Guantánamo Is Not an Anomaly — Prisoners in the US Are Force-Fed Every Day May 6, 2013
Posted by rogerhollander in Civil Liberties, Criminal Justice, Human Rights, Torture.Tags: ann neumann, first amendment, force feeding, Guantanamo, human rights, hunger strike, inmate rights, prisoners rights, prisons, roger hollander, torture, william coleman
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Roger’s note: I am not one of those who believe that American “democracy” only began to crumble with George Bush. The problem goes back a long way; 1492 is an important date. The genocide of the First Nations peoples and the regime of the enslavement of Africans did not occur under the Bush presidency (although I have no doubt he would have been a champion of both disgraces). From the Philippines to all of Latin America to the Middle East, to Africa, to Vietnam, well … to the entire globe, American economic and military hegemony has left unspeakable misery in it wake. Having said all that, and having been aware of these realities all my adult life, I continue to be shocked by the impunity in which today’s American state and federal jurisdictions openly and proudly engage in torture. The United States a Christian nation? The United States a civilized nation? Don’t make me laugh.
Published on Monday, May 6, 2013 by Waging Nonviolence
by Ann Neumann
Guards from Camp 5 at Joint Task Force Guantanamo escort a detainee from his cell to a recreational facility within the camp. (Flickr/Kilho Park)
I know a hunger-striking prisoner who hasn’t eaten solid food in more than five years. He is being force-fed by the medical staff where he’s incarcerated. Starving himself, he told me during one of our biweekly phone calls last year, is the only way he has to exercise his first amendment rights and to protest his conviction. Not eating is his only available free speech act.
The prisoner has lost half his body weight and four teeth to malnutrition. He and his lawyer have gone to court to stop the force-feedings, but a judge ruled against him in March. If I asked you to guess where Coleman is being held, you’d likely say Guantánamo — “America’s offshore war-on-terror camp” — where a mass hunger strike of 100 prisoners has brought the ethics of force-feeding to American newspapers, if not American consciences. Twenty-five of those prisoners are now being manually fed with tubes.
But William Coleman is not at Guantánamo. He’s in Connecticut. The prison medical staff force-feeding him are on contract from the University of Connecticut, not the U.S. Navy. Guantánamo is not an anomaly. Prisoners — who are on U.S. soil and not an inaccessible island military base — are routinely and systematically force-fed every day.
The accounts of force-feeding coming out of Guantánamo, including Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel’s “Gitmo is Killing Me” in The New York Times two weeks ago, are consistent with how Coleman has described the process to me — and to the Supreme Court of Connecticut.
On Oct. 23, 2008, medical staff and corrections officers first strapped Coleman at four points to a vinyl medical table and snaked a rubber tube up his nose, down his throat and into his stomach. When the tube kinked, they thought his reaction to the pain was resistance and tied him across the chest with mesh straps. They reinserted the tube and Coleman gagged as they drained Ensure, a nutrient drink, into it. He continued to gag. He bled. He vomited. He felt violated, not medically treated. Coleman is still being force-fed; sometimes the staff put a semi-permanent tube up his nose, sometimes they don’t. They no longer strap him down. He knows the staff. They are, he says, following orders.
The fact that force feedings are being discussed in the context of Guantánamo is dangerously misleading; it obscures the routine use of feeding tubes in American prisons. Other recent feeding tube cases have taken place in Washington state, Utah, Illinois and Wisconsin — all prisoners who had the resources to contest their treatment in court. No sweeping study of force-feeding has been done, so statistics on usage don’t exist. Only three states have laws against force-feeding prisoners: Florida, Georgia and California, where a hunger strike in 2011 at a facility in Pelican Bay effectively caused a court examination of prison conditions. Just this week Leroy Dorsey, who sued New York state to have his force-feedings stopped, lost his case. “Force-feeding order did not violate inmate’s rights,” the Reuters headline reads.
No matter where force-feedings take place, whether in Guantánamo or Connecticut, they are considered torture by most of the world’s medical and governing bodies. As U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Rupert Coville said this week about tube usage, “If it’s perceived as torture or inhuman treatment — and it’s the case, it’s painful — then it is prohibited by international law.” At The Daily Beast, Kent Sepkowitz, a doctor, writes, “Without question, [force-feeding] is the most painful procedure doctors routinely inflict on conscious patients,” and calls it “barbaric.”
In 2005, when 142 Guantánamo detainees stopped eating, their subsequent force-feedings caused 263 international doctors to write an open letter in the medical journal The Lancet that denounced the practice and called on doctors to stop participating. They wrote, “Physicians do not have to agree with the prisoner, but they must respect their informed decision.”
To little effect, the American Medical Association condemned the force feedings in 2005, 2009 and again last week, saying that “every competent patient has the right to refuse medical intervention, including life-sustaining interventions.”
Yet most media outlets continue to portray feeding tube use as a “complex ethical debate.” It’s not. Competent prisoners go on hunger strike because they have something to say and no other way to say it. Prison officials choose not to hear — and silence them with tubes. In court documents, wardens cite two primary concerns: the health of the prisoner, whose well-being they are responsible for (and for whose “suicide” they could be blamed); and prison order, including disruption of facility routine, copycat hunger strikers, and low morale among corrections officers and staff.
According to Mara Silver, who wrote about prison hunger strikes for Stanford Law Review in 2005, there is scant evidence that hunger strikers disrupt prison order. In fact, she notes, wardens often aren’t required to show proof when challenged. Consistently, routinely, wardens are deferred to in these cases.
Last week The Chicago Tribune reported that President Obama, who has not yet fulfilled a campaign promise to close Guantánamo, had courts on his side:
Most U.S. judges who have examined forced feeding in prisons have concluded that the measure may violate the rights of inmates to control their own bodies and to privacy — rights rooted in the U.S. Constitution and in common law. But they have found that the needs of operating a prison are more important.
Prisoners’ rights activists have long acknowledged courts’ reluctance to reconsider application of common law and constitutional rights to those inside. This status quo works so long as it is supported by public opinion — or public ignorance of the practice.
