Newman is president of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, which for years has targeted the Wichita, Kan., abortion clinic of Dr. George Tiller. Seven years ago, the group even moved its headquarters to Wichita–the better to harass Tiller, his employees and his patients, up close and personal.

But now Dr. Tiller, one of a small number of doctors anywhere in the U.S. who would perform late-term abortions, has been murdered–shot in the face (to avoid his bullet-proof vest) as he attended church on June 1, allegedly by anti-abortion activist Scott Roeder.

And Newman is concerned about a PR disaster–since it’s hard to call your movement “pro life” when it assassinates doctors.

Newman’s regret, of course, isn’t for Dr. Tiller. It’s not for the employees of Women’s Health Care Services, who still face harassment at their homes, where Operation Rescue blankets their neighborhoods with pictures of aborted fetuses.

Nor does Newman care about Tiller’s patients–the women (some of them children) who were victims of rape and incest, or whose pregnancies faced medical complications and fetal abnormalities. These women and their partners were often forced to run a gauntlet of Operation Rescue protesters just to enter Women’s Health Care Services and exercise their legal right to choose abortion.

No, Newman’s worry is that the murder of Dr. Tiller has ripped the mask off the “pro-life” movement and exposed an ugly truth–just behind the “respectable” front that preaches “saving babies” is a group of violent fanatics who are determined to put an end to women’s right to chose abortion “by any means necessary.”

In any other context, a movement that carried out the kind of violence the anti-abortion movement has over the past two decades would be called what it is: terrorist. But most of the media–not to mention politicians–refuse to do so.

The double standard is striking. In May, when a group of men were accused of plotting to carry out bombings of two Bronx synagogues and to shoot down military aircraft, the media featured screaming headlines about “terrorism” on U.S. soil, and politicians promised the public would be protected. This was despite the fact that the alleged “terrorists” never had access to weapons, nor harmed a single person or engaged in a single act of violence.

The modern U.S. anti-abortion movement, on the other hand, has a long and terrible record of bombings, arsons, acid attacks and vandalism at clinics across the country–and a string of murders to answer for.

As the National Abortion Federation web site details, “Since the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that made abortion legal, there has been an organized campaign by anti-abortion extremists which has resulted in escalating levels of violence against women’s health care providers.”

The first reported clinic arson in 1976 has been followed by more than 200 other arsons and bombings. Beginning in the early 1990s, some anti-choice activists began injecting butyric acid–which produces a rancid, vomit-like odor–into the walls of clinics. There were approximately 100 separate acid attacks on clinics between 1991 and 1998, causing more than $1 million in damage.

Between 1998 and 2002, 654 letters purporting to contain anthrax were sent to clinics. In November 2001 (just after the September 11 attacks, and in the wake of real anthrax attacks that killed five people), anti-abortion activist Clayton Waagner sent more than 500 fake anthrax letters to various clinics. Though none of the letters turned out to contain real anthrax, clinics were shut down in some cases.

If Scott Roeder was the man who murdered Dr. Tiller, as police allege, he is far from the first to kill an abortion provider in the U.S. Including Dr. Tiller, at least four abortion providers have been assassinated [2] by anti-choice extremists since 1993.

That year, Dr. David Gunn was shot to death outside a Pensacola, Fla., clinic. The following year, Dr. John Bayard Britton and one of his volunteer escorts were shot and killed by former minister Paul Hill outside another abortion clinic in Pensacola. In 1998, anti-choice extremist James Kopp killed Dr. Barnett Slepian in his home in Amherst, N.Y.

Clinic staff and others have also been killed or injured in attacks–like the 1998 bombing of a Birmingham, Ala., clinic, in which nurse Emily Lyons was maimed and off-duty police officer Robert Sanderson killed by bomber Eric Rudolph.

Dr. Tiller was long targeted for death by the anti-choice movement. In 1993, he was shot in both arms by Rachelle “Shelley” Shannon, who was later also convicted of multiple clinic arsons and acid attacks.

Scott Roeder himself has a history of targeting clinics. Recently, he was caught two weekends in a row–the second being the day before Tiller’s murder–allegedly attempting to put glue in the locks of another Kansas clinic, Central Family Medicine. But when clinic staff called the FBI to report the vandalism (and provide a description of the suspect, complete with car license plate number), they were reportedly told by the FBI that there was nothing that could be done until a grand jury could be convened.

These actions are designed to prevent women from exercising their legal right to an abortion–and to frighten doctors and clinic staff from providing care. If that doesn’t qualify as terrorism, then what does?

Some anti-choice activists, like Operation Rescue’s Troy Newman, condemned Dr. Tiller’s murder and publicly professed that they “abhor violence.” But others couldn’t hide their glee at Tiller’s killing.

Randall Terry, the founder and former president of Operation Rescue, staged a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., where he denied that the anti-choice movement is responsible for Tiller’s death–but added that Tiller “was a mass-murderer and, horrifically, he reaped what he sowed.”

Regina Dinwiddie, who protested at clinics alongside Scott Roeder, told CNN that Tiller’s slaying was “absolutely” justified. “He forfeited his life by taking the lives of innocent children,” she said.

Talk radio host Steve Deace had the gall to compare Scott Roeder to the 19th-century abolitionist John Brown. “Maybe the fact that we have a lawless society that has not protected these babies from infanticide created the Scott Roeders of the world, who in very John Brown-like fashion, illegally took matters into his own hands,” Deace said.

Not surprisingly, there are warnings that more violence could be on the way. Speaking to the Associated Press from his jail cell on June 7, Scott Roeder warned, “I know there are many other similar events planned around the country as long as abortion remains legal.”

Colorado Right To Life spokesman Bob Enyart told the Los Angeles Times that abortion providers “should expect that violence begets violence.” In particular, Enyart had strong words for Dr. Warren Hern–a colleague of Dr. Tiller’s in Boulder, Colo., who has heroically pledged to carry on providing women with access to late-term abortion.

According to the Los Angeles Times, “the constant threats with which [Dr. Hern] has lived since 1973 have transformed his life into a series of security measures: sleeping with a rifle, scanning rooftops for snipers, wearing a protective vest.”

But whether they publicly denounce violence or not, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest an ideological connection–if not more–between groups like Operation Rescue and the more violent wing of the anti-abortion movement.

After he was arrested, authorities searched Scott Roeder’s car and found a Post-It note with the name “Cheryl” and a phone number. That number belongs to Cheryl Sullenger–the senior policy adviser for Operation Rescue–who, after first denying ever having spoken to Roeder, acknowledged speaking with him on several occasions (though never about anything substantial, she claims).

In a statement claiming that Roeder had no affiliation with Operation Rescue, the group stated, “Operation Rescue has diligently and successfully worked for years through peaceful, legal means, and through the proper channels to see to it that abortionists around the nation are brought to justice. Without due process, there can be no justice.”

Yet there was nothing peaceful or legal about the clinic firebombing that Cheryl Sullenger planned in 1988. Though it was not carried out, Sullenger spent two years in prison for her role in conspiring to bomb the Alvarado Medical Center in California.

So Operation Rescue abhors violence…but employs a convicted terrorist?

Like other anti-choice groups, Operation Rescue claims to be peaceful, but it does everything in its power to make life a living hell for abortion providers and clinic staff. As a 2004 report in Rolling Stone details, the group targeted everyone connected to Dr. Tiller, however casually–using tactics that seem to invite the potential of violence without necessarily crossing any legal lines.

For example, Sara Phares, an administrative assistant at Dr, Tiller’s clinic, was sent a letter by Troy Newman suggesting she should “quit her job and repent her sins.” A week later, hundreds of Phares’ neighbors were sent postcards with pictures of aborted fetuses that accused Phares of “killing babies like these.” The cards listed Phare’s phone number and home address.

That was followed by Operation Rescue protesters appearing at Phares’ home, according to Rolling Stone:

They parked a tractor-trailer across the street, plastered with 20-foot-long images of dismembered fetuses. From its speakers came the kind of sweet, tinkling music that lures children from their backyards in pursuit of Dreamsicles. One protester, a somber man in a tan windbreaker with a three-foot crucifix thrust before him, performed an exorcism on Phares’ front lawn, sprinkling holy water on the grass to cast demons from the property.

Such tactics are designed to skirt the line of what’s legal–whipping up anti-choice sentiment and putting providers and clinic staff in the crosshairs, but allowing groups like Operation Rescue to claim they had no responsibility.

Former evangelical anti-choice activist Frank Schaeffer was one of the few who admitted that the anti-choice movement “helped create the climate that made this murder likely to happen.” As Schaeffer commented on the Huffington Post following Tiller’s murder:

The same hate machine I was part of is still attacking all abortionists as “murderers.” And today, once again, the “pro-life” leaders are busy ducking their personal responsibility for people acting on their words. The people who stir up the fringe never take responsibility. But I’d like to say on this day, after a man was murdered in cold blood for performing abortions, that I–and the people I worked with in the religious right, the Republican Party, the pro-life movement and the Roman Catholic Church–all contributed to this killing by our foolish and incendiary words.

Years ago, Troy Newman took out a full-page ad in the Catholic newspaper The Wanderer. In it, he declared: “Wichita isn’t big enough for George Tiller and me.” Looks like Newman finally got his wish.

If Troy Newman and his ilk are responsible for whipping up hatred, they are aided and abetted by the mainstream media and the politicians who applaud their cause.

Few in the press (a notable exception being MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow [6]) have been willing to call out the anti-choice movement for encouraging, promoting and creating a climate where this terrorist violence is okay.

Instead, for years, Fox News‘ Bill O’Reilly, repeatedly attacked Dr. Tiller on the air, referring to him as “Tiller the baby killer” and hurling outrageous lies–for example, that Tiller would “execute babies for $5,000 if the mother is depressed.”

During a 2006 show, O’Reilly said: “[I]f I could get my hands on Tiller…well, you know. Can’t be vigilantes. Can’t do that. It’s just a figure of speech.”

After Tiller’s murder, O’Reilly joined the chorus of those trying to wash their hands of the violence [7]. Instead, O’Reilly insisted that he was being persecuted. “When I heard about Tiller’s murder, I knew that pro-abortion zealots and Fox News-haters would blame us for the crime,” he said, adding that the “far left is exploiting, EXPLOITING, the death” of Dr. Tiller for political gain.

O’Reilly, true to form, then reminded viewers that Tiller was responsible for destroying “60,000 fetuses who will never become American citizens.”

Naturally, there was no mention of the campaign of domestic terrorism engaged in by the anti-choice movement over a period of decades. In O’Reilly’s world, you’re only a terrorist if you’re non-white and a Muslim.

O’Reilly’s attitude is hardly unique. On the campaign trail last year, for example, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin repeatedly invoked the name of former Weather Underground figure Bill Ayers as a “domestic terrorist” to try to smear Barack Obama because of his casual association with Ayers.

But when NBC News reporter Brian Williams asked Palin, with running mate John McCain at her side, “Is an abortion clinic bomber a terrorist under this definition, Governor?” she refused to say yes.

“There’s no question that Bill Ayers, via his own admittance, was one who sought to destroy our U.S. capitol and our Pentagon…that is a domestic terrorist,” she told Williams. “Now, others who would want to engage in harming innocent Americans, or facilities that–it would be unacceptable. I don’t know if you’re gonna use the word ‘terrorist’ there.”

Such rhetoric isn’t surprising given that the modern Republican Party has depended on a base in the anti-choice Evangelical Right–which openly brags about setting Republican “values.”

But if the Republican Party has openly embraced such anti-choice zealots, the Democratic Party has been spineless in calling them out for it. Instead, the Democrats have constantly preached that “Middle America” wants “middle ground” on the question of abortion.

Thus, in April, the Department of Homeland Security issued a report on right-wing extremism acknowledging, in a footnote, that groups opposed to abortion might be among the extremists. That’s hardly a shocking statement in light of the movement’s history of repeated violent actions.

Obama’s Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano defended the report at first–but after anti-choice groups protested vociferously, she said the section including anti-choice activists should not have been included.

That kind of weak-kneed response is, unfortunately, all too typical of the Democrats, who spend more time talking about finding “common ground” with anti-choice activists than fighting to defend abortion rights and abortion clinics.

Now that the anti-abortion forces have been exposed as preachers of violence and hate, in the wake of Dr. Tiller’s murder, activists should seize the opportunity to push back.

Why are women’s health clinics across this country forced to install video cameras and hire security guards? Why are doctors forced to wear bulletproof vests, and patients forced to struggle through a gauntlet of protesters?

If abortion remains legal, then why has the anti-choice movement been able to get away with creating a climate of terror that prevents physicians from practicing, and women from exercising, their legal rights? And why have the Democrats been so willing to accept every restriction on a woman’s right to choose–from parental consent laws to mandatory waiting periods to forced ultrasounds.

This isn’t “common ground.” This is losing ground.

We need to build a new movement for abortion rights that fights to change the terrain of the debate–and pressures the government to hold the anti-choice terrorists accountable for their violence.

Tiller was one of the few remaining doctors in the country who performed late-term abortions. His murder is the culmination of a decades-long campaign against both him and Women’s Health Care Services, the clinic he operated.

In June 1986, Tiller’s clinic was bombed — no arrests were ever made in that case. Last month, the clinic was vandalized, with wires to security cameras and outdoor lights cut. The building’s roof was cut through, and downspouts were plugged, leading to flooding that caused thousands of dollars in damage. Tiller had reportedly asked the FBI to investigate.

In 1993, anti-abortion fanatic Rachelle “Shelley” Shannon attempted to murder Tiller, shooting him in both arms. Shannon remains behind bars, convicted of attempted murder and charges stemming from at least six arson and acid-attacks at clinics in Oregon, California, Nevada and Idaho.

According to press reports, a suspect in the murder is in custody, though not charged–he is 51-year-old Scott Roeder of Merriam, Kan. Roeder was allegedly a member at one time of the anti-government militia group known as the “Freemen.” In 1996, he was reportedly found with bomb components in his car trunk.

In a comment left on an anti-abortion Web site two years ago, someone with the same name wrote: “Bleass (sic) everyone for attending and praying in May to bring justice to Tiller and the closing of his death camp.”

Tiller is the fourth abortion provider to be gunned down by “pro-life” extremists since 1993.

That year, Dr. David Gunn was shot to death outside a Pensacola, Florida, clinic. The following year, Dr. John Bayard Britton and one of his volunteer escorts were shot and killed by former minister Paul Hill outside another abortion clinic in Pensacola. Hill had reportedly been “inspired” by Shannon’s attempted murder of Dr. Tiller the year before.

In 1998, anti-choice extremist James Kopp killed Dr. Barnett Slepian in his home in Amhest, N.Y.

As well, there have been dozens of clinic bombings, arsons and other attacks that have injured or frightened staff and volunteers across the country. This includes the 1998 bombing of a Birmingham, Ala., clinic in which nurse Emily Lyons was maimed, and off-duty police officer Robert Sanderson killed by bomber Eric Rudolph.

The immediate aftermath of Tiller’s death included predictable statements from anti-abortion groups claiming that this murder does not represent their movement.

The anti-abortion group Operation Rescue was among those that mercilessly harassed Tiller in life, only to feign surprise and concern at his death. “We are shocked at this morning’s disturbing news that Mr. Tiller was gunned down,” the group said in a statement on its Web site. “Operation Rescue has worked for years through peaceful, legal means, and through the proper channels to see him brought to justice.”

Yet Operation Rescue’s director Troy Newman moved the headquarters of the group’s operations to Wichita in 2002 specifically to target Dr. Tiller. The group launched a “Year of Rebuke” campaign in 2004 that targeted what it termed Tiller’s “collaborators” — anyone with political, professional or social ties to the doctor.

The “Year of Rebuke” included plans for protests at the home of every employee at Tiller’s clinic. Typical of the campaign were hundreds of postcards showing mangled fetuses that were sent to the neighbors of clinic employees like Sara Phares. As author Kimberley Sevcik noted in a Rolling Stone article “One man’s God squad“:

[The card read], “Your neighbor Sara Phares participates in killing babies like these.” The postcard implored them to call Phares, whose phone number and address were provided, and voice their opposition to her work at the clinic. Another card soon followed. It referred to Phares as “Miss I Help to Kill Little Babies” and suggested, in an erratic typeface that recalled a kidnapper’s ransom note, that neighbors “beg her to quit, pretty please.”

