Coming
in September
From AK Press
Featuring Essays by:
Edward Said, Robert Fisk, Michael Neumann, Shahid Alam, Alexander
Cockburn, Uri Avnery, Bill and Kathy Christison and More
Today's
Stories
August 14, 2003
Peter Phillips
Inside
Bohemian Grove: Where US Power Elites Party
Brian Cloughley
Charlie Wilson and Pakistan: the Strange Congressman Behind the
CIA's Most Expensive War
Linville and Ruder
Tyson
Strike Draws the Line
Jim Lobe
Bush Administration Divided Over Iran
Ramzy Baroud
Sharon Freezes the Road Map
Tom Turnipseed
Blowback in Iraq
Gary Leupp
Condi's
Speech: From Birgmingham to Baghdad, Imperialism's Freedom Ride
Website of the Day
Tony Benn's Greatest Hits
Recent
Stories
August 13, 2003
Joanne Mariner
A Wall of Separation Through the
Heart
Donald Worster
The Heavy Cost of Empire
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Elaine Cassel
Murderous Errors: Executing the Innocent
Ralph Nader
Make the Recall Count
Alexander Cockburn
Ted Honderich Hit with "Anti-Semitism" Slur
Website of the Day
Defending Yourself Against DirectTV Lawsuits: 9000 and Counting
August 12, 2003
William Blum
Myth
and Denial in the War on Terrorism
Ron Jacobs
Revisionist History: the Bush Administration, Civil Rights and
Iraq
Josh Frank
Dean's Constitutional Hang-Up
Wayne Madsen
What's a Fifth Columnist? Well, Someone Like Hitchens
Ray McGovern
Relax,
It Was All a Pack of Lies
Wendy Brinker
Hubris in the White House
Website of the Day
Black
Mustache
August
11, 2003
Douglas
Valentine
Homeland Security for Whom?
Mickey
Z.
Bush's Progress
Bill
Glahn
RIAA Watch: Meet the New Bitch, Same
as the Old
Elaine
Cassel
Indicting DNA
Dr. Mohammad
Omar Farooq
Civil Liberties and Uncivil Super-Patriotism
Uri
Avnery
Who Will Save Abu Mazen?
Website
of the Day
RIAA Subpoena Clearinghouse
August
9 / 10, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
California's Glorious Recall!
Saul
Landau
Bush and King Henry
Gary
Leupp
On Terrorism, Methodism, "Wahhabism"
and the Censored 9/11 Report
Paul de
Rooij
The Parade of the Body Bags
Michael
Egan
History and the Tragedy of American Diplomacy
Rob Eshelman
A Home of Our Own
Daoud
Kuttab
Life as an ID Card
Philip
Agee
Terror and Civil Society: Instruments of US Policy in Cuba
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Marc Racicot: Bush's Main Man
Walt Brasch
Schwarzenegger, "Hollyweird"
and the Rigtheous Right
Christopher
Brauchli
Bush, Bribery and Berlusconi
Josh Frank
Mean, Mean Howard Dean
Elaine
Cassel
Will the Death Penalty Ever Die?
Sean Carter
Total Recall
Poets'
Basement
Hamod, Engel, Albert
August
8, 2003
John
Chuckman
What the US Says Goes
Roberto
Barreto
Defend the Vieques 12!
Bruce Gagnon
Iraq War Emboldens Bush Space Plans
Elaine
Cassel
The Reign of John Ashcroft
Dave
Lindorff
Snoops Night Out
Website
of the Day
Zero Boy
August
7, 2003
M.
Shahid Alam
It the US a "Terrorist Magnet?"
Toni
Solo
Neo-liberal Nicaragua: a New Banana
Republic
Adam Lebowitz
Hiroshima Commemorated: the View from Japan
Hanan
Ashrawi
When the Bully Whines
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
Conscience Takes a Holiday
Jason
Leopold
Wolfowitz Lets Slip: Iraq Not Behind 9/11; No Ties to Al-Qaeda
Mike Kimaid
What's the Score?
