On the night of Obama’s address to a joint session of Congress – a rarity for any sitting president – we dragged an old tv into the waiting room to show the assembled patients and staff Obama’s speech and get their reactions. Here Robert Taylor and Sheon Slaughter, both uninsured, offered their thoughts. Highland Hospital volunteer Lucy Ogbu and Certified Nurse Assistant Amy Johnson also discuss the implications of the speech.
Highland Hospital is in Oakland, CA. For more information—and for many more video clips from the hospital—check out The Waiting Room.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on October 20, 2009 at 6:15 pm
Many thanks to Pam Spaulding for capturing John Lewis’ speech at Equality Alabama’s gala a couple of weekends ago. John Lewis is an American hero and a powerful speaker; it is fantastic to hear him speaking so strongly on this issue and declaring himself an ally to the GLBT community.
John Lewis took batons to the head, was beaten to unconsciousness multiple times for equality — courage and moral conviction that [Bishop Harry] Jackson and his fellow charlatans of bigotry are bereft of.
Rep. Lewis spoke eloquently about the simplicity of the government staying out of the lives of gay and lesbian couples — there is no need to “save” marriage from two people who simply want to love one another and be legally affirmed in the same way that heterosexual couples are when they marry.
But perhaps the most powerful message was to those in the LGBT community who are waiting for equality to come to them — Lewis charged us to seize the moment, do not accept being told to wait your turn, to demand your rights through your representative, and most of all take personal responsibility — the message we all heard was loud and clear.
You can’t grow up in in the home of a political radical from the 1950s and 60s without hearing Peter, Paul and Mary. I’m very sad to hear of the death of Mary Travis. She raised the roof for freedom and justice her whole career. If there’s a heavenly place where great spirits celebrate together Mary is surely whooping it up with them now.
Grand Casino, Biloxi, MS, five months after Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Mississippi.
On August 29, 2005, the eye of Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Waveland, Mississippi, and the western side of the storm grazed New Orleans. Five months after the storm, I visited the Mississippi Gulf Coast.
According to a National Hurricane Center report on Katrina, “in many locations, most of the buildings along the coast were completely destroyed, leaving few structures within which to identify still-water marks.” The center’s researchers estimate that the hurricane produced a storm surge as high as 27 feet in some locations.
It was dumbfounding to drive along the coast in Biloxi and find the Grand Casino on the north side of Highway 90. Before Katrina, the casino was on a barge, docked off the beach, south of the highway. The storm surge lifted the casino barge out of the water, over the beach and over the highway. If you stand at the western end of the barge and look east, you can see the yellow and blue neon sign, a half mile down the road, where the barge originally sat. The same thing happened to two other casino barges—the President Casino in Biloxi, which landed on top of a Holiday Inn, and the Gulfport Grand Casino….
The national media have covered the near-total destruction of Bay St. Louis and Waveland. Driving along Beach Boulevard in the two towns, I saw a few people who had returned and were living in trailers on their plots of land, but practically everything was deserted. All that remained were the merest remnants of homes and the things that had been inside them….
In each place I visited along the western half of Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, the look of the destruction was a little different, but it was consistently total. And surprisingly, the destruction in the coastal areas of Pascagoula, at the eastern end of the state, is comparable. I remembered George W. Bush’s promise to rebuild another “fantastic house” for Trent Lott on the Pascagoula beachfront. I did not know that 95% of the city’s residential areas went underwater or that 65% of the city’s homes remain uninhabitable. Northrop Grumman Ship Systems’ facility in Pascagoula, which before Katrina employed 19,800 people, was all but obliterated.
Hurricane Katrina wiped out the entire Gulf Coast of Mississippi. The scale of the destruction is difficult to comprehend. All along the coast—mile after mile—just about anything that was there is now gone.
But this is only part of the story. According to the National Hurricane Center, the surge “penetrated at least six miles inland in many portions of coastal Mississippi and up to 12 miles inland along bays and rivers. The surge crossed Interstate 10 in many locations.” Interstate 10 runs east-west, four miles or more north of coastal Highway 90.
Gayle Tart’s brother Sam and his son John died in Pass Christian during the hurricane, on John’s second birthday. Tart explained that father and son had drowned inside their own home.