One of Phares’s neighbors, a federal agent, called her at work to warn her. “Just be careful, ma’am,” he said. “You never know what kind of nuts these things will draw.”

Founder and former head of Operation Rescue Randall Terry didn’t even pretend to be sorry about the murder. “George Tiller was a mass-murderer,” Terry told the Associated Press. “We grieve for him that he did not have time to properly prepare his soul to face God.”

Terry’s real concern was for the renewed scrutiny that the assassination might bring on the anti-choice movement. He told a reporter:

I am more concerned that the Obama administration will use Tiller’s killing to intimidate pro-lifers into surrendering our most effective rhetoric and actions…Those men and women who slaughter the unborn are murderers according to the Law of God. We must continue to expose them in our communities and peacefully protest them at their offices and homes, and yes, even their churches.

While a far-right fanatic may have pulled the trigger, the truth is that the “respectable” right–and the state of Kansas — put a very large target on George Tiller’s back.

Fox News blowhard Bill O’Reilly repeatedly attacked Tiller on air, referring to him as a “so-called baby killer” and the clinic as a “death mill.” In segments he called “Tiller the Baby Killer,” O’Reilly hurled wild accusations:

In the state of Kansas, there is a doctor, George Tiller, who will execute babies for $5,000 if the mother is depressed. And there are rapists impregnating 10-year-olds who are being protected by abortion clinics. It doesn’t get worse than that.

Tiller was also forced to defend himself against trumped-up criminal charges brought by the state. This March, he was acquitted on 19 counts of performing illegal late-term abortions in 2003. Jurors took just 45 minutes to find Tiller not guilty of failing to secure an independent second opinion, which, under Kansas law, is needed to perform late-term abortions.

The court case against Tiller was brought by then-Kansas Attorney General Phil Kline–an abortion opponent, who later lost re-election and has since become a law professor at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University.

Given this kind of harassment, it’s not surprising that the number of physicians willing to provide abortions — in particular late-term abortions — has dramatically declined in U.S. in the past several decades.

According to the Guttmacher Institute, in 2005, 87 percent of all U.S. counties (with 35 percent of the U.S. female population) lacked an abortion provider. Just 20 percent of providers offered abortion services after 20 weeks — and only 8 percent of all abortion providers offer abortions at 24 weeks.

This, combined with recent statistics from a Gallup poll, show a troubling shift to the right in attitudes on abortion in the U.S. According to the poll, for the “first time, a majority of U.S. adults have identified themselves as pro-life since Gallup began asking this question in 1995.” The poll found 51 percent describing themselves as “pro-life,” up seven points from a year ago.

As SocialistWorker.org columnist Sharon Smith noted:

Since [Bill] Clinton’s election in 1992, the anti-abortion crusade has remained defiant while the pro-choice movement has been in steady retreat. This is the only way to understand how a small but dedicated army of religious zealots has managed to successfully transform the political terrain in its favor — and why a figure as ridiculous as Randall Terry is now regarded as legitimate within the political mainstream.

Dr. Tiller’s violent death at the hands of an anti-abortion extremist should be a wake-up call to supporters of the right of women to control their own bodies.

Despite the rhetoric — adopted today even by mainstream abortion rights groups — that “no woman wants to have an abortion” and that abortion should be “safe, legal and, above all, rare,” the truth is that some women do desperately need and want to have abortions, and they shouldn’t be made to feel guilty for it.

That was something Dr. George Tiller understood — and ultimately gave his life for. As a statement from Tiller’s family following his murder emphasized:

Our loss is also a loss for the City of Wichita and women across America. George dedicated his life to providing women with high-quality heath care, despite frequent threats and violence. We ask that he be remembered as a good husband, father and grandfather, and a dedicated servant on behalf of the rights of women everywhere.

* A Vietnamese immigrant in Binghamton, N.Y., increasingly paranoid about police and upset after losing his job, kills 13 people at a center for immigrants before committing suicide.

* An Alabama man who had struggled to keep a job kills 10 people in a shooting spree before committing suicide.

* A Pittsburgh man, recently unemployed and afraid that the government would ban guns, opens fire on police responding to a domestic disturbance call, killing three.

These are just some of the recent eruptions of violence to make the headlines in U.S. newspapers. In the 30-day period between March 10 and April 10, there were at least nine multiple shootings across the U.S., claiming the lives of at least 58 people.

The individual motives and stories differ widely, but there’s a common thread among these incidents — the worsening economic crisis is becoming a factor in pushing some people who are already on the edge over it.

As the Washington Post recently noted:

Criminologists theorize that the epidemic of layoffs, the meltdown of storied American corporations and the uncertainty of recovery have stoked fear, anxiety and desperation across society and unnerved its most vulnerable and dangerous.

“I’ve never seen such a large number [of killings] over such a short period of time involving so many victims,” said Jack Levin, a noted criminologist at Northeastern University who has authored or co-authored eight books on mass murder.

The simple fact, criminologist James Alan Fox said, is that more Americans are struggling. “The American dream to them is a nightmare, and the land of opportunity is but a cruel joke,” said Fox, also of Northeastern…”The economic pie is shrinking to the point where it looks more like a Pop Tart, and some feel all they’re getting is the crumbs. There’s a combination of feeling despair and hopelessness at the same time as a certain degree of anger and blame.”

A number of those who have committed recent high-profile acts of violence were either recently laid off or unable to find work after a long period of time. Add mental health issues, family stress and other factors, and violent explosions can be the result. As Jack Levin told the Post, “There are just simply more catastrophic losses than there were when the economy was in good shape.”

Jiverly Wong, the Vietnamese immigrant who committed the killings at the American Civic Center in Binghamton, is an example.

Though it appears one prime factor was Wong’s paranoia that he was being persecuted by law enforcement, his day-to-day troubles — of trying unsuccessfully to find work and a place in a society that is typically hostile to immigrants — seemingly exacerbated his despair and isolation. As the New York Times reported:

Nearly two decades after arriving in America from Vietnam, Mr. Wong still had trouble with basic English, a fact of life for many immigrants, but a problem he seemed especially sensitive about. He was an introvert who was secretive in the extreme, keeping his love of guns and target shooting — and even his marriage — hidden from his family, his oldest sister said. They had improved their English-speaking skills and advanced their careers, while Mr. Wong, now jobless, had moved back in with his parents on a dead-end street in nearby Union.

“I think he felt low and small,” said the sister, who asked to be identified only by her first name, Nga. “But he didn’t share his thoughts. He would always just say he was okay.”

Though it’s not understood — and may never be — why Wong targeted fellow immigrants, it is known that the Shop-Vac factory where Jiverly Wong had worked was shut down last year, and Wong was despondent about not finding work. He started receiving Trade Adjustment Assistance — federal aid for workers whose jobs are moved overseas — and became a regular visitor at the American Civic Center, where he was encouraged to enroll in courses in English as a second language.

Two weeks before he went on his shooting spree, Wong sent a two-page letter to a Syracuse, N.Y., television station. In it, his mental illness is evident: he claims that he was being persecuted by undercover police who spread “rumors” about him and stole money from him at night.

In the end, he apologized — not for the murders he was planning to commit, but because of his limited English. “I am sorry I know a little English,” he wrote.

In many cases, individuals who lose control turn their anger and violent impulses first on those closest to them — their families.

Michael McLendon carried out what the media is calling the worst multiple shooting in Alabama history last month, targeting his mother first before killing nine others — including his grandparents, aunt, uncle and two cousins. At the end of his spree, McLendon drove to a metal factory where he had once worked, and fired 30 rounds at police before entering the building and committing suicide.

According to Coffee County District Attorney Gary McAliley, it was clear that McLendon and his mother, who he lived with, were struggling financially. Two weeks before the shootings, McLendon had abruptly quit his job at a sausage factory.

McLendon was also, along with his mother, part of a lawsuit involving workers at Pilgrim’s Pride, a chicken processor that workers allege violated labor laws by not fairly compensating them (the lawsuit was put on hold last year when the company filed for bankruptcy). During a search of the family home, investigators found a letter informing the gunman’s mother that she had been laid off from her job at the plant.

It’s common for family members to be the first casualties in such cases. Under capitalism, the burden on families is enormous. Especially in the U.S., where the social safety net is so thin and tattered, it can be overwhelming for many working-class families to make ends meet.

Although families can provide a source of comfort in a hostile world, they can also be the place where anger and alienation are first expressed. As Jennifer Roesch explained in the International Socialist Review [1]:

The institution of the nuclear family as an economic unit is central to meeting the needs of capitalism. Under the current system, employers pay workers a wage, but take no responsibility for most of the social costs of maintaining the current generation of workers–or for raising the next generation of workers into adulthood. Rather than these responsibilities being shared collectively by society as a whole through government programs — paid for by taxing the profits of the private enterprises that employ workers — they are shouldered by individual families.

That means that even in the best of times, many working-class families struggle with providing the basics — food, clothing, shelter, health care, etc. Add home foreclosures and layoffs to the mix, and the situation easily becomes volatile, leading to tragedy.

In January, Ervin and Ana Lupoe were fired from their jobs at Kaiser Permanente hospital in Los Angeles after it was discovered they had misrepresented their employment to an outside agency in order to obtain cheaper child care.

After sending a message to a local TV station, Ervin shot his wife and five children and then turned the gun on himself. In the letter faxed to KABC-TV, Ervin — whose family was drowning in debt and losing their home — said that after being fired, an administrator told the couple, “You should not even had bothered to come to work today, you should have blown your brains out.” As Ervin’s letter explained:

So after a horrendous ordeal, my wife felt it better to end our lives, and why leave our children in someone else’s hands. In addition, it seems Kaiser Permanente wants us to kill ourselves and take our family with us. They did nothing to the manager who stated such, and did not attempt to assist us in the matter, knowing we have no job and five children under 8 years with no place to go. So here we are.

This was the fifth mass death of a Southern California family by murder or suicide in the span of a year.

Nationwide reports suggest that domestic violence rates are surging. According to a survey conducted in November and December by the National Domestic Violence Hotline, 54 percent answered “yes” to the question, “Has there been a change in your household’s financial situation in the last year?”; and 64 percent also answered “yes” to the second question: “Do you believe the abusive behavior has increased in the past year?”

In Florida, the Florida Coalition Against Domestic Violence reported a 37 percent increase at the state’s 42 certified domestic-violence centers from August through December of 2008. “We know when perpetrators are laid off from work, there is increased severity in violence and frequency of violent assaults because he is home more often,” according to the report. “Currently, Florida’s domestic violence centers are over capacity and are faced with turning victims away.”

The situation is similar elsewhere. In Tulsa, Okla., the city’s two shelters for battered women are both full for the first time ever. Day Spring Villa Women and Children’s Shelter is turning people away for the first time in its 29-year history.

According to Cindy Meredith, the shelter’s assistant director, the economy is one reason why. “Anything that puts stress on a relationship causes men who are abusers to escalate their behavior,” she told Tulsa World. Meredith said that every day, two or three women seeking shelter are being referred to other services.

Even more troubling is the fact that at the very moment when people need more help, states are cutting back on essential social services and programs in order to save money — including domestic violence resources, child care subsidies, respite care for children and the elderly, and counselors and social workers for families in crisis.

“Ohio and other states face large cutbacks in child welfare investigations, which may mean more injured children and more taken into foster care,” the New York Times reported. “Arizona has one of the nation’s highest deficits in relation to its budget. As revenues sank late last year, forcing across-the-board cuts this spring, the child protection agency stopped investigating every report of potential abuse or neglect, and sharply reduced counseling of families deemed at risk of violence.”

One frightening sign of both the tensions running through U.S. society and the likelihood that more tragedies lie ahead is a reported increase in the sales of guns. The Christian Science Monitor described a “gun-and-ammunition buying spree — a national arming-up effort that began before last year’s election of President Obama and continues unabated.”

“There’s just so many people that would never have knocked on our doors before that are now coming in,” one clerk at a Georgia gun store told the Monitor. “There’s a level of desperation which I don’t ever recall seeing before.”

FBI statistics show that violent crime is down overall, as are robberies and car thefts. But the fact that people perceive the opposite to be true — that our homes and families are under siege — is further testament to the increased stress that the economic crisis is placing on already overburdened families.

The latest incidents of violence brought renewed calls for gun control. But this is treating the symptom, not the disease. Prohibitions on gun buying won’t stop people who are determined enough to kill from finding weapons.

Worse are the calls for putting more police on the streets. In virtually every case of multiple shootings, going back to the recent campus killings at Virginia Tech, Northern Illinois and elsewhere, law enforcement personnel have been ineffectual at best.

The calls for more cops date back 30 years and more, and all there is to show for it is an incarceration boom that has put more citizens, disproportionately minority ones, behind bars than any country in the world. Meanwhile, the real cause of these tragedies — poverty and individual despair — have gone unaddressed.

The real answer to preventing future violence — whether lethal or not, in the home or outside it — lies in providing people with the kind of resources that could make a concrete difference in their lives long before they reach a crisis point.

This includes things like national health care (including comprehensive mental health services); job assistance; an extension of unemployment insurance and an increase in the amount of benefits; restoring welfare benefits and increasing the amount of food stamp money families are eligible to receive; raising the minimum wage; providing state-funded day care and other services to help take strain off families; and full funding of domestic violence prevention programs, to name a few.

Until real help is available for those who need it, incidents of violence like those in Binghamton and elsewhere are inevitable.

These were supposed to be relics of the Bush administration and its attacks on basic constitutional and human rights. Instead, they are among the many troubling actions taken by the new administration of President Barack Obama.

Rather than repudiating Bush’s shredding of the Constitution, the new White House is embracing some of the worst abuses carried out by the Bush administration in the name of national security and the “war on terror.”

As a candidate for president, Obama promised a new direction. While pledging to maintain national security, Obama said that “we also want to make sure that we’re protecting the Constitution, and that we’re not excessively providing the president with a sort of a ‘blank check’ when it comes to dealing with national security,” he told ABC’s This Week.

And, in fact, it was refreshing to hear Obama’s new Attorney General Eric Holder declaring bluntly during his confirmation hearings that “waterboarding is torture.” It was a forceful repudiation of one aspect of the Bush administration, at least–Vice President Dick Cheney had, after all, openly defended “waterboarding” in October 2006.

This seemed to confirm the expectations expressed by Obama supporters like George Washington University law professor Jeffrey Rosen, who wrote in a March 2008 op-ed article in the New York Times: “As a former grassroots activist, Mr. Obama understands the need to make the case for civil liberties in the political arena. At a time when America’s civil-libertarian tradition has been embattled at home and abroad, his candidacy offers a unique opportunity.”

But just two months into his presidency, the “unique opportunity” that Rosen thought Obama represented seems to be evaporating. The litany of disappointing actions on civil liberties taken by the Obama administration seems to grow longer by the week.

Among other things, since taking office, the Obama administration has: pre-empted a Supreme Court ruling on whether a legal resident on U.S. soil can be imprisoned indefinitely without trial as an “enemy combatant”; attempted to block a judicial ruling on Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program; asserted in court that prisoners currently held overseas by U.S. forces in Bagram, Afghanistan, have no constitutional right to challenge their detentions in U.S. courts; and argued to dismiss cases brought in federal court by alleged victims of CIA kidnappings and torture on the grounds of “national security.”

As ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero said after Obama’s Justice Department argued in federal court that a lawsuit filed by five current and former detainees against Jeppesen Dataplan–a company accused of arranging extraordinary rendition flights for the CIA–should be dropped:

Eric Holder’s Justice Department stood up in court today and said that it would continue the Bush policy of invoking state secrets to hide the reprehensible history of torture, rendition and the most grievous human rights violations committed by the American government.

This is not change. This is definitely more of the same. Candidate Obama ran on a platform that would reform the abuse of state secrets, but President Obama’s Justice Department has disappointingly reneged on that important civil liberties issue.