Hunger strikes have the power to change public opinion. This might be why the warden of Coleman’s prison has refused my request for a visit — and that of any other journalist. As the warden put it in a brief letter, they think my presence might “exacerbate” the inmate’s condition or “contribute to his detriment.” Or, perhaps, bring attention to Coleman’s case. So long as force-feeding is considered an exceptional practice, applied to less than two dozen men from foreign countries, and on foreign soil, the public and the medical community can remain ignorant of the torture within our growing domestic prison industry.
For an article on William Coleman that appeared in Guernica magazine in January, I spoke with American bioethicist Jacob Appel, who has written extensively about Coleman and feeding-tube usage in U.S. prisons. The public discourse about Guantánamo, Appel told me, had falsely assumed that torture and abuse are an exception rather than the general rule. Guantánamo, he said, “was presented as … an extraordinary set of circumstances, not an outflow of American law.”
Stand Up for Julian Assange January 29, 2013
Posted by rogerhollander in Civil Liberties, Human Rights.Tags: bradley manning, Criminal Justice, first amendment, human rights, julian assange, mairead macguire, political prisoner, roger hollander, swedish government, wikileaks
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Last month, on December 13th, 2012, I visited Julian Assange, Australian founder and editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, in the Ecuadorian embassy, in Knightsbridge, London. 
It’s been seven months now since Julian Assange entered the Ecuadorian embassy and was given political asylum. He entered the embassy after the British Courts shamefully refused his appeal against extradition to Sweden where he is wanted for questioning about sexual molestation (no criminal charges have been made against him). Julian Assange has said he is willing to answer questions in the U.K. relating to accusations against him, or alternatively, to go to Sweden, provided that the Swedish government guarantee he will not be extradited to the U.S. where plans are being made to try him for conspiracy to commit espionage. The Swedish Government refuses to give such assurances.
Mr. Assange is right to be concerned about the dangers of extradition to U.S. The American media has reported that the U.S. Justice Department and the Pentagon have been conducting a criminal investigation into “whether WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange violated criminal laws in the group’s release of government documents, and should face charges under the espionage act.”
Mr. Assange’s only crime is that he embarrassed the U.S. and other powerful governments with WikiLeaks’ release of thousands of U.S. state department cables and video footage of the 2007 incident with an apache helicopter in which the U.S. military appear to have deliberately killed civilians, including two Reuters employees. These revelations demonstrate crimes against humanity by the United States.
For this truth-telling, he has inherited the wrath of the U.S. government, and has been targeted in a most vindictive way – as has American soldier, Pt. Bradley Manning, currently undergoing a military Court hearing for allegedly leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks. Pt. Bradley Manning has been subjected, according to formal U.N. investigation, to “cruel and inhuman treatment” while being held in solitary confinement in a U.S. prison. In effect, the American government has admitted to the torture of Pt. Bradley Manning, one of their own soldiers.
However, even if the Swedish authorities decide not to charge Julian Assange, the U.S. will probably demand that the British government extradite Assange from Britain to the U.S., to face a Grand Jury indictment. (The U.S. Grand Jury has been sitting for 16 months and it is believed to have reached a verdict to indict Julian Assange and has a sealed indictment ready to unseal at the most beneficial time to the US. The U.S. Grand Jury system is a flawed, unjust legal process, consisting of four prosecutors with defense evidence is allowed. There is no judge and a jury pool is drawn from Alexandria, Virginia, which has the highest percentage of military contractor families in the U.S.)
When I met Julian Assange, I was struck by his bright, intelligent and compassionate mind, and glad to see that in spite of all the persecution and abuse of his human rights, he is in good spirits and good health. For seven months now, he has been confined indoors with no possibility of even five minutes outside in the fresh air, which is a basic right for all political prisoners. If he tried to go outside, he would be immediately arrested by the many British police outside the embassy, and extradited to Sweden or the U.S. (The cost to maintain this police force outside the Embassy is some £11,000 per day).
Unlike most political prisoners, he has no idea how long his virtual imprisonment in the embassy will last–6 more months or 6 years. The diplomatic standoff continues. This is indeed cruel, inhumane and mental torture. His only crime was to tell the truth and bring transparency to the illegal acts of the U.S. Government and its allies around the world.
I believe the U.K., Swedish and U.S. governments are all complicit in the mental torture of Julian Assange, and I appeal to the Australian government, human rights defenders, brave media, and people who love truth and freedom around the world to stand up for Julian Assange and his human rights, and the assurance that he get the chance to answer all accusations against him in the U.K. or Sweden without being extradited to U.S., where he could meet the same “cruel and inhuman treatment” as Pt. Bradley Manning has suffered.
The least we can do is raise our voices to protect Julian Assange–and Bradley Manning–who have made such brave attempts, at the cost of their own freedom, to expose war crimes and defend freedom and democracy.
Mairead Corrigan Maguire won the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize for her work for peace in Northern Ireland. Her book, The Vision of Peace (edited by John Dear, with a foreword by Desmond Tutu and a preface by the Dalai Lama) is available from www.wipfandstock.com. She lives in Belfast, Northern Ireland. See: www.peacepeople.com
Obama fights ban on indefinite detention of Americans August 8, 2012
Posted by rogerhollander in Barack Obama, Civil Liberties, Constitution, Criminal Justice.Tags: chris hedges, civil liberties, Court, fifth amendment, first amendment, habeas corpus, indefinite detention, law, leon panetta, ndaa, Obama, roger hollander, terrorists, USA, war on terror
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(AFP Photo / Paul J. Richards)
Roger’s note: The phrase “lock ‘em up and throw away the key” used to be used jokingly. It is no joke what Obama is doing. This president, who is reputed to be a constitutional scholar, is systematically tramping over the constitution and what is perhaps the most important and precious civil and legal protections, habeas corpus. Imagine how this precedent will be used under some of the Republican nut cases who are likely to be future presidents. Frightening.
www.rt.com, August 7, 2012
The White House has filed an appeal in hopes of reversing a federal judge’s ruling that bans the indefinite military detention of Americans because attorneys for the president say they are justified to imprison alleged terrorists without charge.