“Water never came down there [before Katrina]. That’s across the track. [With Katrina] that water came in and that water went out, and the velocity was unbelievable,” Tart said. “The first boundary was the beach and the next boundary was the highway. The day after the storm, you saw neither—no beach and no highway.”
Small rental and workforce housing progress has fallen dramatically short of State predictions, and so Mississippi has asked HUD for additional funds to temporarily subsidize lower-income residents in market rate rentals….
Mississippi has allocated just over half its funds on housing, and has lowered its commitment to housing by over $800 million in the past 2 years. Louisiana has allocated over 85 percent to housing programs and increased its commitment over the same period.
Mississippi has spent just under half its funds, while Louisiana has spent almost 68 percent of its funds, widening its lead over Mississippi.
Mississippi diverted $600 million from its housing program to a port expansion, while Louisiana intends to reinvest $600 million in unused Road Home funds for housing assistance for low-income residents.
Mississippi took longer to spend less later for low-income residents than for wealthier residents.
A family photo rests on the foundation slab of a home obliterated by Hurricane Katrina in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi.
I emphasize Mississippi in this blog post because I know that nearly all of the fourth anniversary coverage of the ongoing Katrina aftermath, will focus myopically on New Orleans. The situation in New Orleans is still dire. The housing crisis is dire. But there will not be an adequate recovery until the interconnectedness of regions and issues becomes a fundamental insight that drives policy.
While poor and minority survivors and activists will agree (if anyone asks them) that they face multiple, interconnected disasters in the aftermath of Katrina and Rita, this basic local insight goes largely unrecognized. Government failure is certainly most responsible for a “recovery” that has been arbitrary, resource-driven, and slow rather than holistic, need-driven, or effective. But no one, progressives as a group included, has adequately depicted, let alone offset, that failure. Narrowly focused aid has often segregated otherwise related issues, making one or another worse and masking the lack of an overall plan. Residents of the region feel tremendous gratitude to the tens—if not hundreds—of thousands of volunteers whose countless hours of labor, along with their financial contributions, are primarily responsible for what rebuilding has occurred. However, this individual good will is no substitute for the kind of comprehensive, coordinated, and sustained response that is needed from government at all levels.
Unfortunately, no thoughtful and coordinated response will occur without a compelling grassroots push for community visibility, multi-issue awareness, and broad social justice for Gulf Coast survivors. Our region today remains in a cultural, environmental, economic, and human rights crisis no less severe than its more frequently discussed housing crunch and extending far beyond the parishes of its famed city, New Orleans. The media, policymakers, academicians, and private funding groups repeatedly fail to recognize regional connectivity or to challenge the basic invisibility of the Gulf Coast’s multiply wounded communities and ecosystems—together, its very soul. [P]iecemeal analyses and responses … are moving social justice and equitable recovery nowhere fast.
a hybrid model to partner directly with communities in planning, overseeing and administering recovery projects to assist the survivors of these disasters, provide communities with tools to build resilience against the impact of future disasters and revitalize the region economically. The bill would create a minimum of 100,000 prevailing wage jobs and training opportunities for local and displaced workers on projects reinvesting in infrastructure and restoring the coastal environment utilizing emerging green building techniques and technologies. This program would empower residents to realize their right to return with dignity and create stronger, safer, and more equitable communities.
This video is from a film by my friend Pete Nicks, who is the guy with the camera in my banner image, above. The film, The Waiting Room, is a timely documentary about our health care system, as seen at The Alameda County Medical Center in Oakland, CA.
THE WAITING ROOM will follow three people waiting in their own way: Wright Lassiter, the hospital’s CEO, who is struggling to run an under-funded public hospital while waiting for the health care system to change, Lydia Vasquez, a young uninsured woman waiting for the birth of her first child, and Kevin Washington, a young uninsured man who has slipped through the cracks, waiting for a miracle after being diagnosed with a terminal illness. These narratives will be punctuated by content interstitials culled from the social media space, both user-generated and produced: videos submitted online, blog posts cinematically dramatized, conversations between patients and policy makers in Washington, DC, photos and stories from the front lines of the hospital waiting room.
It’s not just a film; it’s a project. Read the rest to find out more about it.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on August 24, 2009 at 2:31 am
Southern African American community resists corporate organized rightwing protestors. Above the shouts the community tells its story and why they need health care for all to overcome historic health disparities.
