The Prison Policy Initiative—with Demos as a partner—has submitted analysis to the Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) in Geneva of the discriminatory US Census approach to counting prisoners. PPI and Demos conclude that US Census practices violate international law.
NEW YORK, Dec. 13 — The United States Census practice of counting prisoners in their districts of incarceration rather than their home districts for the purpose of establishing electoral and Congressional representation is a violation of international treaty. This month, the non-partisan public policy and advocacy centers Demos and the Prison Policy Initiative (PPI) submitted their analysis to the Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) in Geneva.
Demos and PPI urged the committee to scrutinize the racially discriminatory redistricting practice of crediting rural white counties with additional population based on the presence of disenfranchised prisoners in violation of Article 5 of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. The Demos/PPI comments were included in a larger submission [PDF] prepared by the U.S. Human Rights Network.
The United States ratified the CERD treaty in 1994, and therefore is bound under international law to work to eliminate policies that are intentionally or unintentionally racially discriminatory. The CERD treaty obligates each country to report every two years on its progress at eliminating racial discrimination. The United States submitted its report [PDF] in April and will be questioned by the CERD Committee in Geneva in March 2008. The Committee looks to individuals and organizations in each county to critique the reporting counties report and to highlight omissions.
The Prison Policy Initiative and State Senator Eric Schneiderman have brought together an in impressive coalition of organizations and legislators to call on the US Census Bureau to change its policy on counting prisoners—and to kick off a national advocacy campaign on the issue.
“Counting prisoners as residents of the prison districts where they do not vote or otherwise participate in those communities is simply bad policy,” said State Senator Eric Schneiderman. “Disenfranchised people become an undeserved source of political power for legislators who benefit from locking up more people for longer sentences.”
“The Census Bureau’s insistence on counting prisoners as residents of rural counties creates big problems when counties like St. Lawrence go to draw county legislative districts. Because our county districts are so small, a single prison can have a huge negative impact on equal voting power,” said letter co-author Tedra L. Cobb, vice-Chair of the St. Lawrence County Board of Legislators.
Yesterday, federal, state, and local legislators presented a letter signed by 32 elected officials from New York, Texas, and Illinois to Charles Kincannon, Director of the Census Bureau, requesting that the agency collect the home addresses of all incarcerated persons in the next national decennial census and count them at those addresses. According to these officials, counting prisoners at their pre-incarceration address is essential for compliance with the “One Person, One Vote” rulings of the Supreme Court, which require that legislative districts at every level of government contain equal numbers of residents in order to ensure fair and equal representation for all.
“The Census Bureau considers redistricting to be the second most important use of its data and it wants to hear from the elected officials who use that data.” said Prison Policy Initiative Executive Director Peter Wagner. “I call upon all supporters of democracy to ask their own elected officials to join New York State Senator Eric Schneiderman and St. Lawrence County Legislator Tedra Cobb in their appeal to the Census Bureau.”
In addition to the Prison Policy Initiative, the elected officials were joined by criminal justice and democracy advocacy groups, including the Brennan Center for Justice, DEMOS, Citizens Against Recidivism, Coalition for Parole Restoration, Seven Neighborhoods Action Partnership, JusticeWorks Community, Center for NuLeadership on Urban Solutions, Community Service Society, The Correctional Association of New York, Families Rally for Emancipation and Empowerment (FREE!), and the Drug Policy Alliance.
Currently, the Census Bureau includes everyone housed in federal, state, and local prisons in its count of the general population of the Census block that contains the prison. New York State law, however, defines residence as the place where one voluntarily lives. Many states, including New York, also have constitutional clauses or election law statutes that explicitly declare that incarceration does not change a residence.
Unfortunately, the current Census methodology disregards this, instead counting a significant proportion of our national population in the wrong place. According to advocates, crediting the population of prisoners to the Census block where they are temporarily and involuntarily held creates electoral inequities at all levels of government.
“Every decade, states use federal census data to update their legislative district boundaries,” continued Mr. Wagner. “The goal is to ensure that each district contains the same population, as required by the federal constitution’s “one-person, one-vote” rule. The Census Bureau counts people in prison where their bodies are located on census day, not where they come from and where they will return, on average, 34 months later. The Bureau’s current practice made sense before prison populations became large enough to distort democracy. However, more people now live in prison than our three least populous states combined, and African Americans are imprisoned at 7 times the rate of whites. Today, this Census practice undermines the rule of law,” Peter Wagner explained.
Five of the seven members of the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles must recommend clemency for Perry to even consider granting it. But Perry appointed the board members and, while it officially operates independently, the board is known to respond to pressure from the governor’s mansion.
“It’s my belief that if this does not become a political issue, then I have no chance,” Kenneth wrote shortly after receiving his execution date.
He’s right. Rick Perry won’t spare Kenneth out of the kindness of his heart. Having overseen 159 executions since he took office in 2001, Perry has outdone even his predecessor George W. Bush. This summer, Texas will carry out its 400th execution.
In rejoicing over the saving of Kenneth Foster’s life, we should remember two things:
Texas is the most murderous state in the in US, with an incredibly alarming rate of executions since Governor Perry took office.
