"Attica, Attica, Attica"

Closing the Revolving Door

2007-01-25T18:23:00.000-08:00

The United States is paying a heavy price for the mandatory sentencing fad that swept the country 30 years ago. After a tenfold increase in the nation’s prison population — and a corrections price tag that exceeds $60 billion a year — the states have often been forced to choose between building new prisons or new schools. Worse still, the country has created a growing felon caste, now more than 16 million strong, of felons and ex-felons, who are often driven back to prison by policies that make it impossible for them to find jobs, housing or education.

Congress could begin to address this problem by passing the Second Chance Act, which would offer support services for people who are leaving prison. But it would take more than one new law to undo 30 years of damage:

¶Researchers have shown that inmates who earn college degrees tend to find jobs and stay out of jail once released. Congress needs to revoke laws that bar inmates from receiving Pell grants and that bar some students with drug convictions from getting other support. Following Washington’s lead, the states have destroyed prison education programs that had long since proved their worth.

¶People who leave prison without jobs or places to live are unlikely to stay out of jail. Congress should repeal the lifetime ban on providing temporary welfare benefits to people with felony drug convictions. The federal government should strengthen tax credit and bonding programs that encourage employers to hire people with criminal records. States need to stop barring ex-offenders from jobs because of unrelated crimes — or arrests in the distant past that never led to convictions.

¶Congress should deny a request from the F.B.I. to begin including juvenile arrests that never led to convictions (and offenses like drunkenness or vagrancy) in the millions of rap sheets sent to employers. That would transform single indiscretions into lifetime stigmas.

¶Curbing recidivism will also require doing a lot more to provide help and medication for the one out of every six inmates who suffer mental illness.

The only real way to reduce the inmate population — and the felon class — is to ensure that imprisonment is a method of last resort. That means abandoning the mandatory sentencing laws that have filled prisons to bursting with nonviolent offenders who are doomed to remain trapped at the very margins of society.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/25/opinion/25thu3.html?th&emc=th

Hearsay, Coerced Testimony Allowed in Prosecutions

2007-01-19T04:49:00.000-08:00

Manual Gives Wide Leeway for Detainee Trials

The Defense Department has drafted a manual for trying detainees at the Guantanamo, Cuba, jail that would allow terror suspects to be imprisoned, convicted and executed on the basis of hearsay evidence or coerced testimony.

According to a copy of the manual obtained by The Associated Press, a terror suspect's defense lawyer cannot reveal classified evidence in their defense until the government has had a chance to review it.

The manual , sent to Congress on Thursday and scheduled to be released later by the Pentagon, is intended to track a law passed last fall in which lawmakers restored President George W. Bush 's plans to have special military commissions try terror suspects. Those commissions had been struck down earlier in the year by the Supreme Court .

The Pentagon manual could spark a fresh confrontation between the Bush administration and Congress, now led by Democrats, over the treatment of terror suspects.

Last September, Congress, then led by Republicans, sent Bush a bill granting wide latitude in interrogation and detention of alleged enemy combatants. The legislation also prohibited abuses such as mutilation and rape but granted the president leeway to decide which other interrogation techniques are permissible.

Passage of the bill, which was backed by the White House, followed more than three months of debate that included angry rebukes by Democrats of the administration's interrogation policies and a short-lived rebellion by some Republican senators.

The Detainee Treatment Act, separate legislation championed in 2005 by Republican Sen. John McCain , prohibited the use of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of prisoners held by either the military or the CIA. It was approved overwhelmingly by Congress despite a veto threat by Bush, who eventually signed it into law.

The Pentagon manual is aimed at ensuring that enemy combatants, the Bush administration's term for many of the terror suspects held at Guantanamo, "are prosecuted before regularly constituted courts affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized by civilized people," according to the document.

As required by law, the manual prohibits statements obtained by torture and "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" as prohibited by the Constitution.

However, the law does allow statements obtained through coercive interrogation techniques if obtained before Dec. 30, 2005, and deemed reliable by a judge.

Almost 400 detainees suspected of having links to the al-Qaida network or the Taliban militia that once ruled Afghanistan still are held at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo, which former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said was built to hold "the worst of the worst" terrorists; about 380 have been transferred or released. The Defense Department currently is planning trials for at least 10 suspects.

Democrats have said they would like to reconsider detainee legislation to deal with the possibility that the bill gives the president too much latitude to interpret standards set by the Geneva Conventions on prisoner treatment. They say the current law might deny detainees legal rights.

Democratic Rep. Ike Skelton, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said he planned to scrutinize the manual to ensure that it does not "run afoul" of the Constitution.

"I have not yet seen evidence that the process by which these rules were built or their substance addresses all the questions left open by the legislation. This committee will fulfill its oversight responsibility to make sure this is the case," Skelton said in a written statement.

Republican Sen. Arlen Specter and some Democrats have said the legislation will be shot down by the courts as unconstitutional because it bars detainees from protesting their detentions. Under the law, only individuals selected for military trial are given access to a lawyer and judge; other military detainees can be held until hostilities cease.

WASHINGTON (Jan. 18)
By ANNE FLAHERTY
AP

http://news.aol.com/topnews/articles/_a/manual-gives-wide-leeway-for-detainee/20070118133309990001?ncid=NWS00010000000001

Tasers Under Fire After Police Kill 2

2007-01-13T15:50:00.000-08:00

NEW YORK, Jan 13 (OneWorld) - The launch of a new electroshock device to be sold to the public--just days after two men were killed by police officers using similar products--has brought new calls for a moratorium on the sale and use of such instruments.

The new Taser C2 looks like a high-tech personal shaver and comes in several colors like an iPod--including electric blue. And it's designed to fit in a purse, to bring law-enforcement technology to consumers.

But that is precisely what worries groups like Amnesty International, which has renewed its call to suspend the use of Tasers by law enforcement--and the untrained public--until there are further independent studies of their safety.

On Tuesday, a police officer in Wilson, North Carolina, used a Taser on a 15-year-old high school student to break up a fight. The student was not injured, according to news reports. But last weekend, two men died in separate incidents after receiving Taser shocks by police.

"This is not a weapon to have on the streets," says Delia Hashad, director of the USA Program for Amnesty International, who notes that outside the United States and the UK, the single largest use of Tasers is for torture.

"People are led to believe that you take it out when you want to disable someone, and it's a good quick, harmless method," says Hashad. "But we still don't have independent comprehensive medical research on what a Taser weapon does to the human body."

Tasers fire "darts" connected to the device that send an electrical current through the area between the darts, temporarily paralyzing the muscles. In most cases, the action results in minor injuries, if any, such as cuts or bruises.

But Amnesty International USA is tracking what it says is a growing number of post-Taser deaths. News and police reports indicate there have been over 220 such deaths since July 2001, according to Hashad, who calls that a conservative figure.

Steve Tuttle of Taser International disputes this number. "We have been cleared in over 90 percent of the cases they [Amnesty International] refer to, and some are still pending."

Tuttle cites the company's numerous studies and feedback from police departments--Phoenix, Arizona and Orange County, Florida, to name two--showing Tasers have significantly decreased police shootings and injuries to officers and civilians alike.

But Amnesty International's Hashad is not convinced. "We're not saying it has not saved lives. What we're saying is that this weapon hasn't been adequately tested, and doesn't seem to be operating as the manufacturer claims it is."

There is some indication that people with very low body mass, certain mental illnesses, or pre-existing heart conditions--and those on certain prescription or illegal drugs--may react differently to Taser shocks.

Lorie Fridell, associate professor of Criminology at the University of South Florida, has studied police use of Tasers. "We try to identify which of the in-custody deaths occurred because of the Taser specifically, [but] we don't have all the information we need to identify those," she says.

Much of the existing research on Taser safety has focused on a "standard activation"--50,000 volts, 0.07 joules administered for five seconds. (By way of comparison: a cardiac defibrillator operates at about 360 joules per pulse, says Steve Tuttle of Taser International.)

This single, quick jolt may not reflect real-world use, where tense situations often lead to repeated activations or longer durations.

In addition, some of the studies--including a recent University of Wisconsin study funded by the Department of Justice--have been criticized for their connections to the manufacturer.

"The overwhelming majority of people who are Tased are fine. There is some group that we can't measure that are not fine," Fridell says. "The legitimate question is, will getting rid of Tasers save lives or cause more lives to be lost? I truly believe Tasers save lives."

Instead, Fridell says, police departments should establish stronger policies and more consistent training for officers on the appropriate use of Tasers.

Melanie Trimble, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, Capital Region Chapter, agrees. She worries that the prevailing sense that Tasers are harmless may lead to misuse and abuse--particularly when the person on the other end of the dart is younger than 17, pregnant, or under the influence of drugs.

"Their behavior has to be significant and imminently dangerous to themselves or others before police ought to use Tasers," says Trimble.

There are no national standards for training; each police agency defines its own training requirements in accordance with the laws in that state.

As a result, police officers are instructed to use Tasers in different situations in different locales. Some agencies, like the Wilson, North Carolina police department that used the device on the 15-year-old student, call it a "low use of force"; others reserve it for more serious situations.

"Hopefully, the police department will put together their own format to make it their own, but for the most part the training is still being given by a representative from Taser," says Albert Arena, project manager in the Research Center Directorate at the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP). The association is among those that have issued training and use guidelines for departments.

Some states, like Florida, are beginning to address legislation of standards for procedures and training.

More concrete information on the safety of Tasers may also be on the horizon. A National Institute of Justice study is reviewing some 100 deaths after Taser use--including cases where medical examiners ruled that the Taser was not the cause of death. Preliminary results are expected in October.

"People don't think of America as a place where we put these types of weapons in the hands of police officers before we figure out what they do," says Amnesty International's Hashad. "Right now we're just learning from the news reports of deaths--and that doesn't make any sense."

Caitlin G. Johnson
OneWorld US
Sat., Jan. 13, 2007

http://us.oneworld.net/article/view/144906/1/

Related links

Amnesty International's Concerns About Taser Use
http://www.amnestyusa.org/countries/usa/document.do?id=ENGUSA20060328001

Police Brutality Caught on Video (American Friends Service Committee)
http://www.afsc.org/community/vision/april_2003/beyond_rodney_king.htm

Why You Should Care About the U.S. Criminal Justice System (CivilRights.org)
http://www.civilrights.org/issues/cj/care.html

Democrats May Rush To Shutter War Prisons

2007-01-13T15:40:00.000-08:00

Party Leaders Say They'll Cut Funding

WASHINGTON -- House Democratic leaders yesterday outlined plans to try to force the Bush administration to close the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the Guantanamo Bay detention facility in Cuba, taking aim at two sites that have sparked an international furor over the Bush administration's war policy.

Representative John P. Murtha, the chairman of the powerful Defense Appropriations subcommittee and a close ally of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, said he wants to close both prisons by cutting their funding, "to restore our credibility worldwide." If he succeeds, it would force the administration to find a new location for high-value terrorism suspects.

"We have the role, as elected officials, to exert our influence through the power of the purse -- that's what it's all about," said Murtha, a Pennsylvania Democrat whose committee will hold hearings on Iraq next week. "We try not to micromanage the Defense Department, but I tell you, they need micromanagement. They're out of control."

The effort to close the prisons, which Murtha said Pelosi supports, illustrates how congressional Democrats are confronting the president over his war policies. The aggressive push to change the war's course has intensified after the president's address Wednesday night in which he announced plans to send an additional 21,500 troops to Iraq.

Democratic leaders will try to include the measure to close the prisons in a spending bill designed to pay for war operations, Murtha said. He acknowledged that closing Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo would be more symbolic than substantive. Abu Ghraib gained international infamy in 2004 after pictures emerged of US soldiers torturing and sexually abusing Iraqi prisoners there. The Guantanamo facility, which has housed Al Qaeda members and other terror suspects for more than five years, has emerged as a lightning rod for criticism of US policies in combating terrorism.

Numerous human rights groups and a United Nations commission have called for it to be shuttered, citing widespread reports of prisoner mistreatment. Starting last fall, Bush has used the prison as a holding place for suspects who were previously held in secret CIA prisons.

"My action is trying to restore credibility in the Middle East," Murtha said.

Bush has defended the detention center as a "necessary" part of the war on terror.

"I'd like to close Guantanamo, but I also recognize that we're holding some people that are darn dangerous and that we better have a plan to deal with them in our courts," Bush said in June.

A Pelosi spokesman, Brendan Daly, said the speaker isn't going to make a final judgment on whether the prisons should be closed until after Murtha's committee has hearings on the issue.

"She has encouraged him to look into it," Daly said.

Murtha's plan emerged as a new series of volleys over the president's war plans played out on Capitol Hill.

House and Senate Democratic leaders say they still hope to change the president's mind about the troop "surge" by passing a non binding resolution of disapproval in the coming weeks. But a growing number of Democrats say that -- because Bush is almost certain to ignore such a resolution -- more must be done to hasten the end of the war.

The most likely step, many Democrats say, would involve spending restrictions on the war budget.

"The non binding resolution is symbolic, and that's nice to do if you've got the time to do it," said Representative John F. Tierney, a Salem Democrat. But lawmakers have to use their power over the budget to stop the war, he said.

"That's where we're going to find out which Democrats and which Republicans are going to take a stand on this," Tierney said.

Though some Republicans are also skeptical of Bush's plan, they indicated they will resist Murtha's attempts to close prisons and control war policy.

"You can't conduct a war or a battle from the House chamber or a committee room," said Representative C.W. Bill Young of Florida, the ranking Republican on the Defense Appropriations subcommittee.

Still, in an indication of the president's waning support in Congress, House Republican leaders held a "listening session" yesterday morning to hear out GOP members' concerns, and Republican leaders have been invited to join the president at Camp David for further talks this weekend.

Bush yesterday made calls to King Abdullah II of Jordan and President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt to rally support in the Middle East. And for a second straight day, lawmakers grilled top administration officials about the plan on Capitol Hill.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates insisted that the White House has no plans to attack targets in Iran. He also said he believes that having more US troops in Iraq will succeed because Iraqi leaders say they are committed to reaching political settlements to pacify the nation.

"If they fail to do those things, then I think it's incumbent upon the administration and incumbent upon me to recommend looking at whether this is the right strategy," Gates told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

The White House got some support from Senator John McCain of Arizona, the committee's top Republican and a 2008 Republican presidential prospect. McCain said the troop increase will give Iraqis "the best possible chances to succeed."

But Senator Edward M. Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat, said the US mission has changed substantially since Congress gave the president the authority to destroy weapons of mass destruction and depose Saddam Hussein.

"Why not come back to the Congress? Why not come back and permit us to have a vote on this surge?" Kennedy asked.

Gates said he would pass that message on to the president, but "I think he feels that he has the authority that he needs to proceed."

That is driving much of Democrats' interest in forcing the president's hand. Kennedy and other Democrats have proposed keeping the president from sending more troops to Iraq by blocking the money he would need to do it.

Representative James P. McGovern, a Worcester Democrat, said he is preparing a bill that would go even further, cutting off funds for nearly all troops after six months and allocating only enough resources to provide for the "safe and orderly withdrawal" of US forces.

By Rick Klein, Globe Staff | January 13, 2007

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2007/01/13/democrats_may_push_to_shutter_war_prisons/?page=2

The Gulag Of Our Time

2007-01-12T20:26:00.000-08:00

This is a US Torture Camp

Evidence of prisoner abuse at Guantánamo is overwhelming - and it hasn't made anyone safer

It would be the ideal spot for a beachside birthday party. Surrounded by a turquoise sea, palm trees and white sand, the US detention camp at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba was five years old yesterday. Tony Blair calls it an "anomaly", but the evidence is overwhelming. Camp Delta, which still houses 470 men never convicted of any crime, is a torture camp. That should be the starting point of any debate about what is acceptable in the west's fight with Islamist extremists. More than 750 men have passed through the camp, with nearly half being released. Many prisoners, past and present, have given consistent and repeated testimony of serious abuses and ill treatment. There is also significant evidence from US officials and government documents of widespread abuse at the camp.

The British detainees known as the Tipton Three allege they were repeatedly beaten, shackled in painful positions for long periods and subjected to sleep deprivation. They were also subjected to strobe lighting, loud music and extremes of hot and cold - all meant to break them psychologically. Other detainees have suffered beatings, sexual assaults and death threats. At least one man has been "water boarded" - tied to a board and placed under water so that he had the sensation of drowning.

According to the Red Cross, the regime at Guantánamo causes psychological suffering that has driven inmates mad, with scores of suicide attempts and three inmates killing themselves last year.

Even US officials are shocked. Last week FBI documents revealed that an inmate's head had been wrapped in tape for quoting from the Qur'an. Another was humiliated for his religious beliefs and "baptised" by a soldier posing as a Catholic priest. The documents show FBI agents saw 26 instances of abuse in their time at Guantánamo. The FBI is highly sceptical about alleged confessions gained by its military colleagues. A May 2004 FBI memo branded intelligence gained from "special techniques" as "suspect at best". Indeed, one of the Tipton Three confessed to being in a video shot at an Afghan terror camp alongside Osama bin Laden - in fact, at the time he was working in an electronics store in the Midlands.

But the US should not shoulder all the blame. Some of the material from Guantánamo has been used by Britain's counter-terrorism agencies. In June 2003 Tony Blair told the Commons: "Information is still coming from people detained there ... That information is important." George Bush, his aides and the US military define what they have been doing as a special programme using special measures: their position appears to be that as long as blood is not drawn, it is not torture.

One official investigation found an inmate had been sexually humiliated and forced to perform dog tricks on a leash. It said the conduct was "abusive and degrading" but not torture. In a UK court hearing over Guantánamo, a senior British judge, Mr Justice Collins, declared: "America's idea of what is torture is not the same as ours." A UN report has confirmed evidence of torture, and Amnesty International has declared Guantánamo "the gulag of our time". Guantánamo is not the only US torture camp. Bagram in Afghanistan has been dogged by stories of abuse, and there are secret US prisons around the world where it is widely feared new horrors are occuring.

Human rights have been traded away in Guantánamo in the hope of gaining security, and it has not worked. One of the US's founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson, stated: "He who trades liberty for security deserves neither and will lose both." Adorned on the walls of the Guantánamo camp is its mission statement: "Honour-bound to defend freedom". After five years of Guantánamo, do you feel any safer?

by Vikram Dodd
The Guardian/UK

http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0112-21.htm

Torture Inc.

2007-01-11T17:21:00.000-08:00

Americas Brutal Prisons

Savaged by dogs, Electrocuted With Cattle Prods, Burned By Toxic Chemicals, Does such barbaric abuse inside U.S. jails explain the horrors that were committed in Iraq?

By Deborah Davies

They are just some of the victims of wholesale torture taking place inside the U.S. prison system that we uncovered during a four-month investigation for BBC Channel 4 . It’s terrible to watch some of the videos and realise that you’re not only seeing torture in action but, in the most extreme cases, you are witnessing young men dying.

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

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

Another prisoner has a broken ankle. He can’t crawl fast enough so a guard jabs a stun gun onto his buttocks. The jolt of electricity zaps through his naked flesh and genitals. For hours afterwards his whole body shakes.

Lines of men are now slithering across the floor of the cellblock while the guards stand over them shouting, prodding and kicking.

Second by second, their humiliation is captured on a video camera by one of the guards.

The images of abuse and brutality he records are horrifyingly familiar. These were exactly the kind of pictures from inside Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad that shocked the world this time last year.

And they are similar, too, to the images of brutality against Iraqi prisoners that this week led to the conviction of three British soldiers.

But there is a difference. These prisoners are not caught up in a war zone. They are Americans, and the video comes from inside a prison in Texas

They are just some of the victims of wholesale torture taking place inside the U.S. prison system that we uncovered during a four-month investigation for Channel 4 that will be broadcast next week.

Our findings were not based on rumour or suspicion. They were based on solid evidence, chiefly videotapes that we collected from all over the U.S.

In many American states, prison regulations demand that any ‘use of force operation’, such as searching cells for drugs, must be filmed by a guard.

The theory is that the tapes will show proper procedure was followed and that no excessive force was used. In fact, many of them record the exact opposite.

Each tape provides a shocking insight into the reality of life inside the U.S. prison system – a reality that sits very uncomfortably with President Bush’s commitment to the battle for freedom and democracy against the forces of tyranny and oppression.

In fact, the Texas episode outlined above dates from 1996, when Bush was state Governor.

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

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

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

Many of the tapes we’ve collected are several years old. That’s because they only surface when determined lawyers prise them out of reluctant state prison departments during protracted lawsuits.

But for every ‘historical’ tape we collected, we also found a more recent story. What you see on the tape is still happening daily.

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

In one horrific scene, a naked man, passive and vacant, is seen being led out of his cell by prison guards. They strap him into a medieval-looking device called a ‘restraint chair’. His hands and feet are shackled, there’s a strap across his chest, his head lolls forward. He looks dead. He’s not. Not yet.

The chair is his punishment because guards saw him in his cell with a pillowcase on his head and he refused to take it off. The man has a long history of severe schizophrenia. Sixteen hours later, they release him from the chair. And two hours after that, he dies from a blood clot resulting from his barbaric treatment.

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

Two of the deaths we investigated were in the same county jail in Phoenix, Arizona, which is run by a man who revels in the title of ‘America’s Toughest Sheriff.’

His name is Joe Arpaio. He positively welcomes TV crews and we were promised ‘unfettered access.’ It was a reassuring turn of phrase – you don’t want to be fettered in one of Sheriff Joe’s jails.

We uncovered two videotapes from surveillance cameras showing how his tough stance can end in tragedy.

The first tape, from 2001, shows a man named Charles Agster dragged in by police, handcuffed at the wrists and ankles. Agster is mentally disturbed and a drug user. He was arrested for causing a disturbance in a late-night grocery store. The police handed him over to the Sheriff’s deputies in the jail. Agster is a tiny man, weighing no more than nine stone, but he’s struggling.

The tape shows nine deputies manhandling him into the restraint chair. One of them kneels on Agster’s stomach, pushing his head forward on to his knees and pulling his arms back to strap his wrists into the chair.

Bending someone double for any length of time is dangerous – the manuals on the use of the 'restraint chair’ warn of the dangers of ‘positional asphyxia.’

Fifteen minutes later, a nurse notices Agster is unconscious. The cameras show frantic efforts to resuscitate him, but he’s already brain dead. He died three days later in hospital. Agster's family is currently suing Arizona County.

His mother, Carol, cried as she told me: ‘If that’s not torture, I don’t know what is.’ Charles’s father, Chuck, listened in silence as we filmed the interview, but every so often he padded out of the room to cry quietly in the kitchen.

The second tape, from five years earlier, shows Scott Norberg dying a similar death in the same jail. He was also a drug user arrested for causing a nuisance. Norberg was severely beaten by the guards, stunned up to 19 times with a Taser gun and forced into the chair where – like Charles Agster – he suffocated.

The county’s insurers paid Norberg’s family more than £4 millions in an out-of-court settlement, but the sheriff was furious with the deal. ‘My officers were clear,’ he said. ‘The insurance firm was afraid to go before a jury.’

Now he’s determined to fight the Agster case all the way through the courts. Yet tonight, in Sheriff Joe’s jail, there’ll probably be someone else strapped into the chair.

Not all the tapes we uncovered were filmed by the guards themselves. Linda Evans smuggled a video camera into a hospital to record her son, Brian. You can barely see his face through all the tubes and all you can hear is the rhythmic sucking of the ventilator.

He was another of Sheriff Joe’s inmates. After an argument with guards, he told a prison doctor they’d beaten him up. Six days later, he was found unconscious of the floor of his cell with a broken neck, broken toes and internal injuries. After a month in a coma, he died from septicaemia.

‘Mr Arpaio is responsible.’ Linda Evans told me, struggling to speak through her tears. ‘He seems to thrive on this cruelty and this mentality that these men are nothing.’

In some of the tapes it’s not just the images, it’s also the sounds that are so unbearable. There’s one tape from Florida which I’ve seen dozens of times but it still catches me in the stomach.

It’s an authorised ‘use of force operation’ – so a guard is videoing what happens. They’re going to Taser a prisoner for refusing orders.

The tape shows a prisoner lying on an examination table in the prison hospital. The guards are instructing him to climb down into a wheelchair. ‘I can’t, I can’t!’ he shouts with increasing desperation. ‘It hurts!’

One guard then jabs him on both hips with a Taser. The man jerks as the electricity hits him and shrieks, but still won’t get into the wheelchair.

The guards grab him and drop him into the chair. As they try to bend his legs up on to the footrest, he screams in pain. The man’s lawyer told me he has a very limited mental capacity. He says he has a back injury and can’t walk or bend his legs without intense pain.

The tape becomes even more harrowing. The guards try to make the prisoner stand up and hold a walking frame. He falls on the floor, crying in agony. They Taser him again. He runs out of the energy and breath to cry and just lies there moaning.

One of the most recent video tapes was filmed in January last year. A surveillance camera in a youth institution in California records an argument between staff members and two ‘wards’ – they’re not called prisoners.

One of the youths hits a staff member in the face. He knocks the ward to the floor then sits astride him punching him over and over again in the head.

Watching the tape you can almost feel each blow. The second youth is also punched and kicked in the head – even after he’s been handcuffed. Other staff just stand around and watch.

We also collected some truly horrific photographs.

A few years ago, in Florida, the new warden of the high security state prison ordered an end to the videoing of ‘use of force operations.’ So we have no tapes to show how prison guards use pepper spray to punish prisoners.

But we do have the lawsuit describing how men were doused in pepper spray and then left to cook in the burning fog of chemicals. Photographs taken by their lawyers show one man has a huge patch of raw skin over his hip. Another is covered in an angry rash across his neck, back and arms. A third has deep burns on his buttocks.

‘They usually use fire extinguishers size canisters of pepper spray,’ lawyer Christopher Jones explained. ‘We have had prisoners who have had second degree burns all over their bodies.

‘The tell-tale sign is they turn off the ventilation fans in the unit. Prisoners report that cardboard is shoved in the crack of the door to make sure it’s really air-tight.’

And why were they sprayed? According to the official prison reports, their infringements included banging on the cell door and refusing medication. From the same Florida prison we also have photographs of Frank Valdes – autopsy pictures. Realistically, he had little chance of ever getting out of prison alive. He was on Death Row for killing a prison officer. He had time to reconcile himself to the Electric Chair – he didn’t expect to be beaten to death.

Valdes started writing to local Florida newspapers to expose the corruption and brutality of prison officers. So a gang of guards stormed into his cell to shut him up. They broke almost every one of his ribs, punctured his lung, smashed his spleen and left him to die.

Several of the guards were later charged with murder, but the trial was held in their own small hometown where almost everyone works for, or has connection with, the five prisons which ring the town. The foreman of the jury was former prison officer. The guards were all acquitted.

Meanwhile, the warden who was in charge of the prison at the time of the killing – the same man who changed the policy on videoing – has been promoted. He’s now the man in charge of all the Florida prisons.

How could anyone excuse – still less condone – such behaviour? The few prison guards who would talk to us have a siege mentality. They see themselves outnumbered, surrounded by dangerous, violent criminals, so they back each other up, no matter what.

I asked one serving officer what happened if colleagues beat up an inmate. ‘We cover up. Because we’re the good guys.’

No one should doubt that the vast majority of U.S. prison officers are decent individuals doing their best in difficult circumstances. But when horrific abuse by the few goes unreported and uninvestigated, it solidifies into a general climate of acceptance among the many.

At the same time the overall hardening of attitudes in modern-day America has meant the notion of rehabilitation has been almost lost. The focus is entirely on punishment – even loss of liberty is not seen as punishment enough. Being on the restraint devices and the chemical sprays.

Since we finished filming for the programme in January, I’ve stayed in contact with various prisoners’ rights groups and the families of many of the victims. Every single day come more e-mails full of fresh horror stories. In the past weeks, two more prisoners have died, in Alabama and Ohio. One man was pepper sprayed, the other tasered.

Then, three weeks ago, reports emerged of 20 hours of video material from Guantanamo Bay showing prisoners being stripped, beaten and pepper sprayed. One of those affected is Omar Deghayes, one of the seven British residents still being held there.

His lawyer says Deghayes is now permanently blind in one eye. American military investigators have reviewed the tapes and apparently found ‘no evidence of systematic abuse.’

But then, as one of the prison reformers we met on our journey across the U.S. told me: ‘We’ve become immune to the abuse. The brutality has become customary.’

So far, the U.S. government is refusing to release these Guantanamo tapes. If they are ever made public – or leaked – I suspect the images will be very familiar.

Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo – or even Texas. The prisoners and all guards may vary, but the abuse is still too familiar. And much is it is taking place in America’s own backyard.

Deborah Davies is a reporter for Channel 4 Dispatches. Her investigation, Torture: America’s Brutal Prisons, was shown on Wednesday, March 2, at 11.05pm.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8451.htm

Free the Lucasville 5

2007-01-10T07:16:00.000-08:00

In 1995 five innocent men were sent to death row in connection with the prison uprising in Lucasville, Ohio in 1993.

• Siddique Abdullah Hasan • George Skatzes • Jason Robb • Namir Abdul Mateen, and • Bomani Hondo Shakur (Keith Lamar) were convicted of capital
murder in relation to the deaths of a guard and nine inmates.

Four of the five were actually involved in negotiating a resolution of grievances and ending the uprising. The fifth, Bomani Shakur, was one who simply refused to talk.

None of the Five had any involvement in these killings or the decision to carry them out. Other inmates had their sentences reduced in exchange for perjured testimony, which some of them have now recanted.

When the African-American and specifically the Muslim defendants were on trial,
the prosecution appealed to racism and anti-Islamic prejudice.

They have been in solitary confinement for 13 long years
and their appeals are running out.

YOU CAN REVERSE
THIS TERRIBLE INJUSTICE
Demonstrate Jan. 14

2-4 pm outside the Ohio State Penitentiary (OSP) in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday.

OSP is a supermax prison located
at 878 Coitsville-Hubbard Rd.,
Youngstown, OH.

Four of the Lucasville Five are held
in OSP as well as most of Ohio’s
189 other death row prisoners.

Transportation is being organized
from Cleveland. For bus reservations or more info, call (216) 481-6671
or email pfcenter@sbcglobal.net.

Tell Governor Ted Strickland of Ohio to overturn the convictions of all prisoners with charges related to the Lucasville rebellion.

TELL HIM TO HALT
THE EXECUTIONS
IN OHIO

Write to Gov. Ted Strickland
77 High Street, 30th Floor,
Columbus, Ohio 43215
FAX (614) 728-4819 or
call him at (614) 728-4900.

From Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s
1963 letter from Birmingham Jail:

“For more than two centuries our forebears labored in this country without wages; they made cotton king; they built the homes of their masters while suffering gross injustice and shameful humiliation- and yet out of a bottomless vitality they continued to thrive and develop.

If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands.”

Angel Diaz Execution Botched

2006-12-15T19:04:00.000-08:00

Lethal Injection Halted in Calif., Florida

Botched executions in California and Florida that required more than 30 minutes to kill condemned prisoners prompted a moratorium of the lethal injection procedure in both states on Friday.

Federal Judge Jeremy Fogel found California's method of execution unconstitutional, concluding its "implementation of lethal injection is broken, but it can be fixed."

The decision follows the state's 2005 execution in which guards failed to connect a back-up intravenous line to Stanley "Tookie" Williams, the former Crips gang leader who garnered global publicity after writing anti-gang books.

Then on Wednesday Florida executioners botched the insertion of needles into condemned killer Angel Diaz, which meant lethal chemicals did not go directly into his veins, according to the state's medical examiner.

Florida's incoming governor, Charlie Crist, responded on Friday by saying he would halt executions until a commission investigated the state's procedures.

Death penalty opponents have for years argued that lethal injection is cruel and unusual punishment barred by the U.S. Constitution, but only such recent instances have given legal and political traction to their arguments.

"When properly administered, lethal injection results in a death that is far kinder than that suffered by the victims of capital crimes," said Fogel, who earlier this year visited the death chamber at San Quentin State Prison north of San Francisco.

"At the present time, however, defendants' implementation of California's lethal-injection protocol lacks both reliability and transparency," he wrote.

"In light of the substantial questions raised by the records of previous executions, defendants' actions and failures to act have resulted in an undue and unnecessary risk of an Eighth Amendment violation. This is intolerable under the Constitution."

Lethal injection is used in 37 U.S. states, but legal challenges have delayed such executions this year in not only California and Florida, the first and fourth most populous states, but several others including New Jersey and Ohio.

The United States has executed 53 people in 2006, a 10-year low, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

THREE-DRUG DOSE

California has long executed its worst criminals. Its famous San Quentin prison hanged the condemned starting in 1893; the state turned to lethal gas in 1938. It turned to lethal injection in 1994 after a federal judge found gassing cruel and unusual.

Florida lawmakers voted to switch to lethal injection in 2000 after a series of bungled executions using the state's electric chair, including one where flames shot from a prisoner's head.

Executioners now typically attach two intravenous lines to condemned U.S. inmates, one tube acting as a backup to assure a continuous flow of the three chemicals that anesthetize, paralyze and then kill.

In the Williams execution, prison guards struggled for 25 minutes to insert the intravenous lines and it took another 10 minutes for the lethal drugs to take effect, said Barbara Becnel, a witness to the execution and co-author of Williams' anti-gang books.

Journalists at several recent California executions have seen guards struggle to insert the IV lines to the condemned killer.

Witnesses in Florida this week said Diaz appeared to grimace and gasp for breath in what was supposed to be a quick but painless procedure. Prison officials had to give Diaz the drugs twice and it took him 34 minutes to die from the start of the execution.

"The court I think correctly recognized that there are severe flaws in the system," said Richard Steinken, a Chicago attorney who has worked with Death Row inmate Michael Morales, whose case sparked Judge Fogel's decision on Friday. "Whether it can be fixed remains to be seen."

By Adam Tanner
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters)

(Additional reporting by Jim Christie in San Francisco and by Michael Peltier in Tallahassee, Florida)

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=578&u=/nm/20061216/ts_nm/usa_execution_dc_1

Torture Inc.

2006-10-06T17:42:00.000-07:00

Americas Brutal Prisons

Savaged by dogs, Electrocuted With Cattle Prods, Burned By Toxic Chemicals, Does such barbaric abuse inside U.S. jails explain the horrors that were committed in Iraq?

They are just some of the victims of wholesale torture taking place inside the U.S. prison system that we uncovered during a four-month investigation for Channel 4 . It’s terrible to watch some of the videos and realise that you’re not only seeing torture in action but, in the most extreme cases, you are witnessing young men dying.

VIDEO: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8451.htm

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

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

Another prisoner has a broken ankle. He can’t crawl fast enough so a guard jabs a stun gun onto his buttocks. The jolt of electricity zaps through his naked flesh and genitals. For hours afterwards his whole body shakes.

Lines of men are now slithering across the floor of the cellblock while the guards stand over them shouting, prodding and kicking.

Second by second, their humiliation is captured on a video camera by one of the guards.

The images of abuse and brutality he records are horrifyingly familiar. These were exactly the kind of pictures from inside Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad that shocked the world this time last year.

And they are similar, too, to the images of brutality against Iraqi prisoners that this week led to the conviction of three British soldiers.

But there is a difference. These prisoners are not caught up in a war zone. They are Americans, and the video comes from inside a prison in Texas

They are just some of the victims of wholesale torture taking place inside the U.S. prison system that we uncovered during a four-month investigation for Channel 4 that will be broadcast next week.

Our findings were not based on rumour or suspicion. They were based on solid evidence, chiefly videotapes that we collected from all over the U.S.

In many American states, prison regulations demand that any ‘use of force operation’, such as searching cells for drugs, must be filmed by a guard.

The theory is that the tapes will show proper procedure was followed and that no excessive force was used. In fact, many of them record the exact opposite.

Each tape provides a shocking insight into the reality of life inside the U.S. prison system – a reality that sits very uncomfortably with President Bush’s commitment to the battle for freedom and democracy against the forces of tyranny and oppression.

In fact, the Texas episode outlined above dates from 1996, when Bush was state Governor.

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

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

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

Many of the tapes we’ve collected are several years old. That’s because they only surface when determined lawyers prise them out of reluctant state prison departments during protracted lawsuits.

But for every ‘historical’ tape we collected, we also found a more recent story. What you see on the tape is still happening daily.

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

In one horrific scene, a naked man, passive and vacant, is seen being led out of his cell by prison guards. They strap him into a medieval-looking device called a ‘restraint chair’. His hands and feet are shackled, there’s a strap across his chest, his head lolls forward. He looks dead. He’s not. Not yet.

The chair is his punishment because guards saw him in his cell with a pillowcase on his head and he refused to take it off. The man has a long history of severe schizophrenia. Sixteen hours later, they release him from the chair. And two hours after that, he dies from a blood clot resulting from his barbaric treatment.

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

Two of the deaths we investigated were in the same county jail in Phoenix, Arizona, which is run by a man who revels in the title of ‘America’s Toughest Sheriff.’

His name is Joe Arpaio. He positively welcomes TV crews and we were promised ‘unfettered access.’ It was a reassuring turn of phrase – you don’t want to be fettered in one of Sheriff Joe’s jails.

We uncovered two videotapes from surveillance cameras showing how his tough stance can end in tragedy.

