimated $500 billion-$1 trillion of annual money laundering. Globalizing corporations and deepening deficits and housing bubbles required attracting vast amounts of capital.

Attracting capital also required making the world safe for the reinvestment of the profits of organized crime and the war machine. Without growing organized crime and military activities through government budgets and contracts, the economy would stop centralizing. The Clinton Administration was to govern a doubling of the federal prison population [See page 72, Prison Nation: The Warehousing of America’s Poor, edited by Tara Herivel and Paul Wright.].

The boom of course was bound to bust; it didn't last long. Fernandes continues:

In 2000, the industry was carrying more than $1 billion in debt and was violating its existing credit agreements. CCA [Tennessee-based Corrections Corporation of America, one of the nation's biggest prison companies] saw its stock plummet 93 percent and Business Week noted that the correction “industry’s heyday may already be history.”

At the time, the American Prospect, a national magazine, explained the decline:

“The private-prison industry is in trouble. For close to a decade, its business boomed and its stock prices soared because state legislators across the country thought they could look both tough on crime and fiscally conservative if they contracted with private companies to handle the growing multitudes being sent to prison under the new, more severe sentencing laws. But then reality set in: accumulating press reports about gross deficiencies and abuses at private prisons; lawsuits; million-dollar fines. By last year, not a single state was soliciting new private-prison contracts. Many existing contracts were rolled back or even rescinded. The companies’ stock prices went through the floor.”

Then came the the September 11th attacks on New York in 2001. The government began to target non-citizens with mass arrests during sweeps through immigrant communities, increased prosecutions of undocumented border crossers, and the use of immigration law to hold people while looking for criminal or terrorist charges against them. The INS was subsumed into a new agency named the Department of Homeland Security.
. . .

The DHS-run Special Processing Center is a massive one-stop-shop, where immigrants can be jailed, tried in an immigration court, appealed before an immigration judge, and ordered deported—all without leaving the self-contained complex. While DHS does not refer to its facilities as jails, the Special Processing Center in Florence [AZ] is ringed by concertina wire, surrounded by chain-link fences, with inmates locked into cells. They face zealous prosecution and in many cases are left to languish for weeks and months without trial or sentencing.

The complex in Florence is part of a 300-facility-strong network of immigrant incarceration facilities. The average time an immigrant is detained is 42.5 days from arrest to deportation. At $85 a day per detainee, that adds up to $3,612.50 per person. In 2003, DHS was holding 231,500 detainees, and the budget to cover this was $1.3 billion. Since 2001, the DHS budget for detention bed space has increased each fiscal year as has the number of beds. In 2003 there was more than $50 million slated for the construction of immigrant jails.

Corrections Corporation of America

A 2003 report by the DHS Inspector General forcefully condemned the treatment of immigrants inside various jails in it report, “The September 11 Detainees: A Review of the Treatment of Aliens Held on Immigration Charges in Connection with the Investigation of the September 11 Attacks.” Infractions included routine abuse of basic prisoner rights, mental and physical abuse, denial of health care and medical treatment, prison overcrowding, and a lack of working showers, and toilets.

Despite a long record of problems, CCA continues to promote privatization and win contracts. "The private prison industry, to increase the demand for its services, exerts whatever pressure it can to encourage state legislators to privatize state prisons," wrote Sharon Dolovich in the Duke University Law Journal. "[T]he industry is adept at lobbying legislators and targeting campaign contributions to promote its privatization agenda."

Indeed, some critics charge that the company's success is related to its deep rooted ties to elected officials. In addition to CCA's record of campaign contributions to the Republican Party since 1997, there are significant connections between executives and government officials. J. Michael Quinlan, former head of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, has been an executive at CCA for the past decade. CCA’s chief lobbyist in the state of Tennessee is married to the speaker of the house. And CCA is a member of the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative group that writes and pushes bills on policy such as sentencing guidelines.

For the second quarter of 2005, CCA announced that its revenue had increased three percent over last year, for a total of almost $300 million. CCA calculates that it expenditure of $28.89 per inmate, per day allows it to make a daily profit of $50.26 per inmate. Meanwhile, on July 1, 2005, the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement awarded CCA contracts to continue running the 300-bed Elizabeth Detention Center in New Jersey and the 1,216-bed San Diego Correctional Facility. Both of these contracts are for three years with five three-year renewal options. In 2005 CCA also secured new prison contracts with the Kentucky Department of Corrections, the state of Kansas, and the Florida Department of Management Services.

