1/31/2020

bauaw2003 BAUAW NEWSLETTER, FRIDAY, JANUARY 31, 2020

 

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Save The Date: Black Lives Matter at School Week, February 3-7, 2020.



Mark your calendar! The Black Lives Matter at School national week of action will be held from February 3-7th, 2020–and educators from coast to coast are organizing to make this the biggest coordinated uprising for racial justice in the schools yet. 

Black Lives Matter At School is a national coalition educators, parents and students organizing for racial justice in education..  We encourage community organizations and unions to join our annual week of action during the first week of February each year. To learn more about how to participate in the week of action, please check out the BLM@School starter kit.. 

If you or your organization would like to support or endorse the week of action, please email us at: BlackLivesMatterAtSchool2@gmail..com...  

During the 2018-2019 school year, BLM@School held its second national week of action in some 30 different citiesaround the country.. During the nationally organized week of action, thousands of educators around the U....S..... wore Black Lives Matter shirts to school and taught lessons about the guiding principles of the Black Lives Matter Global Network, structural racism, intersectional black identities, black history, and anti-racist social movements. 

In addition to centering Blackness in the classroom, BLM at School has these four demands:

1) End "zero tolerance" discipline, and implement restorative justice

3) Mandate Black history and Ethnic Studies in K-12 curriculum

The lessons that educators teach during the week of action corresponded to the guiding principles of Black Lives Matter:

Monday: Restorative Justice, Empathy and Loving Engagement

Tuesday: Diversity and Globalism

Wednesday: Trans-Affirming, Queer Affirming and Collective Value

Thursday: Intergenerational, Black Families and Black Villages

Friday: Black Women and Unapologetically Black

With your help, this year's BLM at School week of action can continue to grow and provide healing for Black students.  Learn more about how to participate by visiting our website, www.BlackLivesMatterAtSchool.com... Let us know what you are planning for BLM at School week this school year or ask us how to get involved with the action by emailing us at: BlackLivesMatterAtSchool2@gmail.com..

Related

https://blacklivesmatteratschool......com/2019/10/15/save-the-date-black-lives-matter-at-school-week-feb-3-7-2020/










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Join the International Days of Action against Sanctions and Economic War March 13-15, 2020

Sanctions Kill!

Sanctions are War!

End Sanctions Now!


Organize an event in your area against U.S. imposed sanctions! Help build a Global Movement with hundreds of actions around the world March 13-15


Help expose this war crime against people of the world.


Add your endorsement at: https://sanctionskill..org/


List events and contact info at: info@SanctionsKill.org

Sanctions Kill!

Sanctions are War!

End Sanctions Now!


Please add your endorsement and help spread the word



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Party for Socialism and Liberation

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Presidential candidate Gloria La Riva denounces Trump's new Iran sanctions

La Riva speaking on human impact of U.S. Sanctions

Campaign tweet of La Riva at anti-war protest speaking on the human impact of U..S. sanctions

"Sanctions are a silent killer that have already had devastating effects in Iraq and Iran. I denounce Mike Pompeo's and Steven Mnuchin's announcement of more sanctions on Iran, which are solely intended to create suffering on the Iranian people," said Gloria La Riva, 2020 presidential candidate and longtime anti-war activist.

"It is clear that the Trump administration is not backing down from its belligerence. In fact, Trump is forcefully pursuing further confrontation, and is all the more reason for us to remain mobilized against a new war on Iran."

Join the Sat. Jan. 25 – Global Day of Protest – No War On Iran!

"Sanctions are an act of war," she continued, "I traveled three times to Iraq during the 1990's when the United States government imposed a total blockade of the country for more than 12 years. I witnessed the human toll, thousands of people dying every month from the blocking of food, medicine, and infrastructure materials after the 78-day U.S.. military bombing of 1991."

La Riva produced the 1998 award-winning documentary, Genocide by Sanctions: The Case of Iraq, based on her investigative work there...

"And now President Trump, via executive order, is virtually tightening a noose on Iran." In the Friday address Treasury Secretary Mnuchin announced that Trump's sanctions included penalties that would be applied to any individual or governments trading with or involved with Iranian construction, manufacturing, textiles or mining industries.

"Sanctions are designed to destabilize a country's society, they are part of a larger war drive," La Riva said. "They hit the most vulnerable people first, the sick, young children, elderly and the poor because they lose access to necessary items. In Iran the prices of potatoes have already increased over 300% from previous sanctions. The costs of rice and chicken and many other goods have gone up.. The point of sanctions is to create suffering—with these kinds of acts it is no wonder Iran and the Iraqi Parliament have called for the expulsion of the U.S. military from the region.

"There is no justification for these sanctions. In fact United Nations resolutions state that there is no justification for policies that target a whole population.. Such an act of aggression is recognized as genocide."

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claimed that Iranian general Qassem Soleimani was behind imminent threats to Americans but when asked for specifics, he only cited the death of a U.S.. contractor killed in Iraq. However, that was weeks prior to the killing of Soleimani.

La Riva said, "by logic and definition a past occurrence does not constitute not an imminent threat. What we know instead is that with Trump's abrogation of the JCPOA, he embarked a while ago on an offensive that the people of the United States and worldwide are extremely worried about.."

La Riva has been in the streets of San Francisco with thousands of other people demanding No New War on Iran..

She is running nationally for the Party for Socialism and Liberation, and in California she is seeking the Peace and Freedom Party nomination. Her vice-presidential candidate is Leonard Peltier, Native political prisoner unjustly held in federal prison now for 43 years.

Point five of La Riva's Presidential 10 Point Program reads, "Shut down all U.S. military bases around the world—bring all the troops, planes & ships home.. U.S. foreign policy uses the pretext of national security to enforce the imperialist interests of the biggest banks and corporations. That is what is behind the endless wars and occupations. Use the $1 trillion military budget instead to provide for people's needs here and worldwide. Abolish nuclear weapons.. Stop U.S. aid to Israel. Self-determination for the Palestinian people, including the right of return. End the U.S. blockade of Cuba and sanctions against Venezuela, Iran and all countries.... Independence for Puerto Rico and cancel its debt!"

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Party for Socialism and Liberation

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La Riva / Peltier 2020 Campaign
10-Point Program

10 Point Program

The 10-Point Program of the La Riva/Peltier 2020 Campaign is a fighting program that represents the interests and needs of the vast majority of people of the United States and extends international solidarity to the peoples of the world. Our campaign will reach to every corner of the U.S. with the message that only socialism can solve the crises of climate change, racism, poverty and war. It will take a people's movement for real, lasting and sustainable change. We hope you will join us!

★ 1 | Make the essentials of life constitutional rights

The U.S. has more than enough so that all the essentials of life — food, housing, water, education, health care and a job or basic income can be guaranteed rights — rather than distributed only for profit. Create a completely free and public healthcare system.. Make education free—cancel all student debt. Fully fund rebuilding of the infrastructure in transport, water and utility systems. Stop all foreclosures and evictions. End all discrimination based on ability/disability.

★ 2 | For the Earth to live, capitalism must be replaced by a socialist system

Global warming, pollution, acidified and depleted oceans, fracking, critical drought, plastics choking the seas, nuclear weapons and waste — it is clear that capitalism and production for profit are destroying the planet and threatening all life. The crisis is already here, with the most vulnerable and oppressed areas of the U.S. and Global South bearing the brunt. Using truly sustainable energy and seizing the oil and coal companies to stop fossil fuel pollution, are urgent steps needed to reverse climate change. Ultimately, only the socialist reorganization of society can assure the future of the people and the planet.

★ 3 | End racism, police brutality, mass incarceration. Pay reparations to the African American community

Mass incarceration and racist policing are symptomatic of the 400 years of brutal repression meted out to African-descended peoples in the U.S. Reparations must be paid! More than 2.2 million people are behind bars in the largest prison complex in the world. End mass incarceration of all oppressed and working-class people. Fully prosecute all acts of police brutality and violence. Free Leonard Peltier, Mumia Abu-Jamal and all political prisoners!

★ 4 | Full rights for all immigrants

Abolish all anti-immigrant laws. Stop the raids and deportations and demonization of immigrants...... Shut down ICE and the concentration camps and reunite families. The government's war on immigrants must end. The border wall must be dismantled. Amnesty and citizenship for those without documents... Full rights for all!

★ 5 | Shut down all U.S.. military bases around the world—bring all the troops, planes & ships home

U.S. foreign policy uses the pretext of national security to enforce the imperialist interests of the biggest banks and corporations. That is what is behind the endless wars and occupations. Use the $1 trillion military budget instead to provide for people's needs here and worldwide. Abolish nuclear weapons... Stop U.S.. aid to Israel.. Self-determination for the Palestinian people, including the right of return. End the U.S. blockade of Cuba and sanctions against Venezuela, Iran and all countries. Independence for Puerto Rico and cancel its debt!

★ 6 | Honor Native treaties.. Free Leonard Peltier now

Both major parties have continued to allow the destruction and theft of Native lands by mining and corporate agricultural interests in blatant disregard of indigenous sovereign rights. 33% of Native children live in poverty and many of the poorest U..S.. counties are reservations.. The crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and the over-incarceration of Native peoples shows the bankruptcy of capitalism from its earliest inception in the Americas until today..

★ 7 | Full equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people

Fight back against anti-LGBTQ discrimination and violence... Defend marriage equality. Full equality in all matters governed by civil law, including employment, housing, healthcare and education. No to "religious exemption" laws that allow discrimination against LGBTQ people!

★ 8 | Equality for women and free, safe, legal abortion on demand

Stop the attack on women's reproductive rights and defend Roe v. Wade... Women must have the fundamental right to choose and to control their own bodies. Women still earn 22 percent less than men, and the gap is even more severe for Black and Latina women. Close the wage gap and end the gender division of labor...

★ 9 | Defend and expand our unions

Support the right of all workers to have a union. Fight back against the attacks on collective bargaining... Require employers to recognize card check union votes. Repeal the Taft-Hartley Act. Focusing on low-wage worker organizing, rebuild a fighting labor movement.

★ 10 | Take over the stolen wealth of the giant banks and corporations – Jail Wall St.. criminals

The vast wealth of the giant banks and corporations is created by workers labor and the exploitation of the world's diminishing natural resources. The billionaires looted and destroyed the economy. It is time to seize their assets and use those resources in the interests of the vast majority. Power must be taken out of the hands of the super rich, and Wall Street criminals must be jailed.

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Chelsea Manning just spent another birthday behind bars.


Sign the Petition: Free Chelsea Manning Now

Judge Anthony Trenga

Chelsea-1000x600

In 2010, former military intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning disclosed earth-shattering information about the nature of asymmetric warfare and U.S. handling of global affairs. And she paid dearly for it. Chelsea was incarcerated for years, including long stretches in solitary confinement, under conditions that the United Nations condemned as torture.

After millions of people around the world spoke out and demanded her release, Chelsea's sentence was commuted. But the US government did not stop persecuting her.

Now, Chelsea has been back in jail for nine months, and faces nine more. Not because she has committed any crime, but because of her conscientious objection to participating in a secretive grand jury investigation into the publication of her 2010 disclosures.

Between their original forensic investigation and Chelsea's detailed statement at court martial, the government gained exhaustive knowledge about her role in the disclosures. They have no need for her testimony—they obtained at least one indictment a full year before she was called to testify before the grand jury, and disclosed another two months after she was jailed for her refusal to do so.

Chelsea's refusal to participate in this process is part of a long history of resistance to grand juries, which are routinely used to harass and entrap activists, journalists, and truth tellers. In a shocking move, the judge in the case has imposed massive fines on Chelsea, charging her $1,000 per day while the US government holds her in "coercive confinement," ostensibly to convince her to agree to their demand that she give testimony to the grand jury.

We know Chelsea Manning's name because she is a principled and fearless advocate for her beliefs. She is prepared to spend another nine months in confinement, and to bear the crushing debt of these unprecedented fines.... Senior U.S.. officials, including the Secretary of State and the President himself have publicly expressed their hostility toward her. It could not be more clear that the government wishes to punish Chelsea further for her 2010 disclosures. It could not be more clear that she will never comply with the grand jury.

Chelsea has already served half of the 18 month maximum that the government can hold her. She's about to spend another birthday in a jail cell. The US government has no legal justification for continuing to imprison her. This must stop. Sign the petition now to send the following letter to Judge Trenga demanding Chelsea Manning's immediate release.

To: Judge Anthony Trenga 
From: 

Dear Honorable Judge Trenga,

I am writing to ask you to recognize that continuing to keep Chelsea Manning behind bars is both futile and cruel. She is known to the world as a principled advocate, and everything she does and says demonstrates her strong will and commitment to her ideals. Her testimony in this grand jury is not needed, and her current incarceration appears to be an attempt to punish her further for past offenses. As she will never be convinced to betray her principles, even by jail time or burdensome fines, her imprisonment does not serve the interests of the grand jury, the government, the court, or the law.

Please make the right decision and order her release so that she may return to her community and heal in peace.

Questions and comments may be sent to info@freedomarchives...org


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Stop Kevin Cooper's Abuse by San Quentin Prison Guards!

https://www.change.org/p/san-quentin-warden-ronald-davis-stop-kevin-cooper-s-abuse-by-san-quentin-prison-guards-2ace89a7-a13e-44ab-b70c-c18acbbfeb59?recruiter=747387046&recruited_by_id=3ea6ecd0-69ba-11e7-b7ef-51d8e2da53ef&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=copylink&utm_campaign=petition_dashboard&use_react=false


On Wednesday, September 25, Kevin Cooper's cell at San Quentin Prison was thrown into disarray and his personal food dumped into the toilet by a prison guard, A. Young.


The cells on East Block Bayside, where Kevin's cell is, were all searched on September 25 during Mandatory Yard. Kevin spent the day out in the yard with other inmates. In a letter, Kevin described what he found when he returned:


"This cage was hit hard, like a hurricane was in here .. ... . little by little I started to clean up and put my personal items back inside the boxes that were not taken .. .. .. I go over to the toilet, lift up the seatcover and to my surprise and shock the toilet was completely filled up with my refried beans, and my brown rice. Both were in two separate cereal bags and both cereal bags were full. The raisin bran cereal bags were gone, and my food was in the toilet!"


A bucket was eventually brought over and:


"I had to get down on my knees and dig my food out of the toilet with my hands so that I could flush the toilet. The food, which was dried refried beans and dried brown rice had absorbed the water in the toilet and had become cement hard. It took me about 45 minutes to get enough of my food out of the toilet before it would flush."


Even the guard working the tier at the time told Kevin, "K.C.., that is f_cked up!"


A receipt was left in Kevin's cell identifying the guard who did this as A. Young. Kevin has never met Officer A.... Young, and has had no contact with him besides Officer Young's unprovoked act of harassment and psychological abuse...


Kevin Cooper has served over 34 years at San Quentin, fighting for exoneration from the conviction for murders he did not commit. It is unconscionable for him to be treated so disrespectfully by prison staff on top of the years of his incarceration.


