This week, O’Connor launches a California book tour, beginning in the San Francisco Bay Area. On Monday, O’Connor sat down for a video interview with Prison Radio, where he discusses aspects of this story not addressed in this text interview. Marking the book release, Prison Radio has recorded a special message from Kevin Cooper himself. To learn more about Cooper’s case and what you can do to help, visit his website.

Prison Radio:  How did you get involved in Kevin Cooper’s case?

J. Patrick O’Connor:  During the fall of 2008, I was in the Bay Area on a book tour for The Framing of Mumia Abu-Jamal.  During the tour, supporters of Kevin’s approached me at various venues and asked me to consider writing a book on Kevin’s case.

PR:  How did you go about writing this book?

JPO:  I took on this project with no preconceived notions of Kevin’s guilt or innocence. Each case is different, radically so.

My first step was to read and notate the trial transcripts, documents of over 8,000 pages.  I then read all the police reports, witness interviews, and various newspaper accounts. I reviewed the most shocking crime scene and autopsy photos I’ve ever seen — and those I will never forget.  The autopsy reports on the four victims spoke of an incredibly frenzied killing field inside the Ryens’ master bedroom.

Finally, I read all of the appeals and the judicial rulings.  By this time I was ready to begin interviewing various people involved in Kevin’s trial and his subsequent appeals.

PR:  What’s the main obstacle to researching a case that is 25 years old?

JPO:  The biggest problem is that a number of key people involved in the investigation and trial have died, have retired, or have simply forgotten important factual details.

Another obstacle is that because Kevin technically still has appeals open to him, the San Bernardino County D.A.’s Office refused to discuss the case with me.  Nonetheless, I was able to interview Kevin’s trial attorney, his investigator, and the lead prosecutor at his trial as well as many other people familiar with Kevin’s trial and appeals.  For important background on the Ryens, I was able to interview Peggy Ryen’s half-sister and Doug Ryen’s sister.

PR:  Did you ever interview Kevin Cooper?

JPO:  I visited with Kevin for nearly three hours at San Quentin in the summer of 2009.  During this intense interrogation — I was in the process of deciding whether to take on this book possibility — I could sense Kevin felt a number of my questions were intrusive, if not insensitive.  There were things about his past and about his stay at the hideout house, and his fleeing to Mexico that I simply had to know to be able to go forward.

By the end of the interview I was taken with his equanimity and his resolve to prove he was wrongfully convicted of the gruesome Chino Hills murders. Over the next two years, I was able to pose many other questions to Kevin in written form, through his defense team at the Orrick law firm.

PR:  What convinced you that Kevin was innocent of these crimes?

JPO:  A lot of different things. To just cite one here: The prosecution and the police withheld and destroyed evidence that would have exonerated Kevin — evidence that was so exculpatory to him that had it been revealed Kevin would not have even been on trial for these murders.

PR:  Can you provide some background on Kevin Cooper’s case?

JPO:  Kevin Cooper was convicted of the brutal murders of a Chino Hills, California family and a young houseguest in 1985, and has been on death row at San Quentin since then. Scapegoat: The Chino Hills Murders and The Framing of Kevin Cooper, shows how the sheriff’s office and the district attorney’s office of San Bernardino County framed Cooper for these horrific murders and how the justice system has failed him at almost every turn in his long, drawn-out appeal process.

If it were not for a court-ordered moratorium on executions in California over the lethal injection controversy, Cooper – with no appeals remaining – would have been executed by now. It is expected the moratorium will not be lifted until at least 2013.

Two days before the murders of Doug and Peggy Ryen, their 10-year-old daughter, Jessica, and 11-year-old Christopher Hughes, Cooper escaped from a nearby prison and holed up in a vacant house 125 yards below the murdered family’s hilltop house.  Two days after the San Bernardino sheriff’s department established that Cooper had hid out there, it locked in on him as the lone assailant despite numerous eye witness reports that implicated three, young white men as the perpetrators.

From that day forward, four days after the murders were discovered, the sheriff’s department discarded information that pointed at other perpetrators, destroyed evidence that exculpated Cooper, and planted evidence that implicated him.

PR:  What eyewitness testimony is there pointing to other perpetrators?

JPO:  The only survivor of the attack, 8 1/2-year-old Josh Ryen, told ER personnel and a sheriff’s deputy that his assailants were three white men. Cooper is black.

Around midnight on the night of the murders, a couple, attempting to exit a driveway in their truck, saw three, young white men driving rapidly down the only road that leads away from the Ryens’ house in a station wagon that it turned out was stolen from the murdered family.

Shortly after that sighting, two women in a nearby bar saw two young white men, one wearing coveralls, with blood splatter on their faces and clothing.

Four days after the murders, another woman turned into the sheriff’s office bloody coveralls her boyfriend, a convicted murderer, had left on the floor of her closet.  The woman stated she had other information that implicated her boyfriend in the murders but wanted to be interviewed by homicide detectives.  She would have told them that her boyfriend’s hatchet was missing and that he no longer had the tan T-shirt he wore the Saturday of the murders.

PR: What aspects of the crime scene challenge the case against Cooper?

JPO:  The murders were committed with at least three, and probably four, weapons: a hatchet, an ice pick and one or two knifes. The theory that one perpetrator could or would use three or four weapons, is fundamentally counterintuitive.  At trial the prosecutor argued that Cooper was ambidextrous, which he is not.

Nor could one person control two able-bodied adults and three children running around the house, one of whom, Jessica, made it outside the house during the attack. The adult victims were each fit, 41-year-old chiropractors and both were mobile during the onslaught and fought hard for their lives, sustaining numerous defensive wounds to their hands and arms.

The crime scene evidence, according to the medical examiner, showed that the mother was cradling the daughter before the mother died, which meant one of the attackers had brought Jessica back into the house.  More than anything else, this meant there had to be more than one assailant because each parent kept a loaded gun in the master bedroom where the assault occurred.

There was an uncommon viciousness to the attack as though the killers meant not only to murder but to send a message of payback or retribution.  The medical examiner counted 144 wounds on the four murder victims, including 28 fractures and two amputations.  While Cooper’s trial was in progress, an inmate in a California prison told prison authorities and a San Bernardino County Sheriff’s detective that his cellmate had confessed to the Chino Hills murders, stating it was an Aryan Brotherhood hit but the three killers had gone to the wrong house.

PR:  What about the destroyed evidence you cited earlier?

JPO:  During Cooper’s preliminary hearing, the sheriff’s office destroyed the bloody coveralls.  The sheriff’s office claimed it never conducted any tests of the coveralls and admitted it never sent homicide detectives around to interview the woman who had turned them in.

The sheriff’s office also destroyed a bloody blue T-shirt discarded not far from the bar. Coupled with a tan T-shirt found the next day near the bar, the two bloody T-shirts were strong proof that at least two assailants had murdered the Ryens and Chris Hughes.  Testing of the tan T-shirt showed the blood on it matched the blood profile of Doug Ryen and no one else.

PR:  You also said that evidence was planted?

JPO:  Years later, in 2002, as Cooper was attempting to prove his innocence with DNA testing now afforded death row inmates by the California Legislature, his blood was now found on the tan T-shirt. To Cooper and his appeal attorneys, this showed rank tampering and planting of evidence, a belief that was greatly reinforced when it was revealed in 2004 that the vial containing Cooper’s blood, taken from him when he was arrested and kept all those years in the crime lab, was discovered now to contain the DNA of at least one other person.

A hatchet sheath and a bloody green button from a prison jacket were found at the hideout house a day after two detectives had searched the house and found nothing of evidentiary value.  Under oath one of the detectives denied looking in the bedroom but crime scene technicians lifted his fingerprints from the door of the closet where Cooper slept.  It would be established at Cooper’s trial that when Cooper escaped he was wearing a brown jacket, not a green one.

PR:  In 2004, Cooper came within hours of being executed before an extremely rare en banc ruling by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals stayed his execution and granted him a successive habeas corpus hearing in federal district court in San Diego. Can you explain more about this 2004 ruling?

JPO:  In particular, the Ninth Circuit ordered the district court to conduct DNA testing on the numerous blonde or light brown hairs found clutched in Jessica’s hand and other similar hairs deposited on other victims.

The Ninth also ordered EDTA testing to determine if Cooper’s blood had been planted on the tan T-shirt.  EDTA is an anti-clotting substance used in crime labs to preserve blood in vials, to prevent it from coagulating and breaking down. If tests conducted showed high levels of EDTA on the blood attributed to Cooper on the T-shirt, it would establish tampering.  If tampering were established, it would call into question all the forensic evidence the prosecution used to link Cooper to the crime scene.

It seemed that Cooper, after nineteen years of asserting his innocence from death row, would be vindicated.  At a minimum, the district court would have had to order a new trial or exonerate him outright.

Federal District Court Judge Marilyn Huff was not going to let that happen.  She had turned down both of Cooper’s previous habeas appeals, finding evidence of his guilt “overwhelming.”

PR:  How did Judge Marilyn Huff treat Cooper’s third habeas appeal?

JPO:  Over a period of a year, Judge Huff periodically held evidentiary hearings.  As she did, she methodically thwarted Cooper’s attorneys at every turn, refusing to allow Cooper’s experts to participate in the EDTA testing.  When the private lab the court hired to test Cooper’s blood on the T-shirt found elevated levels of EDTA, Judge Huff allowed the lab to retract its findings three weeks later on the grounds the lab itself was contaminated with EDTA during the testing.

Judge Huff dispensed with any further EDTA testing by ruling that the EDTA testing of the tan T-shirt conducted was not conclusive and that EDTA testing in general was an unproven science and of no value.  She was wrong on both counts:  both Cooper’s expert and the private lab found high levels on EDTA on the samples tested from the tan T-shirt and EDTA testing is a proven science.

The extreme bias against Cooper that Judge Huff displayed with impunity throughout the evidentiary hearings was at its most obvious when it came to the DNA testing of the hair clutched in various victims’ hands ordered by the en banc Ninth Circuit.  When a portion of those hairs had been tested in 2002, they were found to have no antigen roots, denoting that the hairs had fallen out rather than been yanked out during the assault.  Those hairs, the tests showed, were either from the victims themselves or were dog hairs.

There could be no purpose in retesting those hairs. However, over half of the hairs in the victims’ hands or adhered to their bodies had not been tested in 2002 and may well have contained antigen roots.    If the mitochondrial testing of those hairs resulted in a DNA that excluded all the victims and Cooper, there would be proof positive that someone other than Cooper was a perpetrator.  Judge Huff, incredibly, ordered testing only of the already tested hairs.

PR:  Did anything new come out at this point?

JPO:  During the evidentiary hearings, Cooper’s lawyers inadvertently learned for the first time about the bloody blue T-shirt found not far from the bar.  How could Judge Huff get around the implications of a bloody blue and a bloody tan T-shirt found one day apart near the bar?

In addition, the prosecution’s not disclosing the blue T-shirt to the defense was a major Brady violation that was so exculpatory to Cooper on its own that it mandated a new trial.

Judge Huff’s way around this inconvenient hurdle was to find that the blue T-shirt was in reality the tan T-shirt, even though the blue shirt was found the day before the tan shirt in a different location from the bar and the woman who found the bloody blue shirt testified at the hearing that the shirt she found was blue.

Judge Huff’s handling of Cooper’s habeas proceedings led Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge William Fletcher to write, “There’s no way to say this politely. The district court failed to provide Cooper a fair hearing and flouted our direction to perform the two tests.”

PR:  Judge Fletcher also made a strong statement about Cooper’s case, as a guest speaker at Gonzaga University School of Law on April 12, 2010.

JPO:  Yes, Judge Fletcher delivered a lecture on the subject of the death penalty, holding that the problems with the administration of it are widespread and endemic rather than merely regional or local.

To illustrate he cited the Kevin Cooper case, stating “The case I am about to describe is horrible in many ways.  The murders were horrible.  Kevin Cooper, the man now sitting on death row, may well be – and in my view probably is – innocent.  And he is on death row because the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department framed him.”

Judge Fletcher, a Rhodes Scholar who roomed with Bill Clinton at Oxford University, said what happened in the Cooper case “is a familiar story.  It is by no means the usual story.  But it happens often enough to be familiar.  The police are under heavy pressure to solve a high profile crime.  They know, or think they know, who did the crime.  And they plant evidence to help their case along.”

PR:  A closing thought?

JPO:  Kevin Cooper has now spent half of his life on death row for a crime he had nothing to do with.  He is, in a word, a scapegoat.

It’s best not to think about politics up there. Last time I went up, there were three black vultures preening on the serpent’s head not ten feet from where I sat. They were so quiet, it took minutes before I saw them looking at me. Makes a strong impression when you’re all alone up there.

What a great way to manifest yourself, if you’re the devil, as black vultures. Carrion birds won’t hurt you. They only eat what’s dead, like cast-off faith and trust and admiration. Nice touch, being triune, too, as father, son and who knows what, in the jokey way the devil has of parodying sacred absurdities.

This was no portentous sermon. The big one hissed and the little one screeched a bit. Demonic possession is great – no voices or intrusive thoughts, you just enjoy a brainstorm and take credit.

So, sitting there like Goodman Brown, when he calms down and thinks it through. Everybody comes here. What could all these humans have in common that’s so awful? What’s this unspeakable secret that everyone keeps?  I had one of those inspirations of horrid blasphemy: it’s rights and rule of law, universal to mankind yet utterly secret. Here in America, public life must never be defiled by universal law and rights. Law and rights show our patriotic exploits through the victims’ eyes. That takes our sacred things and makes them dirty, with all the power of the old oath, Bloody Mary.

The election was everywhere below, an inescapable miasma. It’s said to be important in America. It’s called democracy, the thing that makes us good, and it’s imaginary, just like god. How to desecrate that sacred thing? Just stop pretending. Hold our pointless choices to the standards of the outside world, with rights and rule of law. Obtrude the secrets that Americans aren’t allowed to know.

Let the sacrilege begin. To the candidates let’s apply the minimal standards of the civilized world. They fail spectacularly, bloviating in swinish contempt for the commitments America has made supreme in its own law. Most ordinary voters are less ignorant of presidential duties and commitments. Who cares which candidate is better, if none of them make the cut?

And what about the man who’s now doing the job, and wants to keep it? Job evaluation means a checklist, and none of this nonsense about character and greatness, only work rules. Does the incumbent president measure up? But perhaps it demeans the dignity of office to treat him like other any working stiff. Let’s hope so.

What happens when we vet a presidential candidate in the commonest, most fundamental ways? First, we make sure he’s not a criminal. Before they would let me play angel of mercy in Africa they took my fingerprints, to be sure that I was not the sort of person that would molest needy children or rape powerless women. Fair enough. We’ll do a background check on the incumbent. We’ll set the bar as low as we can, and look only at peremptory norms. Peremptory norms are the bedrock expectations of the civilized world, the law of intolerable, inexcusable transgressions.

Let’s begin our background check with the Convention Against Torture (CAT), supreme law of the land under Article VI of the Constitution, signed by President Reagan and ratified October 27, 1990. CAT Article 12 requires:

Each State Party shall ensure that its competent authorities proceed to a prompt and impartial investigation, wherever there is reasonable ground to believe that an act of torture has been committed in any territory under its jurisdiction.

On January 11, 2009, President Obama said, “We need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.” As a matter of policy, the incumbent president does not want his subordinates to “spend all their time looking over their shoulders and lawyering.” Breaking Article 12 makes Obama Torturer in Chief.

Now in America we’re encouraged to pound our chests and cheer torture of helpless captives as a badge of patriotic courage. In our generally censorious culture, we’ve been inoculated with ambivalence to view torturers as athletes with chalk in their cleats, heroically toeing the line as they pitch out of bounds. You don’t see the sort of hysteria that attaches to, say, sex offenses, where some simpleton pees out of doors or gets a crush, and he’s judicially branded for life, hounded from place to place by mobs of frantic parents. Makes you wonder what it would take to make outrage trump cruelty. Which atavistic impulse would prevail if the President of the United States were presiding over sexual torture?