(h/t Jared Storey)
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on August 13, 2009 at 11:47 pm
Is this what the police in Fort Worth, TX call “Stonewall Commemoration”? A gay club called the Rainbow Lounge opened in the city and Todd Camp, the founder of Q Cinema and former reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, was celebrating his birthday at the club and two Stonewall docs were being screened.
That evening the Fort Worth Police decided to pay a visit and re-enact good-old-fashioned “law enforcement.” Camp told the local LGBT news outlet The Dallas Voice about the incident: Photo of police pinning a patron to the ground. (by Chuck Potter via The Dallas Voice).
The not awesome thing was the paddy wagon of homophobic police that showed up … looking for trouble. My group and I were sitting on the back patio at a picnic table. Nobody was being wild out there. [The police] came through with flashlights, being loud asking what was going on out here, then asked why everyone was all the sudden being quiet. When one group started up their conversations again, they took one guy away. I left shortly after and as I walked through the front bar there were numerous cops with plastic handcuffs all ready to go. I [left] the bar and they [had] a big van in the parking lot and numerous cars on the street. And just so you know, it wasn’t fire hazard crowded or seedy wild in there. … The worst part is [friends later told me] that [the police] had numerous people face down on the ground outside. I just moved to Fort Worth from Dallas, so this is such a shock to me. I know Dallas would not put up with this. … I am still so shocked it is 2009 and this just happened.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on June 29, 2009 at 7:42 am
[Editor's note: two of my friends are among those arrested in these actions to stop the these dangerous mountain top removal operations. ---BG]
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE MAY 23, 2009
CONTACT: Sludge Watch Collective 304-854-7372
COAL RIVER VALLEY, W.Va.– This morning, eleven activists in two civil disobedience actions were removed by state police. As part of the continuing campaign to end mountaintop removal, six people locked themselves to mining equipment on a Patriot Coal-owned mountaintop removal mine on Kayford Mountain and another group floated a 20-by-60-foot banner on the surface of Massey Energy’s Brushy Fork coal slurry impoundment near Pettus, W.Va. The activists are part of a coalition that includes Mountain Justice, Climate Ground Zero and concerned individuals.
At noon today, more protestors are expected to converge at the gate to the Brushy Fork dam with hundreds of pairs of shoes to represent the number of immediate deaths should the dam fail.
“The toxic lake at Brushy Fork dam sits atop a honeycomb of abandoned underground mines, ” said Chuck Nelson, from Raleigh County, W.Va. “Massey wants to blast within 100 feet of that dam. The company’s own filings with the state Department of Environmental Protection project a minimum death toll of 998 should the seven-billion-gallon dam break. EPA should override the DEP and revoke this blasting permit for the safety of the community.” Nelson did not participate in the civil disobedience actions this morning, but is expected to speak at the Brushy Fork gate this afternoon.
The floating banner unfurled this morning atop Brushy Fork read, “West Virginia Says No More Toxic Sludge.”
“If the dam fails, 7.2 billion gallons of toxic coal slurry will flood to 38 feet deep, 26 miles down the Marsh Fork of the Coal River, from Pettus, past Whitesville,” Mike Roselle of Climate Ground Zero said. “These coal companies, the land companies and their corrupt politicians are destroying the headwater streams that supply drinking water to millions of Americans downstream.”
In the Kayford action, independent photojournalist and Rock Creek, W.Va. resident Antrim Caskey was removed from the direct action site by police. She previously had been cited three times for trespassing while embedded with Climate Ground Zero.
“About 12,000-acres of Kayford Mountain has been destroyed by mountaintop removal coal mining,” said Maria Gunnoe, Boone County resident and winner of the 2009 Goldman Environmental Prize. “Not another family should be forced to move because a coal company is going to blow up the mountain above them, then bury and poison their streams.” Gunnoe did not participate in the civil disobedience actions.
The people who locked down on Kayford Mountain unveiled a banner reading, “Never Again.”
“The regulatory agencies that are supposed to be the people’s watchdogs are acting instead as the industry’s guard dogs,” said Willie Dodson of Mountain Justice, one of the Kayford protesters. “Neither Governor Manchin, the DEP, President Obama, nor the EPA are enforcing the law, so we have no choice but to come out here and do it ourselves.”