Manhattan federal court Judge Katherine Forrest ruled in May that the indefinite detention provisions signed into law late last year by US President Barack Obama failed to “pass constitutional muster” and ordered a temporary injunction to keep the military from locking up any person, American or other, over allegations of terrorist ties. On Monday, however, federal prosecutors representing President Obama and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta filed a claim with the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals in hopes of eliminating that ban.
The plaintiffs “cannot point to a single example of the military’s detaining anyone for engaging in conduct even remotely similar to the type of expressive activities they allege could lead to detention,” Obama’s attorneys insist. With that, the White House is arguing that as long as the indefinite detention law hasn’t be enforced yet, there is no reason for a judge to invalidate it.
Reuters reports this week that the government believes they are justified to have the authorization to lock alleged belligerents up indefinitely because cases involving militants directly aligned against the good of the US government warrants such punishment. Separate from Judge Forrest’s injunction, nine states have attempted to, at least in part, remove themselves from the indefinite detention provisions of included in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012, or NDAA.
In section 1021 of the NDAA, the president’s authority to hold a terrorism suspect “without trial, until the end of the hostilities” is reaffirmed by Congress. Despite an accompanying signing statement voicing his opposition to that provision, President Obama quietly inked his name to the NDAA on December 31, 2011. In May, however, a group of plaintiffs including notable journalists and civil liberty proponents challenged section 1021 in court, leading to Just Forrest to find it unconstitutional one month later.
“There is a strong public interest in protecting rights guaranteed by the First Amendment,” Forrest wrote in her 68-page ruling. “There is also a strong public interest in ensuring that due process rights guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment are protected by ensuring that ordinary citizens are able to understand the scope of conduct that could subject them to indefinite military detention.”
At the time Just Forrest made her injunction, attorney Carl Mayer told RT on behalf of the plaintiffs that, although he expected the White House to appeal, “It may not be in their best interest.”
“[T]here are so many people from all sides of the political spectrum opposed to this law that they ought to just say, ‘We’re not going to appeal,’” Mayer said. “The NDAA cannot be used to pick up Americans in a proverbial black van or in any other way that the administration might decide to try to get people into the military justice system. It means that the government is foreclosed now from engaging in this type of action against the civil liberties of Americans.”
The original plaintiffs, who include Pulitzer Prize-winner Chris Hedges, have asked Just Forrest to make her injunction permanent. Oral arguments in the case are expected to begin this week.
Anaheim fights back against outrageous police killing July 24, 2012
Posted by rogerhollander in California, Civil Liberties, Criminal Justice.Tags: anaheim, anaheim police, answer coalition, cviil liberties, first amendment, manuel diaz, police abuse, police brutality, protest, roger hollander
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Roger’s note: watch the video from beginning to end (the link is in the second paragraph). Among other things you will see the police unleash a vicious police dog, who attacks a babe in arms. Unfortunately, what we are seeing here is not atypical. Police forces around the nation have been brutalizing peaceful demonstrators with unprecedented degrees of violence since the beginning of the Occupy movement. Repression against Americans and Canadians who are exercising their right to demonstrate against racism, war, social injustice, etc. has become the unofficial policy in our so-called democracies.
On Saturday, July 21, Anaheim police shot and killed Manuel Diaz. According to the OC Register, “A 17-year-old who lives in the neighborhood said she saw the shooting from about 20 feet away. She said Diaz had his back to the officer and was shot in the buttocks area. Diaz went down on his knees, and she said he was struck by another bullet in the head. The other officer handcuffed Diaz, who by then was on the ground and not moving, she added.’They searched his pockets, and there was a hole in his head, and I saw blood on his face,’ she said.”
Witnesses say Manuel Diaz was simply hanging out when police began harassing him. In response to the killing, friends and neighbors began gathering in their front lawns. Then, without warning, Anaheim police began firing rubber bullets, beanbag shotguns, and pepper-spray bullets indiscriminately into the crowd which included children–even unleashing a police attack dog on a woman holding a child. In the harrowing video, you can clearly see baby strollers and toddlers in the line of fire.
In response to the killing, people immediately came from the area to protest. On Sunday, a large group picketed outside the Anaheim Police Station where the police were holding a press conference about the killing. As the protest grew, demonstrators, who were led by victims of police abuse (including young children), held a protest inside the police station.
As the community continued to mobilize, the Anaheim police then killed another resident on Sunday night. Witnesses say the victim was already handcuffed when he was shot. Another spontaneous demonstration continued until about 4am.
As the situation develops, the ANSWER Coalition will continue to be on the ground supporting the community in their struggle for justice. History shows us that there is no accountability or justice unless the people fight for it. The community will continue to mobilize in order to hold the killer cops and police department accountable.
How you can help:
- Help pack the Anaheim City Council meeting Tuesday, July 24 at 200 South Anaheim Boulevard, Anaheim, CA 92805. Picket starts at 4pm, meeting begins at 5pm.
- Be sure to attend next Saturday’s protestagainst Downey police for the killing of Mike Nida, another victim of police violence.
- Make a donation to help support the fight for justice.
ANSWER LA has been organizing against police brutality in southern California for years in response to the scourge of police violence directed at working-class communities.
Assange’s Last Stand? July 7, 2012
Posted by rogerhollander in Civil Liberties, Democracy, Media.Tags: bradley manning, embedded media, first amendment, journalism, julian assange, justin raimondo, Media, Rafael Correa, wikileaks
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Roger’s note: this is the most incisive analysis I have come across on the Assange/Wikileaks drama, albeit pessimistic with respect to the chance of Assange surviving the US vendetta.