Well, we’re going to find out. It seems that something adverse has turned up in the incumbent’s background check.   A compromising photo.

Rape. We don’t tolerate that. That’s why we had to bomb Serbia and Libya. Under Article 1 of the Torture Convention, official acquiescence to torture is an essential element of the crime. Executive acquiescence goes beyond obstruction of justice: it makes the president an outlaw everywhere, subject to universal-jurisdiction law with no statute of limitations. President Obama is Rapist in Chief, ensuring impunity for the rank-and-file of torture, who hold the captive women down and squeeze their breasts and fuck them. And not only women but boys.  President Obama oversees the gingerly don’t-ask-don’t-tell for soldiers whose orientation is to anal rape.

In extenuation it is said that President Obama is afraid of his subordinates. Dean Christopher Edley of U.C. Berkeley Law School recounted a meeting that ruled out prosecution for fear of a revolt by the government’s torture bureaus.

However, that cuts no ice under Torture Convention Article 2, paragraph 2:

No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.

The US government wished this clause away in its 2006 report to the UN Committee against Torture – all’s fair in war, America maintained – but the Committee affirmed the consensus of the world that nothing can justify torture.

The Committee pointedly cited sexual humiliation as a breach of US obligations under the CAT. The world knows what our government did. The world has seen the photographic fact of that woman bent over for rape. The world has seen the photographic fact of a naked shackled captive with an object thrust up his anus.

The Committee wrote:

The State party should ensure, in accordance with the Convention, that mechanisms to obtain full redress, compensation and rehabilitation are accessible to all victims of acts of torture or abuse, including sexual violence, perpetrated by its officials.

The Committee remarked that the US is hiding from the Special Rapporteur on Torture. Our state has kept the Special Rapporteur at bay, but the Committee against Torture was not so easy to escape – we agreed to its oversight in signing the Convention Against Torture. The international experts confronted the United States with the chapter and verse of its obligations, in stark contrast with its conduct. Merely reading our commitments aloud to us paints a mortifying picture of the United States as a barbarous throwback state.

The United States of America is an enclave where jus cogens, the essential rudiment of civilization, does not apply. The United States signed the CAT with reservations that unlawfully undermine its purpose, and with meaningless declarations meant to hedge its restrictions on the state. Americans lack federal torture statutes that afford us the protections of the Convention. Our laws hem torture round with qualifiers that make much torment officially OK. We don’t enforce the laws on torture when we delegate it to servile satellite states or secret dungeons. We illegally exempt our high officials from the law.

The better to torture its victims in peace, the United States government refused to sign the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance – but the Committee pointed out that every prisoner we disappeared is a per se breach of the Torture Convention.

In breach of Article 10, America ensures that its troops and police wallow in brutish ignorance of the universal law on torture. In defiance of Article 14, America denies redress to torture victims: our state refuses torture victims’ recourse to the Committee against Torture, and drowns their appeals in bureaucratic mire at home.

America institutionalizes torture in Supermax isolation. For the public at large, in insouciant contempt of the historic horrors of electrical torture – the archetypal symbol of totalitarian crime – our state issues instruments of electrical torture to civilian police nationwide, who use them with impunity for punishment and restraint.

The US government has not yet released its fifth Periodic Report to the United Nations Committee Against Torture, due November 19, 2011. It promises lively controversy on the campaign trail as the US reports to the Committee, answers its questions, and publishes the conclusions of the independent international experts.¹ Or so one would think. Surely voters will be anxious to learn if their most urgent concern has been addressed: at the outset of the Obama administration, the question voted highest on change.gov was,

Will you appoint a special prosecutor ideally Patrick Fitzgerald to independently investigate the greatest crimes of the Bush administration, including torture and warrantless wiretapping.

Clearly the answer is no. We shall see if the electorate takes no for an answer.

President Obama is self-evidently in violation of Torture Convention Article 12. But at least he stopped the torture, right?

Ask Gulet Mohamed,  tortured in Kuwait on President Obama’s watch, with US officials on the spot to take away his rights, under threat of worse to come.

It’s only getting worse. With the knowledge and approval of the President’s federal security bureaucracy, local police departments are institutionalizing Israeli techniques for CAT-illegal torture and degradation with a nationwide program of “law enforcement education.”  The non-violent dissenters of the occupy movement have already been subjected to the signature abuses of Zionist repression: nerve damage from hours in tight restraints; the arbitrary violence of Shamir’s infamous “force, might, beatings;” use of tear gas canisters as lethal projectiles.

All right, then. Inarguably, President Obama is a criminal: hostis humani generis, enemy of all mankind. But perhaps we ought to look at the whole person. Maybe he behaves a little better with respect to aggression. After all, aggression is the highest of all high crimes, and a hanging offense, for the Nazis we caught – America hallowed the principle at Nuremberg. As UN General Assembly Resolution 3314 (XXIX) stated:

No consideration of whatever nature, whether political, economic, military or otherwise, may serve as a justification for aggression. A war of aggression is a crime against international peace.

Oh dear, tsk, tsk. Our little background check turns up a problem here too. President Obama waged illegal war in Afghanistan and Iraq. His continuing war in Afghanistan was not authorized by the relevant UNSC Resolution, 1368 (2001). Use of force in this case breaches Articles 46, 48 and 51 of the United Nations Charter, supreme law of the land under Article VI of the Constitution. The now-covert war he commands in Iraq similarly flouts UNSC Resolution 1441, which authorized no use of force. The UN Secretary General termed our war on Iraq illegal.

The wars Obama started are no better. US use of force in Yemen and Somalia is undertaken without UN supervision, in direct breach of UN Charter Chapter VII. Pakistan publicly denounced the US for a ‘deliberate act of aggression’ when President Obama commanded an armed attack on defense forces inside Pakistan.

In Libya, President Obama overstepped the objectives of UNSCR 1973 (2011). The objectives are crucial because use of force is illegal when not under UN supervision. Disregarding the scope of the no-fly zone, President Obama destroyed civilian infrastructure and defensive emplacements in Sirte and elsewhere in support of one combatant faction, interfering with national self-determination in breach of UN Charter Article 2.4. In using, force President Obama aborted African Union efforts at pacific settlement of disputes, required by the supreme law of our land: the Kellogg-Briand Pact and UN Charter Chapter VI.

Illegal use of force against Iran will be laid to President Obama’s account as well. His common plan or conspiracy to commit crimes against peace, the precedent of Count 1 at Nuremberg, is deniable for now, plausibly or not, but evident in partial execution, and complete.

The last time the United States went to war with Iran, in the largest naval battle since World War II, our leaders ran afoul of the law. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) called the US attack disproportionate and unjustified by necessity. We ran to the UN and cried self-defense, but the ICJ rejected that claim.  Our first war on Iran has been ruled an act of aggression. Our new war, with its unsolved murders and mysterious explosions, raises sticky issues in the evolving doctrine of state responsibility for intentionally wrongful acts. President Obama has put the poisoned chalice to his lips. We’ll see if he drinks.

So Obama’s an aggressor too. Well, perhaps he keeps his nose clean once he gets into an illegal war. Let’s apply humanitarian law. While America has run from the accountability of the Rome Statute, its provisions merely institutionalize universal-jurisdiction humanitarian law. So President Obama may get off scot-free on Rome Statute Article 8.2.c.iv, for the extra-judicial execution of Osama bin Laden when rendered hors de combat by detention. But he’s still on the hook for the equivalent crime under universal jurisdiction. The prohibitions come from the Geneva Conventions and the Hague Convention, to which our state is party. In fact, the Hague Convention relaxed American law a bit, as murder of prisoners was a capital offense under Military Order 100. In the case at hand the evidence is clear – we took that woozy mugshot of the captured invalid Osama right before we shot him. Then there’s Rome Statute Article 8.2.a.i, which criminalizes the willful killing of civilians Abdul-Rahman al-Awlaki, along with 90 per cent of our Pakistani drone-war casualties.

Crime goes to the applicant’s character, you might say. With a position of trust in a criminal state, crime is a purely notional embarrassment, and easy to suppress, in America’s cult of personality – but soon legal exposure may be more than an annoyance for elder statesmen craving society’s esteem. Late last year, in ICC-02/05-01/09, the pre-trial chamber of the International Criminal Court denied immunity to heads of state.  The decision leaves plenty of wiggle room for executive lips and shysters like Gonzales and Koh, but it reflects the world’s resolve to end impunity.

For peaceful little countries, it’s great sport to shoo our criminal elder statesmen with the law. Mischievous Swiss lawmaker Dominique Baettig chased George Bush away with public recognition of torture charges. Fortunately for our diminutive warlord, planned protests afforded a face-saving security pretext for his flight from justice.  Lawyers Against the War gave it a whirl in Canada.  Naturally the charges sank without a ripple in America’s servile snowbound hinterlands, but the meticulously documented charges promise lots more fun. They’ll throw the same book at ex-president Obama. CAT Article 12 makes it his crime, too.

When his turn comes, the charges are likely to be lurid. President Obama doesn’t merely fail to investigate torture, he has his diplomats obstruct independent efforts to redress it. When Spanish Judge Baltazar Garzon took up the case of one of Spain’s own torture victims, as the law requires, the US government “fought tooth and nail” to obstruct Garzon’s investigations. To keep official torturers out of reach of the law, the Obama administration disappears charges as well as human beings, perverting justice at home and abroad.

Torturer, aggressor, war criminal. Clearly, rule of law is not Obama’s strong suit. But, as legal wizard Johnny Cochran said, let’s not rush to judgment. What has he done for me lately? That is how we’re taught to think.

Let’s stick with what we are entitled to demand, that the candidate honor the commitments and obligations essential to a sovereign state: our universal human rights. Take minimal civil and political rights, as guaranteed by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (CCPR), supreme law of the land.

Patriotic brainwashing keeps that legal fact repressed deep in Americans’ subconscious. No one in America holds presidential aspirants to the standards of the civilized world. What does sometimes happen is wistful evocation of a less demanding standard, our quaint old long-gone Bill of Rights.

Still it’s easy to pile up annals of despotic overreach. Conor Friedersdorf reels off 14 outrages. Collectively they make a mockery of CCPR Articles 9, 6, 17, 19, 12, 14, 10, and 16. There are many hapless victims beyond Friedersdorf’s myopic view – Gulf States inhabitants, Occupy dissidents, debtors, and people of color – and they might add Articles 1, 7, 11, and 21 to the civil and political rights that have gone through President Obama’s shredder.

Partisan dead-enders maintain that despite the President’s high crimes and overt contempt for civil and political rights, the Democratic alternative offers certain social and material advantages. At this point it would be a waste of time to take the pathetic scraps on offer and systematically compare them to the minimal requirements of the Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (CESCR).  That test reveals the piteous and terrible failure of a puffed-up corporate puppet. He shrinks shyly from state duties to respect core rights, and fails utterly to protect our human rights from corporate depredations. But in search of some indicative examples, let’s measure the pleadings of a random Democratic loyalist against the relevant human rights standards.

Achievement: “Obama has overhauled the food safety system.”

Well, that is certainly worth doing. Article 11 of the Convention on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights states:

The States Parties to the present Covenant, recognizing the fundamental right of everyone to be free from hunger, shall take, individually and through international co-operation, the measures, including specific programmes, which are needed:

(a) To improve methods of production, conservation and distribution of food by making full use of technical and scientific knowledge, by disseminating knowledge of the principles of nutrition and by developing or reforming agrarian systems in such a way as to achieve the most efficient development and utilization of natural resources.

Our ruling class won’t ratify that covenant, so technically, the President is not on the hook for his gross derelictions: lip service to government duties respecting freedom from hunger, and servile negligence that allows corporate interests to destroy fisheries and foodstocks. With America’s Gulf Coast fisheries poisoned by corporate malfeasance, the FDA underestimates the toxicity of Gulf Coast shrimp by four orders of magnitude.  The US government permits Monsanto to impose the “substantial equivalence” doctrine, muzzling scientific inquiry into food safety. To test the food that patent monopolists force-feed us, Americans have to depend on Chinese research. And in fact, the Chinese have found an insidious taint. The Obama administration is colluding with pesticide producers to forestall independent pesticide research. As the censorship continues, commercial interests exterminate bees and the plants that they pollinate worldwide.

Achievement:  “Advanced women’s rights in the work place. Ended Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell in our military. Stopped defending DOMA in court. Passed the Hate Crimes bill. Appointed two pro-choice women to the Supreme Court.”

More insulting scraps of rights. At the outset of his term the president had the majority to sign and ratify the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), codifying comprehensive rights and impelling them with an international framework of independent review. He did not. The president shares the US Government’s provincial compulsion to reinvent all wheels and agonize over bad imitations of the world-standard protections accepted everywhere else. It’s more than stubborn ignorance – it’s fear of any world consensus that our rulers can’t control.

“Expanded access to medical care and provided subsidies for people who can’t afford it. Expanded the Children’s Health Insurance Program. Fixed the preexisting conditions travesty [and rescissions] in health insurance.”

Let’s look at what our president’s job is, if he claims to head a sovereign state: CESCR Article 12:

1. The States Parties to the present Covenant recognize the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health.

2. The steps to be taken by the States Parties to the present Covenant to achieve the full realization of this right shall include those necessary for:

(a) The provision for the reduction of the stillbirth-rate and of infant mortality and for the healthy development of the child;

(b) The improvement of all aspects of environmental and industrial hygiene;

(c) The prevention, treatment and control of epidemic, endemic, occupational and other diseases;

(d) The creation of conditions which would assure to all medical service and medical attention in the event of sickness.

The President’s medical tinkering seems to be a feckless stab at paragraph 2(d). In the event, the President undermined the proven approach of monopsony health-care procurement and delivered a captive market to predatory corporate middlemen. Here again, we have lip service to government duties and utter failure to protect.

Achievement: “Invested in clean energy. Overhauled the credit card industry, making it much more consumer-friendly. While Dodd-Frank bill was weak in many respects, it was still an extremely worthwhile start at re-regulating the financial sector.  He created a Elizabeth Warren’s dream agency: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He’s done a lot for veterans. He got help for people whose health was injured during the clean-up after the 9/11 attacks.”

A motley ragbag that falls apart under cursory examination. Not a hint of the duties of the state. You can sell rubbish like this with a straight face if you can keep Americans ignorant of world standards. Civil law is historically more cognizant of state duties, and most other nations are attuned to evolving international norms, but Americans are educated as provincials. In terms of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the state has failed if you don’t know your rights. But to fanatical theocrat Gary North and his holy electoral vanguard, protecting humans from the overreaching powers of states is “giving equal time in society to the devil.” Americans’ backward ignorance is actually sacred.

What’s more, all that financial boasting invites review in light of the Convention Against Corruption (CAC), supreme law of the land.  CAC Articles 18 and 19 address trading in influence and abuse of functions. Our government has told international reviewers that existing federal law prohibits abuse of function and trading in influence. Our government admits that it has not reviewed the effectiveness of that law. So the blatant and ubiquitous sleaze of public life turns out to be a crime! But corruption is a vital institution here. The graft of contending lobbyists, that’s our sole remaining check and balance. It is all that’s left of our state. So when the sordid story of bank reform is told, President Obama may not even be able to say, with the hapless villain Richard Nixon, “I am not a crook.”

And they want me to go to the polls and vote for this. They actually expect my consent-of-the-governed seal of approval for a criminal despot who can’t even make the trains run on time, and for the failed state that horked him up. Let his party die off like the Whigs. No, I want what I’ve got coming: rights and rule of law. No party gives me that. Saying so desecrates everything that’s sacred to this purulent police state. It’s blasphemy to hold the state to any standards. That’s how you learn that every word they tell you is a filthy lie. It is Satan’s irresistible lure : Now are ye undeceived.