The reveresals from what Obama promised–or was expected–to do on civil liberties questions have shocked many people who looked forward to the end of the Bush regime.

On the question of warrantless wiretapping, for example, the Obama administration’s arguments in one important court case are indistinguishable from its predecessors.

In the case, brought by two American lawyers against the Bush administration, a federal judge ruled in favor of admitting into evidence a classified document showing that the lawyers for a Saudi charity, the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, were electronically eavesdropped on without warrants by the Bush administration.

The Obama administration argued in court that national security would be compromised if the lawsuit was allowed to proceed. As Salon.com’s Glenn Greenwald wrote:

Manifestly, the Obama [Justice Department] has one goal and one goal only here: to prevent any judicial ruling as to whether the Bush [National Security Agency] warrantless eavesdropping program was illegal. And they’re engaging in extraordinary efforts to ensure that occurs…

Everyone knows the Bush administration spied on Americans without warrants and in violation of the law. Everyone knows that this document reflects that these plaintiffs were among those who were illegally spied on. Still, there’s the Obama administration — just like the Bush administration–claiming that we’ll all be slaughtered if a court rules on whether the president broke the law.

Another disappointment came in early March, when the Justice Department argued in a California federal court to dismiss a case filed against former Bush administration official John Yoo.

Yoo famously drafted much of the so-called “Bybee torture memo”–a Justice Department document that approved the use of CIA interrogation methods, including rendition, and blessed as legal methods of physical and psychological coercion that inflicted discomfort “equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.”

Last year, lawyers for supposed “dirty bomb” plotter Jose Padilla–a U.S. citizen who spent years in a military brig without being charged, and subject to sensory and sleep deprivation and other harsh interrogation measures–filed a suit against Yoo.

If heard, it could challenge the government’s policies on the treatment of detainees. According to one of the lawyers, Jonathan Freiman, the premise of the suit is that “a lawyer who gives the green light to clearly illegal conduct is an accomplice to that conduct.”

But the Obama Justice Department is standing behind Yoo–on the grounds that “the Department of Justice generally defends employees and former employees in lawsuits that are filed in connection to their official duties,” according to department spokesperson Matthew Miller.

“We’re not saying that we condone torture,” Justice Department lawyer Mary Mason said at the hearing on the suit.

But by arguing that the case against Yoo should be dismissed, the Obama administration is protecting the very man who crafted the legal reasoning to justify torture as an acceptable part of the U.S. “war on terror.” How is that not “condoning torture”?

The Obama administration isn’t protecting just Yoo, but other top Bush administration military officials who are the targets of lawsuits brought by prisoners who say they were tortured while being held at Guantánamo Bay.

In another federal court document filed in March, the Justice Department argued that holding military officials liable for their treatment of prisoners could cause them to make future decisions based on fear of litigation rather than appropriate military policy. “The Obama administration appears to be sticking with Bush administration legal definitions in pending litigation,” reported the Associated Press.

The case, involving four British men who say they were beaten, shackled in “stress positions” and forcibly shaved while they were imprisoned in Guantánamo Bay (all four have since been released) named, among others, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and retired Gen. Richard Myers, former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

As Eric Lewis, an attorney for the four, put it: “The upshot of the Justice Department’s position is that there is no right of detainees not to be tortured, and that officials who order torture should be protected.”

Even when the Obama administration has seemed to take positive steps to turn back some of the Bush administration’s abuses, the full picture is more complicated.

So, for example, civil liberties advocates applauded Obama’s executive orders to close the U.S. prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, affirm detainees’ right to habeus corpus and instruct that prisoners be treated according to the Geneva Conventions when interrogated by U.S. officials. But it turns out that these orders have wide loopholes.

The order on interrogations, for example, only applies to prisoners “in the custody or under the effective control of an officer, employee or other agent of the United States Government, or detained within a facility owned, operated or controlled by a department or agency of the United States, in any armed conflict.”

That formulation would allow the use of torture by other governments’ security forces operating on orders from the U.S.–under, for example, the “extraordinary rendition” program used by the Bush administration to evade the law by sub-contracting torture to to U.S.-allied regimes.

In addition, the order demands that the CIA close “as expeditiously as possible” any of its detention centers, but says nothing about whether the FBI, Defense Department or any other U.S. body–or private contractors such as Blackwater–may run such facilities. As Professor James Hill noted, “This order contains loopholes big enough to drive a FEMA camp train through them.”

Likewise, in February, it seemed like a positive sign when Attorney General Eric Holder announced a review of every court case in which the Bush administration invoked the “state secrets” privilege to have lawsuits thrown out.

But according to the Associated Press, on the same day that Holder announced his review, Douglas Letter, an attorney for the Justice Department’s civil division, cited the same “state secrets privilege in asking a federal appeals court to uphold dismissal of a lawsuit accusing a Boeing Co. subsidiary of illegally helping the CIA fly suspected terrorists to allied foreign nations where they would be tortured. Three times, Letter assured the judges his position had been approved by Obama administration officials.”

To take another example, earlier this month, the media reported that the Obama administration had dropped the term “enemy combatants” as a justification for detaining terrorism suspects without trial.

But as the New York Times reported, “[I]n a much anticipated court filing, the Justice Department argued that the president has the authority to detain terrorism suspects [at Guantánamo Bay] without criminal charges, much as the Bush administration had asserted. It provided a broad definition of those who can be held, which was not significantly different from the one used by the Bush administration.

“The filing signaled that, as long as Guantánamo remains open, the new administration will aggressively defend its ability to hold some detainees there.”

As Glenn Greenwald put it, “[T]he Obama administration, when called upon to state their position, makes only the most cosmetic and inconsequential changes–designed to generate headlines misleadingly depicting a significant reversal (“Obama drops ‘enemy combatant’ label”)–while, in fact, retaining the crux of Bush’s extremist detention theory.”

There is no “middle ground” on these questions. Those who justified, condoned, participated in and ordered the torture of detainees should be held accountable–starting with George W. Bush. Citizens should have a right not to be spied on by their government. Detainees should have rights under international law, including the right to a trial.

But the Obama administration isn’t taking anything like a principled stand on these questions.

On the contrary, while it wants to change the popular perception of federal policies on civil liberties, the evidence is mounting that the Obama administration is putting a new face on many of the same abuses we’ve been living with for the past eight years.

The attack came September 26–during the holy month of Ramadan–at the Islamic Society of Greater Dayton. As approximately 300 worshipers were preparing for evening prayers, they heard their children, who were in a separate room, begin coughing. Soon, the mosque had to be evacuated, as some worshipers were overcome with fumes.

Worshipper Baboucarr Njie told the Dayton Daily News that he began coughing and had to evacuate the building. “I would stay outside for a minute, then go back in, there were a lot of kids,” Njie said. “My throat is still itchy.”

According to police, it appears that two men sprayed an irritant directly through a window into a room where infants and children were waiting while parents took part in prayers. One 10-year-old girl, who was helping care for the other children, was sprayed directly in the face.

Police later found a can of pepper spray near the mosque, although a HAZMAT team was unable to determine if that was what had been sprayed.

A friend of some of the victims–a mother and her two small children who were in the room where the chemical was sprayed–described the incident in an e-mail to Chris Rodda of the Huffington Post Web site:

[The mother] told me that the gas was sprayed into the room where the babies and children were being kept, while their mothers prayed together their Ramadan prayers. Panicked mothers ran for their babies, crying for their children so they could flee from the gas that was burning their eyes and throats and lungs. She grabbed her youngest in her arms and grabbed the hand of her other daughter, moving with the others to exit the building and the irritating substance there.

The paramedic said the young one was in shock, and gave her oxygen to help her breathe. The child couldn’t stop sobbing.

This didn’t happen in some faraway place–but right here in Dayton, and to my friends.

Many of the Iraqi refugees were praying together at the Mosque Friday evening. People that I know and love. I am hurt and angry. I tell her this is not America. She tells me this is not Heaven or Hell–there are good and bad people everywhere.

She tells me that her daughters slept with her last night, the little one in her arms and sobbing throughout the night. She tells me she is afraid, and will never return to the mosque, and I wonder what kind of country is this where people have to fear attending their place of worship?

The children come into the room, and tell me they want to leave America and return to Syria, where they had fled to from Iraq. They say they like me…and other American friends–but they are too afraid and want to leave. Should a 6- and 7-year-old even have to contemplate the safety of their living situation?

So far, authorities are refusing to call the attack on the mosque an anti-Muslim hate crime. According to Dayton Police Chief Richard Biehl, “The men didn’t say anything to [the girl before she was sprayed]. There was nothing left at the scene or anything that makes us believe this is a biased crime.”

But as several commentators have noted, the attack came in the same week that millions of copies of a right wing-produced anti-Muslim DVD were released in Ohio and elsewhere.

Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West is a pseudo-”documentary,” produced in 2006, by the right-wing Clarion Fund. The film openly compares Islam today to Nazism prior to the Second World War, showing images of Nazi rallies intercut with images purportedly of Muslim children being exhorted to be suicide bombers. The film features prominent right-wing Islamophobes like Daniel Pipes and Alan Dershowitz, among others. Last year, arch-conservative David Horowitz screened the film on several college campuses as part of his “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week.”

During the last two weeks of September, the Clarion Fund–which has run at least one article supporting John McCain’s presidential bid on its Web site–paid to distribute more than 28 million copies of the DVD through 70 different newspapers in 14 “swing” states, including Florida, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and, of course, Ohio.

Shamefully, even some so-called “liberal” papers like the New York Times have distributed the DVDs to subscribers, arguing that because they were sent as paid advertisements, the newspaper isn’t responsible for the content.

Jim McClure, vice president of display advertising for the Raleigh News and Observer, was quoted in the paper’s “Under the Dome” politics blog comparing the DVD to common samples of household products that are sometimes sent out: “‘Obviously, we have distributed other product samples, whether it’s cereal or toothpaste,’ he said. He declined to say how much the agency paid.”

Except, of course, what’s being “sampled” in this case is misinformed bigotry. Angry subscribers wrote back to denounce the decision. As one commented:

A box of cereal? Toothpaste? Does a box of cereal or a tube of toothpaste encourage me to look with hatred and suspicion on my law-abiding neighbors who have a different religion than mine? Does cereal and toothpaste lead to pogroms, religious harassment, fear and intimidation? The trailer for this video is about hate, pure and simple, and shows the video has only one goal–to instill fear and hatred of neighbor against neighbor.

If I receive this DVD in my paper, that day, after 22 years of receiving the [News and Observer], will be the last day of my subscription.

Clarion Fund spokesman Gregory Ross has denied that the DVD is design to influence the election, telling the Los Angeles Times that it is simply “a reminder that a 9/11 could happen again, and we need to remember the past.”

But Ibrahim Hooper, president of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), told the LA Times there were some reports that DVD recipients in Ohio also received automated phone calls referencing the film, saying, “We hope you take it into consideration when you go into the voting booth.”

A multi-faith coalition called “Hate Hurts America” has launched a Web site to counter allegations made in the DVD. CAIR is also asking the Federal Election Commission to investigate Clarion for possible violations of campaign finance law.

In Oregon, approximately 70 protesters turned out September 30 at the offices of the Oregonian to denounce the paper for distributing the film as an advertisement. As Rev. Chuck Cooper, of the progressive Christian community Micah’s Village, told the Associated Press, the newspaper has a moral obligation “to inform, not misinform.” He added that the paper should donate any profits from the advertising to charity. CAIR is also suggesting that people who receive the DVD break it in half and send it back.

Despite the reluctance of police to label the attack on the Dayton mosque a hate crime, there should be no doubt that the wide distribution of hate-filled propaganda like Obsession has been a factor in at least some attacks on Arabs and Muslims since September 11–including verbal and physical assaults, as well as arsons at mosques and high-profile incidents in which Arab and Muslim passengers have been barred from airplanes.

As the e-mail sent to the Huffington Post‘s Chris Rodda noted:

Did the anti-Muslim video circulating in the area have something to do with this incident, or is that just a bizarre coincidence? Who attacks women and children?

What am I supposed to say to them? My words can’t keep them safe from what is nothing less than terrorism, American style. Isn’t losing loved ones, their homes, jobs, possessions and homeland enough? Is there no place where they can be safe?

“[I]t feels very unbelievable and surreal that he’s finally with us after more than five-and-a-half years of being apart and of only being able to see him behind glass. It’s breathtaking, really,” his daughter, Laila Al-Arian, described her feelings to Democracy Now‘s Amy Goodman.

“And the whole time, we–me and my siblings–just kept telling each other, ‘Is this a dream? Is this real?’ We couldn’t believe it. And even when we first heard the news, we were a bit skeptical, because we’ve been in this situation so many times, where we thought my father would finally be released, and he wouldn’t. So we kind of held back our happiness and joy until he was finally with us.”

Sami Al-Arian is the former University of South Florida professor who has been the victim of an ongoing government witch-hunt since the Bush administration, in the days following the September 11 attacks, accused him of using an Islamic think tank and a Muslim school and charity as a cover for raising funds to finance “terrorism” through the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

Though then-Attorney General John Ashcroft held up Al-Arian’s arrest as an essential part of the “war on terror” here at home, after a six-month trial costing more than $50 million, a Florida jury in 2006 refused to find Al-Arian guilty of a single count of the 17 charges against him.

Facing the prospect of a lengthy and costly retrial, not to mention further separation from his wife and children, Al-Arian agreed to plead guilty to a single count of the least-serious charge against him in exchange for what was supposed to be a minor additional sentence and voluntary deportation.

Instead, before his scheduled release date, Assistant U.S. Attorney Gordon Kromberg had Al-Arian moved to Virginia to try to compel his testimony in an unrelated investigation of the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT)–despite an explicit agreement with Florida prosecutors, recorded in court transcripts, that Al-Arian would be exempt from all future testimony.

Because of his continued refusal to testify, Al-Arian has had his prison stay extended first with civil, and then criminal contempt charges. But according to his defense lawyers and family, the government’s request of his testimony is nothing more than a trap–designed to keep Al-Arian imprisoned indefinitely on contempt charges if he refuses to testify, or allow government prosecutors a reason to charge him with perjury if he were to testify.

As Laila Al-Arian noted on Democracy Now, “[W]hat we’ve learned along the way [about Gordon Kromberg]…is that he’s not really interested in the truth. What he’s interested in really is retrying the case that the government lost so badly in Florida.”

Al-Arian’s original sentence and his sentence for civil contempt ended in April, but the government has fought to keep him behind bars.

On August 8, at the most recent pre-trial hearing in his upcoming criminal contempt case, the prosecution’s bias was once again on display. At the hearing, Judge Leonie Brinkema postponed the upcoming trial until a separate appeal by Al-Arian’s lawyers could be ruled on by the U.S. Supreme Court.

In her ruling, Brinkema questioned whether prosecutors have been overzealous in filing additional charges against Al-Arian before the Supreme Court could rule, and questioned whether the most recent contempt charges violate the terms of Al-Arian’s plea agreement, which bars the Justice Department from standing in the way of Al-Arian’s deportation after he served his sentence.

When Judge Brinkema once again ordered Al-Arian released on bail into the care of his daughter Laila, the anti-Muslim racism of Assistant U.S. Attorney Kromberg was on full display.

Kromberg objected to bail, arguing that, as a Muslim woman, Laila Al-Arian–a well-respected author and activist–would be too weak and submissive to oppose any potential attempt by her father to flee. “[I]n this particular culture, she would not be able to stop him from leaving,” he stated in open court.

“[E]verybody was appalled,” Laila Al-Arian told Amy Goodman. “I think mouths dropped all over the courtroom. There were gasps. And before our lawyer even had an opportunity to say anything, the judge interrupted him and said, ‘I got this covered.’ She was appalled at what was said, and said, ‘This is not only an insult to Dr. Al-Arian and his father, this is an insult to the court.’…I just think this particular prosecutor can’t help himself from having these racist outbursts.”

Despite Brinkema rejecting Kromberg’s claim, the government moved to circumvent her order–with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) taking custody of Al-Arian, as it has in the past when it appeared that he could be released from jail.