The first tape, from 2001, shows a man named Charles Agster dragged in by police, handcuffed at the wrists and ankles. Agster is mentally disturbed and a drug user. He was arrested for causing a disturbance in a late-night grocery store. The police handed him over to the Sheriff’s deputies in the jail. Agster is a tiny man, weighing no more than nine stone, but he’s struggling.

The tape shows nine deputies manhandling him into the restraint chair. One of them kneels on Agster’s stomach, pushing his head forward on to his knees and pulling his arms back to strap his wrists into the chair.

Bending someone double for any length of time is dangerous – the manuals on the use of the 'restraint chair’ warn of the dangers of ‘positional asphyxia.’

Fifteen minutes later, a nurse notices Agster is unconscious. The cameras show frantic efforts to resuscitate him, but he’s already brain dead. He died three days later in hospital. Agster's family is currently suing Arizona County.

His mother, Carol, cried as she told me: ‘If that’s not torture, I don’t know what is.’ Charles’s father, Chuck, listened in silence as we filmed the interview, but every so often he padded out of the room to cry quietly in the kitchen.

The second tape, from five years earlier, shows Scott Norberg dying a similar death in the same jail. He was also a drug user arrested for causing a nuisance. Norberg was severely beaten by the guards, stunned up to 19 times with a Taser gun and forced into the chair where – like Charles Agster – he suffocated.

The county’s insurers paid Norberg’s family more than £4 millions in an out-of-court settlement, but the sheriff was furious with the deal. ‘My officers were clear,’ he said. ‘The insurance firm was afraid to go before a jury.’

Now he’s determined to fight the Agster case all the way through the courts. Yet tonight, in Sheriff Joe’s jail, there’ll probably be someone else strapped into the chair.

Not all the tapes we uncovered were filmed by the guards themselves. Linda Evans smuggled a video camera into a hospital to record her son, Brian. You can barely see his face through all the tubes and all you can hear is the rhythmic sucking of the ventilator.

He was another of Sheriff Joe’s inmates. After an argument with guards, he told a prison doctor they’d beaten him up. Six days later, he was found unconscious of the floor of his cell with a broken neck, broken toes and internal injuries. After a month in a coma, he died from septicaemia.

‘Mr Arpaio is responsible.’ Linda Evans told me, struggling to speak through her tears. ‘He seems to thrive on this cruelty and this mentality that these men are nothing.’

In some of the tapes it’s not just the images, it’s also the sounds that are so unbearable. There’s one tape from Florida which I’ve seen dozens of times but it still catches me in the stomach.

It’s an authorised ‘use of force operation’ – so a guard is videoing what happens. They’re going to Taser a prisoner for refusing orders.

The tape shows a prisoner lying on an examination table in the prison hospital. The guards are instructing him to climb down into a wheelchair. ‘I can’t, I can’t!’ he shouts with increasing desperation. ‘It hurts!’

One guard then jabs him on both hips with a Taser. The man jerks as the electricity hits him and shrieks, but still won’t get into the wheelchair.

The guards grab him and drop him into the chair. As they try to bend his legs up on to the footrest, he screams in pain. The man’s lawyer told me he has a very limited mental capacity. He says he has a back injury and can’t walk or bend his legs without intense pain.

The tape becomes even more harrowing. The guards try to make the prisoner stand up and hold a walking frame. He falls on the floor, crying in agony. They Taser him again. He runs out of the energy and breath to cry and just lies there moaning.

One of the most recent video tapes was filmed in January last year. A surveillance camera in a youth institution in California records an argument between staff members and two ‘wards’ – they’re not called prisoners.

One of the youths hits a staff member in the face. He knocks the ward to the floor then sits astride him punching him over and over again in the head.

Watching the tape you can almost feel each blow. The second youth is also punched and kicked in the head – even after he’s been handcuffed. Other staff just stand around and watch.

We also collected some truly horrific photographs.

A few years ago, in Florida, the new warden of the high security state prison ordered an end to the videoing of ‘use of force operations.’ So we have no tapes to show how prison guards use pepper spray to punish prisoners.

But we do have the lawsuit describing how men were doused in pepper spray and then left to cook in the burning fog of chemicals. Photographs taken by their lawyers show one man has a huge patch of raw skin over his hip. Another is covered in an angry rash across his neck, back and arms. A third has deep burns on his buttocks.

‘They usually use fire extinguishers size canisters of pepper spray,’ lawyer Christopher Jones explained. ‘We have had prisoners who have had second degree burns all over their bodies.

‘The tell-tale sign is they turn off the ventilation fans in the unit. Prisoners report that cardboard is shoved in the crack of the door to make sure it’s really air-tight.’

And why were they sprayed? According to the official prison reports, their infringements included banging on the cell door and refusing medication. From the same Florida prison we also have photographs of Frank Valdes – autopsy pictures. Realistically, he had little chance of ever getting out of prison alive. He was on Death Row for killing a prison officer. He had time to reconcile himself to the Electric Chair – he didn’t expect to be beaten to death.

Valdes started writing to local Florida newspapers to expose the corruption and brutality of prison officers. So a gang of guards stormed into his cell to shut him up. They broke almost every one of his ribs, punctured his lung, smashed his spleen and left him to die.

Several of the guards were later charged with murder, but the trial was held in their own small hometown where almost everyone works for, or has connection with, the five prisons which ring the town. The foreman of the jury was former prison officer. The guards were all acquitted.

Meanwhile, the warden who was in charge of the prison at the time of the killing – the same man who changed the policy on videoing – has been promoted. He’s now the man in charge of all the Florida prisons.

How could anyone excuse – still less condone – such behaviour? The few prison guards who would talk to us have a siege mentality. They see themselves outnumbered, surrounded by dangerous, violent criminals, so they back each other up, no matter what.

I asked one serving officer what happened if colleagues beat up an inmate. ‘We cover up. Because we’re the good guys.’

No one should doubt that the vast majority of U.S. prison officers are decent individuals doing their best in difficult circumstances. But when horrific abuse by the few goes unreported and uninvestigated, it solidifies into a general climate of acceptance among the many.

At the same time the overall hardening of attitudes in modern-day America has meant the notion of rehabilitation has been almost lost. The focus is entirely on punishment – even loss of liberty is not seen as punishment enough. Being on the restraint devices and the chemical sprays.

Since we finished filming for the programme in January, I’ve stayed in contact with various prisoners’ rights groups and the families of many of the victims. Every single day come more e-mails full of fresh horror stories. In the past weeks, two more prisoners have died, in Alabama and Ohio. One man was pepper sprayed, the other tasered.

Then, three weeks ago, reports emerged of 20 hours of video material from Guantanamo Bay showing prisoners being stripped, beaten and pepper sprayed. One of those affected is Omar Deghayes, one of the seven British residents still being held there.

His lawyer says Deghayes is now permanently blind in one eye. American military investigators have reviewed the tapes and apparently found ‘no evidence of systematic abuse.’

But then, as one of the prison reformers we met on our journey across the U.S. told me: ‘We’ve become immune to the abuse. The brutality has become customary.’

So far, the U.S. government is refusing to release these Guantanamo tapes. If they are ever made public – or leaked – I suspect the images will be very familiar.

Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo – or even Texas. The prisoners and all guards may vary, but the abuse is still too familiar. And much is it is taking place in America’s own backyard.

Deborah Davies is a reporter for Channel 4 Dispatches. Her investigation, Torture: America’s Brutal Prisons, was shown on Wednesday, March 2, at 11.05pm.

Laughing Pigs

2006-08-09T18:45:00.000-07:00

Attorney Incensed After Viewing FTAA Police Video

A police training video showed high-ranking Broward deputies laughing about shooting rubber bullets at a Coral Gables attorney at the free- trade summit in Miami.

As a middle-aged Coral Gables attorney, dressed sharply in a red suit jacket, skirt and black slingback heels, Elizabeth Ritter stood out among the throng of protesters on Nov. 20, 2003.

Frustrated that she couldn't do business because the Miami-Dade County Courthouse was shut down that week during the Free Trade Area of the Americas summit, she hastily made a sign that read ''Fear Totalitarianism'' and decided to stand with the protesters.

The sign, however, became her shield against a barrage of rubber bullets fired at her by a legion of Broward Sheriff's deputies in riot gear. And, in an image captured by a videographer, she is shot in the head as she cowers in the street.

And now another video, recently released, raises questions about the degree to which police, specifically, Broward Sheriff's deputies, were encouraged, -- and even praised -- for using force against Ritter and other protesters.

In the video -- recorded by BSO on Nov. 21, the day after the event -- a BSO top commander gushes over shooting protesters. Another officer refers to them as ``scurrying cockroaches.''

And when it comes to ''the lady in the red dress,'' said a sergeant, referring to Ritter, eliciting hoots and laughter, ``I don't know who got her, but it went right through the sign and hit her smack dab in the middle of the head!''

Viewing the video for the first time last month, Ritter was incensed. Until now, she had no plans to sue, even though a long list of people -- labor union workers, a filmmaker, protesters and a local reporter -- filed complaints and lawsuits alleging the agencies in charge of crowd control -- Miami Police, Miami-Dade Police and BSO -- used excessive force and made false arrests.

MINOR OFFENSES

About 220 people were arrested, the majority for minor offenses such as obstructing sidewalks, according to the Miami-Dade state attorney's office. Charges have been dropped in nearly half of those cases. So far, 57 people have been convicted, according to spokesman Edward Griffith.

The Miami Civilian Investigative Panel, a voter-created board that vets complaints against the Miami police, looked into 20 allegations of police misconduct. Six of those complaints have become lawsuits backed by the American Civil Liberties Union. Last week, the panel issued a report criticizing police for profiling and ''unlawfully'' searching protesters, but announced it had found no evidence of excessive force.

THE BSO TAPES

On one of the final days of the summit meant to hash out a trade agreement among 34 Western nations, Ritter had accepted a friend's invitation to attend an FTAA-related law lecture at Bayfront Park.

While leaders from 34 countries negotiated inside Miami's downtown Intercontinental Hotel, TV news showed hundreds of police in riot gear facing protesters, many college-age, who thought a trade pact would hurt developing countries.

OVERKILL

But it wasn't trade issues that brought Ritter and her friends to downtown that day. The attorney thought it was overkill that the police had all but shut down the city.

''My city, my hometown, was becoming a police state,'' she said.

A videographer captured what happened next, showing Ritter walking alone in front of a line of BSO deputies on NE Third Street.

As the deputies advance, Ritter turns around to face them and raises her sign.

A barrage of projectiles is fired. She kneels, holding her sign above her head as a shield.

Ritter is shot five times -- in her legs, upper body, and shoulder. And when she kneels on the ground, the sign above her head, a projectile rips through it and strikes her in the head.

Hard rubber projectiles typically leave welts and bruises, but at close range can pierce the skin, or rarely, kill.

'I turned around and said, `Why did you hit me?' Is a woman in a business suit a threat?'' Ritter recalled in a recent interview.

A MISTAKE?

'But then I thought, `That must have been a mistake.' A police officer isn't going to shoot me on purpose.''

Ritter walked around downtown in a daze, finally getting a ride home. Although her head and body were bruised and she was upset, she decided not to make an issue of what happened.

Then, last month the BSO videotape emerged as a result of a public records request from the Miami Civilian Investigative Panel.

Its existence was first reported by the Daily Business Review.

The tape, recorded for training purposes, shows Major John Brooks -- then a captain -- addressing dozens of deputies in an outdoor BSO tent.

''How about yesterday, huh?'' Brooks says, complimenting the officers for their work during the protests. ``I would go to war with everyone here.''

Brooks continues, ``I went home, I couldn't sleep, I was just so pumped up about how good you guys were . . . Nobody broke ranks. You're the best I've ever been with.''

Sgt. Michael Kallman, a BSO counterterrorism unit officer, addresses the group next. A voice off-camera says, ``What about the lady behind the sign? We have intel on her?''

The officers laugh.

Kallman smiles and says, ``The good news about being able to watch you guys live on TV is that the lady with the red dress, I don't know who got her, but it went right through the sign and hit her smack dab in the middle of the head!''

He raises his forefinger and zooms it toward his forehead.

The cops all laugh.

Another officer asks, off-camera, ``Did I get a piece of her red dress?''

BSO'S RESPONSE

No disciplinary action has been taken against any officers in the video, said BSO spokesman Elliott Cohen.

''There has been no Internal Affairs investigations involving FTAA,'' he said.

Brooks left the Miami Police Department and joined BSO amid controversy over the removal of Elián González from his uncle's Little Havana home in April 2000. Brooks, an assistant chief at the Miami police department at the time, had accompanied agents on the raid to clear police through police barricades.

Then-Mayor Joe Carollo criticized Brooks, saying his presence in the van gave the impression the raid had the city's seal of approval.

In May 2005, Brooks was promoted to major, making him one of Sheriff Ken Jenne's highest ranking deputies.

The Miami Herald left numerous messages for Brooks and Kallman through the sheriff's public information office. Three messages were left with Brooks' assistant and at Kallman's office explaining the story and asking for comment. The Herald also sent certified letters to both men. Neither responded. Jenne also declined to comment for this story.

Miami police was the lead police agency during the FTAA. Miami Police Chief John Timoney declined comment for this article.

Miami investigative panel attorney Charles Mays said the panel's ability to vet complaints was halted by one huge obstacle: While Miami officers wore identifying uniforms, BSO and Miami-Dade officers did not.

''It made it much more difficult to know who did what,'' he said.

''With multi-agencies running around, as an officer you won't know who's who,'' said Eugene O'Donnell, professor of police science at New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a former New York City cop.

''It hurts oversight, community and accountability,'' he said.

However, he said it was nevertheless appropriate for law enforcement to prepare for the potential for violence -- like that seen in Seattle in 1999 when protests against the World Trade Organization grew explosive between cops and protesters.

FEW INJURIES

FTAA's injuries hovered around a few dozen and the week was far less violent. Miami police had 16 injuries, spokesman Delrish Moss said.

It's unclear how many Miami-Dade or BSO officers were hurt.

Commander Armando Guzman, a 25-year-old police veteran and leader of the Miami Police Swat Team during FTAA, said officers faced violence that wasn't publicized.

Protesters set fire to freight pallets they placed on the street and fired ball bearings at police using ''wrist rockets,'' sophisticated high-velocity sling-shots, he said.

Demonstrators also flung pieces of brick and rebar at cops, said Guzman.

He was nearly hit in the head with a urine-filled Gatorade bottle.

Guzman witnessed the Ritter shooting.

''Unfortunately there were people between us and them,'' he said.

``If you're in the middle, you're going to get hit.''

O'Donnell added, ''I'm not excusing what they said -- and it probably doesn't sit well with the public,'' he said. ``But it's not unheard of for cops to talk in a kind of locker room way.''

NOT A THREAT

Ritter does not accept that.

''I was not a threat to them,'' she said.

''Referring to people as cockroaches is wrong. Saying they want a piece of my red dress is wrong. The law, I know, will agree with me,'' she added.

BY ASHLEY FANTZ
afantz@MiamiHerald.com

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/15228898.htm

Exonerated

2006-08-04T18:34:00.000-07:00

Florida Death Row Inmate Tells His Tale

Juan Roberto Melendez has not been able to stop talking since he was freed from a cell on Florida's death row four years ago.

"I remember the day and date exactly -- Thursday, January 3, 2002. It's like my second birthday. The first thing I did was kiss the ground because all I did for 17 years was to walk on concrete," said Melendez, who in spite of his age, 55, still has jet black hair and sports a fashionable goatee.

Melendez was released from Union Correctional Institution in Raiford, Florida after being condemned to die in 1984 for a crime he did not commit. The State of Florida still has not apologised.

His story is typical of other exonerated death row inmates, found caught in a prison system simply because he is poor and Hispanic. Some 96 percent of the states where death penalty sentences were studied by the American Bar Association in 1998 showed a direct link of discrimination.

Some 63 percent of the inmates on death row in the U.S. are black or Latino, even though they represent 25 percent of the total population, according to a 2002 Human Rights Watch report.

Melendez is one of 123 former death row inmates set free since 1973. Because so many mistakes are made and innocent people killed, the death penalty must be abolished, rights workers say.

"God only knows how many of all of the people who have been executed in this country did not have the same good fortune as I or other death row exonerees in this country," Melendez told IPS. "I can not stress enough just how lucky I was to have been able to prove my innocence."

Melendez spent 17 years, eight months, and one day -- nearly one-third of his life -- on death row. "When I was released, I was given 100 dollars, a pair of pants, and a shirt. That's it," Melendez said. "Nobody ever apologised."

The U.S.-born Melendez dropped out of school after attending ninth grade in Puerto Rico. He moved back to the U.S. in 1970 and found a job in Delaware as a migrant worker picking vegetables. Later that year, he travelled on to Florida working at various citrus fruit plantations in the state.

Soon after, Melendez started getting in trouble. He served seven years in prison for armed robbery in 1974, a crime he admits he committed.

In 1981, he was set free, but the freedom would prove to be short lived.

Less than two years later, Sept. 13, 1983, a cosmetology school owner named Delbert Baker was brutally murdered and robbed shortly after closing up for the night.

Though Melendez maintained his innocence and could provide four people who verified he was elsewhere that day -- police arrested the Latino on the basis of testimony of a man who held a grudge against Melendez.

While awaiting trial, though, Melendez's attorney interviewed Vernon James, a man seen in the cosmetology school just before closing time, who confessed to the crime in a tape recording.

"I was already indicted; that's why the confession didn't let me go free and why James wasn't charged," Melendez said.

James refused to testify at Melendez's trial, citing his Fifth Amendment constitutional right against self-incrimination. The court ruled that his tape-recorded confession was hearsay evidence and did not allow it to be played. Melendez was sentenced to death on September 21, 1984.

Appeals by Melendez's attorney proved unsuccessful and Melendez sat on death row an innocent man. James was murdered in 1986.

"Death row was hell," he said simply. "All of us (inmates) always felt the pressure everyday." The mental anguish of having a death sentence hanging over their head took its toll on everyone, he said.

He was locked in his cell nearly all day. He spent that time reading, mostly books sent to him from people in Europe who had read about his plight. His Bible, too, was a constant companion. He prayed a lot.

When he was allowed out two hours on Monday and Wednesday to exercise, he was shackled. The restraints remained on during the five-minute long showers he was allowed three times a week.

"Sometimes I was deliberately shackled too tight by some of the guards," Melendez said, adding that he believes this is why he has arthritis in his arm joints. The irons have left permanent marks on his wrists.

In those 17 years, Florida executed 51 inmates. Melendez did not know most of them, but when a friend was killed, it was emotionally painful. "It was horrible. It was like losing a loved one," he said. Melendez only had two visits -- his mother and brother came in 1986; an aunt and his mother came in 1992 -- but it was emotionally overwhelming for him. "I told all of them not to come back; it was just too much," he said.

Ten into his stint, Melendez gave up hope. He had lost a round of appeals and depression set in. A lasting sadness among prisoners is common on death row and he had endured four friends' attempts at suicide. He decided that was the only way out of his nightmare.

"I actually made a noose with a plastic bag. I was ready to kill myself," he said.

In the end, though, he did not. "I had a vivid dream about happy times. When I woke up, I knew I didn't want to kill myself."

In 1999, Melendez was on his last round of appeals before execution. His attorney told an investigator to find something -- anything -- that would give the defence more time. He did. He found the transcript of James' confession in a circuit court judge's office in Polk County, Florida. The judge was Melendez's original defence attorney.

The circuit court judge told the investigator that, while cleaning out his old office he found the transcript. Its discovery was enough to grant Melendez a new trial.

"For a day or two, I was mad at the (circuit court) judge for either forgetting or not knowing about the transcript. But then I figured that anything that could get me off death row was good," Melendez said.

It took two more long before a new trial was granted by Circuit Court Judge Barbara Fleischer on December 5, 2001. A month later, Melendez was set free.

Since then, Melendez can't stop telling his story. He lectures about his ordeal to universities, high schools, detention centres and "anywhere people want to hear my story," Melendez said. Requests have taken him across the U.S. and over to Austria, Canada, England, France, Germany and Spain.

When he is not lecturing, Melendez helps recruit troubled children to work on a plantain farm in Puerto Rico. He teaches them the methods of farming and harvesting. While they work, he tells the story about how he came to live on death row.

"I try to tell the kids to not commit crimes, to try to not mark themselves (get arrested), to live a clean life. Because I had a criminal record, I became a tool for the system," Melendez said.

Mark Weisenmiller
TAMPA, Florida
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0804-07.htm
IPS-Inter Press Service

Nothing Better To Do

2006-07-28T10:30:00.000-07:00

Restaurant Owner Shaken By Seizure Of Fish From Tank

FREEPORT, Maine --Armed game wardens seized 10 exotic fish from the tank of a popular Chinese restaurant, leaving its owner shaken and outraged.

"They treated me like a criminal," said Cuong Ly, who escaped from Vietnam 25 years ago. "I lived under communism and I felt like I'm back there again."

Ly, 45, said his pet koi were like family members and their confiscation in what he described as a heavy-handed raid made him "want to explode inside."

After obtaining a search warrant, two uniformed wardens and a biologist, accompanied by Freeport police, visited China Rose on Wednesday, taking away the 10 fish that ranged in size from 12 to 14 inches.

The koi had been on display since Ly opened the restaurant nearly 15 years ago and he credited them for bringing good luck to the business in a way akin to the arrangement of articles in the ancient Chinese practice of feng shui.

A few years ago, however, Maine outlawed the importation and possession of koi, and Ly was charged with importing freshwater fish without a permit.

"These fish can grow to be very large," said Sgt. Tim Spahr of the Maine Warden Service. "And when they grow out of their indoor habitat, they may be taken to a lake or a river or stream, and what you have is an invasive species that can compete with the native fisheries."

Spahr said wardens had acted in response to a tip but he could not comment on the specifics of Ly's case while it was pending. The warden said he personally had been involved in three koi seizure cases within the past year.

The confiscation, Ly said, followed two days of warden visits to the restaurant in downtown Freeport, down the street from L.L. Bean. On July 17, he said, a warden warned him that the fish were illegal and he could face a big fine.

"We thought they were joking. We had these fish for years and we didn't take them serious," Ly said.

A warden who arrived the next day with a video camera issued Ly a summons.

That incident, according to Ly, came during the business lunch period and he told the warden that he didn't have time to talk just then. The warden left, only to return the next morning to confiscate the fish.

"It looked like they were raiding the place for illegal drugs," he said. "They made it seem like a crime scene."

The koi were transported to the Little Shop of Pets in Portsmouth, N.H., which agreed to let Ly buy them back.

Ly, which planned to place his koi with a relative in Boston while awaiting the final outcome, said he could not bear losing the fish.

"It's like someone taking your dog or your cat away," he said. "These are like my children. I clean the tank every other week, keep them nice and healthy, clean and happy. As long as the fish are happy, I'm happy, and I do good business."

After the koi were removed, Ly placed another fish species, red parrots, in the restaurant tank because leaving it empty would give him an unlucky feeling.

Even so, he said bad luck struck the restaurant soon after the loss of the koi.

"The central air conditioning went down this weekend," he said. "It's an unlucky feeling already appearing in my business."

http://www.boston.com/news/local/new_hampshire/articles/2006/07/24/restaurant_owner_shaken_by_seizure_of_fish_from_tank?mode=PF

Killer Cops Inspire Grave Concern in Las Vegas

2006-07-12T12:19:00.000-07:00

A spate of recent shootings by Las Vegas police has community activists pushing for accountability they say is so lax cops have a virtually free hand to kill and abuse residents.

July 12 – A man is gunned down after a confrontation over a loud car stereo. A teenager is shot in the back as he tears down a street to escape his pursuers, hands bound.

In a rough city like Las Vegas, these incidents would ordinarily be the stuff of local crime blotters: except in all the incidents, the bullets came from police officers’ guns.

In recent months, a rash of shootings involving the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department has sent chills through local communities. Yesterday, a coalition of civil-liberties and community-advocacy groups, including state and local branches of the NAACP, ACORN, the Mexican American Political Association and the American Civil Liberties Union, launched a campaign calling for an overhaul of what they view as a law-enforcement system rife with impunity.

This year, the Metro police have registered nineteen officer-involved shootings, six of which took place in the past month. The shootings resulted in ten deaths, and another death resulted from the use of a Taser electroshock weapon. The number of shootings has already exceeded the total for all of 2005, according to police statistics.

Activists have been especially incensed over the shooting death of 17-year-old murder suspect Swuave Lopez as he fled the police in handcuffs. The case was recently sealed by a special investigatory hearing that deemed the killing "justifiable" according to the state’s legal standards.

Activists say that some of the recent shootings seem more a product of poor judgment by police than imminent danger.
Dean Ishman, president of the Las Vegas NAACP and a retired police officer, told The NewStandard that while his organization understands that police may face difficult choices in extreme situations, some of the recent shootings seem more a product of poor judgment by police than imminent danger.

Ishman pointed to a July 4 shooting as a sign that police might be allowing minor disputes to escalate into tragedies. According to publicized police accounts, when an officer approached 31-year-old Tarance Deshon Hall to order him to turn down his blaring sound system and reached into his car, Hall pulled away, leaving the officer clinging to the side of the vehicle. A crash and a fatal shot from another officer followed.

"All of our young people drive around with their windows down and loud music," remarked Ishman. "Driving down Las Vegas Boulevard with a loud radio… should not result in anyone’s death."

Gary Peck, executive director of the Nevada ACLU, said the spike in police shootings "should raise serious questions about the culture of the department, about the training, and… whether or not they are unnecessarily putting themselves in positions where using deadly force necessarily becomes an option."

But José Montoya, an officer and spokesperson for the Metro police, said that the decision to use lethal force is more complex than the public might assume. "It’s pretty easy to play Monday Morning Quarterback, and it’s difficult for us to predict what the criminal is going to do with their behavior," he told The NewStandard. "We’re in a situation where we have to react to that behavior."

Some argue that police-involved violence stems from bias and weak relations with the community: When there is little mutual trust or communication, police might be less hesitant to use force.
Montoya noted that the department continually reviews its practices and may internally discipline officers for misconduct. But, he said, these actions are "internal affairs" and as a policy are not publicly disclosed.

Others view police behavior from a different angle. "From our perspective… this is really just an issue about being scared of the police," said Will Ward, Nevada head organizer with the low-income grassroots advocacy group ACORN.

Ward argued that police-involved violence stems in part from bias and weak relations with the community. When there is little mutual trust or communication, he said, police might be less hesitant to use force in a confrontation, "rather than trying to calm someone down and take control of the situation, based on a greater understanding of this individual and the community that they come from."

For many cops patrolling local streets, Ward said, "because they don’t have that relationship, it’s less an individual – a real person – that they’re dealing with, and more just a suspect that they can shoot in the back, if they need to."

Ward said the local chapter of ACORN, with a membership he estimates at about 60 percent Latino and 30 percent black, had recently facilitated meetings between police and community members to encourage cooperation in addressing neighborhood crime. But with the surge in officer-involved shootings, he commented, despite police outreach efforts, "at the end of the day, what they’re doing is killing a lot of low-, moderate-income, and minority people… which doesn’t go very far in trying to build good relationships."

Processes like the coroner’s inquest may be unlikely to spur major reform, because laws on the use of deadly force tend to give police broad discretion.
The US Supreme Court has ruled that police can legally use deadly force against an individual as a "reasonable" means of preventing what the police consider serious potential harm. Nevada revised its criminal code in 1993 to allow deadly force against an escaped suspected felon if he or she "poses a threat of serious bodily harm to the officer or to others."

But activists maintain that current state law enables police to exercise deadly force in situations that do not justify it. They also say lawmakers should look toward the Metro police’s own code of conduct. The department’s policy allows the use of deadly force only "to prevent the escape of a fleeing felon who [the officer] has probable cause to believe will pose a significant threat to human life if escape should occur."

In Ishman’s view, this rule is actually more protective of potential victims than the state statute. "Unfortunately," he said, "our state laws don’t agree with the police policies, which would tend to uphold what we’re saying: that you don’t shoot someone in handcuffs who is running away. He is not an immediate threat to anyone’s life, and therefore he should not be shot. But our state law doesn’t say that."

The ACLU has also decried the public process for probing officer-involved homicides, known as a coroner’s inquest. Designed as a "fact-finding" hearing as opposed to a trial, the district attorney’s office orchestrates the process before a jury and questions witnesses without cross-examination. Representation of the deceased is limited to written questions submitted by family members and other advocates, which are filtered through a "hearing master" – a legal professional designated by the Clark County Commission.

Though the jury’s verdict is not binding on any government entity, the district attorney and the police department’s internal "use of force board" may act on the finding in deciding whether to prosecute or discipline an officer. However, of about 150 inquests over the past 30 years, only one was deemed criminally negligent, in 1976; the rest were "excusable," "justified" or otherwise not liable.

According to the Coroner’s office, blacks and Hispanics constitute more than half of the cases vetted through the inquest system since 2004, whereas they make up approximately 10 and 24 percent of the Las Vegas population.

The ACLU contends that the Lopez shooting inquest ignored troubling holes in the witness accounts.

The officer who fired the fatal shot, Shane Womack, testified that he was about 25 to 30 feet away from Lopez when he shot him. But another testifying officer recalled that Womack was just six to eight feet away.

The ACLU argues the discrepancy might have implications for judging whether officers acted appropriately. But the seven-member jury nevertheless ruled that the killing was "justified" following testimony by officers and other witnesses who spoke about Lopez’s alleged criminal involvement.

From a legal standpoint, said ACLU attorney Allen Lichtenstein, widely differing eyewitness accounts should have raised "some real questions about the necessity of shooting him." However, he said, "that wasn’t addressed at the coroner’s inquest. The coroner’s inquest was mainly about what a bad guy he was."

Oren Root, deputy director of the national law-enforcement policy think tank Police Assessment Resource Center, said that processes like the coroner’s inquest are unlikely to spur major reform, because laws on the use of deadly force tend to give police broad discretion.

"Lots of people who are upset at shootings put energies and hopes into seeing indictments of officers," Root said. "But the problem with that is that rarely is there enough evidence to charge officers with violating the law, based on what the law is.… The law gives officers a wide scope for using deadly force."

But Root noted that state legislatures have the authority to amend existing laws on deadly force to go beyond the minimum standard set by the Supreme Court. Individual jurisdictions, as well as police agencies, he said, could establish heavier restrictions on the circumstances in which officers may legally use lethal tactics.

The civil-liberties coalition formed in Las Vegas is pressing lawmakers to strengthen the use-of-force statutes, as well as mechanisms for investigating deaths that police officers cause.

The organizations say they want to see the Nevada criminal code tightened to make it harder to "justify" police killings. They are also calling for an overhaul of the coroner’s inquest process, to provide for fuller legal representation of the deceased and for an independent body to handle the proceedings, rather than the district attorney, who normally works closely with law enforcement.

Lichtenstein said that even if the inquest system serves simply to shed some light on deaths at the hands of police, the process could still be strengthened to empower communities. "Internal police investigations are generally not disclosed to the public, and it’s the police investigating themselves," he said. "These are situations with police who are supposed to be accountable to the public, and the coroner’s inquest is the only public inquiry. And it should be a real one, and a fair one, and a credible one. And it is not."

by Michelle Chen

http://newstandardnews.net/content/index.cfm/items/3405

No To Military Kangaroo Trials

2006-07-11T22:58:00.000-07:00

Pentagon Breaks With Bush On Detentions

· Geneva convention covers Guantánamo detainees
· Supreme court ruling prompts policy switch

The Bush administration was facing the collapse of its detention regime in the war on terror yesterday after the Pentagon said for the first time that prisoners at Guantánamo and elsewhere in US military custody around the world would be granted the protections of the Geneva convention.

In a memo released yesterday, the Pentagon's second in command, Gordon England, broke with the Bush administration's insistence of the past five years that the rules of war do not apply to the fight against al-Qaida.

"I request that you promptly review all relevant directives, regulations, policies, practices and procedures" to bring them in line with protections under article three of the Geneva convention, Mr England wrote. Article three outlaws torture and humiliating and degrading treatment, and says prisoners are entitled to a hearing by a regularly constituted court. Yesterday's memo was a direct result of last month's supreme court decision which ruled that the Bush administration's military tribunals for the detainees were illegal.

The 5-3 decision was widely seen as a rebuke to a White House that had asserted since 2001 that Mr Bush had extraordinary powers as a wartime president, and that al-Qaida suspects were not entitled to the protections given to prisoners of war.

The Pentagon has insisted that it had treated detainees humanely. However, a report this week from the Centre for Constitutional Rights on conditions at Guantánamo describes interrogations of hooded prisoners with snarling dogs, sleep deprivation that lasted for months, solitary confinement for periods of up to a year, and threats of transfer to countries that practise torture.

While the Bush administration has said it will implement the supreme court decision, there were indications the new policy was only reluctantly endorsed by the White House. "We are going to do this in a way that is consistent with national security," the White House spokesman, Tony Snow, told reporters .

Other administration officials expressed reservations. In the first of three days of hearings in Congress on the treatment of detainees, Steven Bradbury, of the justice department's office of legal counsel, told senators the Geneva convention protections were ambiguous and poorly defined.

Those tensions dampened the response of civil rights organisations to the Pentagon announcement. "At the same time that the defence department is showing signs of heading in the direction of restoring the rule of law, the justice department is urging Congress to abandon it," said Anthony Romero, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Amid conflicting signals from the White House and the Pentagon, it was not immediately clear how the directive would affect interrogations at Guantánamo and other detention centres.

However, the move by the Pentagon could weigh on Congress as it considers new legislation following the supreme court decision. There has been growing unease among Republicans and Democrats that the administration might try to dilute the supreme court ruling by introducing legislation that would support its version of military tribunals to try Guantánamo detainees.

Yesterday the Senate judiciary committee opened three days of hearings on Guantánamo amid warnings to the administration that it would be mistaken to try to circumvent the decision.

Last week, Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, criticised America's conduct in the global war on terror and said the west would be "doomed" unless it reclaimed "the moral high ground".

Speaking at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado, Sir Richard singled out CIA rendition flights and the indefinite detention of prisoners in Guantánamo for rebuke, saying both policies would have been illegal under UK law.

Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington, Oliver King and Simon Jeffery
Wednesday July 12, 2006
The Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,1818413,00.html?gusrc=rss

Center for Constitutional Rights Report

2006-07-11T16:42:00.000-07:00

Guantanamo Bay Detainees Face 'Systematic' Abuse: CCR Report

[JURIST] Prisoners at the US detention center at Guantanamo Bay [JURIST news archive] have been subjected to "systematic physical, psychological, sexual, medical and religious abuse," according to a report [PDF full text; synopsis] released Monday by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) [advocacy website]. CCR describes the 51-page "Report on Torture and Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Treatment of Prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba," as the most comprehensive primary-source account of abuse at the facility. The report cites declassified statements from detainees still at Guantanamo and from their lawyers. According to the report, Guantanamo detainees have been:

held in solitary confinement for periods exceeding a year;

deprived of sleep for days and weeks and, in at least one case, months;

exposed to prolonged temperature extremes;

beaten;

threatened with transfer to a foreign country, for torture;

tortured in foreign countries or at U.S. military bases abroad before transfer to Guantanamo;

sexually harassed and raped or threatened with rape;

deprived of medical treatment for serious conditions, or allowed treatment only on the condition that they "cooperate" with interrogators; and

routinely "short-shackled" (wrists and ankles bound together and to the floor) for hours and even days during interrogations.

The report concluded that the Bush administration's designation of Guantanamo prisoners as "enemy combatants" allowed the US Department of Defense to avoid not only the guarantees for prisoners of war under the Third Geneva Convention [text] but also the Army Field Manual's restrictions on interrogation techniques [text].

The commander of the Guantanamo detention facility said last week that most prisoners no longer face regular questioning [JURIST report]. Also last week, the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights called on the US to set a date [JURIST report] for closing Guantanamo. US officials, including President Bush, have said they would like to close the facility [JURIST report] but cannot until they ensure that detainees will not pose a security risk or face torture when returned to their native countries.

Joe Shaulis at 1:36 PM ET
http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/paperchase/2006/07/guantanamo-bay-detainees-face.php

A Failing Grade For A `Broken System'

2006-07-02T11:00:00.000-07:00

THE SAME WEEK Americans enjoy the 230th birthday of the Declaration of Independence, they might also consider the meaning of another, less celebratory, anniversary. Thirty years ago, on July 2, 1976, a divided US Supreme Court upheld Georgia, Florida, and Texas laws that promised an end to the arbitrariness and discrimination that had rendered capital punishment unconstitutional four years earlier.

After the Supreme Court's decision, the 38 states using the death penalty have employed different criteria to measure aggravating and mitigating circumstances. However, all empower juries to use such a formula to decide who deserves death and who does not. After 30 years, it is time to evaluate the impact of the laws.

Regardless of whether observers favor or oppose the death penalty, most agree with the conclusion of Columbia Law School's James Liebman , a leading capital punishment scholar, who has labeled the way we enforce death penalty laws a ``broken system."

And no wonder. Execution commonly occurs more than a decade after the crime that gave rise to it, long after the death has meaning for anyone outside the immediate circle of the case. Amazingly, it costs from $2 million to $5 million to take a convicted killer from trial to the death chamber. The justice system devotes enormous, if often dysfunctional, attention to capital cases, shortchanging the law enforcement resources available to the vastly larger number of serious, noncapital, cases.