Come, devil, for to thee is this world given. Hail the New World Order. Blasphemy is powerful. Satan’s old and wise. He knows depraved institutions always have a sanctifying rite. Defile it – nothing happens, but the institution’s power is gone. The pedophile church has a solemn rite: you must eat cheap pulpy bread and make believe it’s flesh. The crucial rite of the United States is the election, a travesty of futile choice. You must make believe you’re choosing what you want. To profane it breaks the brittle spell. Stop taking the host, and the priests can’t rape your child. Stop casting your vote, and the troops can’t rape that terrified woman that they’re gripping by the hair.

1. N.B. Broken link: sometime after January 20, State took down this handy listing of recent torture and human rights reviews.

The purpose of the draconian 1954 Prevention of Infiltration Law was to lock up any Palestinian who managed to slip past the snipers guarding the new state’s borders. Israel believed only savage punishment and deterrence could ensure it maintained the overwhelming Jewish majority it had recently created through a campaign of ethnic cleansing.

Fast-forward six decades and Israel is relying on the infiltration law again, this time to prevent a supposedly new threat to its existence: the arrival each year of several thousand desperate African asylum seekers.

As it did with the Palestinians many years ago, Israel has criminalised these new refugees — in their case, for fleeing persecution, war or economic collapse. Whole families can now be locked up, without a trial, for three years while a deportation order is sought and enforced, and Israelis who offer them assistance risk jail sentences of up to 15 years.

Israel’s intention is apparently to put as many of these refugees behind bars as possible, and dissuade others from following in their footsteps.

To cope, officials have approved the building of an enormous detention camp, operated by Israel’s prison service, to contain 10,000 of these unwelcome arrivals. That will make it the largest holding facility of its kind in the world — according to Amnesty International, it will be three times bigger than the next largest, in the much more populous, and divine retribution-loving, US state of Texas.

Israeli critics of the law fear their country is failing in its moral duty to help those fleeing persecution, thereby betraying the Jewish people’s own experiences of suffering and oppression. But the Israeli government and the large majority of legislators who backed the law — like their predecessors in the 1950s — have drawn a very different conclusion from history.

The new infiltration law is the latest in a set of policies fortifying Israel’s status as the world’s first “bunker state” — and one designed to be as ethnically pure as possible. The concept was expressed most famously by an earlier prime minister, Ehud Barak, now the defence minister, who called Israel “a villa in the jungle”, relegating the country’s neighbours to the status of wild animals.

Barak and his successors have been turning this metaphor into a physical reality, slowly sealing off their state from the rest of the region at astronomical cost, much of it subsidised by US taxpayers. Their ultimate goal is to make Israel so impervious to outside influence that no concessions for peace, such as agreeing to a Palestinian state, need ever be made with the “beasts” around them.

The most tangible expression of this mentality has been a frenzy of wall-building. The best-known are those erected around the Palestinian territories: first Gaza, then the areas of the West Bank Israel is not intending to annex – or, at least, not yet.

The northern border is already one of the most heavily militarised in the world — as Lebanese and Syrian protesters found to great cost last summer when dozens were shot dead and wounded as they approached or stormed the fences there. And Israel has a proposal in the drawer for another wall along the border with Jordan, much of which is already mined.

The only remaining border, the 260km one with Egypt, is currently being closed with another gargantuan wall. The plans were agreed before last year’s Arab revolutions but have gained fresh impetus with the overthrow of Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak.

Israel is not only well advanced on the walls of the bunker; it is also working round the clock on the roof. It has three missile-defence systems in various stages of development, including the revealingly named “Iron Dome”, as well as US Patriot batteries stationed on its soil. The interception systems are supposed to neutralise any combination of short and long-range missile attacks Israel’s neighbours might launch.

But there is a flaw in the design of this shelter, one that is apparent even to its architects. Israel is sealing itself in with some of the very “animals” the villa is supposed to exclude: not only the African refugees, but also 1.5 million “Israeli Arabs”, descendants of the small number of Palestinians who avoided expulsion in 1948.

This has been the chief motive for the steady stream of anti-democratic measures by the government and parliament that is rapidly turning into a torrent. It is also the reason for the Israeli leadership’s new-found demand that the Palestinians recognise Israel’s Jewishness; its obsessions with loyalty; and the growing appeal of population exchange schemes.

In the face of the legislative assault, Israel’s Supreme Court has grown ever more complicit. Last week, it sullied its reputation by upholding a law that tears apart families by denying tens of thousands of Palestinians with Israeli citizenship the right to live with their Palestinian spouse in Israel — “ethnic cleansing” by other means, as leading Israeli commentator Gideon Levy noted.

Back in the early 1950s, the Israeli army shot dead thousands of unarmed Palestinians as they tried to reclaim property that had been stolen from them. These many years later, Israel appears no less determined to keep non-Jews out of its precious villa.

The bunker state is almost finished, and with it the dream of Israel’s founders is about to be realised.

In her book, Nelson writes that “the Party’s focus on health care was both practical and ideological.” On a practical level, the BPP provided free community health care services, including preventative education. Simultaneously, the BPP railed against the medical-industrial complex, declaring that health care was “a right and not a privilege.” Ronald “Doc” Satchel, the minister of health for the Chicago BPP, wrote in the BPP newspaper that “the medical profession within this capitalist society…is composed generally of people working for their own benefit and advancement rather than the humane aspects of medical care.” A newsletter published by the Southern California chapter argued that “poor people in general and black people in particular are not given the best care available. Our people are treated like animals, experimented on and made to wait long hours in waiting rooms.”

By 1970, People’s Free Medical Clinics had become a requirement for every BPP chapter. In 1972, the BPP revised point six of the founding ten-point-platform, adding a demand for “completely free healthcare for all black and oppressed people…We believe that the government must provide, free of charge, for the people, health facilities which will not only treat our illnesses, most of which have come about as a result of our oppression, but which will also develop preventative medical programs to guarantee our future survival. We believe that mass health education and research programs must be developed to give Black and oppressed people access to advanced scientific and medical information, so we may provide ourselves with proper medical attention and care.”

While citing Martin Luther King’s 1966 declaration that “of all forms of inequality, injustice in healthcare is the most shocking and inhumane,” one chapter provides an important historical context for the BPP’s health activism by detailing what Nelson calls “the long medical civil rights movement,” that began long before the BPP. “Mobilized in response to the distinctly hazardous risks posed by segregated medical facilities, professions, societies, and schools; deficient or nonexistent healthcare services; medical maltreatment; and scientific racism, activism challenges to medical discrimination have been an important focal point for African American protest efforts and organizations. The Panthers were heirs to health activism that directly reflected tactics drawn from this tradition,” writes Nelson.

Nelson says the central focus of her scholarly work is on “the intersections of science, technology, medicine and inequality.” She has co-edited Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life (2001) and Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History (scheduled to be released in March, 2012). To learn more, please visit Alondra’s web site.)

Angola 3 News: In our recent interview with Billy X Jennings from It’s About Time BPP, one theme explored was how, with rare exception, the mainstream media has misrepresented the BPP. However, it seems that even the radical and anti-capitalist media has generally underreported the health activism that is the focus if your book. How did the BPP’s health activism relate to their better-known stances against white supremacy, capitalism, and police violence?

Alondra Nelson: Yes, it’s true. The Black Panthers’ health activism has been under-reported across the ideological spectrum. Their critics obviously did not want to cast them in a positive light. And, as your question suggests, even the Party’s supporters said little about this important aspect of the BPP’s work. I think it’s plausible to say that many on the Right and some of us on the Left — in very different ways and for completely opposite reasons — were captivated by a vision of the Party that did not include its health politics. Depictions of African Americans working in their neighborhoods, wearing white medical coats, was unspectacular compared to images of Black radicals wearing leather jackets and carrying guns.

It is ironic that our collective memory of the Panthers remains so incomplete because their health activism — from their political writing about medical issues in The Black Panther newspaper to their practice of DIY healthcare — exemplified the anti-racist, anti-capitalist stance for which they are known. In fact, the reality of health inequality brought the BPP’s political perspective into sharper relief because it offered stark and specific examples of how economic and racial oppression literally damaged bodies, families and communities.

As you know, the BPP was originally the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, a name that reflected that protecting communities from police brutality was a primary motivation for the group’s founding. The BPP exposed the misuse of power whether it was at the hands of police officers or physicians. So, it’s also useful to think of the Panthers as being engaged in medical self-defense.

In Los Angeles, Party members Ericka Huggins and Elaine Brown, nursing professor Marie Branch, Dr. Terry Kupers, and others established that chapter’s People’s Free Medical Clinic. But, like all of the BPP’s health activism, this work extended beyond the clinic, including in this case, confronting police brutality. (Branch shared meeting notes with me from the 1970s from her personal archive where the formation of BPP health programs and prisoners’ protection from medical discrimination were seamlessly discussed). The LA Panthers advocated for, and provided health care for, incarcerated persons; some of these men and women needed medical attention because they had been abused while in police custody.

A3N: How does the story of the BPP’s health activism, as presented in your book, contribute to and challenge the traditional presentations of the BPP by both the mainstream and alternative media?

AN: Body and Soul offers an account of the BPP that moves away from the narrow confines of the so-called “culture wars,” in which the Party can only ever be a positive force or a negative element. Paying attention to the Party’s health activism calls into question the inaccurate stereotype of the activists as aimless thugs.

We also gain a different perspective on things we thought we already knew about the BPP; like the fact that the Panthers were avid followers of Fanon, Che and Mao, whose writings were required reading for all members. Through the prism of health, one can see very clearly the influence of Fanon’s dissection of colonial medicine in Algeria on the Panthers’ understanding of medical discrimination in the U.S. We can take seriously the fact that Fanon and Che were physicians as well as political thinkers. We can appreciate that Mao, who established the “barefoot doctors” lay health worker program, made available to the Party not only broad revolutionary principles, but also specific ideas about health care as political practice.

A3N: What do you think were the most successful tactics employed by the BPP as part of its health activism? Strategically speaking, what lessons from the BPP’s health activism do you think are most applicable for today’s activists to learn from?

AN: In addition to setting up their own clinics, they used legal approaches not dissimilar from the NAACP to voice their opposition to problematic biomedical research. The Party leadership realized early on that “policing the police” would not be the only method they used in their effort to topple racism and capitalism. The Panthers were pretty flexible tacticians.

One of the lessons that the BPP offers today’s activists is that they should be more loyal to the desired outcome than to the tactic. The sit-in came to be associated with the southern civil rights movement just as the mic check is now emblematic of the Occupy movement. But these groups also used other tactics: marching, occupying, sermons, etc. Social movements are dynamic phenomena; circumstances are constantly changing. So too should tactics.

One of the BPP’s more fascinating tactics was what I call, after sociologist Lily Hoffman, the “politics of knowledge.” Working in this vein, the Panthers engaged and reinterpreted scientific ideas about race and disease. They reinterpreted scientific theories about the causes of sickle cell anemia, for example, by placing the prevalence of the disease in the context of the history of the transatlantic slave trade, the medical-industrial complex and contemporary racism.

The Panthers’ use of this tactic — the politics of knowledge — should remind today’s activists that “framing” matters. It is important to be able to translate political arguments — health-related ones and other ones — into language, into stories, really, that resonate with the broader public. The Party could be expert at this.

The Nixon administration and mainstream philanthropies would ultimately co-opt the issue of sickle cell anemia. But the BPP played a key role in raising awareness about the disease and in situating it in a powerful political language that could mobilize communities.

A3N: Along with chapters focusing on the BPP’s free medical clinics and the campaign to educate the Black community about, and test for, Sickle Cell Anemia, another chapter focuses on the BPP’s involvement with a diverse coalition that successfully organized against the formation of the Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence at UCLA in 1973. You write that BPP felt that the Center’s “biologization of violence” line of research would ultimately “craft a narrative of Black and Latino violent pathology” that would serve to “make already marginalized populations more vulnerable to medicine as a tool of social control,” and “effect the further criminalization of social groups—black males, the incarcerated—and in turn justify calls for increased surveillance and social control.”

While writing that the defeat of the Center was a “notable triumph,” you note further that it “was somewhat of a Pyrrhic victory for Newton and his allies, as blocking resources to the center as an entity would not prevent individual researchers from pursuing other sources of support for their investigations.” With this in mind, how has biologization of violence research progressed since the 1970s? How much influence has it had on public policy?

AN: Attempts to attribute the causes of violence to biology (and closely related to this, criminality) are a very old story. In the late 19th century, the influential Italian criminologist, Lombroso, claimed that new methods (e.g., phrenology) and theories (e.g., social Darwinism) showed that the tendency toward criminal behavior was inherited.

More than one hundred years later, similar ideas persist. In the 1990s, during the first Bush presidency, Louis Sullivan, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, set-up a “violence initiative” to explore the biological models of social unrest in urban settings. Your readers may recall that around the same time another Bush official, referencing studies on violence among non-human primates, said that disproportionately black and brown “inner cities” were like “jungles.” (The initiative and controversial commentary around it would recall the heated debate the Panthers were engaged in over plans to form a “violence center” at UCLA in the 1970s that may have had an especially harmful impact on black and Latino youth and men).

Recently behavioral researchers have aimed to link the presence of what has been called the “warrior gene” to violent, criminal behavior. At a time when we are learning even more about the complexities of genetic inheritance, about the epigenome and the systems biology, it simply does not make sense that one single genetic marker could have such a dramatic, determinative effect.

A3N: What role has biologization of violence research played in justifying the mass incarceration explosion that began in the 1970s, increasing the prison population from 300,000 to 2.4 million today, giving the US the highest incarceration rate and the largest total prisoner population in the world?

AN: To the extent that the longstanding efforts that I have just described have kept in circulation the fallacy that there is a definitive link between human biology and violence, theses ideas have indeed served as a justification for the expansion of the carceral system.

This is where the policy implications of the biologization of violence come to the fore: If violence is “in your genes” or “in your blood,” then one can justify policies that lock people away because these people are “lost causes.”

And, in turn, the idea that there is a innate predisposition to violence contributes to the decline of support for rehabilitation and reparative justice programs.

A3N: Since the 1970s, has the US come any closer to realizing the BPP’s public health goals? If BPP co-founder Huey P Newton were alive today, what do you think he would say about President Obama’s “Affordable Care Act?”

AN: The revised ten-point platform was prescient in capturing one side of the recent debates about widening health inequality in the U.S. and what to do about it. If I had to venture a guess, I would say that Newton and the Party would have appreciated the historic nature of what President Obama accomplished — a feat that many administrations before his had variously tried to accomplish and failed to do. Perhaps Newton would have even observed that the Affordable Care Act is a very small step in the right direction.

However, some journalists and pundits have noted the similarity between President Obama’s historic Affordable Care Act and the national insurance plan that former President Nixon backed unsuccessfully. Given the animus between the Party and Nixon, and the way this administration and its agents worked to destroy the BPP, it is hard to imagine that Newton would have been in strong support of recent healthcare reform legislation. There would have certainly been opposition to the fact that President Obama’s plan is a boon for insurance companies because the Panthers demanded, “healthcare for the people, not for profit.”

The old adage: “if you’re a hammer, everything you see is a nail” never had a clearer application than as it applies to the conduct of America’s “finest.” The initial police response to non-violent conduct by activists in the Civil Rights Movement was the same – batons, attack dogs, and brutality. It was not until those responses proved to be unsuccessful, even counter-productive, that the segregationist South modified its response.

Rather than silencing dissent, police violence and abuse frequently provides the very spark that a docile, unfocused movement needs to grow and develop consciousness. It is not that police officers are inherently cruel and violent (although there are many who are drawn to that profession as a vehicle for carrying out such fantasies), rather it is the fact that police are never taught alternatives to violence as methods of keeping the peace. In fact, many police departments employ combat soldiers, fresh from their apprenticeship in war zones, to “serve and protect” just as they learned how to do it in Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and the other areas where Americans ply our trade.