After being moved to Polunsky, the men on Texas’ death row lost virtually all the privileges they enjoyed at the Ellis Unit. The new facility keeps the inmates in 23-hour administrative segregation inside 60 square foot cells with sealed steel doors. They have lost all group recreation, work programs, television access (some inmates are allowed radios), and religious services. There are no contact visits allowed at Polunsky, meaning that the men on death row will never make physical contact with anyone other than prison staff as they move toward their execution date. Inmates are only allowed one five minute phone call every six months, their mail is often censored, the quality of food is particularly low, and they are given inadequate health and dental services.
I am an insulin dependent diabetic and I am forced to be administered my shots in areas where chemical agents are being sprayed and body waste of others is thrown and not cleaned. If one man is gassed all those in the immediate area suffer as I have at many times. Often the chemical agents used are in excess and are not necessary and protocol in use is not followed. Inmates who are secure in their cells, at the whim of an official can be subject to the use of chemical agents by simply refusing to be harassed by officials in any number of ways. I have been forced to live in cells with the body waste of the previous occupant (and not allowed nothing to clean with as all personal property had been confiscated and held in the property room and no cleaning supplies were made available to me). I have been forced to live in cells that flood when it rains outside (and leak as well). I am forced to live in cells where the ventilation system doesn’t work, plumbing doesn’t work – all because of my aggressive behavior (writing this is the most aggression I’ve shown about all of this thus far). I have a big box on my cell door (designed to keep inmates from throwing on guards) and my food is placed in this box for me to eat. I am not supposed to be allowed to clean it and the guards won’t clean it but it is filthy with food, juices, coffee, etc. from previous meals – very unsanitary. My aggressive behavior merits this I guess.
That’s Driving While Black. He has been in prison for ten years and is scheduled to be executed on August 30, 2007. He watches his daughter Nydes grow up from behind bullet proof glass.
Ten years ago, Kenneth was a young college student, a music lover, and recent father. Born in Austin, Texas, he spent his high school years working for several small record companies in the area. In 1995 he began his first year at St. Phillips College majoring in sociology, and less than a year later, in May of ‘96, he started his own label, Tribulation Records. Kenneth had a bright future ahead of him, no doubt.
But a year later, Kenneth was convicted of murder. The previous August, he had been driving a car with three friends in the San Antonio area. One of those riding in the car, Mauriceo Brown, got out in front of a party to talk to a woman, Mary Patrick. While Kenneth and his other two friends were eighty feet away, waiting in the car, they heard a gunshot. Brown had shot Patrick’s boyfriend, Michael LaHood.
Kenneth never had a gun in his hand, never saw, let alone aimed at LaHood, and never he pulled the trigger. Even the prosecution admits this. And he did not know anyone was going to be shot that night.
But according to Texas’ “law of parties,” Kenneth should have anticipated the loss of life that was to come that night because he was in the same car as Brown. It’s a law straight out of a Franz Kafka novel, where the accused are expected to have an almost psychic ability to predict when a crime is going to happen.
Kenneth’s execution has been set for August 30th, 2007. He is guilty of nothing except driving a car.
In the months immediately following Hurricane Katrina, when I first started blogging about Orleans Parish Prison (OPP) and the criminal justice system in New Orleans, I was overwhelmed by the some of the comments I received from people who had survived OPP or from people who were desperately trying to locate their friends and loved ones who had been locked up before the storm.
One of my posts on OPP continues to receive comments, even as recently as this morning, from people who were locked up there. Things do not seem to have gotten any better.
Last March, the Dollars & Sense Magazine Katrina issue (which I guest co-edited) revealed that FEMA was paying OPP over $146,000 per day to maintain prisoners in the kinds of conditions described below. Where are the civil rights and human rights organizations? Why has there been no Congressional investigation? This is beyond appalling.