According to ICE, since Al-Arian is technically under a deportation order, it should retain the right to keep Al-Arian in custody in order to, in theory, deport him under his original plea agreement. But ICE has never moved to deport Al-Arian when it had him in custody, instead simply holding him in detention until federal prosecutors could drag him back into court once again.

Al-Arian’s attorneys, however, recently filed a petition for habeas corpus with the court, challenging his continued unlawful detention by ICE. Brinkema then set a deadline for immigration authorities to explain their delay in releasing Al-Arian, and, according to Laila Al-Arian, “since they essentially had no response, their decision was to release him, finally.”

While an important victory for the Al-Arian family, Sami Al-Arian’s release on bail does not end his ordeal. While out on bail, he is forced to remain under house arrest at his daughter’s home. He also still faces pending criminal contempt charges, and prosecutors have shown that they are all-too-willing to go to any lengths to keep him imprisoned.

That’s why the efforts of activists–through phone calls, letters and more–will continue to be key in the coming weeks and months to winning Dr. Al-Arian’s freedom once and for all.

Unless you’re delusional or in the pay of the energy industry, you know that the burning of fossil fuels is the primary cause of global warming and destructive climate change that is already wreaking havoc around the globe. Not to mention that fossil fuels are a limited resource, costly to extract and refine, and increasingly sought-after by competing nations.

So if a more environmentally friendly fuel could be derived from renewable plant-based sources, wouldn’t it be logical to make the switch?

This is the justification for the recent boom in biofuel production in the U.S. and around the globe. Since biofuels (which can be made from corn, sugar cane, soybeans or other organic sources) are produced from “renewable resources,” goes the argument, they can go a long way to helping break America from its 21-million-barrels-a-day oil habit and provide a more environmentally friendly alternative to fossil fuels.

Biofuels–especially, in the U.S., corn-derived ethanol–are being promoted as the savior of both the planet and humankind.

Think that’s an exaggeration? Check out the National Corn Growers Association’s online comic book adventures of “Captain Cornelius,” who uses his corn superpowers to “protect the environment.” Or the association’s online promotional video, a Star Wars parody in which “ethanol” is depicted as a wise Yoda-like figure, and “gasoline” is Darth Vader.

Rolling Stone quoted Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa–”the king of ethanol hype,” the magazine pointed out–as saying “Everything about ethanol is good, good, good.” But if you scratch a bit beneath the surface, ethanol stops looking quite so “good, good, good.”

For one thing, although biofuels are promoted as a cure-all for an ailing environment, many scientists say that they aren’t necessarily any better than traditional fossil fuels. As National Geographic reported in October:

Biofuels as currently rendered in the U.S. are doing great things for some farmers and for agricultural giants like Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill, but little for the environment.

Corn requires large doses of herbicide and nitrogen fertilizer and can cause more soil erosion than any other crop. And producing corn ethanol consumes just about as much fossil fuel as the ethanol itself replaces. Biodiesel from soybeans fares only slightly better. Environmentalists also fear that rising prices for both crops will push farmers to plow up some 35 million acres…of marginal farmland now set aside for soil and wildlife conservation, potentially releasing even more carbon bound in the fallow fields.

According to research reported last year by a team led by Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen, ethanol derived from corn may generate up to 50 percent more greenhouse gases than gasoline, because up to twice as much nitrous oxide may be released by the production process due to increased use of nitrogen fertilizers on corn (one of the most fertilizer-heavy crops).

In addition, in the U.S. and across the globe, forests, grasslands and other fragile ecosystems are being cleared to make way for production of corn, soybeans or other biofuel crops, causing further environmental harm.

According to one study published earlier this year in the journal Science, using a worldwide agricultural model to estimate emissions from land-use changes, researchers found that corn-based ethanol, “instead of producing a 20 percent savings in greenhouse gases, nearly doubles greenhouse emissions over 30 years and increases greenhouse gases for 167 years.”

As Nature Conservancy researcher Joe Fargione told Science Daily, “If you’re trying to mitigate global warming, it simply does not make sense to convert land for biofuels production. All the biofuels we use now cause habitat destruction, either directly or indirectly.”

In the Midwest “Corn Belt,” for example, increased corn production for ethanol has now pushed out nearly 20 million acres of soybean production. Until recently, soybeans were regularly rotated with corn crops, but many farmers are now abandoning them in order to chase the big government subsidies that now come with corn.

Brazilian farmers, driven to plant more or the world’s soybeans as a result (not to mention sugar cane for Brazil’s own biofuel production), have in turn increased the conversion of the Brazilian Amazon and Cerrado–some of the richest areas in the world in terms of biodiversity–into croplands and cattle pastures. Overall, the effect has been to push soybean prices higher, while encouraging intensive use of nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizers for corn crops.

This increase in fertilizer use is already causing environmental harm. Fertilizer runoff from Midwestern farms into the Gulf of Mexico has created an algae bloom that suffocates the ocean life underneath it.

In the 1970s, the bloom used to occur just once every two to three years. Intense factory farming has made the bloom a yearly phenomenon since the 1980s. And last year, when Midwestern farmers devoted a tract of land nearly the size of California to corn cultivation–a 15 percent increase over the previous year–the “dead zone” grew to the third-largest size ever observed. Reports suggest that the dead zone this year will expand to more than 10,000 square miles, the largest size on record and nearly 20 percent larger than the previous record.

It’s also worth noting that ethanol production is often bad for the health of those who live in the communities surrounding the distilleries. Reports of fires, toxic spills and air pollution are common. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) concluded this year that “ozone levels generally increase with increased ethanol use.”

A 2005 report by the Des Moines Register–when Iowa had a total of 17 ethanol plants–found that these facilities “emitted so much [cancer-causing] formaldehyde and toluene into the air that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency forced several large companies to install new equipment”; that several plants were built without construction permits; and that some released bad batches of ethanol and sewage into streams, threatening fish and wildlife.

Yet last year, the EPA relaxed regulations for the ethanol industry, allowing fuel-producing ethanol plants to raise their emissions of pollutants like carbon monoxide, nitrous oxide and sulfur dioxide from 100 tons per year to 250 tons per year.

In the years since the Register completed its investigation, the number of ethanol distilleries in the U.S. has skyrocketed–particularly since 2005, when the Energy Policy Act was passed, tripling the U.S. government mandate of biofuel production to 7.5 billion gallons of ethanol per year by 2012.

In early 2006, the U.S. had just 95 ethanol plants in operation. Today, according to the Renewable Fuels Association, there are a total of 161 ethanol distilleries in the U.S.–with another 42 plants under construction and seven undergoing expansion. Iowa alone now has 41 ethanol refineries.

And will this boom in ethanol production have an impact on U.S. oil dependence? Not likely. As the Energy Justice Network noted:

Meeting the lifetime fuel requirements of just one year’s worth of U.S. population growth with straight ethanol (assuming each baby lived 70 years), would cost 52,000 tons of insecticides, 735,000 tons of herbicides, 93 million tons of fertilizer, and the loss of 2 inches of soil from the 12.3 billion acres on which the corn was grown. The U.S. only has 2.263 billion acres of land, and soil depletion is already a critical issue. Soil is being lost from corn plantations about 12 times faster than it is being rebuilt.

As the U.S. General Accounting Office concluded in 1997, “ethanol’s potential for substituting for petroleum is so small that it is unlikely to significantly affect overall energy security.”

One of the biggest negative impacts of the ethanol boom has been the human cost for the world’s poor.

As Foreign Affairs reported in May, “The current biofuels craze…has disrupted food and commodities markets and inflicted heavy penalties on poor consumers. These developments have occurred despite record global grain harvests in 2007.”

Rising demand over the past several years has helped lead to a global spike in the price of corn–one of the most important staple crops for the world’s poor. Between May 2007 and today, the average price of corn increased by some 60 percent (soybeans, also used for biofuel, went up by more than 75 percent).

According to the USDA’s annual Food Security Assessment, the soaring cost of food increased the number of hungry people in the world by 122 million in 2007 to some 982 million (and poverty groups say the real number is likely much higher). The number of new hungry people–roughly equal to the population of Japan–is the biggest increase since the USDA started producing the report 16 years ago.

As Time magazine reported:

The grain it takes to fill an SUV tank with ethanol could feed a person for a year. Harvests are being plucked to fuel our cars instead of ourselves. The UN’s World Food Program says it needs $500 million in additional funding and supplies, calling the rising costs for food nothing less than a global emergency. Soaring corn prices have sparked tortilla riots in Mexico City, and skyrocketing flour prices have destabilized Pakistan, which wasn’t exactly tranquil when flour was affordable.

Though some portion of these price increases can be attributed to natural (and man-made) phenomenon like drought and floods, the skyrocketing costs of gasoline (which adds to the price of almost every stage of agriculture, from petroleum-based chemical fertilizers to harvesting and shipping costs) and market speculation due to a declining dollar, biofuels have also played a critical role.

As Foreign Affairs noted, “Although controversy remains over how much of the food price increase since 2006 can be attributed to biofuels, their effects cannot be overlooked. In 2008, 30 percent of the U.S. corn crop will be used for ethanol.” That percentage is expected to rise through 2015, especially since Congress approved a law in December that mandates the use of at least 36 billion gallons of biofuels by 2020.

As ethanol distilleries suddenly multiplied in the Midwest, as much as 50 percent of some states’ corn crop has been diverted to ethanol–taking up land and corn that was once used to feed livestock, which in turn pushes up prices on meat as well. By next year, the U.S. ethanol industry will need 4 billion bushels of corn–1 billion bushels more than this year and nearly double 2007 levels–to meet anticipated production.

In the same period, however, U.S. corn production is projected to grow by only 11 percent. “The USDA has said that if the ethanol industry gets 1 billion more bushels of corn, it means that the domestic livestock industry will have to cut back 16 percent in feeding corn,” said Purdue University Extension agricultural economist Chris Hurt, “And then our foreign buyers [i.e. countries that import U.S. corn] will have to cut back 18 percent.”

Given that U.S. trade policies–particularly NAFTA–have decimated the ability of countries like Mexico to feed themselves (pushing farmers out of business by opening markets to imports of U.S. grain), the consequences of a further spike in corn prices will be felt not only on the tables of U.S. consumers, but even more keenly among the world’s poor. According to Le Monde Diplomatique, since 1994, Mexico has been forced to triple its imports of all cereals, and now must import nearly 25 percent of its corn. But since a portion of Mexico’s population is now dependent on U.S. corn, any further spike in corn prices will cause further misery for masses of poor Mexicans.

U.S. officials and business, meanwhile, deny any responsibility. Agriculture Secretary Edward Schafer, for example, recently claimed that biofuel production pushed up global food prices by only 2 or 3 percent. But even USDA chief economist Joseph Glauber admitted in testimony to Congress in June that biofuels account for at least ten percent of global food price rises.

A recent World Bank report leaked to Britain’s Guardian newspaper suggested that biofuels may be responsible for as much as 75 percent of global food price increases. World Bank officials say the report isn’t finalized, and the number seems inflated.

But other studies show the same direction. The Gallagher report, a British study released last week, found that the “negative impacts from biofuels are real and significant.” The study stated that, among other things, current biofuel policies could drive 10.7 million people in India into poverty and force grain prices up in the European Union by 15 percent.

Yet at the recent Group of Eight (G8) summit in Japan, leaders of the world’s richest nations–who dined on an elaborate six-course lunch, followed by an eight-course dinner banquet–had little in the way of solutions for the current energy or food crises plunging millions into misery, except to encourage more of the same policies that created the problems in the first place.

As the global women’s organization MADRE noted in a statement:

The root cause of the food crisis is not scarcity, but the failed economic policies long championed by the G8, namely, trade liberalization and industrial agriculture…Yet in the search for solutions, the G8 is considering expanded support for the very measures that caused this web of problems. Calls for more tariff reductions, biofuel plantations, genetically modified crops and wider use of petroleum-based fertilizers and chemical pesticides are at the forefront of discussions in Japan.

These measures cannot resolve the global food crisis. They may, however, further boost this year’s record profits for agricultural corporations. There are viable solutions to the food crisis, but they will not emerge from a narrow pursuit of the financial interests of multinational corporations.

The Agribusinesses cashing in on the twin bonanzas of spiking food prices and biofuels couldn’t get away with it without a little help from their friends in Washington–and not only the Republican variety.

Barack Obama, for example, is a senator from Illinois, where Archer Daniels Midland, the leading producer of ethanol, is a major political force. ADM has spent years lobbying for ethanol, and it’s paid off with politicians like Obama.

“Since entering the Senate in 2005,” reported the Washington Post, “Obama has been a staunch supporter of ethanol–he justified his vote for the Bush administration’s 2005 energy bill, which was favorable to the oil industry, on the grounds that it also contained subsidies for ethanol and other forms of alternative energy, and he has sought earmarks for research projects on ethanol and other biofuels in his home state of Illinois, the second-highest corn-producing state after Iowa.”

More than anything, the ethanol scam shows that corporate, market-based “solutions” to global warming and oil dependence are no solution at all.

The sane and rational creation of biofuels–using, for example, non-food plants and wise land-use–could be one part of working toward solutions to the environmental crisis.

But that would only succeed if it were combined with other measures: real improvements in fuel efficiency in cars; massive government investment in public transit and alternative energy sources such as solar and wind power; restructuring of industrial manufacturing and agriculture away from oil dependence; and a reordering of urban areas so that people were not forced out of economic necessity to drive long distances from home to and from work, to name a few.

However, as Phil Gasper recently noted in the International Socialist Review, such measures “would require wresting control of large quantities of economic resources from corporate control and radically democratizing the entire political process. At the very least, this would require the emergence of social movements on a scale that has not been seen in the U.S. since the 1930s, capable of forcing capital to concede significant concessions.

“But to push the process through to completion would require breaking entirely with the logic of the profit system.”

The crowd grew so large that people began blocking traffic in the street. Fearing that there wouldn’t be enough vouchers to go around, a number of people began to rush the door, and some people were caught in the crush. Several fights broke out, and at least 34 squad cars were sent to the scene.

The rush seems to have been sparked by Gov. Jim Doyle’s announcement the week before that several Wisconsin counties, including Milwaukee, had become eligible for a Federal Emergency Management Agency program offering a month’s worth of food stamps to people who incur damage in a declared disaster area and fall below a certain income threshold.

In reality, the Marcia P. Coggs Human Services Center wasn’t distributing food vouchers — only accepting applications for FoodShare, a state food stamp voucher program.

But the long lines and the scramble to get to the doors show the desperation building up in the richest nation on earth. According to the media commentators, if American families face double-digit inflation in the prices of many food staples, at least things aren’t as dire as countries like Egypt and Haiti, where surging prices and hunger have led to riots in the past several months.

Food riots, they say, could never happen in America.

Tell that to the desperate thousands who lined up in Milwaukee.

The Milwaukee County Health and Human Services Department processed more than 2,000 applications for the FoodShare voucher program between June 19 and 20, but word of a seven-day applications limit appears to have spread last weekend, and when Monday came, no one was prepared for the massive numbers of people who came seeking help.

Some of those who lined up were victims of the power outages and recent flooding that have devastated portions of the Midwest. But many were residents who already had been desperately struggling to make ends meet, even before the floods.

That includes Jerry Lee, who told WUWM News that he came because “I need something on my table. I ain’t working. Ain’t no jobs, no nothing, so I have to do the best I can. You know a lot of people sleeping in the parks and stuff, so I’m kind of fortunate that I don’t have don’t have to sleep in the park. But yeah, the economy is rough.”

Those seeking relief were disappointed, however, since once a person signs up for emergency food aid, it frequently takes at least seven days before they receive actual assistance. Others were told that the wait would be as long as 30 to 60 days.

“Now I have to try and get to a food pantry,” a disgusted Yvonne Love told the Journal Sentinel. “I’ve got to feed my kids.” Love, a mother of an 8-, 10- and 14-year-old said she had been told there would be immediate help while visiting a local food pantry over the weekend. She left the chaotic scene, running to catch a bus to a temporary employment agency.

As the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel pointed out, the chaos that broke out “had more to do with a weak economy and crushing poverty in parts of this community than the devastating floods that swept through the state earlier this month.”