By Justin Raimondo (about the author)
If there was ever a clear-cut case of good versus evil, then surely it is the contest between Julian Assange and most of the world’s governments. They hate him because he exposed their lies, their manipulations, and their routine violations of the most elementary rules of human decency. By publishing virtually the entire corpus of messages sent to and fro between Washington and their diplomats in the field, WikiLeaks has given us the true history of the world in modern times, or, at least, a good glimpse into its secret underside historians rarely uncover.
The release of the “Collateral Murder” video showing the shooting of journalists and innocents in Iraq by our cackling wise-cracking US military pilots was arguably the tipping point in the public relations battle, after which support for continued prosecution of the war even among the political elites dropped precipitously and never recovered. It was the 21st century equivalent of the infamous photo of a napalmed Vietnamese children running down a road, an icon of another unpopular and utterly immoral war. That’s why Bradley Manning, who probably supplied the video to WikiLeaks, has been held incommunicado for over a year, subjected to treatment the UN defines as torture. He will never get a fair trial in the US.
The US government would dearly love to get its hands on Assange: rumor has it a secret grand jury indictment has already been handed down. And they’ve devised a transparently brazen maneuver, which reeks of covert activities, in order to get him: accusations of rape have been made by two Swedish “feminists,” at least one of which — a former Swedish consular official in Havana — has ties to Cuban dissidents with CIA connections. I told their story here,here, and here, and won’t go into the rather gruesome details of the “case” against Assange, except to note that the narrative his accusers are spinning reads like something out of a very bad spy thriller, the kind with a sleazy coverand a lurid title. In short, just the sort of thing some overpaid CIA bureaucrat — the kind who’s writing a novel in his spare time — might come up with.
Once the Swedes get their politically-correct hands on Assange, and subject him to a show “trial,” he’ll be extradited forthwith to the US, where his lawyers claim he’s likely to be locked up in Guantanamo. Assange has wisely chosen not to surrender to British authorities — who have been a key cog in the frame-up machine all along — and has taken refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy, seeking political asylum in that country.
Granting the asylum request would be a purely symbolic gesture, and a futile one, as President Correa doubtless knows. Ecuador’s London embassy is surely the last stop in Assange’s nomadic wanderings: I for one predict he’ll never get off British soil. The moment he leaves the embassy and tries to board a plane he’ll be apprehended and hauled off to Sweden, and — after the “legal” preliminaries — promptly remanded to US custody. The US and its allies care nothing for diplomatic amenities, legal norms, or international law: they’ll brush the Ecuadorians aside so rudely and brazenly it’ll make Rafael Correa’s head spin.
After all, as Assange and WikiLeaks have revealed, these are the same people who wantonly executed Iraqi children by shooting them in the head, unleashed a killing squad in Afghanistan, and spied on UN diplomats on orders from Hillary Clinton. They are hardly above muscling the Ecuadorians aside and simply seizing him.
The legal and military firepower of three Western powers, the editorial boards of practically every major Western newspaper, all the big-time opinionators and would-be opinion “leaders” — a mighty assemblage is arrayed against this one man and his tiny under-funded organization. His very existence is a “security threat” to their corrupt and secretive regimes, and there was no way he was going to escape his fate. I think he knew that before he undertook his quest — and a quest it is, for knowledge, for real history, for redemption through technology. These causes are inextricably bound up with his personal fate, and the public response to it.
At this point, it would take someone like Ragnar Danneskjold or the Scarlet Pimpernel to guarantee Assange’s personal safety. In short, his fate as a martyr to the cause of a free society and a free internet is sealed. Yet the cause he is sacrificing his freedom to is far from defeated: indeed, the story of the persecution and pursuit of Julian Assange and the WikiLeaks organization, when it comes out — and it will — is going to expose how the Smear Brigade works behind the scenes, and how deeply the tentacles of government reach into our supposedly “free” media.
This whole revolting episode is made doubly disgusting by the sickening role the “mainstream” media has played in all this: they are a Greek chorus to their masters in Washington and London, hurling every epithet in the book at the WikiLeaks founder. Their particular hatred for Assange is clearly motivated by the good job he’s done in showing them up for the servile hacks they are and always have been: he’s done more real journalism than they’ve done in their entire combined careers. While they are safely “embedded” in the governmental womb, from where they do their “reporting” on America’s wars, Assange did the kind of digging they never knew how to do and wouldn’t ever have the nerve to do. Reduced to the role of court — as in royal court — stenographers, these frauds are nearly united in their condemnation of Assange, passing along uncritically the Smear Brigade’s narrative of Assange-the-traitor-pervert.
The British media has been the worst — people like this, and this, are the scum of the earth — but the Americans haven’t been that far behind. Assange has few defenders on the Sunday morning talking heads parade, and that’s because the “mainstream” media is just another branch of government, for all intents and purposes. They socialize with the officials they’re supposed to be covering, and they all belong to the same elite Washington-New York set: they go to the same parties, their kids go to the same schools, and it’s all very cozy. That’s what being part of a ruling class is all about — and this one is particularly self-conscious about exercising its prerogatives, and ruthlessly punishing outsiders who dare disobey The Rules.
Rule Number One is: never cross your source. And since the chief sources these “journalists” have are government officials, ex-government officials, or wannabe government officials, they can be counted on to be loyal servitors of power. Aside from those “journalists” directly on the government’s payroll — and don’t be naïve, there are more than a few –that’s one reason why the journalistic pack has been barking at Assange’s heels ever since he rose to prominence. Rather than ferreting out government secrets, the “mainstream” media in the English-speaking world see their role as mediators between the truth and government-created fiction. That’s the exact opposite of what a real journalist is supposed to do — but what do you expect when you’ve fallen into an inter-dimensional warp and find yourself in Bizarro World?