And then there are the disputes between those who insist that executions effectively deter murder and those who claim they do not. Or between those who see race-based decision-making infecting every stage of the process, and those who say that such claims are not established by statistics. These differences are of long standing and they may never be resolved.

Of considerations that demand a failing grade for the American way of death sentencing, three stand out.

First, the rise of the innocence movement has produced well over 100 exonerations. When the Supreme Court decided to restore the death penalty in 1976, serious innocence claims were limited to rare instances of total criminal justice system collapse. Fueled by infallible DNA evidence but also encompassing defects in eyewitness identification and law enforcement malfeasance, doubts about death sentences are now understood to result from common and virtually ineradicable human failures.

Second, when the Supreme Court tried to rid us of capital punishment in 1972, it focused on arbitrariness. As Justice Potter Stewart famously put it, death sentences were ``cruel and unusual in the same way that being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual" -- only a capriciously selected, random few, not fundamentally different in character than those sent to prison, were actually executed.

Today, despite the new laws, little has changed. Washington State's Green River Killer took at least 48 lives, but because he knew where his victims were buried he plea bargained to save his life. The brutal Kansas serial murderer of 10 known as the BTK (``bind, torture and kill") strangler received only multiple life sentences.

Yet we still make room for the execution of men like Chicano laborer Ruben Cantu who, based on the tireless investigation of Houston Chronicle reporter Lise Olsen, turns out to have been sent to his death because of the perjury of an eyewitness. More fortunate was Ray Krone, who spent four years on Arizona's death row and six more in prison before release because the state stubbornly refused to turn over for testing the evidence that ultimately exonerated him and pointed to a man who should have been the prime suspect. These are not isolated cases; they illustrate how difficult it is to make the tough legal and nuanced moral choices that fair and constitutional death sentencing should require.

Last, what we get instead is a distracting series of courtroom passion plays -- the latest involving convicted terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui -- that stoke the fantasy that we are being protected by executing what is, in reality, a tiny percentage of killers. In 2005, only 60 individuals were executed, despite the fact that perhaps 15,000 murders are committed each year.

It is striking how relatively little we talk about reducing lethal violence and how little energy politicians provide to policies targeted at containing it -- youth employment, family support, drug treatment, handgun suppression -- before it happens.

The policies in question are controversial but debate over whether they can make us more secure is muted while capital punishment is a show that never ends.

By Michael Meltsner | July 2, 2006

Michael Meltsner, a professor of law at Northeastern University, is author of ``The Making of a Civil Rights Lawyer."

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/07/02/a_failing_grade_for_a_broken_system/
Globe Newspaper Company.

Supreme Court Rejects Guantanamo Military Tribunals

2006-06-29T09:35:00.000-07:00

In a sharp rebuke of President George W. Bush's tactics in the war on terrorism, the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday struck down as unlawful the military tribunal system set up to try Guantanamo prisoners.

By a 5-3 vote, the nation's highest court declared that the tribunals, which Bush created right after the September 11 attacks, violated the Geneva Conventions and U.S. military rules.

"We conclude that the military commission convened to try (Salim Ahmed) Hamdan lacks power to proceed because its structure and procedures violate" the international agreement that covers treatment of prisoners of war, as well as the Uniform Code of Military Justice, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the court majority.

The decision was a stinging blow for the administration in a case brought by Hamdan, who was Osama bin Laden's driver in Afghanistan. Hamdan, one of about 450 foreign terrorism suspects at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was captured in November 2001.

At the White House, Bush said he had not fully reviewed the ruling and would consult with the U.S. Congress to attain appropriate authority for military tribunals. "We take the findings seriously," he said.

A Pentagon spokesman declined immediate to comment but reiterated the need for a U.S. facility to hold dangerous captives.

The ruling, handed down on the last day of the court's 2005-06 term, followed the deaths of three Guantanamo prisoners this month and increased calls for Bush to close the prison camp. U.S. treatment of inmates at Guantanamo and in Iraq and Afghanistan has drawn international criticism.

One of Hamdan's lawyers, Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift, praised the high court action. "All we wanted was a fair trial," he said outside the Supreme Court. "Yes, it is a rebuke for the process. ... It means we can't be scared out of who we are."

Anthony Romero of the American Civil Liberties Union said, "The Supreme Court has made clear that the executive branch does not have a blank check in the war on terror and may not run roughshod over the nation's legal system."

Stevens, at 86 the high court's longest serving justice and a leading liberal, said the military commissions were not expressly authorized by any act of the U.S. Congress. But in reading part of the decision from the bench, he said Bush was free to go to lawmakers to ask for the necessary authority.

Stevens also wrote the Supreme Court decision two years ago that handed the Bush administration another major setback in ruling the Guantanamo prisoners can sue in U.S. courts.

RULES ARE ILLEGAL

Stevens said in his 73-page opinion, "The rules specified for Hamdan's trial are illegal." He said the system has to incorporate even "the barest of those trial protections that have been recognized by customary international law."

He said the tribunals failed to provide one of the most fundamental protection under U.S. military rules, the right for a defendant to be present at a proceeding.

The case produced a total of six opinions totaling 177 pages.

Stevens was joined by the other liberal justices David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, and moderate-conservative Anthony Kennedy.

The conservatives -- Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, who was appointed by Bush -- dissented.

The ninth member of the court, Chief Justice John Roberts, who also was appointed by Bush, removed himself because he previously was on the U.S. appeals court panel that ruled for the Bush administration in Hamdan's case.

The dissenters agreed with the administration's argument that the case must be dismissed because a recent law stripped the high court of its jurisdiction over Hamdan's appeal.

Thomas also said the court needed to respect Bush's power as commander in chief while Alito said he disagreed with the majority that Hamdan's tribunal was illegal.

By James Vicini

(additional reporting by Deborah Charles)

Reuters

Justice Dept. Reports Inaction on Police Brutality

2006-06-28T00:39:00.000-07:00

Thousands of public complaints are made against police officers for using violence against civilians, but an overwhelming majority do not result in disciplinary action against the officers in question, according to a new report from the US Department of Justice.

‘Copwatch’ Activists Patrol Communities to Thwart Police Misconduct (Mar 3, 2005)
The agency reviewed 26,556 "citizen complaints" filed during 2002 at state and local law-enforcement agencies. Out of that number, just 8 percent were sustained with enough evidence to justify taking punitive action against the accused officer. The report did not say how often or in or what ways officers in this group were disciplined.

In nearly one-half of the cases reviewed, authorities exonerated officers despite allegations that they acted excessively; in about a third of incidents, investigators said they did not find enough evidence that unlawful force was used.

The DoJ report lacks specific accounts of police conduct, let alone victims’ or witnesses’ perspectives.

The author also neglected to define "use of force," a term used regularly in the report, which was released Sunday. The Department states on its website that there is "no single, accepted definition among the researchers, analysts or the police." The report does, however, take pains to define "use of excessive force" – when officers uses too much violence – and "excessive use of force" – when officers use violence legally but in too many incidents.

In nearly one-half of the cases reviewed, authorities exonerated officers despite allegations that they acted excessively.
The report also cautioned that complaint data is inconsistent across agencies. The report’s author, statistician Matthew Hickman, wrote that the quality of records – in addition to differences in receiving, processing, and recording complaints – affects the volume and rate of complaints reported across law-enforcement agencies.

For example, the review found that departments with an internal audit division had a higher rate of complaints than those without. Additionally, officers were more than twice as likely to be exonerated at departments that lacked such a division.

Furthermore, wrote Hickman, "[use-of-]force complaints represent a subset of all force events. That is, not all [use-of-]force events result in citizens filing formal complaints."

According to another DoJ-authored report, based on the Department’s 2002 "Contacts Between the Police and the Public" survey, less than 20 percent of respondents who reported experiencing what they said was excessive threat or use of force, took formal action such as filing a complaint or lawsuit. The study extrapolated that a total of 664,500 people in the United States – or about 1.5 percent of those who had contact with police – experienced a use of force by police. Three quarters of them perceived it to be "excessive."

Police watchdogs agree that complaint statistics are inaccurate. The American Civil Liberties Union states on its website that figures are marred by agencies’ reluctance to provide information and by data that is difficult to interpret. According to the ACLU, "the number of complaints counted is also affected by whether or not the internal-affairs system accepts anonymous complaints and complaints by phone or mail, or requires in-person, sworn statements."

Minnesota lawmakers passed a “false reporting” bill last year that makes it illegal to report a claim of police misconduct that is not proven to be true.
Human Rights Watch has also documented hurdles in the police-accountability process. "Complainants, whether they are victims or witnesses, may not know where to go to file a complaint," the group wrote in 1998. "They may have difficulty communicating due to language barriers, or they may be met with hostility by officers who do not wish to receive a complaint about a colleague. … Officers receiving complaints may ask questions that reveal they do not believe the complainant, or they may ask about the complainant's criminal history or charges that may be pending as a result of the arrest that gave rise to the alleged abuse incident."

Even greater obstacles are cropping up in some places. In Minnesota, a new law could further discourage people from filing complaints. Lawmakers passed a "false reporting" bill last year that makes it illegal to report a claim of police misconduct that is not proven to be true.

Communities United Against Police Brutality, a Twin Cities police watchdog group, questions just who would be determining whether or not a brutality complaint is false under the bill. "This law is clearly meant to frighten people away from filing complaints against abusive police officers," the group said in a petition.

Earlier this month, a coalition of community groups in Richmond, Virginia held a protest to voice frustration with police using what they considered excessive force, especially against black residents. The rally followed the city’s decision not to prosecute an officer involved in a fatal shooting of an unarmed man, and a judge’s dismissal of criminal charges against an officer accused of assaulting and cursing at a woman during a traffic stop.

Many community activists have long agitated for more accountability of officers who brutalize civilians. Some have formed Copwatch groups to "police the police" in places like Berkley, Brooklyn and Portland, Oregon.

In a growing number of cities, communities have lobbied for and organized civilian complaint review boards (CCRB) to review allegations of police misconduct. According to the DoJ report released this week, about one-fifth of large municipal police forces are overseen by such a board. The report noted that cities with CCRBs tend to receive more complaints, but it did not address the cause-or-effect relationship between the boards, incidences of alleged abuse and actual complaint-filing rates.

Some groups have criticized CCRBs, claiming they are not truly independent and lack the tools necessary to effectively hold officers accountable for wrongdoing. The DoJ report found that only about one-in-four CCRBs had independent investigative authority with subpoena powers.

The recent DoJ report also found that in the three quarters of municipalities that allowed police to unionize, residents filed police brutality complaints at significantly higher rates and those complaints were less than half as likely to be sustained.

The DoJ said the citizen-complaint survey report was part of its "continuing efforts to develop data resources on police use of force."

by Catherine Komp
June 27

http://newstandardnews.net/content/index.cfm/items/3343

Bush’s Wiretap Crimes and the FISA Farce

2006-06-27T08:49:00.000-07:00

President Bush proudly announced last December that he is violating federal law. He declared that in 2002 he had ordered the National Security Agency to begin conducting warrantless wiretaps and email intercepts on Americans. He asserted that the wiretaps would continue, regardless of the law.

Bush claims that he must ignore the law because the secret federal court created to authorize such wiretaps moves too slowly to protect U.S. national security. Amazingly, his claim has been treated with respect by much of the nation’s media. Much of the media groveled at his claim the same way that the special court grovels to federal agencies.

In 1978, responding to scandals about political spying on Americans in the name of counterespionage, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). FISA created a new “court” to oversee federal surveillance of foreign agents within the United States.

The FISA court may be the biggest bunch of lapdogs in the federal government, even worse than the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. The court approved almost every one of the 15,000 search-warrant requests the feds submitted between 1978 and 2002, and continues to approve more than 99 percent of requests.

FISA provides a judicial process only in the sense that the room where the political appointees convene is called a “court.” As national security expert James Bamford observed,

Like a modern Star Chamber, the FISA court meets behind a cipher-locked door in a windowless, bug-proof, vault-like room guarded 24 hours a day on the top floor of the Justice Department building. The eleven judges (increased from seven by the Patriot Act) hear only the government’s side.
This speeds matters up and minimizes procedural delays.

Congress set a very low standard for FISA search warrants. In federal criminal investigations, the government must show probable cause that a person is involved in criminal activity before it is permitted to impose a wiretap. Under FISA, the government need show only that a person is a suspected agent of a foreign power or terrorist organization.

When FISA authorizes surveillance, the feds switch on all the turbos. In a 2002 decision, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court noted that after it grants a surveillance request,

the FBI will be authorized to conduct, simultaneously, telephone, microphone, cell phone, e-mail and computer surveillance of the U.S. person target’s home, workplace and vehicles. Similar breadth is accorded the FBI in physical searches of the target’s residence, office, vehicles, computer, safe deposit box and U.S. mails where supported by probable cause.
Federal agencies can submit retroactive search-warrant requests up to 72 hours after they begin surveilling someone. In 2002, for instance, Attorney General John Ashcroft personally issued more than 170 emergency domestic spying warrants permitting agents to carry out wiretaps and to search homes and offices for up to 72 hours before the feds requested a search warrant from the FISA court. Ashcroft used such powers almost a hundred times as often as attorneys general did before 9/11.

After 9/11, the Justice Department vigorously lobbied for Congress to revise FISA to permit it to be used for spying on Americans with little or no relation to foreign powers or terrorist plots. Ashcroft claimed that the reform was needed because FISA had impeded efforts to track terrorists. The dispute was not over whether foreign agents should be tracked: no one in Congress was opposed to that. The issue was whether the feds could launch massive surveillance operations against a U.S. citizen on the pretext of fighting terrorism, even though there was no evidence of the citizen’s criminal wrongdoing. Congress acquiesced to Ashcroft’s demands.

Federal incompetence and Moussaoui

The USA PATRIOT Act changed the law to make it far easier to use FISA search warrants against Americans. During the PATRIOT Act mini-deliberations, the Justice Department claimed that the FISA restrictions had fatally delayed its efforts to secure a search warrant for Zacarias Moussaoui, the suspected “20th hijacker,” who was arrested in Minnesota on August 16, 2001. But, as a 2003 Senate Judiciary Committee report noted, the FBI had sufficient information to get a FISA wiretap before 9/11 but failed to do so because “key FBI personnel responsible for protecting our country against terrorism did not understand the law.” FBI agents in Minneapolis could also have easily gotten a regular search warrant from a federal judge — if they had not been hogtied by FBI headquarters.

FBI agents in Minneapolis asked FBI headquarters for permission to request a search warrant from a federal judge in Minnesota. FBI headquarters refused permission, instead insisting that the Minnesota agents file a FISA search request — which had to be handled by “experts” (who turned out to be nitwits) at FBI headquarters. FBI headquarters agents believed that, before a FISA wiretap could be granted, Moussaoui had to be linked to an organization that the U.S. government formally labeled as “terrorist.”

But that was not the case. Eleanor Hill, the staff director for the Joint Intelligence Committee investigation into pre-9/11 failures, observed,

The lesson of Moussaoui was that F.B.I. headquarters was telling the field office the wrong advice.
A 9/11 commission staff report concluded,

A maximum U.S. effort to investigate Moussaoui could conceivably have unearthed his connections to the Hamburg cell [of 9/11 hijackers]. The publicity about the threat also might have disrupted the plot.
Commission chairman Thomas Kean commented,

Everything had to go right for [the hijackers]. Had they felt that one of them had been discovered, there is evidence it would have been delayed.
But the FBI blew the Moussaoui investigation, perhaps costing thousands of Americans their lives.

The Moussaoui debacle was typical of how the feds botched FISA cases. A 2003 Senate report noted,

In the time leading up to the 9/11 attacks, the FBI and DOJ had not devoted sufficient resources to implementing the FISA, so that long delays both crippled enforcement efforts and demoralized line agents.
The 9/11 commission staff reported,

Many FBI agents also told us that the process for getting FISA packages approved at FBI Headquarters and the Department of Justice was incredibly lengthy and inefficient. Several FBI agents added that, prior to 9/11, FISA-derived intelligence information was not fully exploited but was collected primarily to justify continuing the surveillance.
Besides, the intercepts often languished unused: “The FBI did not have a sufficient number of translators proficient in Arabic and other languages useful in counterterrorism investigations, resulting in a significant backlog of untranslated FISA intercepts by early 2001.”

FISA and the PATRIOT Act

The expansion of FISA-authorized surveillance in the PATRIOT Act was one of the clearest examples of rewarding federal incompetence and misconduct with greater power. In September 2000, the Justice Department notified the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) that the FBI had made at least 75 false representations to the court about wiretaps. The court was so enraged that one senior FBI counter-terrorism official was forbidden to ever appear again before the court. A few months later, the Justice Department notified the court of another rash of false representations about how closely prosecutors were involved with FISA wiretaps. The Justice Department did not notify any member of Congress of its FISA-related misconduct, even though Congress has a statutory right and duty of oversight.

A few months after the PATRIOT Act was signed, Ashcroft proposed new regulations to “allow FISA to be used primarily for a law enforcement purpose.” The FISC judges unanimously rejected his power grab as contrary to federal law.

The Justice Department refused to provide senators with a copy of the FISC decision that rejected Ashcroft’s bid. Though the decision was a blunt rejection of his attempt to use FISA to unleash federal prosecutors to spy on Americans, the Justice Department believed that no one in Congress was entitled to a copy of the decision of the secret court.

The senators eventually got a copy of the decision directly from the court and released it to the public in August 2002. Ashcroft appealed the decision to the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review — a special court that exists to hear cases in which the government loses in its first swing at a wiretap. The judges of this court (which had never met before) were picked by Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist, a jurist renowned for his minimalist interpretation of the Fourth Amendment.

The FISA appeals court met in secret and only the Justice Department was permitted to argue its side. Steve Aftergood, editor of the Federation of American Scientists’ Secrecy News, commented that the transcript of the hearing (released months after the fact) showed that “the judges generally assumed a servile posture toward the executive branch, even consulting the Justice Department on how to handle its critics.”

The FISA appeals court, in a November 2002 decision, unleashed the Justice Department and gave Ashcroft everything he wanted. He proclaimed that its decision “revolutionizes our ability to investigate terrorists and prosecute terrorist acts.”

The FISA appeals court decision encourages federal agents to seek FISA warrants even in cases where the links to terrorism or terrorist activity are very doubtful. American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Ann Beeson observed that the FISA appeals court decision “suggests that this special court exists only to rubber-stamp government applications for intrusive surveillance warrants.” Miami Attorney Neal Sonnett, chairman of an American Bar Association panel on terrorism law, observed that FISA “has now turned into a de facto domestic intelligence act. The line was blurred with FISA for a long time. And when [Congress] passed the PATRIOT Act, they wiped it out completely.”

Unfortunately, Americans are unlikely to learn how this domestic intelligence operation actually functions. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) proposed a bill entitled the Domestic Surveillance Oversight Act that would require that the Justice Department report the “aggregate number of FISA wiretaps and other surveillance measures directed specifically against Americans each year.” Leahy also sought to compel the Justice Department to reveal to Congress the secret rules by which the secret court operated. Because of staunch Justice Department opposition, Leahy’s measure was not enacted.

Breaking the law

Even though the FISA court is often a farce, providing only a façade of judicial procedure, any restriction on domestic spying was too much for the Bush administration. Or perhaps Bush believes that being obliged to request retroactive search warrants tarnishes his imperial majesty. It remains to be seen whether Congress or federal courts will hold the president liable for proclaiming that he is above the law.

Yet, despite the back-flipping bias of the FISA court, Bush would not bother seeking warrants for wiretaps of American citizens. He took a swing at critics shortly after he announced he was entitled to tap calls. Speaking after he had visited wounded soldiers in San Antonio, he declared, “The NSA program is one that listens to a few numbers called from the outside of the United States of known al-Qaeda or affiliated people.”

Except that the program also listens to calls from inside the United States to abroad. And, in some cases, it has wiretapped calls exclusively within the United States. And as for the notion “known al-Qaeda or affiliated people” — what is the Bush team’s definition of “affiliated”? Does it require something aside from being a Muslim? Newsweek reported that the warrantless program tapped 500 people a day.

The president was not content with being able to totally stack the deck: instead, he resented the indignity of being required to deal with the courts and to tacitly concede that the federal government does not have an unlimited right to surveil Americans.

Former White House counsel John Dean observed,

There can be no serious question that warrantless wiretapping, in violation of the law, is impeachable. After all, Nixon was charged in Article II of his bill of impeachment with illegal wiretapping for what he, too, claimed were national security reasons.
Dean suggested that Bush left Tricky Dick in the dust: “Nixon’s illegal surveillance was limited; Bush’s, it is developing, may be extraordinarily broad in scope.”

The response of the American people and the American legal and political system to Bush’s warrantless wiretaps will be a bellwether for the future of American liberty.

James Bovard is the author of Attention Deficit Democracy [2006] as well as The Bush Betrayal [2004], Lost Rights [1994] and Terrorism and Tyranny: Trampling Freedom, Justice and Peace to Rid the World of Evil (Palgrave-Macmillan, September 2003) and serves as a policy advisor for The Future of Freedom Foundation. Send him email.

This article originally appeared in the March 2006 edition of Freedom Daily.

Supreme Court Ruling on Police Raids Endangers Citizens

2006-06-26T11:20:00.000-07:00

Last week, the Supreme Court ruled in its 5-4 decision in the case of Hudson v. Michigan that when police conduct an illegal, no-knock raid, any evidence they seize in the raid can still be used against the suspect at trial, even though the raid was conducted illegally.

I’ve spent the last year researching these types of volatile, highly-confrontational, paramilitary raids for a forthcoming report for the Cato Institute. The decision in Hudson is almost certain to lead to more illegal no-knock raids, more mistaken raids on innocent people, and more unnecessary deaths, both of civilians and of police officers.

Experts on both sides of the ruling have debated the issue for a week now. I’d like to make another point. The Supreme Court split on this case, right down the middle. The four most liberal justices voted in favor of the defendant, while the five most conservative justices voted in favor of the police.

The Court’s "swing voter," Justice Kennedy, filed a middling concurrence that sided with the conservatives, but warned them not to take their line of argument any further, or they’d lose his vote. But the majority opinion in this case, written by Anthony Scalia, was not actually all that conservative. Here’s why:

The Rule of Law

As recently as 1995, the Court ruled in the case of Wilson v. Arkansas that the centuries-old common law notion that police should announce themselves before entering a private home was engrained in the Fourth Amendment. That is, it is an inherent part of the Constitution. The Court issued this ruling unanimously, including votes by Justices Thomas and Scalia.

In Hudson the Court didn’t overturn Wilson. The announcement requirement still exists. But the Court did take away the only realistic way of enforcing it, which is to punish police by barring evidence when they break it.

In his opinion, Scalia argued that there are better ways to punish police who break the rule, such as suing them. But both the state of Michigan and the U.S. government both acknowledged in their briefs in the case that they couldn’t come up with a single case where such a lawsuit had been successful.

In other words, with Hudson and Wilson, the Court has said not only is the requirement that police announce themselves before entering a private home law, it’s in the Constitution, the highest law in the land. Yet the Court has also said it’s not too concerned with enforcing that law.

The Rule of Law is a value held dear by most conservatives. Conservatives tend to loathe the fact that we have laws on the books that go unenforced. And rightly so. Unenforced law undermines respect for the law and for the criminal justice process. Yet that’s exactly what has happened with Hudson.

Originalism

The most puzzling part of Scalia’s opinion comes in a passage where he states that over the last half century, police have become more professional, and more likely to observe and respect our civil liberties. Therefore, according to Scalia, punishing police officers who break the law shouldn’t be of much concern.

Today, they’re less likely to break the law, and more likely to address and correct those who do internally. I don’t happen to agree (neither, apparently, does at least one of the sources he cites for this passage, who has since said Scalia misinterpreted his work).

But let’s assume Scalia is right. What he’s saying, then, is that things have changed. Police have become better trained and better educated. They are less violent and more cognizant of civil liberties. Therefore, we ought to interpret the Constitution differently – in this case removing the remedy of excluding evidence for search violations – to reflect those changes.

This is the very "living, breathing Constitution" argument the left often makes, and that usually drives conservatives batty. It’s an argument that is inconsistent with the originalism or "strict constructionism" conservatives claim to embrace.

The Castle Doctrine

The knock-and-announce rule has a common law tradition that goes back centuries. It is grounded in the "Castle Doctrine," which states that a man’s home is his castle, his place of asylum, and he has the right to defend it against intruders who would do him harm. The sanctity of the home is the same principle that, for example, led conservatives (and libertarians like me) to so loathe the eminent domain decision the Court issued in the Kelo v. New London case.

The knock-and-announce requirement held that when police have a warrant, the owner of a home ought to be given time to compose himself, come to the door, and submit to a peaceful search, and not incur the property damage, fright and possible violence of a forced entry.

Hudson obliterates the Castle Doctrine. It essentially gives police a pass to enter private homes without announcing. It thus makes it much more difficult for a man to adequately defend his home. When intruders force their way inside in the middle of the night, a waking homeowner -- particularly one who lives in a low-income, or high-crime area -- must now pause in the heat of the moment and ask himself, "what if it’s the police?"

Homeowners who understandably mistake police for criminal intruders and put up resistance risk injury, death, or prosecution (see the case of Cory Maye for one example of how these tactics are both dangerous to police and unfair to homeowners). The situation grows even more perilous when one considers that criminals have now caught on to the rising police raid trend.

In my research, I’ve found dozens of examples of criminals posing as raiding police officers to gain entry into a private home.

The most troubling thing about the Hudson case, then, is not that the Supreme Court’s most right-leaning justices are too conservative to uphold our civil liberties. It’s that when it comes to upholding our civil liberties, we can’t even count on them to be sufficiently conservative.

Radley Balko is a policy analyst for the Cato Institute specializing in "nanny state" and consumer choice issues, including alcohol and tobacco control, drug prohibition, obesity, and civil liberties. Separately, he maintains the The Agitator weblog. The opinions expressed in his column for FOXNews.com are his own and are not to be associated with Cato unless otherwise indicated.

FBI: Prison Guard Opens Fire On Feds Sent To Arrest Him

2006-06-21T12:18:00.000-07:00

Three people were shot, two fatally, at a Tallahassee, Florida, federal detention center Wednesday as federal agents went to arrest six corrections officers, authorities said.

The six guards were being arrested in an investigation into allegations that guards were trading drugs for sex with female inmates, federal law enforcement sources said.

One of those being arrested opened fire, said Jeff Westcott, spokesman for the FBI's Jacksonville bureau.

Federal agents returned fire, killing the suspect, Westcott said. An agent with the Department of Justice's Office of Inspector General died in the shootout, he said. (Watch what may have prompted the gunfight -- 1:48)

A Bureau of Prisons official was wounded.

The victims' identities and details of the arrest warrants were not released.

The shooting occurred about 7:45 a.m. at a federal detention facility in Tallahassee. (See facility, map)

The Tallahassee facility holds mainly women, but includes an area holding men awaiting trial.

The facility was put on lockdown after the shooting, officials said.

CNN's Patrick Oppmann and Terry Frieden contributed to this report.

CNN.com

No Knock-Knock

2006-06-21T08:37:00.000-07:00

Gamble Rogers, the late Florida folksinger and story-teller, used to spin a hilarious tale about the execution of what he called an "Alabama search warrant."

That, Rogers would say, is when the sheriff stands at the front door and knocks, whereupon the deputy standing at the back door yells "Come on in!"

But now the U.S. Supreme Court has spun a different kind of knock-knock joke, albeit not nearly so amusing. In this one, the sheriff doesn't even have to bother to knock. Just shout "Police!" and burst through the door.

The Fourth Amendment's prohibition against unreasonable searches of one's home simply doesn't mean much anymore. That's because this court seems less committed to protecting the constitutional rights of Americans than expanding the already fearsome authority of government to intrude upon our privacy.

In deciding, on a 5-4 vote, that police executing search warrants are no longer obliged to observe a "knock-and-announce" rule that has its roots in 13th century English common law, the court has fairly gutted the constitutional right of Americans to feel secure in the privacy of their own homes.

Indeed, so far as Justice Antonin Scalia, author of the majority opinion, is concerned, all that Fourth Amendment expectation really boiled down to was "the right not to be intruded upon in one's nightclothes." Reduced to such triviality, it was certainly not deemed to be of significant weight to offset the government's right to send squads of masked SWAT officers into private homes in the dead of night in search of evidence of criminal activity.

This decision for all practical purposes voids the "exclusionary rule" that prohibits the prosecution from using evidence that was seized illegally. It is also just one more indication that this new Supreme Court majority has a frightening bias toward government authoritarianism.

When even the formality of an "Alabama search warrant" is no longer deemed necessary, is the Fourth Amendment still worth the parchment it was printed on?

http://www.gainesville.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=200660620032&source=email

How US Hid The Suicide Secrets Of Guantanamo

2006-06-17T22:20:00.000-07:00

After three inmates killed themselves, the Pentagon declared the suicides an act of 'asymmetric warfare', banned the media and went on a PR offensive. But as despair grows within the camp, so too does outrage mount at its brutal and secretive regime.

In Guantanamo Bay's Alpha Block, the night was like any other: sweltering and seemingly endless. Although the temperature was down to the high 70s outside, the block's steel roof and walls were radiating heat, and in the two facing rows of 24 cells it felt little cooler than it had at midday. 'The nights are worse than the days,' the British former prisoner Shafiq Rasul recalled yesterday. 'You hear the rats running and scratching. The bugs go mad and there's no air. Especially where that block is: there's no breeze whatsoever.'

According to Guantanamo's rules, a six-person team of military police should have been patrolling constantly, and as usual the bright neon lights stayed on. A guard should have passed each detainee's cell every 30 seconds. 'From the landing, you can see right into every cell,' said Rasul. 'They don't have doors, just gates made from wide-spaced mesh. There's no privacy. If you hang up a towel because you want to go to the toilet, they make you take it down.'

The high degree of surveillance has foiled dozens of previous attempts by prisoners to take their own lives. 'It happened in front of me several times. The soldiers would see what was happening and they were in the cell in seconds,' Rasul said. But somehow, in circumstances that the Pentagon has succeeded in keeping totally obscure, late on Friday, 9 June, three detainees, all weak and emaciated after months on hunger strike and being force-fed, managed to tease bedsheets through their cells' mesh walls, tie them into nooses and hang themselves. With the cells little taller than the height of a man, they stood no chance of breaking their necks: the only way they could die was slowly, by hypoxia.

'That would take at least four or five minutes, probably longer,' said Dr David Nicholl, consultant neurologist at Birmingham's Queen Elizabeth Hospital, who has been co-ordinating international opposition to Guantanamo by physicians. 'It's very difficult to see how, if the landing was being properly patrolled, they could have managed to accomplish it.'

Accomplish it, however, they did. And virtually simultaneously. A little before midnight the bodies of Manei Shaman Turki al-Habadi, 30, and Yasser Talal al-Zahrani, 21, both from Saudi Arabia, and of a Yemeni, Ali Abdullah Ahmed, 29, were found on Alpha Block. How long they had been like that, the Pentagon will not disclose. Their mouths were stuffed with cloth, apparently to muffle any cries.

As often before in its four-and-a-half-year propaganda war over Guantanamo, the US military and its masters in Washington decided that the best means of defence to what looked - at best - like a case of criminal negligence was to go on the offensive. The dead men, said Guantanamo's commander, Navy Rear Admiral Harry Harris, when the news broke last Saturday, had 'no regard for human life, neither ours nor their own. They are smart, they are creative, they are committed. I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetric warfare against us.'

Colleen Graffy, a senior State Department official who recently visited London to make the case for Guantanamo with the UK media, called the suicides a 'good PR move' and 'a tactic to further the jihadi cause'. The US government tried to distance itself from Graffy's remarks. But early on Sunday The Observer talked to the camp's top Washington spin doctor, Lieutenant Commander Jeffrey Gordon, an official in Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's office and the Pentagon's chief press officer. According to Gordon, whatever the outcome of the investigation now being conducted by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, there was no need to regret the deaths. All three men, Gordon said, had been dedicated terrorists: 'These guys were fanatics like the Nazis, Hitlerites, or the Ku Klux Klan, the people they tried at Nuremberg.'

He went on to make specific allegations against each: Ahmed had been a 'mid-to-high-level al-Qaeda operative' with key links to Abu Zubaydah, an al-Qaeda leader captured in 2002; Habadi had been a 'militant recruiter' who worked with a second tier group called Jama'at Tabligh, and knew of operations in Qatar and Pakistan. As for Zahrani, he was a 'frontline Taliban fighter' who had played a prominent part in the November 2001 prison uprising in Mazar-e-Sharif, in which a CIA man died.

All this may be true. On the other hand, they had not been charged with anything. Questionable as it often is and consisting of statements made after torture or coercion, the Pentagon has disseminated some evidence against more than 300 Guantanamo detainees, in federal court filings and at internal camp boards that reviewed their detention. Against the three suicides, it has presented nothing.

Meanwhile, the information available suggests that the explanation of the deaths rejected by Harris - that the men tried to kill themselves through despair and succeeded through the incompetence of his staff - remains more plausible.

Rasul said: 'I was shocked by what happened, though not surprised, because I saw it almost happen so often. It was always scary: I would see people deteriorating mentally in front of my eyes until they tried to take their own lives, and you always thought: "That could be me". There were even times when I thought about it myself, but I wanted to be strong for my family. When I did, believe me, it wasn't because I was trying to hurt the United States, but on days when I'd just been told I'd never see England again, and that I was a terrorist, and when I denied it they wouldn't listen.'

The suicides triggered new calls to close Guantanamo, from the Lord Chancellor, Lord Falconer, the European Union and others. But the Pentagon will go to considerable lengths to block any independent scrutiny of what happened.

News of the suicides broke while I was flying to Washington from London, in order to travel to Guantanamo on a military flight next day and cover a military commission tribunal. A message on my mobile phone - from a fellow reporter, not the Pentagon - said that both had been cancelled. Thus I made the first of many calls to Jeffrey Gordon. At first, he could not have been more helpful. To enter Guantanamo, he said, one needed an 'area clearance', and because mine had been issued for the tribunal it was no longer valid. However, the press office at Guantanamo or Southern Command in Miami might be able to issue a new one, Gordon said. Clearance was not, he pointed out, the only problem. Now that the military plane had been cancelled, the only way to reach Guantanamo was on scheduled 18-seat flights from Florida and Kingston, Jamaica. They tended to be fully booked well in advance.

I teamed up with another British journalist, David Jones of the Daily Mail, to organise clearance and investigate flights. By the end of Sunday, we thought we were on our way. Jones found a private charter firm willing to fly us to the camp from Kingston. Guantanamo's head of public affairs, Commander Robert Durand, explained in an email he was seeking authorisation from Harris. 'He's a pretty open sort of guy,' Durand said, 'and I can't see any reason for not granting you clearance since you were coming already.' At 7.30pm one of Durand's staff phoned to say there were new clearances. He faxed them a few minutes later.

Next day Jones and I got up at 4am to fly to Miami, where we checked with Guantanamo one last time that everything was in order and got on a plane to Kingston. There, at check-in for our private flight, the manager was apologetic. 'Guys, I'm so sorry. Jeffrey Gordon called me from the Pentagon five minutes ago. Your clearances have been revoked.' Over the next 48 hours, I had several heated conversations and email exchanges with Gordon. At first he was apologetic: the new clearances had been 'a mistake' and he would try to get us a refund on the plane costs. Later he became more aggressive: forgetting that he had advised me to approach Durand at Guantanamo, he claimed that we tried to 'get round' the Pentagon by obtaining clearance from a clerk. His last email stated that our conduct had been 'ethically questionable, at best'. It was left to Durand to shed a little light. For the time being, he said, his ability to issue clearances had been removed and assumed by Rumsfeld's office alone.

Meanwhile, three US reporters at the base were ordered to leave. According to a Pentagon spokesman quoted by the US media, the reason was that two barred British reporters - us - had threatened to sue if the Americans were allowed to stay. This was, of course, untrue.

Closing Guantanamo to the media meant there were no reporters there as the Naval Criminal Investigative Service team went about its work; none when pathologists conducted post mortem examinations; and none last Friday when, after a Muslim ceremony conducted by a military chaplain, the first body - Ahmed's - was prepared to be flown home. It was also impossible to gauge the impact of the deaths on the 460 inmates.

Yet our bizarre experience raises a fundamental question: when it comes to Guantanamo, can the world believe a single word that Gordon and his numerous cohorts say? There is, to say the least, an alternative explanation for the three Guantanamo deaths. Since early 2003, when the Red Cross issued the first of many reports stating that inmates were experiencing high levels of depression, there has been mounting evidence that detention there has wrought havoc on some prisoners' mental health. It is not so surprising: most prisoners get just two 30-minute periods out of their cells - the size of a double bed - each week, except when being interrogated. Some have endured this since 2002, and have no idea when, if ever, they may leave.

By the time of my own visit in October 2003, a fifth of them were on Prozac and there had been so many suicide attempts - 40 by August 2003 - that the Pentagon had reclassified hangings as 'manipulative self-injurious behaviours'. Cannily, perhaps, it has refused to give exact statistics on how many SIBs have occurred, claiming that since the reclassification there have been (until last week) only two genuine attempted suicides.