J. Roos
I was booked and processed at O.P.P. for two misdemeanors on july 8th 2006. My family posted bail as soon as they possible and I was not released until july 12th. The place is very overcrowded and immates do not even have room on the floor. I counted 55 people in a holding area not bigger than a classroom. Thier was no room to move you could not be anywhere without touching at least one person. The conditions are not fit for any human being. People were vomiting because of the smell and heat. The guards treated immates like animals. I believe conditions at O.P.P. should be investagated by the federal government. Posted on 15-Jul-06 at 3:02 am
Robert Rielly
I just did 11 days in the Oleans Parish Prison… And I tell you a year after the strom that nothing still has changed. I am from NC was in NO working when I was arrest for a charge in NC. After beening in this lock up I can tell you I will never want to go to NO ever again. The gaurds at the prison are abusive and the prison is a inhumane place for anybody to locked up. I am going to file a law suit against the City of New Orleans and the Sheriff of Orleans Parish. Posted on 15-Jan-07 at 12:38 am
Jim a very PISSED OFF citizen who BELIEVES IN THE PRESS IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
But to stand by and witness the in humaine un-sanitary conditions that were in this place….. 1st cell 300sqft-85men-Toilet overflowing with piss and shit/no water, no place to sit and if you did, well you picture it. Water jug was outside the cell in sight but not in for HOURS. I recieved water after being there from 8am to finally getting a drink at 10:30pm when I was booked … 85men was last count, they continued putting people in till it was up against the doors … I know jails not supposed to be the Holiday Inn but animals at the humaine society have better conditions before being sentenced!!!!!! As the extra souls were put in to the cell people were being threated with more charges if they didnt SHUT UP I believe was the term. All types of arrested people were placed in these cells from tresspass, drunk, warrants, gang/bangers, possesion, murder, and probably other assorted instances. I know I heard a woman screaming she wanted an attorney now…. It got worse we were moved about 11pm to a 2 room cell with 3 toilets overflowing with crap and piss, with as many people who were in there and brought in the next morning and placed that were from other floors in the facility, ranging from career criminals to off course us waiting…. this holding tank as well did not have water until later in the day. Food was outside the cell but not brought in we were moved again to somewher else. Even in jail NOT CONVICTED or CONVICTED you HAVE HUMAN RIGHTS. Everyone was treated the same all right,,,,,Lower than the stuff that was in the toilets. The stories I heard in the MEDIA I didnt believe, I do now…. Posted on 21-Jan-07 at 6:46 am
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on January 21, 2007 at 8:09 pm
The Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola Known as “The Farm,” the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola is the largest prison in the United States. Around three-quarters of its inmates are African-American. According to the Academy-Award-nominated documentary The Farm, 85 percent of the inmates who are sent to Angola will die there.
Angola is an 18,000-acre complex of antebellum plantations that the state of Louisiana purchased and converted into a prison around the turn of the century. The penitentiary is called Angola because most of its former slaves came from the African country of the same name. Angola still operates on the plantation model. Prisoners perform back-breaking labor, harvesting cotton, sugar cane, and other crops from dawn to dusk.
In the early 1970s, Angola was known as the most brutal prison in the United States, with stabbings an almost-daily occurrence. Armed “inmate guards” patrolled the prison, and they frequently used their state-issued rifles to settle scores with other inmates, sometimes at the behest of Angola officials. On one occasion, a prisoner died after five men were locked together in a sweltering isolation cell, without food or water, during the hottest days of summer. Dozens of bodies are rumored to be buried in the swampland where Angola borders the Mississippi River.
Among the men who have been marooned at Angola are Albert Woodfox, Herman Wallace, and, until recently, Robert King Wilkerson. Of the world’s political prisoners, few have been held in solitary confinement for as long as they have: nearly 30 years. All three men initially arrived at Angola with sentences for unrelated robberies, and a dedication to political activism. Wallace and Woodfox founded a chapter of the Black Panther Party at Angola. Their activism made them targets of the all-white prison administration. In 1972, in an effort to stop their organizing, prison officials concocted murder charges against Woodfox and Wallace and placed them on permanent lockdown. Relying on the paid-for testimony of prison snitches, Angola officials won convictions against the two men, who received sentences of life without parole. Later in 1972, when Wilkerson arrived at Angola, his reputation as an activist preceded him, and he was immediately placed in solitary. Subsequently he was charged with and convicted for a murder he did not commit, even though the actual killer admitted he acted alone in self-defense.
Even if all goes right, it may be a while yet before Herman Wallace is released. And then there’s still the case of Albert Wooodfox. In support of them, Dave Stewart (yes, that Dave Stewart) has produced a music video to help spread the word.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on November 12, 2006 at 2:15 pm
I’m a little late on this, but since I’ve been following the issue for about a year and a half, I want to make note of an important development concerning how the Census Bureau counts people who are in prison.
Quick refersher: Many people are aware that the disproportionately Black and Latino population in US prisons cannot vote. Less widely discussed is the problem that the Census Bureau counts this largely Black and Latino population as residents of the places where they are imprisoned. All too frequently the prisons are located in predominantly white rural areas. This practice makes the redistricting process grossly unfair, diluting the votes of everyone in the state who lives outside the districts that maintain prisons.
The National Research Council of the National Academies … released a report calling for the Census Bureau to begin collecting the home addresses of people in prison and to study whether this alternative address should be used in the Census. The report, authored by leading demographers, statisticians and sociologists, was commissioned by the Census Bureau to reexamine where people should be counted in the Census….
The panel expressed deep concern about where people in prison were counted, stating that “the evidence of political inequities in redistricting that can arise due to the counting of prisoners at the prison location is compelling”. The panel cited an article by Eric Lotke and Peter Wagner that “nearly 9% of all African-American men in their twenties and thirties live in prison” and that most prisons are located in largely White rural areas….
The National Research Council report called for the Census Bureau to initiate a major “research and testing program, including experimentation as a part of the 2010 Census” to evaluate assigning incarcerated people to other addresses outside the facility. The panel also recommended that that the Census Bureau rely less on administrative records and more on specialized forms and interviews to count people in prison.