No guard should work at San Quentin if they cannot treat prisoners and their personal belongings with basic courtesy and respect.............. Kevin has filed a grievance against A. Young. Please:


1) Sign this petition calling on San Quentin Warden Ronald Davis to grant Kevin's grievance and discipline "Officer" A. Young.


2) Call Warden Ronald Davis at: (415) 454-1460 Ext. 5000. Tell him that Officer Young's behaviour was inexcusable, and should not be tolerated...


3) Call Yasir Samar, Associate Warden of Specialized Housing, at (415) 455-5037


4) Write Warden Davis and Lt. Sam Robinson (separately) at:


Main Street

San Quentin, CA 94964

5) Email Lt. Sam Robinson at: samuel.robinson2@cdcr.............ca.gov



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Sign Global Petition to Dismiss Charges Against Anti-Nuclear Plowshares Activists Facing 25 Years

US ATTORNEY GENERAL WILLIAM BARR

This is an urgent request that you join with distinguished global supporters including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, other Nobel laureates and many others by signing our global petition to dismiss all charges against the Kings Bay Plowshares 7 (KBP7).. They face 25 years in prison for exposing illegal and immoral nuclear weapons that threaten all life on Earth. The seven nonviolently and symbolically disarmed the Trident nuclear submarine base at Kings Bay, GA on April 4, 2018, the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. (View KBP7 reading their statement here....)


This petition is also a plea for us all to be involved in rebuilding the anti-nuclear weapons movement that helped disarm the world's nuclear arsenals from 90,000 down to 15,000 weapons in the 1980s.. We must abolish them all. The KBP7 trial is expected to begin this fall in Georgia. Time is short. Please sign the petition and visit kingsbayplowshares7...org. Help KBP7 by forwarding their petition to your friends, to lists, and post it on social media....


The Kings Bay Plowshares 7 have offered us their prophetic witness. Now it's up to us!


In peace and solidarity,


The Kings Bay Plowshares 7 Support Committee

https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/sign-global-petition-to-dismiss-charges-against-anti-nuclear-plowshares-activists-facing-25-years?source=direct_link&




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Support the return of Leonard Peltier's Medicine Bundle


November 1, 2019


Dear Friends and supporters,

We need your help in getting Leonard Peltier's- (89637-132) Medicine Bundle returned to him. His Medicine Bundle includes: Pipe bowel, Pipe stem, Eagle feathers, sage and cedar. Leonard is at USP Coleman1, in Coleman FL. which has been locked down since mid-July. This lockdown has led to many "shakedowns" that is where the guards go in to a cell and check it for weapons. Leonard said in a legal letter,  that on"10/22/2019 the shakedown crew came to his cell and destroyed itThey came in and tore apart everything and threw out everything they couldjust because they couldThe most painfuland what caused me the most anger was when they took my religious itemsmyPipe (Chunapain myMedicine Bundleuse in my prayers."

Leonard's lawyer was immediately on top of the situation and asked us to hold off until he could reach Leonard's counselor and get the Bundlereturned.  I heard from the attorney last night and he said the prison has not returned Leonard his Medicine Bundle nor give them any reason for itbeing taken. 


Leonard Peltier as a citizen of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewaa federally recognized American Indian Nation is afforded all the legalprotections and rights pursuant to the American Indian Freedom of Religion Act codified at Title 42 United States Code 1996 et.seq.


I am asking if today you would send e-mails to Coleman I SR. Attorney J.C. DiNicola jcdinicola@bop.gov, public relations officer-COA/Publicinformation@bop.gov and to thenBOP-Southwest Regional office SERO/ExecAssistant@bop..gov requesting the return of Leonard Peltier 89637-132, Medicine Bundle... 


This lockdown has been extremely hard on Leonard and his Medicine Bundle is his way to help him maintain his relationship to his Creator!


Miigwech

Paulette Dauteuil ILPDC National Office

Sheridan Murphy- President of the ILPDC Board

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Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 863......9977 https://freedomarchives..org/




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Leonard Peltier's 2019 Thanksgiving Message: "Walking on Stolen Land"

by Levi Rickert

Published November 23, 2019


COLEMAN, FLORIDA – Leonard Peltier, Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, who is incarcerated at the U.S. Penitentiary in Coleman, Florida, for his 1977 conviction in connection with a shootout with U.S.............. government forces, where two FBI agents and one young American Indian lost their lives........

Peltier, who is considered a political prisoner of war by many, released this statement on Thanksgiving through the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee:


The year of 2019 is coming to a close and with it, comes the day most Americans set aside as a day for Thanksgiving. As I let my mind wander beyond the steel bars and concrete walls, I try to imagine what the people who live outside the prison gates are doing, and what they are thinking. Do they ever think of the Indigenous people who were forced from their homelands? Do they understand that with every step they take, no matter the direction, that they are walking on stolen land? Can they imagine, even for one minute, what it was like to watch the suffering of the women, the children and babies and yes, the sick and elderly, as they were made to keep pushing west in freezing temperatures, with little or no food? These were my people and this was our land... There was a time when we enjoyed freedom and were able to hunt buffalo and gather the foods and sacred medicines.. We were able to fish and we enjoyed the clean clear water! My people were generous, we shared everything we had, including the knowledge of how to survive the long harsh winters or the hot humid summers. We were appreciative of the gifts from our Creator and remembered to give thanks on a daily basis... We had ceremonies and special dances that were a celebration of life.


With the coming of foreigners to our shores, life as we knew it would change drastically. Individual ownership was foreign to my people............ Fences?? Unheard of, back then. We were a communal people and we took care of each other. Our grandparents weren't isolated from us! They were the wisdom keepers and story tellers and were an important link in our families.. The babies? They were and are our future! Look at the brilliant young people who put themselves at risk, fighting to keep our water and environment clean and safe for the generations yet to come.. They are willing to confront the giant, multi-national corporations by educating the general public of the devastation being caused.... I smile with hope when I think of them.. They are fearless and ready to speak the truth to all who are willing to listen.. We also remember our brothers and sisters of Bolivia, who are rioting, in support of the first Indigenous President, Evo Morales. His commitment to the people, the land, their resources and protection against corruption is commendable. We recognize and identify with that struggle so well..


So today, I thank all of the people who are willing to have an open mind, those who are willing to accept the responsibility of planning for seven generations ahead, those who remember the sacrifices made by our ancestors so we can continue to speak our own language, practice our own way of thankfulness in our own skin, and that we always acknowledge and respect the Indigenous linage that we carry..


For those of you who are thankful that you have enough food to feed your families, please give to those who aren't as fortunate. If you are warm and have a comfortable shelter to live in, please give to those who are cold and homeless, if you see someone hurting and in need of a kind word or two, be that person who steps forward and lends a hand. And especially, when you see injustice anywhere, please be brave enough to speak up to confront it.


I want to thank all who are kind enough to remember me and my family in your thoughts and prayers. Thank you for continuing to support and believe in me.... There isn't a minute in any day that passes without me hoping that this will be the day I will be granted freedom. I long for the day when I can smell clean fresh air, when I can feel a gentle breeze in my hair, witness the clouds as their movement hides the sun and when the moon shines the light on the path to the sacred Inipi. That would truly be a day I could call a day of Thanksgiving.


Thank you for listening to whomever is voicing my words. My Spirit is there with you.


Doksha,

In the Spirit of Crazy Horse,

Leonard Peltier



Levi Rickert, a tribal citizen of the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation, is the publisher and editor of Native News Online. Previously, he served as editor of the Native News Network...... He is a resident of Grand Rapids, Michigan....


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Eddie Conway's Update on Forgotten Political Prisoners


EDDIE CONWAY: I'm Eddie Conway, host of Rattling the Bars. As many well-known political prisoners like Mumia Abu-Jamal continue to suffer in prison…

MUMIA ABU JAMAL: In an area where there is corporate downsizing and there are no jobs and there is only a service economy and education is being cut, which is the only rung by which people can climb, the only growth industry in this part of Pennsylvania, in the Eastern United States, in the Southern United States, in the Western United States is "corrections," for want of a better word. The corrections industry is booming. I mean, this joint here ain't five years old.

EDDIE CONWAY: …The media brings their stories to the masses.. But there are many lesser-known activists that have dropped out of the spotlight, grown old in prison, or just been forgotten...... For Rattling the Bars, we are spotlighting a few of their stories.... There was a thriving Black Panther party in Omaha, Nebraska, headed by David Rice and Ed Poindexter..... By 1968, the FBI had began plans to eliminate the Omaha Black Panthers by making an example of Rice and Poindexter. It would take a couple of years, but the FBI would frame them for murder.

KIETRYN ZYCHAL: In the 90s, Ed and Mondo both applied to the parole board. There are two different things you do in Nebraska, the parole board would grant you parole, but because they have life sentences, they were told that they have to apply to the pardons board, which is the governor, the attorney general, and the secretary of state, and ask that their life sentences be commuted to a specific number of years before they would be eligible for parole.

And so there was a movement in the 90s to try to get them out on parole.... The parole board would recommend them for parole because they were exemplary prisoners, and then the pardons board would not give them a hearing. They wouldn't even meet to determine whether they would commute their sentence..

EDDIE CONWAY: They served 45 years before Rice died in the Nebraska State Penitentiary. After several appeals, earning a master's degree, writing several books and helping other inmates, Poindexter is still serving time at the age of 75.

KEITRYN ZYCHAL: Ed Poindexter has been in jail or prison since August of 1970. He was accused of making a suitcase bomb and giving it to a 16-year-old boy named Duane Peak, and Duane Peak was supposed to take the bomb to a vacant house and call 911, and report that a woman was dragged screaming into a vacant house, and when police officers showed up, one of those police officers was killed when the suitcase bomb exploded.........

Ed and his late co-defendant, Mondo we Langa, who was David Rice at the time of the trial, they have always insisted that they had absolutely nothing to do with this murderous plot, and they tried to get back into court for 50 years, and they have never been able to get back into court to prove their innocence. Mondo died in March of 2016 of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and Ed is going to turn 75 this year, I think........... And he has spent the majority of his life in prison.. It will be 50 years in 2020 that he will be in prison.

EDDIE CONWAY: There are at least 20 Black Panthers still in prison across the United States. One is one of the most revered is H. Rap Brown, known by his Islamic name, Jamil Al-Amin.

KAIRI AL-AMIN: My father has been a target for many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many years of the federal government, and I think him being housed these last 10 years in federal penitentiaries without federal charges show that the vendetta is still strong. The federal government has not forgotten who he was as H.. Rap Brown, or who he is as Imam Jamil Al-Amin..

JAMIL AL-AMIN: See, it's no in between.. You are either free or you're a slave. There's no such thing as second-class citizenship.

EDDIE CONWAY: Most people don't realize he's still in prison. He's serving a life sentence at the United States Penitentiary in Tucson...

KAIRI AL-AMIN: Our campaign is twofold.. One, how can egregious constitutional rights violations not warrant a new trial, especially when they were done by the prosecution... And two, my father is innocent. The facts point to him being innocent, which is why we're pushing for a new trial. We know that they can't win this trial twice... The reason they won the first time was because of the gag order that was placed on my father which didn't allow us to fight in the court of public opinion as well as the court of law.. And so when you don't have anyone watching, anything can be done without any repercussion.

EDDIE CONWAY: Another well-known political prisoner that has been forgotten in the media and in the public arena is Leonard Peltier. Leonard Peltier was a member of the American Indian Movement and has been in prison for over 40 years and is now 75 years old.

SPEAKER: Leonard Peltier represents, in a very real sense, the effort, the struggle by indigenous peoples within the United States to exercise their rights as sovereign nations, recognized as such in treaties with the United States.. For the government of the United States, which has colonized all indigenous peoples to claim boundaries, keeping Leonard in prison demonstrates the costs and consequences of asserting those rights.

EDDIE CONWAY: Leonard Peltier suffers from a host of medical issues including suffering from a stroke... And if he is not released, he will die in prison..

LEONARD PELTIER: I'll be an old man when I get out, if I get out.

PAULETTE D'AUTEUIL: His wellbeing is that he rarely gets a family visit. His children live in California and North Dakota. Both places are a good 2000 miles from where he's at in Florida, so it makes it time consuming as well as expensive to come and see him. He is, health-wise, we are still working on trying to get some help for his prostate, and there has been some development of some spots on his lungs, which we are trying to get resolved....... There's an incredible mold issue in the prison, especially because in Florida it's so humid and it builds up. So we're also dealing with that...

EDDIE CONWAY: These are just a few of the almost 20 political prisoners that has remained in American prisons for 30 and 40 years, some even longer. Mutulu Shakur has been in jail for long, long decades... Assata Shakur has been hiding and forced into exile in Cuba..... Sundiata has been in prison for decades; Veronza Bower, The Move Nine....... And there's just a number of political prisoners that's done 30 or 40 years.

They need to be released and they need to have an opportunity to be back with their family, their children, their grandchildren, whoever is still alive. Any other prisoners in the United States that have the same sort of charges as those people that are being held has been released up to 15 or 20 years ago. That same justice system should work for the political prisoners also.

Thank you for joining me for this episode of Rattling the Bars. I'm Eddie Conway.....



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Courage to Resist


Reality Winner, a whistleblower who helped expose foreign hacking of US election systems leading up to the 2016 presidential election, has been behind bars since June 2017. Supporters are preparing to file a petition of clemency in hopes of an early release. Reality's five year prison sentence is by far the longest ever given for leaking information to the media about a matter of public interest........... Stand with Reality shirts, stickers, and more available. Please take a moment to sign the letter



Vietnam War combat veteran Daniel Shea on his time in Vietnam and the impact that Agent Orange and post traumatic stress had on him and his family since... Listen now

This Courage to Resist podcast was produced in collaboration with the Vietnam Full Disclosure effort of Veterans For Peace — "Towards an honest commemoration of the American war in Vietnam." This year marks 50 years of GI resistance, in and out of uniform, for many of the courageous individuals featured.. If you believe this history is important, please ...





COURAGE TO RESIST ~ SUPPORT THE TROOPS WHO REFUSE TO FIGHT!

484 Lake Park Ave #41, Oakland, California 94610 ~ 510-488-3559

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Mumia Abu-Jamal: New Chance for Freedom

Police and State Frame-Up Must Be Fully Exposed!

Mumia Abu-Jamal is innocent. Courts have ignored and suppressed evidence of his innocence for decades. But now, one court has thrown out all the decisions of the PA Supreme Court that denied Mumia's appeals against his unjust conviction during the years of 1998 to 2012! 

This ruling, by Judge Leon Tucker, was made because one judge on the PA Supreme Court during those years, Ronald Castille, was lacking the "appearance of impartiality." In plain English, he was clearly biased against Mumia. Before sitting on the PA Supreme Court, Castille had been District Attorney (or assistant DA) during the time of Mumia's frame-up and conviction, and had used his office to express a special interest in pursuing the death penalty for "cop-killers." Mumia was in the cross-hairs. Soon he was wrongly convicted and sent to death row for killing a police officer...