On Feb 3, five people chained themselves to mining equipment and eight others were cited for trespassing while attempting to deliver a letter to Massey Energy insisting that the company cease all mountaintop removal operations on Coal River Mountain. Since then, four related actions have occurred in the Coal River Valley.
“We are forced to take action today because we have exhausted our legislative and litigatory options,” activist Charles Suggs of Raleigh County said. “We have walked the halls and pounded the doors of our state and national capitols, asked the DEP to complete studies, met with the EPA, filed lawsuits, and what happens? Our West Virginia legislature passes bills to let the destruction continue, and opposes bills that would stop poisoning our water and bring permanent, sustainable economic development to the state.”
NOTE: Massey’s filing with the WVDEP that indicate sludge depth and distance ae available upon request.
Video, still images and breaking news will be posted continually to www.mountainjustice.org.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on May 24, 2009 at 3:22 am
The nation will pause and reflect on the massive “Revolutionary Kool Aid Suicide” of almost a 1000 Americans in their Jonestown refuge in Guyana and the assassination of Congressman Leo Ryan, thirty years ago, on November 18, 1978. This could be my final ten year acknowledgment of the Peoples Temple and Reverend Jim Jones.
CNN was going to tell this story again last night at 9:00 PM. But the Campbell lead-up at 8:00 p.m. was so boring—re-hashing the all day story of Governor Palin and the Republican Governor’s Conference in Miami—that I fell asleep. When I woke up, it was David Letterman time, 11:30, time to enjoy his political jokes. When I turned back to CNN, the news network was showing the horror of the stacked up bodies in a repeat of their 9:00 P.M. special.
But my interest in the Peoples Temple story began before Guyana—in Indianapolis, Indiana—where my connection to the story was made.
In 1998, after watching a version on History Channel, I put it all together in my head. But I better hurry and put my own connection to the story in writing. In 1998, actors connected to me in this story who could have confirmed what I know were living—but they are now gone or about gone. That’s the problem when, as a young adult, you hang with people 15-30 years older than you.
When I visited my grandchildren for my birthday, they announced that I am 74 years old. They are such big liars. I exist in a fantasy of denial. (“Grandpaw—I know how old you are” (who asked them?) “74!!”)
Sometime in 1958-1959 in Indianapolis, Indiana
Damn! She was fine. Brown skin. Not a high yaller—that I felt tended to be uppity in relation to me with my brown skin. Breasts. A behind. And she was aggressive—coming on to me. She came into the ice cream parlor where I was working part-time. I forget WHY I was working there part time. I got her phone number. But it must have been the short period of time between Indiana University Law School and working at the Indiana State Farm—a correctional facility.
But the opportunity to get it on with this fine woman—either for a one night stand or a relationship—was a diversion from my politics of the moment—and I did not call her.
Yet, in about a week, I saw here again in a drug store near my home—and she came on again—showing disappointment that I did not call her. (As I look at it now, this was strange—because the ice cream parlor was way in East Indianapolis—not near my home neighborhood).
She said I could make up not calling her by picking her up and taking her to church—to a Peoples Temple the coming Sunday. That relieved the sexual tension—because I could then play MY game of seduction by doing a neutral thing—where I would be in control.
Peoples Temple? I had no idea. She said it was integrated. So is the Unitarian church I attended. But I was suspicious when she told me the address—located in the Black Ghetto near downtown—and not in an upper class white suburb as was the Unitarian Church.
My new lady friend—I suspected was not college educated. Therefore, I began to imagine that Peoples Temple was like a Father Divine Church that I had read about—and that sparked my curiosity to see what was going on. While growing up as a child in the AME faith—in Terre Haute, Indiana—there was a piano—but no organ. There was no gospel music. Only Wesleyan hymns. No emotionalism—which was frowned upon. (The women who would forget where they were and get happy, would be rushed by church nurses in white uniforms down into the basement where they could shout and cool down before being allowed to come back up and join the congregation).
But back as a child while growing up in Terre Haute, Indiana, as I walked by Pentecostal churches, people seemed to be having a good time—the falling out—the jumping up and down, the tambourines. Visiting a service with a childhood friend, I enjoyed the testifying and the praising the Lord.
But I had always moved on because all that emotionalism was below my class as was taught in my Black Bourgeoisie upbringing as an AME.
So, I was eager to come by and pick up my new lady friend for church with two motivations—to execute my Sex game under my control and to observe an experience which must be like a Father Divine experience.