Every parent in the country knows that violence and repression are the worst teachers in an individual’s arsenal. While many parents believe it is occasionally acceptable to spank a naughty child in order to teach it a lesson, none with an ounce of intelligence and sanity, would administer violent beatings on a regular basis. Indeed, if a parent were to inflict constant physical abuse upon a child, he would be immediately relieved of his or her parental responsibilities.

So why is it that when police departments, foreign mercenaries, Pentagon bureaucrats and others involved in America’s repressive bureaucracies resort to violence as their first and only method of mass control, the society sits idly by, and accepts the conduct as inevitable?

One would expect that the police and prosecuting agencies of the country would be the first to develop alternative, nurturing solutions to social challenges. Yet the opposite is true. District Attorneys are the first to cry foul if non-violent inmates are to be released from outrageously long prison sentences. Police spend half of their time warning the public about how dangerous living in America can be, and the other half of the time beating on people and sending them to prison.

This country imprisons a greater percent of its population than any “democratic” country on earth — 5 times more of our population than any country in Europe.

That the politics of fear and threats of violence are perpetuated by police and military agencies that profit from repression should come as no surprise. That the American people would condone these lies by tolerating police brutality in our communities, is simply shocking. One would expect that the American public would be the first to intervene in situations of unwarranted violence and abuse; yet we tolerate levels of imprisonment and state-sanctioned violence that most people of the world would rise up against.

There have always been those who benefit from a police state. The notorious capitalist robber baron, Jay Gould, proudly proclaimed that he “could hire one-half of the working class to kill the other half.” The economics of the military-industrial complex provide the most recent stunning example of this phenomenon. We are spending over half of the American economy fighting nations that pose no threat to anyone but themselves.

There is a price to be paid by allowing a police state to flourish unabated. The image of Lt. Pike arrogantly assaulting the seated students at their peaceful demonstration is a chilling image akin to similar scenes in Pinochet’s Chile or apartheid South Africa. A docile population can easily find itself more threatened and endangered by uncontrolled state domination than a society that relies upon the citizenry itself to protect its rights.

The Occupy Movement, the non-violent demonstration at Davis, and the civil disobedience that is becoming part and parcel of this unequal society are a result of social problems that will be resolved through dialogue, disagreement and struggle. Police violence will only exacerbate the problems that are festering in this country. It is part of the problem, not a solution.

Patriot Act

On May 27, 2011, President Obama, over widespread bipartisan objections, approved a Congressional four year extension of controversial parts of the Patriot Act that were set to expire.  In March of 2010, Obama signed a similar extension of the Patriot Act for one year.  These provisions allow the government, with permission from a special secret court, to seize records without the owner’s knowledge, conduct secret surveillance of suspicious people who have no known ties to terrorist groups and to obtain secret roving wiretaps on people.

Criminalization of Dissent and Militarization of the Police

Anyone who has gone to a peace or justice protest in recent years has seen it – local police have been turned into SWAT teams, and SWAT teams into heavily armored military.  Officer Friendly or even Officer Unfriendly has given way to police uniformed like soldiers with SWAT shields, shin guards, heavy vests, military helmets, visors, and vastly increased firepower.  Protest police sport ninja turtle-like outfits and are accompanied by helicopters, special tanks, and even sound blasting vehicles first used in Iraq.  Wireless fingerprint scanners first used by troops in Iraq are now being utilized by local police departments to check motorists.  Facial recognition software introduced in war zones is now being used in Arizona and other jurisdictions.  Drones just like the ones used in Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan are being used along the Mexican and Canadian borders.  These activities continue to expand under the Obama administration.

Wiretaps

Wiretaps for oral, electronic or wire communications, approved by federal and state courts, are at an all-time high.  Wiretaps in year 2010 were up 34% from 2009, according to the Administrative Office of the US Courts.

Criminalization of Speech

Muslims in the US have been targeted by the Obama Department of Justice for inflammatory things they said or published on the internet.  First Amendment protection of freedom of speech, most recently stated in a 1969 Supreme Court decision, Brandenberg v Ohio, says the government cannot punish inflammatory speech, even if it advocates violence unless it is likely to incite or produce such action.  A Pakistani resident legally living in the US was indicted by the DOJ in September 2011 for uploading a video on YouTube.  The DOJ said the video was supportive of terrorists even though nothing on the video called for violence.  In July 2011, the DOJ indicted a former Penn State student for going onto websites and suggesting targets and for providing a link to an explosives course already posted on the internet.

Domestic Government Spying on Muslim Communities

In activities that offend freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and several other laws, the NYPD and the CIA have partnered to conduct intelligence operations against Muslim communities in New York and elsewhere.  The CIA, which is prohibited from spying on Americans, works with the police on “human mapping”, commonly known as racial and religious profiling to spy on the Muslim community.  Under the Obama administration, the Associated Press reported in August 2011, informants known as “mosque crawlers,” monitor sermons, bookstores and cafes.

Top Secret America

In July 2010, the Washington Post released “Top Secret America,” a series of articles detailing the results of a two year investigation into the rapidly expanding world of homeland security, intelligence and counter-terrorism.   It found 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence at about 10,000 locations across the US.  Every single day, the National Security Agency intercepts and stores more than 1.7 billion emails, phone calls and other types of communications. The FBI has a secret database named Guardian that contains reports of suspicious activities filed from federal, state and local law enforcement.  According to the Washington Post, Guardian contained 161,948 files as of December 2009.  From that database there have been 103 full investigations and at least five arrests the FBI reported.  The Obama administration has done nothing to cut back on the secrecy.

Other Domestic Spying

There are at least 72 fusion centers across the US which collect local domestic police information and merge it into multi-jurisdictional intelligence centers, according to a recent report by the ACLU.  These centers share information from federal, state and local law enforcement and some private companies to secretly spy on Americans.  These all continue to grow and flourish under the Obama administration.

Abusive FBI Intelligence Operations

The Electronic Frontier Foundation documented thousands of violations of the law by FBI intelligence operations from 2001 to 2008 and estimate that there are over 4000 such violations each year.  President Obama issued an executive order to strengthen the Intelligence Oversight Board, an agency which is supposed to make sure the FBI, the CIA and other spy agencies are following the law.  No other changes have been noticed.

Wikileaks

The publication of US diplomatic cables by Wikileaks and then by main stream news outlets sparked condemnation by the Obama administration officials who said the publication of accurate government documents was nothing less than an attack on the United States.  The Attorney General announced a criminal investigation and promised “this is not saber rattling.” Government officials warned State Department employees not to download the publicly available documents.  A State Department official and Columbia officials warned students that discussing Wikileaks or linking documents to social networking sites could jeopardize their chances of getting a government job, a position that lasted several days until reversed by other Columbia officials.  At the time this was written, the Obama administration continued to try to find ways to prosecute the publishers of Wikileaks.

Censorship of Books by the CIA

In 2011, the CIA demanded extensive cuts from a memoir by former FBI agent Ali H. Soufan, in part because it made the agency look bad.  Soufan’s book detailed the use of torture methods on captured prisoners and mistakes that led to 9-11. Similarly, a 2011 book on interrogation methods by former CIA agent Glenn Carle was subjected to extensive black outs.  The CIA under the Obama administration continues its push for censorship.

Blocking Publication of Photos of U.S. Soldiers Abusing Prisoners

In May 2009, President Obama reversed his position of three weeks earlier and refused to release photos of US soldiers abusing prisoners.  In April 2009, the US Department of Defense told a federal court that it would release the photos.  The photos were part of nearly 200 criminal investigations into abuses by soldiers.

Technological Spying

The Bay Area Transit System, in August 2011, hearing of rumors to protest against fatal shootings by their police, shut down cell service in four stations.  Western companies sell email surveillance software to repressive regimes in China, Libya and Syria to use against protestors and human rights activists.  Surveillance cameras monitor residents in high crime areas, street corners and other governmental buildings.  Police department computers ask for and receive daily lists from utility companies with addresses and names of every home address in their area.  Computers in police cars scan every license plate of every car they drive by.  The Obama administration has made no serious effort to cut back these new technologies of spying on citizens.

Use of “State Secrets” to Shield Government and Others from Review

When the Bush government was caught hiring private planes from a Boeing subsidiary to transport people for torture to other countries, the Bush administration successfully asked the federal trial court to dismiss a case by detainees tortured because having a trial would disclose “state secrets” and threaten national security.  When President Obama was elected, the state secrets defense was reaffirmed in arguments before a federal appeals court.  It continues to be a mainstay of the Obama administration effort to cloak their actions and the actions of the Bush administration in secrecy.

In another case, it became clear in 2005 that the Bush FBI was avoiding the Fourth Amendment requirement to seek judicial warrants to get telephone and internet records by going directly to the phone companies and asking for the records.  The government and the companies, among other methods of surveillance, set up secret rooms where phone and internet traffic could be monitored.  In 2008, the government granted the companies amnesty for violating the privacy rights of their customers.  Customers sued anyway. But the Obama administration successfully argued to the district court, among other defenses, that disclosure would expose state secrets and should be dismissed.  The case is now on appeal.

Material Support

The Obama administration successfully asked the US Supreme Court not to apply the First Amendment and to allow the government to criminalize humanitarian aid and legal activities of people providing advice or support to foreign organizations which are listed on the government list as terrorist organizations.   The material support law can now be read to penalize people who provide humanitarian aid or human rights advocacy. The Obama administration Solicitor General argued to the court “when you help Hezbollah build homes, you are also helping Hezbollah build bombs.”  The Court agreed with the Obama argument that national security trumps free speech in these circumstances.

Chicago Anti-war Grand Jury Investigation

In September 2010, FBI agents raided the homes of seven peace activists in Chicago, Minneapolis and Grand Rapids seizing computers, cell phones, passports, and records.  More than 20 anti-war activists were issued federal grand jury subpoenas and more were questioned across the country.  Some of those targeted were members of local labor unions, others members of organizations like the Arab American Action Network, the Columbia Action Network, the Twin Cities Anti-War Campaign and the Freedom Road Socialist Organization.  Many were active internationally and visited resistance groups in Columbia and Palestine.  Subpoenas directed people to bring anything related to trips to Columbia, Palestine, Jordan, Syria, Israel or the Middle East.  In 2011, the home of a Los Angeles activist was raided and he was questioned about his connections with the September 2010 activists.  All of these investigations are directed by the Obama administration.

Punishing Whistleblowers

The Obama administration has prosecuted five whistleblowers under the Espionage Act, more than all the other administrations in history put together.  They charged a National Security Agency advisor with ten felonies under the Espionage Act for telling the press that government eavesdroppers were wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on misguided and failed projects.  After their case collapsed, the government, which was chastised by the federal judge as engaging in unconscionable conduct allowed him to plead to a misdemeanor and walk.  The administration has also prosecuted former members of the CIA, the State Department, and the FBI.  They even tried to subpoena a journalist and one of the lawyers for the whistleblowers.

Bradley Manning

Army private Bradley Manning is accused of leaking thousands of government documents to Wikileaks.  These documents expose untold numbers of lies by US government officials, wrongful killings of civilians, policies to ignore torture in Iraq, information about who is held at Guantanamo, cover ups of drone strikes and abuse of children and much more damaging information about US malfeasance.  Though Daniel Ellsberg and other whistleblowers say Bradley is an American hero, the US government has jailed him and is threatening him with charges of espionage which may be punished by the death penalty.  For months Manning was held in solitary confinement and forced by guards to sleep naked.  When asked about how Manning was being held, President Obama personally defended the conditions of his confinement saying he had been assured they were appropriate and meeting our basic standards.

Solitary Confinement

At least 20,000 people are in solitary confinement in US jails and prisons, some estimate several times that many.  Despite the fact that federal, state and local prisons and jails do not report actual numbers, academic research estimates tens of thousands are kept in cells for 23 to 24 hours a day in supermax units and prisons, in lockdown, in security housing units, in “the hole”, and in special management units or administrative segregation.  Human Rights Watch reports that one-third to one-half of the prisoners in solitary are likely mentally ill.  In May 2006, the UN Committee on Torture concluded that the United States should “review the regimen imposed on detainees in supermax prisons, in particular, the practice of prolonged isolation.”  The Obama administration has taken no steps to cut back on the use of solitary confinement in federal, state or local jails and prisons.

Special Administrative Measures

Special Administrative Measures (SAMS) are extra harsh conditions of confinement imposed on prisoners (including pre-trial detainees) by the Attorney General.  The U.S. Bureau of Prisons imposes restrictions such segregation and isolation from all other prisoners, and limitation or denial of contact with the outside world such as: no visitors except attorneys, no contact with news media, no use of phone, no correspondence, no contact with family, no communication with guards, 24 hour video surveillance and monitoring. The DOJ admitted in 2009 that several dozen prisoners, including several pre-trial detainees, mostly Muslims, were kept incommunicado under SAMS.  If anything, the use of SAMS has increased under the Obama administration.

These twenty concrete examples document a sustained assault on domestic civil liberties in the United States under the Obama administration.  Rhetoric aside, how different has Obama been from Bush in this area?

In the overland five trips I have made to Gaza since March, 2009, I have seen the disastrous effect of the brutal Israeli land and sea blockade has had on the Palestinian people.  I have seen the terrible level of destruction that the 2008-2009 Israeli attack wrecked on Gaza, in which 1,400 Palestinians were killed in the 22 day attack, 5,000 were wounded and 50,000 were made homeless.  I was on the Gaza Freedom March in 2009 and I was a passenger on the US Boat to Gaza, the “Audacity of Hope” that was forbidden from sailing June, 2011 by the Greek government on behalf of the Israeli government.

As one of two American citizens on the Gaza “Freedom Waves,” I represented hundreds of thousands of Americans who are challenging Israeli and US policies concerning Palestine.  We are using a variety of methods to let Israeli government officials know that international citizen activists are not going to stop challenging their policies.  Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions programs, international citizens who attempt to protect Palestinians as they farm, fish and go to school, students confronting Israeli officials as they speak around the world and flotillas and waves of boats are part of the international effort. I am very proud to be a part of this movement.

Passenger on the “Tahrir”

Passengers on the Canadian Boat to Gaza, the “Tahrir,” left Turkey in good spirits Wednesday, November 2, 2011 despite having its passenger list whittled down by the Turkish Port Authorities who allowed only 12 out of 35 passengers who had travelled to Turkey to get on the boat.  The Turks cited regulations that decreed that only 12 persons could be on a boat rated as a “pleasure craft” to depart Turkey for international waters, no matter that the vessel was rated for 50+ passengers. My fellow Americans Medea Benjamin, Robert Neiman, Paki Wieland, Tighe Barry and David Schermerhorn became our ground crew in Turkey when the passenger reduction was forced on us.  On the day we left the Turkish port of Fetiyah, they rented a third boat to attempt to transfer in international waters the 23 passengers who had not been allowed onto the boats in port.

Working with our sister ship, the “Saoirse”, from Ireland, we hit the high seas full throttle headed to Gaza continuing the previous flotillas efforts to end Israel’s illegal, immoral  naval blockade of Gaza, which, in combination with Israel’s land blockade, has made the 1.6 million people of Gaza, prisoners in a tiny land that is roughly 25 miles long and five miles wide.

Our team, on the Tahrir, consisted of five journalists, including Democracy Now’s Jihan Hafiz, six international delegates and the captain.  We bonded quickly and settled in to our various chores.  Captain George delegated crew duties, journalists set up their satellites and computer stations, cooks and medics tended to physical needs and everyone vied for computer time to reach out to the world.

Canadian Boat to Gaza organizers did an excellent job stocking the boat with food, water and medical supplies plus $30,000 of medical aid to be delivered in Gaza.   The next two days were filled with blogging, filming, battling seasickness, sleeping, eating, non-violent training and preparation for probable Israeli confrontation and imprisonment.