July 6, 2012
Posted by rogerhollander in California, Civil Liberties, Occupy Wall Street Movement.Tags: berkeley, berkeley police, civil liberties, first amendment, Homeland Security, nick sibilla, oakland police, ows, police, police brutality, roger hollander, uasi
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Roger’s note: As a UC Berkeley graduate, who as an undergraduate took part in free speech and anti-war protests, I maintain an abiding interest in the city and the campus. The militarization of American police forces is an ominous development, and it is no coincidence that Berkeley is in the vanguard given its long and proud history of non-violent first amendment protest. An imperial nation such as is the United States, which supports and spreads violence around the globe, will eventually see that violence erupt on its own shores. This is surely the case with what we are witnessing today. One is reminded of Malcolm X’s prophetic (in response to the Kennedy assassination): “the chickens have come home to roost.
By Nick Sibilla, People’s Blog for the Constitution | Report, Friday, 06 July 2012 11:00
The police departments for Berkeley, Albany, and the University of California system have partnered together to buy an armored personnel carrier (APC). Not quite a tank, the APC is a Lenco Ballistic Engineered Armoured Response Counter Attack Truck, better known as a BearCat.
If approved, the APC will be paid for by a $200,000 grant from the Department of Homeland Security’s Urban Areas Security Initiative (UASI). Created in 2003, UASI funds counterterrorism measures in “high-threat, high-density urban areas.” From FY 2003 to 2011, over $6.5 billion was appropriated for UASI. In FY 2012, UASI had funding worth $490 million.
However, David Muhlhausen, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, has criticized UASI: ”Currently, there appears to be a virtual absence of independent, objective evidence indicating the effectiveness of UASI…Increased spending does not equal increased effectiveness.” Daniel Borgstrom, a former US Marine now active in the Occupy movement, recently urged the Berkeley City Council to reject the APC and police militarization: “I’m asking, please stay out of this urban warfare stuff.”
Meanwhile, Berkeley Police Chief Michael Meehan praised the BearCat, calling it “a defensive resource” necessary to protect officers from being killed. But according to the Officer Down Memorial Page, which tracks the deaths of law enforcement officials, no officers from UC Berkeley or Albany have been killed in the line of duty and only two Berkeley police officers have ever been killed by gunfire. The last Berkeley police officer killed in the line of duty was in 1973. Furthermore, as Radley Balko observes at the Huffington Post:
We’re now about halfway through 2012, and this year is on pace to be the safest ever for America’s police officers…Fifty officers have died on duty so far this year, a 44-percent decrease from last year, according to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund (NLEOMF). More remarkably, 17 have died from gunfire, down 55 percent from last year. (21 died in traffic accidents, the remaining 12 in various other incidents.) If the second half of this year follows the first, fewer officers will have died on duty this year than in any year since 1944, a time when there were far, far fewer police officers.
In addition, there have been significant concerns about armored vehicles’ ability to violate civil liberties and increase police brutality. A spokesman for the UCPD insisted that the BearCat “is not going to be used for protests or crowd control…it’s nothing to be feared.”
However, police in nearby Alameda County (which includes Oakland) used a $323,000 grant from Homeland Security to buy an APC from Xe Services (formerly known as Blackwater). That APC was even used to suppress protests by the Occupy in May 2012. The Inter Press Service elaborates:
Locally, police militarisation was evident at the Nov. 9, 2011 Occupy Cal demonstration at UC Berkeley, where combat-gear clad police injured peaceful protesters with baton strikes, and on Oct. 25, 2011 in Oakland, when similarly armed police nearly killed a young former Marine when they fired a tear-gas canister that hit him in the head.
Due to mutual aid agreements, whereby law enforcement agencies can assist each other, the UCPD could share the APC with both the Berkeley and Albany police departments. The decision to renew mutual aid has previously been postponed, thanks to efforts by the Coalition for a Safe Berkeley, which is advised by the Bill of Rights Defense Committee.
As Emily Odgers noted earlier this year, turning police into soldiers has eroded the Constitution:
This clash between Occupy protesters and police highlighted a need to stand in support of the protection of First Amendment rights. In the past ten years, there has been a decay of constitutional freedoms in America and the only way to get them back is through cooperative grassroots movements.
This is not just an issue for Occupiers or other activists; the First Amendment applies to everyone and it is necessary that the rights described within it are preserved for all, if they are to be preserved for any.
For more information about efforts to defend constitutional rights in the Bay Area, contact the BORDC organizing team This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .
Francis Scott Key on trial July 4, 2012
Posted by rogerhollander in Civil Liberties, Constitution, History, Race, Racism.Tags: abolition, american history, civil liberties, first amendment, jefferson morley, property rights, quincy adams, Race, roger hollander, scott key, slavery, Star-Spangled Banner
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Roger’s note: The land of the free, and the home of the … slaves.
Wednesday, Jul 4, 2012 06:30 AM EST
Land of the free? Remembering when the man who penned “The Star-Spangled Banner” defended slavery
Francis Scott Key (Credit: Wikipedia)
In the final two days of U.S. v. Reuben Crandall, on April 25 and 26, 1836, Washington’s district attorney, Francis Scott Key, and defense attorney Richard Coxe addressed the jurors for the last time. The courtroom in City Hall in Judiciary Square was thronged with spectators. Congressmen jockeyed for seats along with national newspaper correspondents. The crowds had come to see Key’s case against the abolitionist movement. Just as the slaveholders’ representatives on Capitol Hill were noisily seeking a “gag rule” to prevent debate over slavery on the floor of Congress, so did Key, the famous author of “The Star Spangled Banner,” seek to silence those who would agitate for freedom on the streets of Washington City. In the trial of New York doctor Reuben Crandall, he hoped to defeat the antislavery men in the court of public opinion. The abolitionist, in turn, hoped to discredit Key, sneering about his hometown, “Land of the Free …. Home of the Oppressed.”
The debate between Key and Coxe crystallized how radical new ideas of rights introduced by the free people of color and their white allies in the early 1830s had galvanized popular thinking in America. These ideas divided Americans into two broad political tendencies that would endure into the 21st century. Key and Coxe were exemplars of what we now know as red and blue politics.