Poverty in Milwaukee is at epidemic levels. The city ranks as America’s eighth-most impoverished city and fourth in the number of children living in poverty. An estimated 25 percent of Milwaukee residents — and 33 percent of school-age children — live below the official poverty line. Since the government only provides meals to schoolchildren aged 12 or younger who are in summer school during this time of year, children are particularly hard hit right now.

“Unfortunately, it strikes me that Milwaukee continues to be a leader in so many unfortunate measures, such as unemployment, mortgage rates, incarceration and segregation,” Gregory D. Squires, chair of the sociology department at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., told the Journal Sentinel in February.

You might think that after the scandalous treatment of the victims of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, the federal government would be responsive to the needs of those who are going hungry in America. After all, in the richest country on the planet, how hard could it be to meet the needs of the country’s poor?

Too hard, apparently. Sherrie Tussler, executive director of the Hunger Task Force of Milwaukee, an emergency food pantry, said that food donations from the government have dropped more than 30 percent since 2001. As the Journal Sentinel reported, “To keep up with the increasing demand, the Hunger Task Force purchases food. The Task Force purchased $3,400 worth for the first five months of 2007. Through May of this year, that number climbed to $92,000, Tussler said.”

Bonnie Bellehumeur, president and CEO of America’s Second Harvest of Wisconsin, told WUWM that the food aid organization is having difficulty keeping its shelves stocked this year because donations are down 15 percent, and food manufacturers and grocery stores — which used to give large quantities of food–are scaling back donations as a way to cut costs.

Meanwhile, requests for assistance are up as rising food and gas prices and unemployment take their toll on many families. Nationwide, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 10 percent of households are either at risk of, or experiencing, hunger today.

The number of families forced to rely on food stamp assistance has also shot up. In March, some 27.9 million Americans received food stamps — up 1.5 million, or 5.7 percent, from a year earlier. Nearly half of households receiving food stamp benefits have one or more working adults.

As Milwaukee Common Council President Willie Hines said at a press conference following the incident at the Coggs Center, “The food crisis in Milwaukee and throughout the United States is worse than many of us have realized. We expect long lines for free food in Third World countries. We don’t expect a line of 2,500 people waiting for food vouchers [in Milwaukee].”

Everywhere you look, the mainstream media–finally waking up to the economic reality facing millions of poor and working-class Americans–are suddenly full of “helpful” suggestions for those feeling the squeeze of rising food prices.

But are platitudes about how best to tighten our belts the answer?

Food inflation is at its worst in more than 17 years today, with prices having risen nearly 5 percent in the past year. The price of staple products is climbing event faster–milk and dried beans are up more than 17 percent; cheese is up 15 percent; rice and pasta 13 percent, and bread 12 percent.

With the official unemployment rate jumping by a half percentage point in May–the biggest one-month increase in 22 years–gas prices climbing to more than $4 a gallon nationally, and a growing number of families hit by skyrocketing mortgages, things are looking exceptionally bleak for many working and poor families across the U.S.

In a new USA Today poll, 54 percent of those surveyed say their standard of living is no better today than five years ago. “Fewer Americans now than at any time in the last half century believe they’re moving forward in life,” concluded a recent report by the Washington, D.C.-based Pew Research Center.

That includes their access to food. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 10 percent of U.S. households today are either at risk of, or experiencing, hunger.

One bleak sign: Hormel, the company that produces the canned pork product Spam, reported a 14 percent jump in profits for the last quarter, largely because of a spike in sales of their exceedingly cheap product.

Anita Rhodes, a single mother of three living in Oakland, Md., who makes $374 every two weeks, recently told National Public Radio that she has been forced to begin shopping at a local grocery store selling expired food and damaged goods at discount prices. “The things there are all way, way past their due date, but I tried it,” Rhodes said. “The first box [of cereal] I opened had bugs in it.” She returned the box to the store to get her money–$1–back, because she couldn’t afford not to.

The family has been forced to cut out paper towels, bottled water, chips, cookies, candy and toiletries. “I don’t even look at roast right now, just because it’s so expensive. I looked at a chuck roast, and it was $15.”

According to Rhodes, if things prices continue to rise, she may be forced to take more drastic action. “I can shoot a deer,” she says. “I can do that. I can shoot a turkey. So I will feed my kids one way or another.”

And it’s not just people in rural areas who are being forced to make such choices. High school senior Brighton Early, who lives in Los Angeles, told NPR that she has gotten used to “finding flexibility” in her weekly shopping trips with her mother.

When shopping at the regular grocery store became too expensive, Early and her mother started getting their food at the local Chevron gas station–where the cashier gives them a 40 percent discount on leftover apples and bananas. As she wrote in an essay:

To ensure the best selection possible, my mother and I pile into our 20-year-old car and pull up to the food mart at 5 p.m. on the dot, ready to get our share of slightly overripe fruits.

Chevron shopping started like this: One day my mother suddenly realized that she had maxed out almost every credit card, and we needed groceries for the week. The only credit card she hadn’t maxed out was the Chevron card, and the station on Eagle Rock Boulevard has a pretty big mart attached to it…

Grocery shopping at Chevron has its drawbacks. The worst is when we have so many items that it takes the checker what seems like hours to ring up everything. A line of anxious customers forms behind us. It’s that line that hurts the most–the way they look at us. My mother never notices–or maybe she pretends not to.

I never need to be asked to help the checker bag all the items. No one wants to get out of there faster than I do. I’m embarrassed to shop there, and I’m deathly afraid of running into someone I know. I once expressed my fear of being seen shopping at Chevron to my mother, and her eyes shone with disappointment. I know that I hurt her feelings when I try to evade our weekly shopping trips.

As food prices rise, many families are being forced to ask for help in the form of government assistance and food stamps.

In some places, applications for food stamps have doubled in the last year. According to federal statistics, in March alone, some 27.9 million Americans received food stamps–up 1.5 million, or 5.7 percent, from a year earlier. Nearly half of households receiving food stamp benefits have one or more working adults.

And with food stamp benefits averaging just $1 per person per meal, many recipients who found the benefits pitifully small during the “boom” are now finding it nearly impossible to stretch what little they get.

Debby Missimi, director of food services for Family and Community Services, which offers hot meals and runs food pantries in Kent and Ravenna, Ohio, told the Akron Beacon Journal, ”When people think about the hungry, they think of a homeless person walking down the street without food. With this economy, that’s not the case. It could be your neighbor. It could be someone in your family. It could be someone who sits next to you in church. In this economy, the face of hunger has changed.”

Laura Diaz, a mother of four, whose husband works as a machinist in Chicago, got $332 in food stamps to feed her family–for the entire month of June. Her husband’s paycheck, she told NPR, goes almost entirely to pay for the family’s mortgage. And while she would like to work, without a high school diploma, she fears there’s no way she would be able to make enough to even pay for child care.

The money isn’t enough to make it through to the end of the month, so Diaz volunteers at, and receives assistance from, Casa Catalina–a neighborhood food pantry that serves more than 300 families each day.

According to America’s Second Harvest, the largest food bank in the U.S., demand across the U.S. is up 15 percent to 20 percent over last year, and many food banks are having difficulty coping. CBS News recently reported that virtually all food banks in a recent survey said demand was growing–and more than 80 percent said they were unable to meet that rising demand.

“Having a job isn’t enough anymore,” Marcia Paulson, spokeswoman for Great Plains Food Bank in North Dakota, recently told Reuters. “Having two or three jobs isn’t enough anymore.”

“Milk is just as much as gas prices these days,” a tearful Stephanie Smith told CBS News as she waited to pick up food with her daughter at a mobile food pantry in Dover, Tenn.–where the number of families signing up has almost doubled since October.

Smith was forced to leave her minimum wage job when her salary could no longer cover the cost of child care and her commute to work. “This is hard, to have your kids watch their parents go through this,” she added.

Unfortunately for Smith and the hundreds of others who have come to rely on the Dover food pantry, the state money that funded it is due to run out this month–and has not been renewed.

Olga Medina, who works full time providing home care for the elderly in Douglas, Ariz., told Reuters that her $1,100 monthly paycheck is no longer enough to support her, her parents and her sick child. To make ends meet, she now looks for milk, fruit and vegetables in dumpsters outside of her local supermarket each week. One day last month, she waited in line with 147 others outside the Douglas Area Food Bank for a grocery handout because she had no bread.

“We have to put up with a lot of humiliation just to survive,” she said, putting on a pair of sunglasses to hide tears. “It’s not dignified, but we are hungry, and hunger is ugly.”

In March, Al-Arian began a new hunger strike, his third since he was first imprisoned in February 2003. As Socialist Worker went to press, he was on day 50 with no food and had reportedly lost more than 34 pounds.

According to his daughter, journalist Laila Al-Arian, the latest hunger strike is “in protest against what the Department of Justice is doing to him. His scheduled release date is April 11, but they’re trying to ensnare him in a whole other trial, just to increase his prison time, even though he’s already spent five years in detention. They’re trying to keep him locked up indefinitely.”

The government’s 17 original charges against Al-Arian accused him of using a think tank and a Muslim school and charity as a cover for raising funds to finance “terrorism.” In 2006, after a lengthy trial, a Florida jury acquitted Al-Arian of the eight most serious charges and deadlocked on the rest, with the jury favoring acquittal by a 10-2 margin.

But the government kept Al-Arian in prison, threatening him with a retrial. Rather than face this, Al-Arian agreed to plead guilty to a single count of the least serious charge against him, in exchange for a minor additional sentence and voluntary deportation.

“The first trial cost us $1 million in legal fees,” said Laila Al-Arian. “It was very, very exhausting: financially, physically, emotionally. We just really didn’t want to go through that nightmare again. Also, we would have had to hire new lawyers, because our lawyers were already committed to other cases.”

But rather than release Al-Arian as promised after he served his sentence, Gordon Kromberg, the assistant U.S. attorney for the eastern district of Virginia, had Al-Arian transferred to try to compel his testimony in an investigation into a Muslim charity in that state–in defiance of an agreement with Florida prosecutors, recorded in court transcripts, that he would be exempt from future testimony.

Kromberg has reportedly made anti-Muslim statements in the past. According to Al-Arian attorney Jack Fernandez, when Fernandez requested that Al-Arian’s 2006 transfer to Virginian be delayed until after the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, Kromberg responded that if Muslims “can kill each other during Ramadan, they can appear before the grand jury. All they can’t do is eat before sunset.”

The courts have so far sided with Kromberg that Al-Arian should testify. Al-Arian, however, views such testimony as a trap–since others who testified in similar cases were immediately charged with perjury. Instead, by refusing to cooperate, Al-Arian has been held in contempt. He now faces a new indictment on criminal contempt charges, which could lead to an open-ended jail sentence.

“We really thought that once he signed that plea agreement, everything would be over,” said Laila Al-Arian. “But, we realized later that you can’t trust the Department of Justice to keep its promise, because in our case, the plea agreement turned out to be a farce, a total lie. If the prosecutors are not going to keep their word, then why would any defendant in history ever choose to sign a plea agreement?…

“It’s almost like you’re offered two poisons, and you have to choose one: The first is that if he testifies in front of the grand jury they’re trying to bring him in front of, in an unrelated case, they’re going to charge him with perjury; and, if he chooses not to testify, then he’ll be charged with criminal contempt. So either way, he’ll be imprisoned more.”

Beyond imprisonment alone, Al-Arian has endured at various times during his confinement virtual round-the-clock lockdown, unsanitary cell conditions, severe restrictions on his access to telephones and writing materials, and physical and verbal abuse at the hands of guards.
According to the Tampa Bay Coalition for Justice and Peace, a support group working for his release, Al-Arian, now under the jurisdiction of immigration authorities, was recently moved to the Hampton Roads Regional Jail in Portsmouth, Va.

“Since arriving at the facility, he has been subjected to numerous, shocking abuses, even worse than those he experienced at a detention center in Maryland,” read an alert issued by the group. “After placing him on suicide watch, prison guards confiscated all of Dr. Al-Arian’s belongings.

“His clothing, including undergarments, were taken away, and he was given only a thin hospital gown to wear in the cold prison. Although Dr. Al-Arian suffers from weak eyesight, his eyeglasses were also taken away. His cell contains no bed sheets, blankets or pillows, only a hard metal bed frame beneath a one-inch mattress.

“Furthermore, guards took his drinking cup needed to drink water, which is critical during his hunger strike. Further, Dr. Al-Arian was also told that he would only be given one telephone call every 15 days, and that he would not be allowed any attorney calls. Even if he were to be given regular calls, a single call from Hampton Roads Regional Jail costs $25…

“Prior to his transfer, Dr. Al-Arian was promised by immigration officials that he would not be subjected to more humiliating and abusive treatment at the new facility. These horrendous conditions reflect a gross negligence on the part of the authorities at the Hampton Roads Regional Jail and a deliberate attempt to break Dr. Al-Arian’s will through this cruel and punitive treatment. By subjecting him to these continuous abuses, they have attacked his basic dignity and jeopardized his health to an alarming degree.”

As Laila Al-Arian pointed out, “He’s getting much weaker each day…His spirits are always strong, which keeps us strong, but he really has had it with these tactics by the Department of Justice. Five years of his life were already stolen from him and his family. Enough is enough.

“I think he really feels like going on this hunger strike is the only thing in his power to do to protest this grave injustice. He’s just taking it day by day. I think he’s very determined to continue on with the hunger strike, just as other political prisoners all over the world have done.”

In the initial days of this hunger strike, Al-Arian had also been refusing water. But prison officials have been slow to offer medical treatment.

“Frankly, we’re wondering why they have this approach,” his daughter said. “Last year, he went 60 days without eating, taking only water for two months. The human body can only handle so much. They never force-fed him. They never offered him any kind of proper treatment. It’s very scary for us as his family.”

Now According to Laila, the Al-Arian family is trying to support Sami while renewing calls for his release. “We’re fed up with this,” she said. “It really feels like Groundhog Day–the same statements that were being released last year during the hunger strike are being released this year. There’s still a media blackout on his case…

“Very few media outlets are really giving it the attention it really deserves, with the exception of your paper, Democracy Now! and a few other small outlets here and there. I think it’s a determined decision to not cover this case, so that’s frustrating for us.”

Despite the abuse he’s been subjected to, Sami Al-Arian has vowed not to give up. In a statement recorded on March 31 from prison, he said, “My case, dear sisters and brothers, represents a principled stand for all the sacred rights enshrined in the Bill of Rights in the Constitution and the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. It’s in defense of the integrity of our system of justice.

“After spending more than five years in 10 different prisons across the United States, and despite a six-month trial with 80 witnesses, including 21 from Israel, 12 average Americans stood firm and refused to convict innocent people of any count of over 100 charges leveled at them by the most powerful government in history.

“No wonder people have been asking, ‘Where is justice?’ Justice can’t be served when people are targeted because of their beliefs and politics…Justice can’t be served when those who are supposed to administer it abuse it in order to exact revenge. Justice can’t be served when employing fear mongering and fear tactics by exploiting a national tragedy to silence the voices of a vulnerable and weak minority in our society.”

For Laila Al-Arian, the persistent attack by the government on her father is a symptom of the “war on terror”–including the demonization of Arabs and Muslims and the shredding of civil liberties after the September 11 attacks.

“I think it just shows that the Bush administration is so misguided and hateful of people who are Arab and Muslim,” she said. “It doesn’t matter who you are or what you stand for. In their eyes, all Arabs and all Muslims are the same: they’re the enemy. I think they’ve declared Islam and Muslims as the enemy.

“It’s very clear in my father’s case. He is a very peaceful and moderate person. His only crime was exercising his First Amendment rights. For that, he was punished–silenced by the Bush administration, which has made enemies out of people who should have been their friends, if they truly were interested in bridging the gap between the Muslim world and the U.S. My father would have been that perfect bridge, but instead they decided to burn their bridges and lock up innocent people…

“I think this case is not just about us. It’s not just about Muslims or Arabs or Palestinians. It’s about Americans. If this could happen to my father, it could happen to anyone.”