Elaine
Cassel
The Smell of VICTORY: Ashcroft's Latest Stinkbomb
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
August 6, 2003
Steve
Higgs
Going to Jail for the Cause: It's Not
Easy Confronting King Coal
David
Krieger
Remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Robert
Fisk
The Ghosts of Uday and Qusay
Christopher
Brauchli
Bush's War on the National Forests
Elaine
Cassel
No Fly Lists
Stan
Goff
Military Equipment and Pneumonia
Hugh Sansom
An Open Letter to Nicholas Kristof on the Nuking of Japan
August
5, 2003
Uri
Avnery
The Prisoner of Ramallah: Arafat at
74
Forrest
Hylton
Terrorism and Political Trials: the
View from Bolivia
Ray
McGovern
"We Cook Estimates to Go"
David
Morse
Poindexter's Gambit
Edward
Said
Orientallism: 25 Years Later
George
W. Bush
My Darn Good Resumé
Hammond
Guthrie
It's Incremental, Watson!
Website
of the Day
National Prayer Day
August 4, 2003
Bruce
K. Gagnon
Another Peace Activist Detained by
Airport Cops: My Story
David
Lindorff
Fear-Mongering About Social Security
Mark
Zepezauer
George F. Will: Descent into Self-Parody
James
Plummer
Tracking You Through the Mail
Mickey
Z.
Marriage Insecurity from Sharon to Bush
Bruce
Jackson
News that Isn't News: How the NYT's
Pimps for the White House
August
2 / 3, 2003
Tamara
R. Piety
Nike's Full Court Press Breaks Down
Francis
Boyle
My Alma Mater, the University of Chicago, is a Moral Cesspool
David
Vest
Sons of Paleface: Pictures from Death's Other Side
Neve Gordon
Nightlife in Jerusalem
Uri
Avnery
Their Master's Voice:
Bush, Blair and Intelligence Snafus
Robert
Fisk
Paternalistic Democracy for Iraq
Jerry
Kroth
Israel, Yellowcake and the Media
Noah Leavitt
What's Driving the Liberian Bloodbath: Is the US Obligated to
Intervene?
Saul
Landau
The Film Industry: Business and Ideology
Ron Jacobs
One Big Prison Yard: the Meaning of George Jackson
Thomas
Croft
In the Deep, Deep Rough: Reflections on Augusta
Amadi Ajamu
Def Sham: Russell Simmons New Black Leader?
Poets'
Basement
Vega, Witherup, Albert and Fleming
August
1, 2003
Joanne
Mariner
Stopping Prison Rape
Alex Coolman
Who Moved My Soap: Trivializing
Prison Rape
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Stan Goff
Injury and Decorum: The Missing Wounded in Iraq
Wayne
Madsen
Europe Unplugs from the Matrix
Robert
Fisk
Wolfowitz the Censor
Elaine
Cassel
Ashcroft Loses Big in Puerto Rico
Website
of the Day
Stop Prisoner Rape
July
31, 2003
Ray
McGovern
The Prostitution of Intelligence
Brian
Cloughley
Wolfowitz's Operative Statement
Sheldon
Hull
The RIAA's Jihad:
The Devil's Music (Industry)
Elaine
Cassel
The Next Time You Crack a Lawyer Joke, Think of These Attorneys
Sheldon
Rampton
and John Stauber
True Lies: Propaganda and Bush's
Wars
Hammond
Guthrie
Speculation Blues
Website
of the Day
Army of One?
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher Gilad Atzmon! BBC Names EXILE Top Jazz CD
July
30, 2003
David
Lindorff
Poindexter the Terror Bookie
Marjorie
Cohn
Why Iraq and Afghanistan? It's About
the Oil
Elaine
Cassel
How Ashcroft Coerces Guilty Pleas
in Terror Cases
Zvi
Bar'el
The Hidden Costs of the Iraq War
Lisa Walsh
Thomas
Killing Mustafa Hussein: Death of a Child, Birth of a Legend?
Sean
Carter
Pat Robertson's Prayer Jihad: God, Sodomy and the Supremes
ND Jayaprakash
India and Ariel Sharon
Steve
Perry
Bush's Top 40 Lies
Standard
Schaefer
Correction about Bloomberg and Outscourcing
Website
of the Day
Bring Them Home Now!
Hot Stories
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Elaine
Cassel
Civil Liberties
Watch
Michel
Guerrin
Embedded Photographer Says: "I
Saw Marines Kill Civilians"
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
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August
16, 2003
Bastille New Jersey
America's
Apartheid Detention Program
By FLAVIA ALAYA
Just west of the Hudson, looking hard at lower
Manhattan's now achingly blinded skyline, is that stretch of
metropolitan New Jersey tourism experts call America's "Gateway".
Named to remind us of New Jersey's historic role as launching
point for immigrant journeys westward into the heart and hinterlands
of the nation, it also highlights Lady Liberty's famous welcome,
for only hundreds of feet from this shoreline, on her own little
island, stands our world-famous symbol of safe-haven and deliverance.
The mockery here can now be felt not
just by newcomers but by many of those who'd begun the process
of settling long before the 9/11 attacks. And yet few Americans
are aware of this further irony: how inexorably "Gateway
New Jersey" has become "Dungeon" or better, "Bastille
New Jersey" for those the government has deemed politically
undesireable or threatening.
For nearly two years now, this is where
it has "detained," or more precisely, dumped, thousands
of them--almost regardless of reason or the need to produce any--into
two immigration detention centers and five County jails, the
memory holes we and the INS have complacently and complicitly
created out of a mindless fear that extends beyond "terrorists"
to the strangers in our own neighborhoods.
Paterson is my "neighborhood",
third among the state's three largest cities, all of them within
the "Gateway". It is also where the Passaic County
Jail is located, and proximity has taught me over the past six
months just how mindless that fear is, however calculated the
official repression it is used to justify. Not just because the
"detainees" aren't the terrorist suspects most "patriotic"
Americans think them in order to sleep at night. But because
we've hardly known enough about them to say how many they are,
let alone who, or why they've been held.
As of this writing, not one has had a
credible terrorism-related rap laid on him. Until recently, it
was possible to say that only a handful had even been charged
with anything. I suspect that if we generalized from the few
we know something about to the entire cohort (is it 1200? 2000?
5000? 10,000?), we wouldn't be far off. It would certainly be
as mad a mix of men as any who ever stumbled into a government
net or suddenly found themselves trapped in it, running the gamut
from boys to men to old men, from the hapless to the reckless
and feckless, from retail workers to intellectuals, taxi drivers
to computer programmers to the serially unemployed, from illegal
immigrants and petty criminals to students and minor visa violators.
We would find a spectrum of nationalities
from East Asia to Latin America, of beliefs from devout Muslims
to marxists. Among those who haven't yet been deported many have
already been imprisoned for a year or more. Others only months
or weeks, caught up in the terrifying sweeps of the new registration
regs as tens of thousands were "called-in" from the
infamous "twenty-five countries" and then snatched
into custody.
One thing most have in common is poverty,
otherwise they might have pulled some savvy legal strings or
maybe still be awaiting disposition on the outside. They differ
in this and other respects from Paterson's infamous Muhammed
El-Atriss, the Egyptian-American who'd already made a small fortune
in the sale of phony documents to illegals when in a seizure
of bad karma he sold them to two of the 9/11 hijackers. El-Atriss
is a naturalized US citizen, a factor key to his legal standing.
But the relative speed with which his case came to judgment (February-March
2003), as well as the success of his plea-bargain, also represent
a return on investment in aggressive and expensive lawyers. Prosecutors
could not prove El-Atriss knew the intentions of his customers,
so Judge Marilyn Clark gave him only time served (169 days) and
5 years probation, expressing outrage at how little law she had
to throw at him.
And yet at the behest of federal prosecutors
and in defiance of normal standards of due process, she ordered
the bail hearing closed to the public and court transcripts of
the proceedings sealed. (In a suit brought by the North Jersey
Media Group, representing two local newspapers, she has since
reversed herself, declaring it proper and in the public interest
to open these again. Stay tuned.)
Ironically, El-Atriss spent his time
inside in Paterson's own Passaic County Jail with (at any given
time) from 15 to 500 other "detainees," so-called--that
familiar apartheid euphemism for political prisoners. He has
since said he felt ashamed that the American public thought of
him as a terrorist--presumably like them--though he's been spared
certain of the degradations some of them still suffer, being
"disappeared" among them. His fellow prisoners were
and are chargeable with much lesser offenses in the scheme of
things. They are also theoretically protected by the same Bill
of Rights, which, until John Ashcroft's highhanded (and as yet
unreversed) reinterpretation, guaranteed due process to all "persons"
without regard to citizenship, including the right to be charged,
to be heard, and to be defended.
Worse yet, a few of the men El-Atriss
left behind had lawyers who took up front whatever their families
could cobble together, promised the moon, and then never showed
up again. Now, not just deprived of constitutional rights but
abandoned to the wretched prison conditions and various levels
of official thuggery in "Gateway" jails, they face
a hardened racism newly hardened by patriotism run amok. The
recent Inspector General's Report has just confirmed the allegations
of abusive conditions. It even mentions the jail as having held
at one time the largest number of post 9/11 detainees in the
country; and while it placed the jail second after the Brooklyn
Municipal Detention Center in a pattern of abuse, it failed to
indicate that the conditions are unrelenting.
Eyewitness civil liberties lawyers have
(for instance) described the Passaic County Jail as one of the
worst in the country, a "dungeon" by any other name.
Two prisoners are now on hunger strike there, protesting abusive
conditions among other things. One of them, Hemnauth Mohabir,
a legal permanent resident originally from Guyana, has cited
foul latrine smells, broken showers, damp, moulding ceiling plaster
that drops down on him as he eats and sleeps, swarming roaches
and rats. A Christian and vegetarian, he had until his strike
spared himself the atrocities of the routine menu, only to be
offered peanut butter at every meal, and then beaten for the
insubordination of demanding better.
Over the months since April 2002 that
have now stretched beyond a year in both Middlesex and Passaic
County jails, Hemnauth shared time with fellow-prisoner Farouk
Abdel-Muhti, a Palestinian native and leftist intellectual, considered
"stateless" and difficult to deport. But Farouk is
also a powerful organizer who'd established a wide circle of
progressive friends before his arrest, which occurred in early
2002, just after he actively brokered live reports from the Intifada
to Free Speech Radio at WBAI. Once Inside, he again made himself
a threat, not just by speaking his mind but by speaking it in
several languages, including the Spanish he acquired from years
in Latin America. This past January he persuaded five other inmates
to join him in a hunger strike, then got Democracy Now!'s Amy
Goodman to give him telephone airtime to talk about it.
I first chanced on Farouk's voice in
January as he made one of these amazing reports from the belly
of the beast, my awareness sharpened by an assignment to moderate
a panel at a National Writer's Union conference--"Writing
for Our Rights"--which eventually drew hundreds to Rutgers/
Newark on the weekend of January 25-26. The overarching theme
of this conference was the the anger--and fear--felt by Middle
Eastern writers and activists since 2001. But the event inevitably
drew detainee rights into its orbit. Conference organizer Jeannette
Gabriel (who'd recruited me) was also a long-time friend of Farouk's,
already working for months to rescue him. She later admitted
that the horror of the detentions hadn't actually come home to
her till his arrest. "It completely radicalized me on this
issue," she has since told me guiltily. "I shouldn't
have needed to lose a friend to feel this way."
In a world overwhelmed with rights abuses,
where it can be a life's work to confront any one of them authentically,
we may all need a flashpoint . Mine was hearing Farouk's voice
over breakfast. It wasn't just that it took victims of the national
paranoia of 9/11out of some imaginary moated stone bastion somewhere
and put them here, in the same jail where I'd once visited a
babysitter-friend who'd shot her ex in a fit of dementia; my
participation in earlier demos had already done that. It was
the realization that they too were--or could be--political resisters,
direct-line descendants of the radical anarchists and unruly
strikers I knew as a Paterson historian, the people who'd stirred
things up in these parts a century ago when industrial Paterson
was "Red City" and the authorities were as likely (if
not more so) to be stuffing you in the slammer for your politics
as your morals.
Jeannette and her partner Eric Lerner
(an NWU stalwart and dissident physicist from Lawrenceville)
had already helped create a "detainees committee" out
of an alliance of other writers union members and a New York
"Free Farouk Committee" with progressive students in
the state colleges and the New Jersey Action Network. Despite
the small turnout at two demos at the Passaic County jail in
the fall, the presence of several body-pierced anarchists at
the one i attended in October, as well as clear attempts of the
city and county police to disrupt it, made it feisty and reportable.
Word that prisoners were being beaten in retaliation produced
some flap in the press, particularly in the local paper of record,
the North Jersey Herald News, which had already mounted a class
action suit to have facts about the detainees publicly released,
and was fairly aggressively telling the story.
A key demographic reality here, of course,
is that South Paterson is home to the second largest Arab-American
community in the US, Dearborn/Detroit being the first. Paterson's
tends to be more Palestinian and recently immigrated, and more
on the political qui-vive. This makes local police understandably
skittish. It has also drawn us some unwelcome national attention
obviously heightened by the case of the two hijackers who passed
through El-Atriss's mill, assuring that we are regularly dissed
by New York shock-radio as "Al Qaeda West." The demos
brought out few South Paterson locals, who understandably feared
visibility. A small well-behaved cohort came to the October demo
with a local Muslim leader, a man clearly suspicious of "outsiders"
and a little too visibly proud of his good relations with the
police. He didn't come back.