Arriving in Danger Zone in the Daylight

Getting into international waters without the Turkish Coast Guard turning us back was our first success.  In hopes of not being boarded by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) during darkness, we slowed our speed so it would be daylight Friday morning, November 4, 2011, when we approached 100 nautical miles off Gaza’s shore and probable contact with the IDF.

Each hour brought us 10 miles closer to Gaza.  We were thankful to make it past the 70 mile mark where the Mavi Marmara was so brutally attacked in June, 2010.

Three Giant Warships Looming on the Horizon

A momentary excitement permeated the ship as the captain announced we were 50 miles offshore– until we saw the 3 giant warships looming on the horizon.

We got on the satellite phones and computers to get out our last messages.  I was on the phone with CNN and I remember them saying, “call me when something happens” and I said, “This is probably the last you’re going to hear from me as our communications will be cut….” and then they were.

17 Israeli Warships Surround and Force collision between Freedom Waves boats–Water Cannons blew out windows and almost sunk the Irish boat Saoirse

We were told by the Israeli Navy to change our course.  Organizers of both boats restated that we were sailing to “the goodness of humanity.”

Within a half an hour we were surrounded by 17 boats; gunboats, water cannon boats, zodiacs.

The IDF radioed that they wanted to inspect our boats, meanwhile two zodiacs were harassing the Saoirse by driving in circles around them, finally forcing the Irish boat to crash into the Tahrir causing damage to the Saoirse.

The Saoirse pulled away and was chased by the IDF commandos who proceeded to blow out their windows and fill the ship with water from the water cannons.  If the Saoirse’s auxiliary power had not kicked in, the boat would have sunk.

Meanwhile, the IDF blasted the Tahrir with water cannons.  Over bullhorns, IDF soldiers told us to go to the bow of the boat where they were hitting our boat with the most force with the water cannons. We tried to protect ourselves by staying behind the wheel house.

One passenger and a cameraman attempted to remain on the bow of the Tahrir but moved away as the commandoes jumped the rail.  Commandos snatched the camera and 25 masked commandos shoved their way on board screaming, “Shut Up! Sit Down,! Move! Get Up!,  Shut Up!, Move!”  over and over for the next half hour.

One Passenger Tasered by IDF

Two passengers stayed at the wheelhouse and one was tasered by the IDF commandos.  They were shoved out the wheelhouse and dragged to the benches where they were forced at gunpoint to sit.  Commandos continued to yell, “Sit! Shut up! Don’t move!”  Our male passengers were searched first with commandos pointing guns and tasers at them.  Everyone had to keep their empty hands visible at all times.

Computers, Cameras, Satellite Phones Taken

I asked if  we could go down below as it was getting dark and cold and they corralled us into the tiny galley room and “guarded” us  while other soldiers  searched our backpacks and suitcases and threw our computers, cameras,  and bags on the floor.  Computers, cameras and other electronics confiscated on the boat were never returned to us.

IDF Commandos Brainwashed into Committing Horrific, Illegal Actions

I felt sad and angry looking into the young masked eyes of the IDF soldiers who had been so successfully brainwashed into doing horrific, illegal acts for the Israeli government.  They pirated our ship, kidnapped us and tasered us and now many of them were asleep on the benches, every bit as tired as we were.

Strip Searched at Port of Ashdod

About three hours later we arrived at the Israeli port of Ashdod, where Israeli officials strip searched, demeaned and dehumanized us. However, nothing they did to us is comparable to what the Palestinians endure.

The officials in the Israeli Immigration and Deportation office processed us.  They told us that if we signed a document that stated we had entered Israel illegally, we would be deported the next day.  This was one of the many lies we were told by Israeli authorities. Another untruth that they told us was that after 72 hours we would be deported automatically.

Three Days in Israeli Prison

After processing at the port, we were separated again and taken in small groups to the Givon prison where once again we were strip searched.  Our packs pawed through by at least ten people and we were then handed a list of our possessions that they were going to keep.

Women’s Wing of the Prison

Five women including myself spent the next three days in our own wing of the prison.  We were locked in our cells, locked in the women’s section of the prison and then locked behind two more locked gates.  Still, the guards repeatedly counted us and checked to make sure we weren’t plotting an escape, as if we could dig our way out through the floors. Maybe they thought “the criminals” could break out with the flimsy toothbrushes we were given!  Again, only a small taste of what Gazans have felt for years.

No American Embassy Presence or Phone Call for Two Days

I didn’t get my phone call out, nor did we see any one from the American Embassy for two days, whereas a representative of the Irish Embassy to Israel met the Irish boat when they arrived at the Port of Ashdod.

When the American Embassy officials finally arrived at the prison, they recommended I sign the form saying I had entered Israel illegally.  I refused.

The Embassy officials did contact my family and continued to keep in touch with them during my stay in the Israeli prison.  However, the official later told me there wasn’t much the US Embassy could do since we were in Israel and Israel was calling the shots, despite the US giving $3 billion in military aid annually to Israel!

Inside the Prison

We were locked in our cells for hours on end and ended up having a sit down strike in the corridor demanding that we be allowed out of the cells more than once a day.  We were tormented all one night by an irate guard beating on our door and awakened many times a night so they could “count us.”  We were berated and treated like criminals the entire time.

Paying for My Own Deportation

Finally Monday night, November 7th, after almost 72 hours, the Israelis said I could “leave” if I paid for my own deportation air ticket.  I agreed so that I could get back to the U.S. and tell the story of the “Freedom Waves.”  I was taken to the notorious Ben Gurion Airport Detention Center with a fellow passenger, who flew out that night. I was locked up in the airport facility for another 14 hours until my flight left on Tuesday, November 8.

Israeli Defiance of International Law and Basic Human Decency

There is no surprise in Israel’s act of piracy in attacking two civilian boats in international waters trying to sail to Gaza, imprisoning the passengers, and stealing the cargo and personal possessions. This is yet another example of Israeli defiance of International Law and basic human decency.

In my interactions with the IDF commandos and the Israeli government officials at the Port of Ashdod, in the prison and at the airport, I was struck by the desensitized, robotic, inhumane behavior they displayed consistently—and, again, I only experienced a small taste of what Palestinians routinely face.

“Freedom Waves” to Freedom Riders

There’s another dangerous passage – this time over land – that’s about to set forth: On Tuesday, November 15th, Palestinian activists plan to board settler-only public buses in the West Bank and attempt to sit down and ride the bus, in the great tradition of the Freedom Riders that challenged segregation in the American South. These brave change-makers have called on the international community to stand in solidarity, and many actions are planned around the US where activists will protest Veolia, the French company that runs many of the settler buses and is the subject of an international boycott campaign.  If the Palestinian Freedom Riders are arrested and detained, it will be important for us to speak up and take action as well.

US Congress should be Investigated for giving $3 Billion in Military Aid Annually to Israel instead of Demanding that the State Department Investigate Citizen Activists

Because of this experience in trying to break Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza, I am more resolved than ever to work to stop the US government allocation of military aid to Israel and policies supporting the Israeli government’s apartheid treatment of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

Some Congresspersons are now going after US citizens on the Gaza flotillas!

Who is part of a terrorist organization: International activists saying Israeli and U.S policies toward the Palestinians are unjust and illegal, or the US Congress?

I think the US Congress should be held accountable for the illegal and unlawful uses of the weaponry that the U.S. has provided to Israel – including the F-16s, Apache helicopters, white phosphorous and dense inert metal explosive bombs that killed 1,400 Palestinians, wounded 5,000 and left 50,000 homeless during Operation Cast Lead in 2008-09.

Instead, 13 Congresspersons want those of us who have challenged Israeli and US policies on Palestine investigated for terrorist links and have introduced House Resolution 3131 toward that end.

The legislation introduced in the United States Congress in October, 2011, by Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) and Congressman Gus Bilirakis (R-FL), would require the State Department to “submit a report on whether any support organization that participated in the planning or execution of the recent Gaza flotilla attempt should be designated as a foreign terrorist organization and any actions taken by the Department of State to express gratitude to the government of Greece for preventing the Gaza flotilla from setting sail in contravention of Israel’s legal blockade of Gaza, and for other purposes.”  Twelve other strong supporters of the Israel Occupation have signed onto the bill: Engel, Ros-Lehtinen, Sarbanes, Carter, Frelinghuysen, Young, Grimm, Diaz-Balart, Rothman, Roskam and Sires.  Coincidentally, these representatives, especially Ros-Lehtinen, receive big contributions of campaign funding from the right-wing Israel lobby.

Please call these Congresspersons at (202) 225-3121 and give them an earful.

Some of us had been assigned to read selections from the late Zinn’s “Voices of a People’s History of the United States.”  I was asked to read John Brown’s courtroom speech in which he said, “Now if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children, and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I submit: so let it be done!”

Brown had used violence.  I condemn it.  Brown was not submitting.  He’d been captured.  But he also said this: “[H]ad I so interfered in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great, or in behalf of any of their friends, either father, mother, brother, sister, wife, or children, or any of that class, and suffered and sacrificed what I have in this interference, it would have been all right, and every man in this Court would have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment.”

Had Troy Davis been able to afford an expensive lawyer.  Had Troy Davis been white.  Had Troy Davis lived in a different state or a different nation.

Davis was again told he would be killed. He was again told that he might not be.  He was again told that he would be killed.  And finally, he was killed by chemical injection while strapped down to prevent writhing.  Observers observed.  And those of us who had left the restaurant to go and protest in front of the U.S. Supreme Court wailed in pain, while the world reacted as it reacted to the killing of Sacco and Vanzetti, and as it has reacted to each of our governments’ million acts of barbarism down through the years.

Over in Texas another man was governmentally killed, thus creating the possibility for even louder applause when that state’s governor’s total scalp-count is next announced.

Meanwhile, large numbers of people are killed in our wars, wars our President announced Wednesday morning are waged on behalf of peace.  Where is Amnesty International?  Where is the NAACP?  Are those people killed in wars less human?

What about those our government has tortured to death?  Does the manner in which they are killed make them more lamentable than those killed with bombs, just as chemical injection is deemed less lamentable than electrocution?

Our government now kills, as a rule, rather than taking prisoners.  And it kills with unmanned drones.  It also kicks in doors at night and disappears people.

We know a little about assassination teams that have operated in Afghanistan in recent years, teams including Special Forces, CIA, and mercenaries.  I have good reason to believe — although I cannot now say why — that such teams have also operated on U.S. soil.  But isn’t killing, even on Afghan soil, just as evil?  Should it matter where, or who, or why, or how?

Aren’t the lost opportunities to save lives when our money all goes to wars and Wall Street just as murderous?  Medicare cuts kill.  Unclean air kills.  Pretending Social Security is in trouble kills. Pushing our elders into the poor house kills.  Polluting our environment kills.

Our government’s status as pro-life is in grave doubt.  Its title as the greatest purveyor of violence in the world remains in place.

We can’t prosecute Supreme Court justices because we have no Justice Department.  We can’t impeach Supreme Court justices, because we have no Congress.  What can we do?  One thing that I think we can and must do is recognize that, if for that one moment we believed Troy Davis might be spared, then we believe in our hearts that victory is possible. And because we believe that, we have a responsibility to work for it.

We can do that by building as large a presence as possible to occupy Washington, D.C., beginning October 6th

In response to the hunger strike, Assembly member Tom Ammiano and the Public Safety Committee in the State Assembly of California will hold an informational hearing on August 23 regarding conditions and policies of the Security Housing Units at Pelican Bay. Activists have initiated a statewide mobilization around this hearing, in order to pressure state legislators and the CDCR to make substantial changes.

A statement written by the Short Corridor Collective, composed of some Pelican Bay hunger strike leaders, explains that on July 1:

A collective group of PBSP-SHU inmates composed of all races began an indefinite hunger strike as a means of peacefully protesting 20-40 years of human rights violations…. The decision to strike was not made on a whim. It came about in response to years of subjection to progressively more primitive conditions and decades of isolation, sensory deprivation and total lack of normal human contact, with no end in sight. This reality, coupled with our prior ineffective collective filing of thousands of inmate grievances and hundreds of court actions to challenge such blatantly illegal policies and practices (as more fully detailed and supported by case law, in our formal complaint available online here) led to our conclusion that a peaceful protest via hunger strike was our only available avenue to expose what’s really been going on here in CDCR-SHU prisons and to force meaningful change…. We ended the hunger strike the evening of July 20, 2011, on the basis of CDCR’s top level administrators’ interactions with our team of mediators, as well as with us directly, wherein they agreed to accede to a few small requests immediately, as a tangible good faith gesture in support of their assurance that all of our other issues will receive real attention, with meaningful changes being implemented over time.

On August 3, the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity Coalition announced that it had just received a letter from the hunger strike leaders at Pelican Bay, dated July 24, explaining that strikers have given the California Department of Corrections and Reform (CDCR) a deadline of two to three weeks from July 20 to come up with some substantive changes in response to their five core demands. Todd Ashker, one of the leaders of the hunger strike, explains that if the CDCR does not follow through, prisoners at Pelican Bay plan to go back on hunger strike:

It’s very important that our supporters know where we stand, and that CDCR knows that we’re not going to go for any B.S. We remain as serious about our stand now as we were at the start, and mean what we said regarding an indefinite hunger strike peaceful protest until our demands are met. I repeat − we’re simply giving CDCR a brief grace period in response to their request for the opportunity to get [it] right in a timely fashion!

Hugo Pinell, one of the hunger strikers at Pelican Bay State Prison, has now been held in continuous solitary confinement for over 40 years—longer than any other US prisoner known to date. In a letter written during the strike to journalist Kiilu Nyasha, Pinell explained why he was fasting:

I have to get with it because it’s for a great cause and if good changes come about, I could get a break too. At this point, a move to a mainline would be great, being that my keepers are determined to keep me until I die. On a mainline, we could have contact visits again! It’s been too long since I’ve touched my Mom and all of my loved ones…I wasn’t prepared for a hunger strike, so I don’t know how well or how long I can hold on, but I had to participate…I don’t even think in terms of doing or saying something wrong, for that would strike against everything I live for: freedom, becoming a new man and the New World. So, Sis, this hunger strike provides me with an opportunity for change while also allowing me to be in concert with, and in support of, all those willing to risk their precious and valuable health.

Our previous interview with Solitary Watch about the Pelican Bay hunger strike examined the broader issue of solitary confinement in prisons throughout the US. In this follow-up report, we place the strike in context, alongside a statewide grassroots movement calling for cuts in prison spending to address California’s budget crisis, and a recent US Supreme Court ruling that calls for the reduction of California state prisoners by at least 30,000, in response to overcrowding.

We interviewed Isaac Ontiveros for an inside look from within California’s anti-prison movement. Ontiveros is the Communications Director for Critical Resistance, a national organization that is working to abolish the prison-industrial complex and is a member of the Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB) alliance and the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity Coalition.

Angola 3 News:  What is the latest news from the hunger strikers?

Isaac Ontiveros: As far as we know, the leaders of the strike at Pelican Bay’s Security Housing Unit have called an end to the strike—based on what they see as some movement on the part of the CDCR beginning to address some of their demands.

At the peak of the strike at least 6,600 prisoners across at least a third of California’s 33 prisons participated.  These are official CDCR numbers, so we can confidently assume actual numbers were higher.  Right now, our struggle is to determine how many other prisoners, in what prisons, are continuing to strike.  Given how isolated prisoners are throughout the system, this is a challenge, to say the least.

A3N: Why have the Pelican Bay hunger strikers declared victory?

IO: The prisoners made very important, historic gains.  That the strikers were able to move the CDCR at all was no small feat, especially when working under some the most horrendous conditions possible.  The fact that they were able to coordinate among themselves despite extreme isolation is also impressive.  Furthermore, solidarity was able to spread throughout the California system. This solidarity crossed the racial and geographic lines that we are taught are uncrossable; and strike leaders were able to incite strong support of people outside of prison on an international level. This is all very important when we think about victories, especially if we understand victories as being stepping-stones to further and greater victories.