Business is good for CCA and the more people it stuffs into its prisons the better it becomes. "As you know, the first 100 inmates into a facility, we lose money, and the last 100 inmates into a facility we make a lot of money " CCA Chief Financial Officer Irving Lingo said on a 2006 company conference call.

[Fitts:

On February 4, 1994, U.S. Vice President Al Gore announced Operation Safe Home, a new enforcement program at HUD. Gore was a former Senator from Tennessee. His hometown of Nashville was home of the largest private prison company, the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). . . . Jeff Gerth and Stephen Labaton in the New York Times in November 1995 describe the political appointees in the Clinton Administration who were successful at overcoming the natural intelligence of the career civil service at DOJ:

“In the middle of last year, the White House sent its proposal to privatize prisons to the Justice Department, where it was greeted with a frosty response, according to officials involved in the discussions.

“To help overcome the resistance of senior officials at the Justice Department and the Bureau of Prisons, the plan’s architect at the White House, Christopher Edley Jr., asked Mr. Gore’s office to turn up the heat.

Mr. Edley, an associate director of the Office of Management and Budget, enlisted the aid of Ms. Kamarck, Mr. Gore’s senior policy adviser overseeing his government review. She then called her friend, Ms. Gorelick, the Deputy Attorney General, who oversees the day-to-day operations of the Justice Department.

“I convinced Jamie to do more of it,” Ms. Kamarck recalled.”

. . . Thanks to the successful efforts of the Clinton Administration to pass new crime legislation and ensure DOJ bureaucracy support for outsourcing contracts to run federal prisons to private prison companies—including a gush of contracts to Cornell from the fall of 1995 to the spring of 1996—Dillon Read’s Cornell stock purchased at an average price between $2-3 per share, was now worth $12 a share, a 400-600 percent increase. . . . In nine months, the Clinton Administration’s increase in contracts and acquisition of entities with contracts supporting 1,726 prisoners had literally made the company [Cornell]. The IPO reflected a stock market valuation of $24,241 per prisoner. What that means is that every time HUD’s Operation Safe Home dropped swat teams into a community and rounded up 100 teenagers for arrest, the potential value to the stockholders of the prison companies that managed the juvenile facilities and prisons was $2.4 million.]

Wackenhut

Florida-based Wackenhut, a major private security company, has also received a great boost in the years since the September 11th attacks on New York. Its poor record has not undermined its ability to reap lucrative government contracts. Before 2001, Wackenhut, like CCA, had been at the center of all manner of inmate-abuse scandals: Guards were caught having sex with underage inmates, there were routine reports of extreme mistreatment of inmates, and there was even a disproportionately high level of deaths in their facilities.

Wackenhut CEO George Zoley has been flippant about the cases of abuse. After a CBS Television report exposed the repeated rape of a 14-year-old girl at a Wackenhut juvenile jail and two guards were found guilty, Zoley said, “It’s a tough business. The people in prison are not Sunday-school children.” Still more worrying was Wackenhut’s record with inmate-on-inmate killings, which, contrary to public perception, are not very common in America’s prisons. In 1998–99 alone, Wackenhut’s New Mexico facilities had a death rate of one murder for every 400 prisoners. For the same period in all U.S. prisons, the rate was about one in 22,000.

Wackenhut's most visible response was to change its name. Now as the GEO Group, it is still headed by George Zoley, and it continues to run the Wackenhut facilities and get new contracts. In 2005 the State of California Department of Corrections gave GEO the contract for the housing of minimum security adult male inmates at the 224-bed McFarland Community Correctional Facility estimated to generate $4.1 million in annual revenues. On August 8, 2002, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) awarded GEO a contract for the company's Broward Transitional Center in Miami. The contract has been extended through September 2008.