Prison Policy Initiative Executive Director Peter Wagner and Soros Senior Justice Fellow Eric Lotke had earlier submitted a proposed finding and recommendation to the National Academy of Sciences [pdf]. In their submission, Wagner and Lotke elaborated on the problem that the Census Bureau needs to respond to:
Prisons present a significant distortion on local populations. Currently, there are more than 2 million people in prisons and jails. Since the 1980 Census, the percentage of Americans incarcerated in correctional facilities has increased four-fold, with more than 0.7% of Americans currently incarcerated in a prison or jail. For certain demographic groups, such as African-American men in their late 20s, more than 12% of the population is currently incarcerated.
Recent research has shown that correctional facilities are increasingly located in areas that are geographically and demographically far removed from the communities that most incarcerated people belong to. According to Department of Agriculture Demographer Calvin Beale, although non-metro counties contain only 20% of the national population, they are the host for 60% of new prison construction. In the 1990s, an astonishing 30% of new residents of upstate New York were people being sent to prison.
The result of counting large external populations of prisoners as local residents leads to misleading conclusions about the size and growth of communities. One study of incarcerated populations in the Census found 21 counties in the United States have at least 21% of their population in prison. Counties that see prisons close report that their populations declined when in fact they did not. Conversely, population growth reported by some counties is due to the importation of prisoners to a new correctional institution. If not for the construction of new prison cells, 56 counties the Census Bureau identified as growing during the 1990s would have reported declining populations.
Because Latinos and Blacks are incarcerated at three to seven times the rate of Whites, where incarcerated people are counted has tremendous implications for how Black and Latino populations are reflected in the Census. For this reason, the African-American subcommittee of the Census Bureau’s Race and Ethnicity Advisory Committee recommended that the Census Bureau count prisoners as residents of their pre-incarceration addresses.
Following last month’s release of the National Research Council report, Peter Wagner said the Council “has defined what a good faith examination of the feasibility of counting incarcerated people at their pre-incarceration addresses would look like. The Census Bureau should get to work today.”
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on October 14, 2006 at 11:49 pm
In Connecticut, Delaware, Iowa, South Dakota and Utah, if a prisoner will not voluntarily leave his cell when ordered to do so, officers may bring a trained attack dog to the cell front to terrify the prisoner into compliance. If the prisoner still refuses, the dog is let into the cell to bite the prisoner. While the prisoner tries to fend off the dog, correctional officers place restraints on him and then remove him from the cell.
“The entire world has seen the photo of an Abu Ghraib detainee crouched in terror before a snarling dog, but the use of attack dogs against prisoners here in the U.S. has been a well-kept secret,” said Jamie Fellner, director of the U.S. Program of Human Rights Watch. “Longtime corrections professionals were appalled when we told them that guards in some states use dogs on prisoners.”
Today, Human Rights Watch released a report on the use of attack dogs in US prisons, “Cruel and Degrading: The Use of Dogs for Cell Extractions in U.S. Prisons.”
“We know of no other country in the world where officers use attack dogs to remove prisoners from their cells,” said Fellner. “State prison officials in these five states should adopt the more humane methods that their colleagues across the country already use.”
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: August 8, 2006
Contact: Anne Anderson: (Cell) 202-262-0989
Psychologists for Social Responsibility Urges APA to Adopt Policy of “No Participation in National Security Interrogations”
PsySR urges the American Psychological Association to declare immediately, clearly, and unequivocally that psychologists should not participate at this time in any way in national security or military interrogations.
[Mark Benjamin's] article opens by suggesting that the APA is facing an “internal revolt” against the Association’s current policy on the role of psychologists in military interrogations. The reality is that APA’s Council of Representatives endorsed the current policy at its last meeting. (February 2006)
Mark Benjamin:
That raised some eyebrows among some members, who pointed out the claim was incorrect. In a relatively unusual move, they said, the interrogation report bypassed the council (described on the APA Web site as the “most important governance body of the association”) and became policy through the imprimatur of APA’s smaller 12-person board of directors. “Council was not asked to endorse or approve the PENS task force report,” said council member Bernice Lott.
[Rhea] Farberman, the APA spokeswoman, acknowledged that the original APA statement on the council’s endorsement was technically incorrect. She said that members of the council had made “laudatory” statements about the report at a council meeting last February. When called on this issue last week by her own members, Farberman admitted to the council in an e-mail, obtained by Salon, that “Council took no official action on the report.” Still, Farberman said in a telephone call to Salon that the APA leadership was not facing an internal revolt. She said that an Associated Press article was more accurate in describing the APA leadership as “under fire.”
At best the APA assertion that “APA’s Council of Representatives endorsed the current policy at its last meeting” is an unsupported half truth. Other possibilities are that the assertion is either a) delusional thinking or b) a lie.
Last summer, the APA adopted new ethical principles drafted by a task force of 10 psychologists, who were selected by the organization’s leadership. That controversial task-force report, which is now official APA policy, stated that psychologists participating in terror-related interrogations are fulfilling “a valuable and ethical role to assist in protecting our nation, other nations, and innocent civilians from harm.”
But Salon has learned that six of the 10 psychologists on the task force have close ties to the military. The names and backgrounds of the task force participants were not made public by the APA . . .
The APA countered:
This is totally false. In reality, the names and composition of the Task Force is public information. The names and biographical statements of each of the Task Force members are, and have been for some time, available through the APA website.