The blues of the 1830s were the liberals of the day, the opponents of slavery, concentrated in the Midwest and Northeast. They had a presence in Congress, led by former president John Quincy Adams, a formidable parliamentarian. They had a wealthy benefactor, New York businessman Arthur Tappan, who organized effective publicity campaigns. And they had made themselves felt in Washington City, thanks to the efforts of editor Ben Lundy, schoolmaster John Cook and others. They were so-called abolitionists and they brought three radical ideas into the realm of American politics:
1) Property rights are not unlimited;
2) American citizenship is open to people of any race;
3) The freedom to advocate both is essential
These strong ideals still animate the American liberal tradition nearly two centuries later. Like the anti-slavery men and women of yore, 21st century liberals believe that property rights can be limited for the common good; that American citizenship should be as inclusive as possible; and that freedom of expression is a prerequisite of a free society. Reuben Crandall’s defense attorney Richard Coxe was no abolitionist and he did not argue in court for Negro equality in U.S. v Crandall. But he did lay out a “true blue” case for freedom of expression to protect those who wanted to advance such ideas.
Key’s response was a classic conservative rebuttal. From the start Key denounced Coxe for even defending the advocates of Negro citizenship and those who questioned the slave owners’ expansive definition of property rights. Compared to Coxe, Key had a much narrower conception of freedom of speech. He argued that the antislavery publications could be suppressed in the name of public safety since they might incite violent rebellion. He defended a narrower conception of American citizenship — that it was reserved for the native-born and whites only. And he had a much more expansive understanding of property rights. White men did have a constitutional right to own property in people, Key insisted.
This general set of ideas still animates red American conservatism against the country’s liberal tendencies. It is true that conservatives no longer believe in chattel slavery as a social practice but they do retain an extreme definition of property rights (embodied in freedom from taxation and regulation); a narrower conception of citizenship (it is reserved for native-born Americans) and a belief that threats to public safety may justify limitations on civil liberties. In U.S. v. Crandall, the famous author of the Star-Spangled Banner argued the red agenda of the day: defending the white man’s property rights, scorning the idea of multiracial citizenship and urging the suppression of those who disagreed.
Richard Coxe spoke first in closing arguments. He was 43 years old and far less eloquent than his opponent. But 23 years of practicing law gave him an understated style that was easy to underestimate. Never, he said, had the performance of his professional duties aroused “feelings of more intense anxiety.” Never, he went on, had he felt a deeper interest in the outcome. The issues decided here, he told the jurors, “May be brought to bear upon each member of this community, and upon our children’s children …. Great principles are to be settled.”
As for himself, Coxe said he felt a sense of duty to “the principles of liberty and of the constitution.” He said that if any individual in the District of Columbia could, like Reuben Crandall, be arrested, have his personal papers seized, and his most confidential correspondence exposed to public gaze, “then I say, this District is no place for me.”
Coxe spoke of Reuben’s plight, arrested and charged, held for eight months and denounced before the community. Coxe wanted to make clear his position was very different than that of his friend Mr. Key.
“This process, thus illegally issued, thus illegally executed, has been justified by the District Attorney. He avows his participation in it, and avows himself ready, whenever required, to prove that it is lawful. “
Coxe wanted to interpose himself forcefully. “On the other hand, I pledge myself on all occasions, and whenever the question shall be presented for judicial decision, to brand it as tyrannical, oppressive, illegal, and unconstitutional.”
Coxe denounced Mr. Key’s case against Reuben Crandall. “It is, gentlemen, preposterous. It is monstrous,” he slashed. “It has no foundation in any principle of law — it can find no support in any dictate of reason. It is a reproach to our community — it is a slander upon our institutions, that an intelligent and highly accomplished individual, should, under such circumstances and upon such grounds, have suffered what has already been inflicted upon him.”
Then he looked to Reuben in the dock. “His books and papers were harmlessly reposing in his trunk and his office, neither injuring nor calculated to injure anyone. From this quiet repose, both have been snatched by the lawless violence which has characterized the proceedings against him: language imputed to him which he never uttered, and bruited forth to rouse into action, and to stimulate to deeds of ferocity, a ruthless mob.”
Coxe knew when to stop. He thanked the jury on behalf of his client. “I submit him and his fate with entire confidence into your hands,” he said. He sat down.
It was half past five o’clock and Judge Cranch called for the court to adjourn for the evening.
The next morning, Key summed up the U.S. government’s case against Reuben Crandall.
“I consider this one of the most important cases ever tried here,” he began. It presented a conflict of rights, he said: the white man’s property rights versus the free speech rights of an antislavery man who sought not only to deprive white men but also to degrade them.
“We are to give up our slaves — not for compensation — not gradually as we may be enabled to substitute other labour… but absolutely, unconditionally immediately,” the District Attorney said. “Nor is this all. They are to remain among us — to be admitted immediately to a full and equal participation in all civil and social privileges. Then, if we do not like our new condition, we can go away — and the friends of human rights and amalgamation can come and take our places.”
So the most important question facing the jurors, Key said, was whether the pamphlets seized from Crandall’s house were “libelous.”
“They declare that every law which sanctions slavery is null and void …” Key reminded them, “That we have no more rights over our slaves than they have over us. Does not this bring the constitution and the laws under which we live into contempt? Is it not a plain invitation to resist them?”
Implacable in his desire to see Crandall hanged, Key asked the jurors to understand the threat to their own honor.
“Are you willing, gentlemen, to abandon your country, to permit it to be taken from you, and occupied by the abolitionist, according to whose taste it is to associate and amalgamate with the negro? Or, gentlemen, on the other hand, are there laws in this community to defend you from the immediate abolitionist, who would open upon you the floodgates of such extensive wickedness and mischief?”
Key’s language would echo in American political rhetoric through the late 20th centuries, especially in the South. Anyone challenging the system of legal slavery (and later legal segregation) would be accused of wanting to associate and amalgamate with the negro. Key thought the prospect was appalling. In summing up, he waxed sarcastic against Crandall.
“If he is an innocent man, cruelly imprisoned under an illegal warrant, and these vile, calumnatory libels, are actually this innocent, persecuted gentlemen’s property — stolen from him — then gentlemen return him his property and let him go free.”