Tarek Dergoul, another freed British former detainee, knew two of the dead men well. 'I was next to or opposite Manei [Habadi] for weeks, maybe months,' he said, 'and like me his morale was high. He was always up for a protest: a hunger strike or a non-co-operation strike. He used to recite poetry, not just Arabic, but English - he knew chunks of Macbeth and he taught me how to read the Koran correctly. When you go through that sort of experience with someone, you really get to know them. I just can't believe he would take his own life. He would have had to be really desperate.' Likewise, Dergoul said, Zahrani was 'a person everyone loved. It's offensive to me to say he could have killed himself.' Apart from anything else, all three men would have been deeply aware of Islam's prohibition of suicide.

However, the men may well have been so desperate that they ignored the prohibition - even if, as seems likely, they co-ordinated their deaths in the hope of increasing their political impact. Many lawyers who have visited clients at Guantanamo have spoken eloquently of their despair: this year a prisoner tried to kill himself in front of his US attorney, somehow managing to open his veins, covering himself in blood, as the lawyer watched in horror, unable - because of the screen that separated them - to intervene.

Dergoul also suggested how the three may have been able to kill themselves undetected. Sometimes, he said, instead of patrolling the guards 'used to sit in their room at the end. It's a long walk from end to end of the block and some nights they didn't feel like it: they'd sit in their room, smoking and playing cards. You'd need toilet paper or something and you'd yell "MP, MP!" But they wouldn't come - it could be as long as an hour.'

One might, just about, imagine such a scene in a British prison. One can also envisage what might happen if three men committed suicide on the same landing at the same time: public inquiries, sackings, outrage. All three had been on hunger strike, with few breaks, since the middle of last summer. This meant that, four times a day, they were strapped down in restraining chairs so that they could not move their limbs and force-fed through nasal tubes, inserted and removed each time - a process the Pentagon's own court documents state causes bleeding and nausea. It is not hard to see why that may have made them depressed.

According to newly declassified testimony by another prisoner shortly before the suicides, a guard recently told him: 'They have lost hope in life. They have no hope in their eyes. They are ghosts and they want to die. No food will keep them alive right now.' This prisoner, the former British resident Shaker Aamer, told his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, that the three dead men and other hunger strikers were so ill whenever their feeds contained protein that it went 'right through them' causing severe diarrhoea.

Last week Rumsfeld got what he wanted: the removal of media scrutiny from Guantanamo's deepest crisis. Potentially embarrassing, perhaps very damaging, headlines have been averted, and tomorrow, with the most sensitive tasks in the wake of the deaths complete, Guantanamo's public affairs office will resume its chaperoned tours. But the bigger costs of shutting out the daylight are making themselves felt.

On BBC1's Question Time last week, Falconer called the camp 'intolerable and wrong', adding that it acted as a recruiting agent for those who would attack all our values. Proving his point next day, some former Guantanamo detainees suggested the three dead men had been murdered, a claim echoed by their families and the government of Yemen next day.

The Pentagon response to the suicides was characterised by panic, smears and blatant obstruction. One might be forgiven for thinking that its vehement denials lacked a little weight.

David Rose
Sunday June 18, 2006
The Observer

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,1800218,00.html?gusrc=rss

Abolish the Death Penalty

2006-06-11T09:00:00.000-07:00

Message from Amnesty International USA

Dear Felix,

You are one of Amnesty International USA's most dedicated online activists and we need you to protest a terrible injustice.

Did you know that at one time there was no death penalty in the United States? The Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty was arbitrary, capricious and discriminatory - as random as being struck by lightning. But things changed with the Gregg v. Georgia ruling on July 2, 1976 and the death penalty was reinstated. In the 30 years since the Gregg decision over 1,000 people have been executed and we have become increasingly aware of how arbitrary, capricious and discriminatory our death penalty system still is.

Raise your voice and call for an end to this outmoded, outlandish and outrageous system of injustice on the 30th anniversary of the Gregg decision.

Three things we're asking you to do:

Write a letter to the editor,
Organize an event with your friends and family, or
Organize a public event with other concerned citizens.
How? Find out at www.amnestyusa.org/abolish/gregg/act.html. We'll give you a special grassroots organizing kit, a study guide on the Gregg decision, and a way to promote your local events.

We know this is harder than just clicking and sending an email. But we believe that you have the will and heart to go the extra mile, and will stand with us to uphold our basic human rights.

In solidarity,
Sue Gunawardena-Vaughn
Director, Program to Abolish the Death Penalty
Amnesty International USA

Guantanamo At Crisis Point

2006-05-30T09:46:00.000-07:00

Hunger Strike, Defiance Spread Among Guantánamo Bay Inmates

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — The number of Guantánamo Bay detainees participating in a hunger strike has ballooned from three to around 75, the U.S. military said Monday, revealing growing defiance among prisoners held for up to 4 -1/2 years with no end in sight.

Navy Cmdr. Robert Durand called the hunger strike at the U.S. naval base in southeastern Cuba an "attention-getting" tactic to step up pressure for the inmates' release and said it might be related to a May 18 clash between detainees and guards that injured six prisoners.

"The hunger-strike technique is consistent with al-Qaida practice and reflects detainee attempts to elicit media attention to bring international pressure on the United States to release them back to the battlefield," Durand said from Guantánamo Bay.

The United States now holds about 460 people at Guantánamo on suspicion of links to al-Qaida or the Taliban. But human-rights groups say innocent people have been sent to the jail. Defense lawyers said the hunger strike, which began last year, reflects increasing frustration among men who have little contact with the world outside the remote prison.

"I think it is escalating because the people down there are getting more and more desperate," said Bill Goodman, legal director for the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents many of the detainees. "Obviously, things have reached a crisis point."

The military did not release the names of the striking detainees, and lawyers said they have no way of learning if their clients are involved until they can visit the base.

"All these men want is a chance to have a trial," said Zachary Katznelson, an attorney for Reprieve, a British human-rights group that represents 36 Guantánamo detainees. "If they are guilty, punish them. If not, then send them home."

Only 10 of the prisoners have been charged and face trial before military tribunals. The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to rule in June whether President Bush overstepped his authority in ordering the tribunals.

Four of the detainees on hunger strike are being force-fed, including the three who were participating in the protest before the recent increase, Durand said.

By Ben Fox
The Associated Press

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2003027107_gitmo30.html

Faulty Evidence Masquerading As Science

2006-05-03T06:27:00.000-07:00

Faulty Testimony Sent 2 to Death Row, Panel Finds

Faulty evidence masquerading as science sent two men to death row for arson in Texas and led to the execution of one of them, a panel of private fire investigators concluded in a report released Tuesday in Austin.

Texas Department of Criminal Justice

Cameron T. Willingham was executed for setting fire to his home, killing his three daughters.

The report, prepared for the Innocence Project, a legal clinic dedicated to overturning wrongful convictions, was presented to a new state panel, the Texas Forensic Science Commission, created by the Legislature last year to oversee the integrity of crime laboratories.

Barry C. Scheck, a co-director of the Innocence Project, said the report offered "important evidence of serious scientific negligence or misconduct in the investigations, reports and testimony of Texas state fire marshals" and called into question not just the two cases but also many others based on similar arson analyses.

The nine-member forensic panel, late to start up and as yet unfinanced, "will review it and investigate," said its chairwoman, Debbie Lynn Benningfield, a fingerprint expert and retired deputy administrator of the Houston Police Department's latent laboratory section.

The report examined prosecution arson testimony in the trials of two men: Ernest R. Willis, convicted of killing two women in a house fire in 1986 in Iraan, and Cameron T. Willingham, convicted of burning his home in Corsicana in 1992, killing his three young daughters.

Mr. Willingham was executed by lethal injection on Feb. 17, 2004, after Gov. Rick Perry rejected a plea for a last-minute stay, once the courts and the State Board of Pardons and Paroles had declined to intervene.

Mr. Willis was exonerated and pardoned on Oct. 6, 2004, and collected almost $430,000 for 17 years of wrongful imprisonment.

The report says that prosecution witnesses in both cases interpreted fire indicators like cracked glass and burn marks as evidence that the fires had been set, when more up-to-date technology shows that the indicators could just as well have signified an accidental fire. In one case, the signs were accepted as proof of guilt, the report said; in the other, they were discarded as misleading.

"These two outcomes are mutually exclusive," Mr. Scheck said. "Willis cannot be found 'actually innocent' and Willingham executed based on the same scientific evidence."

Mr. Willingham's stepmother, Eugenia Willingham, who traveled to Austin from Ardmore, Okla., to attend a news conference about the report, said, "I've known it all along," adding, "I wish it could have happened before he was executed."

To analyze the evidence, the Innocence Project commissioned five unpaid experts: Douglas J. Carpenter of Combustion Science and Engineering in Columbia, Md.; Daniel L. Churchward of Kodiak Fire and Safety Consulting in Fort Wayne, Ind.; John J. Lentini of Applied Technical Services in Marietta, Ga.; Michael A. McKenzie of the law firm Cozen O'Connor in Atlanta; and David M. Smith of Associated Fire Consultants in Tucson.

In the Willingham trial, the committee found, a deputy state fire marshal, Manuel Vasquez, erred in tracing the blaze to an accelerant. The committee discredited his finding of arson. "Each and every one of the 'indicators' listed by Mr. Vasquez means absolutely nothing," the report said.

A Corsicana assistant fire chief, Douglas Fogg, "seemed to harbor many of the same misconceptions held by Mr. Vasquez," the report went on. It concluded that the fire had been "grossly misinterpreted." Mr. Fogg did not respond to a message left on his answering machine. Mr. Vasquez is dead.

Calls to offices in the Texas Fire/Arson Investigation division of the Texas Department of Insurance were not returned Tuesday.

Other Texas arson investigators and a retired agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation testified that the fire charged to Mr. Willis was also arson, the report said. One prosecution witness said fires were rarely caused by accidentally dropped cigarettes; in fact, cigarettes are the leading cause of fire deaths, the report said.

Many arson investigators were self-taught and "inept," the report said, adding: "There is no crime other than homicide by arson for which a person can be sent to death row based on the unsupported opinion of someone who received all his training 'on the job.' "

Texas leads the nation in inmates serving time for arson, the report said: 666 as of 2002, the latest year for which statistics are available.

Kathy Walt, a spokeswoman for Governor Perry, said the forensic science commission, to which Mr. Perry names four members, was the right body "to help the criminal justice system improve by establishing appropriate standards for labs and investigations."

Ms. Walt said that minutes before Mr. Willingham's execution, the governor was faxed an earlier report by an arson specialist, Gerald L. Hurst, disputing the prosecution's arson testimony, but that Mr. Perry had no way of evaluating it after the courts and pardons board had turned down the final appeals.

By RALPH BLUMENTHAL
Published: May 3, 2006
HOUSTON, May 2

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/03/us/03execute.html?th&emc=th

U.S.: More Than 600 Implicated in Detainee Abuse

2006-04-27T12:45:00.000-07:00

Investigations Lag Two Years After Abu Ghraib Photos

Two years after the Abu Ghraib scandal, new research shows that abuse of detainees in U.S. custody in Iraq, Afghanistan, and at Guantánamo Bay has been widespread, and that the United States has taken only limited steps to investigate and punish implicated personnel.

A briefing paper issued today, “By the Numbers,” presents findings of the Detainee Abuse and Accountability Project, a joint project of New York University’s Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, Human Rights Watch and Human Rights First. The project is the first comprehensive accounting of credible allegations of torture and abuse in U.S. custody in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo.

“Two years ago, U.S. officials said the abuses at Abu Ghraib were aberrations and that people who abused detainees would be brought to justice,” said Professor Meg Satterthwaite, faculty director of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at NYU Law School. “Yet our research shows that detainee abuses were widespread, and few people have truly been brought to justice.”

The project has collected hundreds of allegations of detainee abuse and torture occurring since late 2001 – allegations implicating more than 600 U.S. military and civilian personnel and involving more than 460 detainees.

The project found that many abuses were never investigated, and investigations that did occur often closed prematurely, or stalled without resolution. In cases where abuses were substantiated and perpetrators identified by military investigators, military commanders often chose to use weak non-judicial disciplinary measures as punishment, instead of pursuing criminal courts-martial. Of the courts-martial that did take place, the majority resulted in either prison sentences of less than a year, or punishments that did not involve jail time (such as discharge or rank-reduction).

“We’ve seen a series of half-hearted investigations and slaps on the wrist,” said Tom Malinowski, Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch. “The government seems more interested in managing the detainee abuse scandal than in addressing the underlying problems that caused it.”

The project found that the vast majority of those who were investigated for abuse were enlisted military personnel, not officers. Under military law, officers can be held accountable for the abuses of their subordinates under the doctrine of command responsibility. The project did not find a single case in which an officer was held accountable under that doctrine.

“There’s been a failure of accountability for detainee abuse at the command level,” said Elisa Massimino, Washington director for Human Rights First. “Without accountability up the chain of command, there won’t be deterrence, and the torture and abuses we’ve documented likely will continue.”

The Detainee Abuse and Accountability Project (DAA) was initiated in March 2005 as a joint research effort to collect and analyze credible allegations of abuse of detainees in U.S. custody in Afghanistan, Iraq, and at the Guantánamo Bay detention facility, and to assess what actions, if any, the U.S. government has taken in response to these allegations. The project has also recorded investigations, disciplinary measures, or criminal prosecutions that are linked to abuse allegations.

Among the key findings released today:

• Detainee abuse has been widespread. The DAA Project has documented more than 330 cases in which U.S. military and civilian personnel are credibly alleged to have abused, tortured or killed detainees. These cases implicate more than 600 U.S. personnel and involve more than 460 detainees.

• Only a fraction of the more than 600 U.S. personnel implicated in these cases – 40 people – have been sentenced to prison time.

• Of the hundreds of allegations of abuse collected by the DAA Project, only about half appear to have been adequately investigated.

• In cases where courts-martial – the military’s equivalent of criminal trials – have convened, the majority of prison sentences have been for less than a year, even in cases involving serious abuse. Only 10 U.S. personnel have been sentenced to a year or more in prison.

• No U.S. military officer has been held accountable for criminal acts committed by subordinates under the doctrine of command responsibility. Only three officers have been convicted by court-martial for detainee abuse.

• Although approximately 20 civilians, including CIA agents, have been referred to the Department of Justice for criminal prosecution for detainee abuse, the Department of Justice has shown minimal initiative in moving forward in abuse cases. The Department of Justice has not indicted a single CIA agent for abusing detainees; it has indicted only one civilian contractor.

Recommendations
In order to remedy the serious failures of accountability that the DAA Project research documents, the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, Human Rights Watch and Human Rights First recommend that:

• Congress should appoint an independent commission to review U.S. detention and interrogation policy and operations worldwide.

• The secretary of defense and the attorney general should order their departments: (1) to move forward promptly with investigations of allegations of torture and other abuse of detainees in U.S. custody abroad; (2) to initiate prosecutions where the evidence warrants; and (3) to instruct relevant authorities to ensure that appropriate criminal action is taken against all persons implicated in killings, torture, and other abuse, whatever their rank or position.

• The secretary of defense should appoint a single, high-level, centralized authority who can convene and prosecute courts-martial across the branches of the military to investigate all U.S. military personnel – no matter their rank – who participated in, ordered, or bear command responsibility for war crimes or torture, or other prohibited mistreatment of detainees in U.S. custody.

• Congress should implement a check on officer promotions, by requiring that each branch of the military certify, for any officer whose promotion requires Senate confirmation, that the officer is not implicated in any case of detainee torture, abuse, or other mistreatment, including through the doctrine of command responsibility.

http://hrw.org/english/docs/2006/04/26/usint13268_txt.htm

Sadistic Bootcamps Booted

2006-04-27T04:31:00.000-07:00

Fla. Lawmakers Agree to Close Boot Camps

Florida lawmakers agreed Wednesday to shut down the state's juvenile boot camps after the death of a 14-year-old boy who had been kicked and punched by guards.

The move, agreed to by House and Senate negotiators, is part of a state budget agreement that still requires both chambers' approval.

Under the deal, Florida's four remaining boot camps would be replaced with a new, less militaristic program. The state would pump an additional $32.6 million into juvenile justice programs, increasing total spending to $699.5 million.

"Unfortunately it has taken the death of a young man to get to this point," said Republican Rep. Gus Barreiro, chairman of the House Juvenile Justice Appropriations Committee.

The move was prompted by the death Jan. 6 of Martin Lee Anderson, who was roughed up in a videotaped scuffle at a Panama City boot camp. The camp was shut down after the boy's death, which remains under investigation and has drawn protests from civil rights leaders.

"Now there won't be any more children being abused while in the custody of the state," said attorney Ben Crump, who is representing Anderson's parents in a lawsuit against the state and the sheriff's office that ran the camp. "It is something good to have a legacy knowing that his death wasn't in vain."

Florida had nine juvenile boot camps at the height of the program but is now down to four, with about 130 offenders in all. The teenagers are sent there for mid-level crimes such as burglary and drugs, and usually stay for four to six months.

Guards operate like drill sergeants, typically waking up the teenagers at 5 a.m. for calisthenics, yelling in their faces, and using push-ups and running as punishment for breaking the rules.

Gov. Jeb Bush, who had been a strong supporter of the boot camps, has said he supports the new measures, which would take effect July 1.

The new juvenile programs, like the boot camps, would be run by sheriffs, but they would be closely monitored by the state. The programs would emphasize self-esteem and prohibit physical intervention between guards and youngsters. Under the old system, guards were legally allowed to physically intervene for disciplinary purposes.

A medical examiner concluded Anderson died of natural causes — a blood disorder. But the boy's family and others disputed that, and the body was exhumed for a second autopsy. The results have not been released, but the office of a special prosecutor has said Anderson did not die of natural causes.

Wednesday, April 26, 2006 9:07 PM EDT
The Associated Press
By BRENT KALLESTAD

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP)

Help, It's the Police!

2006-04-22T06:21:00.000-07:00

Someone's lying in the latest DART cop beat-down. Can you tell us who?

Todd Lyon says DART cops beat him up again, this time for talking to the Observer.

Well, I guess I need your help. I have two very different versions here of a story about the DART police. The first version is that they beat up, Maced and jailed Todd Lyon again for no good reason. He's the guy I wrote about last year who said DART cops beat up him and his teenage son for jaywalking ("Bus Gestapo," December 8). The other take is that Lyon is crazy and he's been deliberately hanging around in front of DART cops trying to taunt them into beating him up and gassing him.
Somebody out there saw this second incident. Somebody knows what happened. I believe there are pictures. I badly want to see those pictures. This is now personal.

Not that I'm the only person worried about the DART cops. The FBI is looking into this too. I had to tell DART the FBI was investigating them. When I did, DART shrugged it off. Let me tell you: This is not an agency that worries a whole lot.

Lyon says two DART cops on bicycles spotted him in the West End on March 17, St. Patrick's Day. He says they recognized him as the man I had written about in my column, tossed him on the sidewalk, Maced him and took him to jail, laughing the whole time about how they wanted to see their names in the Dallas Observer. After serving several days, he pleaded "no contest" because he didn't have any money, and he wanted to get out of jail.

The names of the officers who arrested Lyon this second time are Louis Pacheco, 29, and Michael Schmidt, 37. I will give you their version and Lyon's.

The cops say Lyon was not where he told me he was. According to their report, they say they found him on the property of the DART West End Transit Station, where he had been forbidden to go after last year's incident. They say he identified himself to them as "Jim Bowles" (same name as the former Dallas County sheriff).

When they moved to arrest him for trespassing and giving a false name, they say Lyon ran from them.

Lyon agrees with that part. He says he did run. But he says they started hassling him far away from any DART property.

The cops say when they caught up with Lyon he went into a Mike Tyson routine, "both closed fists up in a fighting stance." So they threw him down, cuffed him and Maced him.

I left messages at DART for both cops. They didn't call back. I am relying on their official report for their version. I also tried to speak to DART police Chief James Spiller, and, as always, he refused to speak, according to DART spokesman Morgan Lyons. Spiller is the head of a major urban police agency, and he lacks the cojones to do a simple interview. That tells me a lot right there.

Here's a recap of the first incident: On October 27 of last year, DART cops arrested Lyon and his 14-year-old son on Pacific Avenue downtown. Witnesses told me they saw the police beat up Lyon and Mace him and saw the DART cops punch the kid around as well. The cops later uncuffed the boy and left him downtown alone at night.

A spokesman for DART told me that Lyon was arrested and sent to jail for 11 days for "resisting arrest." I asked, "Resisting arrest for what?" The spokesman said, "Resisting arrest." Later he amended that to jaywalking.

After that incident, Lyon was given a "criminal trespass warning" that effectively barred him from entering the West End DART Transit Station. He depends on DART for transportation. In order to get to the West End on St. Patrick's Day, he says he rode the DART train to Reunion Station and walked back across downtown to the West End.

He says two DART cops on bicycles spotted him just as he entered the West End, blocks away from the West End Transit Station.

"They said, 'Hey, you're the guy who told all those lies about us in the Observer.'

"My first response was, 'No, you got me confused.' Because I don't want any trouble. I'm not on DART property, and they're not even supposed to be talking to me.

"The Hispanic officer said, 'Well, I got a picture, I can compare it to you.' Well, hey, that got a rise out of me. That got a laugh. I said, 'Look, you carry a picture of me? Well, that explains why you're stalking me.'

"I'm trying to be funny at this point. I guess they don't see the humor in it. Then they say, 'Well, we want to be in the next story. We want our names in the paper.' I believe the bald officer is talking now. He says, 'I don't want to be listed as Officer Number One or Number Two. I want my name in the paper.'

"The Hispanic officer says, 'Let's make sure it's him. Let's put him face down on the pavement and pat him down.'

"Well, at that point, I'm not laughing. That's a threat, and I took off running, straight ahead. It wasn't like a sprint. It was like, 'Shoot, leave me alone.' I've come to a walk, and I probably had taken maybe three or four steps, and I hear the guy yell, 'Put your hands behind your back!'

"Well, again I'm trying to comply, because I thought, 'Oh, no. Now what?' The whole feeling of dread was through the whole situation. I'm stopped, and before I get my hands behind my back, they say, 'Get down on the pavement,' and I'm pushed on the pavement.

"They bang up my knees, and I get my elbows on the pavement. They've got one hand behind my back. I got my cell phone in my other hand. I'm trying to comply, and they Mace me again. They Mace me on the pavement. I'm offering no resistance.

"I'm hearing a few clicks of pictures. I see a big flash, which is to me a professional photographer. More officers have arrived on the scene. If I had to guess, I'd say there's at least four there, and they are all taunting and saying remarks about, 'Well, we finally got him.'

"And they were all saying various remarks about the Observer story. 'About time we got him back.' And everybody in that crowd heard the remarks."

Lyon says the DART cops then put him in a car and transported him to the West End Transit Station.

"One of the officers said, 'Hey, he's not supposed to be in the West End Transit Station. Don't we have him on the list?'

"I said, 'Well, I was in the eating area.' They said, 'Well, you're here now.'"

It's a key point. The official incident report says the arresting officers spotted Lyon already in the transit station and arrested him for violating the criminal trespass warning issued after the earlier incident. Lyon says they started in on him blocks away from the transit center and then moved him to the station.

Somebody's lying. And somebody saw it.

It looks as if this second incident may at least have had the good effect of drawing the attention of the FBI. Lori Bailey, a supervisory special agent and spokeswoman for the Dallas office of the FBI, confirmed to me last week that the FBI has opened an investigation of DART police, based on the Todd Lyon story.

Lyon's civil lawyer, Jay Lucas, confirmed to me that the FBI made an appointment to interview him and Lyon at Lucas' offices this week.

If the FBI finds jurisdiction here, it will be for civil rights violations. And, just between you and me, you really have to violate bad in order to do an FBI civil rights violation on a 49-year-old white guy. I mean, most old white guys, you can hang them up by their heels and write on them with a Magic Marker and still be well within the guidelines.

You might wonder--I know I do--why the cops working for the bus company would be such a particular problem. Lyon's case is one of dozens and dozens that people have called to tell me about involving sub-professional, subhuman behavior by DART cops.

I have a two-bit theory. I finally attended a DART board meeting a few months ago. I am ashamed to admit, I never did before because they seemed too boring.

And it was. Very boring. Except for this: I looked around, and there were no actual people there watching from the cheap seats, as in members of the public. Instead there was a tight-knit little claque of maybe a dozen nattily dressed special seekers, people who looked like lawyers and contractors and salesmen, nodding and winking to their favorite board members, even speaking up from the back of the room when an item of interest came up on the agenda.

The DART board is made up of political appointees from Dallas and the suburbs, and the only people they ever have to deal with are the butt-kissers who sit out there hoping to chisel a few million bucks out of them in contracts, jobs and favors.

Try calling a DART board member some day. Try finding a phone number for a DART board member. This is a fat, sassy agency, rolling in big, greasy gobs of tax money, and nobody has to run for office.

I think those cops out there are a perfect reflection of the inner culture of the agency. None of this happens by accident.

If you saw any of this, here are two phone numbers, one of which you must call. Lyon's lawyer, Lucas, is at 214-428-5342. Or if your version supports the cops and you don't want to talk to Lyon's lawyer, call the DART police at 214-749-5900.

You can tell I have a bias here. If I'm wrong, turn me around. With the truth.

By Jim Schutze
Article Published Apr 20, 2006

http://www.dallasobserver.com/Issues/2006-04-20/news/schutze_full.html

JESUS Said

2006-04-20T04:48:00.000-07:00

Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink? When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee? Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee? And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.

Matthew 25:37-40 (KJV)

An Intensifying Whirlpool Of Desperation

2006-04-18T13:08:00.000-07:00

Justices Reject Gitmo Detainees' Appeal

The Supreme Court rejected an appeal Monday from two Chinese Muslims who were mistakenly captured as enemy combatants more than four years ago and are still being held at the U.S. prison in Cuba.

The men's plight has posed a dilemma for the Bush administration and courts. Previously, a federal judge said the detention of the ethnic Uighurs in Guantanamo Bay is unlawful, but that there was nothing federal courts could do.

Lawyers for the two contend they should be released, something the Bush administration opposes, unless they can go to a country other than the United States.

A year ago, the U.S. military decided that Abu Bakker Qassim and A'Del Abdu al-Hakim are not ``enemy combatants'' as first suspected after their 2001 arrests in Pakistan. They were captured and shipped to Guantanamo Bay along with hundreds of other suspected terrorists.

The U.S. government has been unable to find a country willing to accept the two men, along with other Uighurs. They cannot be returned to China because they likely will be tortured or killed.

President Bush meets with Chinese President Hu Jintao at the White House on Thursday.

German officials are being pressed to take the men, according to a report over the weekend in a newspaper there.

It would have taken an unusual intervention of the Supreme Court to deal with the case now.

Lawyers for Qassim and al-Hakim filed a special appeal, asking justices to step in even while the case is pending before an appeals court. Arguments at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit are next month.

Justices declined, without comment, to hear the case.

Bush administration Supreme Court lawyer Paul Clement told justices that there were ``substantial ongoing diplomatic efforts to transfer them to an appropriate country.''

Clement said that in the meantime, the men have had television, a stereo system, books and recreational opportunities: including soccer, volleyball and ping-pong.

The detainees' lawyers painted a different picture, saying that hunger strikes and suicide attempts at Guantanamo Bay are becoming more common and that the men are isolated.

``Guantanamo is at the precipice,'' Boston lawyer Sabin Willett wrote in the appeal. ``Only prompt intervention by this court to vindicate its own mandate can prevent the rule of law itself from being drowned in this intensifying whirlpool of desperation.''

About 500 foreigners are being held at Guantanamo Bay. Lawyers for more than 300 of the men filed a brief in Monday's case, saying that Qassim and al-Hakim ``are far from the only innocent non-combatants languishing at Guantanamo.''

Justices ruled two years ago that the detainees could use American courts to challenge their detentions. And the court this summer will rule on a case testing the goverment's plans to hold war-crimes trials at Guantanamo Bay.

Qassim and al-Hakim were captured as they fled a Taliban military training camp where they were learning techniques they planned to use against the Chinese government. They are Uighurs, Turkic-speaking Muslims who have a language and culture distinct from the rest of China.

The case is Qassim v. Bush, 05-892.

By GINA HOLLAND
Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP)

---

On the Net:

Supreme Court: http://www.supremecourtus.gov/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,,-5760852,00.html

Ex-New Orleans Cops Indicted In Taped Beating

2006-03-30T05:15:00.000-08:00

Felony Charges Could Bring Years in Prison

Two former New Orleans police officers who were caught on videotape beating a retired teacher were indicted on felony charges that could send them to prison for years.

The officers -- Robert Evangelist and Lance Schilling -- were fired after the Oct. 8 beating of Robert Davis, 64, was captured on video by an Associated Press Television News crew covering the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Evangelist, 36, faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted of false imprisonment while armed with a dangerous weapon and second-degree battery. Schilling, 29, could spend five years behind bars if convicted of second-degree battery.

"I hope this will result in something good for our city," said Davis, who spent more than an hour Wednesday testifying about the beating, which left him lying on the street, hands cuffed and blood flowing from his head and face.

A third officer, Stewart Smith, 50, was charged with simple battery. If convicted, he faces up to 6 months in jail and a $500 fine. Smith was suspended for 120 days but remains on the force.

Evangelist and Schilling were charged with battery against Davis, and Smith was charged with battery against a reporter.

A telephone call Wednesday to an attorney representing Evangelist, Schilling and Smith for comment was not returned.

Police Superintendent Warren Riley said in a statement late Wednesday that Smith would be reassigned to desk duty pending the outcome of his trial.

After the grand jury appearance, Davis told reporters that he still has headaches and back problems. He had to interrupt his testimony to take medicine.

The retired elementary school teacher said he had returned to the storm-struck city to check on his property and was looking for a place to buy cigarettes in the French Quarter when police grabbed him.

The videotape shows an officer hitting Davis at least four times on the head. Davis twisted and flailed as he was dragged to the ground. One officer kneed Davis and punched him twice.

Smith had ordered APTN producer Rich Matthews and the cameraman to stop recording. When Matthews held up his credentials, the officer grabbed him, jabbed him in the stomach and delivered a profanity-laced tirade.

The video also shows two FBI agents joining the police in subduing Davis. Their role is being investigated by federal officials.

A federal civil rights investigation also was launched.

"Without this videotape, I'm sure this case would be swept under the rug," said Davis' attorney, Joseph Bruno.

District Attorney Eddie Jordan agreed the videotape was important.

"Any time you have strong evidence, and I consider a videotape strong evidence, it helps your case," he said.

When asked if the false imprisonment charge meant that Davis should not have been arrested, Jordan said, "I think that's a fair inference."

Davis has pleaded not guilty to municipal charges of public intoxication, resisting arrest, battery on a police officer and public intimidation. His lawyer said this week he expects the charges will be dropped.

Thursday, March 30, 2006; Posted: 3:58 a.m. EST (08:58 GMT)
NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (AP)

http://www.cnn.com/2006/LAW/03/30/taped.beating.ap/index.html

Juvenile Justice

2006-03-26T14:18:00.000-08:00

The tragic death of a youth in a boot camp last month once again brings a grim spotlight on the inner workings of the Department of Juvenile Justice.

Juvenile Justice has moved the furthest in the privatization journey and made the least progress. The agency, like most social service agencies in the state, has been organized, reorganized, restructured, revamped and reengineered at every change in the state administration and at every media crisis.

Only the Department of Children and Families (DCF), which was once the home of Juvenile Justice when DCF was Health and Rehabilitation Services (HRS), has experienced more turmoil in the name of progress.

In the present era of more justice and less service, even the mission statement of Juvenile Justice proclaims that children are not their first priority: "Protect the public by reducing juvenile crime and delinquency in Florida."

Yes, the Department of Juvenile Justice does not exist to help the youth of Florida. By its own mission statement, it exists to protect the public. This is significant. If your first priority is not your clients, then the care and well-being of your clients takes a backseat to the public interest.

Recent headlines reveal that the health care and security of youths in residential care is in jeopardy. A youth dies after a beating; another dies complaining of stomach pains; a pregnant girl is delayed medical treatment until she gives birth; a youth is attacked by a fellow client who has been assigned to bathe him.

These types of incidents will continue to occur in part because they are not the first priority of the department.

The public safety was never in danger, so the department is obviously doing just what they say they are suppose to do. If children die or are abused while in the custody of the department, it is tragic, but predictable.

Removing Juvenile Justice from the old Department of HRS and creating a separate department was suppose to give the new department more autonomy, flexibility and accountability. It did, but it also changed from a service provider to a punishment provider.

Approximately 90 percent of all Juvenile Justice services are privatized. In the area of "Residential Corrections" there are 157 residential programs throughout the state, and 87 percent of them are under private contract. Twenty-three programs remain under state control and department administrators stress that these programs are needed so that the state can send in trained staff when the private programs get into trouble.

Over 70 percent of the youth in residential programs are being treated for mental health issues, and almost 50 percent have substance abuse needs. However, the treatment programs in the private facilities are a matter of concern.

The legislative oversight group, the Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability (OPPAGA), recommended that the Department strengthen its program monitoring, provide more frequent monitoring and provide for withholding payments for providers who do not comply with their contracts. From 30 percent to 40 percent of the special needs and mental health programs provided by private contractors received a quality assurance rating of minimal or failed.

One of the significant factors in juvenile justice referrals is that youth are confined, not for a specified number of weeks or months, but until they satisfactorily complete their treatment program. If a program changes or closes, or if a youth is transferred to another program, the youth must start over.

With almost 90 percent of the programs in private provider hands, closings and transfers are not uncommon. Of the 152 residential programs in the Department's 2005 Program Accountability Report, 27 have closed in the past two years.

With costs for completion of these programs ranging from $5,000 to $165,000, why would the citizens of Florida want to support failing and ineffective programs? The number of closings alone is problematic. Not only are we putting all of the youth in these programs at risk, we are extending their treatment at significant cost and duplication of effort.

The providers claim that they cannot provide effective service because they cannot retain good staff. They cannot retain good staff because they pay low wages.

A 2005 Gainesville Sun article listed the average pay for employees in the private facilities as $8.36 per hour, or less than $18,000 per year. State employee salaries are significantly higher, plus their benefit packages are usually much better. Yet on average, the privatized programs cost more than the state operated programs.

Treating problem youth is not an easy job. It takes very dedicated staff with specific skills and training. Military personnel and corrections personnel also have difficult jobs that require specific skills, however, the jobs are not interchangeable. Privatizing social services does not save money, increase services or save lives.

Perhaps if the Department of Juvenile Justice changed its mission to "protecting youth" instead of "protecting the public," we would all benefit and fewer children would die.

Sue Tennant is a former state human resources manager and author of the book "The Fleecing of Florida, Privatization in the Shadows of the Sunshine State." She lives in Gainesville.

http://www.gainesville.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2006203260325&source=email

Self vs. Savior -- Conversation with a Humanist

2006-03-26T07:06:00.000-08:00

My e-mail address is public so, as you can imagine, I get plenty. Mostly just advertisements for Mexican banks, Canadian drugs, or items of an extremely personal nature. Extremely personal. Between 5 p.m. and 8 a.m. I will receive around 100 messages. The first 30 minutes of my weekday morning is spent clicking through e-mails and deleting 90% of them without even looking past the subject line. And, because of the nature of my work -- and the fact that I am somewhat opinionated -- I get my share of detractors.

A couple of weeks ago I received an e-mail from a young college student named Clark who was upset with me for several reasons. He started out by saying that our country's founding fathers were not Christians, but rather deists. When I pointed out to him that deism says that God is not active in the affairs of men and that America's founding fathers -- even Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin -- believed in divine providence and prayer, he changed the subject. His other problem with me was the fact that I am against same-sex marriage. He said it was people like me who were fostering hatred towards homosexuals. Said that the American Family Association was made up of a bunch of fools. He later made some other less-than-positive comments, but that was the essence of it.

I told Clark I was a Christian and that I believe in the Holy Bible as the Word of God, and that is where I got my value system. I cited the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount. He told me my "moral compass" was "broken." I asked him what he believes in. He told me he is a "humanist" and believes in the "innate" goodness of man. I told Clark that was great, but I wanted to know what that meant exactly. How does a humanist define "good," for instance? Clark didn't really have an answer.

A humanist is someone who basically believes that man is god. Not in a New Age spiritual sense, but rather the humanist does not believe God exists, and therefore he sees life though a purely secular prism. Any form of religion, to the humanist, is man-invented superstition. It is unprovable. And in America, humanists find Christianity particularly bothersome.

Humanism teaches that there is no such thing as moral absolutes. While the Christian and the Jew would say the Ten Commandments are given to mankind by Almighty God as rules by which we should conduct ourselves, humanists do not believe there is such a "rule book" for life. Whereas the Christian believes that to violate a commandment is to sin against God (which then requires repentance and forgiveness), there is no such concept of "sin" to the humanist.

While one might not agree with the Christian view of morality (and even Christians sometimes disagree on context and definitions), at least we have something to point to (the Bible) and a logical reason why it then affects our thinking and our behavior so strongly. However, as I found out with Clark, while a humanist finds fault with Christianity, there is nothing for him to fall back on as a superior moral value system. They have no moral value system other than the one each man makes up for himself which, in the end, comes down to being a matter of personal opinion. And personal opinions, like noses, are something we all have.