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Mumia Abu-Jamal is an award-winning and intrepid journalist, a former Black Panther, MOVE supporter, and a critic of police brutality and murder.  Mumia was framed by police, prosecutors, and leading elements of both Democratic and Republican parties, for the shooting of a police officer. The US Justice Department targeted him as well.. A racist judge helped convict him, and corrupt courts have kept him locked up despite much evidence that should have freed him. He continues his commentary and journalism from behind bars. As of 2019, he has been imprisoned for 37 years for a crime he did not commit. 

Time is up! FREE MUMIA NOW!

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DA's Hidden Files Show Frame-Up of Mumia

In the midst of Mumia's fight for his right to challenge the state Supreme Court's negative rulings, a new twist was revealed: six boxes of files on Mumia's case--with many more still hidden--were surreptitiously concealed for decades in a back room at the District Attorney's office in Philadelphia. The very fact that these files on Mumia's case were hidden away for decades is damning in the extreme, and their revelations confirm what we have known for decades: Mumia was framed for a crime he did not commit!

So far, the newly revealed evidence confirms that, at the time of Mumia's 1982 trial, chief prosecutor Joe McGill illegally removed black jurors from the jury, violating the Batson decision. Also revealed: The prosecution bribed witnesses into testifying that they saw Mumia shoot the slain police officer when they hadn't seen any such thing... Taxi driver Robert Chobert, who was on probation for fire-bombing a school yard at the time, had sent a letter demanding his money for lying on the stand... Very important, but the newly revealed evidence is just the tip of the iceberg! 

All Evidence of Mumia's Innocence Must Be Brought Forward Now!

Mumia Abu-Jamal's trial for the murder of police officer Daniel Faulkner was rigged against him from beginning to end....... All of the evidence of Mumia's innocence--which was earlier suppressed or rejected--must now be heard:

• Mumia was framed - The judge at Mumia's trial, Albert Sabo, was overheard to say, "I'm gonna help 'em fry the n____r." And he proceeded to do just that.. Mumia was thrown out of his own trial for defending himself! Prosecution "witnesses" were coerced or bribed at trial to lie against Mumia.. In addition to Chobert, this included key witness Cynthia White, a prostitute who testified that she saw Mumia shoot Faulkner... White's statements had to be rewritten under intense pressure from the cops, because she was around the corner and out of sight of the shooting at the time! Police bribed her with promises of being allowed to work her corner, and not sent to state prison for her many prostitution charges.

• Mumia only arrived on the scene after Officer Faulkner was shot - William Singletary, a tow-truck business owner who had no reason to lie against the police, said he had been on the scene the whole time, that Mumia was not the shooter, and that Mumia had arrived only after the shooting of Faulkner. Singletary's statements were torn up, his business was wrecked, and he was threatened by police to be out of town for the trial (which, unfortunately, he was)...

• There is no evidence that Mumia fired a gun - Mumia was shot on the scene by an arriving police officer and arrested. But the cops did not test his hands for gun-powder residue--a standard procedure in shootings! They also did not test Faulkner's hands. The prosecution nevertheless claimed Mumia was the shooter, and that he was shot by Faulkner as the officer fell to the ground. Ballistics evidence was corrupted to falsely show that Mumia's gun was the murder weapon, when his gun was reportedly still in his taxi cab, which was in police custody days after the shooting!

• The real shooter fled the scene and was never charged - Veronica Jones was a witness who said that after hearing the shots from a block away, she had seen two people fleeing the scene of the shooting.... This could not have included Mumia, who had been shot and almost killed at the scene. Jones was threatened by the police with arrest and loss of custody of her children. She then lied on the stand at trial to say she had seen no one running away. 

• Abu-Jamal never made a confession - Mumia has always maintained his innocence. But police twice concocted confessions that Mumia never made. Inspector Alfonso Giordano, the senior officer at the crime scene, made up a confession for Mumia. But Giordano was not allowed to testify at trial, because he was top on the FBI's list of corrupt cops in the Philadelphia police force... At the DA's request, another cop handily provided a second "confession," allegedly heard by a security guard in the hospital.... But at neither time was Mumia--almost fatally shot--able to speak.. And an earlier police report by cops in the hospital said that, referring to Mumia: "the negro male made no comment"!

• The crime scene was tampered with by police - Police officers at the scene rearranged some evidence, and handled what was alleged to be Mumia's gun with their bare hands... A journalist's photos revealed this misconduct. The cops then left the scene unattended for hours.. All of this indicates a frame-up in progress...

• The real shooter confessed, and revealed the reason for the crime - Arnold Beverly came forward in the 1990s. He said in a sworn statement, under penalty of perjury, that he, not Mumia, had been the actual shooter. He said that he, along with "another guy," had been hired to do the hit, because Faulkner was "a problem for the mob and corrupt policemen because he interfered with the graft and payoffs made to allow illegal activity including prostitution, gambling, drugs without prosecution in the center city area"! (affidavit of Arnold Beverly).

• The corruption of Philadelphia police is documented and well known - This includes that of Giordano, who was the first cop to manufacture a "confession" by Mumia. Meanwhile, Faulkner's cooperation with the federal anti-corruption investigations of Philadelphia police is strongly suggested by his lengthy and heavily redacted FBI file...

• Do cops kill other cops? There are other cases in Philadelphia that look that way. Frank Serpico, an NYC cop who investigated and reported on police corruption, was abandoned by fellow cops after being shot in a drug bust. Mumia was clearly made a scape-goat for the crimes of corrupt Philadelphia cops who were protecting their ill-gotten gains.

• Politicians and US DOJ helped the frame-up - Ed Rendell, former DA, PA governor, and head of the Democratic National Committee--and now a senior advisor to crime-bill author Joe Biden--is complicit in the frame-up of Mumia. The US Justice Department targeted Mumia for his anti-racist activities when he was a teenager, and later secretly warned then-prosecutor Rendell not to use Giordano as a witness against Mumia because he was an FBI target for corruption.

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All this should lead to an immediate freeing of Mumia! But we are still a ways away from that, and we have no confidence in the capitalist courts to finish the job. We must act! This victory in local court allowing new appeals must now lead to a full-court press on all the rejected and suppressed evidence of Mumia's innocence!

Mass Movement Needed To Free Mumia! 

Mumia's persecution by local, state and federal authorities of both political parties has been on-going, and has generated a world-wide movement in his defense.. This movement has seen that Mumia, as a radio journalist who exposed the brutal attacks on the black community by the police in Philadelphia, has spoken out as a defender of working people of all colors and all nationalities in his ongoing commentaries (now on KPFA/Pacifica radio), despite being on death row, and now while serving life without the possibility of parole (LWOP)..

In 1999, Oakland Teachers for Mumia held unauthorized teach-ins in Oakland schools on Mumia and the death penalty, despite the rabid hysteria in the bourgeois media. Teachers in Rio de Janeiro held similar actions. Letters of support came in from maritime workers and trade unions around the world.. Later in 1999, longshore workers shut down all the ports on the West Coast to free Mumia, and led a mass march of 25,000 Mumia supporters in San Francisco.......... 

A year later, a federal court lifted Mumia's death sentence, based on improper instructions to the jury by trial judge Albert Sabo.. The federal court ordered the local court to hold a new sentencing hearing... Fearing their frame-up of Mumia could be revealed in any new hearing, even if only on sentencing, state officials passed. Much to the chagrin of the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP)--which still seeks Mumia's death--this left Mumia with LWOP, death by life in prison.. 

Mumia supporters waged a struggle to get him the cure for the deadly Hepatitis-C virus, which he had likely contracted through a blood transfusion in hospital after he was shot by a cop at the 1981 crime scene. The Labor Action Committee conducted demonstrations against Gilead Sciences, the Foster City CA corporation that owns the cure, and charged $1,000 per pill! The Metalworkers Union of South Africa wrote a letter excoriating Governor Wolf for allowing untreated sick freedom fighters to die in prison as the apartheid government had done. Finally, Mumia did get the cure.. Now, more than ever, struggle is needed to free Mumia!

Now is the Time: Mobilize Again for Mumia's Freedom!

Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal


Labor Action Committee to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal | Mumia Abu-Jamal is an I.....



November 2019


"There is no time for despair, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language.. This is how civilizations heal."


-Toni Morrison


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Board Game

https://www.thegamecrafter.com/games/race-for-solidarity


Solidarity against racism has existed from the 1600's and continues until today

An exciting board game of chance, empathy and wisdom, that entertains and educates as it builds solidarity through learning about the destructive history of American racism and those who always fought back. Appreciate the anti-racist solidarity of working people, who built and are still building, the great progressive movements of history.. There are over 200 questions, with answers and references.

Spread the word!!

By Dr. Nayvin Gordon



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Action Alert for Shaka Shakur

Urgent Action Alert: Stop Prison Officials from Blocking Shaka Shakur's Access to Educational and Vocational Services


Shaka Shakur is a politically active, incarcerated, New Afrikan who was transferred on December 18th, 2018, from the Indiana Department of Corrections (IDOC) to the Virginia Department of Corrections (VADOC) as part of campaign to neutralize his activism by prison officials. This transfer was done in violation of his due process rights as a prisoner. He is currently incarcerated at the Sussex 1 State Prison in Waverly, Virginia..... His VA DOC # is 135647...........  Since being held there, his right to access educational and vocational programs has been violated. Below is a summary of these violations in Shaka's own words:


"1) i was moved out of the state of Indiana against my will in violation of Indiana Code and due process.. i was never afforded any form of hearing where i was informed as to why i was being shipped out of state nor allowed to present evidence challenging the decision to move me...


2) Upon my arrival to the prison system in Virginia, i was never given any form of orientation... I've never been informed as to what my rights are, nor informed as to how i can go about challenging any decision made by the state of Va. I've only been informed that the state of Va has custody of my body and that all decisions pertaining to my classification, security level and placement was being determined and controlled by the state of Indiana and its Department of Corrections (IDOC).


3) There is supposed to be an IDOC liaison that oversees my placement in Va and communicates with an official in the Virginia Department of Corrections (VDOC) named Ms. Collins. She has refused to respond to any and all efforts to contact her by myself or any outside sources..... Any questions i've had pertaining to video visits, security level, placement, and classification have gone unanswered except for being told that it is up to Indiana.


4) Per Indiana Code i am supposed to be afforded the same rights and privileges as if i was still in Indiana. That includes jobs, programming, religious services etc......s To deny me such is a const violation and discrimination.... In fact, it denies me equal protection under the law.. I am not being allowed to find a job outside of the housing unit.. i'm being told that i'm not going to be allowed to drop my security level even though my points will drop as low as 10 points in Va and less than 15 in indiana. Both of which would qualify me for a level 3 security level placement.


5) The counselor Ponce falsified my classification review/progress report by lying and saying that i had assaulted a staff member within the last 12 months. This was in order to justify my continued placement at a level 4/5 prison. When this was brought to her attention, she pretended that she had corrected it and instead further falsified the report and then blamed it on Indiana.. i have copies of these documents and my lawyer have the originals [see images posted in event below]."


Furthermore:


6) The doctors at Sussex 1 have not been provided with Shaka's medical records past 2014... Shaka experiences nerve and other issues due to a degenerative disc on which he has been operated. Without these records he cannot be provided with the necessary care for his chronic condition.


7)There is no appeals process available to Shaka or any other out-of-state inmate. Indiana code establishes the sender state [Indiana] as having unchallenged authority in cases of interstate transfer. Having access only to internal grievance procedures in Virginia, Shaka is unable to appeal decisions made in Indiana


You can read about Shaka's long history of activism and rebellious activity in Indiana prisons here and here..


What You Can Do to Support Shaka:


On Monday, 11/11, call  the Indiana DOC Executive Director of Classification Jack Hendrix at (317) 232-2247. Leave a message with whoever you are able to speak to, or a voicemail. You can also email Jack Hendrix at jdhendrix@idoc.in....gov..


Please tell them to drop Shaka's  security level dropped to a level 3 for which he qualifies so that he can access vocational and educational programs, or to authorize Shaka's lateral transfer to a facility where he can be allowed to participate in vocational and educational programs...........


As Shaka stated:


"How am i supposed to work my way back to Indiana if i'm not being allowed to participate in anything positive or constructive?"


To make a donation to Shaka Shakur's legal defense fund and for more info on his case, go to https://www.....gofundme..com/f/shaka-shakur-legal-defense-fund


For more information, contact Seth Donnelly at sethdonnelly2000@yahoo..com.......



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50 years in prison: 

ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!!


FREE Chip Fitzgerald 

Grandfather, Father, Elder, Friend

former Black Panther 

              

Romaine "Chip" Fitzgerald has been in prison since he was locked up 50 years ago...... A former member of the Black Panther Party, Chip is now 70 years old, and suffering the consequences of a serious stroke. He depends on a wheelchair for his mobility. He has appeared before the parole board 17 times, but they refuse to release him..


NOW is the time for Chip to come home!


In September 1969, Chip and two other Panthers were stopped by a highway patrolman..... During the traffic stop, a shooting broke out, leaving Chip and a police officer both wounded. Chip was arrested a month later and charged with attempted murder of the police and an unrelated murder of a security guard. Though the evidence against him was weak and Chip denied any involvement, he was convicted and sentenced to death.


In 1972, the California Supreme Court outlawed the death penalty..... Chip and others on Death Row had their sentences commuted to Life imprisonment with the possibility of parole. All of them became eligible for parole after serving 7 more years...... But Chip was rejected for parole, as he has been ever since. 


Parole for Lifers basically stopped under Governors Deukmajian, Wilson, and Davis (1983-2003), resulting in increasing numbers of people in prison and 23 new prisons. People in prison filed lawsuits in federal courts: people were dying as a result of the overcrowding.. To rapidly reduce the number of people in prison, the court mandated new parole hearings:

·        for anyone 60 years or older who had served 25 years or more;

·        for anyone convicted before they were 23 years old;

·        for anyone with disabilities 


Chip qualified for a new parole hearing by meeting all three criteria.


But the California Board of Parole Hearings has used other methods to keep Chip locked up. Although the courts ordered that prison rule infractions should not be used in parole considerations, Chip has been denied parole because he had a cellphone.....


Throughout his 50 years in prison, Chip has been denied his right to due process – a new parole hearing as ordered by Federal courts. He is now 70, and addressing the challenges of a stroke victim. His recent rules violation of cellphone possession were non-violent and posed no threat to anyone. He has never been found likely to commit any crimes if released to the community – a community of his children, grandchildren, friends and colleagues who are ready to support him and welcome him home.


The California Board of Parole Hearings is holding Chip hostage....


We call on Governor Newsom to release Chip immediately.