In reality:
[A] link to the biographies of those task force members appeared on the APA Web site only after the publication of Salon’s article. Farberman acknowledged that the APA did put the link to the bios of the task force members on its site after Salon published its story.
Still, for psychologists, there is always room for interpretation, especially when your meaning is conveyed in prepositions rather than facts:
But she added that one could have previously navigated to the Web site of the Society for the Study of Peace, Conflict and Violence through the APA Web site. “We said that the bio statements have been available through the Web site for some time,” she wrote in an e-mail.
Here is how one would have gotten to the bio statements of the Task Force before the APA added the link to the front page of its site:
Scroll about 1/2 way down the busy, two column page to the section on the right, headed “APA Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security.”
Voilà! It’s that simple to get to the list “through” the APA website.
Linda M. Woolf, president of the Society for the Study of Peace, Conflict and Violence, told Mark Benjamin that Division 48 published the Task Force names because current APA interrogation policy “does not provide clear enough guidelines to keep psychologists out of situations involving abuse in the name of the war on terror.”
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on August 8, 2006 at 9:05 am
And then shut down the American Psychological Association.
It turns out this little tangential ethical concern about medical participation in interrogations is at the very center of how the US has been carrying out its torture policies. It has begun to appear that the involvement of psychologists in interrogations is, in fact, the smoking gun that proves torture is an integral part of US policy in the so-called War on Terror.
Though the American Medical and American Psychiatric associations have both prohibited their members from participating in interrogations of detainees, the American Psychological Association has been taking a more permissive stance.
Last summer, the APA adopted new ethical principles drafted by a task force of 10 psychologists, who were selected by the organization’s leadership. That controversial task-force report, which is now official APA policy, stated that psychologists participating in terror-related interrogations are fulfilling “a valuable and ethical role to assist in protecting our nation, other nations, and innocent civilians from harm.”
Why is the APA’s stance so different from that of the other two associations? Could it be because the APA’s policy recommendations were made by military men?
Salon has learned that six of the 10 psychologists on the task force have close ties to the military. The names and backgrounds of the task force participants were not made public by the APA; Salon obtained them from congressional sources. Four of the psychologists who crafted the permissive policy were involved with the handling of detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, or served with the military in Afghanistan — all environments where serious cases of abuse have been documented. . . .
Task force member Col. Larry James was the chief psychologist for the intelligence group at Guantánamo in 2003. In 2004, James was at Abu Ghraib working as the director of the behavioral sciences group in the interrogation unit there. His biography said he was sent to Abu Ghraib “in response” to the abuse scandal. Requests to interview James were rebuffed; U.S. Army Medical Command spokeswoman Cynthia Vaughn referred Salon back to the APA.
And it gets even creepier.
Col. Morgan Banks spent four months during the winter of 2001 and 2002 “supporting combat operations” at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan, where serious abuses have been reported. Banks told Jane Mayer of the New Yorker last summer he had also “consulted generally” on Guantánamo interrogations, but could not recall any specific cases. Banks’ biography lists him as one of the founders and the senior psychologist at the Army’s secretive Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) program at Fort Bragg, N.C., where the military trains elite soldiers to resist torture in case of capture. The techniques used to harden those soldiers against torture — sleep deprivation, isolation, sexual humiliation, bags on the head, long exercise — have been used on detainees in Afghanistan, Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. (Emphasis added.)
Remember Benjamin’s Salon article from last month? There he reported that SERE “taught their methods to interrogators of the prisoners in Cuba.” Now it seems that one of the torture teachers essentially wrote the book on torture techniques and then helped write the policy that would allow his students to be involved in interrogations.
Other military psychologists on the APA ethics task force include another SERE school veteran and two others involved directly in military operations.
If you listen to APA president Gerald Koocher, who hand-picked the ethics task force, or APA director of ethics, Stephen Behnke, you might feel slightly reassured to hear that “[p]sychologists take advisory or consultative roles in relation to interrogations to help ensure interrogations are safe, legal, ethical, and effective.”
However, in at least one case, the psychologists on hand were actually calling the shots on torture.
[T]he presence of a psychologist did not prevent the interrogation of so-called 20th hijacker Mohammed al-Khatani at Guantánamo from turning brutal. Khatani was stripped naked, isolated, given intravenous fluids and forced to urinate on himself, and exercised to exhaustion during interrogations that lasted 18 to 20 hours a day for 48 of 54 days.
Part of the plan was to humiliate Khatani and submit him to extreme psychological stress. He became exhausted, disoriented and hopeless. He was called a homosexual, forced to wear a mask and dance, and leashed and made to perform dog tricks. Interrogators hung pictures of fitness models on his neck and had a female interrogator “invade his personal space,” according to the unredacted interrogation log obtained by Salon.
To help break down Khatani’s psyche, the interrogation team included a psychologist, Maj. John Leso, a member of the military’s Behavioral Science Consultation Teams, called BSCTs. The teams are a newly minted tool in the “war on terror.” They include psychologists who are supposed to help interrogators break down resistance and pry loose useful information. Former Guantánamo commander Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller called the teams “essential in developing interrogation strategies” in a September 2003 internal military report.