To the Christian, morality is objective truth given to us by God. To the humanist, morality is subjective opinion given to them by ... well ... themselves.

What I found with Clark, as I have with other humanists, atheists and agnostics, is that they revel in pointing out hypocrisy among Christians. And while hypocrisy is a bad thing, it does not negate the truth of the Christian message. It merely means that Christians are exactly what the Bible teaches all human beings are -- sinful creatures in need of help from God. We need to be saved from our sin that separates us from God (salvation) and we need the power of God to live the life He desires us to live.

Clark and I went several rounds back and forth with each other. Each time I asked him for some resource outside himself to prove the validity of his beliefs, he would change the subject, usually with another criticism of Christians.

I challenged Clark that if the Christian value system is such a bad one, name a better one. He has not done that to date. But if you think about it, when Clark tells me my moral compass is broken, isn't he passing judgment on me? And that is precisely why he wrote me in the first place, telling me (with respect to homosexual marriage) I had no right to judge other people. Clark, you are confusing me, man.

Tim Wildmon
March 1, 2006
(AgapePress)

http://headlines.agapepress.org/archive/3/12006gst.asp

The Joy of Being Blameless

2006-03-23T06:03:00.000-08:00

The contrast could not have been more stark, nor the message more clear. On the day that a court-martial imposed justice on a 24-year-old Army sergeant for tormenting detainees at Abu Ghraib with his dog, President Bush said once again that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, whose benighted policies and managerial incompetence led to the prisoner abuse scandal, was doing a "fine job" and should stay at his post.

We've seen this sorry pattern for nearly two years now, since the Abu Ghraib horrors first shocked the world: President Bush has clung to the fiction that the abuse of prisoners was just the work of a few rotten apples, despite report after report after report demonstrating that it was organized and systematic, and flowed from policies written by top officials in his administration.

Just this week, Eric Schmitt and Carolyn Marshall provided a bloodcurdling account in the Times of how a Special Operations unit converted an Iraqi military base into a torture chamber, even using prisoners as paintball targets, in its frenzy to counter a widely predicted insurgency for which Mr. Rumsfeld had refused to prepare. In early 2004, an 18-year-old man suspected of selling cars to members of a terrorist network was arrested and beaten repeatedly. Another man said he had been forced to strip, punched in the spine until he fainted, put in front of an air-conditioner while cold water was poured on him and kicked in the stomach until he vomited. His crime? His father had worked for Saddam Hussein.

These accounts are tragically familiar. The names and dates change, but the basic pattern is the same, including the fact that this bestiality produced little or no useful intelligence. The Bush administration decided to go outside the law to deal with prisoners, and soldiers carried out that policy. Those who committed these atrocities deserve the punishment they are getting, but virtually all high-ranking soldiers have escaped unscathed. And not a single policy maker has been called to account.

Col. Thomas Pappas, the former intelligence chief at Abu Ghraib, testified at the dog handler's trial that the use of dogs had grown out of conversations he had had with military jailers from Guantánamo Bay led by Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who had been sent to Iraq to instruct soldiers there in the interrogation techniques refined at Gitmo under Mr. Rumsfeld's torture-is-legal policy. Colonel Pappas said General Miller had explained how to use the "Arab fear of dogs" to set up interrogations.

What of General Miller? He invoked his right against self-incrimination to avoid testifying, and Time magazine reported this week that he was exonerated by an Army whitewash. Apparently he was not responsible for the actions of soldiers operating under rules he put in place.

About the only high-ranking officer whose career has suffered over Abu Ghraib is Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, who was the commander in Iraq at the time. General Sanchez should certainly take responsibility, but he was also a victim of administration blunders.

General Sanchez was vaulted inappropriately from head of the First Armored Division to overall commander because Mr. Bush declared "mission accomplished": the war's over. He was then denied the staff, soldiers and equipment he needed to deal with the insurgency that quickly broke out and produced thousands of prisoners.

Mr. Bush has refused to hold himself or any of his top political appointees accountable for those catastrophic errors. Indeed, he has promoted many of them. And this is not an isolated problem. It's just one example, among many, of how this president's men run no risk of being blamed for anything that happens, not matter how egregious.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/23/opinion/23thu1.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=print

Get On The Floor, Get On The Floor, NOW!

2006-03-21T15:09:00.000-08:00

Death Raises Concern At Police Tactics

Some say police units increasingly resemble military teams

The recent killing of an unarmed Virginia doctor has raised concerns about what some say is an explosion in the use of military-style police Swat teams in the United States.

Armed with assault rifles, stun grenades - even armoured personnel carriers - units once used only in highly volatile situations are increasingly being deployed on more routine police missions.

Dr Salvatore Culosi Jr had come out of his townhouse to meet an undercover policeman when he was shot through the chest by a Special Weapons and Tactics force.

It was about 2135 on a chilly January evening. The 37-year-old optometrist was unarmed, he had no history of violence and displayed no threatening behaviour.

But he had been under investigation for illegal gambling and in line with a local police policy on "organised crime" raids, the heavily armed team was there to serve a search warrant.

Dr Salvatore Culosi was unarmed when he was accidentally shot.

As officers approached with their weapons drawn, tragedy struck. A handgun was accidentally discharged, fatally wounding Dr Culosi.

Two months on, investigations into the incident are still continuing, a delay which Dr Culosi's family says is compounding the "horror and burden of it all".

Salvatore Culosi Sr, the dead man's father, told the BBC: "I never knew him to carry so much as a pocket knife so it bewilders me how a detective could spend three months investigating my son and not know he is a pussy cat.

"If anything comes out of this it must be that another family does not experience this pain and anguish for absolutely no reason.

"Policy needs to change so these kinds of accidents never occur again."

'Excessive force'

Professor Peter Kraska, an expert on police militarisation from Eastern Kentucky University, says that in the 1980s there were about 3,000 Swat team deployments annually across the US, but says now there are at least 40,000 per year.

What we find is that when Swat teams go out, shootings go down

John Gnagey
National Tactical Officers Association

"I have no problem with using these paramilitary style squads to go after known violent, armed criminals, but it is an extreme tactic to use against other sorts of suspects," he said.

Dr Kraska believes there has been an explosion of units in smaller towns and cities, where training and operational standards may not be as high as large cities - a growth he attributes to "the hysteria" of the country's war on drugs.

"I get several calls a month from people asking about local incidents - wrong address raids, excessive use of force, wrongful shootings - this stuff is happening all the time," he adds.

Every wrongful death of a civilian, or criminal killing of a police officer, fuels the complex and emotive argument over the way the United States is policed.

Those who reject criticism of the use of Swat teams argue that the presence of the units actually prevents violence through the credible threat of overwhelming force.

John Gnagey, executive director of the National Tactical Officers Association, told the BBC: "What we find is that when Swat teams go out, shootings go down.

"We don't see it as escalating anything. We see it as reducing violence."

The NTOA rejects Dr Kraska's figures and says the actual number of deployments is far lower, but says there is a need for national training standards.

An NTOA study of 759 Swat team deployments across the US, found half were for warrant service and a third for incidents where suspects had barricaded themselves in a building - 50 were for hostage situations.

When criminology professor David Klinger looked at 12 years of data on Swat teams in 1998, he also found the most common reason for calling out teams was serving warrants, but that the units used deadly force during warrant service only 0.4% of the time.

Recruitment video

Last year the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) commissioned music video director JC Barros to make them a 10-minute film - To Protect and Serve - that would "get young men and women excited" about a career with the force.

The problem is that when you talk about the war on this and the war on that, and police officers see themselves as soldiers, then the civilian becomes the enemy

Dr Peter Kraska
Eastern Kentucky University

More action film than recruitment video, it follows two LAPD officers who - in one day - capture a robbery suspect, are first on the scene when a gun-toting man takes a woman hostage, mediate a fight, and help to find a young kidnap victim.

Along the way they are supported by colleagues from bike patrol, K-9 dog teams, air support and, of course, the Swat team.

But Dr Kraska sees such initiatives as reflecting a changing culture of police work.

"These elite units are highly culturally appealing to certain sections of the police community. They like it, they enjoy it," he says.

"The chance to strap on a vest, grab a semi-automatic weapon and go out on a mission is for some people an exciting reason to join - even if policing as a profession can - and should - be boring for much of the time.

"The problem is that when you talk about the war on this and the war on that, and police officers see themselves as soldiers, then the civilian becomes the enemy."

Matthew Davis
BBC News, Washington
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4803570.stm

Court-stripping

2006-03-20T07:06:00.000-08:00

The President and the Courts

Since the Republican majority has decided to allow President Bush to usurp Congress's role in matters of national security, the battle to save the constitutional balance of powers moves to the judiciary. A critical test of judicial independence will come this month, when the Supreme Court hears arguments in a case that has become a focus of Mr. Bush's imperial vision of the presidency.

Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemeni national accused of having been a bodyguard and driver for Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, has been detained since 2002 in Guantánamo Bay. He filed suit to challenge the legitimacy of the military commission that upheld his designation as an "unlawful enemy combatant" — a term Mr. Bush invented after 9/11 to deny the protections of the Geneva Conventions, international statutes or United States law to certain prisoners.

Mr. Hamdan argued, rightly, that the commissions are not legitimate because prisoners are routinely barred from seeing evidence, much less confronting their accusers or having access to real legal representation. But his case has now become a much larger battle over the principle of habeas corpus, which is embedded in the Constitution and says that a prisoner cannot be denied the right to challenge his detention. Mr. Bush's decision after 9/11 that he had the power to put prisoners beyond the reach of the law at his choosing was the first attempt to suspend habeas corpus on American territory since the Civil War.

The Supreme Court two years ago emphatically rejected the president's claim that its jurisdiction did not extend to Guantánamo. Seeking to reverse that ruling, the White House in December helped push through a special amendment as part of the deal that also saw Mr. Bush sign a watered-down ban on torture of military detainees. The amendment, sponsored by Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican, and Senator Carl Levin, a Democrat, stripped Guantánamo detainees of the normal rights of judicial review. It also designated a single appellate court to conduct a limited review of decisions by the military commissions, and left "enemy combatants" held without a trial in a seemingly inescapable legal black hole.

As soon as Mr. Bush signed this law, he declared that the administration was going to apply it to all pending cases, about 160 or so, and the solicitor general told the Supreme Court it no longer had a right to hear Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. This is court-stripping — the attempt by another branch of government to prevent the court from deciding a particular issue. The White House tried to justify this outrageous tampering with the judiciary by ignoring the new law's actual language and legislative history to argue that the new legislation took away the power of the courts to hear not just future cases but also cases already filed and accepted for review. The Supreme Court responded by adding the jurisdictional objection to the list of issues it will consider when the case is heard on March 28.

At a minimum, we hope the court will rule that Congress and the president may not deny the justices the power to review pending cases. But it should also reject the defective military commissions, as well as the idea of denying access to the courts for future valid claims brought by Guantánamo detainees, including claims of torture.

If Congress wants to take the extreme step of suspending the Supreme Court's jurisdiction over habeas corpus, especially pending appeals, it must say so in unmistakable terms, which it has not done. Both the text and the legislative history of the Graham-Levin amendment demonstrate an intention to avoid touching pending cases. Moreover, the Constitution itself requires an "invasion" or a "rebellion" as a prerequisite for suspension of habeas corpus. It's hardly likely that the founding fathers intended to give Congress the right to eliminate judicial review during an ongoing international struggle against terrorism that may well go on for generations.

The retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor observed in a recent speech that the framers created three separate and equal branches of government because they knew that preserving liberty requires that no single branch or person can amass unchecked power. According to NPR's Nina Totenberg, who heard the speech, Justice O'Connor cited Republican court-stripping efforts as an example of dangerous overreaching. "It takes a lot of degeneration before a country falls into dictatorship," Justice O'Connor said, "but we should avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings."

The president seems to forget that and Congress clearly will not remind him. The nation cannot afford for the Supreme Court to forget as well.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/20/opinion/20mon1.html?_r=1&th=&oref=login&emc=th&pagewanted=print

Juvenile Boot Camp Murderers

2006-03-15T15:15:00.000-08:00

Expert: Beating Is What Killed Boy

The mother of a 14-year-old boy who was beaten and kicked in a Panama City juvenile boot camp said Tuesday she wants justice now that a second autopsy showed that he did not die from a blood disorder as a medical examiner initially ruled.

A noted pathologist who observed Monday's 12-hour autopsy on behalf of the family said it was clear that Martin Lee Anderson did not die from sickle cell trait, as the medical examiner in Bay County had determined, or any other natural causes.

Prosecutors confirmed that assertion by Dr. Michael Baden, but declined to comment further on the case except to say it will be "months" before the investigation is complete.

"My opinion is that he died because of what you see in the videotape," said Baden, referring to a surveillance video showing the guards kicking and punching Anderson's limp body shortly after he arrived at the Bay County Sheriff's Office boot camp Jan. 5. He died at a hospital early the next day.

Anderson's mother, Gina Jones, said she wants to see action now.

"I'm just glad the truth is out," she said. "But I already knew what the truth was. Now the truth is out, and I want justice. I want the guards and the nurse to be arrested."

His father, Robert Anderson, said the new findings gave him some solace.

"I feel at ease," he said. "Maybe my son can get his rest now and get some justice."

The body was returned to Panama City from Tampa late Friday and Anderson was reburied following a brief ceremony attended by dozens friends and family members, Sen. Tony Hill, D-Jacksonville, and Florida NAACP State Conference President Adori Obi Nweze.

Hill said that the Florida Conference of Black State Legislators is scheduled to meet with Gov. Jeb Bush next week and that the Anderson case will be at the top of their agenda.

He repeated calls for the arrests of nine boot camp guards videotaped hitting, kicking and dragging Anderson and for the arrest of the camp nurse who watched the 30-minute ordeal but did not intervene.

The sheriff's office has said the guards were trying to get Anderson to participate after he became uncooperative.

"We will continue to mount whatever legal strategies that we can do from the legislative perspective," he said. "Throughout our 60-day session in Tallahassee, we will stay focused and we will not let this die. We will bring some type of justice for this young man who we are here to day to put back in the ground."

Baden said it will be several weeks before Hillsborough County Medical Examiner Vernard Adams can determine the exact cause of death because tissue samples must be analyzed and other evidence considered.

Widely considered to be one of the nation's top forensic pathologists, Baden noted that he had investigated thousands of deaths of people in custody over the past 30 years and not one was caused by sickle cell trait.

Dr. Charles Siebert, medical examiner for the district that includes Bay County, had ruled that Anderson died of sickle cell trait, a usually benign blood disorder many blacks have, rather than the beating.

After questions arose, Ober was appointed by Gov. Jeb Bush to investigate the case, which led to the second autopsy by Adams. Ober said no one from his office will talk about the autopsy until the investigation is complete.

Siebert also was present at the second autopsy, Baden said. Siebert's office said Tuesday he will not comment until the investigation in Tampa is complete. A spokeswoman for the Bay County Sheriff's Office, which operated the boot camp, also declined to comment.

"I think (Siebert) made a mistake," Baden said.

Appearing on NBC's "Today" show, Jones said she thinks the guards targeted her son because he had long hair.

The U.S. Attorney's office in Tallahassee and the U.S. Justice Department's Civil Rights Division also have opened an investigation into Anderson's death. No guards have been arrested or fired. The camp has been closed.

Civil rights leaders who rallied to support Anderson's parents said they hoped the case would lead to reforms.

"He was a microcosm of many young Andersons sitting in boot camps and detention centers across the state of Florida, said Sevell C. Brown, state president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Anderson entered the camp for a probation violation for trespassing at a school after he and his cousins were charged with stealing their grandmother's car from a church parking lot.

Rev. Russell Wright of Panama City's Full Gospel Methodist Church led Tuesday evening's burial services. Wright said he was hopeful the second autopsy would lead to arrests of those responsible for Anderson's death and answer the questions of many in his congregation.

Pointing to a group of young teens gathered at the small neighborhood cemetery, Wright said that Anderson's death has been especially difficult for the youth in the community.

"People say children don't comprehend death, but I think it's overwhelming for them and now they are having to relive it by coming out here again," he said.

Later, about 350 Panama City residents gathered for candlelight prayer vigil outside the boot camp and sang "We shall overcome."

http://www.gainesville.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2006203150336&source=email

Archbishop of Canterbury Speaks Out Against Guantanamo Bay Detention

2006-03-07T07:40:00.000-08:00

Sends the Wrong Message to Tyrants Elsewhere in the World

The Church of England's most senior clergyman has today joined criticism of the US detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, warning that it's set a dangerous precedent.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, says the United States' disregard of international law sends the wrong message to tyrants elsewhere in the world, as Toni Hassan reports.

TONI HASSAN: When Rowan Williams speaks he carries the voices of not just those within the Church of England, but those within the 70 million strong world wide Anglican communion - the loose federation that he heads.

In a BBC interview conducted during his current visit to war-ravaged Sudan, Archbishop Williams took the opportunity to strongly criticise the US Government's detention facility at Guantanamo Bay.

He says the camp goes against existing legal norms by creating a new category of custody, with prisoners held without proper legal assistance and without being found guilty of specific crimes.

The end result is not a win in any war America wages against its enemies. Instead, he says the camp may even help enemies or tyrants elsewhere in the world.

ROWAN WILLIAMS: Any message given that any state can just override some of these basic habeas corpus type provisions is going to be very welcome to tyrants elsewhere in the world, now and in the future.

Once again, words have consequences, policies have consequences. What, in 10 years' time, are people going to be able to say about a system that tolerates this?

TONI HASSAN: Reverend Rowan Williams says the base in eastern Cuba is an "extraordinary legal anomaly".

His comments are remarkably similar to those made by British Prime Minister Tony Blair during a speech to the British House of Commons just last week.

Mr Blair said then, as he's said before, that the camp is a legal anomaly. The difference is that Mr Blair, who supported America's invasion of Iraq and the war in Afghanistan, has qualified his remarks. Mr Blair added that the US had justifiably opened the detention camp in response to the September 11, 2001 attacks, in which nearly 3,000 people were killed.

Nonetheless, both want the naval base shut down, and as soon as possible, with the prompt adjudication of cases involving current detainees.

Britain had nine of its citizens detained at Guantanamo Bay; all were released in recent years.

The fate of Australia's only remaining detainee, accused terrorist David Hicks, still remains uncertain.

Last week Australian Greens leader Bob Brown said the 30-year-old is being kept at Guantanamo Bay as a trophy prisoner because it's too embarrassing for the US to have the camp full of only Middle Eastern suspects.

While pressure mounts on the Bush administration to close down Guantanamo Bay, US authorities have repeatedly insisted that detainees are treated humanely and that the camp remains a strategic intelligence resource.

ELEANOR HALL: Toni Hassan reporting.

This is the print version of story http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2006/s1584947.htm

© 2006 Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Report Finds Few Protections for Pregnant Prisoners

2006-03-06T16:39:00.000-08:00

Women Prisoners Largely Unsafe From Rape, Mistreatment

Prison officials regularly order the shackling of pregnant inmates – even while the prisoner is giving birth, according to a recently released report on state and federal corrections policies governing women inmates.

The study, conducted by the United States arm of Amnesty International and released last Wednesday, also found that the state and federal prison systems lack proper procedures and laws to protect women inmates from sexual assault by jail staff.

According to Amnesty's survey, 41 states and the federal corrections system permit the use of restraints on pregnant women and 23 states, plus the Federal Bureau of Prisons, allow women to be restrained during labor. Eight states have no official written policy on the practice, Amnesty said, and just two states – Illinois and California – have specific laws limiting the restraint of pregnant women.

Sunday, the New York Times reported that one Arkansas inmate who had her legs shackled during childbirth against her wishes, and against the wishes of attending medical staff, is suing the state over the practice. Her captors removed the restraints only during delivery, the paper reported.

Several states are considering ending the practice of using restraints on pregnant and birthing women. According to the Associated Press, Wisconsin Department of Corrections Secretary Matt Frank directed his staff to put an end to the practice in January.

Amnesty cited a series of news reports documenting instances of pregnant-inmate shackling in Wisconsin, including an incident last fall in which corrections officers took a woman to the hospital in restraints and had her pregnancy forcibly induced.

Protections for pregnant prisoners are not the only safeguards absent from US prison systems. Few states have laws protecting any female inmates from sexual predation by jailers, the report found. Vermont has no law against such acts, known to officialdom as "custodial sexual misconduct," but considered rape by women's advocates Six other states do not directly address the issue, Amnesty found: Delaware, Illinois, Kansas, Maryland, New Jersey and Utah.

And while many states do have laws and polices governing such relations, most fail to adequately take into account the inherent difference in power such "relationships" have rendering "consensual" sex between inmates and jailers impossible in the eyes of Amnesty.

In both Nevada and Delaware, for example, an inmate involved in sexual activity with a prison guard or other worker faces criminal charges unless she can prove the person raped her. Laws in both states call for guards and officers to be punished for sexual acts with prisoners regardless of consent.

Arizona law is even more draconian toward inmates, providing for criminal punishment even if the sex was not consensual, according to Amnesty. In a footnote to the report, Amnesty said correction of this is of "paramount importance." Arizona does punish officers and guards for the action as well, the report noted.

"When a woman can be held criminally liable for sex with a guard, or when a guard can claim consent as a defense, it demonstrates a horrible misuse of power," Amnesty USA Executive Director William F. Schulz said in a statement accompanying the report's release. "Furthermore, restraining a woman in the throes of labor endangers her and the child she is carrying. All correctional facilities should review their legislation and policies to ensure that they are protecting women inmates."

by Brendan Coyne Mar. 6
http://newstandardnews.net/content/index.cfm/items/2895/printmode/true

New Orleans 1973 to Guantánamo 2006

2006-02-28T13:25:00.000-08:00

A discussion on torture at the hands of the

United States government

March 3, 2006

6:30 to 8:30

Riverside Church

91 Claremont Ave. Room 9T

Subway: 1 to 116th @ Broadway (1 block west of Broadway)

For more information contact: Edget Betru

212-614-6477or ebetru@ccr-ny.org

Featuring testimonials by
Danny Glover
Actor and Activist

Michael Ratner and Bill Goodman

Board President & Legal Director, respectively, of CCR will discuss strategies to bring to an end the Bush Administration's abuse of executive power and unlawful practices.

Gita Gutierrez

CCR attorney will report on the plight of her clients whom she recently visited at Guantánamo Bay and the conditions she witnessed. Gita will also speak about CCR’s efforts to seek justice for the hundreds of men and minors who have languished at Guantánamo for more than three years and to seek redress for the abuse and torture many have suffered at the hands of military interrogators and private contractors there, at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, in Afghanistan and at secret detention facilities around the world.

John Bowman and Harold Taylor

Black Panthers who were arrested in New Orleans and tortured by law enforcement authorities in striking similarity to the horrors visited upon detainees Guantánamo in and Abu Ghraib.

Henry “Hank” Jones

Of CDHR will speak about his efforts to draw attention to past and current domestic human rights abuses perpetrated by the government of the United States and law enforcement authorities, and the strategies that progressives can employ against government repression.

Moderators: Ron Daniels, Institute of the Black World 21st Century & Wayne Thompson, Committee for the Defense of Human Rights

COSPONSORED BY:

Committee for the Defense of Human Rights (CDHR), and Global Justice & Peace Ministries of Riverside Church

Reporters Without Borders

2006-02-20T17:19:00.000-08:00

Three Journalists Face Prison For Revealing Existence Of Secret CIA Prisons In Europe

Reporters Without Borders has appealed to the Swiss justice and defence ministers to drop complaints against three journalists who revealed the existence of secret CIA prisons in Europe.

In letters to the federal councillors, Justice Minister Christoph Blocher and Defence Minister Samuel Schmid, it has pointed out that the journalists only fulfilled their duty to report on a case of public interest.

Zurich-based weekly SonntagsBlick on 8 January this year reproduced a fax from the Egyptian foreign minister to his embassy in London, referring to the existence of secret CIA detention centres in Kosovo, Macedonia, Ukraine, Rumania and Bulgaria.

The case produced an outcry in Switzerland and worldwide and the country’s secret services were implicated in the leak of the confidential document. Romania and Bulgaria denied the allegations. The United States admitted the existence of flights chartered by the CIA over numerous European countries but not the existence of prisons.

A damning report from the Council of Europe condemned abuses committed by the US administration in its fight against terrorism and its recourse to torture, comparing the camps to one in Guantanamo Bay.

The Swiss authorities, fearing a deterioration in their diplomatic relations with the US, with whom they are in the process of negotiating a free-exchange agreement, have sought to defuse the crisis by opening two investigations, one criminal, one military, to track down who was behind the leak. The journalists on SonntagsBlick face prison sentences under the terms of both investigations.

Geneva, 8 February 2006

Dear Federal Councillor,

Reporters Without Borders, an international organisation for the defence of press freedom, is particularly concerned about the investigations that have been opened by military justice and the federal public ministry against the editor of SonntagsBlick, Christoph Grenacher and two of his journalists, Sandro Brotz and Beat Jost. They are accused of having published on 8 January 2006, a fax from the Egyptian foreign ministry to London revealing the existence of secret CIA prisons in Europe.

Under Article 293 of the Swiss criminal code, invoked by the military investigation, the journalists face a fine and up to five years in prison for “publication of secret official debates”. The confederation’s public ministry accuses the journalists of having violated “the confidentiality of office”, making them liable to a fine or prison.

Can respect for military secrets in this case be applied to journalists, who are not auxiliaries of the state ? Also, according to Article 320 of the criminal code, the violation of confidentiality of office only applies to members of an authority or an official. We do not understand therefore why the federal justice system has invoked this article against the SonntagsBlick journalists.

We understand that publication of secret official documents is embarrassing - even prejudicial - for the Swiss authorities, but they should not mistake their target by seeking to punish journalists who only doing their duty which is to inform public opinion.

Swiss journalists should be able to benefit from the right to protect their sources included in the criminal code in 1998 (Articles 27a 1, 2a, 2b). We understand that the investigations that have been opened should pinpoint the origin of the leak of the official document which the newspaper published, but the journalists cannot be held responsible for it.

Recent statements by Dick Marty, tasked by the Council of Europe to shed light on the existence of such places of detention, only confirms the public interest linked to the publication of this document. Let us not forget that allegations of inhuman or abusive treatment have been made in this case.

As guardians of the Geneva Conventions, Switzerland owes it to itself to defend the principles contained therein, whatever the political circumstances of the moment.

We also support the request from the Media Freedom Representative of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), Miklos Haraszti, calling on the Swiss authorities to amend its punitive laws over breaking of confidentiality so as to bring them into line with international and democratic standards that recognise the overriding public interest, or the public’s absolute right to information, in a country under the rule of law.

Knowing you to be sensitive to press freedom, we appeal to you to intervene so that the complaints against the SonntagsBlick journalists are withdrawn and so that they avoid receiving prison sentences. An editor from the same newspaper was already sentenced on 7 June 2005, to a six-month suspended prison sentence for violating military secrets. We also call on you apply journalists’ rights to protect their sources.

We trust you will give our request your careful consideration.

Yours sincerely,

Robert Ménard, Secretary general

Gérald Sapey, President Reporters Without Borders in Switzerland

The Devil's Chair

2006-02-09T19:08:00.000-08:00

Intended As A Restraint, It Has Led To Torture And Death

Jail and prison employees call it the "strap-o-lounger," the "barcalounger," the "we care chair," and the "be sweet chair." Inmates and their lawyers have other names for the device: "torture chair," "slave chair," and "devil's chair."

They are referring not to the electric chair, but to a restraining device that has led to many serious abuses, including torture and death. Belts and cuffs prevent the prisoner's legs, arms, and torso from moving.

The restraint chair is designed for violent prisoners who pose an immediate threat to themselves or others. But according to interviews with prisoners, lawyers, and restraint chair manufacturers, as well as a review of court cases, jail videotapes, coroners' reports, and scattered news stories, it is clear that the restraint chair is being used in an improper--and sometimes sadistic--manner:

• restraint chairs have been used for punishment of nonthreatening behavior;

• children have been strapped into the chairs for nonviolent behaviors;

• nude inmates and detainees have been strapped into restraint chairs;

• prisoners have been left in restraint chairs for as long as eight days. In some cases, the jail staff failed to manipulate the prisoners' limbs to protect against blood clots;

• prisoners have been required to testify while in restraint chairs;

• prisoners have been interrogated while in restraint chairs;

• prisoners have been injured while in restraint chairs;

• prisoners have been tortured by being hooded, pepper-gassed, beaten, or threatened with electrocution while in the chairs;

• at least eleven people have died under questionable circumstances after being strapped into a restraint chair.

Use of the restraint chair is widespread: Jails, state and federal prisons, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the U.S. Marshals Service, state mental hospitals, juvenile detention centers, and foreign governments are all equipped with the chair.

Amnesty International has called for a federal investigation into use of the restraint chair. The device "is an issue of great concern to us," says Angela Wright, a researcher at Amnesty's headquarters in London. "It appears to be used in some jurisdictions as a front-line or even routine form of control, including as a punishment for disruptive or annoying behavior."

On December 20, 1994, Shedrick Brown died after struggling with guards while being forced into a restraint chair in the Hillsborough County Jail in Tampa, Florida. After more than four hours in the chair, he was found unresponsive, having suffered a stroke. He died an hour later. In March 1995, the Hillsborough County Medical Examiner's Office ruled his death a homicide.

On April 17, 1995, Carmelo Marrero died in the Sacramento County Jail while strapped in a restraint chair. The County Coroner's Office said his death was an accident. Officially, his death was listed as the result of "probable acute cardiac arrhythmia, due to probable hypoxemia, due to combined restraint asphyxia, and severe physical exertion, due to apparent manic psychotic episode." As Supervising Deputy Coroner Phil Ehlert explained to the Sacramento Bee, restraint asphyxia is "a lack of oxygen caused by a highly agitated state exacerbated by the imposed restraint." A class-action lawsuit against the jail, which was eventually settled for $750,000, claimed that the device had repeatedly been used for torture at the jail and that Marrero's death was a direct result of his time in the restraint chair.

Scott Norberg died in June 1996 in Arizona of what the Maricopa County Medical Examiner's Office called accidental "positional asphyxia" after he was pushed into a restraint chair, his head forced to his chest, shocked with a stun gun, and gagged. Maricopa County and its insurance carrier settled a wrongful death lawsuit with Norberg's family for $8.25 million in 1998.

Katalin Zentai, a former journalist, died in late 1996 at the Connecticut Valley Hospital, according to an investigative report that appeared in the Hartford Courant in October 1998. For thirty-three of the final thirty-six hours of her life, Zentai was strapped in a restraint chair. She died, after being released from the chair, as the result of blood clots that had traveled to her lungs.

On December 3, 1996, twenty-two-year-old Anderson Tate was arrested after a routine traffic stop and taken to the St. Lucie County Jail in Florida. He informed the jail personnel that he had swallowed a large amount of cocaine. He was denied medical care and "died while strapped in a restraint chair," reported Amnesty International in 1998. As Tate died, "he was in the chair for three hours, moaning and chanting prayers, while jailers taunted him and ignored his pleas for help. Two deputies were dismissed after an administrative investigation by the Sheriff's Department, but no criminal charges were filed." The incident was recorded by a video camera.

Michael Valent, a mentally ill prisoner, died after spending sixteen hours nude in a restraint chair in a Utah prison in March 1997. The deputy chief medical examiner, Edward Leis, confirmed that Valent's prolonged restraint "is the main precipitating factor leading to blood clots and his death." A lawsuit brought by Valent's mother ended in a $200,000 settlement with the state of Utah. Although it was not a stipulation of the lawsuit, the state stopped using the restraint chair.

Also in March 1997, Daniel Sagers died in an Osceola County, Florida, jail after guards placed him in a restraint chair and beat him, using a towel to force his head back so violently that they damaged his brain stem. Sagers, who was mentally ill, was being held at the jail for firing a shotgun while on a golfing range. His family eventually won a $2.2 million civil lawsuit. In February 1999, a former corrections officer was convicted of manslaughter in Sagers's death and sentenced to one year in jail. He has filed an appeal. Two other guards pleaded no contest to charges of battery and were placed on probation.

On August 30, 1997, Anthony R. Goins died in a Kansas City, Missouri, jail of cardiac arrest after struggling with guards who squirted him with pepper spray and strapped him in a restraint chair. When the officers returned a few minutes later from washing the spray off themselves, they found him dead. The coroner said that the drug PCP and Goins's struggle with the police were contributing factors in his death.

In December 1998, Kenneth Vincent Bishop died at the Pueblo County Jail in Colorado shortly after being placed in a restraint chair. Although the Pueblo County coroner ruled that his death resulted from an excessive level of amphetamines, the sheriff has denied the ACLU's open-records request of the video of Bishop's treatment. According to Mark Silverstein, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado, the sheriff has also refused to hand over the jail's restraint policy.

Demetrius Brown, a twenty-year-old mentally ill man, died in Jacksonville, Florida, on October 31, 1999, after a guard used a choke hold while others attempted to strap him into a restraining chair. "The manner of death," concluded the medical examiner's report, "is homicidal."

On the night of July 6, 1999, James Arthur Livingston was having a psychotic break. He wrongly believed his brother-in-law was chasing him and trying to kill him. Livingston, a thirty-year-old man with schizophrenia from Tarrant County, Texas, ran to the police for protection. In about eight hours, Livingston was dead. He had spent much of that time in and out of a restraint chair.

The Tarrant County Medical Examiner's Office determined last August that Livingston's was a natural death caused by bronchial pneumonia. But that's not the whole truth, says Richard Haskell, a lawyer who is representing Livingston's mother, Maxine Jackson, in a suit against the Tarrant County Sheriff's Depart-ment. He says Livingston's last stint in the chair killed him.

"So far as we know, he was pepper-sprayed in the face and then placed in a restraint chair," says Haskell. Livingston was not allowed to wash the pepper spray out of his eyes and off his face in apparent violation of Tarrant County Sheriff's Department procedures, says Haskell. "He was not decontaminated, and he was left alone in a room. Within twenty minutes he was dead."

Pepper spray "inflames the mucous membranes, causing closing of the eyes, coughing, gagging, shortness of breath, and an acute burning sensation on the skin and inside the nose and mouth," said Amnesty International in a 1998 report on human rights abuses in the United States. "There is considerable concern about its health risks."

Deputy Mark Lane Smith was the first person to perform artificial respiration on Livingston in an unsuccessful attempt to revive him. When another deputy took over, wrote Smith in a Detention Bureau Report, "I then removed myself from the area and walked into the sally port, where I threw up from inhaling pepper gas residue from inmate Livingston."

It's hard to imagine the terror someone feels who is buckled into a restraint chair after being pepper-sprayed, says Haskell. "You wouldn't do that to a dog."

The chair that held James Arthur Livingston for more than four hours on the night of July 6, 1999, was manufactured by KLK, Inc., of Phoenix, Arizona. The KLK chair sells for $2,290, plus a $190 crating charge. This "Violent Person Restraint Chair" (the company's name for the device) "has been in use by the sixth largest sheriff's office jail system in the nation for four (4) years, with a ninety (90%) percent reduction in injuries compared to the previous four (4) years," brags the company advertising. "Special sizes or colors upon request."

I telephone KLK. Teresa Dominguez, a production coordinator with the company, tells me the chair is sold mainly to prisons and mental hospitals but says she can give me no other information. On her advice, I submit a fax of questions for the company's officers. After more than a week without a response, I call back.

"They basically said they can't answer the questions," says Dominguez. "The owner . . . saw the fax and said, 'No, we won't answer these.' "

The company also declined to answer questions about the death of James Arthur Livingston. But Dominguez says the chair isn't to blame. "How they use the chair, I imagine, would be the question," she says.

Another manufacturer is more forthcoming. Dan Corcoran is president of AEDEC International Inc., of Beaverton, Oregon, which manufactures the popular Prostraint Violent Prisoner Chair.

Corcoran says his chair is "humane" and was designed to be so. "You know, when you take a little bird and it's lost and confused, and at first its heart is beating?" he asks. But if you fully cup that bird in your hands and immobilize it, the bird, he says, "calms down." So, too, says Corcoran, with human beings. The chair "makes a real nice sit for them."

What about allegations that the restraint chair has been linked to several deaths and that it is easily misused? "The people who want to do good start gainsaying it, calling it a medieval instrument of torture," says Corcoran, who "has no patience" with this stance. "It's a way of getting attention."

When I ask Corcoran for a press packet, he tells me he doesn't have one "because every lawyer who doesn't have a job" will want to get hold of the press packet and take his words out of context.

He will, however, tell me the chair's cost--"900 bucks. If you get the accessories, $1,300." He will also tell me who his customers are--"mostly county jails," but also state prison systems, the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, the U.S. Marshals Service, and the Forest Service. "Park Service, too," he says. "Every state, every province has it."

Corcoran also exports his restraint chairs, but "only [to] the countries that really believe in human rights," he says. "A lot of countries are looking into them right now. We're kind of ticklish about selling them to Third World countries that don't have human rights because then there really is a possibility that they might be abused." But, he says, you can use anything for torture.