What YOU can do to support this campaign to FREE CHIP:



1)   Sign and circulate the petition to FREE Chip. Download it at https://www.change.org/p/california-free-chip-fitzgerald

Print out the petition and get signatures at your workplace, community meeting, or next social gathering.


2)   Write an email to Governor Newsom's office (sample message at:https://docs..google.com/document/d/1iwbP_eQEg2J1T2h-tLKE-Dn2ZfpuLx9MuNv2z605DMc/edit?usp=sharing


3)   Write to Chip: 

 Romaine "Chip" Fitzgerald #B27527,

CSP-LAC

P.O. Box 4490

B-4-150

Lancaster, CA 93539


--

Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 863..........9977 https://freedomarchives.org/



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Support Chuck Africa for Parole

Michael Africa Jr. started this petition to Pennsylvania Governor


Charles Sims Africa #AM 4975 has been in prison since age 18... He is now 59 years old and a recovering cancer patient. He has been eligible for parole since 2008 but continually denied because of  his political views.

Charles has 8 codefendants. Two has died in prison, four has been released from prison onto parole..... Chuck's sister Debbie Sims Africa is one of the four codefendants released onto parole.

Since coming home from prison, Debbie is thriving. Our community of support has supported Debbie to excel and we are committed to do the same for Chuck so that he can excel as well. 

http://chng.it/Yprs8pXBBp


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Move 9 member Delbert Orr Africa freed after 42 years in prison

Ed Pilkington - January 18, 2020


One of the great open wounds of the 1970s black liberation struggle came closer to being healed on Saturday with the release of Delbert Orr Africa, a member of the Move 9 group who has been imprisoned for 42 years for a crime he says he did not commit.

Del Africa walked free from Pennsylvania's state correctional institution, Dallas, on Saturday morning after a long struggle to convince parole authorities to release him. He is the eighth of the nine Move members – five men and four women – to be released or to have died while in prison.

Only one of the nine, Chuck Africa, remains behind bars.

The nine were arrested and sentenced to 30 years to life following a dramatic police siege of their communal home in Philadelphia which culminated with a shootout on 8 August 1978. In the maelstrom a police officer, James Ramp, was killed with a single bullet. Move has always denied that any of its members were responsible......

Brad Thomson, a member of Del Africa's legal team, said the decision to release him on parole "affirms what the movement to free the Move 9 has been arguing for decades: that their continued incarceration is unjust".

Thomson added: "With the release of Delbert, that leaves Charles 'Chuck' Africa as the last member of the Move 9 to still be in prison. Chuck went before the parole board last month and we are optimistic that he will be released in the very near future."

The Guardian told the story of Del Africa and his fellow Move 9 member Janine Phillips Africa in a series of articles on black radicals who have been incarcerated for decades as a result of their activities in the 1960s, 70s and 80s.

Move was formed in Philadelphia as a group of black radicals committed not only to the liberation from racial oppression, in tune with the Black Panther party of the time, but also to environmentalist and back-to-nature ideals. They lived, as they still do today, as a family, taking "Africa" as their shared last name.

Over two years, from prison, Del Africa related his story to the Guardian in emails and a three-hour interview. He recounted how he became engaged in the black struggle when a girlfriend introduced him to the Black Panther Party in Chicago in the late 1960s.

Later, he moved to Philadelphia and drifted into Move... He was inside the Move house in Powelton Village in the summer of 1978 when it came under police siege.

The city, under a notoriously brutal mayor, Frank Rizzo, wanted to evict the group on the grounds that they were a nuisance and an affront to public decency.

When the shootout broke out, police went in with guns and water cannon. Del Africa provided one of the astonishing images of the black liberation struggle when he emerged from the house with his arms outstretched, as if on the cross, while a police officer jabbed a rifle in his neck.

Video footage shows two officers throwing him to the ground and kicking him on the head, which bounces between them like a ball.

Africa described the event: "A cop hit me with his helmet.. Smashed my eye. Another cop swung his shotgun and broke my jaw.. I went down, and after that I don't remember anything till I came to and a dude was dragging me by my hair and cops started kicking me in the head."

For six years of his incarceration, Delbert Africa was put in an infamous solitary confinement wing known by prisoners as the "dungeon"... His isolation was imposed because he refused to have his dreadlocks cut – part of the Move philosophy.

He recalled in Guardian interviews how he survived in solitary confinement by developing a black history quiz with other prisoners, which they would play by tapping out messages. Other prisoners joined the game, which asked questions like: when was the Brown v Board of Education ruling in the US supreme court? What year was the Black Panther party founded? Who was Dred Scott? For what is John Brown remembered?

In 1985, when Del Africa had been in prison for almost seven years, tragedy struck again. He learned that Philadelphia police had conducted a second siege on the Move communal home, which was now located in Osage Avenue..

On this occasion, the police dropped an incendiary bomb from a helicopter.. The bomb ignited a fire that spread through the overwhelmingly African American neighborhood..

City leaders allowed the fire to rage. Sixty-one houses were razed and 11 people in the Move house were killed, including five children. One of the survivors, Ramona Africa, was badly burned. She was duly put on trial and sentenced to seven years in prison..

One of the children who died was Delisha, Del Africa's 13-year-old daughter.. He told the Guardian how he responded to the news that she had been killed in an inferno: "I just cried. I wanted to strike out.. I wanted to wreak as much havoc as I could until they put me down. That anger, it brought such a feeling of helplessness. Like, dang! What to do now? Dark times."

With the 35th anniversary of the bombing approaching in May, Del Africa is free.. At the end of the Guardian's interview with him, he described how he had managed to endure four decades behind bars.

"I keep staying on the move. Stagnation is the worst thing. I'm on the move, and I hope you are too," he said.

"We've suffered the worst that this system can throw at us – decades of imprisonment, loss of loved ones. So we know we are strong. For all of that, we are still here and I look on that with pride."


Questions and comments may be sent to info@freedomarchives.org




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On Abortion: From Facebook


Best explanation I've heard so far....., Copied from a friend who copied from a friend who copied............., "Last night, I was in a debate about these new abortion laws being passed in red states. My son stepped in with this comment which was a show stopper. One of the best explanations I have read:, , 'Reasonable people can disagree about when a zygote becomes a "human life" - that's a philosophical question.. However, regardless of whether or not one believes a fetus is ethically equivalent to an adult, it doesn't obligate a mother to sacrifice her body autonomy for another, innocent or not..., , Body autonomy is a critical component of the right to privacy protected by the Constitution, as decided in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), McFall v.. Shimp (1978), and of course Roe v. Wade (1973).. Consider a scenario where you are a perfect bone marrow match for a child with severe aplastic anemia; no other person on earth is a close enough match to save the child's life, and the child will certainly die without a bone marrow transplant from you. If you decided that you did not want to donate your marrow to save the child, for whatever reason, the state cannot demand the use of any part of your body for something to which you do not consent... It doesn't matter if the procedure required to complete the donation is trivial, or if the rationale for refusing is flimsy and arbitrary, or if the procedure is the only hope the child has to survive, or if the child is a genius or a saint or anything else - the decision to donate must be voluntary to be constitutional... This right is even extended to a person's body after they die; if they did not voluntarily commit to donate their organs while alive, their organs cannot be harvested after death, regardless of how useless those organs are to the deceased or how many lives they would save..., , That's the law.., , Use of a woman's uterus to save a life is no different from use of her bone marrow to save a life - it must be offered voluntarily.......... By all means, profess your belief that providing one's uterus to save the child is morally just, and refusing is morally wrong...... That is a defensible philosophical position, regardless of who agrees and who disagrees...... But legally, it must be the woman's choice to carry out the pregnancy..., , She may choose to carry the baby to term... She may choose not to. Either decision could be made for all the right reasons, all the wrong reasons, or anything in between... But it must be her choice, and protecting the right of body autonomy means the law is on her side.. Supporting that precedent is what being pro-choice means....", , Feel free to copy/paste and re-post., y

Sent from my iPhone


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Celebrating the release of Janet and Janine Africa

Take action now to support Jalil A.... Muntaqim's release





Jalil A.... Muntaqim was a member of the Black Panther Party and has been a political prisoner for 48 years since he was arrested at the age of 19 in 1971. He has been denied parole 11 times since he was first eligible in 2002, and is now scheduled for his 12th parole hearing. Additionally, Jalil has filed to have his sentence commuted to time served by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. Visit Jalil's support page, check out his writing and poetry, and Join Critical Resistance in supporting a vibrant intergenerational movement of freedom fighters in demanding his release.


48 years is enough. Write, email, call, and tweet at Governor Cuomo in support of Jalil's commutation and sign this petition demanding his release.


http://freedomarchives.org/Support.Jalil/Campaign.html

Write:

The Honorable Andrew M. Cuomo

Governor of the State of New York

Executive Chamber State Capital Building

Albany, New York 12224


Michelle Alexander – Author, The New Jim Crow; Ed Asner - Actor and Activist; Charles Barron - New York Assemblyman, 60th District; Inez Barron - Counci member, 42nd District, New York City Council; Rosa Clemente - Scholar Activist and 2008 Green Party Vice-Presidential candidate; Patrisse Cullors – Co-Founder Black Lives Matter, Author, Activist; Elena Cohen - President, National Lawyers Guild; "Davey D" Cook - KPFA Hard Knock Radio; Angela Davis - Professor Emerita, University of California, Santa Cruz; Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz - Native American historian, writer and feminist; Mike Farrell - Actor and activist; Danny Glover – Actor and activist; Linda Gordon - New York University; Marc Lamont Hill - Temple University; Jamal Joseph - Columbia University; Robin D.G. Kelley - University of California, Los Angeles; Tom Morello - Rage Against the Machine; Imani Perry - Princeton University; Barbara Ransby - University of Illinois, Chicago; Boots Riley - Musician, Filmmaker; Walter Riley - Civil rights attorney; Dylan Rodriguez - University of California, Riverside, President American Studies Association; Maggie Siff, Actor; Heather Ann Thompson - University of Michigan; Cornel West - Harvard University; Institutional affiliations listed for identification purposes only.


Call: 1-518-474-8390


Email Gov........ Cuomo with this form


Tweet at @NYGovCuomo

Any advocacy or communications to Gov. Cuomo must refer to Jalil as:

ANTHONY JALIL BOTTOM, 77A4283,

Sullivan Correctional Facility,

P.O. Box 116,

Fallsburg, New York 12733-0116




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Funds for Kevin Cooper

https://www.gofundme.....com/funds-for-kevin-cooper?member=1994108


For 34 years, an innocent man has been on death row in California.. 


Kevin Cooper was wrongfully convicted of the brutal 1983 murders of the Ryen family and houseguest. The case has a long history of police and prosecutorial misconduct, evidence tampering, and numerous constitutional violations including many incidences of the prosecution withholding evidence of innocence from the defense. You can learn more here ... 


In December 2018 Gov. Brown ordered  limited DNA testing and in February 2019, Gov.... Newsom ordered additional DNA testing. Meanwhile, Kevin remains on Death Row at San Quentin Prison.. 


The funds raised will be used to help Kevin purchase art supplies for his paintings ........ Additionally, being in prison is expensive, and this money would help Kevin pay for stamps, paper, toiletries, supplementary food, and/or phone calls...


Please help ease the daily struggle of an innocent man on death row!






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Don't extradite Assange!

To the government of the UK

Julian Assange, through Wikileaks, has done the world a great service in documenting American war crimes, its spying on allies and other dirty secrets of the world's most powerful regimes, organisations and corporations. This has not endeared him to the American deep state....... Both Obama, Clinton and Trump have declared that arresting Julian Assange should be a priority... We have recently received confirmation [1] that he has been charged in secret so as to have him extradited to the USA as soon as he can be arrested. 

Assange's persecution, the persecution of a publisher for publishing information [2] that was truthful and clearly in the interest of the public - and which has been republished in major newspapers around the world - is a danger to freedom of the press everywhere, especially as the USA is asserting a right to arrest and try a non-American who neither is nor was then on American soil. The sentence is already clear: if not the death penalty then life in a supermax prison and ill treatment like Chelsea Manning... The very extradition of Julian Assange to the United States would at the same time mean the final death of freedom of the press in the West.... 

The courageous nation of Ecuador has offered Assange political asylum within its London embassy for several years until now. However, under pressure by the USA, the new government has made it clear that they want to drive Assange out of the embassy and into the arms of the waiting police as soon as possible... They have already curtailed his internet and his visitors and turned the heating off, leaving him freezing in a desolate state for the past few months and leading to the rapid decline of his health, breaching UK obligations under the European Convention of Human Rights. Therefore, our demand both to the government of Ecuador and the government of the UK is: don't extradite Assange to the US! Guarantee his human rights, make his stay at the embassy as bearable as possible and enable him to leave the embassy towards a secure country as soon as there are guarantees not to arrest and extradite him.. Furthermore, we, as EU voters, encourage European nations to take proactive steps to protect a journalist in danger.. The world is still watching.

[1] https://www..nytimes.com/2018/11/16/us/politics/julian-assange-indictment-wikileaks....html

[2] https://theintercept.com/2018/11/16/as-the-obama-doj-concluded-prosecution-of-julian-assange-for-publishing-documents-poses-grave-threats-to-press-freedom/

https://internal.diem25...org/en/petitions/1


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Words of Wisdom



Louis Robinson Jr., 77

Recording secretary for Local 1714 of the United Auto Workers from 1999 to 2018, with the minutes from a meeting of his union's retirees' chapter.


"One mistake the international unions in the United States made was when Ronald Reagan fired the air traffic controllers. When he did that, the unions could have brought this country to a standstill...... All they had to do was shut down the truck drivers for a month, because then people would not have been able to get the goods they needed. So that was one of the mistakes they made. They didn't come together as organized labor and say: "No.... We aren't going for this..... Shut the country down." That's what made them weak. They let Reagan get away with what he did. A little while after that, I read an article that said labor is losing its clout, and I noticed over the years that it did. It happened.. It doesn't feel good..."


[On the occasion of the shut-down of the Lordstown, Ohio GM plant March 6, 2019..]

https://www.....nytimes.com/interactive/2019/05/01/magazine/lordstown-general-motors-plant..html


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Get Malik Out of Ad-Seg




Keith "Malik" Washington is an incarcerated activist who has spoken out on conditions of confinement in Texas prison and beyond:  from issues of toxic water and extreme heat, to physical and sexual abuse of imprisoned people, to religious discrimination and more...  Malik has also been a tireless leader in the movement to #EndPrisonSlavery which gained visibility during nationwide prison strikes in 2016 and 2018..  View his work at comrademalik.com or write him at:


Keith H. Washington
TDC# 1487958
McConnell Unit
3001 S......... Emily Drive
Beeville, TX 78102

Friends, it's time to get Malik out of solitary confinement.


Malik has experienced intense, targeted harassment ever since he dared to start speaking against brutal conditions faced by incarcerated people in Texas and nationwide--but over the past few months, prison officials have stepped up their retaliation even more.