The Experience
I came by the house where my new friend lived with her mother and sisters. Only she in the family was going to Peoples Temple. Their house was also in the hood. A typical working class Black family. I was already beginning to lower my expectations of my new friend—because you can be poor—but have a vision of rising—intellectually—not just financially—like having family members striving to go to college if you can’t. Yet that did not turn me off like my mother would have liked it to; instead, I was more comfortable that I would not be put down and would be in charge.
Then we arrived at the church building—which was not like a traditional church—but a big warehouse—with a big neon sign that showed it was a church. There must have been more than a thousand people. Looking back now, having had experiences being in big assemblies, I think it could have been 2000 people there—and though my friend and I were not late, we had to sit near the back. Again, not like a traditional church: everyone was sitting on folding chairs. Not pews.
And noise. Not like in a Methodist church or Unitarian church—where in a back row, you can hear a pin drop. My friend did not have to tell me that the young white athletic man on the stage was Reverend Jim Jones. Speakers were set up all over the place; you could hear what he was saying over the noise, the cymbals, the organ and shouts. Everyone was in an uproar, responding to what he was saying.
If you succeeded in shutting your ears to all this noise, to what he was saying—what he said sounded pretty good, until he got to the monsters and the retribution and end of times forecast in the Book of Revelation. This was 1959-60, so the Gantry movie had not yet come out—but just like the Gantry movie—only magnified. Everything was staged—the mass healings and the frenzied exultations—Black and white—about equal.
But it came to me. This guy is a stone hustler. I realized that, somehow, I had been targeted as a mark to be brought to this place to be enrolled in this church because of its enthusiastic integration of Black and white that was not bound to an upper middle class mentality. After the service, there was a great banquet of food and fellowship with the people which was enjoyable, but something was not right. Everyone seemed brainwashed into an alternate reality, and it felt addictive to hang there and get involved there with my new lady friend.
The young lady was fine. But after I took her home—I never called her back. Because I felt I had been a target. I felt as if she knew who I was before she met me—as if this guy Jim Jones had ordered it. I don’t want to read into the story what I now know in comparison to what I knew then. But as I recall, I just did not like or trust this Jim Jones—using so-called “integration” to be a white Father Divine. And Black people eating it up.
1960 Indiana Human Rights Commission
When I was selected to be the chairman of the Indianapolis NAACP Political Action Committee in 1958, instead of taking care of my law school classes, I was working demonstrations, picketing and pressing for an Indiana Human Rights Bill on public accommodations and employment. My partners were Willard B. Ransom, general counsel to Madam C. J. Walker beauty industries, and my mentor, Attorney John Preston War, counsel for the Indianapolis NAACP and legal director of the Indiana Civil Liberties Union. State Senator Nelson Grills and State Representative Andrew Jacobs were co-sponsors of the bill. It passed.
Indianapolis, like the rest of the State of Indiana in 1959—was strictly segregated. Poor whites lived in Southern Indianapolis—near the manufacturing centers. Blacks lived in Northern Indianapolis, from central Indianapolis—the Ghetto—near Indiana Avenue, extending north to the suburbs where upper middle class whites lived. Middle class Blacks were slowly moving into these areas near Butler University—the home school of the Disciples of Christ. (I learned in 1998 that the Disciples of Christ had sponsored Jim Jone’s Peoples Temple—but later kicked him out—which was the reason he moved to California before moving to Guyanna.)
But after our human rights bill passed, Ransom, Ward and myself lost control or influence as to how the Indiana Human Rights Law would be structured and implemented. My alienation with Indiana then began to develop when the moderates chose Reverend Jim Jones to be a member of the Indiana Human Rights Commission. Even my friends did not understand why I was so adamantly against this so-called progressive integrationist, Jim Jones. He was one of the factors, along with my friends supporting him, for my deciding to come to Florida and the FAMU Law School in order to be part of the Southern Movement bursting in 1960.
So, in 1978, when the news of the Jonestown suicide was told to the world, and they noted that this Reverend Jim Jones, from Indianapolis, was the cult leader directing the so-called mass “revolutionary suicide” I was not surprised.
As if I had a premonition.