One country that has gotten Corcoran's OK and now owns AEDEC restraint chairs is the United Arab Emirates.

According to Amnesty Interna-tional's reports on the United Arab Emirates, "Cruel, inhuman, or degrading punishments, including flogging and amputation, were repeatedly imposed" in 1999. In 1998, "Torture and ill-treatment were reported and the use of cruel judicial punishments increased significantly." In 1997, said the human rights group, "Torture and ill-treatment of detainees in police custody continued."

Corcoran says he has sold "thousands" of the chairs. But as to the exact number, "We don't tell anybody that, in court or otherwise."

A flier for the chair recommends its use for "Interrogating Prisoners" and for detaining people in "Holding Tanks in Mass Entertainment Facilities (Concert Halls, Collisiems [sic], etc.)."

It appears to be used primarily in the intake and booking sections of local jails. Many of those who end up in the chair have not been convicted of a crime and have landed in jail for minor offenses, such as public drunkenness.

"The mere presence of the restraint chair is asking for abuse," says Charles Magarahan, an Atlanta attorney.

On June 5, 1997, Magarahan's client, Christopher Stone, was beaten, strapped into a restraint chair, and then pepper-sprayed after he was arrested for drunk driving and brought to the Cherokee County Adult Detention Center in Georgia. "He had not been uncooperative," says Magarahan. "He kept saying, 'I'm with you guys.' They put him in the chair--but they didn't push it like you'd push a chair. They dragged him by his head, with him screaming in pain."

"When Plaintiff was in the holding cell, totally restrained, Defendant [Deputy Sheriff Donald] Ware returned to the outside of the cell and sprayed pepper spray underneath the door," says the legal complaint that Stone filed against Ware, Cherokee County, and two other jail employees (the suit is currently in court). No one bothered to decontaminate Stone. Then, once the cloud of gas subsided, says the complaint, Deputy Ware returned and sprayed under the door again.

In a separate suit, Ware was also prosecuted for using excessive force against Stone. On November 3, 1999, he pleaded guilty. He was sentenced to one year's probation and fined $1,000. He has also been dismissed from his position.

In February 1999, the Sacramento Sheriff's Department settled a class-action lawsuit alleging that deputies were torturing people, many of them women and minorities, with a restraint chair. The cost of the settlement was $755,000, the largest ever for alleged officer misconduct in the department's history. The lawyers who brought that suit are demanding that the restraint chair be banned.

The Sacramento case alleged numerous and repeated forms of torture, including mock executions, where guards strapped inmates into a Prostraint chair and told them they were about to be electrocuted.

Katherine Martin, a 106-pound woman with a heart condition, claimed she spent eight and a half hours in the chair after she was wrongly accused of touching a guard. She alleged that the straps had been pulled so tight that they had sliced skin from her back and shoulders and cut off circulation to her extremities and that she suffered permanent nerve damage. She also claimed that she was given no liquids and that she was taunted and mocked. She was denied her requests to use the bathroom and ended up urinating on herself. Martin had originally been brought into the jail on suspicion of public drunkenness. This charge was later dismissed.

Videotapes of the Sacramento Jail's restraining methods played an important role in the case. In one tape, Ronald Motz calls through the window of his cell, asking for his lawyer. "Motz, this is the last time we're going to tell you, sit down," says a police officer, "Your attorney's not here, and the phone doesn't work."

Motz continues to call out. After a break in the tape, guards wrap a spit mask around his face and pull him into a chair. "I just want to call my attorney," says Motz. "You don't get to call an attorney," says the officer. "Why?" asks Motz. The officer tells him that he can't make the call because he was "drunk in public."

A few seconds later, the guard says, "You were going to be released in about five hours. Now you're not."

"What did I do wrong--ask for my attorney?" asks Motz.

"You weren't following directions," says the guard.

The videotapes also show a woman named Gena Domogio being put into the chair naked. She yells at the guards who are kneeling on her back and spits blood on the floor, apparently because her mouth has been injured. The guards respond by wrapping her face in a towel. They keep the towel on her face and at one point appear to hold it against her mouth as they force her into the chair, although she repeatedly says that she has a thyroid problem and that she can't breathe.

Kimberly Byrd was reportedly taken to the hospital after she passed out in the chair where she had been hooded and tightly bound, according to a letter Amnesty International wrote to the Sacramento County Sheriff's Department in March 1999. In the videotape of her restraint, she is obviously terrified. "I'm going to die. Please don't let me die," she says over and over again.

The Sacramento case, Geovanny D. Lobdell vs. County of Sacramento et al., listed AEDEC International, Inc., as a defendant. AEDEC's Corcoran gave a deposition on June 8, 1998, to attorney Stewart Katz. Many of Katz's questions referred to a "Manufacturer's Warning" sheet Corcoran distributes to his clients: "The purpose of the Prostraint Violent Prisoner Chair is to provide law enforcement and correctional officers with the safest, most humane, and least psychologically traumatizing system for restraining violent, out-of-control prisoners," reads the statement of purpose included on the warning. "The chair is not meant to be an instrument of punishment and should not be used as such."

Here are selections from Corcoran's deposition:

"Q. What testing did you do?

A. I put various friends in there. I yanked on [the straps] as hard as I could, and I'm physically apt. I could cause no pain to them whatsoever. . . .

Q. Are there any physical conditions that you believe should lead to a person not being restrained in the chair?

A. No arms, no legs.

Q. All right. So you don't believe the chair should properly be used on amputees or people born without fully developed limbs.

A. The chair wouldn't be functional unless they had appendages. . . .

Q. Is it a fair statement that it's your opinion that the chair is less psychologically traumatizing than the alternatives you mentioned [these included, in Corcoran's words, "four-pointing, chained to a bench, strapped to a bed"]

A. Yes.

Q. Is that opinion based upon any medical or psychological expert work in the field?

A. No. . . .

Q. Now [your statement of purpose says]: "It is an especially useful tool for restraining drug- or alcohol-affected prisoners," period.

My question, sir, what is your evidence for believing that it is especially useful for people who are on drugs?

A. Because medical restraints at that time are very dangerous.

Q. And what is the basis for saying the medical restraint at that point is dangerous?

A. Because they have not diagnosed what is in their bloodstream already, and whatever is put in there is compounded.

Q. Was there any scientific literature you relied on to come to this conclusion?

A. That's common sense. . . .

Q. Did you do any testing on people who were under the influence of drugs or narcotics?

A. No.

Q. Did you do any testing for people who are under the influence or feeling the effects of alcohol?

A. No. . . .

Q. All right. Now, the last sentence under your "Statement of Purpose": "The chair is not meant to be an instrument of punishment and should not be used as such."

Why did you include that sentence?

A. Because Mexico asked to purchase 200 of them, and I wouldn't sell them to Mexico.

Q. And why wouldn't you sell them to Mexico?

A. As any instrument, car, toilet plunger, they can all be abused. There was too high a potential without--we have a high, much higher standard in this country than other countries do. That's why the chair does work here and people will buy it. . . .

Q. People go to the bathroom while they are seated in the chair.

Are there provisions in the design of the chair to evacuate those excretions?

A. Yes.

Q. What are those?

A. Not to evacuate but contain.

Q. What are those?

A. The thing is cupped. Blood-borne pathogens and bodily fluids are contained in the person's clothes. I felt that was a better choice than let the pathogens go into the cell and infect other people. . . .

Q. . . . Have you looked at any of the literature regarding how long a person can safely be restrained in a Prostraint Chair?

A. There is no literature that I know of. . . .

Q. . . . Have you done any studies, research, as to the maximum amount of time an individual can be restrained in your restraining chair without causing a physical injury?

A. No. . . .

Q. Now, if you thought the chair wasn't punishing, why wouldn't you sell those chairs to Mexico?

A. Because I have seen enough movies, and I may be stereotyping, but there could be interrogations. I didn't want that to happen. . . .

Q. Is it a correct statement that you marketed the Prostraint restraining chair for use which includes interrogating prisoners?

A. Yes. . . .

Q. Do you know if any customers purchased ten restraint Prostraint chairs?

A. Yes.

Q. And has anyone purchased ten?

A. Yes, or more than ten.

Q. What entity would that have been?

A. I think both the states of Florida and the state of Georgia for the juvenile division. They require it."

On December 13, 1999, Amnesty International issued a statement calling for an independent inquiry into police actions at the WTO protests in Seattle. Among the allegations that troubled Amnesty were several incidents involving restraint chairs at the King County Jail. "People were allegedly strapped into four-point restraint chairs as punishment for nonviolent resistance or asking for their lawyers," says the group's press release. "In one case, a man was stripped naked before being strapped into the chair."

Martin Mijal, a building contractor in Portland, Oregon, participated in the WTO protests. He was arrested with other Direct Action Network protesters and charged with "failure to disperse." After ten hours of waiting in several jails, and hearing that a lawyer was on her way, the group decided to resist the deputies' attempts to transfer them to individual cells. According to Mijal, they linked arms.

Mijal says the deputies responded by bringing in several restraint chairs. They then began to separate the protesters. "I was holding myself in a ball with my arms locked under my legs," writes Mijal in his complaint to the ACLU of Washington. "As they carried me, I cried out 'Lawyer!' three times because I was very scared and thought they might be close by." Mijal says he did not resist as the guards placed him in the restraint chair. In fact, he wrote in his ACLU statement, "I asked the guards if they were OK since they had to carry me and it must have been awkward. They said yes they were.

"Then, as I remained entirely incapacitated in the wheelchair, and totally by surprise a male guard put pepper foam directly into my eyes," says Mijal in his complaint. "It was very, very painful. Instinctually, to get the foam out of my eyes, I wiped my forehead against the nearest thing, which was a guard's leg, who was standing to the side of me . . . and I heard him yelp when the chemical burned through his pants."

Mijal's action seems to have angered the guard. "Then he took a cloth and put it over my face," he writes in his ACLU complaint. "Then he put his hand on the cloth and with his finger found my left eye socket and rubbed the poison in my eye, forcing my eyelid up. . . . Then he lifted the cloth and put another pad of thick cloth over my mouth and gagged me. I couldn't breathe at all, because of the pain and the fear. . . . I was in immense agony."

"We would dispute that account," says Jim Harms, Public Information Officer for the King County Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention. He claims that the deputies were simply following procedures and that the activists shouldn't have expected to see their lawyer so quickly upon arriving at the jail. He also says that the officers used a standard use-of-force progression on Mijal, that he struggled with the guards and refused to be restrained, and that he was pepper-sprayed just so the deputies could get him into the chair. As for Mijal being pepper-sprayed while restrained, hooded, poked in the eye, and gagged, "There is nothing in the report or the follow-up review to show that actually happened," says Harms.

"If you've ever seen the film Brazil, it's like a scene from the torture chamber," says Robert Smith. An activist with Art and Revolution in San Francisco, Smith was arrested along with Mijal and backs up his claims. "He's being held down, he's got a bag over his face, there's people in riot gear all around him. This is after being pepper-sprayed. I'd never seen human beings doing something like that to other human beings."

Efforts are under way to restrict or ban use of the chair. .This past August, a Knox County, Tennessee, judge ruled that the confession of robbery suspect E.B. "Boyd" Collier was involuntary and illegal because it came while he was confined in a restraining chair during his five-hour interrogation. "While such a chair may be useful, it can easily cross the line as a coercive force," wrote Criminal Court Judge Mary Beth Leibowitz.

A March 1996 Department of Justice investigation of the Maricopa County Jails in Arizona found that the sheriff's department used stun guns on prisoners while they were confined in restraint chairs, including one case where jail staff used a stun gun against a prisoner's testicles. According to Amnesty International, one inmate, Richard Post, was forced into a restraint chair in a manner that is "reported to have caused compression of his spine and nerve damage to his spinal cord and neck, resulting in significant loss of upper body mobility." In August 1999, Maricopa County agreed to pay Post $800,000 to settle his claims that jail guards had used excessive force against him.

In 1997, jail officials told Amnesty International that the jail system owned sixteen chairs and that it had used them about 600 times in the past six months. The Maricopa County Jails have since altered their restraint policy and now say they no longer use the chairs for punishment. A Department of Justice lawsuit against the jail system was dropped in June 1998.

Alleged misuse of the restraint chair led the U.S. Department of Justice to file a 1996 lawsuit against Iberia Parish Jail in Louisiana, claiming that the jail deputies, as a matter of course, subjected inmates to "cruel and unusual punishment and physical and mental torture" by confining them to restraint chairs for hours and forcing them to sit in their own excrement. One inmate was allegedly held in the chair for eight days, another for forty-three hours. In a pretrial settlement, the jail authorities agreed to stop using the restraint chair.

In early January of this year, a group of Erie County, Pennsylvania, inmates asked a federal judge to ban use of the chair. Their suit against the prison, which is still pending, says that inmates have been held for two to eight hours in the chair for such behaviors as "making insolent remarks," cursing, and throwing towels at one another.

In Ventura County, California, a class-action lawsuit led a federal judge to issue a preliminary injunction banning the chair on November 15, 1999. That order is being appealed. The lawsuit alleged that during one eighteen-month period, 377 people had been strapped into the chair at the Ventura County Jail and that one inmate had been left in the chair for thirty-two hours. "Data . . . shows that the Sheriff's Department's misuse of that chair flows from a practice of restraining nonviolent arrestees for extended periods of time in violation of the arrestees' Fourteenth Amend-ment rights," wrote U.S. District Judge Lourdes Baird in her fifty-page decision. "The policy allows deputies to require restrained arrestees to either urinate or defecate on themselves and be forced to sit in their own feces or 'hold it.' "

Amnesty International is deeply troubled by the restraint chair. Such chairs "are being widely deployed" and appear "to be completely unregulated," says Wright. "The reports we have been getting suggest they are so easily abused that they should be banned for use in detention facilities." Amnesty believes that their should be "an urgent national inquiry" into thier use, says Wright. But though Amnesty has asked the U.S. government to conduct such an inquiry, it has "not responded in any way."

By Anne-Marie Cusac

This article was made possible in part by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism, Inc.

http://progressive.org/mag_cusacchair

Brutalized & Arrested in Cleveland for Posting "Bush Step Down" Posters

2006-02-05T10:42:00.000-08:00

The following is a first-hand account of police harrassment and brutality against a World Can't Wait organizer in Cleveland. If anything like this happens to you, let us know asap! Contact info@worldcantwait.org.

My name is Carol Fisher, and I am on the staff of Revolution Books in Cleveland OH. At the bookstore we have been immersed in building and supporting the initiatives of World Cant Wait. Yesterday, 1.28.06, while putting "Bush Step Down" posters on telephone poles along a major thoroughfare on a sunny Saturday afternoon, I was brutalized by Cleveland Heights police, charged with 2 counts of felony assault and held incommunicado under police custody in the hospital! This outrage and others like it must be exposed and opposed by all who hate the direction that the Bush regime is taking this country and the world.

Here is what happened:

I had set out from my house with a full agenda, to contact lots of people and get out materials about our upcoming Cleveland event to Drown Out the State of the Union address, and the call to march around the White House on Feb. 4th. My first stop was the an area known for its community of artists and progressives, where I stapled up posters for blocks and was greeted warmly by those who saw and appreciated what World Cant Wait is doing. I talked to an artist, and a Palestinian store owner who took fliers to distribute to customers.

Next stop, to the east side. I drove down a street in Cleveland Heights, another area known for its diversity and progressive history. This street was badly in need of postering too and though i was in a big hurry, I couldnt drive on without getting up a few signs. Before long a cop called from across the street: "Ma'am! Hundred dollar fine for doing that!" Oh really, since when? Another way of keeping us from getting the word out, eh? But not wanting to get arrested, I said ok and put up my staplegun and walked away. But that wasnt the end of it. "Ma'am! Hundred dollar fine unless you take those posters down." He is pursuing me across the street. Damn! OK fine, I say, I will take them down (not wanting to get into a confrontation, because I have lots to do today!) But this too is not enough for the cop. He wants my ID. I say I dont have my ID. He grabs my arm. I say let go of me, I am not doing anything wrong, I will take the posters down. People are watching to see what happens, are outraged but very afraid. The cop wont let go, he clearly wants more grief from me, and he is in the spotlight. He wants people to be scared. He pushes me against a store window and next thing I know I am face down on the sidewalk with two cops on top of me, one with his knee in my back. I am trying to call out to people, to tell them what the posters are about. They keep pushing my face into the sidewalk. I cant breathe.

I have osteoradionecrosis in my jaw, resulting from radiation treatments for cancer. My jawbone is slowly deteriorating, is very fragile, and doesnt heal well. I am 53 years old, not exactly a spring chicken. A hand comes down again to push my chin against the concrete. By this time there are four cops on the scene. My hands are tightly cuffed behind my back. They lift me up and shove me onto a parkbench and shackle my legs. I am still calling out, telling people what this is about. One of the cops says to me, "Shut up or I will kill you!", "I am sick of this anti-Bush shit!" "You are definitely going to the psyche ward." Then somebody calls the EMS, and a fire squad shows up. The cop superviser appears and puts his finger in my face: "I dont like it when people treat my men like this and if you don't obey the law you will suffer the consequences."

I am lifted into the EMS truck, hands still cuffed behind my back. I ask to make a call and this is refused, but a fireman offers to make a quick call for me. If not for this, no one would have known where I was or what was happening, a fate shared by many immigrants in this country. At the hospital, I am treated as an arch-criminal. Escorted by four policemen, I shuffle into the emergency room, legs still shackled, covered with leaves and mud. I think to myself, if I was Black, I would not have made it this far. I would probably be dead by now. People in the emergency room are shocked by the scene and by what I am saying happened. I probably do look pretty crazy by now.

They put me on a gurney and pull the curtains around. One female nurse and four male cops. They want me to undress in front of the cops. I refuse. The cops refuse to leave. Finally the nurse shields my body with a gown as I undress and put on hospital clothes. I am cuffed to the bed, and two cops remain guarding me the whole time. They put in an IV. I have no idea what they have in mind. Questions, probes, tests and a tetanus shot, a hint from the nurses that friends are calling to find out whats going on. First they say that one friend is coming in to see me, but that never happens.

After many hours a psychiatrist appears to determine my sanity. I dont want to talk to him, but have no choice. "This information is confidential", I say. Well yes, he says, but if the police want the information, I don't know if I can refuse... "This information is confidential", I repeat, and I tell him, there are times when you have to decide which side you are on. I have told him why I have wound up here and what they did to me, and I tell him, this is a moment in history when people have to stand firm against these repressive measures. He replies, "Fair enough", and proceeds to write a detailed record of my injuries.

I dont know it at the time, but outside in the waiting room all hell had broken loose. In a very short period of time, over a dozen WCW people showed up at the emergency room to demand that someone be allowed to see me. The WCW people discussed what was happening with the folks waiting in the ER, who were horrified at what was happening, and very supportive when they were shown the posters I had been putting up. The police and hospital staff claimed over and over that the police were in charge of me, and they determine what happens, not the doctors! Another example of a police state.

At one point, there was a big confrontation between the WCW people and the police, right in the ER. My supporters said that we weren't going to leave until someone saw me. Some of them were sitting in the waiting room holding the big green WCW posters.

The main cop tried to have a "private conversation" with the person with medical power of attorney. " NO! Come out here in the open where we can all hear!" As people gathered to listen to the conversation, and enter in their own opinions, the police threatened WCW folks with arrest! They argued, stood their ground, called this shameful (both to the police but also to the nurses who did nothing to stand against this shit). The cops kept saying that there was no legal right to see me, but people responded that, in Bush's America, the law is whatever the police say it is and that there is a moral and ethical right to to check on someone who is in the hospital.

Then a large phalanx of cops came. My friends pushed it as far as they could, then marched out of the ER, followed by the cops, all the way up to the street. 4 more people showed up who'd heard about what was happening and wanted to help.

A lawyer and a doctor, who are endorsers of the WCW Call, persisted in getting what info they could. All the while, people were calling the local media (who never showed up!), calling in complaints to the Cleveland Heights Police Department, and Cleveland Heights City Hall. I was never able to be seen by my own nurse or doctor or communicate by phone with anyone.

Shortly after being released from the hospital, I was released on my own recognizance. The battle is far from over. This is but one example of the attempts that the state, their authorities and spokespeople will make to try to keep us from opposing the crimes of this regime, and especially now, 2 days before the State of the Union address. Our cause is as righteous as it gets, and no attempts to intimidate or suppress, with threats or laws or physical abuse, should stop us but instead strengthen the resolve, build our organization and further demonstrate to the world that this regime is doomed, they are vicious, and they must be stopped.

As it says in the Call, "If we speak the turh, they will try to silence us. If we act, they will try to stop us. But we speak for the majority, here and around the world, and as we get this going we are going to reach out to the people who have been so badly fooled by Sush and we are NOT going to stop...The future is unwritten. Which one we get is up to us."

There are plans in the works for possibly a press conference, suing the Cleveland Heights Police Department, taking this issue of brutality to the Cleveland Heights City Council Meeting on Feb 6, doing a press conference, and circulating a pledge of medical personnel to not allow medical treatment to be run by the police. We will also be working with lawyers to fight these outrageous charges. If any legal aid could be offered nationally, it would really help.

Call the Cleveland Heights Police at 216-291-3883

Call Cleveland Heights City Hall at 216-291-4444

Please contact us at cleveland@worldcantwait.org or 216-633-6200

http://worldcantwait.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=842&Itemid=184

FREE Leonard Peltier

2006-02-03T11:46:00.000-08:00

Political Prisoner Held For 30 Years By U.S. Government

Two Events on Monday, Feb 6:

Rally and speak out to demand the release of Leonard Peltier on the 30th anniversary of his incarceration.

Monday Feb 6
4:00 - 6:30 pm
Union Sq.
Park Ave. & 15th St.

Leonard Peltier is a citizen of the Anishinabe and Dakota/Lakota Nations who has been unjustly imprisoned since 1976, even though government attorneys and courts acknowledge that the government withheld evidence, fabricated evidence, and coerced witnesses to fraudulently convict him. Leonard is recognized worldwide as a political prisoner and a symbol of resistance against the abuse and repression of indigenous people. To many Indigenous Peoples, Leonard Peltier is a symbol of the long history of abuse and repression they have endured.

This year marks the 30th year of Leonard’s imprisonment. Despite the fact that the government has admitted that the trial was a fraud, Leonard is still behind bars because the U.S. doesn’t want this vocal defender of indigenous rights to be free.

A Hearing has been scheduled for February 13, 2006 to correct the illegal sentencing that occurred in Leonard Peltier's case. The basis for this motion is that the United States District Court lacked subject matter jurisdiction under the statutes upon which Mr. Peltier was convicted and sentenced.

Join us on February 6 to demand the release of Leonard Peltier. We will rally on the east side of Union Square, at the site of the plaque commemorating indigenous settlements in Manhattan. This rally and speakout will mark the launch of a series of actions this year as we struggle to free Leonard Peltier.

for more information: 212-633-6646

To learn more about the case of Leonard Pelter and how you can support the struggle, go to http://www.leonardpeltier.org/

February 6, 2006
Save the Date for Leonard Peltier!
Warrior! A Film by Susie Bear

February 6, 2006 is the 30th anniversary of Leonard Peltier's capture in Canada.

To acknowledge his commitment to the people and our commitment to his release, NYC Jericho and ProLibertad will have a showing of the film "Warrior: The Life of Leonard Peltier" by Susie Bear on Monday, February 6, 2006

COFFEE & DESSERT 6:30 p.m.

WARRIOR: THE LIFE OF LEONARD PELTIER 7 p.m.

Q&A with members of the
Leonard Peltier Defense Ctte.

St. Mary's Episcopal Church
521 W. 126th St, Manhattan

For more information, please call: 718-220-6004

$5.00 on a sliding scale. All money raised to be sent to Leonard's commissary fund.

Synopsis

"An intimate look at the circumstances surrounding the incarceration of Native American activist Leonard Peltier, convicted of murder, with commentary from those involved, including Peltier himself."

Listen to Toni from the Leonard Peltier Defense Ctte.
www.worldtalkradio.com/show.asp?sid=141 After you click on the link, click on "Listen to this Show" at the top of the righthand column.

"When a cause comes along and you know in your bones that it is just, yet refuse to defend it, at that moment you begin to die. And I have never seen so many corpses walking around talking about justice."

--Mumia Abu-Jamal

Prisoner Alert

2006-02-01T02:52:00.000-08:00

Pham Ngoc Thach

Location: Vietnam
Arrested: March 2004
Days Imprisoned: 701

An incident on March 2, 2004, near the Vietnam Mennonite church center in District 2, eventually resulted in the arrest of six church leaders, including evangelist Pham Ngoc Thach. It began when they attempted to report to local civil authorities they were being harassed by secret agents. After agents fled the scene, leaving a motorcycle behind, the church leaders insisted police conduct an official investigation. Many police arrived at the scene. There was scuffling, and Thach was knocked down, jumped on and kicked in the face. Police withdrew after arresting one man. Hearing this man was being beaten at the precinct police station, Thach and two others went to the police station to urge restraint. They, too, were arrested and imprisoned. Thach was kicked in the stomach, chest and groin by the police officers, leaving him unconscious. He suffered additional beatings during interrogation sessions in the following weeks. More than four months later, Thach's father was allowed his first visit with his son.

On November 15, 2004, at the Ho Chi Minh City People's Court, Thach was tried-along with the five others-on charges of interfering with persons carrying out their official duties. They all were convicted and sentenced to various prison terms with Thach receiving a two-year sentence.

An appeal filed on behalf of Quang and Thach was heard by the court April 12, 2005. The court upheld their convictions and sentences. A concerted international appeal for the release of these two men resulted in the government granting amnesty to Pastor Quang in late August 2005. Thach remains in prison, assigned to a unit breaking rocks into gravel and more recently digging graves when a prisoner dies.

- Vietnamese Ministries -

Doing Dirty Work Abroad

2006-01-27T21:05:00.000-08:00

On Tuesday, Jan. 24, the Council of Europe announced the results of its long-awaited, months-long investigation into the possibility that torture victims have been shuttled around Europe to clandestine interrogation centers. The Council's investigations were led by Sen. Dick Marty of Switzerland, who, in the final report, excoriated European leaders for their complicity. Marty's findings also undermine U.S. denials that it does not practice torture overseas.

Marty's report is a zinger. He finds that the CIA conducted illegal activities in Europe by transporting and detaining prisoners while European governments looked on:

"What was shocking was the passivity with which we all, in Europe, have welcomed these things. Europeans should be less hypocritical and not turn a blind eye. There are those who do the dirty work abroad, but there are also those who know when they should close their eyes when that dirty work is being done."
While unable to offer formal, irrefutable proof of the existence of officially sanctioned CIA detention centers in Romania, Poland or other countries, as U.S.-based Human Rights Watch has argued, Marty concluded there was "a great deal of coherent, convergent evidence pointing to the existence of a system of 'relocation' or 'outsourcing' of torture."

As extensive as it is, Marty's report is only the beginning of Europe's evolving efforts to learn how this global network of American-sponsored interrogation sites touched the continent. Setting off a second extensive investigation last Wednesday, members of the European Parliament voted to establish a special committee specifically to analyze whether the U.S. violated European Union human rights norms in its handling of terrorist suspects.

The nearly 50-member body will begin its work in February and report back in a couple of months. The committee's justice commissioner earlier indicated that EU member states, as well as candidate countries, could face extensive sanctions if the allegations are found to be true.

After a leaked document last week indicated how Downing Street could effectively handle public inquiries about CIA rendition flights, the normally cool as a cucumber Tony Blair is coming under heavy pressure to reveal more about whether Great Britain is aware of and condones U.S. torture centers. The Guardian reported a few days ago that the leaked document shows the Blair government is trying to snuff attempts by MPs to find out exactly what and how much Britain knew about the torture flights.

Neutral Switzerland, interestingly, has been the only country to follow the Bush line, expressing more outrage over a possible leak of information about collaboration rather than the collaboration itself.

It is easy for cynics to blast Europeans about these investigations, given European nations' own history of using torture throughout World War II. But the European Union has been developing some real bite. Just this past week, EU pressure resulted in Turkey dropping its lawsuit against the famous novelist Orhan Pamuk for allegedly making critical comments toward Turkey.

Despite this, there's been an almost total lack of U.S. coverage about the torture centers since the report was issued. Perhaps journalists are too busy enjoying the blockbuster film "Hostel" -- a story about torture centers in poor former-Soviet bloc Eastern Europe nations -- to be paying much attention to real news in Eastern Europe.

Romania is nervous that it won't be able to join the EU if the allegations of complicity with the CIA are found credible. The EU's main satellite communications center is about to provide images of air bases in central Europe to Council investigators, possibly demonstrating clandestine CIA air traffic. And the EU has put Poland on notice that it is in the spotlight for its alleged collaboration. Back in the United States, the lack of any hint of action in Congress to understand these CIA flights is the lamentable reality. Indeed, the only real concern about our dwindling civil liberties has come during a unreported basement Democrats-only House Judiciary Committee hearing on Bush's warrantless domestic spying program.

Congress has shown no interest in either following up on the Council of Europe's investigation or instigating its own investigation into the torture centers.

Council of Europe investigator Marty has repeatedly said, "We do not want to weaken the fight against terrorism, but this fight has to be fought by legal means. Wrongdoing only gives ammunition to both the terrorists and their sympathizers."

The United States appears to need an outside entity to help put the brakes on what looks like a slow drift into a benign police state. Ironically, the former totalitarian states the United States helped rebuild after World War II may be the ones that help save us.

Noah Leavitt is an attorney who writes frequently on civil liberties and human rights issues. He can be contacted at nsleavitt@hotmail.com.

Jailhouse Salsa

2006-01-19T15:56:00.000-08:00

The Bandleader Didn't Commit the Murder, Affidavit Claims

Stormville, New York— Inside the concrete walls of the behemoth Green Haven Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison hidden away in this bleak upstate town, Harry Ruiz, inmate No. 95-A-2026, is sitting in a barren conference room talking about music. Salsa music. Congas, timbales, guitars—Ruiz plays them all. He leads nine other convicts in a jailhouse band he named Alma Libre.
"It means your soul is free," Ruiz said in an interview last month. "Why did I name the band that? Because that's the way I feel. . . . I had nothing to do with this."

Ruiz is talking about murder. It was a shooting that happened on August 29, 1993, during the city's gang wars and crack feuds: one low-level dealer, standing at a bus stop in Harlem one summer night, struck with a single bullet. Now serving a 31-years-to-life sentence for the killing, Ruiz, 37, insists he was wrongly convicted. But not many people believe him. Ruiz's appeals in the state and federal court systems have been denied.

Now, however, he might have a chance. Michael Race, a private investigator and former NYPD homicide detective, has found a fresh lead that he hopes may prompt a judge to reopen the Ruiz case. The new evidence comes in the form of an affidavit from Juan Mirabal, a former Harlem drug lord who became a cooperating witness for federal prosecutors. Facing a life sentence after his arrest in 2000 for running a vast, violent drug enterprise, Mirabal opted to work with the feds, and according to prosecutors, his cooperation has led to convictions in eight major cases.

Mirabal not only identified key players in the drug trade, he also claimed that Ruiz is innocent. In a signed affidavit dated April 26, 2004, and obtained by the Voice, Mirabal, 31, confessed to hiring a man other than Ruiz to kill a wayward employee, the same victim that Ruiz was convicted of killing.

Ruiz's family first learned about Mirabal's confession when two police detectives visited the Harlem apartment of Ruiz's mother, Gladys Rodriguez, and told her about Mirabal's cooperation deal with the feds. The Ruiz family then decided to hire Race, who specializes in wrongful-conviction cases. To pay the investigator, Ruiz's fiancée, Lizzette Rivera, an old friend of Ruiz's who fell in love with him over the course of bimonthly prison visits, embarked on a home-cooked fundraising campaign, selling jewelry at raffle sales and hawking her specialty beef patties, with minced onions and green peppers and her own secret Spanish seasoning. Rivera estimates she raised $1,000 to pay Race, while other family members chipped in about $2,500.

"I know Harry will be coming home," Rivera says. "I just know. I can feel it."

In the next few weeks, Mirabal's statements are expected to be part of a new appeal being prepared on Ruiz's behalf by Ron Kuby, the civil rights attorney and radio personality, who has taken on the case pro bono. While these statements about the murder are inconclusive (Mirabal claims not to know the full name of the killer he hired), Kuby hopes they will convince a judge to reassess the evidence against Ruiz, who was convicted solely on eyewitness testimony from a 15-year-old girl.

Without physical, biological, or DNA evidence, which has been responsible for overturning so many convictions throughout the country in recent years, Kuby says Ruiz is similar to scores of other inmates who were convicted on weak evidence or by mistaken identifications. Since Ruiz's conviction in 1994, there have been 32 exonerations in New York State, according to Northwestern University School of Law's Center on Wrongful Convictions. Of that lot, about 75 percent of the bad cases rested on shoddy testimony from eyewitnesses—a problem Kuby argues was more prevalent a decade ago.

"Harry Ruiz is a product of a different time in New York," Kuby says. "He is a product of the drug wars of the late '80s and early '90s, a product of three times the number of murders, hardly the same number of cops, and sloppy work by law enforcement all around."

Sherri Hunter, a spokeswoman for Manhattan district attorney Robert Morgenthau, declined to comment on the Ruiz case. The files have been archived and would take weeks to retrieve and analyze. Three former prosecutors who handled Ruiz's case for the D.A. did not return calls. A fourth former prosecutor, who would not speak for attribution, says it's unlikely a judge would reopen Ruiz's case, because former dealers like Mirabal are unreliable. Why would a judge reverse conviction on a 12-year-old murder because of new claims by a former Harlem crack lord, the former prosecutor asks, when 12 jurors found Ruiz guilty?

Kuby says Mirabal's track record as a star informant for the feds should be enough to push the D.A.'s office to reinvestigate. "This man's word was the golden standard of truth for the federal government and resulted in major convictions," Kuby says. "Now, all of sudden, why should his word be insufficient to cast doubt on the conviction of Harry Ruiz?"

Wearing an olive-green prison jumpsuit in Green Haven, Ruiz says that when he heard the gunshot on the night of the murder he was sitting in his mother's kitchen about to eat a late dinner.

"I remember clearly," Ruiz says. "Arroz blanco, habichuelas, chuletas, tostones, ensalada, and a big glass of Pepsi. It was delicious."

Then 24 and living at home, Ruiz describes himself as shy and reserved. Unlike other kids on his street, Ruiz grew his hair long, dressed all in black like a punk rocker, and listened to metal bands like Queensrÿche.

And like many of his friends, he started peddling drugs on the side. While Ruiz was dealing on street corners between shifts working odd jobs, Mirabal had emerged as a drug kingpin. As Mirabal would later confess to prosecutors, he was storing hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, kilos of cocaine and crack, and caches of machine guns and semiautomatic weapons in a "safe house." (Mirabal served 43 months behind bars and is now free. In his affidavit he claims he knows Ruiz; Ruiz denies that he knows Mirabal.)

According to the affidavit, the motives behind the murder Mirabal ordered were a combination of street justice and deterrence. In the fall of 1992, Mirabal states that he suspected one of his workers, Felix Emmanuel, had conspired to steal $150,000, three kilos of cocaine, and several 9mm handguns from Mirabal's safe house. In retaliation, Mirabal claims in his affidavit, he paid a hit man $8,000 to have Emmanuel killed. Mirabal claims he knew the hit man he hired only by his street name—"Shorty." Mirabal paid the man $4,000 up front, his affidavit states. The day after the murder, he received a phone call from Shorty: "It's done." He agreed to meet Shorty in a Spanish restaurant, where he paid him another $4,000.

When Ruiz heard the gunshot, he claims he got up from his mother's kitchen table and walked outside his building to join a mob of people moving toward the crime scene. (His mother; his sister-in-law, Jacqueline Ruiz; and his sister, Hilda Rodriguez, all testified at the trial that Ruiz was home with them at the time of the shooting.) Ruiz says he then followed the crowd over to Amsterdam Avenue in front of a bus stop. Emmanuel was lying in the bus lane. He had been shot once in the head with a low-caliber pistol fired six to eight inches away, the medical examiner later determined.

At the crime scene, little evidence was recovered. No gun. No bullet. No fingerprints. Four days later, a 15-year-old girl and her mother walked into Harlem's 30th Precinct. The girl, Nilda Alomar, claimed to be a good friend of Emmanuel, and she told police she was in the street the night he was killed and had seen the man who shot him. According to the police report, Alomar said she recognized the killer, having seen him around the neighborhood. She said he "was wearing a black vest, black jeans, and baseball cap. In his right hand he had a black pistol. . . . I know his name to be Harry."

The case went cold. It was one of about 1,900 reported homicides in 1993, 56 of them reported in Harlem's 30th Precinct. In the months before Ruiz was first arrested, detectives were assigned to review old murder cases. Then Ruiz was spotted wearing clothes identical to those that Alomar had described, according to police. The arresting officer said Ruiz wore a black vest with no shirt, black pants, and a backward baseball cap.

During questioning, Ruiz says detectives offered him a deal—less prison time in exchange for a guilty plea for Emmanuel's murder. Ruiz refused. "Why am I gonna try and make a deal for something I didn't do?" Ruiz recalls asking. "They had nothing. They were fishing."