Former Wal-Mart employee Debbie Shank became a target of the company’s lawyers in the wake of a car accident that left her severely disabled. Shank used to stock shelves at Wal-Mart, but she was severely injured in 2000 when her minivan was struck by a tractor-trailer. The accident left Shank permanently brain damaged and in a wheelchair.

Today, the 52-year-old lives in a nursing home and requires 24-hour-a-day care. In addition to her physical disabilities, Shank’s short-term memory has been damaged to the point that she can no longer remember that her son Jeremy was killed in Iraq. She breaks down in tears each time she is told again.

One small blessing for the family — or so they thought — was that Shank had signed up for Wal-Mart’s health care and benefits plan. The company’s insurance did kick in, with Wal-Mart paying a total of about $470,000 for Shank’s medical expenses.

Two years after the accident, Shank and her husband were awarded a settlement in a lawsuit against the trucking company involved in the crash. After legal fees, the couple received $417,000 — money that was put into a trust for Debbie Shank’s long-term medical and nursing home care.

But after three years went by, Wal-Mart started demanding that the couple reimburse it for the money spent on Debbie’s medical expenses. Wal-Mart sued the couple, demanding that it turn over proceeds from the legal settlement.

Like many employer health plans, the fine print gives Wal-Mart the right to recoup any money paid on medical care if the injured person later collects money in a lawsuit.

The legal rationale is that this prevents people from collecting twice for the same medical bill. But in the case of Debbie Shank, the settlement money was clearly going to be used to cover the cost of Shank’s future care, which will almost certainly run into the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars.

Even so, Wal-Mart sued the family for the entire $470,000. A court ruled in the company’s favor, though it did reduce the amount, saying Wal-Mart could only recoup money left in the family’s trust — currently about $277,000.

Still, that leaves the Shanks with nothing for Debbie’s long-term care. In March, the US Supreme Court refused to hear the case, leaving the Shanks without any other legal options.

“We assumed after three years [that Wal-Mart] had made a decision to let Debbie Shank use this money for what it was intended to,” the family’s attorney, Maurice Graham, recently told CNN.

Debbie’s husband Jim, who is currently recovering from prostate cancer, works two jobs and struggles to pay the family’s bills. He told CNN that he may lose his car and is afraid he won’t be able to send their youngest son to college because of the cost of both his and Debbie’s medical care.

Last year, struggling under the weight of the medical bills, Jim legally divorced Debbie — in order for her to qualify for more money under the Medicaid health program.

Jim Shank admits that Wal-Mart is “within their rights, but I just wonder if they need it that bad . . . Who needs the money more? A disabled lady in a wheelchair with no future, whatsoever, or does Wal-Mart need $90 billion plus $200,000?”

Of course, Wal-Mart doesn’t need the money at all. The company was ranked first on the Fortune 500 list of top U.S. corporations last year, with revenues of more than $351 billion and profits of over $11 billion. Wal-Mart took in $100 billion in just the last three months of 2007 — meaning it covered the $470,000 it claims the Shanks owe it in just 37 seconds during that period.

But Wal-Mart spokesperson John Simley told CNN in a statement that the company’s hands are tied. “Wal-Mart’s plan is bound by very specific rules,” Simley said. “We wish it could be more flexible in Mrs. Shank’s case since her circumstances are clearly extraordinary, but this is done out of fairness to all associates who contribute to, and benefit from, the plan.”

But Wal-Mart has never been known for being “flexible” when it comes to its employees. In fact, the company seems almost proud of the sub-standard wages and benefits it offers.

Last year, it sent Vice President Tom Emerick — the man responsible for designing its employee benefits packages — to lecture business leaders in Dallas. According to the Dallas Morning News, Emerick praised “high-deductible plans,” explaining that employees are more likely to curtail health care spending — and save the company money — if they have high out-of-pocket costs to pay.

In 2005, in an internal memo leaked to the press, M. Susan Chambers, Wal-Mart’s executive vice president for benefits, expressed dismay over the growing cost of employee health care. To solve the problem, Chambers suggested hiring fewer full-time workers, discouraging the elderly or people with health problems from taking jobs at Wal-Mart and reducing corporate contributions to employees’ 401(k) retirement plans.

According to the company’s own figures, as of January 2006, just 46 percent of Wal-Mart’s 1.3 million U.S. workers had company health insurance. And according to the Wal-Mart Watch Web site, that coverage is full of hidden charges, and plans frequently provide less in benefits than other comparable companies.

For now, the Shanks are out of legal options–though Jim Shank says the family will try to figure out a way to get by and “do the best we can for Debbie.”

As MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, who recently nominated Wal-Mart as part of his “Worst Person in the World” series, put it: “Contrary to general opinion, Wal-Mart is not owned by the devil . . . but you know why people think of Wal-Mart and evil in the same sentence? Because of the crap you guys do like this . . . Wal-Mart: may your stores melt in the hot sun. Today’s worst person in the world.”

What You Can Do

* You can sign an Internet petition at the Wal-Mart Watch Web site urging the company to let the Shanks keep their money.

* Wal-Mart March and another union-sponsored site, Wake Up Wal-Mart, contain a wealth of information on the giant retailers scandalous behavior toward workers, as well news of various activist campaigns.

For a book that details the company’s rise to economic dominance, try Anthony Bianco’s The Bully of Bentonville. Charles Fishman’s The Wal-Mart Effect looks at the impact of the company and its policies on the U.S. economy. Liza Featherstone’s Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Worker’s Rights at Wal-Mart documents the class-action lawsuit filed by women workers over sex discrimination in promotions, pay and job assignments.

It might not seem obvious, but these words from George W. Bush in a recent speech at the Economic Club of New York were meant to reassure the public and investors that the U.S. economy was fundamentally sound and would continue to grow.

But as Bush pointed out, consumer confidence is rapidly tanking. For working families, a skyrocketing grocery bill is one of the most ever-present of reminders that they have been making do with less. Each week, it seems, the price of staple food–everything from eggs to milk to cereal–edges up higher.

“I’ve spent $300 in a matter of two weeks,” one shopper, Roseann Fede, told the New York Times as she left a Bloomfield, N.J., supermarket. “It used to be like $150. Milk, eggs, nonperishable things–everything has gone up in price.”

According to U.S. government figures released earlier in March, grocery costs increased 5.1 percent over the past 12 months. The U.S. is undergoing the worst grocery inflation in close to 20 years, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture predicts prices will climb another 3 to 4 percent this year.

The problem is especially obvious when you look at the cost of individual goods. According to the Labor Department, milk prices are up 17 percent. Prices for dried beans, peas and lentils are up the same amount. Cheese is up 15 percent, rice and pasta 13 percent, and bread 12 percent. And the price of eggs has risen 25 percent since February 2007–and 62 percent in the last two years.

In all likelihood, food inflation will continue, driven by a number of factors, including the rising price of oil–hitting as high as $112 a barrel recently–which has raised the cost to deliver food and run farm and factory equipment; increases in the cost of farm commodities like milk, corn and wheat; and the declining value of the dollar, which is encouraging exports of U.S. crops and food products.

Increased government mandates for ethanol production are not only driving up the price of corn used for making it, but are pushing up prices for other staple foods–since, for example, land is being diverted from staples like wheat and soybeans to produce corn. By the end of the 2006-07 crop year, 19 percent of harvested corn was made into ethanol–a 30 percent increase in just one year. Increased demand for ethanol helped boost the price of a bushel of corn from $2 in 2005 to $3.40 in 2007.

The grim result of the increase in food prices is a record number of requests for help at food pantries around the country.

Eileen O’Shea, director of member services for the Greater Boston Food Bank, told the Boston Herald that more and more working- and middle-class families are showing up at food pantries and soup kitchens. When O’Shea recently visited the St. Francis House homeless shelter in Boston, she noticed people in suits and business attire entering the soup kitchen to eat lunch.

In January 2006, for example, the Sacred Heart Parish Outreach Food Pantry in Middleboro served 39 families a month. This past January, reported the Herald, it served 203 families.

“It’s working-class people who no longer have a job,” pantry President Bill Pye said. “Builders aren’t building, so they don’t need plumbers, they don’t need electricians, they don’t need painters, they don’t need carpenters. And when their unemployment runs out, what do they do? They come to the food pantry–reluctantly, most of them.”

According to the New York Times, for two weeks last November, the New Hampshire Food Bank was forced to distribute supplies usually reserved for emergency relief. Demand was up 40 percent from 2006, and supply was down 30 percent–an especially striking fact considering that New Hampshire is the state with the lowest reliance on food banks in the U.S.

While things may be bad for many working and poor families in the U.S., in many parts of the world, it is even darker.

According to the UN’s World Food Program (WFP), global food reserves are “at their lowest for 30 years and commodity markets extremely volatile, subject to sudden spikes and speculation. The situation has been exacerbated by the falling value of the dollar, which is the currency in which all major commodities are traded.”

Globally, wheat prices have surged 83 percent in the past year. Earlier in March, in Asia, rice prices were at a 20-year high. “When you see those kinds of increases, [people] are simply priced out of the food markets,” WFP Executive Director Josette Sheeran recently told BBC News.

The WFP reports that a staggering 854 million people in the world are food “insecure,” and 170 million children are undernourished. But UN officials say they may have to begin rationing international food aid because of spiking costs. In West Africa, alone, the WFP’s food and operations costs are now 30 percent higher than at the same time last year because of price increases for basic food commodities.

Sheeran says that the hardest hit so far are people in developing countries who live on less than $1 a day. Some 80 to 90 percent of their paltry incomes was already being spent on food.

In Haiti–where a recent Associated Press report described “containers full of food…stacking up in the nation’s ports because of government red tape, leaving tons of beans, rice and other staples to rot under a sweltering sun or be devoured by vermin”–food prices have increased so much that some of the country’s poor have begun eating cookies made of dirt as a regular source of food.

“When my mother does not cook anything, I have to eat them three times a day,” Charlene, a 16-year-old woman with an infant, said of the cookies that are made of salt, vegetable shortening and a form of edible clay that is sold by the bag.

According to the Associated Press, two cups of rice now sell for 60 cents, up 50 percent from a year ago. Beans, condensed milk, and fruit have gone up by a similar amount–and even the price of the edible clay has risen over the past year by almost $1.50.

Even middle-class people and those living in traditionally stable urban areas in countries like Indonesia, Yemen and Mexico are increasingly being priced out of the food market–or forced to sacrifice education and health care in order to feed their families.

Some governments have begun food rationing. The Indian government is having difficulty maintaining a food price subsidy system, and both the Chinese and Russian governments have moved to impose price controls in the wake of rampant inflation.

Shortages and price increases have sparked demonstrations in Burkina Faso, Mexico, Italy and elsewhere–and food riots in Namibia, Zimbabwe, Cameroon, Morocco, Yemen, Senegal, Uzebekistan and other countries.

“The risks of food riots and malnutrition will surge in the next two years as the global supply of grain comes under more pressure than at any time in 50 years, according to one of the world’s leading agricultural researchers,” the British Guardian reported.

“Recent pasta protests in Italy, tortilla rallies in Mexico and onion demonstrations in India are just the start of the social instability to come unless there is a fundamental shift to boost production of staple foods, warned Joachim von Braun, the head of the International Food Policy Research Institute.”

As Von Braun told the Guardian, “The first sign was the tortilla riot in Mexico City, where 70,000 took to the streets. I think that was only the beginning–there will be more. For a year or two, countries can stabilize with stocks. But the risk comes in the next 12 to 24 months. The countries that cannot afford to buy will be the losers, while those with huge foreign exchange reserves will bid up the world market.”

Some 25 students are facing severe disciplinary action following a peaceful November 1 lunchtime protest in their school cafeteria. The demonstration included as many as 70 students in all, who linked arms, sang songs and talked about how the war has affected the world.

In response, school officials have charged the students with “gross disobedience and mob activity” with 5- and 10-day suspensions as punishments–and the threat of possible expulsions to come.

But students and their supporters immediately protested the administrators’ crackdown, holding press conferences and organizing people to attend a November 7 district school board meeting.

At that meeting, District 201 Superintendent Ben Nowakowski defended the punishments, saying that the students disrupted the educational process and threatened the safety of others. “The cafeteria was required to be shut down, and students were held in their classrooms, causing a major disturbance to the school day,” Nowakowski read from a prepared statement. “Protesting in the cafeteria rather than outside the school created an environment in the cafeteria which could have caused harm to many people.”

But Nowakowski’s version of events is a fraud, according to others who were on the scene. Morton West High School teacher Gale Holmlund, for example, told board members that her classroom and others at the school weren’t disrupted in any way.

Jonathon Acevedo, one of the students facing expulsion, told the Chicago Tribune, “We weren’t violent in any way. We were holding hands and singing ‘Kumbaya’ and the song ‘Give Peace a Chance.’”

The students say they even obeyed the administration’s request to move the protest from the cafeteria to a hall near the principal’s office–and were promised in return that they wouldn’t face severe punishment. “We agreed to move to another side of the building,” student Matt Heffernan told the New York Times. “We also made a deal that if we moved there, there would be no disciplinary action taken upon us.”

Students and parents are also angry that some student protesters seem to have been given preferential treatment by the school if they were athletes or had high grade point averages. During the protest, some parents were selectively called by school officials to pick up their children, leaving the remaining protesters to face the possibility of harsher punishments.

Parent Rita Maniotis, for example, said her daughter Barbara participated in the protest, but was given a 5-day suspension and doesn’t face the threat of expulsion–because she is an honor student. “This entire incident is outrageous,” Maniotis said. “The school missed out on a wonderful teachable moment. Instead, they cracked down on them right away and turned it into a punitive situation.”

School officials have also reportedly threatened some students with harsher punishments if they didn’t identify organizers.

According to Acevedo’s aunt Gladys Hansen-Guerra, “It was a group effort [but] they’re trying to offer leniency to those who point out the organizers. This isn’t a fascist state. [School officials] aren’t the CIA. These are 16-year-old kids.”

Parent Adam Szwarek, whose 16-year-old son, also named Adam, faces expulsion, described the stakes for the students.

“Who’s the next group to go off to war? These kids,” he said. “The kids do a peaceful sit-in, and they’re threatened with expulsion, yet the military’s running around the school trying to recruit.”

Joshua Rodriguez, a suspended senior, told the Tribune, “I thought the school would support us. They teach us civil rights, but then they pummel us down.”

In response to this attack on the right to protest, supporters of the students and antiwar activists have begun to mobilize.

At a press conference a few days after the protest, students, parents and supporters delivered a letter to Superintendent Nowakowski’s office. Signed by parents, it says: “We support a safe and productive learning environment in the school, but we also understand that our children are thinking individuals and a reflection of the larger society. They were expressing the view of an overwhelming majority of Americans that the Iraq War is wrong…

“There was no violence, no property damage and the students cleaned up after themselves. They showed themselves to be truly committed to a peaceful world. We believe that these are exactly the students needed to achieve and maintain a safe and productive school environment…[W]e will not permit any one of these students’ educational future to be so undeservedly destroyed.”

As Socialist Worker went to press, a rally and press conference was held in the Morton West parking lot, with members of Rev. Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow/PUSH Coalition and other activists.

Rainbow/PUSH has said it will file a lawsuit if the threatened expulsions aren’t rescinded and the students’ records expunged. “This was just young people with a high consciousness, trying to say we need to save lives,” said Rev. Gregory Livingston.

The response from the school district? “We won’t engage these demagogues,” declared Dan Proft, a spokesman for School District 201.

It turns out, however, that Proft is hardly unbiased himself. He’s a known Republican Party strategist, a frequent commentator on local right-wing talk radio and–naturally–an outspoken supporter of the war in Iraq.

Meanwhile, local antiwar activists are vowing to continue building support for the students. As disabled Gulf War veteran Cesar Ruvalcaba, dressed in his military uniform, told the school board, “Shame on the administrators who think receiving military money from recruiters is more important than the education of their students…These kids should receive extra credit for speaking up, not expulsion.”

The images from that September day in 1957 show the ugly reality of American racism. Elizabeth Eckford had arrived alone on the first day of school, and was turned away by the Arkansas National Guard on orders of Democratic Gov. Orval Faubus. The crowd of whites that surrounded her as she later walked to a bus stop looked ready to lynch her. All of the nine would face similar harassment.