As far as the specific concessions made by the prison administration, the details are still coming, but it seems that CDCR has moved a bit on the prisoners demands around providing and expanding some of the privileges and programs they have access to in the SHU.  These gains—for example, some around cold weather clothing and access to calendars—may seem modest, but for people in such extremely oppressive conditions, these things take on a different weight.   Also, it seems like there could be some movement on some of their other demands, perhaps some review of the “debriefing” process.

A3N: How can our readers support the next phase of this struggle?

IO: The next phase is to hold the CDCR to good faith negotiations, and to continue our push for all of the strikers’ demands to get met.  It is very important for supporters to continue their solidarity work on the outside, with particular attention toward defending strike leaders from retaliation from the prison administration.

Many people are coordinating actions all over the US and in other parts of the world.  A potentially important legislative hearing on conditions in Pelican Bay’s SHU is happening on August 23rd in Sacramento—there is lots of talk about that being a big point of mobilization.

Folks should stay tuned to the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity web site for more information.

A3N: In recent months, CURB has organized statewide mass protests against California prison politics. In response to the use of California’s budget crisis as an excuse to cut state programs serving low-income residents, CURB presented a “Budget for Humanity” that called for dramatic reductions in prison spending and the number of prisoners. How does this campaign support the recent hunger strike?

IO:  I think CURB’s fight is absolutely related to the strike because more prisons mean more torture, more SHUs, more people be locked up, more communities devastated economically and socially—all of it.

The demands of the strikers were particular to the conditions of Pelican Bay’s SHU, and the SHU has a very specific function, but the fact that solidarity spread throughout the California system also speaks to how common the conditions the strike leaders were talking about are to all prisoners—deadly lack of health care, poor food, torture, overcrowding, breaking up of political organizing, and more.  These conditions are also connected to those on the outside, primarily in Black and Brown communities.

Right now CURB’s main platform, as outlined in the Budget for Humanity, is demanding an end to all prison and jail construction; an immediate reduction of prison and jail overcrowding; the releasing of tax dollars from the grip of imprisonment; and an end to cuts to the most vital services, along with a reprioritization of  how California uses it resources to create what and for whom.  These demands feed and are fed by each other.  Ending prison and jail construction frees tens of thousands of people along with billions of dollars.  Ending the attack on basic resources like education, health care, meaningful employment, creates strong communities for people to come home to and to thrive in.

We also have to understand that this is not just a matter of fiscal sense-making and balancing the budget. This is also about political power. This is about capitalism and white supremacy. We need to understand that SHUs, the prison system in general, and police are tools of repression used to thwart peoples’ efforts and abilities to fight back, build up their communities, and build self-determination.

This also links CURB’s work with prisoner strike solidarity, along with community struggles against gang injunctions, police violence, ICE raids, and more. So I think CURB’s work—along with the work of so many other organizations and coalitions—is a step toward building larger and stronger grassroots movements that will make larger, stronger, and more thoroughgoing economic and social changes.

A3N: Can you give a history of California’s “budget crisis”? How far back does this go? How does it relate, if at all, to the accelerated incarceration rates in the US that began in the 1970s, where the number of prisoners increased from 300,000 to over 2 million today?

IO: The best answer to this question is the wonderful and very important book “Golden Gulag” by Ruth Wilson Gilmore.  The book explores these questions in great detail and I really can’t recommend it enough.

But, roughly, we can understand that in the late 60s and early 70s, the powers-that-be in the US responded to social uprisings against racism, social and economic inequality, and other forms of oppression in the US — linked to anti-imperialist struggles happening all over the planet at the time — by making war primarily on communities of color in a variety ways, including the expansion and further militarization of policing and the expansion of imprisonment.  This is intertwined with a crisis in the capitalist system occurring at the same time.  So we saw an assault on organized labor and social services and programs that was basically the rise of neoliberal economic models—creating a deepening in the divide between the haves and have-nots (already pretty deep for those marginalized to begin with).

Into the 1980s we saw the war on drugs—which we should understand as a war on Black and Brown communities—go into full gear with the passing of thousands of laws, tougher and longer sentences, and the activation of all sorts of media stories and images that aggressively criminalize and dehumanize poor people and people of color, especially Black people.

Even though the so-called crime rate started dropping steadily in the early 80s, the economy, this fear-mongering, increased policing, mixed with the proliferation of anti-social ideas that social services are a waste, created the perfect storm for a gigantic increase in imprisonment.  And the cycle perpetuated itself from there with harsher probation and parole conditions that made it easier to deny essential services and to land more people back in cages for longer amounts of time. Tying it back to the 60s and 70s, this cycle makes it more difficult for social movements to change the oppressive social and economic relationships the system is predicated on.

So California, with one of the largest economies in the world, is situated in this history.  The gutting of social services, the attack on labor, the loss of jobs, tax revolts, the abandonment of certain industries, financial speculation, the disuse of farmland, housing bubbles, energy speculation, “dot-com bubbles”, the criminalization of people of color, anti-immigrant hysteria, the passage of the three strikes law, etc., leads to one the largest prison expansions in world history.

Between 1982 and 2000, California’s prison population grew 500%.  Between 1984 and 2005, at least 20 prisons were built. In this period, only one university was built.  And right now, these prisons are close to 200% of their holding capacity.

Obviously this history is cursory, simplistic, and leaves out a lot, but in engaging with any crisis there are questions we need ask, patterns we need to identify, and actions we need to take. In thinking about budget crisis, we need to ask ourselves: why does everything (education, health care and services, wages, jobs, etc.) except corrections get cut?  What does this mean for the health of our communities? How does this relate to further economic crisis?  How are we prepared to organize around this crisis?  What are our opportunities?

A3N: Have there been any examples of other states reducing their prison populations as a response to budget issues?

IO: Yes,  even right now, states are reducing prison spending, closing facilities and releasing people in response to the economic havoc caused by prisons.   Now to be clear, much of this reduction is not based on progressive or humanitarian politics, or even an opposition to imprisonment.  But, in the past year, New York, Kentucky, Ohio, Oklahoma, Florida, and Connecticut have all implemented a variety of schemes to shrink imprisonment.  Some of them have to do with sentencing reforms and parole and probation reforms, some schemes involve outright prison closure.

I think the key here is for organizations and individuals that want to see longer-term and deeper changes to organize around making these shrinkages permanent, and then to battle to have funds no longer wasted on prison spending be put towards repairing and building up the communities imprisonment has devastated—so that people coming home can stay home.

A3N: Further influencing California prison politics is a recent US Supreme Court ruling that calls for the reduction of California state prisoners by at least 30,000, in response to overcrowding. How significant is this ruling?

IO: This ruling is very significant.  It says even the Supreme Court—which is far from a politically progressive entity—recognizes that the California prison system is scandalous, devastating, and deadly.  It says change needs to happen immediately.

The Supreme Court decision gives us a chance to address the human rights crisis in California prisons, and to change the system itself, hopefully so that we can avoid further crisis.

Acting strongly here also positions us to take steps to address human rights crises happening outside the prisons, in the communities from which these thousands and thousands of prisoners are taken.

A3N: Since the CDCR released their proposal responding to the US Supreme Court ruling (that has been criticized by CURB in an open letter to Gov Brown) has there been any response from the state government?

IO: Unfortunately, but maybe not surprisingly, Gov. Brown and the CDCR’s plan is to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic.  They came up with a scheme called realignment where, rather than let people out of cages, reforming parole conditions, and using the tens of millions of dollars that would free up to support these prisoners return to their communities. they have decided to shift these 33-40,000 prisoners to the county level; ie., jails.  Brown and the CDCR are responding to one crisis by creating the conditions for 58 crises.

For example, Los Angeles County is 33% of the entire California prison system.  Its jails are already overcrowded and have been the subject of human and civil rights abuse scandals.  Brown and CDCR’s realignment scheme would add at least an extra 11,000 to that system.  Their scheme does nothing to address sentencing guidelines, and there seems to be a not-so-hidden construction scheme bubbling away on the side burner already.  So, they propose more disaster.

What’s hopeful is that, luckily, people all over the state are more imaginative and humane than Brown and Co. and are ready for some serious changes.  A recent poll shows a vast majority of Californians oppose cutting key state services and increasing taxes to pay for more prisons and jails: 80% of Californians favor paroling people who are terminally ill or medically incapacitated, and 60% support reducing life sentences for third strike prisoners.

People are ready for changes, and I’d wager they are ready to think about even greater changes.  If Brown and the CDCR want to shift the burden to the county level, then, with some strong organizing, residents, organization, and coalitions like CURB can meet them on their own turf, and say, “the only solution is to bring our friends, family members, and neighbors all the way home.”  And we can move forward from there.

• This article was first published in Alternet.

The insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies and health industry bring shame on every person connected with them. Foreigners shake their heads in disbelief at the farce and charade our health industry has become. More and more Americans are literally outsiders in what has become an exclusive resource for the rich: health care.

Our educational institutions have priced themselves out of the public realm. They now serve as research arms of the corporations that fund them. Students can’t possibly graduate with a meaningful education without incurring hundreds of thousands of dollars in debts and loans. The arms industry, Pentagon and multi-national corporations control virtually all of the research of our “educational” institutions.

The public service sectors of our economy have not only failed to keep up with the needs of the people, they barely even recognize the crumbling infrastructure that surrounds them. Public highways look like minefields; streets are rarely cleaned; public buildings fall into disrepair, with no money to keep them up; electricity is becoming too expensive for middle class households to support; and, more garbage fills the streets of our cities than the landfills created to hold it.  Even water will soon become a scarce resource, to be bought and sold by those who “own” it.

Police and their cohorts, the prison guards have become invading armies joined at the hip in our cities and counties. The widespread murder and torture perpetrated by these “armed servants” of the ruling class is of epidemic proportions, and the laws protect these murderers in the name of law and order. Police who murder are seldom prosecuted, their names are hidden from the press, and those who challenge their authority face life-threatening opposition.

The courts have been bought and paid for by the corporations that finance judicial elections, and the politicians who appoint their lapdogs to the bench, do so upon orders from above. Prosecutors run our judicial system, and justice is nowhere to be found.

The media has become an arm of the entertainment industry, and good looks are more important to a reporter’s success than having a brain, or developing anything like investigative skills. The news is what corporate America and the Pentagon say it is – nothing more and nothing less.

Corporations, in the name of profit, are destroying the environment and our natural resources at an unparalleled pace. Even if the human race is able to outlast the catastrophes created by the ruling class, it is questionable whether the earth itself can survive.

The military-industrial complex defines our foreign policies pure and simple. Manufacturers of weapons systems and the Pentagon, which use those weapons, assure the world that our country will continue to invade and kill anyone who can’t fight back.

Civilization is something we no longer seem to aspire to. The United States locks up more people and a greater percentage of its people than anyone else. We lock them in training centers for anger and violence. We subject them to rape, assault, humiliation, and isolation. We throw the innocent in with the guilty, the young with the old, the nonviolent with the violent, the hopeful with those who’ve lost all interest in life.

And we routinely subject large numbers of prisoners to the torture of near-total isolation. We lock human beings in little boxes for 22 or 23 hours per day. When it’s done to an accused whistleblower like Bradley Manning, we protest. But what about when it’s done to thousands of people, many of them baselessly accused of being members of gangs? Where is the outrage?

We should be refusing to eat. We should be shutting down our government with nonviolent action. We should be risking the lives we have. Instead the burden has fallen to those who have little or no lives to risk. The prisoners themselves are taking action and gaining power from behind bars.

Look at the prisoners’ demands. They want an end to group punishment of individual rules violations. That seems like a basic requirement of justice. Bombing a nation because some terrorists spent time there may make sense to our politicians, but it is horribly unjust to the people living and dying under the bombs. Stopping and searching people who look like they might be immigrants may make sense to those whose hatred of immigrants is distorting their thinking, but it is outrageously unjust from the perspective of the innocent people repeatedly harassed. Punishing everyone in a prison for something one person did make sense if the goal is cruelty. But will the innocent prisoners thus abused eventually emerge from prison believing they’ve been given fair treatment by a justice system with which they should comply? Or will they be released thirsting for vengeance?  Or thirst for vengeance while never being released? And will we be able to keep what we have done to them secret from ourselves?  Will we not continue to grow more ill?

They want an end to the use of completely unreliable criteria for labeling a prisoner a gang member and on that basis subjecting them to the torture of isolation. Should a tattoo or the word of someone offered decent food in exchange for a name really be the test of whether a human being should be placed at risk of severe mental damage? Should anything? Would we stand for another nation treating people this way? Don’t tell me it’s necessary and responsible. It would cost a lot less money to offer children decent schools and food and guidance than it does to imprison men. This is a luxury. It’s a sick indulgence of a wealthy country. We can afford to engage in massive sadistic cruelty. But that shouldn’t mean that we have to do it.

They want compliance with the recommendations found in the latest study our government produced to make itself feel better despite ignoring it. They want an end to the long-term solitary confinement that takes people’s minds away. They are risking death by starvation to end death by deprivation of human contact. We could risk a lot less to do it for them.

They want adequate food provided to all prisoners and an end to the practice of depriving some and feeding others as a tool for manipulating people like wild beasts. They want basic decency, including the ability to make one phone call per week. They want standards of health and humanity that do not even begin to approach those we are required by international treaty to provide to prisoners of war. For that matter, they want to cease being treated in a manner that would get you locked up with them if you treated a dog or a cat that way.

All the prisoners are asking of us is that we spread the word. But, in fact, they are not asking this of us. They are offering it to us. They are leading us where we need to go, and doing it from behind bars. We would need to go to this place even if we had no prisons. We are allowing our government to destroy the physical environment. Our children will have no more reason to eat than these prisoners do, if we fail to act. We are allowing our government to murder on a massive scale through what it calls the “Defense” Department, a name as skillfully chosen as that of a “Corrections” Department. We need to do some real defending and correcting. Some of us have plans for October. The least among us are showing us how right now.

Private First Class Manning is accused of being the source of the huge number of secret diplomatic cables, field intelligence reports, and at least one military video published by WikiLeaks. He was held without charge for nine months in the brig at Quantico Marine Corps Base in Virginia, isolated for 23 hours a day in “Maximum Custody and under Prevention of Injury Watch.” I believe that the conditions of his imprisonment, including the Abu Ghraib style humiliation of being forced to strip and surrender his clothing nightly, amounted to torture. Manning’s rights were violated further when President Obama, the military’s commander in chief, declared Manning guilty. Since Manning faces a possible court martial by military officers, all of whom are under Obama’s command, this makes it impossible for him to receive a fair trial.

I have several reasons to aid Private Manning.

The first is my commitment to the concept of Freedom of Information. Bradley Manning has been imprisoned and threatened with death for providing the truth to the American people. In the words of Daniel Ellsberg: “If Bradley Manning did what he’s accused of, then he’s a hero of mine.” The free flow of information is absolutely essential to a functioning democracy. Since 2001, the burgeoning “National Security State” has made it almost impossible for voters to make informed choices.

The people’s right to know what their government is doing has been at the core of my activism for almost four decades. It was no accident that my brother and I chose to sue under the newly toughened Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) when we commenced our campaign to reopen our parents’ case in 1974. Reporters asked if we were worried that the material in the government’s files we sought would point to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg’s guilt rather than their innocence. We answered without hesitation that while we hoped the material would exonerate our parents, the public’s right to know was more important than the vindication of our beliefs. My brother and I spent 10 years of our lives fighting that case in the name of the public’s right to know. The attack on Bradley Manning is an assault upon this right and must be resisted.

Also, I am virtually certain that the cruel and inhumane conditions Manning was subjected to in the Marine Base brig were designed to coerce him into testifying against Julian Assange and the Wikileaks community. In other words, the government wanted Manning to become the David Greenglass of the Wikileaks case. In my parent’s case the government offered David Greenglass a deal in return for falsely testifying that my parents engineered Greenglass’s theft of what the government called “the secret of the Atomic bomb,” even though my parents did not participate in that theft and there was no such secret. Similarly, the government sought to use Manning as a pawn to spark a conspiracy trail against Julian Assange and his associates in order to expand the security state and inflame public fear that hackers threaten our national security.

Finally, it is reported that Bradley Manning may be charged with violating the Espionage Act of 1917, and face the death penalty if he is convicted. That’s the same penalty my parents received for violating that act.

Under such circumstances, how could I stay away! For more information about the Bradley Manning support network go to: www.bradleymanning.org.

After Obama reversed his decision to end military tribunals and release the pictures of US torture, and the Democrats refused to close Guantanamo, liberal and progressive pundits in the media began wringing their hands asking how this could be. After all, they say, this is the neocon agenda, not the agenda for change that Obama got elected on. How can we change this? What kind of hold do Dick Cheney, Newt Gingrich and the rest of the rabid right-wingers have on the liberals we voted for? The question none of these hand-wringers have asked is a very simple, indeed, a very radical one. That question is, is the foreign policy of Washington the same no matter which party is in power? The reason why this question isn’t asked is as simple as the answer (which is of course, yes) — it is not a policy, it is an economic and political system that incorporates both political parties, the media, the educational system, and the commercial life that is the US.

The accepted understanding since September 11, 2001 is that the events that day changed everything in the world. The truth is the opposite. Nothing changed at all. Nothing, that is, except for the justification used by the Pentagon and Wall Street to continue their rigged game against the world. Instead of communism or the yellow hordes, it became terrorism.

The war on drugs. This exercise in futility (if one accepts its premise that it is being fought to end the influx of illegal drugs into the US) hasn’t ended illegal drug trade and its accompanying murder and mayhem, but it has put US bases in regions where there were none. It has also been used as part of the imperial struggle against national liberation and indigenous movements that are contrary to US interests — Sendero Luminoso in Peru back in the 1980s and 1990s to the narco-traffickers in Mexico of today.

The global war on terror hasn’t ended terror but has put bases in places where none were before–with the added attraction that they are in areas rich in resources and also encircle Russia and China — potential capitalist rivals. In addition, it has strengthened Israel’s position in the Middle East, leading to further and more brutal oppression of the Palestinians while increasing the possibility of war with Iran. On top of that we now have the selective bombing of various Muslim and Arab countries in the name of supposed freedom struggles whose very alignment with Washington and its NATO surrogate make the possibility of real freedom less likely with each “Made In USA” bomb dropped or missile fired. Meanwhile, Israel, that supposed beacon of freedom in the Middle East, continues to shoot Palestinian protesters at will.

The control of WMD. If nothing else has shown the vacuity of this policy, the war on Iraq has. Initially undertaken to find and destroy WMD in Iraq, it soon became apparent in the weeks after March 20, 2003 that there were no such weapons. Indeed, the previous administration had already forced the elimination of any such weaponry via its regimen of deadly sanctions, illegal flyovers and bombings and occasional missile attacks on Iraq. Although US policymakers were concerned about WMD in Hussein’s Iraq, this concern had a lot more to do with the challenge they represented to Washington and Tel Aviv’s dominance in the region than they had to do with concern for proliferation of said weapons. This is the case in the ongoing campaign of half-truths and threats against Teheran’s nuclear power endeavors. In the 1990s, northern Korea went along with the program to end its nuclear weapons development with an understanding that the US and other nations would help them develop power that could not be converted into weapons. Washington failed to uphold its end of the bargain under Clinton and Bush put the nation into Washington’s axis of evil. Now, Pyongyang is testing the right wing government in Seoul while keeping DC at a distance. The hypocrisy of this policy against WMD is laid bare by the complete and total refusal of Washington to address either the US or Israel’s nuclear weapons program at all.

The immigration battle. US capitalism requires cheap labor. An economy that exists because of its early dependence on slavery can not readily give up labor that comes cheap. Since the end of slavery, immigrants have historically filled the lowest positions in the labor pool. They have also been subject to some of the worst violations of their rights since the time of slaves. Indeed, today a whole system of prisons exist solely to lock up immigrants primarily because they are essentially excess labor. As prisoners, they prop up another domestic part of the Empire: the prison system.

I am of the opinion, like many other folks, that prisons are the present day embodiment of the system of chattel slavery. An unneeded and unwanted part of the population is put in chains and forced to work for meals and a minimal stipend, oftentimes because they have been convicted of a crime that was written with their demographic in mind. Do the differences between the original penalties for crack cocaine and its powdered version ring any bells? The other aspect to this labor arrangement is that it is the taxpayers who make up the difference. Yes, even when the prisons are privately owned (a situation that creates another form of injustice), the taxpayers pay through the nose even while the owners make a profit.

There’s an argument that says the State needs enemies to justify its existence and, if it doesn’t have nay, it will create them. The preceding list is a clear indication of that as far as the United States is concerned.

On March 31, a 12-person jury with one Black member convicted Wallace of three counts of distribution of a controlled substance. At her June 1 sentencing, Wallace received 5 years for each count, to be served consecutively. Even in Louisiana, the incarceration capital of the US, fifteen years for a first offense is somewhat exceptional, as is the stacking of consecutive sentences. “I’ve never seen a judge run anything consecutive, certainly not for drugs or a first offender,” says Miles Swanson, an attorney in private practice who used to work for the public defenders office in Orleans Parish. “In New Orleans, a case like this probably wouldn’t even go to trial – they’d likely get offered probation.”

However, vast discrepancies exist across parishes. For example, an Orleans Parish man recently received probation for selling pot. Then, when arrested for the same offense a few miles away in St. Tammany Parish, he was sentenced to life in prison.

“Unfortunately, I’m not shocked by the sentence,” commented Jasmine Tyler, deputy director of national affairs for the Drug Policy Alliance. “We used to use prisons for the people who really caused problems, and made us concerned about public safety. Now we use them for the people we’re mad at.”

• For background on this story, see this previous coverage.

Steven A. Barnes, Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Art History at Virginia’s George Mason University is the researcher and the book is The Gulag’s Foundation in Kazakhstan.

Wisely, Barnes has moved his book into public think tanks, such as the Woodrow Wilson Center, so its contents won’t become dusty on University book shelves. His revelations challenge accepted dogma, his research combats propaganda, and his history illuminates a black time. A closed record opens to more inspection.

Note: The following is this reporter’s record of Steven Barnes’ talk at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, Washington DC., May 19, 2011, Death and Redemption: The Shaping of the Gulag System and Soviet Society.

The camps were not conceived as producers of death. All types of prisoners, politically incorrect, socially unfit and criminally attached mixed in the same camps. The criminal elements developed their own sub-culture.

Barnes research shows 18 million prisoners passed through the GULag, with 5.2 million incarcerated at its peak. However, the camps weren’t designed to kill or destroy; they were the last opportunity for the ‘enemies of the state’ to become rehabilitated. About 20 percent of the prisoners returned home each year, with releases reaching 0.5 million in some years. Although high, the total of those who died is far below estimates; Barnes statistics show about 1.6 million died in the principal thirty years of camp existences. Rather than being just ‘work to death’ penal institutions, the camps had cultural activities, correction programs and their own economic organization. Prisoners shaped their own society.

The Soviets believed their society was moving the world to the end of history. Similar to the German dictum “Arbeit Macht Frei’ (Work Makes Free), Soviet vision equated strong labor with ultimate freedom. The camps were one of many historical responses to the nation’s conditions, to the need to industrialize a rural population, to destroy opposition which prevented the forward march, and to remove those who blocked the vision of struggle and suffering.

Meticulous files were actually kept on each prisoner and these files were periodically reviewed to ascertain who had repented and could be released. In effect, the prisoner guided his/her own destiny. Work would either reshape the individual or prove the individual’s incapability to assume a proper place in society. Life is a battle against nature, and only those who cooperate and fight valiantly in the battle will survive.

Barnes’ own words tell the more complete story.

The most salient feature of the Gulag was an apparent paradox: forced labor, high death rates and an oppressive atmosphere of violence, cold and constant hunger coexisted with camp newspapers and cultural activities, a constant propaganda barrage of correction and reeducation and the steady release of a significant portion of the prisoner population.

The Bolsheviks could not escape their fundamental belief in the malleability of the human soul and they believed that labor was the key to reforging criminals. The very harshness of the Gulag was seen as necessary to break down a prisoner’s resistance in order to rebuild him or her into a proper Soviet citizen. If a prisoner refused correction, the brutality of the Gulag would lead to inevitable death, for the Bolsheviks were no humanitarians. If mistakes were to be made, they believed it was better to kill too many than too few.

Steven Barnes has made a major contribution to the historical record. By careful research and analysis, he has supplied us with new knowledge and the recognition that events are not simplistic recordings to be explained by unqualified statements. He has shown that the Soviet labor camps had a deep meaning, one requiring in-depth thought and analysis. Hopefully other intrepid and skillful researchers will reveal details in other historical events that have been hidden by media control, demagoguery, propaganda and unwillingness to combat accepted knowledge.

One cannot for an instant begin to presume Bradley Manning was in one breath the sage and the next the fool. It would be equally ludicrous to believe he was somehow unaware of the import of the information he was about to make public. One cannot suppose he was naively ignorant of the possible “official” responses to his actions within what all know to be the totalitarian environment of military service. This is especially the case for those who actually reside within the system of of the “armed forces.” Those who preside over this system consistently and persistently make it clear, there is a hierarchy of rule and order. It is the incessant mantra of the day. Only the village idiot could miss the ever present message of action and consequence.

Bradley Manning chose to act, while an active duty member of the “volunteer” Army, outside the safe boundaries of logic and rationality. Mr. Manning’s actions were those which we, his fellow humans, would hope to be the actions of the majority of our species as well. Mechanistic responses of logic and rationality gave way to human emotion and compassion. The consequence of this human action within its context, was easily predictable.

It would then seem that the subject, which has been taken to task by progressives, could not possibly be that of existential accountability. It would appear instead that liberal sensibilities are outraged in response to the “inhumane” treatment of Bradley Manning, received at the hands of those who literally (and “legally” for whatever it is worth) hold him captive. The absence of a higher moral code of human behavior among his captors seems more a matter of concern among many of those who classify themselves as liberals than the self initiated acts of conscience and free will which led to his incarceration. It is at this juncture that the entire issue becomes problematic for me.

In general humans crave attention for actions they have taken in the public sector. When our thoughts or behaviors are adjudged to be “good” we gladly bask in the limelight of adulation. Conversely when our actions are viewed less favorably we hurriedly seek circumstances outside ourselves upon which to place accountability. In the case of Bradley Manning, we have elected to direct our public outrage toward the military subculture and the soldiers who find themselves to be elements within it. We ask of them and ourselves, “How can they not only allow but participate in such blatant disregard for the basic human rights of another human being?”

Raising the issue of moral or humanitarian behaviors within the context of a social instrument (the Military) designed and specifically tasked with penultimate antisocial and inhumane objectives (i.e. those of the coercion and/or killing of state sanctioned “enemies”) is either quintessential hypocrisy or madness. The military culture is not a spontaneous event. It is a social construct evolved and developed over the course of our human history and arising from the primal desire of our species to survive. The military, at this juncture in its evolution, is an end game. Military objectives at the level of the individual soldier are not directed at middle ground or compromise. Objectives are very simple: win or lose, live or die. This is pointedly reflected in a variety of boot camp indoctrinations engineered to aid in the transition of the individual from civilian to soldier. I can still hear the voice of my own Marine Corps drill instructor during our bayonet training, “Slide the leading foot forward (accompanied by a jabbing motion with my bayonet ensconced rifle) Kill !!! Kill !!! Kill !!!” Duly note the D.I.’s instructions were not to wound, disable, frighten nor incapacitate. Not surprisingly, the concept at work here was not that of scaring an enemy into submission but rather that of conditioning the soon to be soldier to the unconventional task of killing or risk being killed.

Under the Geneva Conventions, “protected persons” are identified as: wounded or sick fighters, prisoners of war, civilians, medical and religious personnel. As such:

Protected persons are entitled, in all circumstances, to respect for their persons, their honor, their family rights, their religious convictions and practices, and their manners and customs. They shall, at all times, be humanely treated, and shall be protected, especially against all acts of violence or threats thereof and against insults and public curiosity.

This can be contrasted with the United States’ military mission as quoted from the USMC Warfighting Manual regarding the wartime mission of the Marine Corps:

The object in war is to impose our will on our enemy. The means to this end is the organized application or threat of violence by military force. The target of that violence may be limited to hostile combatant forces, or it may extend to the enemy population at large.

Stop here for a moment and attempt to juxtapose the concept of “the organized application or threat of violence by military force” with that of “respect for their persons, their honor, family rights, religious convictions /practices, and their manners and customs.” Not only is this task difficult, but I would guess nearly impossible. Try as one may, these two antithetical conceptual models of behavior do not reside well within the same framework.

The difficulty arises in part from the fact that each is a dichotomous aspect of situational ethics. The military construct is obviously a product of our most primitive primal drive toward survival, (kill or be killed, survival of the fittest) and is common among most species. It has presumably been with us since our inception and has been integral in our ongoing existence in an environment which is becoming increasingly hostile and aggressive. (The latter being a “natural” consequence, from the Dark Ages to the present, of increasing numbers of consumers competing for proportionally decreasing resources.)

The other is a by-product of ourselves in our role as “clever monkey’s.” Based upon little more than evolved survival skills and a self-proclaimed presumption of hierarchical superiority, we preside over all that we purvey. It is the process by which we attempt to demonstrate through “intellect” and/or “Divine right” arguments those justifications which support our reversals and contradictions in ethical and moral behaviors. We are intellectual, we are spiritual, we are evolved; we are the (co)creators of ourselves and our beliefs. That being said, are we not the creators of our humane/inhumane dichotomy as well?

The antagonist of this current morality play is the Military/Industrial paradigm, a construct to which we provide 54% of our national budget. The individual soldiers, several of whom serve in the capacity of “guards” for Mr. Manning were provided the highest and most advanced training available to perform the jobs we require of them at an average cost to the taxpayer of $400,000.00 per soldier. In his book, On Killing, Lt. Colonel David Grossman indicates that much psychological work has been done to enhance the training and ultimately the efficiency of our soldiers in the performance their roles. As the title of the book implies and the statistical data provided supports, we have become extremely skilled at the task of killing our own to survive. For the average U.S. citizen, the relative success of our investment in those who serve in our national defense can be somewhat attested to by the infrequency of “violence or threats of violence by military force” implemented by foreign armies, occurring within our own National boundaries.

How our “security,” (from the level of the individual to the more global scale of protecting the resources of the larger society overall) is achieved, and at what human cost, is something of which “civilized” societies prefer not to be aware. To this end the military is, for the most part, allowed autonomous self governance regarding the attainment of their objectives. By contemporary example one need look only at the torture which has taken place at Guantanamo Bay or Bagram Airbase, the more recent state sanctioned assassinations of Saddam Hussein or Osama Bin Laden, or the ongoing daily predator airstrikes which have killing hundreds of innocent civilians through out the Middle East. Examples of our most negative human potentials are running rampant. On a Likert scale where 1 is the most primal and savage of responses and 10 the most humanistic utopian ideal, successful military operations in the field would depend upon actions far closer to one than ten.

The morality of torture, murder and assassination is not situational. If these actions are wrong for the individual members of a society or are to be used as the criteria by which we adjudge a societies’ enemies, then this is a standard we must apply to ourselves as well. If we are to exempt a subculture within our society (the Military) from the cultural mores which we claim define us, then we must also waive our right to criticism and judgement of their actions. It is far too convenient and hypocritical to lay blame and responsibility for that which we as a society have condoned upon those (the individual soldiers) who have the least ability or access to power to resist what we ask of them. If we continue to allow our military to engage in acts of aggression such as assassinations and military occupations of other sovereign nations without even so much as a Declaration of War, or if by our silence we are complicit in their behaviors, then we must bear equal or greater responsibility for these actions as well.

The Indochinese died before their time in far greater number (to say the least) than the American invaders. The Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations killed at least 3 million in Vietnam, Laos , and Cambodia. Much of Vietnam and its not-so sovereign neighboring territory were bombed and burned “back to the stone age” by the American “liberators.”

“War” is a curious term for such one-sided imperial slaughter, which turned Vietnam into a lethal “basket case” (the Pentagon’s own language) while many Americans enjoyed lives of historically unprecedented mass affluence in relative freedom at home.

Not long after the full and direct attack receded, the Christian U.S. president Jimmy Carter proclaimed at a news conference that we owed no debt to Vietnam because “the destruction was mutual.” It was a remarkable comment, thoroughly uncontroversial in the dominant U.S. political and media culture, which renders invisible and officially unworthy the victims of American and U.S.-allied violence. The 3 million prematurely dead Indochinese met their demise on the wrong side of the imperial guns and the wrong side of the imperial cameras. They did not and do not officially exist or matter according to the Orwellian rules of the dominant national and mass media culture.

Flash forward to the aftermath of the death of the former U.S. Cold War terror tool Osama bin Laden. Over the last two days, we have been fed images of al Qaeda’s criminal act of 9/11/2001, when bin Laden’s extremist warriors killed 3000 Americans on U.S. soil. The wounds of what the evil others from the Middle East did to us have been re-opened for public viewing like no time in recent years. There’s nothing said in the dominant mass media and politics culture about the vastly larger number of Arabs and Muslim killed on their soil by the U.S. and its aliens and clients (including the CIA-backed Osama back in the 1980s) before and since 9/11.

Last Monday night on the “Public” Broadcasting System’s News Hour, Madeline Albright applauded the death of a terrorist who had “killed not only Americans but a lot of other people.” The end of the already irrelevant criminal bin Laden should occasion no tears, of course, but a reasonably civilized culture would be more than a little skeptical about righteous expressions of concern for innocent victims from a woman who as Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State said the following on national television about the killing of more than half a million Iraqi children by U.S.-led economic sanctions: “this is a very hard choice, but the price – we think the price is worth it.” The standard statistic for the number of Iraqis killed by the sanctions (1991-2003) is 1 million, considerably more than the 3000 Americans who died in September of 2001. Never mind: the Iraqis died on the wrong side of the imperial culture and are thus invisible. Along with other and related aspects of U.S. policy in the Middle East (chiefly America’s sponsorship and protection of Israeli oppression and bloody dictatorships across the region’s arc of U.S.-backed despotism), those officially unworthy casualties were part of why a major Islamo-terrorist attack on the U.S. seemed likely well before 2001. The Islamist “blowback” (a CIA term that the left author Chalmers Johnson turned into a book title and prediction in 2000) was all too predictable.

Also unsurprising was Washington ’s exploitation of the predicted “blowback” as a pretext to launch an ambitious military campaign in the oil-rich Middle East and particularly in Iraq (second only to Saudi Arabia in petroleum reserves). The morning the Twin Towers fell in lower Manhattan, I sat mesmerized in front of my television, thinking that a large number of innocent people would be losing their lives in the Arab and Muslim worlds at the hands of a vengeful Empire (an empire that no longer seemed to face any relevant deterrent on the global scale) in coming months and years. I had no idea how big the body count would be. The brilliant British Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk estimates “up to half a million Muslims dead in Iraq and Afghanistan ” thanks to U.S. wars since 9/11. It’s a reasonable guess. Many, perhaps most of that half million have died indirectly, through health problems created by the American invasions’ terrible impact on daily life. But many –far more than the American death count of 9/11 – have been directly slaughtered by U.S. forces, both uniformed and contracted-out.

The American petro-imperial revenge machine reached its mass-murderous apex, perhaps, in the Iraqi city of Fallujah in April of 2004. That’s when the Marines responded to the killing of four Blackwater mercenaries with a quasi-genocidal assault that included the criminal bombing (including hyper-lethal cluster-bombing), mortaring, napalming, gassing, and shooting of civilians, the destruction of hospitals and clinics, and the targeting of ambulances. U.S. snipers boasted of killing anyone they could get in their sites and U.S. soldiers tossed grenades into civilian homes. The assault considerably out-did al Qaeda’s 9/11 death count. An American video game (“Fallujah – Operation al-Fajr”) was subsequently released to celebrate and profit from the Fallujah slaughter. The game’s players join U.S. Marines and Army soldiers in their attack on the Jolan district in Fallujah. Kuma Reality Games used detailed satellite imagery of Jolan in making the popular game. Publicity material for the game enticed purchasers with the opportunity to “dodge sniper fire and protect civilians.”

Along the way we have seen well-documented mass torture and rape in the imperial American charnel houses of Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and Bagram Air Force Base, not to mention the capture and sending of often innocent accused terrorists to torture chambers in Egypt and other U.S.-allied states.

U.S. military personnel have routinely and preposterously justified disgraceful actions in the Middle East and Southwest Asia as “revenge for 9/11” – a frequent motivational theme in the preparation of U.S. troops to kill “Hajis” during the basic training that precedes deployment in Iraq and Afghanistan. American troops, officers, intelligence operatives, and pilots have been conditioned to take out their hatred for Osama bin Laden on innocent men, women, and children in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Ethiopia .

The indiscriminate killing of civilians in the name of 9/11 retribution has continued into the age of Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama, who refused to apologize for the deadly bombing of dozens of women and children in the Afghan village of Bola Boluk even as he offered a formal apology to New Yorkers for an ill-advised Air Force One flyover that reminded some city residents of 9/11.

It is well understood in elite circles that the lethal, mass-murderous (dare we say “monstrous”?) U.S response to 9/11 has increased the Islamist terror threat to Americans and others by deepening the Arab and Muslim worlds’ alienation from the U.S. and the West. The Wall Street Journal reported last Monday that Al Qaeda had 200 members on the eve of 9/11. Today the group is larger and “more far-reaching than before the U.S. sought to take it down.” Independent offshoots have emerged in Yemen , Somalia and elsewhere. “New terrorist leaders,” New York Times columnist Joe Nocera writes, “include Nasir al-Wahishi, who leads Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born cleric who has been involved in several terrorist plots, including the attempt to blow up a plane on Christmas Day in 2009.”

This makes perfect sense in light of U.S. Middle East policy, which continues under Obama to rest on alliance with military despotism and Israel and on the related threat and use of direct military force. The increase of the terror threat by the U.S. “war on terror” (now speaking of its greatest victory) might seem paradoxical and dysfunctional from America’s perspective but it keeps alive the threat of future Islamist attacks that can be used again to fuel and the military-media industrial complex’s seemingly insatiable thirst for the profits and diversions of endless war.

The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man…

– Huey Newton

For as long as I can remember, Baltimore has had the reputation as a corrupt and tough town. City Hall is known as a cashbox for the thieves that run it. The cops are no-nonsense and care little about the Bill of Rights, especially when dealing with the city’s poor and non-white residents. Neighborhoods are closed societies that one is hesitant to walk through unless he is a resident. The demarcations between the wealthy and poorer neighborhoods are enforced, often quite forcefully, by the police. When I worked at an IHOP in the mid-1970s about twenty miles outside of Baltimore I would occasionally end up in a certain after hours club in one of the city’s rougher sections. I was often the only white male in the room, although there were often several white women. The guys I was hanging with made sure that nobody screwed with me, but my safety (or anyone else’s) was never guaranteed. There was a fellow I drank with there who I used to talk politics with. He claimed to be a former member of the Baltimore Black Panthers and talked a lot about Panther member Marshall Eddie Conway, who had been in prison since 1970 on a very questionable conviction.

It was with this memory in mind that I recently read Marshall Law: The Life and Times of a Baltimore Black Panther. This memoir describes Conway’s early life in Baltimore, his introduction to the Black Panthers, his eventual arrest and conviction for murder, and his life in prison since then. The details of the case, like so many cases against Black Panthers, are sketchy and based on the testimony of an informant who was only brought in when the prosecutor saw how weak the case against Conway was. In fact, Conway’s arrest was the result of a tip from an informant who was never identified and whose existence has never been verified. At the time of his arrest Conway was working at the US Post Office. The Baltimore chapter of the Panthers had already been the target of intense law enforcement surveillance and infiltration under the aegis of the COINTELPRO program. A show trial based on the indictments drawn up from this surveillance resulted in no convictions and the dismissal of the charges. During Conway’s trial for murder, no physical evidence was ever presented that linked him to the crime scene. Police officers at the scene could not positively identify Conway and he was denied representation by a lawyer of his choice. The prosecution relied primarily on a supposed jailhouse confession that Conway claims did not occur. He maintains his innocence to this day.

There is another aspect to this story. It is Conway’s commitment to revolutionary struggle, self improvement and the betterment of others whose lives and circumstances have brought them to prison. Unlike so many Americans, Conway has always opposed drugs, in large part because they destroy communities and lives. His politics have enabled him to stay free of drugs and the associated business. This story of a young black man railroaded into prison because of his race and politics does not end with that sentence. The reader is presented with Conway’s life inside the Maryland prison system. Lockdowns, fires, riots and the daily grind of so much of one’s physical activity being controlled by others. While reading Marshall Law I was constantly reminded of Bob Dylan’s lines from the ballad “George Jackson”: “Sometimes I think that this world/Is one big prison yard./Some of us are prisoners and some of us are guards.” As Conway learned and explains through his tale, freedom is not only a physical concept but also an existential state.

In prose both concise and personal, Eddie Conway’s memoir is essentially a story about hope. Here is a man who has been in prison for forty years for a crime many people are convinced he did not commit, yet he maintains a realistic optimism in his situation and that of the world. The hope he maintains is not one based on some pie-in-the-sky scheme. Instead, it is based on a practical understanding of the merits and rewards of political organizing. As Conway tells the reader, those merits are not only seen in the programs and other results brought to life by political organizing, they are also seen in the personal meaning they give to those doing the organizing. From the Black Panthers community breakfast programs he was involved in to the various programs he helped organize in the Maryland prison system, Conway proves the values of organizing again and again.

Marshall Eddie Conway remains in prison. His case is one of many that is supported by a number of prisoner support organizations including the Jericho Movement. Many of the prisoners involved are considered political prisoners since the circumstances of their arrests and convictions are the result of their political activities. Indeed, some are clearly the result of frameups by law enforcement. Most of these prisoners have spent considerably more time in prison than other men and women serving time for similar crimes but not known for their political convictions. It is clear from reading Marshall Law: The Life and Times of a Baltimore Black Panther that should he achieve his freedom, he will not compromise his beliefs to do so. This may be why he remains locked up.

The findings of this study demonstrate that allegations by these nine detainees of torture were corroborated by forensic evaluations by non-governmental medical experts and that DoD medical and mental health providers at GTMO failed to document physical and/or psychological evidence of intentional harm.

In each case we reviewed, detainees alleged forms of abuse that are highly consistent with torture as defined by the UN Convention Against Torture as well as the more restrictive US definition of torture that was operational at the time [12]. In one case, unclassified interrogation plans and interrogation summaries provided precise corroboration of the methods of torture and ill treatment that the detainee alleged.

….

The medical evaluations in this case series revealed evidence of severe physical and severe and prolonged psychological pain as stipulated in the Bybee definition of torture. But, according to the Bybee definition of torture, even if the requisite pain thresholds had been exceeded, the infliction of such pain had to be the interrogator’s “precise objective” to constitute torture.

….

The medical doctors and mental health personnel who treated the detainees at GTMO failed to inquire and/or document causes of the physical injuries and psychological symptoms they observed. Psychological symptoms were commonly attributed to “personality disorders” and “routine stressors of confinement.” Temporary psychotic symptoms and hallucinations did not prompt consideration of abusive treatment.

The documentation of torture and ill treatment in medicolegal evaluations conducted by non-governmental medical experts indicates that each of the detainees continues to experience severe, long-term and debilitating psychological symptoms that are likely to persist for many years, and possibly a lifetime.

The Defense Department has issued a response to Iacopino and Xenakis which, in its failure to even mention their main charges can be taken as an official confirmation that Guantanamo health professionals do no investigate or document the terrible abuses suffered by many prisoners there:

DoD personnel working in detention facilities operate under a high level of scrutiny and consistently provide the most humane and safe care and custody of individuals under their control. The Joint Medical Group is committed to providing unconditional appropriate comprehensive medical care to all detainees regardless of their disciplinary status, cooperation, or participation in a hunger strike. The healthcare provided to the detainees being held at Guantanamo Bay rivals that provided in any community in the United States. Detainees receive timely, compassionate, quality healthcare and have regular access to primary care and specialist physicians. The care provided to detainees is comparable to that afforded our active duty service members. All medical procedures performed are justified and meet accepted standards of care. A detainee is provided medical care and treatment based solely on his need for such care and the level and type of treatment is dependent on the accepted medical standard of care for the condition being treated. Diagnosis of such conditions and medical care and treatment for them are not affected in any way by a detainee’s cooperation, or lack thereof, during an interrogation session. Similarly, medical care is not provided or withheld based on a detainee’s compliance or noncompliance with detention camp rules or on his refusal to end a hunger strike. Medical decisions and treatment are not withheld as a form of punishment. Additionally, the medical staff has no involvement in discipline decisions made by detention personnel.

This DoD reesponse also neatly elides the Iacopino and Xenakis claims in another way in that it is written in the present tense and thus only applies to current practices. Yet Iacopino and Xenakis, by their methodology of examining medical records, are talking about past practices. The DoD “response” makes no claims whatsoever recording the appropriateness of past practices. It thus seems likely that some of those practices were indefensible, even by Defense Department spokespeople not usually noted for their truthfulness.

The Iacopino and Xenakis findings are entirely consistent with my experience reading medical files on one Guantanamo prisoner on whom I consulted. Despite claims that he had been subjected to abuse, and mental health symptoms consistent with abuse, there was no indication in the hundreds of pages I read that any health professional had made any attempt to find out if he had been abused or to document possible abuse. Rather, the mental heath staff seemed only interested in whether the prisoner might make a suicide attempt. Beyond that, his obvious anguish appeared to be of no interest to the psychologists and other mental health staff.

Further, the Guantanamo medical unit and the Obama Justice Department fought tooth and nail to prevent any independent examination of these records, much less of the prisoner himself. The prisoner’s attorneys requested, and the habeas judge ordered, that the records be made available for examination by an independent psychologist, me, to determine if there was a possibility that mental health issues might interfere with the prisoner’s ability to cooperate with his attorneys. The Guantanamo medical staff filed a declaration denying any need for independent evaluation. And the Justice Department appealed every step. First they opposed any access to records as too burdensome. Then they appealed access to more than the past few month’s records. They appeared to objected to any scrutiny on principle, which in itself in a sign of inadequate transparency at Guantanamo and is the exact opposite of what should occur in an institution run by a democratic government. We cannot take the word of officials at an institution absent meaningful independent scrutiny that abuses and ethical lapses were, or are, absent.

The Iacopino and Xenakis paper contributes to existing evidence, including the questionable use of anti-malarial drugs, that Guantanamo healthcare was often problematic and deserves independent scrutiny. While the Bush and Obama administrations have made every effort to keep those records secret, health professionals should challenge that secrecy. We should demand that Guantanamo medical records be opened, with prisoner consent, to independent inspection. Further, all detainees desiring it should be able to receive independent medical evaluations.

Additionally, independent of the issues of possible abuse, the complete medical records of released prisoners should be made available to those prisoners and/or their current health providers. To suppress medical records for years of a person’s life is unethical as it interferes with released individuals’ ability to obtain required care in the present and the future. Health professionals from all disciplines should make clear that denial of access to their records by released prisoners is in simply unacceptable.