The cops did have something, though. They had Alomar, who later picked Ruiz out of a lineup. In that lineup, Ruiz says, he was flanked by scruffy, homeless men who looked nothing like him.

At the time of Ruiz's trial, in the fall of 1994, criminal courts were flooded with violent gangs like the Wild Cowboys and Latin Kings. The prosecutor, Helen Sturm, now a Family Court judge, centered her case on Alomar, who told jurors her story. Alomar talked about going out the night of the murder, partying with two 15-year-old friends. Then, Alomar claimed, walking in the street that night, from a distance of about 40 feet, she watched Ruiz approach Emmanuel from behind. He took a gun from his waistband, put it to Emmanuel's head, and pulled the trigger.

When asked to identify Ruiz sitting in front of her in the courtroom, Alomar, who claimed to have known Ruiz for about a year, had difficulty.

From the trial transcript:

Sturm: "I would ask you to look around the courtroom now and tell us if you see Harry Ruiz in the courtroom."

Alomar: "Yes I do."

Sturm: "And can you indicate where, please?"

Alomar: "There."

At this point, instead of pointing at Ruiz, Alomar pointed to the back of the room, to another person. The trial judge, Alfred Kleiman, then asked Alomar to stand up on the witness stand and point to Ruiz.

The second time Alomar got it right.

Explaining her mistake, Alomar said: "He looked like him. I just got confused. . . . He looks like Harry."

During a cross-examination, Ruiz's court-appointed lawyer, Thomas Dunn, asked Alomar: "There was doubt when you were asked this morning to identify Harry Ruiz, wasn't there: yes or no?"

Alomar: "Yes."

Dunn: "In fact, you pointed out someone in the back of the courtroom; isn't that a fact?"

Alomar: "He looks like Harry."

In his interview with the Voice, Ruiz says that after all his failed appeals it may be impossible to convince anyone he is innocent. To keep his mind clear and emotions stable, he sticks to his Green Haven routine. Alma Libre practice every Monday, he has a $7-a-week job as a copy clerk, and every other week, his fiancée, Rivera, takes a bus upstate to visit. They don't talk about the crime or developments in his case, she says, but of marriage, family, and the promise of a new life. Because of prison restrictions, Ruiz has never taken a bite of one of Rivera's beef patties.

"I'm dying to taste them," he says. Ruiz is eligible for parole in 2025. Wedding plans are pending.

Geoffrey Gray
January 3rd, 2006 12:19 PM
http://villagevoice.com/news/0601,gray,71462,5.html

Some Soldiers Who Have Humanity

2006-01-14T18:20:00.000-08:00

Guantanamo Prisoner Records Horrors Of Detention

WASHINGTON: A man now detained at Guantanamo has given a harrowing account of his treatment at the hands of his captors and keepers, reported Amnesty International.

A report released by Amnesty to mark the fourth anniversary of the transfer of detainees to the notorious camp maintained by the United States on leased Cuban territory, includes an account provided by Saudi detainee Jumah al-Dossari’s civilian lawyer. The first person account was written in longhand in July 2005 by the still-imprisoned Jumah al-Dossari. He writes, “I am writing the story of what I have suffered from the day I was kidnapped on the Pakistani border and sold to American troops until now and my being in Guantanamo, Cuba. What I will write here is not a flight of fancy or a moment of madness; what I will write here are the established facts and events agreed upon by detainees who were eyewitnesses to them, representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) as well as soldiers, investigators and interpreters.”

Al-Dossari writes that he passed through several small jails where there was a lot of abuse. “I had previously met several people when I was on the border, they were of different nationalities. They had left Afghanistan and the Pakistan Army abused us and gave us the worst food. They put me in a cell measuring four metres by four metres in which there were 59 prisoners without mattresses, blankets or a bathroom; there was only one bucket in the cell for everyone to relieve themselves in without a screen. They stole any passports from prisoners who were of many nationalities and also abused them. They abused me personally and beat me several times during investigations. The worst tribulation for us was when they transported us from one place to another: they would tie us up in the most savage way, so much so that some of us got gangrenous fingers and our hands and feet swelled and turned blue. They would tie us up for long periods of time in military trucks, sometimes from daybreak until night, in addition to the hours that they spent transporting us in trucks.”

Finally, the group of prisoners arrived at the Kohat airport where an American military plane, American soldiers and an American interpreter who spoke Arabic were waiting for them. “They took one by one and handed us over to the American soldiers. The deal was done and they sold us for a few dollars and they were not interested in us,” he adds.

According to al-Dossari, there were 30 of them, whom the soldiers mistreated. They beat them and took their pictures. They also kicked him in the stomach after he complained of pain. The plane landed at Kandhar after midnight. This happened in January 2002. There was even worse treatment for them in store. He was taken in to face two interrogators. The beatings and interrogations continued. He was asked to confess that he was a terrorist. He was in the third group to be moved to Guantanamo. They were put in cages and told not to talk or even touch the mesh. To relieve themselves, they had to be taken out. There was no privacy. Al-Dossari says one detainee by the name of Abdul Aziz Al-Masri was ill in hospital where beaten up in front of the doctors and nurses. His injuries were excessive and caused his spine to break. He is now hemiplegic. At the end of 2003, al-Dossari writes during an interrogation session, the Quran was desecrated and he was told that “this is a holy war between the star of David and the cross against the crescent.” By then Camp 5 had been constructed where he was taken and put in solitary. He says his state of health has worsened and he falls and faints every day. On 12 June he was given a plate of food with a dead scorpion on it. “Since the day that they threatened until now, I have been removing insects and dung beetles from the food and showing it to the soldier who then says, ‘Do you want another plate?’” He has also been on hunger strike

Al-Dossari concludes his account by affirming, “I would thus like to point out that not all of the soldiers in Guantanamo tortured and oppressed us. There were some soldiers who treated us humanely, some of them would cry because of what was happening to us and were embarrassed by the style of management at the camp and even by the American government, their lack of justice and oppression of us. To give an example, when I was in Camp India in Camp Delta and I was being tortured, an Afro-American came to me. He said sorry to me and gave me a cup of hot chocolate and some sweet biscuits. When I thanked him, he said, ‘I don’t want your thanks. I want you to know that we are not all bad and we think differently.’ When I was talking to a soldier and I told him what happened to me, he cried and had tears in his eyes. He was clearly moved. He said sorry to me about what had happened to me and he also offered me some food. These are examples to show the reader that there are some soldiers who have humanity, irrespective of their race, gender or faith.

”khalid hasan

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2006%5C01%5C14%5Cstory_14-1-2006_pg7_48

Florida Eight Grader Murdered By Cops

2006-01-14T17:06:00.000-08:00

"A Florida eighth grader who pulled out a pellet gun in class and was shot by police has died of his injuries, his brother said."

Lawyer: Authorities Were Told Student's Gun Was Fake

LONGWOOD, Florida (CNN) -- The father and brother of a teenager shot at school Friday while brandishing a pellet gun told authorities before an officer opened fire that Christopher Penley's gun was not real, the family's attorney said Saturday.
The eighth-grader is clinically brain dead and being kept on life support to harvest his organs, attorney Mark Nation said.

When Ralph Penley arrived at the school Friday to help police and school officials defuse the situation, he wasn't allowed inside, Nation said.

Nation said Ralph Penley was "angry" because he had spoken to police before his son was shot and told them Christopher did not have a real gun. Christopher's younger brother told school officials the same thing, Nation said.

Asked if the father blames police for his son's death, Nation said, "I'm not here to point a finger at anybody at this time."

Seminole County Sheriff Don Eslinger said one of his deputies shot Penley after he pointed the gun at him, which had been painted so it would look more real.

One of Penley's classmates said he, too, thought the gun was real -- and that Penley was going to kill him -- until he grabbed the pistol and realized it was fake.

Jennings "Bucky" Hurt, a longtime friend of the family, told reporters that Ralph Penley had hsi son's organs harvested because he wanted "other children to live if his son had to die."

The ordeal began about 9:30 a.m. Friday at the 1,100-student Millwee Middle School in suburban Orlando, Florida.

Maurice Cotey and his classmates were about to take a test when two students noticed the gun in Penley's backpack. Cotey heard one of them say, "This kid has a gun." (Watch the aftermath of the Friday incident -- 1:54)

"The teacher, she went to the phone and told the office, and then he, the kid, he went to the lights and turned them off" before pulling the weapon and showing it to the class, Cotey, 13, told Orlando's WKMG TV.

At first, Cotey thought the gun was fake, he said, but Penley "seemed so sure that it was a real gun, so it like scared me, kind of."

Everyone darted from the classroom except Cotey and a girl, he said. Penley looked at Cotey and said, "You stay." The girl ran out.

With his gun in Cotey's back, Penley told his classmate to get against the blackboard. Cotey began pleading.

"Please don't shoot me, please don't shoot me," Cotey recalled telling Penley, who ordered him into the closet.

As the two walked toward the closet door, Penley grabbed Cotey and turned him around, and Cotey seized the chance to try to wrest away the gun from his older classmate, he said.

"He started to point the gun at me, so I started to grab for it and he pulled it away," Cotey told WKMG. "And then I grabbed for it one more time 'cause he pointed it at me for like a little while, so I grabbed it and I twisted it and I pointed it at him."

It was then that Cotey knew for sure the gun was a fake. (Watch Cotey describe the frightening ordeal -- 1:33)

"While I was twisting it, it started to come apart like a toy gun would, like a dollar-store type toy," he said.

Cotey pointed the gun toward Penley's legs, but Penley kicked him into the closet, the 13-year-old said.

Cotey was able to get out of the closet and run out of the classroom. Penley already had gone and was running from a school resource deputy and others who were chasing him, Eslinger said.

As he ran, Penley could be heard saying, "I'm going to kill myself or I'm going to die somehow," according to Eslinger. At one point, he held the gun to his neck, another time to his head.

Penley fled to an isolated alcove area and went into a restroom where he refused to speak with negotiators, the sheriff said.

Authorities pleaded with the boy inside the bathroom to put down his weapon, Eslinger said, but the boy refused.

"He refused to even comment. All he said was his first name. He did not drop the firearm," the sheriff said.

Finally, the boy came out of the bathroom and "raised the firearm in a tactical position and pointed it" at a SWAT team member, who "decided to use deadly force," Eslinger said. (Full story)

The boy's motive was not immediately clear.

After the shooting, deputies discovered what Cotey had suspected -- the gun was phony. It was an airsoft pellet gun, and the normally brightly colored tip had been painted black to make it look more authentic, Eslinger said.

Such guns generally shoot plastic pellets or paintballs.

In a news conference after the shooting, authorities displayed the gun alongside a real 9 mm handgun. To the naked eye, there was little difference between them.

"It was a terrible situation," the sheriff told reporters.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/01/14/teen.shot/index.html

Article 5 of the 1975 World Medical Association Tokyo Declaration

2006-01-09T16:25:00.000-08:00

Scandal of Force-Fed Prisoners

Hunger strikers are tied down and fed through nasal tubes, admits Guantánamo Bay doctor

New details have emerged of how the growing number of prisoners on hunger strike at Guantánamo Bay are being tied down and force-fed through tubes pushed down their nasal passages into their stomachs to keep them alive. They routinely experience bleeding and nausea, according to a sworn statement by the camp's chief doctor, seen by The Observer.

'Experience teaches us' that such symptoms must be expected 'whenever nasogastric tubes are used,' says the affidavit of Captain John S Edmondson, commander of Guantánamo's hospital. The procedure - now standard practice at Guantánamo - 'requires that a foreign body be inserted into the body and, ideally, remain in it.' But staff always use a lubricant, and 'a nasogastric tube is never inserted and moved up and down. It is inserted down into the stomach slowly and directly, and it would be impossible to insert the wrong end of the tube.' Medical personnel do not insert nasogastric tubes in a manner 'intentionally designed to inflict pain.'

It is painful, Edmonson admits. Although 'non-narcotic pain relievers such as ibuprofen are usually sufficient, sometimes stronger drugs,' including opiates such as morphine, have had to be administered.

Thick, 4.8mm diameter tubes tried previously to allow quicker feeding, so permitting guards to keep prisoners in their cells for more hours each day, have been abandoned, the affidavit says. The new 3mm tubes are 'soft and flexible'.

The London solicitors Allen and Overy, who represent some of the hunger strikers, have lodged a court action to be heard next week in California, where Edmondson is registered to practise. They are asking for an order that the state medical ethics board investigate him for 'unprofessional conduct' for agreeing to the force-feeding.

Edmonson's affidavit, in response to a lawsuit on behalf of detainees on hunger strike since last August, was obtained last week by The Observer, as a Guantánamo spokesman confirmed that the number of hunger strikers has almost doubled since Christmas, to 81 of the 550 detainees. Many have been held since the camp opened four years ago this month, although they not been charged with any crime, nor been allowed to see any evidence justifying their detention.

This and other Guantánamo lawsuits now face extinction. Last week, President Bush signed into law a measure removing detainees' right to file habeas corpus petitions in the US federal courts. On Friday, the administration asked the Supreme Court to make this retroactive, so nullifying about 220 cases in which prisoners have contested the basis of their detention and the legality of pending trials by military commission.

Although some prisoners have had to be tied down while being force-fed, 'only one patient' has had to be immobilised with a six-point restraint, and 'only one' passed out. 'In less than 10 cases have trained medical personnel had to use four-point restraint in order to achieve insertion.' Edmondson claims the actual feeding is voluntary. During Ramadan, tube-feeding takes place before dawn.

Article 5 of the 1975 World Medical Association Tokyo Declaration, which US doctors are legally bound to observe through their membership of the American Medical Association, states that doctors must not undertake force-feeding under any circumstances. Dr David Nicholl, a consultant neurologist at Queen Elizabeth's hospital in Birmingham, is co-ordinating opposition to the Guantánamo doctors' actions from the international medical community. 'If I were to do what Edmondson describes in his statement, I would be referred to the General Medical Council and charged with assault,' he said.

· Yesterday the new German Chancellor Angela Merkel became the latest leader to condemn the United States for practices at the prison. In a magazine interview days before her first visit as premier to the US, Merkel said Washington should close Guantánamo and find other ways of dealing with terror suspects.

David Rose
01/08/06 "The Observer"

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

Wait A Minute!

2006-01-06T02:07:00.000-08:00

"Elisa Massimino, Washington director of Human Rights First, said the senators' statement should send a clear warning to military and CIA interrogators that they would be subject to criminal prosecution if they abuse a detainee."

3 GOP Senators Blast Bush Bid To Bypass Torture Ban

Reject assertion he has right to waive rules to protect US security

By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff | January 5, 2006

WASHINGTON -- Three key Republican senators yesterday condemned President Bush's assertion that his powers as commander in chief give him the authority to bypass a new law restricting the use of torture when interrogating detainees.

John W. Warner Jr., a Virginia Republican who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican, issued a joint statement rejecting Bush's assertion that he can waive the restrictions on the use of cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment against detainees to protect national security.

''We believe the president understands Congress's intent in passing, by very large majorities, legislation governing the treatment of detainees," the senators said. ''The Congress declined when asked by administration officials to include a presidential waiver of the restrictions included in our legislation. Our committee intends through strict oversight to monitor the administration's implementation of the new law."

Separately, the third primary sponsor of the detainee treatment law, Senator Lindsey O. Graham, Republican of South Carolina, told the Globe in a phone interview that he agreed with everything McCain and Warner said ''and would go a little bit further."

''I do not believe that any political figure in the country has the ability to set aside any . . . law of armed conflict that we have adopted or treaties that we have ratified," Graham said. ''If we go down that road, it will cause great problems for our troops in future conflicts because [nothing] is to prevent other nations' leaders from doing the same."

The White House did not return calls yesterday about the senators' statements. On Friday, in signing the ban on torture, Bush issued a ''signing statement," saying he would interpret the restrictions in the context of his broader constitutional powers as commander in chief. A ''signing statement" is an official document in which a president lays out his interpretation of a new law.

A senior administration official later confirmed that the president believes the Constitution gives him the power to authorize interrogation techniques that go beyond the law to protect national security. But in enacting the law, Congress intended to close every loophole and impose an absolute ban on all forms of torture, no matter the circumstances, Graham said.

David Golove, a New York University law professor who specializes in executive power issues, said the senators' statements ''mean that the battle lines are drawn" for an escalating fight over the balance of power between the two branches of government.

''The president is pointing to his commander in chief power, claiming that it somehow gives him the power to dispense with the law when he's conducting war," Golove said. ''The senators are saying: 'Wait a minute, we've gone over this. This is a law Congress has passed by very large margins, and you are compelled and bound to comply with it.' "

Elisa Massimino, Washington director of Human Rights First, said the senators' statement should send a clear warning to military and CIA interrogators that they would be subject to criminal prosecution if they abuse a detainee.

''That power [to override the law] was explicitly sought by the White House, and it was considered and rejected by the Congress," she said. ''And any US official who relies on legal advice from a government lawyer saying there is a presidential override of a law passed by Congress does so at their peril. Cruel inhuman and degrading treatment is illegal."

But Golove said that it is politically unlikely that Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales would prosecute an official for taking an action Bush ordered him to take. Still, he said, Congress has a number of tools for compelling the president to obey the law. Congress can withhold funds for programs. It can subpoena administration officials to testify under oath. It can pass stricter laws or block legislation Bush needs. In an extreme and politically unlikely scenario, it can impeach the president.

Bush's interpretation of another detainee-related provision in the new law sparked further friction yesterday with some lawmakers.

The provision stripped courts of the jurisdiction to hear most lawsuits from detainees held at the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Citing that provision, the administration said this week that it would ask courts to dismiss more than 180 Guantanamo lawsuits.

http://www.boston.com

Catholic Workers Back from Guantanamo · Bethlehem

2005-12-23T18:48:00.000-08:00

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
DECEMBER 22, 2005
12:37 PM

CONTACT: Institute for Public Accuracy
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

WASHINGTON / NEW YORK - December 22 -

ANNA BROWN
FRIDA BERRIGAN

Berrigan and Brown are among the 25 activists, many with the Catholic Worker, who have just returned from a march to the U.S. military base at Guantanamo. While holding vigils, they fasted outside Guantanamo. The Associated Press recently reported that "32 prisoners [in Guantanamo] are on hunger strike to protest what they say is cruel and inhumane treatment. Twenty-five of those prisoners are being fed through tubes."

Berrigan wrote in her piece "Why I Am Marching to Guantanamo": "It is an act against biology. But refusing to eat is the prisoners' only way of drawing attention to their predicament. They have no other tools except deepening their own suffering. ... The Bush administration has denied every fundamental right afforded by international law or American law to allow the inmates to defend themselves. It has even denied charging them with any crime beyond looking the part of the villain in Bush's war on terrorism."

In addition to being available for interviews, Brown can arrange interviews with other marchers from around the U.S.; profiles of each of the 25 activists along with personal statements and other information is available at Witness Torture. (Recent news reports indicate that the Catholic Worker is among the groups being monitored by the FBI.)

Sr. ANNE MONTGOMERY
ART LAFFIN

Also just back from the Guantanamo march, Sr. Anne has more than 40 years teaching experience. For the last 10 years, she has worked with the Christian Peacemaker Teams, which currently have four members held hostage in Iraq. She was with the CPT in Iraq most recently in April; she was also recently in Hebron with the group in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Laffin has been active in nonviolence work for peace, justice and human rights for over 25 years. He is a member of the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker in Washington, D.C., and is co-editor with Sr. Anne Montgomery of the book Swords Into Plowshares.

SCOTT LANGLEY

Langley works in the Catholic Worker house in Raleigh, North Carolina, with his wife, Sheila Stumph; they have both returned from the march to Guantanamo. He is also North Carolina Death Penalty Coordinator for Amnesty International. He said today: "We live a few blocks from death row in North Carolina, one of the more active death rows. We work with the families visiting their loved ones on death row; we organize resistance around executions when they come up." This year North Carolina executed the 1,000th person since the death penalty was reinstated. Langley is working on a photo documentary about the death penalty.

LEILA SANSOUR
PATRICK ORR

Chief executive of the Open Bethlehem Project, Sansour said today: "The current situation here is grim. The walls and fences that encircle Bethlehem have turned this 4,000-year-old city into a prison for its 160,000 citizens."

Patrick Orr is London representative for the group. He said today: "The Israeli Occupation is an ever-present fact in Bethlehem. Over the last few years, the city's borders have been dramatically redrawn by the expansion of illegal settlements in a ring-like formation around the city, on land confiscated by force or acquired by coercion from Bethlehemites. Squatting above every hilltop, these settlements have no respect for the environment or the lives and heritage they erase."

American Friends Service Committee

2005-12-17T15:39:00.000-08:00

An Urgent Message from the General Secretary of the American Friends Service Committee

Dear AFSC Friend,

What I'm about to tell you is an outrage. This is an important update for the peace and justice community.

Please share this message with all of your friends.

You may have been following the breaking scandal that the Department of Defense has admitted spying on the American Friends Service Committee, our coalition partners, and thousands of people like you.

Take action now to tell your Congressional representatives that you want the government to stop spying on the people of this country.

Two years ago, the Defense Department directed its Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) to establish a domestic law enforcement database that included information related to "potential terrorist threats directed against the Department of Defense." Earlier this week, NBC broke the story that the Pentagon was using the system to collect information on peaceful gatherings and counter-recruiting activities.

NBC obtained a 400 page printout from the database of which 8 pages have been released. In those few pages, we have found four events sponsored by AFSC. The threatening events in the database included handing out literature in front of military recruiting stations and commemorating the second anniversary of the Iraq War.

We knew that our staff had already been under surveillance by the FBI and local police in Colorado, Illinois, and Iowa for their work to end this war. The courts agreed with us then that spying, not free speech, is a threat, as they did during the Vietnam War, when we helped win the guarantees that we are all supposed to enjoy today that our military will not spy on Americans.

Take action now: https://secure2.convio.net/afsc/site/Advocacy?pagename=homepage&page=UserAction&id=127&JServSessionIdr005=i0dw790v91.app8b
to see that history doesn't repeat itself.

Tell Congress that you support our fundamental right to speak our mind and organize on the issues of the day. This new wave of spying can only be seen as a threat to our rights to free speech and the freedom of assembly. For decades, Cold Warriors criticized foreign governments for exactly these types of activities. With the help of friends like you, AFSC stood firm against the pressures of the McCarthy era and we won't stop speaking truth to power today.

Tell your representatives in Washington that this isn't our America.

Please, take action now:

https://secure2.convio.net/afsc/site/Advocacy?pagename=homepage&page=UserAction&id=127&JServSessionIdr005=i0dw790v91.app8b

In Peace,

Mary Ellen McNish,
General Secretary, AFSC

EFF Defends Prisoners' First Amendment Rights

2005-12-17T15:11:00.000-08:00

Opposes Prison Mail Ban on Materials Printed from Internet

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) on behalf of
Prison Legal News told a federal court Wednesday that
Georgia state prisoners should be allowed to receive
material printed from the Internet through the mail.

Although Georgia state prisons allow prisoners to receive
handwritten letters in the mail, Georgia prison policy also
includes a blanket ban on any incoming mail containing
printouts from the Internet. Since prisoners cannot
themselves access the Internet, Internet materials printed
and mailed by family and friends are often the only way for
them to receive valuable legal information, health advice,
and religious materials. In a friend-of-the-court brief for
a case filed by Georgia prisoner Danny Williams, EFF argues
that this indiscriminate and arbitrary ban on
Internet-generated materials violates prisoners' First
Amendment rights. Several courts in other states have
already ruled that mail policies like the one at issue here
are unconstitutional.

"Georgia prisons are violating the rights of prisoners and
those who correspond with them by senselessly allowing
prisoners to receive handwritten mail but prohibiting
printouts of material from the Internet," said EFF Staff
Attorney Kevin Bankston. "It makes no sense and serves no
legitimate interest for a prison to prohibit a prisoner
from receiving, for example, a printout of the latest issue
of Prison Legal News, or information from the Internet
about health issues like AIDS that can be life-or-death
issues for prisoners."

Prison Legal News is a non-profit legal magazine,
publishing monthly review and analyses of prisoner rights,
prisoner-relevant legislation and court rulings, and news
about general prison issues. The majority of Prison Legal
News subscribers, as well as most of its writers, are
currently incarcerated.

EFF was assisted in this case by attorney Sarah M. Shalf of
Bondurant, Mixson & Elmore, LLP in Atlanta, Georgia.

For the brief filed in this case:

For this release:

Circumventing McCain

2005-12-14T05:43:00.000-08:00

"In a high-level meeting at the Pentagon on Tuesday, some Army and other Pentagon officials raised concerns that Mr. McCain would be furious at what could appear to be a back-door effort to circumvent his intentions. "

New Army Rules May Snarl Talks With McCain on Detainee Issue

The Army has approved a new, classified set of interrogation methods that may complicate negotiations over legislation proposed by Senator John McCain to bar cruel and inhumane treatment of detainees in American custody, military officials said Tuesday.

The techniques are included in a 10-page classified addendum to a new Army field manual that was forwarded this week to Stephen A. Cambone, the under secretary of defense for intelligence policy, for final approval, they said.

The addendum provides dozens of examples and goes into exacting detail on what procedures may or may not be used, and in what circumstances. Army interrogators have never had a set of such specific guidelines that would help teach them how to walk right up to the line between legal and illegal interrogations.

Some military officials said the new guidelines could give the impression that the Army was pushing the limits on legal interrogation at the very moment when Mr. McCain, Republican of Arizona, is involved in intense three-way negotiations with the House and the Bush administration to prohibit the cruel treatment of prisoners.

In a high-level meeting at the Pentagon on Tuesday, some Army and other Pentagon officials raised concerns that Mr. McCain would be furious at what could appear to be a back-door effort to circumvent his intentions.

"This is a stick in McCain's eye," one official said. "It goes right up to the edge. He's not going to be comfortable with this."

Army officials said the manual required interrogators to comply with the Geneva Conventions, which give broad protections to prisoners of war against coercion, threats or harsh treatment of any kind.

But they declined to give examples of specific interrogation techniques that the addendum authorizes, or the conditions for their use, saying they wanted to prevent captives from learning how to thwart them.

The Bush administration has held that many captives in the campaign against terrorism are not entitled to the same protections as prisoners of war.

Mr. McCain's measure, which the Senate has overwhelmingly approved, would require that only interrogation techniques authorized by the new Army field manual be used on prisoners held by the military.

Mark Salter, Mr. McCain's chief of staff, said that the Army and Pentagon had not briefed his boss or other aides on the contents of the manual or its addendum.

He warned that if the interrogation techniques in the addendum were overly aggressive, they could complicate the talks Mr. McCain continued on Tuesday with Stephen J. Hadley, President Bush's national security adviser.

"This is politically obtuse and damaging," Mr. Salter said in a telephone interview. "The Pentagon hasn't done one molecule of political due diligence on this."

Larry Di Rita, the Defense Department spokesman, said Pentagon officials had not yet told Mr. Hadley about the contents of the classified addendum and any political implications it might pose to discussions with Mr. McCain. Mr. Di Rita said the Pentagon meeting on Tuesday was simply to review the status of the field manual and related detention policies.

"The field manual is not finished," he said. "We're mindful of the negotiations going on with the White House and Congressional committees on Senator McCain's language."

The officials who described the manual, the meeting on Tuesday and its implications for the negotiations were granted anonymity so they could speak candidly about a sensitive internal debate that involves classified information.

One Army officer expressed exasperation that senior military and civilian officials were failing to articulate a coherent approach toward interrogation, saying much of the confusion centered on disparate definitions of abuse.

"Everybody's talking past each other on this," the officer said. " 'Cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment' is at the crux of the problem, but we've never defined that."

The new manual, the first revision in 13 years, will specifically prohibit practices like stripping prisoners, keeping them in stressful positions for a long time, imposing dietary restrictions, employing police dogs to intimidate prisoners and using sleep deprivation as a tool to get them to talk, Army officials said. In that regard, it imposes new restrictions on what interrogators are allowed to do.

Those practices were not included in the manual in use when most of the abuses occurred at Abu Ghraib in Iraq in the fall of 2003, but neither were they specifically banned.

Army officials said that barring any last-minute problems, they expected the manual to be issued this month.

On Capitol Hill, negotiations intensified Tuesday between Senator John W. Warner, the Virginia Republican who heads the Armed Services Committee, and his counterpart in the House, Representative Duncan Hunter, a California Republican.

The two lawmakers are working with the White House and Mr. McCain to resolve differences on his provision, the last major issue holding up passage of the annual military budget and policy bill.

Mr. Warner, who strongly supports the provision, expressed confidence that House and Senate negotiators could approve the conference report within 48 hours.

It was unclear, however, how far the House was willing to go to back White House efforts to alter Mr. McCain's language. The speaker, J. Dennis Hastert, met Tuesday with Vice President Dick Cheney but details of their talks could not be learned.

Mr. Cheney strongly opposes Mr. McCain's measure and unsuccessfully sought to have the Central Intelligence Agency exempted from its restrictions.

Also on Tuesday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in a speech to the Heritage Foundation, tried to recalibrate her position on the treatment of terrorism suspects in American detention, saying the administration was willing to do anything legal to prevent a terrorist attack.

During her trip through Europe, she made several statements about the administration's policy on torture, culminating with one in Kiev Wednesday when she said the United States prohibits "cruel and inhumane and degrading treatment" of suspects, "whether they are in the United States or outside of the United States."

She reiterated that in a truncated form on Tuesday but added that "we should be prepared to do anything that is legal to prevent another terrorist attack."

The statement in Kiev, which went a long way to placating skeptical Europeans, was based on policy, not legality. So her statement Tuesday could be seen as an effort to scale back from her remarks last week. But some officials dismissed any suggestion of major policy shifts.

"Do not read this in a tortured, convoluted and contrived way," a senior State Department official said.

ERIC SCHMITT
WASHINGTON, Dec. 13
Joel Brinkley contributed reporting for this article.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/14/politics/14detain.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=print

Torture Inc. Americas Brutal Prisons

2005-12-13T15:28:00.000-08:00

View Video:

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8451.htm

Savaged by dogs, Electrocuted With Cattle Prods, Burned By Toxic Chemicals, Does such barbaric abuse inside U.S. jails explain the horrors that were committed in Iraq?

By Deborah Davies

They are just some of the victims of wholesale torture taking place inside the U.S. prison system that we uncovered during a four-month investigation for BBC Channel 4 . It’s terrible to watch some of the videos and realise that you’re not only seeing torture in action but, in the most extreme cases, you are witnessing young men dying.

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

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

Another prisoner has a broken ankle. He can’t crawl fast enough so a guard jabs a stun gun onto his buttocks. The jolt of electricity zaps through his naked flesh and genitals. For hours afterwards his whole body shakes.

Lines of men are now slithering across the floor of the cellblock while the guards stand over them shouting, prodding and kicking.

Second by second, their humiliation is captured on a video camera by one of the guards.

The images of abuse and brutality he records are horrifyingly familiar. These were exactly the kind of pictures from inside Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad that shocked the world this time last year.

And they are similar, too, to the images of brutality against Iraqi prisoners that this week led to the conviction of three British soldiers.

But there is a difference. These prisoners are not caught up in a war zone. They are Americans, and the video comes from inside a prison in Texas

They are just some of the victims of wholesale torture taking place inside the U.S. prison system that we uncovered during a four-month investigation for Channel 4 that will be broadcast next week.

Our findings were not based on rumour or suspicion. They were based on solid evidence, chiefly videotapes that we collected from all over the U.S.

In many American states, prison regulations demand that any ‘use of force operation’, such as searching cells for drugs, must be filmed by a guard.

The theory is that the tapes will show proper procedure was followed and that no excessive force was used. In fact, many of them record the exact opposite.

Each tape provides a shocking insight into the reality of life inside the U.S. prison system – a reality that sits very uncomfortably with President Bush’s commitment to the battle for freedom and democracy against the forces of tyranny and oppression.

In fact, the Texas episode outlined above dates from 1996, when Bush was state Governor.

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

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

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

Many of the tapes we’ve collected are several years old. That’s because they only surface when determined lawyers prise them out of reluctant state prison departments during protracted lawsuits.

But for every ‘historical’ tape we collected, we also found a more recent story. What you see on the tape is still happening daily.

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

In one horrific scene, a naked man, passive and vacant, is seen being led out of his cell by prison guards. They strap him into a medieval-looking device called a ‘restraint chair’. His hands and feet are shackled, there’s a strap across his chest, his head lolls forward. He looks dead. He’s not. Not yet.

The chair is his punishment because guards saw him in his cell with a pillowcase on his head and he refused to take it off. The man has a long history of severe schizophrenia. Sixteen hours later, they release him from the chair. And two hours after that, he dies from a blood clot resulting from his barbaric treatment.

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

Two of the deaths we investigated were in the same county jail in Phoenix, Arizona, which is run by a man who revels in the title of ‘America’s Toughest Sheriff.’

His name is Joe Arpaio. He positively welcomes TV crews and we were promised ‘unfettered access.’ It was a reassuring turn of phrase – you don’t want to be fettered in one of Sheriff Joe’s jails.

We uncovered two videotapes from surveillance cameras showing how his tough stance can end in tragedy.

The first tape, from 2001, shows a man named Charles Agster dragged in by police, handcuffed at the wrists and ankles. Agster is mentally disturbed and a drug user. He was arrested for causing a disturbance in a late-night grocery store. The police handed him over to the Sheriff’s deputies in the jail. Agster is a tiny man, weighing no more than nine stone, but he’s struggling.

The tape shows nine deputies manhandling him into the restraint chair. One of them kneels on Agster’s stomach, pushing his head forward on to his knees and pulling his arms back to strap his wrists into the chair.

Bending someone double for any length of time is dangerous – the manuals on the use of the 'restraint chair’ warn of the dangers of ‘positional asphyxia.’

Fifteen minutes later, a nurse notices Agster is unconscious. The cameras show frantic efforts to resuscitate him, but he’s already brain dead. He died three days later in hospital. Agster's family is currently suing Arizona County.

His mother, Carol, cried as she told me: ‘If that’s not torture, I don’t know what is.’ Charles’s father, Chuck, listened in silence as we filmed the interview, but every so often he padded out of the room to cry quietly in the kitchen.

The second tape, from five years earlier, shows Scott Norberg dying a similar death in the same jail. He was also a drug user arrested for causing a nuisance. Norberg was severely beaten by the guards, stunned up to 19 times with a Taser gun and forced into the chair where – like Charles Agster – he suffocated.

The county’s insurers paid Norberg’s family more than £4 millions in an out-of-court settlement, but the sheriff was furious with the deal. ‘My officers were clear,’ he said. ‘The insurance firm was afraid to go before a jury.’

Now he’s determined to fight the Agster case all the way through the courts. Yet tonight, in Sheriff Joe’s jail, there’ll probably be someone else strapped into the chair.

Not all the tapes we uncovered were filmed by the guards themselves. Linda Evans smuggled a video camera into a hospital to record her son, Brian. You can barely see his face through all the tubes and all you can hear is the rhythmic sucking of the ventilator.

He was another of Sheriff Joe’s inmates. After an argument with guards, he told a prison doctor they’d beaten him up. Six days later, he was found unconscious of the floor of his cell with a broken neck, broken toes and internal injuries. After a month in a coma, he died from septicaemia.

‘Mr Arpaio is responsible.’ Linda Evans told me, struggling to speak through her tears. ‘He seems to thrive on this cruelty and this mentality that these men are nothing.’

In some of the tapes it’s not just the images, it’s also the sounds that are so unbearable. There’s one tape from Florida which I’ve seen dozens of times but it still catches me in the stomach.

It’s an authorised ‘use of force operation’ – so a guard is videoing what happens. They’re going to Taser a prisoner for refusing orders.

The tape shows a prisoner lying on an examination table in the prison hospital. The guards are instructing him to climb down into a wheelchair. ‘I can’t, I can’t!’ he shouts with increasing desperation. ‘It hurts!’

One guard then jabs him on both hips with a Taser. The man jerks as the electricity hits him and shrieks, but still won’t get into the wheelchair.

The guards grab him and drop him into the chair. As they try to bend his legs up on to the footrest, he screams in pain. The man’s lawyer told me he has a very limited mental capacity. He says he has a back injury and can’t walk or bend his legs without intense pain.

The tape becomes even more harrowing. The guards try to make the prisoner stand up and hold a walking frame. He falls on the floor, crying in agony. They Taser him again. He runs out of the energy and breath to cry and just lies there moaning.

One of the most recent video tapes was filmed in January last year. A surveillance camera in a youth institution in California records an argument between staff members and two ‘wards’ – they’re not called prisoners.

One of the youths hits a staff member in the face. He knocks the ward to the floor then sits astride him punching him over and over again in the head.

Watching the tape you can almost feel each blow. The second youth is also punched and kicked in the head – even after he’s been handcuffed. Other staff just stand around and watch.

We also collected some truly horrific photographs.

A few years ago, in Florida, the new warden of the high security state prison ordered an end to the videoing of ‘use of force operations.’ So we have no tapes to show how prison guards use pepper spray to punish prisoners.

But we do have the lawsuit describing how men were doused in pepper spray and then left to cook in the burning fog of chemicals. Photographs taken by their lawyers show one man has a huge patch of raw skin over his hip. Another is covered in an angry rash across his neck, back and arms. A third has deep burns on his buttocks.