My friend John Due has sent to me his remembrance of Peoples Temple and Reverend Jim Jones as a guest post for Hungry Blues. John is now a retired civil rights-community organizer lawyer living in Gadsden County, FL. John and I met on the internet and have a mutual interest in the movement in Mississippi—where he worked during the 1964 Freedom Summer and where I currently investigate racial violence from that time. But before Due moved to Florida in 1960, he was an activist in Indiana. He sent this post to express how he felt how he was a mark for Peoples Temple and Reverend Jones and how we all must take care in any movement. —BG
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on November 15, 2008 at 7:29 pm
We are PEOPLE. We are not an alien race. We are not a cult. We are people, with lives, jobs, families, and feelings. We are constructive members of society and to deny us of rights that all PEOPLE should have is just WRONG.
Voting against us is not going to make us or the issues disappear. We’re not giving up. We’re fighting back. We aren’t going anywhere.
We didn’t vote away racism and we didn’t vote away other bigotry and inequality, and these votes against GLBT people were one of this Election Day’s ugliest demonstrations of what we have not yet overcome.
My friend Adina pointed out that whether you’re talking about the possible inappropriate participation of the Mormon Church in political organizing for Prop 8 or the possible votes of some Black voters for Prop 8, the fight really lies elsewhere.
But let’s be real here—there was 49% turnout in San Francisco County and 55% turnout in Alameda which voted overwhelmingly against Prop 8. There was 59% turnout in San Mateo county. If we the supporters of marriage rights for all had done a better job of helping our neighbors and friends to vote, the result would have gone the other way. The result was in many respects a failure of execution. I care much less about yelling at Mormons and much more about turning out allies and persuading people on the fence about justice for all.
This is precisely how Obama won out over the fearfulness that could have prevented many more people from voting for him. We need to help the people who want to support us to follow through and we need to reach out to the people we can influence. That kind of reaching out is infectious and is what will win the day. It will win elections—but more importantly it will win us the community we need to move forward as a society.
The Washington Post’s Joby Warrick reports today that
At least two dozen other former and current detainees at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere say they were given drugs against their will or witnessed other inmates being drugged, based on interviews and court documents.
Warrick’s WaPo article gives a vivid account from Adel al-Nusairi, one of the detainees who has come forward.
Nusairi is among a handful of former detainees who directly allege the use of drugs in interrogations at the military prison in Guantanamo. Others described being forcibly given sedatives that knocked them out or made them groggy before being transferred, or being forced to take pills or receive shots for unclear reasons and suffering unusual symptoms afterward. At least one detainee has alleged in a written statement through his attorney that he was drugged after being “renditioned” or transferred by U.S. officials to a prison in Morocco.
Nusairi, in prison interviews in 2005 with Anant Raut, his attorney, described a six-month period in which he says his captors subjected him to drugs and temperature extremes to extract information about al-Qaeda connections they believed he had.
“They thought he was hiding something,” said Raut, who represented Nusairi and other Saudi detainees in 2005 and 2006 while working for the Washington office of the law firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges. “He was injected in the arm with something that made him tired — that made his brain cloudy. When he would try to read the Koran, his brain would not focus. He had unusual lethargy and would drool on himself.”
It was during one such episode, in an interrogation room Nusairi remembers as ice-cold, that he became so desperate for sleep that he signed a confession professing to involvement in al-Qaeda, according to his attorney’s notes. The interrogator watched him sign his name, and “then he smiled and turned off the air conditioner. And I went to sleep,” Nusairi said, according to the notes.
After the confession– which Nusairi later said was a lie — the Saudi remained at Guantanamo Bay for another three years before being turned over to his home country, which released him. “He signed the statement, and they declared him an enemy combatant,” Raut said, “yet they released him anyway with no explanation.” The Saudi Embassy declined to comment.
Nusairi and other detainees’ allegations that they were drugged have enormous ramifications.
“The use of drugs as a form of restraint of prisoners is both unlawful and unethical,” said Leonard Rubenstein, an expert on medical ethics and the president of Physicians for Human Rights. “These allegations demand a full inquiry by Congress and the Department of Justice.”
Scott Allen, a physician and co-director of the Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights in Providence, R.I, noted that there are no accepted medical standards for the use of drugs to subjugate prisoners. Thus, any such use in interrogations “would have to be considered an experimental use of medicine.”