At various points during the questioning of Khatani, Leso’s BSCT operators instructed interrogators to keep the prisoner awake, force him to stop staring at a wall, and advised on the effectiveness of techniques. “BSCT observed that detainee does not like it when the interrogator points out his nonverbal responses,” reads an entry in the log from Dec. 29, 2002. (Emphasis added.)
If the BSCT operators were calling the shots just this once, that’s one time too many.
There is reason to be concerned, however, that the Khatani interrogation was not an isolated incident. If BSCT operators are widely guiding interrogations, then Mark Benjamin may have just unraveled the torture scandal at the level of US policy decisions and how the APA stepped forward to enable them.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on July 26, 2006 at 1:18 am
In his article “Torture Teachers,” Benjamin explains the special function of the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) school at Fort Bragg, NC. Officially, the SERE school provides training to elite US troops in how to resist torture. Benjamin’s evidence shows that SERE instructors have also been teaching students how to be effective torturers.
A March 22, 2005, sworn statement by the former chief of the Interrogation Control Element at Guantánamo said instructors from SERE also taught their methods to interrogators of the prisoners in Cuba.
“When I arrived at GTMO,” reads the statement, “my predecessor arranged for SERE instructors to teach their techniques to the interrogators at GTMO … The instructors did give some briefings to the Joint Interrogation Group interrogators….”
There are striking similarities between the reported detainee abuse at both Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib and the techniques used on soldiers going through SERE school, including forced nudity, stress positions, isolation, sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation and exhaustion from exercise.
Leonard Rubenstein, executive director of Physicians for Human Rights, said, “This is the missing link,” proving that “that the SERE training was in fact used, for a time at least, as a basis for interrogations at Guantánamo.” [Disclosure: I am an employee of Physicians for Human Rights.]
This missing link–this evidence that US torture practices were cultivated in an elite military training program at Fort Bragg, NC–ought to make it clear the extent to which the horrors of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are the function of concerted US policies in the US War on Terror.
The missing link should also be occasion to counter again what Naomi Klein has called “Our Amnesiac Torture Debate,” the glossing over by liberals and conservatives, alike, of the long history of the use of torture by the US. Klein cites, as one example, the evidence, gathered by Alfred McCoy, of how
monstrous CIA-funded experiments on psychiatric patients and prisoners in the 1950s turned into a template for what he calls “no-touch torture,” based on sensory deprivation and self-inflicted pain. McCoy traces how these methods were field-tested by CIA agents in Vietnam as part of the Phoenix program and then imported to Latin America and Asia under the guise of police training programs.
The significance of the Supreme Court ruling in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld is therefore not that the judicial branch is finally beating back the executive excesses the Bush administration (though the legal victory is important for those reasons).
When torture is covertly practiced but officially and legally repudiated, there is still the hope that if atrocities are exposed, justice could prevail.
Klein’s point is, essentially, that the rule of law provides seekers of justice with a vehicle for demanding that our governments live up to objective standards of behavior. The Hamdan ruling provides some hope for the rule of law in the US.
I’d like to find the spot behind the White House, where they’ve got the flag hung out to dry. I’ll wave it this Fourth of July the same as I always do: in celebration of the patriots who believe enough in this country–in its people–to demand, often at great risk to themselves, that the US live up to its stated values. A country that produces such seekers of justice–that’s something to wave a flag for.
~ NOTES:
The almost lost version of the song, above, can be found on this.
It’s called Area 2. And for nearly two decades beginning in 1971, it was the epicenter for what has been described as the systematic torture of dozens of African-American males by Chicago police officers. In total, more than 135 people say they were subjected to abuse including having guns forced into their mouths, bags places over their heads, and electric shocks inflicted to their genitals. Four men have been released from death row after government investigators concluded torture led to their wrongful convictions.
US sanctioned torture is one of the pressing human rights issues of our time. I very much admire and am grateful for the moral vigilance with which some are responding to this administration’s attack on democracy and human rights in its war on terror. Yet I also wish for a day when there is comparable popular awareness of and outrage about the long standing, institutionalized human rights abuses that take place within US borders. The most recent example of the latter to come my way was in Salim Muwakkil’s latest article in In These Times:
The latest domestic example is Chicago, where for nearly two decades (from 1973 to 1991) the police department virtually condoned the torture of more than 100 black criminal suspects. Those illegal techniques led to the wrongful conviction of dozens of black men, and even prompted Amnesty International in 1990 to call for an inquiry into police torture in the city.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on May 11, 2006 at 11:30 am
When Hurricane Katrina struck six months ago, the mainstream media was shocked to discover the scope of poverty in New Orleans. And that’s about as deep as the coverage has gone.
• When Katrina struck, the New Orleans jail housed about 6,800 prisoners, including violent felons but also plenty of people awaiting arraignment or trial, like a guy arrested for reading Tarot cards without a permit and homeless people arrested for begging or sleeping on the street. Prisoners were locked in first-floor cells as the water rose; some spent days standing in sewage-filled cells with little food or water. Meanwhile, the facility’s scant two-page evacuation plan was on “this guy’s computer” that got flooded.