The district attorney’s last words quieted the courtroom.
“It is with you, gentlemen,” he said, “I ask of you but to do your conscientious duty. ”The jury went into a separate room to deliberate. The attorneys, the crowds, the clerks, the defendant could only wait and wonder. Could an antislavery man caught with a trunk full of incendiary sheets get a fair trial in Washington City? Would the jurors be persuaded by Coxe’s plea for freedom of speech? Or by Key’s case for suppressing the antislavery subversives in the name of white supremacy?
Less than three hours later, the jury foreman reappeared. The crowd quieted itself.
Judge Cranch asked the foreman for the verdict on Reuben Crandall.
“Not guilty!” he exclaimed.
Jefferson Morley is a staff writer for Salon in Washington and author of the forthcoming book, Snow-Storm in August: Washington City, Francis Scott Key, and the Forgotten Race Riot of 1835 (Nan Talese/Doubleday). More Jefferson Morley.
Atheist Clubs Spring Up In High Schools Across The Country With Help From The Secular Student Alliance July 1, 2012
Posted by rogerhollander in Uncategorized.Tags: atheism, Atheism In Schools, Atheist Club, Atheists Clubs, Education News, first amendment, High School Clubs, High School Students, religion, Religion In Schools, roger hollander, school prayer, School Religion, Secular Student Alliance
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Roger’s note: It never ceases to amaze me the mindless stupidity (I realize that is redundant, but somehow it fits) of the religious bigots, who insist that atheism, the quintessential anti-religion, is a religion. And the fascist-like intolerance of anyone who would dare to question their beliefs and authoritarianism, not to mention their blatant dishonesty. God (npi) help those students attempting to organize atheism clubs in the Bible belt. “That’s the beauty of America — that you don’t have to follow the same religion the majority does,” she said. Give it time.
Huffpost, June 30, 2012
With help from the Secular Student Alliance — a national organization of more than 300 college-based clubs for freethinking students — high school atheists clubs are springing up across the country, the Religion News Service reports.
JT Eberhard, director of SSA’s high school program, says he hopes that both atheist and religious students having clubs will help foster a dialogue.
“I also hope it will let the atheist students know that you can be an atheist and its okay,” Eberhard told Religion News Service. “You are still a good person. We want to say: Here is a place where you can feel that.”
There were about a dozen clubs of this ilk at the beginning of the 2011-12 academic year — a number that increased to 39 in 17 states by the start of summer break. The clubs are student-led, and SSA only provides information and guidance upon a student’s request.
Some clubs exist in states that have large numbers of people who claim no religious affiliation, such as New York, Washington and California. Others are located in more religion-centered states, with North Carolina, Alabama, Louisiana and Texas all claiming at least one high school with a club for atheists. Since January of this year, students representing 73 different high schools have requested “starter kits,” according to SSA.
Some students have no issue launching an atheist club assuming they meet their school’s criteria, which usually entails obtaining a faculty sponsor and demonstrating student interest.
Others are met with administrative resistance, like at Melbourne High School in Melbourne, Fla., where administrators rejected an atheist club on the basis that it was “too controversial.” Students at another Florida high school were told that no religious clubs were permitted, even though there was a school Christian club in existence. The principal of Houston’s La Porte High School denied students the use of the word “atheist” due to the fact “it could disrupt the educational process.”
In such instances, Eberhard usually intervenes, reminding administrators that the Equal Access Act grants students the right to form a club.
Earlier this month, Chelsea Stanton, a senior and atheist at Collingswood High School in New Jersey, also used the law to her advantage in defending her refusal to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance.
“That’s the beauty of America — that you don’t have to follow the same religion the majority does,” she said.
In Rhode Island, Cranston High School West student Jessica Ahlquist objected to a prayer banner the school had on display. The 16-year-old brought the case to court, receiving a January mandate for the school prayer banner to be brought down because it violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Ahlquist has also received a $40,000 scholarship fund from the American Humanist Association.
Ahlquist was also honored with the Humanist Pioneer Award at this year’s annual American Humanist Association in New Orleans, the Christian Post reported.
Obama DOJ Formally Accuses Journalist in Leak Case of Committing Crimes May 20, 2013
Posted by rogerhollander in Barack Obama, Media, Criminal Justice, Democracy, Civil Liberties.Tags: bradley mannin, Criminal Justice, first amendment, freedom of press, glenn greenwald, james rosen, journalism, julian asange, Media, obama doj, Richard Nixon, roger hollander, stephen kim, wikileaks
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Yet another serious escalation of the Obama administration’s attacks on press freedoms emerges
It is now well known that the Obama justice department has prosecuted more government leakers under the 1917 Espionage Act than all prior administrations combined – in fact, double the number of all such prior prosecutions. But as last week’s controversy over the DOJ’s pursuit of the phone records of AP reporters illustrated, this obsessive fixation in defense of secrecy also targets, and severely damages, journalists specifically and the newsgathering process in general.
New revelations emerged yesterday in the Washington Post that are perhaps the most extreme yet when it comes to the DOJ’s attacks on press freedoms. It involves the prosecution of State Department adviser Stephen Kim, a naturalized citizen from South Korea who was indicted in 2009 for allegedly telling Fox News’ chief Washington correspondent, James Rosen, that US intelligence believed North Korea would respond to additional UN sanctions with more nuclear tests – something Rosen then reported. Kim did not obtain unauthorized access to classified information, nor steal documents, nor sell secrets, nor pass them to an enemy of the US. Instead, the DOJ alleges that he merely communicated this innocuous information to a journalist – something done every day in Washington – and, for that, this arms expert and long-time government employee faces more than a decade in prison for “espionage.”