Under a 2005 ICE contract GEO also manages the Queens Private Correctional Facility, where it expects to reap $10.5 million in annual revenues. The Mississippi Department of Corrections also renewed GEO's contract for the continued management and operation of the 1,000-bed Marshall County Correctional Facility. Meanwhile, also in 2005, GEO announced a merger with Correctional Services Corporation (CSC) that will add approximately $100 million in revenue to GEO’s coffers. GEO is especially excited about the earning potential from CSC’s 1,000-bed expansion of its State Prison in Florence, Arizona.

GEO executives are overjoyed about the boom in business. In 1999, the feds farmed out less than 3 percent of beds; but seven years later, the number had reached almost one in five. "That's a remarkable turnaround," GEO Group CEO George Zoley told his fellow executives."And it's continuing to lead in that direction, that for minimum-security beds by the BOP (Bureau of Prisons) to house criminal aliens and illegal aliens by either the U.S. Marshal Service or the BOP or immigration service, they are turning to private companies.”

“I think we're in a new era that I could never predicted, really, this scale of acceptance by the federal government. We talked about it for many, many years, but we're finally on the verge of it... ." added Zoley.

Fitts describes how as the 1994Omnibus Crime Bill (which "implemented mandatory sentencing, authorized $10.5 billion to fund prison construction that mandatory sentencing would help require, loosened the rules on allowing federal asset forfeiture teams to keep and spend the money their operations made from seizing assets, and provided federal monies for local police") was pending, some investors realized that:

[t]he potential impact on the private prison industry was significant. With the bill only through the house, former Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti joined the board of Wackenhut Corrections, which went public in July 1994 with an initial public offering of 2.2 million shares. By the end of 1998, Wackenhut’s stock market value had increased almost ten times. When I visited their website at that time it offered a feature that flashed the number of beds they owned and managed. The number increased as I was watching it -- the prison business was growing that fast.
. . .

If you want to see a bi-partisan system at work, follow the money. In the middle of a Presidential election, a Democratic administration engineered significant equity value into a Republican firm’s back pocket. If you step back and take the longer view, however, what you realize is that many of the players involved appear to have connections to Iran Contra and money laundering networks. A surprising number of them went to Harvard and other universities whose endowments are significant players in the investment world. And as it turned out, while the U.S. prison population was soaring from 1 million to 2 million people and US government and consumer debt was skyrocketing, Harvard Endowment was also growing --from $4 billion to $19 billion during the Clinton Administration. Harvard and Harvard graduates seemed to be in the thick of many things profitable.

Fernandes:

Prison companies . . . are able to save large amounts of money on labor practices that would illegal under any other circumstances. Inmate jobs in all prisons pay a pittance, but immigrant prisons are even worse. Because DHS guidelines mandate that non-citizen prisoners cannot earn more than $1 per day, the company gets janitors, maintenance workers, cleaners, launderers, kitchen staff, sewers and grounds keepers at almost no cost.

With the increase in prison beds for immigrants comes the pressure to fill them-- a scenario that has immigrant advocates extremely worried. Isabel García, attorney and human rights activist in Tucson, sees the drive to jail immigrants as fueling the same prison-industrial complex that first flourished with the war on drugs.

“The war on drugs has conveniently become a war on immigrants,” says García, “and there is a lot of money to be made in detaining immigrants.” The growing industry of incarcerating immigrants is facilitated by the tight connections between the private-prison industry and the federal government and the extent of the industry's powerful and well-funded lobby. García worries that the profit motive behind detaining immigrants will promote the criminalization of immigrants.

"Will" really should read has. Always has been. And of course, capital demands growth. Fitts:

Cornell Corrections [based in Houston] was created to take advantage of plans to privatize the government’s prison operations. The War on Drugs and its related mandatory sentencing were fueling an explosion in the U.S. prison population. The construction and management of new prison facilities was potentially big business for the construction industry -- firms like Brown & Root [now Halliburton's notorious subsidiary KBR, who constructed the detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay, prisoner of war camps in Iraq and has received contracts to build immigration detention facilities for DHS] who Cornell used to build their first detention center—and those who financed them -- like Dillon Read.
. . .

Prison stocks also are valued on a “per bed” basis—which is based on the number of beds provided and the profit per bed. “Per bed” is really a euphemism for people who are sentenced to be housed in their prison.

. . . for every contract Cornell got to house one prisoner, at that time, their stock went up in value by an average of $24,261. According to prevailing business school philosophy, this is the stock market’s current present value of the future flow of profit flows generated through the management of each prisoner. This, for example, is why longer mandatory sentences are worth so much to private prison stocks. A prisoner in jail for twenty years has a twenty-year cash flow associated with his incarceration, as opposed to one with a shorter sentence or one eligible for an early parole. This means that we have created a significant number of private interests—investment firms, banks, attorneys, auditors, architects, construction firms, real estate developers, bankers, academics, investors among them -- who have a vested interest in increasing the prison population and keeping people behind bars as long as possible.

It's a numbers game. So what's the projected worth of a war on immigrants?

'dad's gonna kill me now

Legendary British singer-songwriter & folk guitarist extraordinaire Richard Thompson performing September, 2006, at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. He played a new anti-war anthem, introducing it with something to the effect of:

'The soldiers in Vietnam shortened the name to 'Nam — this one's for the soldiers in Baghdad':

'Dad's Gonna Kill Me Now

[I first posted this picture last November. Via Counterpunch, I see that not only has Richard now recorded the song, but that it is available on-line to listen or download. Click on the song title above. The festival took place during 'Fleet Week.' Earlier in the day as Elvis Costello & T-Bone Burnett took the stage in a reprise of The Coward Brothers (joined at one point by "honorary brother" Emmylou Harris , the crowd was subjected to the roar of the Navy's Blue Angels' aerial acrobatics overhead - a vivid reminder of the thoroughly embedded military bent of this nation. What fear had those sounds, that sight, roused in how many civilians across the globe this year? How many had see or heard the bombs dropped? Or fast asleep never knew they were coming?]

Josh Wolf's history mark

"Much is made of China imprisoning bloggers, yet we have a very similar situation here in the US." Simon Barrett, bloggernews.net

Julian Davis:

Today Josh Wolf becomes the longest incarcerated journalist for contempt in U.S. history. He is exemplary of a new class of independent free-lance journalists who are changing the landscape of journalism with new media and new modes of communication. Wolf and those like him are no less deserving of protection that the mainstream media. With other reporters, such a Lance Williams, Mark Fainaru-Wada and until very recently Sarah Olson under threat of jail time, the importance of passing an inclusive and robust federal shield law has never been more apparent.

Representatives of the Free Josh Wolf Coalition were in Washington D.C. last week lobbying members of Congress to call for Wolf's release. Their plea follows on the heels of recent requests by Speaker Pelosi, Senators Boxer and Feinstein, and Representatives Conyers and Davis that Attorney General Gonzales rescind subpoenas of San Francisco Chronicle writers Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada. Their success or failure to conjure action from Congress on Wolf's behalf will be a telling comment on the state of Democracy in America. Within days the Hearst Corporation was able rally at least five Representatives and Senators to the defense of the embattled Chronicle reporters.

Josh Wolf does not have a powerful media giant to pay his legal bills or exert influence in Congress but he does have the support of a formidable and ever-growing list of professional journalist organizations and first ammendment advocates including The National Press Club, The Society of Professional Journalists, the American Civil Liberties Union, Reporters Without Borders, the Newspaper Guild, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the Center for Media and Democracy, the National Writers Union, and the First Amendment Project. If Congress will react to the Hearst Corporation and not this impressive coalition professionals and advocates, the thesis that our great American experiment in Democracy has devolved into little more than a thinly veiled Corporate Oligarchy will never have been so well supported.

Huffington managed to run a decent piece (& great improvement over one they ran last fall); otherwise the 'great liberal progrsessive netroots' aren't concerning themselves much with a first amendment issue that has imprisoned a young man. Even yesterday's NY Times article didn't seem to spark much interest. Google reveals the story is all over the place today. Let's hope people wake up & start paying attention.

Here’s the letter to DC-critters from Josh’s mother posted on his blog last week:

I am Liz Wolf-Spada, the mother of imprisoned journalist, Josh Wolf. I am so sorry I cannot be there today in person. I want to thank Lucie Morillon and Reporters Without Borders for their diligence and faithfulness in following the story of my son’s ordeal and imprisonment since the beginning. As a public school teacher, I have very limited time I can manage to be gone and I had planned to be there on the 8th and 9th of February, hoping to speak with both members of the press and congressional delegates.

Ironically, as my son faces his 160th day of imprisonment as a journalist who is not cooperating with a federal grand jury investigation, I am teaching the California social studies curriculum to my third grade class. We are learning about the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights. This is a FAST FACT quote from our textbook.

“Freedom of the press is the right of United States citizens to write, read and speak freely. Today, the press includes not only newspapers and magazines, but films, television and the internet.” How difficult it is for me to teach my class to believe that we have a free press, when I see that we do not. From Judith Miller to Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wadu to my son, Josh Wolf, the federal government no longer seems to recognize the rights of us, the citizens, to benefit from your open, unbiased and unhindered reporting.When independent journalists such as my son, are imprisoned for refusing to turn over unpublished material and testify about people exercising free speech rights at an anti-war, anti-G8 summit protest in San Francisco, it certainly has a chilling effect on what may or may not be filmed and reported to the public. Who wants to report controversial news knowing that their reporting could lead to months of imprisonment for standing by journalistic principles?

Josh is one of many young journalists who use words and video to tell the story of what they see happening in the world around them. For most of them, the internet is the chosen vehicle to publish this information. For many people today, young and old, it is also a major source of news. Recently, I attended the Free Press, Reform the Media Conference in Memphis. I was there to speak about Josh’s case. There were 3500 people there, people who care about protecting the rights of you, the press, so that you can protect our rights to be informed citizens. Josh is on the crest of the wave of a media revolution and he is in prison. What does that say about our country’s commitment to a free press?

“We need those who provoke us so that we may be warned of the fate that our prejudices or ignorance or wishful thinking may hold in store for us.”

—William O. Douglas, former U.S. Supreme Court justice, 1962

previously:
Josh Wolf: patriot
free press? why Josh Wolf sitting in prison matters

campaign season super bowl lines overheard & imagined in a time of War

football's america's game now—bet on it!

selective listening for an amusing guide to electoral politics, USA style:


that was a tough run up the middle

you've got to get meaner & nastier

build your team around a strong defense

best defense is an aggressive offense

can he unite this team w/ his leadership & lead them to victory?

go team!
rah! rah! rah!

he never saw it coming

"I've got a confession for you
I ain't no fool!" —Prince

they're not having any success on the ground

"let's get aggressive again"

sooner or later you've got say "we're tired of this" and come with the blitz

their game plan is to get it done through the air

that was a legal hit

they can't just drive through the red zone

the inside players are taking care of it

those numbers just aren't very good

they're playing it safe

you change how they play you—make 'em react to you

it's time for a change-up—what you're doing isn't working

so agonizingly close

it's a little right to left but most of the time it's straight up the middle

they've had trouble following through

you've got to play it safe—can't let them run right by you

no one's ever come back from that kind of deficit

he's looking left & going right

Josh Wolf: patriot

"We need those who provoke us so that we may be warned of the fate that our prejudices or ignorance or wishful thinking may hold in store for us."

William O. Douglas, former U.S. Supreme Court justice, 1962

At a hearing last week a federal judge refused to release Josh Wolf from prison. His lawyer argued "that imprisonment would never have its intended effect of coercing him into relinquishing the tape and that it had crossed the line into criminal punishment. He also noted that authorities dropped charges this month against the only suspect in the police car vandalism."

The judge, however, denied his release Tuesday, citing a prosecutor's statement that Wolf's lawyer, Martin Garbus, had offered to turn over the tape in exchange for a promise that Wolf would not have to identify anyone who appeared on it.

"This reveals a realistic possibility that Mr. Wolf's confinement may be having its coercive effect," [U.S. District Judge William ] Alsup said.

But Garbus said in a court filing Tuesday that prosecutors misrepresented his proposal, which was only made to gauge their interest in such a deal. Garbus said that Wolf never agreed to it and that Wolf has remained unwilling to testify or release the tape.

This means that on Tuesday, Feb. 6, the 24 year old video journalist/blogger will have been imprisoned longer than any other journalist in US history for his failure to comply with a subpoena. The grand jury doesn't expire until July, and could be extended another 6 months. More details about his case at: free press? why Josh Wolf sitting in prison matters.