The Helsinki Declaration and the Nuremberg Code establish standards for the protection of individual rights in human experimentation, which are largely codified in US law. They absolutely prohibit human experimentation without the consent of the subject. These ethical rules, the Nuremberg Code in particular, were created in response to human experiments conducted by German health professionals on prisoners during World War II. The doctors involved in those human rights abuses were later convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
It is all the more telling, then, that one of the Yoo memos released this month contains justifications of drugging:
Written to provide legal justification for interrogation practices, the memo by then-Justice Department lawyer John C. Yoo rejected a decades-old U.S. ban on the use of “mind-altering substances” on prisoners. Instead, he argued that drugs could be used as long as they did not inflict permanent or “profound” psychological damage. U.S. law “does not preclude any and all use of drugs,” Yoo wrote in the memo.
Bad government has been good business during the Bush administration. In 1999, nine companies had federal homeland security contracts. Today the total is over 33,000. “Much of what we’ve seen touted by vendors after 9/11,” says security consultant Doug Laird, “is nothing more than a sales force trying to use 9/11 as the hype to get poorly advised folks to buy their products.”
Today, more than 23,000 representatives of private industry are working quietly with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. The members of this rapidly growing group, called InfraGard, receive secret warnings of terrorist threats before the public does—and, at least on one occasion, before elected officials. In return, they provide information to the government …
InfraGard is “a child of the FBI,” says Michael Hershman, the chairman of the advisory board of the InfraGard National Members Alliance and CEO of the Fairfax Group, an international consulting firm…
“We are the owners, operators, and experts of our critical infrastructure, from the CEO of a large company in agriculture or high finance to the guy who turns the valve at the water utility,” says Schneck, who by day is the vice president of research integration at Secure Computing.
“At its most basic level, InfraGard is a partnership between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the private sector,” the InfraGard website states. “InfraGard chapters are geographically linked with FBI Field Office territories.”
In other countries, for decades, cooperation between US industries and government has gone much further. In Argentina, for example, the Ford Falcon automobile is emblematic (PDF) of government terror. In the 1970s,
the Ford Falcon was the car of choice used by police, military and paramilitaries alike. Ford’s exclusive contracts with the Argentine security forces throughout the dictatorship eventually made the Falcon the single most recognizable icon of repression, one that clearly still resonates today. “Whenever a Falcon drove by or slowed down, we all knew that there would be kidnappings, disappearances, torture or murder,” reflects renowned Argentine psychologist and playwright Eduardo “Tato” Pavlovsky in a recent article. “It was the symbolic expression of terror. A death-mobile.”
The terror has continued into the present:
At noon on March 4, 2005, a green Ford Falcon pulled up next to a woman in Centenario, a municipality of Neuquén, in southern Argentina. Three men and a woman forced her into the car and then spent the next several hours threatening, torturing and mutilating her. The victim, whose name has been kept secret, was the wife of an employee at the Cerámica Zanon tile factory, one of the flagship worker-controlled enterprises that have sprung up in Argentina since the 2001 crisis. While the Zanon workers have successfully resuscitated the plant, they have also faced growing intimidation, as exemplified by this attack. The victim’s abductors released her with the message: “This is for Zanon. Tell them that the union will run with blood…. You’re all going to have to move into the factory because we’re going to kill all of you.”
In Latin America it is clear that these partnerships are part of an explicit war on organized labor and the culture that grew from developmentalist economies (PDF) in the 1950s and 60s. And a further crackdown on US labor may also be the promise of InfraGard.
FBI Director Robert Mueller addressed an InfraGard convention on August 9, 2005…. “Those of you in the private sector are the first line of defense.”
He urged InfraGard members to contact the FBI if they “note suspicious activity or an unusual event.” And he said they could sic the FBI on “disgruntled employees who will use knowledge gained on the job against their employers.”
Outside the US, American corporations are in many ways independent entities not bound by US laws or by the laws of the countries where they operate. Increasingly, there is a class of American citizens who enjoy similar status within the US boarders.
One of the advantages of InfraGard, according to its leading members, is that the FBI gives them a heads-up on a secure portal about any threatening information related to infrastructure disruption or terrorism.
The InfraGard website advertises this. In its list of benefits of joining InfraGard, it states: “Gain access to an FBI secure communication network complete with VPN encrypted website, webmail, listservs, message boards, and much more.”
InfraGard members receive “almost daily updates” on threats “emanating from both domestic sources and overseas,” Hershman says.
“We get very easy access to secure information that only goes to InfraGard members,” Schneck says. “People are happy to be in the know.”
On November 1, 2001, the FBI had information about a potential threat to the bridges of California. The alert went out to the InfraGard membership. Enron was notified, and so, too, was Barry Davis, who worked for Morgan Stanley. He notified his brother Gray, the governor of California.
“He said his brother talked to him before the FBI,” recalls Steve Maviglio, who was Davis’s press secretary at the time. “And the governor got a lot of grief for releasing the information. In his defense, he said, ‘I was on the phone with my brother, who is an investment banker. And if he knows, why shouldn’t the public know?’ ”
Maviglio still sounds perturbed about this: “You’d think an elected official would be the first to know, not the last.”
Worse, there are indications that this special class of citizens may be the enforcers of martial law, with permission to shoot to kill.
One business owner in the United States tells me that InfraGard members are being advised on how to prepare for a martial law situation—and what their role might be. He showed me his InfraGard card, with his name and e-mail address on the front, along with the InfraGard logo and its slogan, “Partnership for Protection.” On the back of the card were the emergency numbers that Schneck mentioned.
This business owner says he attended a small InfraGard meeting where agents of the FBI and Homeland Security discussed in astonishing detail what InfraGard members may be called upon to do.
“The meeting started off innocuously enough, with the speakers talking about corporate espionage,” he says. “From there, it just progressed. All of a sudden we were knee deep in what was expected of us when martial law is declared. We were expected to share all our resources, but in return we’d be given specific benefits.” These included, he says, the ability to travel in restricted areas and to get people out.
But that’s not all.
“Then they said when—not if—martial law is declared, it was our responsibility to protect our portion of the infrastructure, and if we had to use deadly force to protect it, we couldn’t be prosecuted,” he says.
Rothschild has substantial confirmation of this report from two other sources, as well.
Often using unreliable informants and guilt by association, the mid-20th century US government placed large numbers of its citizens on the Security Index, which qualified them to lose their rights and be rounded up and jailed en masse, upon declaration of martial law. Even if the FBI found that a subject did not qualify for the Security Index, it was nearly impossible to have one’s name removed from the lists of those to be imprisoned without charges—unless one agreed to inform on others.
The canceled Security Index cards on individuals taken off the Index after 1955 were retained in the field offices. This was done because they remained “potential threats and in case of an all-out emergency, their identities should be readily accessible to permit restudy of their cases.” These cards would be destroyed only if the subject agreed to become an FBI source or informant or “otherwise indicates complete defection from subversive groups.”
(Book III of the Final Report of the US Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect To Intelligence Activities, 1976)
The odd twist of InfraGard is to recruit informants through the promise of placing them above the law rather than through threatening them with a possible loss of their rights.
At least through the mid-1960s, predominantly working class Klansmen enjoyed relative impunity as they murdered, bombed, burned, raped, shot and beat Blacks and their allies to maintain a social and economic order that kept them—the violent whites—poor as well.
Today, it seems the mantle of violence with impunity is being handed to an owning class elite.
To join, each person must be sponsored by “an existing InfraGard member, chapter, or partner organization.” The FBI then vets the applicant. On the application form, prospective members are asked which aspect of the critical infrastructure their organization deals with. These include: agriculture, banking and finance, the chemical industry, defense, energy, food, information and telecommunications, law enforcement, public health, and transportation….
Curt Haugen is CEO of S’Curo Group, a company that does “strategic planning, business continuity planning and disaster recovery, physical and IT security, policy development, internal control, personnel selection, and travel safety,” according to its website. Haugen tells me he is a former FBI agent and that he has been an InfraGard member for many years. He is a huge booster. “It’s the only true organization where there is the public-private partnership,” he says. “It’s all who knows who. You know a face, you trust a face. That’s what makes it work.”
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Folks I've got them hungry blues
And nothin' in this to lose
People tellin' me to choose
Between dyin' and lyin' and
keep on cryin'
Tired of them hungry blues
Listen ain't you heard the news
There's another thing to choose
A brand new world
clean and fine
Where nobody's hungry
And there's no color line
A thing like that's worth
anybody dyin'
I ain't got a thing to lose
But them doggone hungry blues
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