Coming after the 1954 Brown v. the Board of Education Supreme Court decision that outlawed legal segregation, Little Rock showed the reality of racism in the U.S.–that equality before the law mattered little in the Jim Crow South, and that racism would have to be fought every step of the way to overcome it.

Today, we’re told that America has moved beyond its ugly past–that nooses, “separate but equal” and “Jim Crow justice” are relics of a bygone era. But 50 years after Little Rock, the case of the Jena 6 is proving that racism is alive and well.

The Jena 6 are six high school students facing decades in prison for their alleged part in a school fight–which itself followed a series of racist incidents endured by the small minority of African Americans in this Louisiana town of less than 3,000 people.

The case has many of the hallmarks of the Jim Crow past–a vindictive white prosecutor, all-white juries, blatant double standards in punishment.

And, of course, the nooses–hung from a tree in the courtyard of Jena’s high school to intimidate Black students who dared to expect equal treatment.

The story of the Jena 6 has spread around the country and the world, causing disbelief–and anger. On September 20, that anger found an outlet–with tens of thousands of people mobilizing around the country to stand up for the Jena 6.

Hundreds rallied on college campuses in Nashville, Houston, Atlanta, Cleveland, Toledo, Muncie, Ind., Berkeley, Calif., and beyond. In Allentown, Pa., middle school students marched. In Chicago, students from the all-male Hales Franciscan High School on the South Side organized an out-of-uniform day so they could wear black to show support for the Jena 6. Hundreds more marched in communities in Detroit, Philadelphia and elsewhere.

And then there was Jena itself. Tens of thousands of people descended on the tiny town. From early in the morning, protesters came pouring down the sloping road into Jena. They rallied in the town park and walked to the courthouse–and to Jena High School to witness the spot where the “whites only” tree once stood. The tree has since been removed–although the school’s burned-out auditorium, set on fire by an unknown arsonist last November, remains.

Ashleigh Randle, a student at the University of Michigan, drove 22 hours with a group of fellow students to stand in the courtyard. “We wanted to come and stand up for what is right, because we’re tired of what’s been going on, the racial injustice,” she said.

“People act like racism is in the past, but it’s not. It’s subtle or it’s blunt, but it’s out there. We want people to know that we’re tired of settling for less. I say look around. How can you look at Hurricane Katrina and say racism doesn’t exist?”

Ashleigh’s fellow student, Shanika Steen, pointed to the spot where the tree once stood. “The noose that was hung on the tree. And another one at the University of Maryland a couple of days ago. You can’t look at these things and say, ‘It’s not racism, it’s just something that happened.’”

Shavette Wayne Jones traveled to Jena from St. Louis with a group of about 60 people. “I came because I have two sons of my own,” she said. “I have a 2-year-old and a 9-year-old. My mother and I came together. This could very well be one of my children.”

Among everyone in the streets of Jena that day, there was a determination to take a stand–if the racism of the Jim Crow days had returned, they would stand up against it, just like the civil rights marchers of 50 years ago. The sign Shavette held summarized the mood: “Jena, La., today. Anytown, USA, tomorrow. Not on our watch!”

The double standards that run through the case of the Jena 6 are unmistakable.

The schoolyard assault that the six Black students are charged with was preceded by a series of racist incidents, beginning when three white students hung nooses from a tree in the courtyard of Jena High School. The nooses appeared the day after some Black students asked for and received permission from an assistant principal to sit under the tree, traditionally “reserved” for whites only.

Dismissed as a “prank” by LaSalle Parish Schools Superintendent Roy Breithaupt, the white students who hung the nooses received in-school suspensions.

But to Jena’s Black residents, the incident was a clear threat. “It meant the KKK, it meant ‘niggers, we’re going to kill you, we’re going to hang you ’til you die,’” Caseptla Bailey, whose son is also among the six, later told Britain’s Observer.

When Black students attempted to address the school board about the noose incident, they were turned away–with the board apparently deciding that it had dealt with the issue.

After Black students staged a sit-in under the tree in response to the nooses, LaSalle Parish County District Attorney Reed Walters was called in to address a school assembly. According to Black students, Walters said to stop “fussing” over an “innocent prank”–and then, looking specifically at them, said: “See this pen? I can end your lives with the stroke of a pen.”

In late November, Robert Bailey, a Black student, was beaten up at a party attended by mostly whites. According to the Louisiana Public Defenders’ Association, police initially refused to let Bailey make a complaint against his attacker and warned Black students at the party to get “get their Black asses out of this part of town.”

A few nights later, Bailey and two others were threatened by a white student with a sawed-off shotgun at the town’s “Gotta Go” convenience store. The three wrestled the gun away and fled, but instead of police arresting the white student who pulled the gun, Bailey was initially arrested and charged with second-degree robbery, theft of a firearm and disturbing the peace.

At school the following week, a white student, Justin Barker, allegedly taunted Bailey. After lunch, Barker was knocked down, punched and kicked by a group of Black students, said to include Bailey, Theo Shaw, Carwin Jones, Bryant Purvis, Mychal Bell and another unidentified minor. Barker was taken to the hospital, though he was well enough to attend a party that night.

As Walters promised, there was instant retaliation for the six Black students. They were immediately expelled, and slapped with charges of attempted second-degree murder–punishable by 30 years in prison. Several of the Jena 6 remained in jail for months because their families couldn’t afford bail, which ranged from $70,000 for Purvis to $138,000 for Bailey.

The injustice didn’t end there. Mychal Bell was the first to come to trial. In June, on the morning his trial began, the charges against him were reduced to aggravated second-degree battery and conspiracy. The battery charge, however, was based on the idea that Bell used a “deadly weapon” during the assault–according to Walters, Bell’s gym shoe.

Bell was eventually found guilty by an all-white jury–which included two people who were allegedly friendly with the Walters and one who was a friend of the victim’s father. Not only was the jury all-white, but the jury pool itself didn’t contain a single African American.

According to the Jena 6 families, Bell’s court-appointed defense attorney had been trying to cut a plea deal with the DA behind the scenes. The attorney didn’t call a single witness in Mychal’s defense or present any evidence on his behalf.

The charges against Jones, Shaw and Bailey have been reduced to aggravated second-degree battery and conspiracy. Purvis has yet to be arraigned in the case and is the only remaining Jena Six member still charged with attempted second-degree murder.

Bell was originally scheduled to be sentenced on September 20, facing as much as 22 years in prison. But with the increased media attention and wave of activism around the case, new lawyers were able to overturn Mychal’s conviction. The trial judge first threw out the conspiracy charge, and, later, Bell’s battery conviction was overturned when an appeals court judge ruled that he should not have been tried as an adult.

The reversal of Mychal’s conviction, however, doesn’t affect the four other Jena 6 members charged as adults–because they were 17 at the time of the alleged crime and, under Louisiana law, are no longer considered juveniles.

Unequal “justice” is nothing new in Jena. Michael Kirkland, who runs a barbeque stand outside the Christian Saints Baptist Church on the road into town, has lived in Jena for the past 10 years, “It’s a rough town,” said Kirkland. “It’s a good town, but it’s rough. It’s very segregated.”
Kirkland rejects the idea that racism is a thing of the past in Jena. “It happens all the time,” he says.

When the superintendent suggested that the hanging of the nooses was a “prank,” Kirkland said, “It shocked the Black community. It didn’t shock the white community because that was what they wanted him to do. He’s their puppet on a string.”

As for the incident with the shotgun, Kirkland says, “It was outrageous. This same guy who pulled the gun, he got away easy. But they charged the boy who took the gun from him with theft.”

Gregory Gibbs, who was raised in Jena and attended Jena High, now lives in Alexandria. He speaks today of “getting through” and “getting out.” Heywood Williams, who attended Jena High, too, and still lives in Jena, has the same feelings about the school.

According to Gibbs and Williams, it’s not surprising that racial tensions would flare up at the high school, since kids in Jena attend separate, racially segregated elementary schools. White children, the men say, go to Nebo Elementary, while Black kids attend a separate school.

Though the “whites only” tree at Jena High may be gone, there’s still the “Nebo bench,” the men say, where only students from Nebo–in other words, all whites–traditionally sit.

Blacks who have tried speaking out against racism in the past in Jena have found themselves retaliated against, Gibbs says. “If you get too outspoken here,” he says, “you might show up at work in the morning and find you don’t have a job. So that’s what took it so long to come out.”

Now, the conditions that Gibbs and others have endured are known around the world, thanks to the outrage of people who heard about the story–often on the Internet or from a Black radio station–and forced it into the mainstream media.

Even George W. Bush was forced to weigh in. Asked about the planned protest at a news conference, he said the “events in Louisiana have saddened me,” and advised whoever is elected next year to “reach out to the African American community.” In other words, don’t look for any justice from Bush’s Justice Department.

Meanwhile, Louisiana’s Democratic Gov. Kathleen Blanco had declared that the case was a “local matter,” and she doesn’t have the jurisdiction to intervene.

But some Democrats are finding themselves on the hot seat for their failure to speak out. Earlier in the week, at a meeting in South Carolina, Jesse Jackson took Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama to task for failing to respond to Jena. “Jena is a defining moment, just like Selma was a defining moment,” said Jackson.

The emotions stirred by the injustice in Jena were clear on September 20, the date that Mychal Bell had been scheduled to be sentenced, when tens of thousands of people made the trip to Jena–and demand that the charges against Mychal and the rest of the Jena 6 be dropped.

When the charges against Mychal Bell were overturned earlier this month, Jena officials must have breathed a sigh of relief–figuring that the September 20 demonstration wouldn’t draw a big turnout.

They were wrong. At least 50,000 people traveled to the out-of-the-way town, one of the largest civil rights demonstrations in 40 years.

The night before the protest, in Alexandria, La., a larger town 45 minutes south of Jena, every hotel and motel for miles around was sold out, filled with protesters preparing for the next day.

The next morning, buses and cars began arriving in Jena as early as 4:30 a.m. By 7:30 a.m., the two-lane road into town was backed up for at least a mile or more. Every available parking space for miles out of town was taken on both sides of the road.

Hundreds of people–nearly all dressed in black shirts in solidarity–began the long walk into town as more cars and buses continued on the road. The arrival of a contingent of hundreds of Black motorcycle riders–organized through Black clubs across the country–brought cheers and awe.

Days earlier, when it became clear that there would be no stopping the protest, state officials declared a “state of emergency” in LaSalle Parish, where Jena is located, in order to ensure that some provisions would be made for protesters–portable toilets, emergency service, and so on. The Red Cross was on hand as well, to distribute water and Gatorade–a necessity, when the temperature climbed to 92 degrees by midday.

On the way into town, people’s spirits were buoyed by the size of the turnout. Signs, banners and shirts bore witness to the distances people had traveled–from Washington, D.C., Chicago and Atlanta, and across Texas and Louisiana. Contingents from colleges and Black fraternities, churches and community groups, and civil rights organizations, continued to pour in–along with people who had simply heard about the case and been angered enough to come on their own or with a group of friends.

“Memphis supports the Jena 6,” read one sign. “Atlanta supports the Jena 6: Until the six are free, never are we,” read another, pasted on the side of a van full to overflowing.

One of the passengers, Carnell, was cheering and pumping his fists as he rode on top of the van while it crawled along in the traffic. He said he and his friends decided to make the nine-hour drive after hearing about the case on talk radio. Disbelief gave way to outrage and the desire to do something to help win justice, he explained.

Johnny Williams, better known as “Big John” and a member of the Buffalo Soldiers motorcycle club in Alexandria, La., expressed the same sentiments. “When word got out, it wasn’t any problem [getting people together],” he said. “I wouldn’t be anywhere else today. I think it’s very, very impressive. We need it.

On the way into town, a large highway sign pointed buses toward the Ward 10 Recreation Park, where thousands gathered for a rally featuring civil rights leaders and family members of the Jena 6, to be followed by a march through town later in the day.

But thousands felt compelled to go in the opposite direction–toward the center of town, to the LaSalle Parish Courthouse, where Mychal Bell was convicted, and farther down the road to the Jena High, to seek out evidence of the “white tree” and stand in defiance of racism.

The courthouse stands on a small hill that was soon packed with people, the overflow spilling onto the crowded streets below. As a small group of state police and–it appeared–town officials looked on with stony faces from the steps, protesters jeered or chanted with raised fists: “Free Mychal Bell,” “No justice, no peace,” “Enough is enough.”

In the morning, Rev. Al Sharpton arrived on the courthouse steps with Marcus Jones, the father of Mychal Bell. “This is a march for justice,” Sharpton said as the crowd broke out into cheers.

“[Rev. Martin Luther] King went to Selma. That wasn’t the only place you couldn’t vote. That was the point of action. They went to Birmingham. That wasn’t the only place we didn’t have public accommodations. It was the point of action. Jena is a point of action for the Jenas everywhere. There’s Jenas in Atlanta, there’s Jenas in New York, there’s Jenas in Florida, and there are Jenas all over Texas.”

Later in the day, Rev. Jesse Jackson made the same point, drawing wild applause before leading a march from the park to the courthouse. “There’s a Jena in every state in America,” he said, mentioning police torture of African Americans under the watch of Commander Jon Burge in Chicago, the beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles and the use of prison slave labor today at Angola prison in Louisiana.

The message was the same at the high school, where protesters came to see where the “whites only” tree once stood. Shavette Wayne Jones from St. Louis remembered her years as a college student at Grambling State University–when she protested white supremacist David Duke running for governor of Louisiana.

“I just find it ironic that, here I am, coming back down here after that many years, to fight for justice to prevail again,” she said. “I went to school in Louisiana for four years, so I know that not only is here in Louisiana, but it’s everywhere. Sometimes it’s not as blatant as this, but all you have to do is live to experience it. It’s alive and well.”

Helen Comeaux drove five hours from Dallas with her friend Djuna LeBlanc to attend the protest. “I have seven grandkids, and it just scares me for them,” she said. “We have to stand up now and fight. We have to. This happens everywhere. I think this is an eye-opener for everybody, not just Black people. It happens in small towns, big cities, everywhere.”

Her friend Djuna added: “We want to let everybody know that we’re tired, and we’re not going to let our children be thrown away like that. Enough is enough.”

To hear town officials tell it, the problem in Jena isn’t racism, but “outsiders” stirring up trouble.

That certainly seems to be the attitude of Reed Walters, the district attorney. The day before the protest, Walters spoke at what Democracy Now’s Rick Rowley called “one of the unfriendlier press conferences I think I’ve ever seen.”

Walters began by blaming the media for supposedly finding examples of Southern racism where none existed. Jena, he seemed to suggest, was simply suffering from an irrational media bias against the small-town South.

“This case has been portrayed by the news media as being about race, and the fact that it takes place in a small Southern town lends itself to that portrayal,” Walters said. “But it is not and never has been about race. It is about finding justice for an innocent victim and holding people accountable for their actions.”

But Walters, who was also the lawyer for the school board when the nooses were hung, never described how white students were “held accountable” for their actions.

According to Rowley, “At the end, as someone asked [Walters], ‘Why are you trying to destroy these boys’ lives with a stroke of your pen?’ he picked up his folder and scattered microphones across the ground and said, ‘It’s obvious that this press conference is out of control.’ And he turned around and ran back inside the courthouse.”

Minnijean Brown-Trickey, one of the Little Rock Nine, who was expelled from Central High in 1958 in part for spilling food on a group of white boys who were harassing her, compared Walters’ “outsiders” complaint to her own experience.

“The rhetoric is that ‘our Negroes are fine, and y’all people are coming down here, riling them up,’” she told Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman in an interview the day of the Jena demonstration. “That’s what it sounds like, and that’s the tragedy. But I also think it’s because of hearing that again that people feel such a sense of alarm.”

For many of Jena’s Black residents, the presence of “outsiders” is welcome.

When Goodman asked the Jena 6 mother Caseptla Baily, “What do you say to those who say this is a bunch of outsiders coming in, everything was fine in Jena before they started marching on our town?” Bailey replied, “Well, I’d like to say that everything wasn’t fine in Jena. That’s why the outsiders are here, and that’s why everything has gone so tremendously within the last few months.