The focus of the Post’s report yesterday is that the DOJ’s surveillance of Rosen, the reporter, extended far beyond even what they did to AP reporters. The FBI tracked Rosen’s movements in and out of the State Department, traced the timing of his calls, and – most amazingly – obtained a search warrant to read two days worth of his emails, as well as all of his emails with Kim. In this case, said the Post, “investigators did more than obtain telephone records of a working journalist suspected of receiving the secret material.” It added that “court documents in the Kim case reveal how deeply investigators explored the private communications of a working journalist.”
But what makes this revelation particularly disturbing is that the DOJ, in order to get this search warrant, insisted that not only Kim, but also Rosen – the journalist – committed serious crimes. The DOJ specifically argued that by encouraging his source to disclose classified information – something investigative journalists do every day – Rosen himself broke the law. Describing an affidavit from FBI agent Reginald Reyes filed by the DOJ, the Post reports [emphasis added]:
Under US law, it is not illegal to publish classified information. That fact, along with the First Amendment’s guarantee of press freedoms, is what has prevented the US government from ever prosecuting journalists for reporting on what the US government does in secret. This newfound theory of the Obama DOJ – that a journalist can be guilty of crimes for “soliciting” the disclosure of classified information – is a means for circumventing those safeguards and criminalizing the act of investigative journalism itself. These latest revelations show that this is not just a theory but one put into practice, as the Obama DOJ submitted court documents accusing a journalist of committing crimes by doing this.
That same “solicitation” theory, as the New York Times reported back in 2011, is the one the Obama DOJ has been using to justify its ongoing criminal investigation of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange: that because Assange solicited or encouraged Manning to leak classified information, the US government can “charge [Assange] as a conspirator in the leak, not just as a passive recipient of the documents who then published them.” When that theory was first disclosed, I wrote that it would enable the criminalization of investigative journalism generally:
That’s what always made the establishment media’s silence (or even support) in the face of the criminal investigation of WikiLeaks so remarkable: it was so obvious from the start that the theories used there could easily be exploited to criminalize the acts of mainstream journalists. That’s why James Goodale, the New York Times’ general counsel during the paper’s historic press freedom fights with the Nixon administration, has been warning that “the biggest challenge to the press today is the threatened prosecution of WikiLeaks, and it’s absolutely frightening.”
Indeed, as Harvard Law Professor Yochai Benkler noted recently in the New Republic, when the judge presiding over Manning’s prosecution asked military lawyers if they would “have pressed the same charges if Manning had given the documents not to WikiLeaks but directly to the New York Times?”, the prosecutor answered simply: “Yes, ma’am.” It has long been clear that this WikiLeaks-as-criminals theory could and would be used to criminalize establishment media outlets which reported on that which the US government wanted concealed.
Now we know that the DOJ is doing exactly that: applying this theory to criminalize the acts of journalists who report on what the US government does in secret, even though there is no law that makes such reporting illegal and the First Amendment protects such conduct. Essentially accusing James Rosen of being an unindicted co-conspriator in these alleged crimes is a major escalation of the Obama DOJ’s already dangerous attacks on press freedom.
It is virtually impossible at this point to overstate the threat posed by the Obama DOJ to press freedoms. Back in 2006, Bush Attorney General Alberto Gonzales triggered a major controversy when he said that the New York Times could be prosecuted for having revealed the Top Secret information that the NSA was eavesdropping on the communications of Americans without warrants. That was at the same time that right-wing demagogues such Bill Bennett were calling for the prosecution of the NYT reporters who reported on the NSA program, as well as the Washington Post’s Dana Priest for having exposed the CIA black site network.
But despite those public threats, the Bush DOJ never went so far as to formally accuse journalists in court filings of committing crimes for reporting on classified information. Now the Obama DOJ has.
This week, the New Republic’s Molly Redden describes what I’ve heard many times over the past several years: national security reporters have had their ability to engage in journalism severely impeded by the Obama DOJ’s unprecedented attacks, and are operating in a climate of fear for both their sources and themselves. Redden quotes one of the nation’s best reporters, the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, this way:
Redden says that “the DOJ’s seizure of AP records will probably only exacerbate these problems.” That’s certainly true: as surveillance expert Julian Sanchez wrote in Mother Jones this week, there is ample evidence that the Obama DOJ’s seizure of the phone records of journalists extends far beyond the AP case. Recall, as well, that the New York Times’ Jim Risen is currently being pursued by the Obama DOJ, and conceivably faces prison if he refuses to reveal his source for a story he wrote about CIA incompetence in Iran. Said Risen:
If even the most protected journalists – those who work for the largest media outlets – are being targeted in this way, and are saying over and over that the Obama DOJ is preventing basic news gathering from taking place without fear, imagine the effect this all has on independent journalists who are much more vulnerable.
There is simply no defense for this behavior. Obama defenders such as Andrew Sullivan claim that this is all more complicated than media outrage suggests because of a necessary “trade-off” between press freedoms and security. So do Obama defenders believe that George Bush and Richard Nixon – who never prosecuted leakers like this or formally accused journalists of being criminals for reporting classified information – were excessively protective of press freedoms and insufficiently devoted to safeguarding secrecy? To ask that question is to mock it. Obama has gone so far beyond what every recent prior president has done in bolstering secrecy and criminalizing whistleblowing and leaks.
Goodale, the New York Times’ former general counsel, was interviewed by Democracy Now last week and said this:
That was before it was known that the Obama DOJ read James Rosen’s emails by formally labeling him in court an unindicted co-conspirator for the “crime” of reporting on classified information. This all just got a lot more dangerous.
UPDATE
Even journalists who are generally supportive of Obama – such as the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza – are reacting with fury over this latest revelation:
Lizza added:
The Daily Beast’s Eli Lake said this:
Any journalist who doesn’t erupt with serious outrage and protest over this ought never again use that title to describe themselves.
Glenn Greenwald is a columnist on civil liberties and US national security issues for the Guardian. A former constitutional lawyer, he was until 2012 a contributing writer at Salon. His most recent book is, With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful. His other books include: Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics, A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency, and How Would a Patriot Act? Defending American Values from a President Run Amok. He is the recipient of the first annual I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism.