Hungry Blues

Yesterday (Tuesday) morning I received an email message from Verizon Wireless, offering me a "Wory Free Guarantee" with new "exclusive benefits," including "FREE Back-Up Protection:"

• Never worry about losing your phone's contact list.
• Automatically retain a copy of your saved phone numbers to a secure web site.
• Available if you lose or upgrade to a new phone.

The thought of Verizon storing my cell phone data does not exactly ease my mind, however. Onnesha Roychoudhuri reports:

When USA Today published an article on May 11 alleging that the National Security Agency (NSA) had teamed up with major telecommunications companies to obtain access to Americans' communication records, [Doug] Cowie sent an e-mail to Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg, asking if the company was taking part in this program. After ambiguous responses from Verizon, Cowie filed a complaint with the Maine PUC [Public Utility Commission]. According to Cowie, the PUC is supposed to determine whether the complaint has merit and if it does, it 's supposed to open an investigation and have a hearing." ... After two months of silence, the PUC finally acted, asking Verizon to swear under oath to the veracity of a May press release the company issued in response to the USA Today allegations.

That release claimed that Verizon was not providing records to the government, but was ambiguous enough to leave room for doubt. A deadline was set for Verizon to respond and about an hour after the deadline passed, a response was received - a Justice Department announcement that it was suing the state of Maine.

The department invoked the state secrets privilege and claimed that for Verizon to even affirm that their previous statement was true would endanger the country. That's ridiculous, says Cowie. "[If] Verizon's public statements had classified information in them, they would have gone to jail."

Minutes after receiving notice of the Justice Department suit, Verizon submitted their filing, which stated that it could not verify its previous press statement because of the lawsuit that had just been announced. At that point, the Maine Civil Liberties Union (MCLU) got involved. The MCLU maintains that the Justice Department has no legal basis to sue the state of Maine for enforcing state law. Shenna Bellows, executive director of the MCLU, says that the department's claim that forcing Verizon to verify its previous statements would threaten national security "doesn't pass the straight-face test."

The Justice Department has sued four other states that launched similar inquiries: Missouri, Connecticut, Vermont and New Jersey - where the DoJ sued the attorney general for subpoenaing telecommunications companies within the state.

Is Verizon offering to keep my cell phone data safe, or has the wireless phone company launched a campaign to collect my user information for the NSA?

Verizon Wireless stands behind me, and the Justice Department stands behind Verizon.

I feel less worried already.

What's a lame duck president to do when he looses both houses of Congress to the opposition party in mid-term elections? Learn to play a little nicer? Cultivate a spirit of cooperation and bipartisanship?

Well, no.

Bush's Iraq Study Group recommends he redouble his efforts to "win" the war: commit 20,000 new troops and "lower the goals, forget about the democracy crap, put more resources in, do it." Winning the war is a must if the Republicans want to regain the White House and take back some seats in Congress in 2008.

The other thing the Republicans must do is recapture its racist base, which seems to have lost faith in Bush's war, along with the rest of the US voters.

Re-enter Trent Lott.

Take it away Ze Frank:

While the Democrats are busy pickin' out drapes and arguin' about who's the prettiest girl at the ball, Republicans are back on the move.

At a recent speech, Presidential hopeful John McCain said the Republicans had lost the mid-term elections because they abandoned their principles.

Time to get back to basics.

In a Senate shuffle-de boogle-de, Trent Lott . . . was chosen for the Minority Whip, the second in command for the GOP.

Senator Lamar Alexander, who was was also up for that job, said that, "this proves that the U.S. Senate, like the American public, likes a come-back story."

It is a sweet little story, like Cinderella, but with racism.

Four years ago, Senator Lott was forced to resign from his Senate Republican leadership after a speech he gave at Senator Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday party.

Lott said:

I want to say this about my state. When Strom Thurmond ran for president we voted for him. We're proud of it, and if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either.

During that campaign, Strom Thurmand ran on a racial segregation platform, and Lott's remarks were widely considered - uh - insensitive. Uh - stoopid. It was "out of context."