But the story goes back much farther. The jail’s population has increased eightfold since the mid-1970s—while the city’s population has dropped. Why? Because the parish sheriff makes money for each prisoner he houses. As one sheriff commented, “fewer inmates translates into less revenue for the jail.” Locking up fewer New Orleanians would mean shrinking the sheriff’s fat patronage-based fiefdom.
• When Katrina struck, it devastated nearly the entire Mississippi coast, in some places for miles inland. Thousands lost their homes. But state and federal relief and reconstruction plans are doing little to help people rebuild their homes or find other housing. In Mississippi, Gov. Haley Barbour decided to spend the state’s entire $5.3 billion federal Katrina relief grant on retroactive flood insurance for otherwise insured homeowners—not a penny for renters, uninsured homeowners, or to repair public housing.
But the story goes back much farther. For years, redevelopment plans in coastal cities like Biloxi and Gulfport have been endangering low-income and black neighborhoods. “There are people here who’ll tell you that developers and local politicians have been trying to flood us out of existence, because with each piece of land, they haul in a bunch of red clay, which is semi-impervious, dump it in the wetlands to build up land on which to put a slab or a parking lot, then on the slab they put a building, a big ‘ole Wal-Mart or something,” says Mississippi historian and community organizer Derrick Evans.
• When Katrina struck, the flooding in New Orleans left behind a layer of toxic sediment—contaminants include arsenic and diesel-fuel substances—in neighborhoods throughout the city. The EPA has not begun any cleanup of the sediment. Government agencies are recommending that returnees wear protective gear like Tyvek suits when they work on their homes but, as environmental justice activist Monique Harden notes, “not one government agency provides this protective gear to people returning to the area.”
But the story goes back much farther. For years, low-income and black communities in Louisiana have faced the massive legal(!) dumping of toxic pollutants. In fact, the historic African-American community of Mossville, La., is the focus of the first-ever environmental human-rights lawsuit brought against the U.S. government, now pending before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States.
These are just some of the in-depth stories you’ll read in this special issue of Dollars & Sense. The issue includes:
• Bringing Them All Back Home – Housing in New Orleans, six months later
• SPECIAL PULLOUT CENTERFOLD – Rogues’ Gallery of Katrina Profiteers / Map of the Katrina Diaspora / Roster of progressive Gulf Coast organizations
• And more!!!
Authors and editors available for interviews – contact Chris Sturr or Amy Gluckman at (617) 447-2177.
Founded in 1974, Dollars & Sense explains the workings of the U.S. and international economies and provides left perspectives on current economic affairs. It is edited and produced by a collective of economists, journalists, and activists who are committed to social justice and economic democracy.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on April 1, 2006 at 8:06 pm
The Black Commentator’s Margaret Kimberly notes that Halliburton has won yet another multi-million dollar government contract—this one to build “temporary detention facilities” in case of an “immigration emergency.”
The contract may also provide migrant detention support to other U.S. Government organizations in the event of an immigration emergency, as well as the development of a plan to react to a national emergency, such as a natural disaster. In the event of a natural disaster, the contractor could be tasked with providing housing for ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) personnel performing law enforcement functions in support of relief efforts.
Kimberly quotes the passage, above, from Halliburton’s press release and then comments:
Anyone paying a little bit of attention will ask, “What immigration emergency?” If there is an immigration emergency looming on the horizon it is a big secret. Of course immigrants will be the first ensnared in the net that big brother Bush has in mind, but the net won’t stop with them.
What sort of national emergency requires detention centers? America has plenty of prisons. More of our population is behind bars than in any country on earth. There are detention centers for immigration in existence already. As for helping in case of a natural disaster, hurricane Katrina proved that saving American lives is not on the Bush agenda.
When the word detention comes up, hairs should rise on the back of every neck. Thanks to the Patriot Act and the creation of “enemy combatants” these detention centers can be used to lock up anyone for any reason for any length of time that Uncle Sam wishes.
Kimberly hopes for the “best case scenario” in which “this contract may be just the latest hand out to the welfare queen of corporate America,” but she also entertains the more likely possibility that “our government is planning to create more [Jose] Padillas.” I say “more likely” because history suggests this development is nothing less than a revival of J. Edgar Hoover’s Emergency Detention Program, detailed in a 1976 Congressional report:
The development of plans during this period for emergency detention of dangerous persons and for intelligence about such persons took place entirely within the executive branch. In contrast to the employee security program, these plans were not only withheld from the public and Congress but were framed in terms which disregarded the legislation enacted by Congress. Director Hoover’s decision to ignore Attorney General Biddle’s 1943 directive abolishing the wartime Custodial Detention List had been an example of the inability of the Attorney General to control domestic intelligence operations. In the 1950s the FBI and the Justice Department collaborated in a decision to disregard the attempt by Congress to provide statutory direction for the Emergency Detention Program. This is not to say that the Justice Department itself was fully aware of the FBI’s activities in this area. The FBI kept secret from the Department its most sweeping list of potentially dangerous persons, first called the “Communist Index” and later renamed the “Reserve Index,” as well as its targeting programs for intensive investigation of “key figures” and “top functionaries” and its own detention priorities labeled “Detcom” and “Comsab”(emphasis added).
Director Hoover advised Attorney General Clark in March 1946 of the existence of its Security Index, although he did not say that it had existed since Attorney General Biddle’s 1943 directive. The Index listed persons “who would be dangerous or potentially dangerous in the event of . . . serious crisis, involving the United States and the U.S.S.R.” The Justice Department then prepared a memorandum concluding that the available options for action in an emergency were a declaration of martial law or suspension of the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus. The FBI Director recommended going to Congress to secure “statutory backing for detention” (emphasis added).
After a conference between Department and FBI officials, the FBI submitted a lengthy analysis of its standards for classifying potentially dangerous persons. The memorandum gave specific examples of “Communists and Communist sympathizers whose names appear in the Bureau’s Security Index.” However, the FBI did not provide any specific examples in the category “Espionage Suspects and Government Employees in Communist Underground.” Assistant Director Ladd advised Director Hoover of the reason for excluding any such examples:
The Bureau has identified over 100 persons who are logically suspected of being in the Government Communist Underground; however, at the present time, the Bureau does not have evidence, whether admissible or otherwise, reflecting actual membership in the Communist Party. It is believed that for security reasons, examples of these logical suspects should not be set forth at this time. (emphasis added)
The Director noted, “I most certainly agree. There are too many leaks.”
The National Counterterrorism Center maintains a central repository of 325,000 names of alleged international terrorism suspects or people who aid them, a number that has more than quadrupled since the fall of 2003, according to counterterrorism officials.
The list kept by the National Counterterrorism Center – created in 2004 to be the primary U.S. terrorism intelligence agency – contains a far greater number of international terrorist suspects and associated names in a single government database than has previously been disclosed.
The keeping of large lists of “suspects” is also part of the Hoover heritage. The Custodial Detention List was established in the early 1940s, abolished by Attorney General Francis Biddle in 1943, and immediately re-invented by Hoover as the Security Index, which was maintained through the early 1970s, when it was re-named as the Administrative Index. At each stage in the game, there were subsidiary indices—such as the Communist Index, the Reserve Index and the Agitator Index—less well-known to the Attorney General and Congressional oversight committees. The 1976 Congressional report states that
By early 1951, the total had increased to 13,901 names [on the Security Index] as the result of an FBI decision after the outbreak of the Korean War to broaden “the basis for inclusion in the Security Index to include alI active members of the Communist Party.” The size of the Communist Index, as contrasted with the Security Index, was indicated by the figures from the New York field office which had 2,897 names on the Security Index and 42,000 names on the Communist Index. Since the Communist Index was based on “allegations of Communist activity,” it was “a measure of investigations performed.” If this proportion applied “throughout the field,” as the FBI memorandum suggested, then the Communist Indexes in the field offices contained over 200,000 names.
The Bush administration says we should take some comfort in knowing that US citizens comprise “only a very, very small fraction” of the 325,00 names in the National Counterterrorism Center’s central repository. “The vast majority are non-U.S. persons and do not live in the U.S.,” a Bush administration official said.
The comments of ACLU legislative counsel for privacy rights, Timothy Sparapani, are more to the point:
We have lists that are having baby lists at this point, they’re spawning faster than rabbits…. If we have over 300,000 known terrorists who want to do this country harm, we’ve got a much bigger problem than deciding which names go on which list. But I highly doubt that is the case.
The existence of these over-swollen lists is evidence of what the new, Halliburton-built detention centers are intended for. The development of an infrastructure for mass detentions does not come out of the blue. It has long been a desired power of the federal law enforcement. Even in 1974, after many of these earlier programs came to light and the Attorney General demanded more precise “guidelines” for how security lists would be maintained, the 1976 Congressional report concluded that “the broad claims of power in the hands of the Executive branch could readily permit a return to the vague and overbroad domestic intelligence policies of the past.”
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
Ten years ago, Kenneth was a young college student, a music lover, and recent father. Born in Austin, Texas, he spent his high school years working for several small record companies in the area. In 1995 he began his first year at St. Phillips College majoring in sociology, and less than a year later, in May of ‘96, he started his own label, Tribulation Records. Kenneth had a bright future ahead of him, no doubt.
Kenneth never had a gun in his hand, never saw, let alone aimed at LaHood, and never he pulled the trigger. Even the prosecution admits this. And he did not know anyone was going to be shot that night.
In Connecticut, Delaware, Iowa, South Dakota and Utah, if a prisoner will not voluntarily leave his cell when ordered to do so, officers may bring a trained attack dog to the cell front to terrify the prisoner into compliance. If the prisoner still refuses, the dog is let into the cell to bite the prisoner. While the prisoner tries to fend off the dog, correctional officers place restraints on him and then remove him from the cell.
“We know of no other country in the world where officers use attack dogs to remove prisoners from their cells,” said Fellner. “State prison officials in these five states should adopt the more humane methods that their colleagues across the country already use.”
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