Meanwhile, conference-organizing was
proving a further recruiting tool. As some of the earlier group
veered off the detainees issue in the run-up to the war, a newly
committed coalition emerged, known at first only by its email
address (writersactivists@yahoo.com), our activist profile and
our consciousness both raised by the courage of Farouk's hunger
strike. Participation by some within the targeted communities
assured our rising sensitivity to the people of South Paterson
and their sometimes vocal and nervous awareness of being caught
between us and the police, expressing solidarity yet fearing
being identified with making waves.
"Writersactivists@" did some
bootstrap actions, organizing a letter-writing campaign to the
Sheriff and the local INS director as well as Farouk himself,
to keep his heart up. Then another small demo at the jail in
early February. This time the Sheriff's men banished us to the
other side of Main Street, in front of St. John's Cathedral,
where after our initial frustration we actually found our posters
reading "Free the Detainees" and "Hunger for Freedom"
even more visible to passing traffic, and where two brave hijabbed
women--wives left to struggle at home without breadwinners--pushed
baby strollers up and down the sidewalk before the seat of the
Roman Catholic Bishop of the diocese.
Heightening the pressure, the group began
plans for a major new rally, a "March Against Fear"
to be held at the corner of Gould and Main Streets on Saturday,
March 29, in the heart of the South Paterson community: the notion
was that if they wouldn't or couldn't come down to the jail,
we'd come to them, in as full a display of mutual solidarity
as we could muster. Then the news hit that Sheriff Jerry Speziale,
Passaic County's recently-elected and rather swaggering guardian,
a veteran NYPD surveillance expert, had cooperated with federal
authorities to ship Farouk's fellow-strikers off to two other
county jails, Hudson and Middlesex, and then silently decamped
the "troublemaker" himself to the York (PA) Detention
Center,150 miles farther away from lawyers, family and friends.
There Farouk was placed in solitary,
in 23-hour lockdown in an iron cage, shackled hand and foot,*
as the writers-activists he'd helped to galvanize faced off against
the combined forces of the Paterson and County police and mounted
a rally that would became a local cause celebre and make it to
the national press. [*It should be noted that the Report of the
Office of the Inspector General of the Department of Justice
has since characterized this kind of 23-hour lockdown as a human
rights abuse. Also that the report, completed literally months
ago, had been kept under wraps until a number of Senators (including
New Jersey's Jon Corzine) asked for its release. As of the date
of this writing, two weeks since it appeared, the brutalizing
treatment of Farouk Abdel-Muhti, in defiance of the IGO's official
rebuke, continues unchecked.]
The late-breaking news is that there
are two detainees here in Paterson hunger striking (fluids-fasting)
for 53 and 41 days respectively. The strike is still ongoing
for both men, as far as we know, but we're in a blackout regarding
the condition of Nigel Maccado, the Indian national who's been
striking longer and was described as extremely ill several days
ago by a member of our committee who saw him. The other is Hemnauth
Mohabir, the Guyanese national I mentioned i. He has been able
to phone us periodically.
Flavia Alaya,
educator turned full time writer-activist, lives in
Paterson, NJ, and (as local officials can attest) pays attention.
Her memoir of love and politics in the 60s, Under the Rose (Feminist
Press, 1999), has just been published in a new Irish edition
(New Island Press). She can be reached at: flavia@bigplanet.com
Weekend
Edition Features for August 9 / 10, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
California's Glorious Recall!
Saul
Landau
Bush and King Henry
Gary
Leupp
On Terrorism, Methodism, "Wahhabism"
and the Censored 9/11 Report
Paul de
Rooij
The Parade of the Body Bags
Michael
Egan
History and the Tragedy of American Diplomacy
Rob Eshelman
A Home of Our Own
Daoud
Kuttab
Life as an ID Card
Philip
Agee
Terror and Civil Society: Instruments of US Policy in Cuba
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Marc Racicot: Bush's Main Man
Walt Brasch
Schwarzenegger, "Hollyweird"
and the Rigtheous Right
Christopher
Brauchli
Bush, Bribery and Berlusconi
Josh Frank
Mean, Mean Howard Dean
Elaine
Cassel
Will the Death Penalty Ever Die?
Sean Carter
Total Recall
Poets'
Basement
Hamod, Engel, Albert
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