Context, however, crept up on him by his involvement in groups like the Council of Conservative Citizens - sorta like the Boy Scouts, you know: sit around the fire and say things like:

Each one of the three major races plays a distinct role in history: the Whites were the creator of civilization, the Yellows its sustainers and copyists, the Blacks its destroyers. . . .

Start today, fellow white Americans: look at the faces around you. Find the faces like yours and see them as your brothers and sisters. Find the fair-skinned babies and see them as your children.

To be clear, those aren't Trent Lott quotes, those are Council of Conservative Citizen quotes, but, eh, he hangs [with them].

After four years of being the ugly step-daughter of the Republican movement, Lott's feets have once again found the pretty slipper that fits.

The above is a slightly edited transcript from the video, which is much funnier to watch than it is to read:

Like many, I have been haunted and disturbed by news of Alyssa Peterson's suicide.

While there may have been specific abuses that pushed Alyssa Peterson over the edge after she witnessed them or was ordered to participate in them, US torture of detainees is more than the sum of a set of abusive interrogation techniques. The abuses occur in an environment which may be as devastating as any of the events that occur during interrogations.

1.

Since Kevin Elston's initial report about Army specialist Alyssa Peterson's suicide over her participation in military interrogations in Iraq, more information has come out about this tragedy.

Kevin Elston . . . did a report for his station KNAU this week. It contained the following passages.

The investigative report states that a sergeant and team leader both 'detailed the aversion she had towards applying the interrogation methods to detainees.' Peterson's first sergeant, identified as James D. Hamilton, told investigators, 'It was hard for her to be aggressive to prisoners/detainees, as she felt that we were cruel to them,' the report states. . . .

She avoided eating with her interrogation team and spent time reading at her desk when she did not have other assignments. No one in the unit reported signs of impending suicide.

On the evening of Sept. 15, 2003, she got off work at about 9 p.m. and was not seen again that night. According to the documents, the company executive officer heard two gunshots at about 9:30 p.m. but did not investigate.

At 9 the next morning, an aircraft passing over the nearby landing zone reported seeing Peterson's body in a grassy field next to her service rifle. Documents disclosed that she had two gunshot wounds - her weapon apparently had been set on burst - beneath her chin."

We don't know what interrogation techniques were being used at the Tal-Afar air base because, according to army officials, all records of the practices from September 2003 have been destroyed. Yet Editor & Publisher's Greg Mitchell has turned up some further hints at what might have been at play. Mitchell recently interviewed Kayla Williams, who served in the same battalion in Iraq at the same time as Peterson. Combining his own interview with Kayla Williams' own written account and previous interviews with others, Mitchell pieced together the following picture:

There were prisoners that were burned with lit cigarettes. . . . They stripped prisoners naked and then removed their blindfolds, so that I was the first thing they saw. And, then, we were supposed to mock them and degrade their manhood. And it really didn't seem to make a lot of sense to me. I didn't know if this was standard. But it did not seem to work. And it really made me feel like we were losing that crucial moral higher ground, and we weren't behaving in the way that Americans are supposed to behave.

As soon as that day ended, after a couple of these sessions, she told a superior she would never do it again.

In another CNN interview, on Oct. 8, 2005, she explained:

I sat through it at the time. But after it was over I did approach the non-commissioned officer in charge and told him I think you may be violating the Geneva Conventions. . . . He said he knew and I said I wouldn't participate again and he respected that, but I was really, really stunned and struggled a lot with whether or not I should do anything about it because I don't know whether or not it's appropriate technique.

2.

"I think you may be violating the Geneva Conventions." With Kayla Williams' realization must come other realizations. “Are we going to hold these people forever?,” asked Michael Scheuer, former CIA counter-terrorism expert, who helped start the practice of extraordinary rendtition in the mid-90s (under Clinton).

Once a detainee’s rights have been violated, he says, “you absolutely can’t” reinstate him into the court system. “You can’t kill him, either,” he added. “All we’ve done is create a nightmare.”

Scheuer is alluding to past CIA intelligence operations which were not subject to public scrutiny and were not complicated by competing law enforcement objectives of gathering evidence for prosecutions of terrorists. Alfred McCoy explains:

As we slide down the slippery slope to torture in general, we should also realize that there is a chasm at the bottom called extrajudicial execution. . . . The ideal solution to this conundrum from an agency perspective is pump and dump, as in Vietnam—pump the terrorists for information, and then dump the bodies. . . . [T]he CIA’s Phoenix program produced, by the agency’s own count, over 20,000 extrajudicial killings.

Thus the Defense Department's assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, Cully Stimson's, recent statement that 300+ detainees at Guantanamo "could be held for the duration of their lives." Whether secretly executed or held without legal recourse, access to family or a meaningful existence, these detainees are the human refuse of the so-called "War on Terror."

The environment is as devastating as the individual practices. The abuses and acts of torture are horrific in and of themselves---enough, I believe, to severely traumatize those who witness them. But the broader consequences of the individual abuses---mass, indefinite detention and abuse of people not charged with any particular crime---is also devastating.

Alyssa Peterson attempted to stop associating with her fellow interrogators, refusing to eat with them. But she also avoided participating in the life of the Tel-Afar air base altogether, spending her time "reading at her desk when she did not have other assignments."

Was it a particular incident in an interrogation room? Or was it the stench of humanity left to rot, which pervaded every corner of the air base, from which Alyssa Peterson concluded there was no escape?

RELATED READING (Torture Notes II)

• Detainees' Attorneys Ask Court to Allow Challenges
• In limbo: Cases are few against Gitmo detainees
• Gitmo interrogations spark battle over tactics
• Can the ‘20th hijacker’ of Sept. 11 stand trial?
• NO-HEARING HEARINGS: CSRT: THE MODERN HABEAS CORPUS? [PDF]
  An Analysis of the Proceedings of the Government's Combatant Status Review Tribunals at Guantanamo
• Torture Notes (I)

Who are the Angola 3? Here's a brief overview:

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.

(More)

That's the short version of the bad news. The good news is that after nearly three decades in solitary confinement, things are looking up for Herman Wallace.

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.

It's been a while since I've posted one of these...

Billie Holiday - Embraceable You

Big Star - Thank You Friends

Adrian Belew - Drive

Elliott Smith - No Name No. 5

Randy Weston - Berkshire Blues

Paul Simon - Sure Don't Feel Like Love

Ella Fitzgerald - People Will Say We're In Love (w/Ellis Larkins!)

Meade Lux Lewis - Jada

Robert Fripp - Häaden Two

Bourbon Princess - Lovesick

Pete Seeger's Vietnam era song is no less current today.

For a personal tribute to the veteran in my family, see Winter. 1969.

What do you say after bad men die?

Ex-Imperial Wizard Bowers Dies in Prison

By HOLBROOK MOHR Associated Press Writer
November 5, 2006, 9:04 PM EST

JACKSON, Miss. -- Former Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard Samuel H. Bowers, who was convicted eight years ago of ordering the 1966 bombing death of a civil rights leader, died Sunday in a state penitentiary, officials said. He was 82.

He died of cardio pulmonary arrest, said Mississippi Department of Corrections spokeswoman Tara Booth.

Bowers was convicted in August 1998 of ordering the assassination of Vernon Dahmer Sr., a civil rights activist who had fought for black rights during Mississippi's turbulent struggle for racial equality. He was sentenced to life in prison.

"He was supposed to stay there until he died. I guess he fulfilled that," Dahmer's widow, Ellie Dahmer, told The Associated Press on Sunday. "He lived a lot longer than Vernon Dahmer did."

Booth said that the Klansman died at approximately 11:30 a.m. in the Mississippi State Penitentiary Hospital in Parchman, a sprawling prison carved out of the cotton and soybean fields in the impoverished Mississippi Delta.

Dahmer, who championed equal voting rights for blacks, died at the age of 58 after being fire-bombed outside his Hattiesburg-area home on Jan. 10, 1966. The attack came after Dahmer announced that residents could pay their poll taxes at his grocery store, which was next to his home. The home and store also were torched.

When the Dahmer family awoke to honking horns in the pre-dawn hours that January morning, two carloads of Klansmen were waiting outside. They firebombed Dahmer when he exited the home, according to court testimony during a four-day trial in Forrest County Circuit Court in 1998.

Dahmer was able keep the Klansmen at bay with a shotgun while his family fled, but flames had already seared his lungs and he died in his wife's arms about 12 hours later.

During the trial, prosecutors claimed Bowers ordered the attack after becoming enraged that Dahmer was trying to register blacks to vote....

Bowers had a history of violence and served a prior six-year sentence after being convicted in 1967 on federal charges of violating the civil rights of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner.

The three civil rights workers were stopped by Klansmen while in Mississippi in an effort to register black voters in 1964. They were beaten and shot and buried in an earthen dam. Bowers allegedly approved the killings as head of the KKK....

Dahmer's widow said Bowers' death brings little closure to a wound she has nursed for decades.

"It won't bring Vernon back," she said. "I lost a wonderful husband and my children lost a father. We lost a community leader. We lost a Christian man who saw good in people."

(Whole thing.)

There was a enough evidence to convict Bowers in 1967 on federal charges in the murders of Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman but supposedly not enough to indict him on state charges in 2005. That leaves nine living suspects in the murders of the three civil rights workers.

In addition to Edgar Ray Killen, who is now serving time on manslaughter charges, there was sufficient evidence to arrest and/or indict on federal charges related to the murders the following men in the 1960s, all still living:

Jimmy Arledge - presently living, Meridian, MS

Olen Burrage - presently living, Philadelphia, MS

James Thomas “Pete” Harris - presently living, Meridian, MS

Tommy Horne - presently living, Meridian, MS

Billy Wayne Posey - presently living, Meridian, MS

Jimmy Snowden - presently living, Hickory, MS

Jimmy Lee Townsend - presently living, Philadelphia, MS

Richard Willis - presently living, Noxapater, MS

I have a backlog of items that I'd have blogged already if I were less busy than I have been lately. Here, then, is an initial batch of these items.

¶ Today (Wednesday) came the tragic story of Army specialist Alyssa Peterson, 27, the third American woman to die in Iraq, back in 2003. Peterson's death was much publicized at the time, but relentless investigation by reporter Kevin Elston now reveals that she shot and killed herself after objecting to the torture of detainees.

“Peterson objected to the interrogation techniques used on prisoners. She refused to participate after only two nights working in the unit known as the cage. Army spokespersons for her unit have refused to describe the interrogation techniques Alyssa objected to. They say all records of those techniques have now been destroyed….”

She was was then assigned to the base gate, where she monitored Iraqi guards, and sent to suicide prevention training. “But on the night of September 15th, 2003, Army investigators concluded she shot and killed herself with her service rifle,” the documents disclose. . . .

Elston said that the documents also refer to a suicide note found on her body, revealing that she found it ironic that suicide prevention training had taught her how to commit suicide. He has now filed another FOIA request for a copy of the actual note.

¶ Alyssa Peterson's death conveys in a painfully personal way the effects of torture, beyond the most immediate consequences for the victims of psychologically and physically coercive interrogation techniques. Psychologist and interrogation ethics expert Jean Maria Arrigo describes the social costs of coercive interrogation in broader, analytical terms.

In her article "A Utilitarian Argument Against Torture Interrogation of Terrorists" (not available online), Arrigo argues that the more sophisticated the interrogation methods, the greater their toll on the society that practices them.

The use of sophisticated torture techniques by a trained staff entails ... problematic institutional arrangements ... : physician assistance; cutting edge, secret biomedical research for torture techniques unknown to the terrorist organization and tailored to the individual captive for swift effect; well trained torturers, quickly accessible at major locations; pre-arranged permission from the courts because of the urgency; rejection of independent monitoring due to security issues; and so on. These institutional arrangements will have to be in place, with all their unintended and accumulating consequences, however rarely terrorist suspects are tortured. Then the terrorists themselves must be detected while letting pass without torture a thousand other criminal suspects or dissidents, that is, avoiding a dragnet interrogation policy.

The moral error in reasoning from the ticking bomb scenario arises from weighing the harm to the prospective innocent victims against the harm to the guilty terrorist. Instead—even presuming the doubtful, long-term success of torture interrogation—the harm to innocent victims of the terrorist should be weighed against the breakdown of key social institutions and state-sponsored torture of many innocents. Stated most starkly, the damaging social consequences of a program of torture interrogation evolve from institutional dynamics that are independent of the original moral rationale.

(Science and Engineering Ethics, Volume 10, Issue 3, 2004 )

¶ The recent contortions by Bush supporters to justify and rationalize Dick Cheney's sanction of waterboarding are so ludicrous and offensive that they do not truly deserve comment. Yet it is always valuable to clear the stench of bull shit with some factual information.

Via the Project to Enforce the Geneva Conventions, Evan Wallach has released a draft version of his article "Drop by Drop: Forgetting The History of Water Torture in U.S. Courts" [pdf], which traces a long history of rulings by US courts that waterboarding is illegal under US law.

In trials, both before U.S. military commissions, and as a participant in the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) American judges or commissioners heard American prosecutors roundly condemn the practice as it was applied to American servicemen, and voted to convict the perpetrators.

These and other examples discussed by Wallach are highly significant since last month's passage by Congress of the military commissions act removes arbitration of possible US war crimes from the domain of international human rights law and places it, instead, in the US courts.

In tracing numerous past examples of US prosecutions of waterboarding in US courts and tribunals, Wallach also provides a disturbing collection of descriptions of the practice of waterboarding. Here, for example, is testimony from the 1946 prosecution of Sergeant-Major Chinsaku Yuki of the Kempentai for torture and murder of Philippine civilians.

Q: And then did he take you back to your room?
A: When Yuki could not get anything out of me he wanted the interpreter [to] place me down below and I was told by Yuki to take off all my clothes so what I did was to take off my clothes as ordered. I was ordered to lay on a bench and Yuki tied my feet, hands and neck to that bench lying with my face upward. After I was tied to the bench Yuki placed some cloth on my face and then with water from the faucet they poured on me until I became unconscious. He repeated that four or five times.
COL KEELEY: You mean he brought water and poured water down your throat?
A: No sir, on my face, until I became unconscious. We were lying that way with some cloth on my face and then Yuki poured water on my face continuously.
COL KEELEY: And you couldn’t breath?
A: No, I could not and so I for a time lost consciousness. I found my consciousness came back again and found Yuki was sitting on my stomach and then I vomited the water from my stomach and the consciousness came back again for me.
Q: Where did the water come out when he sat on your stomach?
A” From my mouth and all openings of my face....and then Yuki would repeat the same treatment and the same procedure to me until I became unconscious again.
Q: How many times did that happen?
A: Around four or five times from two o’clock up to four o’clock in the afternoon.When I was not able to endure his punishment which I received I told a lie to Yuki....I could not really show anything to Yuki because I was really lying just to stop the torture...

In case you missed it, earlier this week, FOX TV's Brian Kilmeade sneered at objections to waterboarding, saying you just "put a washcloth on them." Co-host Steve Doocy said "you don't dunk 'em in the water - you just kind of splash some water on 'em." Newshounds has the video. The Newshounds link also gets you video from a Current TV episode with Kaj Larsen, a former SERE trainee, subjecting himself to waterboarding by other former SERE trainees in order to bring to the public more information about what these tactics really are.

The on air waterboarding is in a staged environment, with mostly vapid commentary running concurrent to the footage. Larsen knows the interrogators will stop when he gives them the sign. It may be reality TV waterboarding, but it is still ten minutes of footage you may not be able to sit through. Be forwarned: it is disturbing.

Philadelphia, MS sure knows how to put on a party for the Confederacy.

Back in July, I noted that Philadelphia restored a statue of a Confederate soldier to the lawn of the Neshoba County Courthouse. This Saturday, Philadelphia will hold a special ceremony to dedicate the restored monument during the town's annual Autumnfest.

This year's Autumnfest festival will not only include music, food and art contests but also a special ceremony officially dedicating the newly restored Confederate monument on the courthouse lawn.

The dedication will take place at 10 a.m. on Saturday, Oct. 21 and will feature a bagpiper and a Civil War reenactment troop.

All other Autumnfest activities will stop during that time so the ceremony will not be interrupted, Arts Council Executive Director Sharon Deweese said.

Edward Sebesta recently wrote:

Neo-Confederate politics is a program of a separtist [sic] nationalism of a Confederate identified region with a Confederate civil religion.

This isn't a Council of Conservative Citizens barbecue. It is an official city-of-Philadelphia-sponsored celebration of separatist nationalism, a celebration of racism and slavery.

The Confederate Monument returned to the Neshoba County Courthouse this summer, just after the one year anniversary of the conviction of Edgar Ray Killen on manslaughter charges for the murders of James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman. At about the same time, Mississippi State Senator Gloria Williamson (D-Philadelpiha) began a public campaign with James E. Prince III (editor and publisher of the Neshoba Democrat) and others to bring a proposed Mississippi civil rights museum to Philadelphia.

"The Killen trial brought to the attention of everyone about the need to acknowledge our past rather than run from it," Williamson said.

"It made more people aware that we needed such a museum. It had a great deal to do with attention on the civil rights era and I suspect Neshoba County will be a lead character at the museum."

Following one of Killen's several failed attempts to get out of prison on an appeal bond, Susan Glisson, director of the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation at the University of Mississippi, said:

It's interesting ... Forty-one years ago the police department was involved in a conspiracy to murder these three young men. The fact that members of that same police department are now involved in putting Mr. Killen back in jail is indicative of how far this community has come.

Too many people are buying what Susan Glisson, Gloria Williamson, James Prince and others are selling as racial progress in Philadelphia.

In the past I've noted that while James Prince was calling for justice for Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman, he was actually more concerned about the feelings of a Klansman than he was about the feelings of Ben Chaney, brother of the one African American victim in that crime.

In fact, it seems everywhere you look, prominent whites who promote racial reconciliation and justice in Neshoba County have yet to truly divest themselves from white separatist nationalism. Take former Neshoba Democrat editor and publisher Stanley Dearman, widely credited with leading the way to the prosecution of Edgar Ray Killen: in 1989, to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Neshoba murders, he published an interview he did with Carolyn Goodman, mother of Andrew; in 2000, in his final editorial before he handed the Neshoba Democrat over to James Prince, Dearman wrote:

This is a case that never goes away for the reason that it has never been dealt with in the way it should have been. It’s time to bring a conclusion by applying the rule of law.

Yet Stanley Dearman is also a member of the Neshoba County Monument Restoration Committee, which raised the $13,500 that was needed to restore the monument to the Neshoba County Courthouse lawn. I wonder if Mr. Dearman will be speaking at the dedication this Saturday.

Dearman concluded his 2000 editorial saying, "Come hell or high water, it’s time for an accounting."

Amen, Mr. Dearman. Amen.

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 Prison Policy Initiative, which is the leading organization working to change how prisoners are counted in the US Census, announced last month that:

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."

By Larry Rubin

October 11, 2006

I'm heartbroken to tell you that Willie McCray succumbed to brain cancer early this morning at a hospital near his home in Yellow Springs, Ohio.

During SNCC's years of struggle in the South, he was always there when you needed him: bringing you supplies in the dead of night to avoid the police; driving you away from life-threatening situations--or into them when needed. He did what was necessary to make sure SNCC's work happened.

In many ways, McCray (nobody called him Willie) was Jim Forman's* get-it-done guy. He was the one who helped convince churches throughout the South to let us use their halls. He'd set up the room, make sure everybody was sufficiently fed, and see to it that the hall was left pristine so that the church group would let us use it again.

Most important, he'd make sure that Jim got to where he was supposed to be when he was supposed to be there--at least as much as this was possible.

McCray bubbled with enthusiasm, helping leaders recover their spirit so that they could continue to lead, and helping organizers overcome their fears so that they could help others overcome theirs.

McCray's enthusiasm for the Movement and Movement workers lasted his whole life. In recent years, at reunions throughout the South, he was the guy that most vigorously greeted and hugged everybody, making you feel that the Beloved Community was still alive after all.

McCray worked as the head of security at the National Afro-American Museum and Cultural Center, connected to Wilberforce College and Central State University in Wilberforce, Ohio. Most people visiting the museum probably didn't know that he himself had played an important, historic role. But a few years ago, the museum held a ceremony to honor him and I was privileged to be a presenter. McCray insisted that the ceremony concentrate more on the accomplishments of the Movement as a whole rather than on any one individual.

McCray's wife, Helen---also a Civil Rights hero---says that his most recent days were peaceful and happy. He visited with friends, listened to his favorite music, and spent only his last few days in a hospital. He was 64.

Larry Rubin was one of the few full-time white SNCC organizers. First in SW Georgia (1962-63) and then in Mississippi (1963-65). Now he is the Communications Director of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Council of Carpenters, an affiliate of the Union Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners---the carpenters' union.

[*James Forman was the Executive Secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee from 1961-66. See also Charles Cobb, Jr.'s tribute to Forman. ---BG]

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.”

Quote are from the HRW press release.

Report is available here.

My new article came out today in the Black Commentator. Here is the opening section:

The Black Commentator
September 21, 2006 - Issue 198
Who Killed Jimmie Lee Jackson?
by Benjamin Greenberg
Guest Commentator

Jimmie Lee Jackson did not live to see his grandfather, Cager Lee, finally receive a voting card in his early 80s at the Marion, Alabama Town Hall, August 20, 1965. The day came just two weeks after the Voting Rights Act had been signed into law by President Johnson. Congress might not have passed the law in 1965 without the pressure it felt as the whole world watched the spectacle of the Selma to Montgomery March five months earlier.

Jimmie Lee Jackson died on February 26, 1965 from injuries sustained a week prior, during the violent response by state and local police to a night time civil rights demonstration in Marion. His death was never properly investigated. No one was ever charged. He was twenty-six years old.

In 2005, Perry County District Attorney Michael Jackson reopened the Jimmie Lee Jackson murder investigation. At the end of August, responding to public pressure and a formal request from the District Attorney, Alabama Governor Bob Riley issued a $5000 reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction in the 1965 case. “The person responsible for this murder should be brought to justice,” Riley said.

Governor Riley’s public statement on Jimmie Lee Jackson was delivered by his press secretary, Jeff Emerson, as a recorded message on the answering machine of journalist Kenneth Mullinax. Mullinax published the Governor’s remarks in the Montgomery Advertiser on August 29. “The entire statement was maybe two sentences,” Mullinax wrote to me in an email. Emerson has not returned any of my repeated calls requesting a written statement from the Governor on Jimmie Lee Jackson.

Jimmie Lee Jackson’s death inspired a determined throng of activists to attempt the dangerous march from Selma to Montgomery. The marchers had originally planned to deliver Jackson in his coffin to Governor George Wallace at the capitol in Montgomery. Their march for Jimmie Lee Jackson became the march for voting rights, which won Cager Lee his voting card, but won no justice for his dead grandson.

For the next week, you can read the rest here for free.

UPDATE: "Who Killed Jimmie Lee Jackson" is now archived here, on the Hungry Blues site.