“So I’d like to applaud those people that have come here from the outside–to come in and to support us and help us and assist us in this matter. I’d like to say, hats off to those persons.”

Gregory Gibbs had the same reaction. “Thirty years late” was how he described the protest for the Jena 6. “It’s been a long time coming,” he said. “We’ve had so much injustice here. We happened to be raised in it, and we survived it. But they do it with the legal system now. They almost got away with it.

Heywood Williams agreed. “There’s a level for the whites and a level for the Blacks,” he said. “It’s just like back in the ’60s, like the way they had the water fountains–one for the colored, and one for the whites. That’s the way our justice system is set up, on two levels–one for the colored, and one for the whites. That’s the way our school system is set up.”

“Living here in Jena, people get along for the most part, but when it comes down to treating each other fairly, the justice system is one-sided.

“And they let you know who you are. They let you know where you’re from and where you’re at. They let you know that you’re in Louisiana and that you’re down in the South. They let you know that they prefer their race to be the dominant race.”

If Reed Walters and Jena officials get their way, things will stay the way they’ve always been. After Bell’s conviction was overturned by the appeals court judge, Walters vowed to appeal.

And in a sore disappointment for supporters of the Jena 6, a judge rejected a request by Mychal Bell’s lawyer to allow the teen to be freed on bail while his appeal is heard–effectively keeping him in prison for the immediate future. A request to remove the original trial judge, J.P. Mauffray Jr., from the case, was also denied–despite the fact that Mauffray preceded over a farce that included Bell being improperly charged as an adult.

The Jena 6 and their families could face other forms of retaliation as well, On the evening of the demonstration, for example, two teens were arrested after driving a pickup through downtown Alexandria, with nooses hanging off the back. Both allegedly had been drinking, and a gun and brass knuckles were found in their truck.

And in the wake of all the publicity surrounding the case, nooses have been found at other schools–Andres High School in North Carolina and the University of Maryland, to name two.

And to top it off, the families of the Jena 6 were targeted for harassment by a neo-Nazi group that called on its Web site for the Jena 6 to be lynched and posted some of the families’ addresses and phone numbers “in case anyone wants to deliver justice.”

Rev. Sharpton said in a statement that “[s]ome of the families have received almost around-the-clock calls of threats and harassment…[The fact] that some person could actually harm or even continue to harass these families with no effort by law enforcement, will further exacerbate the tensions around this case immeasurably.”

The struggle to win justice for the Jena 6 and challenge the racism that the case represents is far from over–but the protests on September 20 were an important step.

“People have been crying out for a long time for equal justice,“ said Heywood Williams. ”It took Al Sharpton and the coalition groups and Jesse Jackson and all the other people who came, and they got the world’s attention. This small thing you see right here in Jena, if you allow it to continue, will spread. If they can get away with it now, they’ll do it again.

“They were going to take those six kids’ lives and just ruin them–just throw them away. That’s what [Reed Walters] was intending to do. They’ve done it for years and years. That’s how we were raised.”

But things are different now that attention has been focused on Jena, says Williams. “I’m glad the people did come because it takes a movement,” he said. “It takes a movement every time. And today we’ve seen it. They showed they whole world, and the whole world is showing this system down here that a change has got to come.”

As Michael Kirkland put it, “I hope it’s an eye opener–the attention of America on Jena. The whole world is watching now.”

Bell, who is Black, was found guilty–by an all-white jury–of aggravated second-degree battery and conspiracy.

Along with five other Black students, Bell is accused of jumping a white student on December 4 at the high school in the small town of Jena, La. He could be sent to prison for as many as 20 years when he is sentenced July 31.

Prosecutors have painted the “Jena Six” as the aggressors, while ignoring the racism that permeates the case. The assault that Bell and the others are charged with was preceded by a series of fights between white and Black students in Jena that began after three white students hung nooses from a tree at the high school in September.

Jena is a town where a white man who pulled a loaded shotgun on three Black students at a convenience store was never charged with a crime. Instead, the three Black teens were initially arrested and accused of aggravated battery and “theft”–for wrestling the shotgun away from the assailant.

In the case of the students, the nooses appeared the morning after a group of Black students had been told by the principal that they were “allowed” to sit under a tree in the school’s courtyard–an area traditionally used only by whites.

What the nooses meant was loud and clear to Black students. But school officials dismissed the threat of lynching as no more than a high school prank. The three white students who hung the nooses ended up with short “in-school” suspensions instead of being expelled.

As Jena’s white school superintendent, Roy Breithaupt, explained to the Chicago Tribune, “Adolescents play pranks. I don’t think it was a threat against anybody.”

But the town’s Black residents have no doubt that the threat implied by the nooses was serious. “It meant the KKK, it meant ‘niggers, we’re going to kill you, we’re gonna’ hang you ’til you die,’” Caseptla Bailey, whose son, Robert Bailey Jr., is also among the Jena Six, told Britain’s Observer.

Segregation is alive and well in the town–and not just in the high school. According to Bailey, the area she lives in, Ward 10, is where the majority of Jena’s Black residents live–mainly in trailers or wooden shacks. No whites live there. Only two Black families live in the wealthier area of town.

Racism runs through the justice system as well. In 2000, the Jena Juvenile Justice Center, a privately run youth detention center, was closed by the state after a pattern of racist abuse by guards against inmates–both verbal and physical–was uncovered.

According to the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, Blacks children make up approximately 78 percent of juveniles incarcerated in the state, though African Americans account for just one-third of the state population overall.

Following the appearance of the nooses at the school, and in the wake of the school’s failure to hand out any real punishment, racial tensions intensified between the Black and white students.

A series of fights broke out, and in November, the central wing of the school was set on fire by unknown arsonists. Off campus, there were reports of additional fights, including the beating of a Black student who had attended an all-white party with friends.

According to the Louisiana Public Defenders’ Association, though a white teen was later charged with simple battery, police at the scene reportedly told the African American students to “get their Black asses out of this part of town.”

When Black students staged a protest under the tree at Jena High, LaSalle Parish District Attorney Reed Walters was called in. Appearing with police at an assembly, Walters reportedly warned Black students against any more “incidents,” allegedly telling them, “I can make your lives disappear with a stroke of my pen.”

On December 4, the fight erupted that would lead to the charges against the Jena Six.

A group of Black students at the high school allegedly assaulted a white student, Justin Baker, on his way out of the gym, knocked him unconscious and kicked him after he hit the floor. Baker was reportedly a friend of the students who had hung the nooses, and some reports say he had been taunting Black students before the fight.

True to his word, the district attorney went on the attack, charging all six Black students–four as adults–and pushing for attempted murder charges, with maximum sentences of 100 years each. All six students were immediately expelled from school.

Later, the attempted murder charges were reduced to “aggravated battery.” But this charge is supposed to depend on the use of a dangerous weapon. Since there was no evidence that Bell or the other teens had a gun, knife or other weapon, Walters argued that the tennis shoes Bell was wearing at the time of the attack qualified as a “dangerous weapon.”

The trial that followed for Mychal Bell is all too typical of “justice” for Blacks in the U.S. today.

The jury that heard the case was all white, and took just three hours to convict Bell. The witnesses at the trial were all white. Trial Judge J.P. Mauffray Jr. ruled that the noose incident was irrelevant to the case and couldn’t be mentioned at trial, meaning that much of the original context of the fight was never heard.

Reports from witnesses at the trial suggest that Bell’s public defender, Blane Williams, was unprepared, and more interested in pushing for a plea deal than proving Bell’s innocence. He failed to put a single witness on the stand, or to present any evidence at all in Bell’s defense.

Williams failed to challenge the all-white composition of the jury, as well. He told the Associated Press that he was sure he could “get a fair trial” anyway.

Alan Bean, director of Friends of Justice, a Texas-based civil rights group, attended the trial and told the Associated Press, “Blane Williams did not want to go to trial, he was not prepared to go to trial, and he was angry when he was forced to go to trial. So he just sort of plowed ahead and decided to go through the motions.”

During the trial, several witnesses claimed they saw Bell struck the first blow in the assault–key to proving the charge against him. But other witnesses said that the white student struck first, and still others said they couldn’t tell who struck the first blow, or if Bell was even among the group of students–a clear indication that there should have been reasonable doubt as to whether Bell was guilty.

Now, Mychal Bell faces a 20-year sentence, five more young Black men will go on trial soon, and Black residents live each day in fear of racist violence. As Vivian Thompson, a friend of the Bell family, told the Alexandria-Pineville Town Talk, “Blacks do not stand a chance here. I want to see justice. This wasn’t it.”

In a recent ruling, a federal appeals court found that Bush doesn’t have the authority to declare civilians inside the U.S. to be military combatants and have them held indefinitely.

The ruling centered around the case of a Qatari citizen, Ali al-Marri, the only U.S. resident being held as an enemy combatant within the U.S. Al-Marri was arrested in 2001 and has been held in solitary confinement in a Navy brig in Charleston, S.C., since June 2003.

The Bush administration claims that al-Marri is an al-Qaeda operative who was active in the U.S., but it refuses to allow him to have a trial in order to fight the charges against him. Al-Marri’s lawyer, Jonathan Hafetz, from the Brennan Center for Justice, told the Associated Press that prosecutors are refusing to charge al-Marri because they lack evidence–“or the evidence they’ve obtained is through torture, unreliable or unacceptable in civilized society.”

Former detainee Moazzam Begg’s book Enemy Combatant: My Imprisonment at Guantánamo, Bagram and Kandahar is a powerful indictment of the hidden U.S. prison system around the world and the “war on terror.” Michael Ratner and Ellen Ray detail the facts about the U.S. prison camp in Guantánamo: What the World Should Know.

Amnesty International’s recent report “Cruel and Inhuman: Conditions of Isolation for Detainees at Guantánamo Bay” can be read online. For more information on Guantánamo and the legal challenges against it, see the Center for Constitutional Rights’ Guantánamo Action Center.

In a 2-to-1 ruling, the court found that the federal Military Commissions Act, passed last year, does not strip al-Marri of his constitutional right to challenge his accusers in court.

“The president cannot eliminate constitutional protections with the stroke of a pen by proclaiming a civilian, even a criminal civilian, an enemy combatant subject to indefinite military detention,” the court said. “Put simply, the Constitution does not allow the president to order the military to seize civilians residing within the United States, and then detain them indefinitely without criminal process, and this is so even if he calls them ‘enemy combatants.’”

As Steven Shapiro, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement, “It is difficult to imagine a more complete repudiation of the administration’s strategy of treating suspected terrorists as enemy soldiers who can be subject to indefinite detention by the military without charges or trial.”

Unfortunately, THE al-Marri decision doesn’t apply to the estimated 385 prisoners who remain in a legal limbo at the U.S. military gulag at Guantánamo Bay.

However, they also recently received a small bit of good news when military judges dismissed all charges against the only two Guantánamo prisoners facing trial, saying they had been designated only as “enemy combatants,” and not “unlawful enemy combatants,” as required by the 2006 Military Commissions Act.

The rulings are seen as another setback for the Bush administration, which had hoped to begin pointing to convictions as progress in the war on terror–and justification for continuing the system of indefinite detentions.

One of the men in question, Omar Ahmed Khadr, a Canadian national, was just 15 years old when he was sent to Guantánamo Bay–a clear violation of international law, under which child soldiers are considered victims of warfare, not war criminals.

Though the Pentagon could appeal the decision and take steps to reclassify the prisoners as “unlawful enemy combatants,” some politicians are taking the opportunity to quietly raise questions about Guantánamo, and whether detainees should have their legal right to habeus corpus restored–something that Republicans and Democrats in Congress stripped from them when they approved the Military Commissions Act.

But taking away the rights of detainees has been the norm for the Bush administration, Congress and the courts ever since September 11.

Despite claims by the Bush administration that it would like to eventually close Guantánamo, according to a recent Boston Globe report, there have been at least three detainees quietly transferred to the prison camp since March–the first to be sent there since 2004. In addition, the number of detainees being released has also slowed.

“It’s like Guantánamo is getting its second wind, and becoming a permanent option,” Joanne Mariner, director of the Terrorism and Counterterrorism Program at Human Rights Watch, told the Globe.

Two of the men recently sent to the camp were captured during U.S. operations in Somalia, suggesting that the Bush administration sees Guantánamo as a permanent part of expanding the “war on terror” globally.

“Rather than closing Guantánamo, they’re using it for the next phase, in another front in the war on terror,” Jonathan Hafetz told the Globe. “It shows that the administration still believes Guantánamo is a viable way to hold people indefinitely without due process.”

That means devastating consequences for detainees. On May 30, the brutality of Guantánamo drove another prisoner to suicide. Abdul Rahman Ma’ath Thafir al-Amri was found in his cell, not breathing. U.S. officials refused to say how he died, but reported that his death was an apparent suicide.

Al-Amri is one of four detainees who have killed themselves at the U.S. camp. Al-Amri had been imprisoned, without charges, since February 2002.

Because he had no lawyer of record, few details are known about him beyond what the Pentagon has chosen to release to the public. U.S. officials claim that al-Amri, originally from Saudi Arabia, was a “mid-level” detainee who traveled to Afghanistan, where he ran safe houses for al-Qaeda and tried to kill American troops.

According to reports, al-Amri had been held in “Camp 5”–one of two high-tech, “maximum security” facilities at Guantánamo. Camp 5 is one of the areas at the camp in which “troublesome” and “high-value” detainees are housed. It is designed to keep prisoners in near-constant isolation.

“Camp 5 is just utterly grim psychologically,” Sabin Willett, a lawyer for some detainees, told the Associated Press after al-Amri’s death. “There’s no question that isolation destroys human beings.”

Of the approximately 385 prisoners housed at Guantánamo today, only a handful have been charged with any crime. According to international human rights groups and lawyers, the psychological impact of indefinite detention, combined with harsh living conditions and brutal interrogation practices, has been devastating.

Prior to al-Amri’s suicide, two Saudi detainees and a Yemeni detainee hanged themselves on the same day last June, using clothing and bedding in their cells. Lawyers say that dozens more suicide attempts have occurred throughout the camp’s history.

Hunger strikes–one of the only forms of protest available to detainees–have also become a common occurrence, with dozens, and sometimes hundreds, refusing meals at various points. U.S. officials responded with brutal force-feedings, designed to inflict pain and punish detainees who dare to refuse to cooperate. As of April, at least 12 detainees were on hunger strike and being force-fed.

In al-Amri’s case, reports suggest that he was on hunger strike as recently as March. Military records show that during a past hunger strike in 2005, al-Amri’s weight dropped below 90 pounds at one point–down from the 150 pounds he weighed when he was first brought to the prison camp.

The kind of despair that drove al-Amri to his death has been felt by others. Juma al-Dossari, a Bahrainian detainee who is still imprisoned, reportedly attempted suicide more than a dozen times since he was first brought to Guantánamo in 2002. One attempt was made during a visit by his lawyer, Joshua Colangelo-Bryan, in October 2005.

According to the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), al-Dossari had been held at that point for almost two years in near complete isolation, and had been subjected to abusive interrogations, including the threatening of his life and family, and sexual humiliation.

In a suicide letter, al-Dossari wrote, “[R]emember that the world let us and let our case down…Remember the unreasonable delay of the courts in looking into our case and to side with the victims of injustice…

“Remember that if there were people who are actually fair and who defend justice and defend the victims of injustice and if there are judges who are fair, I wouldn’t have been wrapped in death shrouds now and my family–my father, my mother, my brothers and sisters, and my little daughter–would not have to lose their son…but what else can I do?”

The letter, “reveals a man brought to the brink of self-destruction because of the government’s inhumane policies of indefinite detention and mistreatment,” said CCR Deputy Legal Director Barbara Olshansky.

Now, the suicide of Abdul Rahman al-Amri proves once again that there’s nothing humane about the U.S. prison camp. As Anthony Romero, executive director of the ACLU, said following al-Amri’s death, “Further deaths at Guantánamo should not surprise us when prisoners are afforded a second-class system of justice, are held indefinitely without charge, and are given only limited access to their lawyers.”