‘They usually use fire extinguishers size canisters of pepper spray,’ lawyer Christopher Jones explained. ‘We have had prisoners who have had second degree burns all over their bodies.

‘The tell-tale sign is they turn off the ventilation fans in the unit. Prisoners report that cardboard is shoved in the crack of the door to make sure it’s really air-tight.’

And why were they sprayed? According to the official prison reports, their infringements included banging on the cell door and refusing medication. From the same Florida prison we also have photographs of Frank Valdes – autopsy pictures. Realistically, he had little chance of ever getting out of prison alive. He was on Death Row for killing a prison officer. He had time to reconcile himself to the Electric Chair – he didn’t expect to be beaten to death.

Valdes started writing to local Florida newspapers to expose the corruption and brutality of prison officers. So a gang of guards stormed into his cell to shut him up. They broke almost every one of his ribs, punctured his lung, smashed his spleen and left him to die.

Several of the guards were later charged with murder, but the trial was held in their own small hometown where almost everyone works for, or has connection with, the five prisons which ring the town. The foreman of the jury was former prison officer. The guards were all acquitted.

Meanwhile, the warden who was in charge of the prison at the time of the killing – the same man who changed the policy on videoing – has been promoted. He’s now the man in charge of all the Florida prisons.

How could anyone excuse – still less condone – such behaviour? The few prison guards who would talk to us have a siege mentality. They see themselves outnumbered, surrounded by dangerous, violent criminals, so they back each other up, no matter what.

I asked one serving officer what happened if colleagues beat up an inmate. ‘We cover up. Because we’re the good guys.’

No one should doubt that the vast majority of U.S. prison officers are decent individuals doing their best in difficult circumstances. But when horrific abuse by the few goes unreported and uninvestigated, it solidifies into a general climate of acceptance among the many.

At the same time the overall hardening of attitudes in modern-day America has meant the notion of rehabilitation has been almost lost. The focus is entirely on punishment – even loss of liberty is not seen as punishment enough. Being on the restraint devices and the chemical sprays.

Since we finished filming for the programme in January, I’ve stayed in contact with various prisoners’ rights groups and the families of many of the victims. Every single day come more e-mails full of fresh horror stories. In the past weeks, two more prisoners have died, in Alabama and Ohio. One man was pepper sprayed, the other tasered.

Then, three weeks ago, reports emerged of 20 hours of video material from Guantanamo Bay showing prisoners being stripped, beaten and pepper sprayed. One of those affected is Omar Deghayes, one of the seven British residents still being held there.

His lawyer says Deghayes is now permanently blind in one eye. American military investigators have reviewed the tapes and apparently found ‘no evidence of systematic abuse.’

But then, as one of the prison reformers we met on our journey across the U.S. told me: ‘We’ve become immune to the abuse. The brutality has become customary.’

So far, the U.S. government is refusing to release these Guantanamo tapes. If they are ever made public – or leaked – I suspect the images will be very familiar.

Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo – or even Texas. The prisoners and all guards may vary, but the abuse is still too familiar. And much is it is taking place in America’s own backyard.

Deborah Davies is a reporter for Channel 4 Dispatches. Her investigation, Torture: America’s Brutal Prisons, was shown on Wednesday, March 2, at 11.05pm.

Europe CIA Probe: Prisoners Abducted, Transferred Illegally

2005-12-13T05:48:00.000-08:00

PARIS, France (AP) -- A Swiss investigator probing claims of secret CIA prisons in Europe said his committee has evidence that supports allegations that prisoners were transferred between countries and temporarily held "without any judicial involvement."
"Legal proceedings in progress in certain countries seemed to indicate that individuals had been abducted and transferred to other countries without respect for any legal standards," lawmaker Dick Marty said in a written report summarizing his investigations so far.

He presented his findings in Paris to a committee of the Council of Europe, the continent's human rights watchdog.

Marty added that "information gathered to date reinforced the credibility of the allegations concerning the transfer and temporary detention of individuals, without any judicial involvement, in European countries."

He is investigating the CIA's reported transfers of prisoners through European airports to secret detention centers, actions that would breach the continent's human rights principles.

Poland and Romania have been identified by the New York-based Human Rights watch as sites of possible CIA secret prisons, but both countries have repeatedly denied any involvement.

Marty, in his report, added it is "still too early to assert that there had been any involvement or complicity of member states in illegal actions."

He was critical of the United States for not formally denying the allegations. He said he "deplores the fact that no information or explanations" were provided by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who faced repeated questions about the CIA prison allegations on her recent visit to Europe.

Marty has requested air traffic log books to try to determine flight patterns of several dozen suspect CIA airplanes.

He has also requested satellite images of the Sczytno-Szymany airport in northeastern Poland and the Mihail Kogalniceanu Air Base in eastern Romania, after they were identified by Human Rights Watch as possible sites of clandestine CIA detention centers. European officials say such prisons would violate the continent's human rights principles.

After hearing Marty's presentation, Tony Lloyd, a member of the Council of Europe committee, said: "The really difficult thing is the idea is that there is a kind of legal black hole in the middle of Europe."

Copyright 2005 The Associated Press.
Tuesday, December 13, 2005; Posted: 8:26 a.m. EST
http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/12/13/cia.europe.ap/index.html

Let's See Some I.D.

2005-12-09T15:29:00.000-08:00

What happens if you refuse to surrender identification when authorities demand it? You may go to jail. Or, you may not.

We humans are generally compliant creatures. We follow the path of least resistance, even if it's not to our advantage. We halt at stop signs even when there are no other cars around for miles. We unquestioningly accept the small "service fee" tacked on to our bills without knowing exactly what they are for. We are sheep who follow the herd -- most of us, most of the time.

This is the story of one rogue sheep.

Deborah Davis, a 50-year-old mother of four, is by all accounts an ordinary woman who worries about ordinary things like her mortgage and the safety of her middle son, who is a soldier in Iraq. To save money, she rides the bus to work in Denver, Colorado. That is, she used to ride the bus to work, until one morning in September when she dared to do what my favorite bumper sticker urges people to do: Question Authority.

Every morning, Davis's bus follows a route through the Denver Federal Center, a collection of government offices in an area with increased security. Every morning, officers from the Federal Protective Services, a branch of the Department of Homeland Security, board the bus and check the IDs of all passengers, whether or not they are exiting the bus at the Federal Center. Davis found it odd and irritating that she had to get out her ID just so an officer could glance at it; not even checking it against a "no ride" list or, maybe, a "no exiting at the Denver Federal Center" list.

One September morning she decided to stop being so compliant. And that's where the story gets interesting.

Davis says her discussion with the officer went basically like this:

Officer: "Do you have your ID?"
Davis: "Yes."
Officer: "May I see it?"
Davis: "No."

Some debate ensued -- officers would later describe Davis as "argumentative" -- and then the Federal Protective Services cops tossed Davis's cell phone, physically forced her off the bus, handcuffed her and took her into custody. Ultimately, she was ticketed for violating two mundane-sounding federal regulations regarding compliance with signs and access to federal property.

"I just want to be able to ride a public bus," Davis said. "This is about freedom to travel." She felt the ID check was more about submission than security, and so she decided to dispute the ticket. The American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado took up her case, along with an organization called the Identity Project, which fights for citizens to maintain the right to travel freely in the U.S.

"It took [the officers] two hours to try to figure out what regulations to write on the ticket. They had to go look for what to charge her with," said Mark Silverstein, legal director of the ACLU of Colorado. The charge that Davis failed to obey signs, Silverstein said, "begs the question" of whether officers only have the authority to make people show ID if there are signs alerting the public to that possibility.

Silverstein says the ACLU was interested in Deborah Davis's case because it exemplified the type of measures that infringe on citizens' privacy and freedom; measures justified by a post-9/11 government in the name of fighting terrorism.

"The ACLU wants to question some of these measures that we believe are not really justified in order to fight terrorism," Silverstein said. "We think a number of questions need to be asked. Does [a specific measure] actually advance safety? And if it does, how much does it infringe on citizen's right to privacy? In Davis's case, you don't even get past the first question. The ID check on the bus doesn't do anything to enhance safety. They don't check to make sure it is a valid ID. They don't even check the names against a pre-determined list of suspicious people."

Almost immediately, Davis's case became a cause celebre among the active but small contingent of Coloradoans fighting invasive security measures. When the Identity Project posted Davis's story on its website, PapersPlease.org, it received more than 1.5 million visitors in the first few days, and Davis received tons of supportive emails.

"It gives me a lot of hope. People have come out of the woodwork. People do care," Davis said, adding that she had no idea so many people would support her.

Davis's civil liberties dispute drew support from both Libertarian-leaning conservatives and liberal Democrats. "This is the first time I've seen people across the political spectrum really getting it," said Bill Scannell, media liasion for the Identity Project. "It has always been the right that has been way better on privacy rights than the left, but now the liberals and the left are really waking up to how dangerous all this stuff really is."

As the intensity of the media attention mounted, the case against Davis crumbled. On Wednesday, just two days before her scheduled arraignment, the U.S. Attorney's office decided to drop the charges due to a "technicality" regarding the official signs that Davis was supposedly disobeying by refusing to show her ID. Jeff Dorschner, spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office in Denver, would not say whether any changes in the signs were planned, or if Federal Protective Services officers would ticket Davis again if she refused to show ID on the bus. A spokesperson from the Federal Protective Services was not immediately available to comment.

"If they continue arresting people they will probably find themselves back in court," said Scannell. "This isn't about one woman getting uppity and getting her way, this is about making things better for everyone."

Davis's story has inspired rather dramatic comparisons to Nazi Germany, and the bus boycott begun by Rosa Parks. For most of us, though, Davis's experience evokes not a cataclysmic drama, but a sense of mundane recognition. If a police offier, security guard, or anyone else reeking of officialdom demands something, we usually give it up. Sometimes, this gives us a possibly false sense of security that our public buses, subways and airlines are safer. But at other times, it feels like we are being given a lesson in passivity, and submitting to an unnecessary reach into our privacy that may be worth protesting against.

When can you question authority without getting handcuffed and taken away? Unfortunately, there is no clear answer, despite a handful of recent cases that have tested the limits of law enforcement's right to demand ID.

Take, for example, the case of Dudley Hiibel, which is also spotlighted by the Identity Project. Hiibel, a cowboy type living in Nevada, was stopped in May 2000 by a Humboldt County sheriff's deputy when a passerby called in a possible domestic violence incident after seeing Hiibel and his teenage daughter in a heated argument while driving. By the time the deputy showed up, Hiibel had pulled over to the side of the road, and was standing outside talking to his daughter, Mimi. The sheriff's deputy approached, said he'd heard there had been some trouble, and asked to see identification.

Hiibel repeatedly asked why he had to show ID and refused, finally saying, "No, just take me to jail." And that's exactly what deputies did -- that is, after throwing Hiibel's daughter on the ground and cuffing her, too, when she began to protest her father's arrest. (Video footage of the arrest is available on PapersPlease.org.)

Dudley Hiibel was never charged with domestic violence or resisting arrest. He was fined $250 for refusing to identify himself to police. Hiibel went to court to challenge the Nevada law that allows police to demand identification pretty much whenever they want, arguing that demanding ID without reasonable cause violated his Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights. You remember those: no unreasonable search and seizure and the right to remain silent so you don't incriminate yourself.

The case eventually made it up to the Supreme Court, which upheld the Nevada law requiring people who are stopped under "suspicious circumstances" to identify themselves to a police officer. However, the Supreme Court made one exception to that law -- you do not have to identify yourself if simply giving your name is incriminating. This presents a tremendous catch-22. What do police officers do with someone who refuses to identify himself citing his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself?

Imagine one possible scenario. A police officer stops a man who is suspiciously lurking behind a dumpster at 3am. The following conversation ensues:

Cop: What're you doing back there, mister?
Mister: Just hangin' out.
Cop: Okay. Can I see some ID?
Mister: Nope. I have a legal right not to identify myself. The Supreme Court said so.
Cop: And why's that?
Mister: Because if I tell you who I am, I would be incriminating myself.
Cop: Uh, hmm. All right then, I guess I'll let you go with a warning. Don't do anything suspicious again.

Somehow I don't think that will -- or should -- happen. It is bad policing and bad policy. Under any circumstance, it remains unclear what the legal consequences are for refusing to identify yourself, whether you are incriminating yourself or not. At least 19 other states have similar laws requiring people to show identification if they are stopped under suspicious circumstances, which means thousands of law enforcement officers must attempt to comply with this confusing decision.

As for Davis, Thursday morning she was back on the bus, riding with friends and supporters in a victory lap through the Denver Federal Center. If the Federal Protective Services officers ask again for ID, chances are she won't comply. Asked whether she was prepared to go to jail for this cause, Davis said, "If that's what it takes, absolutely."

Maria Luisa Tucker is an AlterNet staff writer.
http://www.alternet.org/story/29268

They Shoot Latinos, Don't They?

2005-12-09T04:24:00.000-08:00

Air Marshals lied about slain Latino passenger saying "I have a bomb"

It now appears that Air Marshals lied about a mentally ill Latino passenger saying "I have a bomb" just before they shot him at the Miami International Airport yesterday. The fact is Air Marshals over-reacted when dealing with a Middle Eastern looking passenger who was experiencing a "fear of flying" panic attack.

The victim, Mr. Rigoberto Alpizar, according to his accompanying wife, is a bi-polar patient who ran out of his medications during their trip. While waiting for the airplane to take off on the next leg of the American Airline flight, Mr. Alpizar panicked and wanted to get off the airplane. He started to run down the isle towards the door when two Air Marshals confronted him. Instead of subduing him physically, they went for their guns and shot him five or six times. In order to justify the shooting, the Air Marshals appear to have lied about Mr. Alpizar saying that he had a bomb. No passenger witnesses have come forward saying that they heard Mr. Alpizar yell "I have a bomb".

Witnesses interviewed after the shooting described instead how Alpizar's wife tried to tell fellow passengers and Air Marshals that her husband suffered from bi-polar disorder. "I did hear the lady say her husband was bipolar and had not had his medication," said Mary Gardner, a passenger.

Accounts by other passengers suggest that Alpizar began behaving strangely before he was challenged by the Air Marshals. "He didn't look stable," said fellow passenger John McAlhany. Mr. McAlhany adds, "They put a gun to the back of my head and said: 'Put your hands on the seat'. That was more scary than anything else," passenger John McAlhany said. "'I don't know if they shot an innocent man or not. I don't think he was armed or had a bomb. I think he had a mental illness," Mr. McAlhany added. "I don't think they really had to shoot him," Mr. McAlhany concluded.

There have now been numerous abuses of Arabs, Blacks and Latinos by Air Marshals but none have ended in a shooting tragedy. The fact is that people of color are in more danger from White, usually veterans of the Iraq War, Air Marshals than from actual terrorists. Many of the Air Marshals, some who are mentally unstable themselves because of war experiences, have been trained to shoot first and ask questions later. Under these circumstance, Latinos, Middle Easterners and other people of color are in dire danger when flying as passengers on American airlines.

http://www.aztlan.net/air_marshals_shoot_latino_passenger.htm

George Orwell... meet Franz Kafka

2005-12-06T14:04:00.000-08:00

Room 101

For his dystopia, 1984, his classic novel of totalitarianism, George Orwell created "Room 101," an interrogation room where a prisoner's deepest fears were to be realized and applied. Tier 1 in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, as the now-infamous photos indicate, was the Bush administration's Room 101 for the "Arab mind," and so the crown jewel of its global interrogation facilities; just as Guantanamo was the "crown jewel" of the prison camps in its global Bermuda Triangle of injustice; just as the new appointed "interim government" hidden within the ever-more fortified Green Zone in Baghdad and led by a prime minister and former CIA asset whose exile organization, we learned this week, once set off car bombs in downtown Baghdad, is now the crown jewel of "freedom and democracy" in the Middle East. This is our "war against terrorism." Talk about an Orwellian world.

As it happens, from the heart of Abu Ghraib's interrogation rooms and the acts of, as our President and other administration officials have repeatedly said, "a few people" or even "a few hillbillies," the nature of, extent of, knowledge about, and responsibility for such acts has been rapidly spreading outwards across the imperium, upwards into the highest reaches of our government, and backwards in time. We now know, for instance, that, to the various acts of horror caught on camera in Abu Graib, we must add murder (or rather numerous murders) in Afghanistan as well as Iraq, and the use of electric shocks on prisoners, as the Marine Corps Times reported recently.

As for the acts we saw in the photographs, they too have "spread" and knowledge of them reaches ever higher: To take but two examples, Nakedness is now reported to have been used as a tool of humiliation not just in Iraq but in Afghanistan and at Guantanamo, as it was used in one of the earliest acts of American inhumanity in the war against terrorism, the interrogation of John Walker Lindh in Afghanistan back in 2001; while the "technique" of menacing prisoners with dogs -- "an apparent violation of the Geneva Conventions and the Army's field manual" -- has now been well documented at Abu Ghraib by the Washington Post ("On Jan. 13, Spec. John Harold Ketzer, a military intelligence interrogator, saw a dog team corner two male prisoners against a wall, one prisoner hiding behind the other and screaming, he later told investigators. ‘When I asked what was going on in the cell, the handler stated that he was just scaring them, and that he and another of the handlers was having a contest to see how many detainees they could get to urinate on themselves…'"); but it was also evidently employed at Guantanamo, according to the Wall Street Journal.

In the meantime, responsibility for such actions has moved inexorably upwards. We know now that interest in information gleaned from interrogations, ranging from that of John Walker Lindh to those in Iraq was requested at the highest official levels (not so surprising, since our offshore mini-gulag was a pet project of top officials in this administration): "The head of the interrogation center at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq told an Army investigator in February that he understood some of the information being collected from prisoners there had been requested by ‘White House staff,' according to an account of his statement obtained by The Washington Post." Far more specifically, R. Jeffrey Smith and Josh White of the Post reported this Saturday that, despite his denials to Congress, in the fall of 2003, "Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the senior U.S. military officer in Iraq, borrowed heavily from a list of high-pressure interrogation tactics used at the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and approved letting senior officials at a Baghdad jail use military dogs, temperature extremes, reversed sleep patterns, sensory deprivation, and diets of bread and water on detainees whenever they wished, according to newly obtained documents."

In turn, thanks to Jess Bravin and Greg Jaffe of the Wall Street Journal, we now know that in December 2002 Donald Rumsfeld approved a very similar list of "interrogation techniques" right down to those dogs for Guantanamo: "U.S. military interrogators at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, could put prisoners in ‘stress positions' for as long as four hours, hood them and subject them to 20-hour-long interrogations, ‘fear of dogs' and ‘mild non-injurious physical contact,' according to [a] list of techniques Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved in December 2002." (The list was later rejiggered not because of any qualms Rumsfeld had but due to complaints from military officers about the severity of the methods suggested. The present list of approved techniques remains classified, but will undoubtedly soon be leaked to the press.)

The above can be traced back farther yet. According to "documents, read to The [Los Angeles] Times by two sources critical of how the government handled the Lindh case," writes journalist Richard Serrano, "After American Taliban recruit John Walker Lindh was captured in Afghanistan, the office of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld instructed military intelligence officers to ‘take the gloves off' in interrogating him… In the early stages, his responses were cabled to Washington hourly, the new documents show… What happened to Lindh, who was stripped and humiliated by his captors, foreshadowed the type of abuse documented in photographs of American soldiers tormenting Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib."

This, of course, takes us not only to the top of the administration, but back to the brink of the -- if I dare put it this way -- Ur-moment in the setting up of what would become our offshore mini-gulag, those months right after the 9/11 attacks when the Bush administration began to set their system in place on the fly and, as Suzanne Goldenberg of the British Guardian reported recently, on key issues without initially even consulting White House or Pentagon lawyers.

"In one instance, President George Bush's military order of November 13 2001, which denies prisoner-of-war status to captives from Afghanistan and allows their detention without charge or access to a lawyer at Guantánamo, was issued without any consultations with Pentagon lawyers, a former Pentagon official said… The military order issued by Mr Bush in November 2001 was the first such directive since the second world war, and the administration's failure to seek the Pentagon's advice on what would emerge as the entire system of detention at Guantánamo surprised Pentagon officials."

Add it all up -- only what's been revealed so far -- and you have a global system of injustice and torture, purposely mounted in the moral and legal darkness, beyond the reach or oversight of anyone but the President, vice-president, secretary of defense and associated officials, meant to extract information (and take revenge), meant as in Kafka's fictional penal colony to write the sentence these men had passed on the bodies of America's captives.

And talk about paper trails! If you need any evidence of the combination of arrogance, incompetence, and plain stupidity of the Bush administration, it now sits unavoidably before our eyes. Didn't they know anything about deniability? Didn't they know that you can get so much done without committing anything to paper? Didn't they know that you can signal what you want from the top without issuing orders, making direct demands, or demanding supporting opinions on paper?

Note two things here: That almost all of the above, this whole little global shop of horrors, is already documented -- quite literally in papers pouring out of the bowels of this administration. These documents are leaking daily from an administration that seems to have split open along many angry rift lines. The British Telegraph this week, writing of the leaking of a legal document on torture to the Wall Street Journal commented, for example:

"The leak appears to be part of an extraordinary civil war in the Pentagon between civilian officials and uniformed officers appalled by what they have described as moves by political appointees to shroud the war on terrorism in an ‘environment of legal ambiguity'."

Some in the military, the intelligence community, the State Department, administration legal offices, and possibly even the Justice Department opposed the creation of our mini-gulag and the kinds of interrogations and conditions planned for it; some simply feared what the illegality might do to them or their careers, including evidently Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Richard Myers who fretted that he might become "a target for prosecution under laws governing prisoner treatment"; some are undoubtedly settling scores; others protecting tattered reputations; but it's now close to open season on the administration from within.

Only today, the Los Angeles Times reported that, in a nearly unprecedented act in our country, 26 ex-military and senior diplomatic officials, "several appointed to key positions by Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, plan to issue a joint statement this week arguing that President George W. Bush has damaged America's national security and should be defeated in November." And retired officials almost invariably are speaking for larger constituencies within the government -- all those potential leakers and mutterers -- who fear speaking out publicly themselves.

Addressing an Asian security conference on the administration's "war on terror," Donald Rumsfeld recently commented : "[T]he reality is that today we remain closer to the beginning of this struggle than to its end." The same might be said of the uncovering of responsibility for our own global terror system. There will be so much more to learn. Already, when it comes to Abu Ghraib, Iraq, and Afghanistan, the Pentagon keeps heaping investigations on top of one another, each subsequent one led by a figure with a higher rank and so more capable of investigating responsibility at higher levels, and I think it can be said with certainty that this will only get worse -- worse probably than anything we now imagine. After all, to take but the smallest of examples, CBS news reports that "of the 20 U.S.-run jails in [Afghanistan], the Red Cross has only been allowed to visit one in Kabul. Now one in Kandahar is being opened." Imagine what's been happening at those other 18.

A world of tortured definitions

Here's what's clear. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the "tough guys" of Bush's world promptly battened down the hatches and began preparing for the war, and warfare state, of their dreams. Using the analogy of the almost four-decade-long Cold War, which was their lifetime experience (and with movie images of World War II dancing in their heads), they announced that we were in a global war not against any state (though they were already itching to hit Saddam's Iraq), but against "terrorism" itself, an amorphous force -- actually, of course, a tactic employed by scattered bands of Islamic fanatics (some initially funded by men in this administration back when we were fighting the Soviets by proxy in Afghanistan). This new "war," they announced with a certain élan and self-satisfaction would, like the previous cold one, last decades if not a lifetime. With Americans in shock and fearful, they then began planning a no-holds-barred, bring-‘em-on style of warfare filled with acts of pitiless, unilateral vengeance to be launched by the most powerful state on the planet in the way of which nothing should get.

This was a war to be fought, to use a common Cold War catchphrase, "in the shadows," and the shadows would soon enough include a global imprisonment system that stretched from holding cells on aircraft carriers to facilities in Afghanistan to Saddam's old prisons to Guantanamo to military brigs in the United States and unnamed jails in "friendly" foreign countries. In those shadows, beyond the eyes of anyone, they had every intention of employing the sort of tactics that they imagined would break the back of terrorism. These acts of "information extraction" would be torture -- terror, that is -- by another name or no name at all.

Looking back, it's curious how much of this was a war of words, a redefinitional journey involving linguistic and legalistic contortions of the most remarkable sorts. The first of these contorted definitions was of "war" itself. We did not actually declare war. After all, who was war to be declared against? We were simply defined as being "at war." And from this, a series of other definitions followed. Perhaps the most important had to do with the people captured in this "war."

It might seem apparent that, having declared yourself at war, the people you thereafter captured might indeed be prisoners of war. But this presented a problem since the rights of POWs were so clearly defined internationally in treaties signed by the U.S. government. So the administration simply redefined those captured in this redefined war as "unlawful combatants" or "illegal combatants." This and other terms used for them came out of a new Devil's dictionary; for once we had defined them thusly, they could then enter our offshore world of imprisonment -- at least in the minds of Bush administration officials – as the sorts of captives to whom a whole new series of definitions could be applied.

The third definitional problem was where to hold these prisoners, so that the holding itself (without charge or trial, potentially to eternity) could not be challenged either by the prisoners themselves through any legal representation or through the courts of our own country. The administration needed a place where it could publicly practice its new definitional privacy – and that turned out to be our military base at Guantanamo, which was redefined for the purposes of the moment as under "Cuban sovereignty," though this was obviously a brazen fiction. But even this wasn't satisfactory for them. Guantanamo, off-limits as it was, still turned out to be far too "public" for what they planned to do to their "highest value" captives and so, for them, they developed a special, CIA-run system of imprisonment that stepped beyond definition itself. As Human Rights Watch puts it in an invaluable recent report on our global torture system:

"Among the most disturbing cases, perhaps unprecedented in U.S. history, are the detainees who have simply been ‘disappeared.' Perhaps out of concern that Guantánamo will eventually be monitored by the U.S. courts, certainly to ensure even greater secrecy, the Bush administration does not appear to hold its most sensitive and high-profile detainees there. Terrorism suspects like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, accused architect of the September 11 attacks, and Abu Zubaydah, a close aide of Osama bin Laden, are detained by the United States instead in ‘undisclosed locations,' presumably outside the United States, with no access to the ICRC, no notification to families, no oversight of any sort of their treatment, and in most cases no acknowledgement that they are even being held. Human Rights Watch has pieced together information on 13 such detainees, apprehended in places such as Pakistan, Indonesia, Thailand, Morocco, and the United Arab Emirates, who have ‘disappeared' in U.S. custody."

At the same time, the administration was attempting to redefine presidential power in such a way that the once normal Congressional and court checks and balances of an American republic no longer applied. In his power as commander-in-chief (again note that all other redefinitions were based on the redefinition of "war"), the President was, in various legal briefs meant for the highest officials in this administration, pronounced to be beyond any control by Congress or the courts in his acts. (See the initial quote above.)

Finally, having redefined the nature of war, the powers of the president, the nature of captivity, and the places of imprisonment, it was the most natural thing in the world to redefine "information extraction" within such a system so that neither international treaties like the Geneva Conventions, nor congressionally passed laws, nor the Constitution itself was applicable to them. In this sense, from the earliest days after the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration was focused on, above all else, setting up a global torture system by another name.

Much of this has recently become clearer as a series of internal documents produced by White House, Pentagon, and Justice Department lawyers have leaked out in recent weeks. To offer a Vietnam analogy, you might say that in the Vietnam era, The Pentagon Papers, that revelatory secret study ordered up by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and slipped to the New York Times by one brave whistleblower, Daniel Ellsberg, were the private, confessional equivalent of liberal guilt over the war; in the Bush era, these unbelievable lawyers' memos, some also ordered up in the privacy of the administration by the present Secretary of Defense, are the neocon equivalent of a (legalistic) guilty conscience. They are, in some perverse fashion, deeply confessional documents, and in the future, they will read that way.

There were two parallel struggles here: One was to establish the war they wanted to fight and this they largely did before they turned to the lawyers; the other was to clear the decks legally for it. This week – even while Ronald Reagan ruled -- Jess Bravin of the Wall Street Journal produced a hard-hitting piece based on one of these leaked documents that began a process not likely to go away soon. He led off:

"Bush administration lawyers contended last year that the president wasn't bound by laws prohibiting torture and that government agents who might torture prisoners at his direction couldn't be prosecuted by the Justice Department. The advice was part of a classified report on interrogation methods prepared for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld after commanders at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, complained in late 2002 that with conventional methods they weren't getting enough information from prisoners… at its core is an exceptional argument that because nothing is more important than ‘obtaining intelligence vital to the protection of untold thousands of American citizens,' normal strictures on torture might not apply. The president, despite domestic and international laws constraining the use of torture, has the authority as commander in chief to approve almost any physical or psychological actions during interrogation, up to and including torture, the report argued."

As Bravin reported:

"The report was compiled by a working group appointed by the Defense Department's general counsel, William J. Haynes II. Air Force General Counsel Mary Walker headed the group, which comprised top civilian and uniformed lawyers from each military branch and consulted with the Justice Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Defense Intelligence Agency and other intelligence agencies. It isn't known if President Bush has ever seen the report. A military lawyer who helped prepare the report said that political appointees heading the working group sought to assign to the president virtually unlimited authority on matters of torture -- to assert ‘presidential power at its absolute apex.'"

Though the report has now been much quoted, it should be read in full. Its flavor can hardly be grasped in tidbits. It may, in fact, be one of the most tortured "legal" pieces ever written -- certainly ever written in a democracy -- on the subject of redefining acts of inhumanity and torture as something other than acts of inhumanity and torture. (If your computer can handle pdf files, you can click here to find it.) In it, Orwell's "doublethink" meets the lawyers and judges of Kafka's The Trial head on, revealing a dark landscape of legalistic legerdemain.

The report had two main purposes, as best I understand it -- to place presidential power (in the form of the powers of the commander-in-chief to prosecute war) outside any legal boundaries whatsoever, thus removing from George Bush and his subordinates of any responsibility for acts he may have ordered committed; and to redefine torture so narrowly that it becomes the definitional property of the torturer.

It's worth spending a little time with some of this document just to get a feel for it. The lawyer-authors, for instance, expend much effort acting as if they were part of a panel for a new edition of some dictionary ("The word 'profound' has a number of meanings, all of which convey a significant depth. Webster's New International Dictionary 1977 [2nd ed. 1935 defines profound as...]") and, where necessary, they don't hesitate to take up the role of psychiatrist either. "We likewise think," they write at one point, considering what might disrupt "profoundly the senses or personality" and so be considered torture, "that the onset of obsessive-compulsive disorder behaviors would rise to this level... Moreover, we think that pushing someone to the brink of suicide [which could be evidenced by acts of self-mutilation], would be a sufficient disruption of the personality to constitute a 'profound disruption.'")

Their purpose in each case is to narrow drastically some previous legal definition of torture. They spend much time, for instance, considering how to define various parts of the well-accepted phrase "severe physical or mental pain or suffering," always emphasizing the word "severe" and then defining it in the most severe possible way:

"In order to prove 'severe mental pain or suffering,' the statute requires proof of 'prolonged mental harm' that was caused by or resulted from one of four enumerated acts... [T]he development of a mental disorder such as posttraumatic stress disorder, which can last months or even years, or even chronic depression... might satisfy the prolonged harm requirement... [I]f a defendant [interrogator] has a good faith belief that his actions will not result in prolonged mental harm, he lacks the mental state necessary for his actions to constitute torture. A defendant could show that he acted in good faith by taking such steps as surveying professional literature, consulting with experts, or reviewing evidence gained from past experience... Because the presence of good faith would negate the specific intent element of torture, good faith may be a complete defense to such a charge."

In other words, the harm to a prisoner from what might ordinarily be considered acts of inhumanity and torture must be "severe" indeed -- proof of that severity could even take several months to develop -- and in addition it would have to be proved that the interrogator actually meant to create a state of, say, posttraumatic stress disorder. In other words, the act of torture is not, in fact, torture if the intent to torture is not there -- and, since it's a matter of "good faith," the only person who could affirm that torture had taken place would, in essence, be the torturer.

But even that's not enough. According to this administration's best legal minds, even knowing in a general sense what ill results might come from your acts does not necessarily make you a torturer, not if you did not mean to cause such results. What must be proven is "specific intent to cause pain," a phrase they then spend much space redefining. They write:

"As a theoretical matter, therefore, knowledge alone that a particular result is certain to occur does not constitute specific intent... if causing such harm is not his objective, he lacks the requisite specific intent... A defendant is guilty of torture only if he acts with the express purpose of inflicting severe pain or suffering on a person within his custody or physical control... Where a defendant acts in good faith, he acts with an honest belief that he has not engaged in the proscribed conduct."

This is, of course, but the briefest glimpse into the bizarre and twisted definitional thinking that fills this 56-page document, much of it focused on the problem of potential future "prosecutions arising out of the exercise of the president's express authority as Commander-in-Chief" to create what is essentially a torture regime abroad. (Strangely enough, in the light of day this dark document reads like a witness for the prosecution in any future war-crimes-style trials of the members of this administration.) Just to give a tiny flavor of this aspect of the document, here's an almost random passage:

"Any effort by Congress to regulate the interrogation of unlawful combatants would violate the Constitution's sole vesting of the Commander-in-Chief authority in the President. There can be little doubt that intelligence operations, such as the detention and interrogation of enemy combatants and leaders, are both necessary and proper for the effective conduct of a military campaign. Indeed such operations may be of more importance in a war with an international terrorist organization than one with the conventional armed forces of a nation-state, due to the former's emphasis on secret operations and surprise attacks against civilians. It may be the case that only successful interrogations can provide the information necessary to prevent the success of covert terrorist attacks upon the United States and its citizens. Congress can no more interfere with the President's conduct of the interrogation of enemy combatants than it can dictate strategy or tactical decisions on the battlefield. Just as statutes that order the President to conduct warfare in a certain manner or for specific goals would be unconstitutional, so too are laws that seek to prevent the President from gaining the intelligence he believes necessary to prevent attacks upon the United States."

Finally, the authors of this document invoke the "superior orders" doctrine (made famous at Nuremberg) commenting that:

"In sum, the defense of superior orders will generally be available for U.S. Armed Forces personnel engaged in exceptional interrogations except where the conduct goes so far as to be patently unlawful."

Of course, that wonderfully turned phrase "exceptional interrogations" means "torture" (except that, by this point in the document, torture itself no longer means torture); and while I'm no lawyer, the concept of "patently unlawful" seems a curious one to me. I'd like to see that brought into an everyday court of law. (The defendant throws himself on the mercy of the court: "I did it, judge, and it was definitely unlawful, but I plead innocent since it was not patently so.")

The Wall Street Journal "opinion" is but one of a series of internal memorandums we now know about, written between January 2002 and early this year, which seem to have much in common. For instance, in an earlier legal memorandum, written in August 2002 by the Justice Department for the CIA, "signed by Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee," addressed to White House counsel Alberto Gonzalez, and leaked to the Washington Post, the writers also chewed over the issue of how much pain constitutes torture. They wrote that the "inflicting [of] moderate or fleeting pain does not necessarily constitute torture. Torture, the memo says, ‘must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.'" (Otherwise, assumedly, you just scream.) Similarly, the writers suggest: "For purely mental pain or suffering to amount to torture… it must result in significant psychological harm of significant duration, e.g., lasting for months or even years."

Let's remember that of the legal minds responsible for these "opinions," Bybee is now a judge on the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco; the Defense Department's general counsel, William J. Haynes II has been nominated to be an appellate judge, in the U.S. 4th Circuit in Richmond, Va.; and John Yoo, author of some of the earliest of these memorandum, has returned to a professorship at the University of California, Berkeley, where, in response to student protests, he said: "I think the calls for my resignation are misguided and don't show an understanding of the job of a lawyer."

And in this he's probably right. As the CIA produced the kited "intelligence" the administration needed to go to war in Iraq, so its various legal groups produced the memorandum it needed – again and again and again – to imprison beyond the rule of law and torture those whom it pleased. As Phillip Carter, a former U.S. Army officer, put it in Slate: "[N]o amount of caveating can save the latest Defense Department memorandum on the legality of torture… from being construed as what it is: a cookbook on how to conduct illegal torture and get away with it."

These are, in fact, documents of shame, symbolic of a kind of bureaucratic lawlessness let loose at the heart of our government. They are intent on creating a pseudo-legal basis for replacing the rule of law with the rule of a commander-in-chief. As Robert Kuttner put it in the Boston Globe, "For nearly three years, the Bush administration has resorted to the most preposterous fictions to define either locales or categories of people to whom the law does not apply. If you connect the dots, the torture at Abu Ghraib is part of a larger slide toward tyranny as the Bush administration tries to exempt itself from the rule of law." As justifications for torture, these are the sorts of documents one can imagine finding in the files of some grim third world dictatorship or maybe the former Apartheid regime of South Africa. As the Washington Post editorial page put it recently, speaking of the authors of such memos and their masters, "Theirs is the logic of criminal regimes…" Were it ever to be made the law of the land, our republic, such as it is, would quite literally be ended and we would face some kind of one-party dictatorship. Were its definitions of torture ever made the law of the land, every torturer on earth would shout hosannas to it.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=1494