In Administrative Segregation (solitary confinement) at McConnell Unit, Malik has experienced frequent humiliating strip searches, medical neglect, mail tampering and censorship, confinement 23 hours a day to a cell that often reached 100+ degrees in the summer, and other daily abuses too numerous to name..  It could not be more clear that they are trying to make an example of him because he is a committed freedom fighter.  So we have to step up.



Who to contact:

TDCJ Executive Director Bryan Collier

Phone: (936)295-6371


Senior Warden Philip Sinfuentes (McConnell Unit)

Phone: (361) 362-2300

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MAJOR TILLERY FILES NEW LEGAL PETITION

SEX FOR LIES AND MANUFACTURED TESTIMONY



April 25, 2018-- The arrest of two young men in Starbucks for the crime of "sitting while black," and the four years prison sentence to rapper Meek Mill for a minor parole violation are racist outrages in Philadelphia, PA that made national news in the past weeks. Yesterday Meek Mills was released on bail after a high profile defense campaign and a Pa Supreme Court decision citing evidence his conviction was based solely on a cop's false testimony...

These events underscore the racism, frame-up, corruption and brutality at the core of the criminal injustice system. Pennsylvania "lifer" Major Tillery's fight for freedom puts a spotlight on the conviction of innocent men with no evidence except the lying testimony of jailhouse snitches who have been coerced and given favors by cops and prosecutors.......


Sex for Lies and Manufactured Testimony

For thirty-five years Major Tillery has fought against his 1983 arrest, then conviction and sentence of life imprisonment without parole for an unsolved 1976 pool hall murder and assault........ Major Tillery's defense has always been his innocence.... The police and prosecution knew Tillery did not commit these crimes... Jailhouse informant Emanuel Claitt gave lying testimony that Tillery was one of the shooters..


In May and June 2016, Emanuel Claitt gave sworn statements that his testimony was a total lie, and that the homicide cops and the prosecutors told him what to say and coached him before trial. Not only was he coerced to lie that Major Tillery was a shooter, but to lie and claim there were no plea deals made in exchange for his testimony. He provided the information about the specific homicide detectives and prosecutors involved in manufacturing his testimony and details about being allowed "sex for lies".. In August 2016, Claitt reaffirmed his sworn statements in a videotape, posted on YouTube and on JusticeforMajorTillery...org.


Major Tillery has Fought his Conviction and Advocated for Other Prisoners for over 30 Years


Major Tillery Needs Your Help:



HOW YOU CAN HELP

    Financial Support—Tillery's investigation is ongoing..... He badly needs funds to fight for his freedom...

    Go to JPay...com;

    code: Major Tillery AM9786 PADOC


    Tell Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner:

    The Conviction Review Unit should investigate Major Tillery's case. He is innocent.. The only evidence at trial was from lying jail house informants who now admit it was false.

    Call: 215-686-8000 or


    Write to:

    Security Processing Center

    Major Tillery AM 9786

    268 Bricker Road

    Bellefonte, PA 16823

    For More Information, Go To: JusticeForMajorTillery.org

    Call/Write:

    Kamilah Iddeen (717) 379-9009, Kamilah29@yahoo.com

    Rachel Wolkenstein (917) 689-4009, RachelWolkenstein@gmail..com





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    Articles:



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    1) Native Solutions to Big FiresCultural burning practices are working to reduce wildfires in northern Australia. Can they work in California, too?

    By Thomas Fuller, January 24, 2020

    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/24/us/native-american-controlled-burns-california-wildfires.html


    Violet Lawson, a landowner near Cooinda, Northern Territory, Australia, burns an area of her land using dead palm fronds that she lights as she walks along the fires' edge..Credit...Matthew Abbott for The New York Times


    Bill Tripp learned to burn when he was 4 years old.

    In an Indian community along a bend in the Salmon River in the northwest corner of California, Mr. Tripp absorbed traditional burning techniques from his great-grandmother, who was born in the late 1800s and was a repository of knowledge on where and when to burn. He learned the difference between good fire and bad fire.

    "We've being doing it for millennia," Mr. Tripp said.

    In listening to Mr. Tripp, a member of the Karuk tribe, I was struck by the parallels with Aboriginal burning traditions in northern Australia, which I wrote about during a two-week trip covering the fires.

    Native burning techniques have come into the spotlight as many parts of the world grapple with how to reduce destructive, out-of-control wildfires.


    The experience in northern Australia has been critical. Researchers have used satellite data to calculate that an Aboriginal burning program started seven years ago has cut hot and destructive wildfires in half and reduced carbon emissions by more than 40 percent.

    Could something similar be done in California?

    Margo Robbins, a member of the Yurok, California's largest Indian tribe, traveled to Australia two years ago and saw many similarities with her own cultural burning practices.

    In 2014, Ms. Robbins helped organize a burn of seven acres on the Yurok reservation. A crew of 20 prison inmates brought by Cal Fire worked with the tribe to conduct the burn..

    "The No. 1 priority for our community was to bring fire back to the land," she said.


    The 2014 burn rekindled the tradition and has been repeated every year with help from the Nature Conservancy, a charity.


    "The land needs fire in order to be healthy," said Ms. Robbins, a basket weaver who relies on the long and pliable shoots that emerge from burned hazelnut bushes.

    Don Hankins, a fire expert at Cal State, Chico, estimates that, at most, a few thousand acres are burned in California every year using traditional cultural burning techniques. This is tiny compared with the Australian program, which covers close to 90 million acres, around the size of Montana.

    But Mr. Hankins and tribal fire experts say there seems to be an appetite in California to better understand and expand tribal burning practices. This week he gave a presentation on Indigenous practices to federal officials who visited Butte County to discuss the strategies on dealing with wildfires.

    "If we are going to make our landscapes resilient, and thus our communities resilient, we have to follow these practices that are tried and true," Mr. Hankins said. "There's definitely opportunity for it."

    Native American burning traditions are similar to Aboriginal ones in the way that they look to nature for signals on when to burn.

    Mr. Tripp says it is crucial not to interrupt natural reproductive cycles with fire — nesting birds, flowering plants — but to burn in ways that encourage growth of critical plants like hazelnut bushes and acorn-bearing oaks.

    As in Australia, fire was a crucial tool in managing the land before the arrival of Europeans.

    Mr. Hankins says researchers are realizing that some of California's most scenic vistas were shaped by fire — more than they previously appreciated. John Muir's celebrated paeans to the beauty of the Yosemite and Hetch Hetchy valleys ignored the Indigenous role in fires, Mr.. Hankins said.


    "The landscape that he fell in love with was a product of that burning and he completely missed it," he said.

    Scholars have noted parallel experiences of Indigenous groups when they came into contact with European conquerors. Bans on burning came into force in both Australia and California after colonization, and natives were punished if they persisted in burning.

    This attitude toward fire was later manifested in public admonitions such as the Smokey Bear campaigns warning against setting wildfires.

    For more than a century, the policy of the United States has been to "eliminate every fire," said Leaf Hillman, a member of the Karuk tribe who is active in fire activities. "It's catching up with us now and we are paying the price for it."

    There is tension between Native groups in California and state and federal authorities who require that tribes obtain permits before burning, and sometimes ban the activities citing concerns over air quality, liability and fires spreading out of control. Indeed, fire specialists say some forests in California would need to be thinned out before they undergo cultural burning.

    As with other Native fire experts, Mr. Tripp, who is deputy director of the Karuk tribe's Natural Resources Department, says he is working with the National Forest Service, Cal Fire and the Bureau of Indian Affairs to obtain more sovereignty over fire.

    "It's starting to turn the corner," Mr. Tripp said. "We just want to take the handcuffs off."

    "We view this our right, a right that we never ceded."


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    2) London Police Amp Up Surveillance With Real-Time Facial Recognition

    The city, stepping into a debate over privacy, says it will use the technology "to tackle serious crime."

    "In Britain, an independent review last year found many problems with a police trial of facial recognition, including its accuracy. Of 42 identifications made by the system in one trial, only eight were correct."

    By Adam Satariano, January 24, 2020

    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/24/business/london-police-facial-recognition.html


    A closed-circuit camera on Oxford Street in London.Credit...Tolga Akmen/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images


    LONDON — London's police department said on Friday that it would begin using facial recognition technology in the city to identify people off the street in real time with video cameras, adopting a level of surveillance that is rare outside of China.

    The decision is a major development in the use of a technology that has set off a worldwide debate about the balance between security and privacy. Police departments contend that the software gives them a technological edge to catch criminals that may otherwise avoid detection. Critics say the technology is an invasion of privacy and is being rolled out without adequate public discussion.

    Britain has been at the forefront of the debate. In a country where CCTV cameras line the streets, police surveillance has traditionally been more accepted than in other Western countries.

    The technology London plans to deploy goes beyond many of the facial recognition systems used elsewhere, which match a photo against a database to identify a person.. The new systems, created by the company NEC, attempt to identify people on a police watch list in real time with security cameras, giving officers a chance to stop them in the specific location.


    Under pressure to address rising crime, the Metropolitan Police said in a statement that the technology would help quickly identify and apprehend suspects and help "tackle serious crime, including serious violence, gun and knife crime, child sexual exploitation and help protect the vulnerable."

    "Every day, our police officers are briefed about suspects they should look out for," Nick Ephgrave, assistant commissioner of the police department, said in the statement. Live facial recognition, he said, "improves the effectiveness of this tact."

    "As a modern police force, I believe that we have a duty to use new technologies to keep people safe in London," he added.

    Already widespread in China, facial recognition is gaining traction in Western countries. An investigation by The New York Times this month found that more than 600 law enforcement agencies are using a facial recognition system by the company Clearview AI. According to researchers at Georgetown University, cities including New York, Chicago, Detroit and Washington have at least piloted the use of the real-time systems.

    Use of the facial recognition technology has generated a backlash. San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley in California, along with Somerville and Brookline in Massachusetts, have banned its use.


    Privacy groups immediately criticized London's decision and vowed to take legal action to try to stop its deployment.

    "This decision represents an enormous expansion of the surveillance state and a serious threat to civil liberties in the U.K.," said Silkie Carlo, director of Big Brother Watch, a London-based group that has been fighting the use of facial recognition. "This is a breathtaking assault on our rights and we will challenge it."

    Last year, a British judge said that police departments could use the technology without violating privacy or human rights, a case that is under appeal. The government's top privacy regulator has raised concerns about the use of the technology, as did an independent report of a trial use by the Metropolitan Police.

    The Metropolitan Police said it would be transparent about deploying the technology. Officers will post signs and hand out leaflets when the cameras are in use.

    Researchers have found problems with many facial recognition systems, including trouble accurately identifying people who are not white men. Civil liberties groups point to flaws in the technology as a reason it should not be deployed, arguing it will lead to constant surveillance and hinder free movement..

    In Britain, an independent review last year found many problems with a police trial of facial recognition, including its accuracy. Of 42 identifications made by the system in one trial, only eight were correct.

    "It was incredibly inaccurate," said Daragh Murray, a senior lecturer at the University of Essex who conducted the report. "Most times they didn't actually find the people they were looking for. From just a technological perspective, you have to question the utility."


    Mr. Murray said that without clear laws about how the technology is used police departments everywhere have wide latitude to put the camera systems in place. Particularly concerning, he said, is the lack of transparency about how police decide when somebody is placed on a watch list.

    "Too much leeway is given to the police," Mr. Murray said. "What is needed is proper safeguards around its use."

    Britain's Information Commissioner's Office, the country's top privacy regulator, said it would monitor how the system is deployed. It said the police gave assurances that the department would take steps to reduce privacy and data-protection risks.

    "This is an important new technology with potentially significant privacy implications for U.K. citizens," the privacy regulator said in a statement.

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    3) You Are Now Remotely Controlled

    Surveillance capitalists control the science and the scientists, the secrets and the truth.

    "The first is the assertion that democracy threatens prosperity and innovation. Former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt explainedin 2011, 'we took the position of 'hands off the internet.' You know, leave us alone … The government can make regulatory mistakes that can slow this whole thing down, and we see that and we worry about it.' This propaganda is recycled from the Gilded Age barons, whom we now call 'robbers.' They insisted that there was no need for law when one had the 'law of survival of the fittest,' the 'laws of capital' and the 'law of supply and demand.'"

    By  Shoshana Zuboff, January 24, 2020

    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/24/opinion/sunday/surveillance-capitalism.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage


    Photo Illustration by Frank Augugliaro/The New York Times; Photograph by Getty Images



    The debate on privacy and law at the Federal Trade CommissionClose Xwas unusually heated that day. Tech industry executives "argued that they were capable of regulating themselves and that government intervention would be costly and counterproductive." Civil libertarians warned that the companies' data capabilities posed "an unprecedented threat to individual freedom.." One observed, "We have to decide what human beings are in the electronic age. Are we just going to be chattel for commerce?" A commissioner asked, ''Where should we draw the line?" The year was 1997.

    The line was never drawn, and the executives got their way. Twenty-three years later the evidence is in. The fruit of that victory was a new economic logic that I call "surveillance capitalism." Its success depends upon one-way-mirror operations engineered for our ignorance and wrapped in a fog of misdirection, euphemism and mendacity. It rooted and flourished in the new spaces of the internet, once celebrated by surveillance capitalists as "the world's largest ungoverned space." But power fills a void, and those once wild spaces are no longer ungoverned. Instead, they are owned and operated by private surveillance capital and governed by its iron laws.

    The rise of surveillance capitalism over the last two decades went largely unchallenged. "Digital" was fast, we were told, and stragglers would be left behind. It's not surprising that so many of us rushed to follow the bustling White Rabbit down his tunnel into a promised digital Wonderland where, like Alice, we fell prey to delusion. In Wonderland, we celebrated the new digital services as free, but now we see that the surveillance capitalists behind those services regard us as the free commodity. We thought that we search Google, but now we understand that Google searches us. We assumed that we use social media to connect, but we learned that connection is how social media uses us. We barely questioned why our new TV or mattress had a privacy policyClose X, but we've begun to understand that "privacy" policies are actually surveillance policies.

    And like our forebears who named the automobile "horseless carriage" because they could not reckon with its true dimension, we regarded the internet platforms as "bulletin boards" where anyone could pin a note. Congress cemented this delusion in a statute, Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, absolving those companies of the obligations that adhere to "publishers" or even to "speakers."


    Only repeated crises have taught us that these platforms are not bulletin boards but hyper-velocity global bloodstreams into which anyone may introduce a dangerous virus without a vaccine. This is how Facebook's chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, could legally refuse to remove a faked video of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and later double down on this decision, announcing that political advertising would not be subject to fact-checking.

    All of these delusions rest on the most treacherous hallucination of them all: the belief that privacy is private. We have imagined that we can choose our degree of privacy with an individual calculation in which a bit of personal information is traded for valued services — a reasonable quid pro quo. For example, when Delta Air Lines piloted a biometric data system at the Atlanta airport, the company reported that of nearly 25,000 customers who traveled there each week, 98 percent opted into the process, noting that "the facial recognition option is saving an average of two seconds for each customer at boarding, or nine minutes when boarding a wide body aircraft."

    In fact the rapid development of facial recognition systems reveals the public consequences of this supposedly private choice. Surveillance capitalists have demanded the right to take our faces wherever they appear — on a city street or a Facebook page. The Financial Times reported that a Microsoft facial recognition training database of 10 million images plucked from the internet without anyone's knowledge and supposedly limited to academic research was employed by companies like IBM and state agencies that included the United States and Chinese military. Among these were two Chinese suppliers of equipment to officials in Xinjiang, where members of the Uighur community live in open-air prisons under perpetual surveillance by facial recognition systems.

    Privacy is not private, because the effectiveness of these and otherprivate or public surveillance and control systems depends upon the pieces of ourselves that we give up — or that are secretly stolen from us.

    Our digital century was to have been democracy's Golden Age. Instead, we enter its third decade marked by a stark new form of social inequality best understood as "epistemic inequality." It recalls a pre-Gutenberg era of extreme asymmetries of knowledge and the power that accrues to such knowledge, as the tech giants seize control of information and learning itself.. The delusion of "privacy as private" was crafted to breed and feed this unanticipated social divide. Surveillance capitalists exploit the widening inequity of knowledge for the sake of profits. They manipulate the economy, our society and even our lives with impunity, endangering not just individual privacy but democracy itself. Distracted by our delusions, we failed to notice this bloodless coup from above.


    The belief that privacy is private has left us careening toward a future that we did not choose, because it failed to reckon with the profound distinction between a society that insists upon sovereign individual rights and one that lives by the social relations of the one-way mirror. The lesson is that privacy is public — it is a collective good that is logically and morally inseparable from the values of human autonomy and self-determination upon which privacy depends and without which a democratic society is unimaginable.

    Still, the winds appear to have finally shifted. A fragile new awareness is dawning as we claw our way back up the rabbit hole toward home. Surveillance capitalists are fast because they seek neither genuine consent nor consensus. They rely on psychic numbing and messages of inevitability to conjure the helplessness, resignation and confusion that paralyze their prey. Democracy is slow, and that's a good thing. Its pace reflects the tens of millions of conversations that occur in families, among neighbors, co-workers and friends, within communities, cities and states, gradually stirring the sleeping giant of democracy to action.

    These conversations are occurring now, and there are many indications that lawmakers are ready to join and to lead. This third decade is likely to decide our fate. Will we make the digital future better, or will it make us worse? Will it be a place that we can call home?

    Epistemic inequality is not based on what we can earn but rather on what we can learn. It is defined as unequal access to learning imposed by private commercial mechanisms of information capture, production, analysis and sales. It is best exemplified in the fast-growing abyss between what we know and what is known about us..

    Twentieth-century industrial society was organized around the "division of labor," and it followed that the struggle for economic equality would shape the politics of that time. Our digital century shifts society's coordinates from a division of labor to a "division of learning," and it follows that the struggle over access to knowledge and the power conferred by such knowledge will shape the politics of our time.

    The new centrality of epistemic inequality signals a power shift from the ownership of the means of production, which defined the politics of the 20th century, to the ownership of the production of meaning. The challenges of epistemic justice and epistemic rights in this new era are summarized in three essential questions about knowledge, authority and power: Who knows? Who decides who knows? Who decides who decides who knows?

    During the last two decades, the leading surveillance capitalists — Google, later followed by Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft — helped to drive this societal transformation while simultaneously ensuring their ascendance to the pinnacle of the epistemic hierarchy. They operated in the shadows to amass huge knowledge monopolies by taking without asking, a maneuver that every child recognizes as theft. Surveillance capitalism begins by unilaterally staking a claim to private human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data. Our lives are rendered as data flows.


    Early on, it was discovered that, unknown to users, even data freely given harbors rich predictive signals, a surplus that is more than what is required for service improvement. It isn't only what you post online, but whether you use exclamation points or the color saturation of your photos; not just where you walk but the stoop of your shoulders; not just the identity of your face but the emotional states conveyed by your "microexpressions"; not just what you like but the pattern of likes across engagements. Soon this behavioral surplus was secretly hunted and captured, claimed as proprietary data.

    The data are conveyed through complex supply chains of devices, tracking and monitoring software, and ecosystems of apps and companies that specialize in niche data flows captured in secret. For example, testing by The Wall Street Journal showed that Facebook receives heart rate data from the Instant Heart Rate: HR Monitor, menstrual cycle data from the Flo Period & Ovulation Tracker, and data that reveal interest in real estate properties from Realtor.com — all of it without the user's knowledge.

    These data flows empty into surveillance capitalists' computational factories, called "artificial intelligenceClose X," where they are manufactured into behavioral predictions that are about us, but they are not for us. Instead, they are sold to business customers in a new kind of market that trades exclusively in human futures. Certainty in human affairs is the lifeblood of these markets, where surveillance capitalists compete on the quality of their predictions. This is a new form of trade that birthed some of the richest and most powerful companies in history.


    In order to achieve their objectives, the leading surveillance capitalists sought to establish unrivaled dominance over the 99.9 percent of the world's information now rendered in digital formats that they helped to create. Surveillance capital has built most of the world's largest computer networks, data centers, populations of servers, undersea transmission cables, advanced microchips, and frontier machine intelligence, igniting an arms race for the 10,000or so specialists on the planet who know how to coax knowledge from these vast new data continents.

    With Google in the lead, the top surveillance capitalists seek to control labor markets in critical expertise, including data science and animal research, elbowing out competitors such as start-ups, universities, high schools, municipalities, established corporations in other industries and less wealthy countries. In 2016, 57 percent of American computer science Ph..D. graduates took jobs in industry, while only 11 percent became tenure-track faculty members. It's not just an American problem. In Britain, university administrators contemplate a "missing generation" of data scientists. A Canadian scientist laments, "the power, the expertise, the data are all concentrated in the hands of a few companies."

    Google created the first insanely lucrative markets to trade in human futures, what we now know as online targeted advertising, based on their predictions of which ads users would click. Between 2000, when the new economic logic was just emerging, and 2004, when the company went public, revenues increased by 3,590 percent. This startling number represents the "surveillance dividend." It quickly reset the bar for investors, eventually driving start-ups, apps developers and established companies to shift their business models toward surveillance capitalism. The promise of a fast track to outsized revenues from selling human futures drove this migration first to Facebook, then through the tech sector and now throughout the rest of the economy to industries as disparate as insurance, retail, finance, education, health care, real estate, entertainment and every product that begins with the word "smart" or service touted as "personalized."


    Even Ford, the birthplace of the 20th-century mass production economy, is on the trail of the surveillance dividend, proposing to meet the challenge of slumping car sales by reimagining Ford vehicles as a "transportation operating system." As one analyst put it, Ford "could make a fortune monetizing data. They won't need engineers, factories or dealers to do it. It's almost pure profit.."

    Surveillance capitalism's economic imperatives were refined in the competition to sell certainty. Early on it was clear that machine intelligence must feed on volumes of data, compelling economies of scale in data extraction. Eventually it was understood that volume is necessary but not sufficient. The best algorithms also require varieties of data — economies of scope. This realization helped drive the "mobile revolution" sending users into the real world armed with cameras, computers, gyroscopes and microphones packed inside their smart new phones. In the competition for scope, surveillance capitalists want your home and what you say and do within its walls. They want your car, your medical conditions, and the shows you stream; your location as well as all the streets and buildings in your path and all the behavior of all the people in your city. They want your voice and what you eat and what you buy; your children's play time and their schooling; your brain waves and your bloodstreamNothing is exempt.

    Unequal knowledge about us produces unequal power over us, and so epistemic inequality widens to include the distance between what we can do and what can be done to us. Data scientists describe this as the shift from monitoring to actuation, in which a critical mass of knowledge about a machine system enables the remote control of that system. Now people have become targets for remote control, as surveillance capitalists discovered that the most predictive data come from intervening in behavior to tune, herd and modify action in the direction of commercial objectives. This third imperative, "economies of action," has become an arena of intense experimentation. "We are learning how to write the music," one scientist said, "and then we let the music make them dance."

    This new power "to make them dance" does not employ soldiers to threaten terror and murder. It arrives carrying a cappuccino, not a gun. It is a new "instrumentarian" power that works its will through the medium of ubiquitous digital instrumentation to manipulate subliminal cues, psychologically target communications, impose default choice architectures, trigger social comparison dynamics and levy rewards and punishments — all of it aimed at remotely tuning, herding and modifying human behavior in the direction of profitable outcomes and always engineered to preserve users' ignorance.

    We saw predictive knowledge morphing into instrumentarian power in Facebook's contagion experiments published in 2012 and 2014, when it planted subliminal cues and manipulated social comparisons on its pages, first to influence users to vote in midterm elections and later to make people feel sadder or happier. Facebook researchers celebrated the success of these experiments noting two key findings: that it was possible to manipulate online cues to influence real world behavior and feelings, and that this could be accomplished while successfully bypassing users' awareness.

    In 2016, the Google-incubated augmented reality game, Pokémon Go, tested economies of action on the streets. Game players did not know that they were pawns in the real game of behavior modification for profit, as the rewards and punishments of hunting imaginary creatures were used to herd people to the McDonald's, Starbucks and local pizza joints that were paying the company for "footfall," in exactly the same way that online advertisers pay for "click through" to their websites.

    In 2017, a leaked Facebook document acquired by The Australian exposed the corporation's interest in applying "psychological insights" from "internal Facebook data" to modify user behavior. The targets were 6.4 million young Australians and New Zealanders. "By monitoring posts, pictures, interactions and internet activity in real time," the executives wrote, "Facebook can work out when young people feel 'stressed,' 'defeated,' 'overwhelmed,' 'anxious,' 'nervous,' 'stupid,' 'silly,' 'useless' and a 'failure.'" This depth of information, they explained, allows Facebook to pinpoint the time frame during which a young person needs a "confidence boost" and is most vulnerable to a specific configuration of subliminal cues and triggers. The data are then used to match each emotional phase with appropriate ad messaging for the maximum probability of guaranteed sales.


    Facebook denied these practices, though a former product manager accused the company of "lying through its teeth." The fact is that in the absence of corporate transparencyClose X and democratic oversight, epistemic inequality rules. They know. They decide who knows. They decide who decides.

    The public's intolerable knowledge disadvantage is deepened by surveillance capitalists' perfection of mass communications as gaslighting. Two examples are illustrative. On April 30, 2019 Mark Zuckerberg made a dramatic announcement at the company's annual developer conference, declaring, "The future is private." A few weeks later, a Facebook litigator appeared before a federal district judge in California to thwart a user lawsuit over privacy invasion, arguing that the very act of using Facebook negates any reasonable expectation of privacy "as a matter of law." In May 2019 Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Google, wrote in The Times of his corporations's commitment to the principle that "privacy cannot be a luxury good." Five months later Google contractors were found offering $5 gift cards to homeless people of color in an Atlanta park in return for a facial scan.

    Facebook's denial invites even more scrutiny in light of another leaked company document appearing in 2018. The confidential report offers rare insight into the heart of Facebook's computational factory, where a "prediction engine" runs on a machine intelligence platform that "ingests trillions of data points every day, trains thousands of models" and then "deploys them to the server fleet for live predictions." Facebook notes that its "prediction service" produces "more than 6 million predictions per second." But to what purpose?

    In its report, the company makes clear that these extraordinary capabilities are dedicated to meeting its corporate customers' "core business challenges" with procedures that link prediction, microtargeting, intervention and behavior modification.. For example, a Facebook service called "loyalty prediction" is touted for its ability to plumb proprietary behavioral surplus to predict individuals who are "at risk" of shifting their brand allegiance and alerting advertisers to intervene promptly with targeted messages designed to stabilize loyalty just in time to alter the course of the future.

    That year a young man named Christopher Wylie turned whistle-blower on his former employer, a political consultancy known as Cambridge Analytica. "We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people's profiles," Wylie admitted, "and built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons." Mr. Wylie characterized those techniques as "information warfare," correctly assessing that such shadow wars are built on asymmetries of knowledge and the power it affords. Less clear to the public or lawmakers was that the political firm's strategies of secret invasion and conquest employed surveillance capitalism's standard operating procedures to which billions of innocent "users" are routinely subjected each day. Mr. Wylie described this mirroring process, as he followed a trail that was already cut and marked. Cambridge Analytica's real innovation was to pivot the whole undertaking from commercial to political objectives.

    In other words, Cambridge Analytica was the parasite, and surveillance capitalism was the host. Thanks to its epistemic dominance, surveillance capitalism provided the behavioral data that exposed the targets for assault. Its methods of behavioral microtargeting and behavioral modification became the weapons. And it was surveillance capitalism's lack of accountability for content on its platform afforded by Section 230 that provided the opportunity for the stealth attacks designed to trigger the inner demons of unsuspecting citizens.

    It's not just that epistemic inequality leaves us utterly vulnerable to the attacks of actors like Cambridge Analytica. The larger and more disturbing point is that surveillance capitalism has turned epistemic inequality into a defining condition of our societies, normalizing information warfare as a chronic feature of our daily reality prosecuted by the very corporations upon which we depend for effective social participation. They have the knowledge, the machines, the science and the scientists, the secrets and the lies. All privacy now rests with them, leaving us with few means of defense from these marauding data invaders... Without law, we scramble to hide in our own lives, while our children debate encryptionClose X strategies around the dinner table and students wear masks to public protests as protection from facial recognition systems built with our family photos.


    In the absence of new declarations of epistemic rights and legislation, surveillance capitalism threatens to remake society as it unmakes democracy. From below, it undermines human agency, usurping privacy, diminishing autonomy and depriving individuals of the right to combat. From above, epistemic inequality and injustice are fundamentally incompatible with the aspirations of a democratic people.

    We know that surveillance capitalists work in the shadows, but what they do there and the knowledge they accrue are unknown to us.. They have the means to know everything about us, but we can know little about them. Their knowledge of us is not for us. Instead, our futures are sold for others' profits. Since that Federal Trade Commission meeting in 1997, the line was never drawn, and people did become chattel for commerce. Another destructive delusion is that this outcome was inevitable — an unavoidable consequence of convenience-enhancing digital technologies. The truth is that surveillance capitalism hijacked the digital medium. There was nothing inevitable about it.

    American lawmakers have been reluctant to take on these challenges for many reasons. One is an unwritten policy of "surveillance exceptionalism" forged in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, when the government's concerns shifted from online privacy protections to a new zeal for "total information awareness." In that political environment the fledgling surveillance capabilities emerging from Silicon Valley appeared to hold great promise.

    Surveillance capitalists have also defended themselves with lobbying and forms of propaganda intended to undermine and intimidate lawmakers, confounding judgment and freezing action. These have received relatively little scrutiny compared to the damage they do. Consider two examples:

    The first is the assertion that democracy threatens prosperity and innovation. Former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt explainedin 2011, "we took the position of 'hands off the internet.' You know, leave us alone … The government can make regulatory mistakes that can slow this whole thing down, and we see that and we worry about it." This propaganda is recycled from the Gilded Age barons, whom we now call "robbers." They insisted that there was no need for law when one had the "law of survival of the fittest," the "laws of capital" and the "law of supply and demand."

    Paradoxically, surveillance capital does not appear to drive innovation. A promising new era of economic research shows the critical role that government and democratic governance have played in innovation and suggests a lack of innovation in big tech companies like Google. Surveillance capitalism's information dominance is not dedicated to the urgent challenges of carbon-free energy, eliminating hunger, curing cancers, ridding the oceans of plastic or flooding the world with well paid, smart, loving teachers and doctors. Instead, we see a frontier operation run by geniuses with vast capital and computational power that is furiously dedicated to the lucrative science and economics of human prediction for profit.

    The second form of propaganda is the argument that the success of the leading surveillance capitalist firms reflects the real value they bring to people. But data from the demand side suggest that surveillance capitalism is better understood as a market failure. Instead of a close alignment of supply and demand, people use these services because they have no comparable alternatives and because they are ignorant of surveillance capitalism's shadow operations and their consequences. Pew Research Center recently reported that 81 percent of Americans believe the potential risks of companies' data collection outweigh the benefits, suggesting that corporate success depends upon coercion and obfuscation rather than meeting people's real needs.

    In his prizewinning history of regulation, the historian Thomas McCraw delivers a warning. Across the centuries regulators failed when they did not frame "strategies appropriate to the particular industries they were regulating.." Existing privacy and antitrust laws are vital but neither will be wholly adequate to the new challenges of reversing epistemic inequality.


    These contests of the 21st century demand a framework of epistemic rights enshrined in law and subject to democratic governance. Such rights would interrupt data supply chains by safeguarding the boundaries of human experience before they come under assault from the forces of datafication. The choice to turn any aspect of one's life into data must belong to individuals by virtue of their rights in a democratic society. This means, for example, that companies cannot claim the right to your face, or use your face as free raw material for analysis, or own and sell any computational products that derive from your face. The conversation on epistemic rights has already begun, reflected in a pathbreaking report from Amnesty International.

    On the demand side, we can outlaw human futures markets and thus eliminate the financial incentives that sustain the surveillance dividend. This is not a radical prospect. For example, societies outlaw markets that trade in human organs, babies and slaves. In each case, we recognize that such markets are both morally repugnant and produce predictably violent consequences. Human futures markets can be shown to produce equally predictable outcomes that challenge human freedom and undermine democracy.. Like subprime mortgages and fossil fuel investments, surveillance assets will become the new toxic assets.

    In support of a new competitive landscape, lawmakers will need to champion new forms of collective action, just as nearly a century ago legal protections for the rights to organize, to strike and to bargain collectively united lawmakers and workers in curbing the powers of monopoly capitalists. Lawmakers must seek alliances with citizens who are deeply concerned over the unchecked power of the surveillance capitalists and with workers who seek fair wages and reasonable security in defiance of the precarious employment conditions that define the surveillance economy..

    Anything made by humans can be unmade by humans. Surveillance capitalism is young, barely 20 years in the making, but democracy is old, rooted in generations of hope and contest.

    Surveillance capitalists are rich and powerful, but they are not invulnerable. They have an Achilles heel: fear. They fear lawmakers who do not fear them. They fear citizens who demand a new road forward as they insist on new answers to old questions: Who will know? Who will decide who knows? Who will decide who decides? Who will write the music, and who will dance?

    Shoshana Zuboff (@ShoshanaZuboff) is professor emerita at Harvard Business School and the author of "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism."

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    4) He Waterboarded a Detainee. Then He Had to Get the C..I.A. to Let Him Stop.

    An architect of the C.I.A. interrogation program testified that to persuade his superiors to let him stop torturing a captive, he had them stand in the cell and watch.

    By Carol Rosenberg, January 22, 2020

    https://www..nytimes.com/2020/01/22/us/politics/cia-torture-interrogation-guantanamo.html?action=click&module=News&pgtype=Homepage


    James E. Mitchell testified to the military tribunal at Guantánamo Bay for a second day on Wednesday.Credit...Angel Valentin for The New York Times


    This article was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting..

    GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — After a few weeks of waterboarding the captive in August 2002, the C..I..A. contract psychologists who had developed the interrogation program wanted to stop. The prisoner, a Palestinian known as Abu Zubaydah, was cooperating, and there did not seem to be any point in continuing to torture him.

    But senior intelligence officials wanted them to press on, one of the psychologists, James E. Mitchell, testified to the military tribunal at Guantánamo on Wednesday.

    "Please continue with the aggressive interrogation strategy for the next 2-3 weeks," their C.I.A. supervisors cabled them, even after the psychologists had sought permission several times to stop using the waterboard and had sent their bosses a disturbingly graphic video montage of what they had been doing.

    Dr. Mitchell said those directing the operation derided the psychologists as "pussies" and believed that, contrary to reports from the secret C.I.A.. prison in Thailand where they were carrying out the interrogation, Mr. Zubaydah could yield some information about what they feared were looming terrorist attacks. If they would not continue, their supervisors threatened to replace them with someone more aggressive.


    So with the support of the C.I.A. station chief, Dr. Mitchell and his partner in developing the program, John Bruce Jessen, summoned a delegation from headquarters to the site to see a real-life version of what had been antiseptically portrayed on television. He quoted himself as saying, "They should bring their rubber boots and come on down."

    The agency dispatched a debriefer from Alec Station, the division that was hunting for Osama bin Laden, and a senior lawyer from the C.I.A.'s Counterterrorism Center.

    Dr. Mitchell, describing the incident for the first time in court, said his thinking at the time was: "If you think you want us to waterboard him, then you're going to witness it. We're going to do it one more time and then never again.."

    In his account in court on Wednesday, he omitted any description of what Mr. Zubaydah was experiencing as guards, the visitors and other black site workers crammed inside his musty, sweaty-smelling cell to watch the waterboarding.

    "I don't want to use the word 'perfunctory' about something that horrible," Dr. Mitchell said, describing how he held a cloth over the Palestinian prisoner's face as Dr. Jessen did two "20-second pours," gave the prisoner time to catch his breath, poured water on his face for shorter durations and then concluded with a final, "40-second pour."


    Seven months later, Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen waterboarded Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who allegedly led the Sept. 11, 2001, hijacking plot, 183 times. But Dr. Mitchell, testifying on the second day of two weeks of hearings centered on the C.I.A. torture program, described essentially putting on a show for visiting senior intelligence officials from C.I.A. headquarters to get permission to stop waterboarding Mr. Zubaydah, whom he and his partner waterboarded a total of 63 times.

    Abu Zubaydah, who was subjected to waterboarding and other "enhanced interrogation" techniques. The C.I.A. thought he was a high-ranking leader of Al Qaeda.Credit...U.S. Central Command


    Defense lawyers in the Sept. 11 death-penalty case called Dr. Mitchell as the first eyewitness of what went on in the C.I.A. interrogation and detention program in the years before Mr. Mohammed and his co-defendants were transferred to Guantánamo in September 2006 for trial.

    During his testimony, Dr. Mitchell pantomimed pouring water, as though from a pitcher.. Twenty-five feet away, Mr. Mohammed, on trial for his alleged role in planning the Sept. 11 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people, had headphones on and appeared to be watching a video on a laptop.

    "Some of the folks who were watching were tearful," Dr. Mitchell said in describing the reaction among the visitors who came to see Mr. Zubaydah's interrogation, including "people who had been there all along who didn't want to see him waterboarded again. I was tearful.. I cry at dog food commercials, and it was particularly hard for me to do."

    "I felt sorry for him," Dr. Mitchell said of Mr. Zubaydah. "I thought it was unnecessary.. He had agreed to work for us," and aside from the occasional deception, he said, "he held up his end of the bargain."

    In April 2002, as C..I.A. contract psychologists, Drs.. Mitchell and Jessen designed a program of violence, sleep deprivation and isolation specifically for use on Mr. Zubaydah. The C.I.A. euphemistically called them "enhanced interrogation techniques."


    Both psychologists were Air Force veterans and drew from experience at the military training program called SERE — for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape — that subjected United States forces to simulated torture to prepare them for possible capture.

    They began waterboarding Mr. Zubaydah in early August. Later that month, Dr. Mitchell testified, they had concluded that they wanted to stop because he was cooperating with his captors and divulging Qaeda secrets.


    It was later disclosed that the C.I.A.. had mistakenly profiled Mr. Zubaydah as a senior Qaeda official. In fact, he knew some fellow jihadists from Pakistan and Afghanistan and had aspired to set up a rival "terror cell," Dr. Mitchell testified, but had not yet done so. He has never been charged with a crime and is held at Guantánamo as an indefinite detainee.

    Through the day, Dr. Mitchell portrayed himself as a sometime whistle-blower who tried to prevent full-time C.I.A. interrogators from doing gratuitously cruel things in the black sites.

    He dispassionately described watching an interrogation of the Saudi man now charged in the U.S.S. Cole bombing case, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, that involved a "stress position": Guards put a broomstick behind the captive's knees and bent his torso backward, "pushing his shoulder blades to the floor."

    "He was screaming, and I thought he would dislocate his knees," said Dr. Mitchell, who said he reported the mistreatment internally. He added that he did not use stress positions in his interrogations because they "don't lend themselves very well to the kind of classical conditioning I was interested in."

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    5) What the C.I.A.'s Torture Program Looked Like to the Tortured

    Drawings done in captivity by the first prisoner known to undergo "enhanced interrogation" portray his account of what happened to him in vivid and disturbing ways.

    By Carol Rosenberg, December 4, 2019

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/04/us/politics/cia-torture-drawings.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article


    An image drawn by Abu Zubaydah, a prisoner at Guantánamo Bay, shows how the C.I.A. applied an approved torture technique called "cramped confinement."Credit...Abu Zubaydah, Courtesy Mark P. Denbeaux


    This article was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

    GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — One shows the prisoner nude and strapped to a crude gurney, his entire body clenched as he is waterboarded by an unseen interrogator. Another shows him with his wrists cuffed to bars so high above his head he is forced on to his tiptoes, with a long wound stitched on his left leg and a howl emerging from his open mouth. Yet another depicts a captor smacking his head against a wall.

    They are sketches drawn in captivity by the Guantánamo Bay prisoner known as Abu Zubaydah, self-portraits of the torture he was subjected to during the four years he was held in secret prisons by the C.I.A.

    Published here for the first time, they are gritty and highly personal depictions that put flesh, bones and emotion on what until now had sometimes been portrayed in popular culture in sanitized or inaccurate ways: the so-called enhanced interrogations techniques used by the United States in secret overseas prisons during a feverish pursuit of Al Qaeda after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

    In each illustration, Mr.. Zubaydah — the first person to be subject to the interrogation program approved by President George W. Bush's administration — portrays the particular techniques as he says they were used on him at a C.I..A. black site in Thailand in August 2002.


    They demonstrate how, more than a decade after the Obama administration outlawed the program — and then went on to partly declassify a Senate study that found the C.I.A. lied about both its effectiveness and its brutality — the final chapter of the black sites has yet to be written.

    Mr. Zubaydah, 48, drew them this year at Guantánamo for inclusion in a 61-page report, "How America Tortures," by his lawyer, Mark P. Denbeaux, a professor at the Seton Hall University School of Law in Newark, and some of Mr. Denbeaux's students. 

    The report uses firsthand accounts, internal Bush administration memos, prisoners' memories and the 2014 Senate Intelligence Committee report to analyze the interrogation program. The program was initially set up for Mr. Zubaydah, who was mistakenly believed to be a top Qaeda lieutenant..

    He was captured in a gun battle in Faisalabad, Pakistan, in March 2002, gravely injured, including a bad wound to his left thigh, and was sent to the C.I.A.'s overseas prison network.. 

    After an internal debate over whether Mr. Zubaydah was forthcoming to F.BI. interrogators, the agency hired two C.I.A. contract psychologists to create the now-outlawed program that would use violence, isolation and sleep deprivation on more than 100 men in secret sites, some described as dungeons, staffed by secret guards and medical officers.


    Descriptions of the methods began leaking out more than a decade ago, occasionally in wrenching detail but sometimes with little more than stick-figure depictions of what prisoners went through. 

    But these newly released drawings depict specific C.I.A. techniques that were approved, described and categorized in memos prepared in 2002 by the Bush administration, and capture the perspective of the person being tortured, Mr. Zubaydah, a Palestinian whose real name is Zayn al-Abidin MuhammadHusayn.

    He was the first person known to be waterboarded by the C.I.A. — he endured it 83 times — and was the first person known to becrammed into a small confinement box as part of what the Seton Hall study called "a constantly rotating barrage" of methods meant to break what interrogators believed was his resistance.

    Subsequent intelligence analysis showed that while Mr. Zubaydah was a jihadist, he had no advance knowledge about the 9/11 attacks, nor was he a member of Al Qaeda. 

    He has never been charged with a crime, and documents released through the courts show that military prosecutors have no plans to do so. 

    He is held at the base's most secretive prison, Camp 7, where he drew these sketches not as artwork, whose release from Guantánamo is now forbidden, but as legal material that was reviewed and cleared — with one redaction — for inclusion in the study. Other drawings he has done of himself during his imprisonment were published last year by ProPublica.


    Abu Zubaydah, Courtesy Mark P. Denbeaux


    In this drawing, the prisoner portrays himself as nude on the waterboard, immobilized as water pours down on his hooded head, his right foot contorted in pain. The image contrasts with some others seen in popular culture; an exhibit at the Spy Museum in Washington, for example, shows a guard pouring water onto the face of a prisoner who is neatly clad in what looks like a prison jumpsuit. 

    Mr. Zubaydah's self-portrait also shows a design detail not present in most depictions — a drop-down hinge to tilt the prisoner's head. Restraints hold down his wounded thigh. 

    The Senate Intelligence Committee study of the C.I.A. program concluded that waterboarding and other techniques were "brutal and far worse than the C.I.A. represented." Its use induced convulsions, vomiting and left Mr. Zubaydah "completely unresponsive, with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth." 

    In a now declassified account he provided his lawyer in 2008, Mr. Zubaydah described the first of what would be 83 waterboarding sessions this way: "They kept pouring water and concentrating on my nose and my mouth until I really felt I was drowning and my chest was just about to explode from the lack of oxygen."


    Abu Zubaydah, Courtesy Mark P. Denbeaux


    Accounts by detainees in different black sites have differed on how this method was used. In his illustration, Mr. Zubaydah shows himself nude and shackled at the wrists to a bar above his head, forced to stand on tiptoe. 

    In his account, as reported by his lawyers, he was still recovering from what the C.I.A. had described as a large wound in his thigh, and he tried to balance his weight on the other leg.


    "Long hours went by while I was standing in that position," he told his lawyers. "My hands were tight to the upper bars." 

    Some guards, he said, "noticed the color of my hands," moved him to a chair "and the interrogation vertigo resumed — the cold, the hunger, the little sleep and the intense vomiting, which I didn't know whether it was caused by the cold, the 'Ensure' or the noise." (The C.I.A.. put its prisoners on liquid diets in its program of so-called learned helplessness..)

    Abu Zubaydah, Courtesy Mark P. Denbeaux


    Mr. Zubaydah, who is not known to have formal art training, drew himself in a hood, shackled in the fetal position and tethered by a chain to a cell bar to constrict his movement. In granting the C.I..A. approval to use a technique similar to this, Jay S. Bybee, a former assistant attorney general, noted in an 18-page memo dated Aug. 1, 2002, that "through observing Zubaydah in captivity, you have noted that he appears to be quite flexible despite his wound." 

    He also noted in the authorization, addressed to the C.I.A.'s actinggeneral counsel at the time, John A. Rizzo, that the agency asserted that "these positions are not designed to produce the pain associated with contortions or twisting of the body."

    Abu Zubaydah, Courtesy Mark P. Denbeaux


    This image emerged from Guantánamo with a black redaction box over Mr.. Zubaydah's depiction of the face of his interrogator.


    It shows the prisoner's captor tightly winding a towel around his neck as he smashes the back of his head against what Mr. Zubaydah recalled was a wooden wall covering a cement wall. 

    "He kept banging me against the wall," he said of the experience, which he described as leaving him blind "for a few instants." With each bang, he said, he would fall to the floor, be dragged by the plastic-tape-wrapped towel "which caused bleeding in my neck," and then receive a slap on his face. 

    In a 2017 deposition as part of a lawsuit that was eventually settled, James E. Mitchell, a former C.I.A. contract psychologist who devised the techniques with a colleague, John Bruce Jessen, said walling was "discombobulating" and meant to stir up a prisoner's inner ears. "If it's painful, you're doing it wrong," he said. 

    Abu Zubaydah, Courtesy Mark P. Denbeaux


    In this drawing, Mr. Zubaydah is shaved, nude, shackled in such a way he cannot stand up and, by his account, is sitting on a bucket meant to serve as a toilet.

    "I found myself in total darkness," he said. "The only spot I could sit in was on top of the bucket, for the place was very tight." 

    In his account, Mr.. Zubaydah describes being confined in "a large wooden box that looked like a wooden casket." The first time he saw it, guards were turning it vertical and a man in black clothes and a military jacket announced, "From now on, this is going to be your home."


    Mr. Zubaydah portrays himself in the drawings with both eyes. A photograph of him early during his time at Guantánamo shows him wearing an eye patch after the removal of an injured eye.

    Abu Zubaydah, Courtesy Mark P. Denbeaux


    The small box is similar to the one on display at the Spy Museum where, during a visit, children could be seen crawling inside. 

    In his account, included in the Seton Hall report, Mr. Zubaydah describes his time in what he called "the dog box" as "so painful." He adds: "As soon as they locked me up inside the box, I tried my best to sit up, but in vain, for the box was too short. I tried to take a curled position but to no vain, for it was too tight." He was immobilized and shackled in the fetal position, as he described it, for "countless hours," experiencing muscle contractions. 

    "The very strong pain," he said, "made me scream unconsciously." 

    Abu Zubaydah, Courtesy Mark P. Denbeaux


    Mr. Zubaydah recalled that agents used a method of "horizontal sleep deprivation" that involved shackling him flat on the ground in such a painful position that it made it impossible to sleep. 

    The C.I..A. justified sleep deprivation by saying it "focuses the detainee's attention on his current situation rather than ideological goals." In approving this and other techniques in August 2002, Mr. Bybee said the C.I.A. had said it would not deprive Mr. Zubaydah of sleep for "more than 11 days at a time."


    In the Seton Hall study, Mr. Zubaydah recounted being deprived of sleep for "maybe two or three weeks or even more." 

    "It felt like an eternity," he added, "to the point that I found myself falling asleep despite the water being thrown at me by the guard.." 

    In this drawing, the prisoner portrays himself as lightly clothed.


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    6) Doctors Could Face Criminal Charges for Treating Transgender Teens

    In South Dakota and other states, lawmakers are considering bills that would restrict access to hormone treatment and surgeries for young transgender people.

    By Julie Bosman and Mitch Smith, January 27, 2020

    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/27/us/south-dakota-transgender.html


    Samson Mettler, 22, is a transgender college student in Sioux Falls, S.D., where lawmakers are trying to bar doctors from prescribing treatments to transgender teenagers under 16.Credit....Tim Gruber for The New York Times


    A "bathroom bill" to regulate the restroom choice of transgender people has failed in South Dakota. So has a bill that would have required high school athletes to play on a sports team according to their sex at birth, not their gender identity.

    But it is a new year and a new legislative session, and a group of South Dakota lawmakers is trying to pass a new restriction on transgender teenagers that the lawmakers say would prevent unnecessary medical procedures.. 

    The proposed law, which is expected to go up for a vote in the state's House of Representatives on Monday, would bar doctors from prescribing hormones or puberty-blocking medication or performing transgender surgeries on anyone under the age of 16.

    The bill has strong support from social conservatives in the Republican-controlled Legislature, who believe it would enforce a common-sense view: that transgender youths under 16 are too young to begin taking medication or hormones.


    But rural libertarians, Democrats, transgender people and the medical community have lined up against it, saying that it would harm transgender teenagers who greatly benefit from those treatments, particularly puberty blockers. Doctors have been particularly appalled; they could face criminal charges and jail time for violating the new law, should it pass the Legislature and be signed by Gov. Kristi Noem, a Republican who has expressed concerns about it.

    "I've heard 'It interferes with parental rights,' and that 'doctor knows best,'" said Representative Lee Qualm, a Republican who is the House majority leader and a sponsor of the bill.

    "I understand people can go a lot of ways on this," Mr. Qualm said. 

    Of his constituents who have emailed him, he said, "it's almost a 50-50 split."

    Representative Fred Deutsch, who introduced the bill, said he got the idea when he was surfing the internet last year.. He said he had heard about people in other states who regretted transitioning from one gender to another, and wondered whether such treatments were offered in his state.

    "I Googled 'transgender medicine South Dakota' and I found a handful of doctors, not many, that do the procedures," said Mr. Deutsch, who also introduced the bathroom bill in 2016. "And that's the genesis of the concept of this bill."


    Mr. Deutsch, a chiropractor, said he had received input on the legislation from the Kelsey Coalition, a parent group that opposes hormone treatment for transgender children, and the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative group based in Scottsdale, Ariz., whose leaders declined an interview request, as well as other groups. Mr. Deutsch said he had also given drafts of his bill to lawmakers in other states considering similar measures.

    "This bill came out of that feeling of, We need to protect our children," he said, comparing the legislation to a "pause button." "When you turn 16 you can do whatever you want. But by golly, can't you just wait before you take these drugs?"


    It is relatively uncommon for teenagers in South Dakota to undergo gender-affirming surgery, such as mastectomies for transgender boys, because most medical professionals advise waiting until adulthood for permanent procedures. The bill would affect far more teenagers who are prescribed puberty blockers, injections or implants that are frequently administered to children who are experiencing gender dysphoria as a way to pause the process of puberty. 

    But those treatments worry advocates of the bill, who say they are concerned that children are not old enough to decide whether they want to delay puberty. "We are a coalition of parents who are standing together to stop the harming of children," said Lynn Meagher, a parent from Washington State.

    Medical professionals who treat transgender youth said that the medicines could be lifesaving, helping to diminish anxiety, depression and suicidal behavior. For many transgender teenagers, the development of their bodies during puberty — particularly the growth of breasts — can deepen their psychological stress.

    "They're not using actual evidence," said Dr.. Alexis Chávez, a psychiatrist who is the medical director for the Trevor Project, a national organization focused on preventing suicide among lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youths. "They're not using the research. They're not listening to any health care providers. And they're advancing something that's very dangerous to make a statement."


    Senator Reynold Nesiba, a Democrat and an economics professor, said his primary concern with the bill was the way it was being framed.

    "Here we are in the Capitol in Pierre, S.D., at a great distance, trying to influence a decision that is so personal and really needs to be made by the child, the parent and the physician," he said. "And from the evidence I've seen, there is no evidence that physicians are doing harm." 

    South Dakota, where Republicans have full control of state government, has become a proving ground for conservative legislation on issues such as abortiongun rights and, in recent years, transgender rights. One reason the state is appealing for such experimentation: Every bill introduced in South Dakota is guaranteed a public hearing. 

    If an issue survives in South Dakota, that can make it easier for conservative groups to pitch a policy to lawmakers in other states. This year, bills restricting medical care for transgender children have also been introduced in several states, including ColoradoFloridaMissouri and South Carolina, though none of those bills have advanced out of committee.

    "Once you pass one of these bills somewhere, it gets a heck of a lot easier to pass them somewhere else," said Libby Skarin, the policy director for the American Civil Liberties Union of South Dakota, which opposes the bill banning treatment for transgender teenagers and has threatened to sue if it becomes law.

    Though South Dakota is a heavily conservative state, there is nuance within its Republican Party. Three House Republicans voted against sending the bill to the full House, after a hearing in which out-of-state proponents of the bill testified on video. Even some supporters acknowledge that transgender restrictions are not a top priority for constituents.

    "I would never go so far as to say it's a No. 1 issue," said Mr. Qualm, the House majority leader. "It's on their radar."


    Samson Mettler, a 22-year-old college student in Sioux Falls who is transgender, said he was dismayed to hear about the bill several weeks ago — particularly knowing that other bills that would have curtailed transgender rights had already failed in South Dakota.

    "It's just a constant fight," he said. "That's a hard thing." 

    Andrew C., 17, a transgender boy who lives in a small town near Sioux Falls, said he heard about the bill on a local news website this month. He immediately feared that he would have to end the hormone treatment he began last summer. The bill, which initially called for banning treatment for those under 18, was later changed to apply only to those 15 and younger.

    "I was like, 'They can't be doing this stuff again,'" said Andrew, an aspiring teacher who, citing privacy concerns, spoke on the condition that his surname not be used. "The legislators, they don't understand the people that it could affect."

    If the bill passes in the House, it could advance to the Senate in the next week.

    Should it succeed in the Senate, its fate is still uncertain. In 2016, the veto pen of a Republican governor, Dennis Daugaard, blocked the bathroom restrictions from taking effect. Ms. Noem, the current governor, has said that she would have signed that bathroom bill. 

    But at a news conference on Friday, Ms. Noem expressed "a few concerns" about the legislation restricting medical treatment.

    "When you take public policy and try to fill parenting gaps with more government, you have to be very careful about the precedent you're setting," she told reporters. Ms. Noem has not said publicly whether she would sign the bill.

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    7) The Day I Realized I Would Never Find Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq

    By J.D. Maddox, January 29, 2020

    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/29/magazine/iraq-weapons-mass-destruction.html


    J.D. Maddox in Baghdad in 2003.Credit...via J.D. Maddox


    I rolled west from Baghdad in a convoy of soft-side Humvees. It was a morning in late June 2003, and I had traded a bottle of whiskey for the use of an American military police detachment as protection for a daylong mission to Abu Ghraib prison. As an intelligence officer for the Department of Energy assigned to the Iraq Survey Group — the American-led team searching for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq — I was scheduled to interview an Iraqi prisoner who had been captured weeks before, on suspicion of transporting stolen nuclear material. I couldn't know it that morning, but the interview would entirely change my perspective on America's involvement in Iraq, and set me on a decades-long course of struggling with the false narratives used to persuade us to march into that conflict and other ones.

    I gripped my pistol tightly as we moved along in the doorless vehicles, occasionally pointing it in the direction of anything that came near the convoy. I had borrowed the weapon — no more than a party favor in that bacchanal of R.P.G.s and gold-plated Kalashnikovs — from a fellow intelligence officer, who asked me to return it with all of its bullets.

    As we approached the outskirts of the prison, the road narrowed, and we drove through a frenetic marketplace. During Saddam Hussein's long rule, families of Abu Ghraib prisoners had made the area their home, and many stayed there after Hussein had released his prisoners in the lead-up to the war. As our oversize vehicles stalled traffic and disrupted local business, men cursed us and spat on the ground.. A butcher stared me in the eyes and hacked deeply into a hanging goat carcass. Children came within an arm's length, demanding handouts and laughing mockingly.

    Finding the entryway to the prison was a relief — until an American service member explained that a convoy had been struck just outside the facility by a roadside bomb the day before, severing one soldier's spine. A young guard manning an M60 machine gun waved us in while keeping his weapon aimed in our direction. I hardly felt safer than I did outside — the place was under a constant threat of attack.

    There was a sense of anxiety in every facility I visited in Iraq, but the American soldiers at Abu Ghraib had an unusual look of dread and contempt in their eyes. The place felt completely detached from the headquarters I'd been dealing with in Baghdad, and I could tell their isolation was affecting them. At the time I knew nothing about the horrific human-rights abuses that took place behind those prison walls and would be revealed to the world 10 months later, but I could sense that everyone I encountered was on edge.

    This was my first deployment to a "shooting war." I had previously served in the Army, but by the time of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, I had left the military to go into nuclear-counterterrorism operations for the Department of Energy. I had privately questioned the motive for going into Iraq, suspicious of the way the administration had shifted its justification over time, but I still chose to go. Secretary of State Colin Powell's now-notorious United Nations speech on Feb. 5, 2003 — when he argued that Saddam Hussein's regime had developed weapons of mass destruction and posed an imminent threat — assuaged any reservations I might have had. "Every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources," he said. "These are not assertions. What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence." There was no more trustworthy spokesman, I thought at the time.

    A few months later, I deployed to Qatar and then to Iraq. The Iraq Survey Group would scour the countryside, excavating purported W.M.D. sites and interrogating dumbfounded Iraqi military officers. There was a core group of true believers who led the effort and controlled every meeting. The rest of us followed their lead, unsure what to expect. After just a short time with the group, I had little belief that we would find any nuclear weapons. During late-night rants, my fellow intelligence officers debunked the stories that the Iraqi government had access to African uranium, had developed special centrifuges or was driving biological-warfare trailers around the country. But nobody said anything during work hours. That argument had already been made and lost in Washington.

    Instead, I eventually focused my work on counterterrorism questions. I felt that I could best carry out my duty and contribute something useful by following up on more realistic threats. A terrorist named Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, then presumed to be affiliated with Al Qaeda, was reportedly active in the region and had supposedly shown interest in nuclear weapons. I wanted to know everything I could about his operations, and I thought the man arrested for transporting illicit nuclear material could potentially provide a link to al-Zarqawi's network.

    At Abu Ghraib, I interviewed my subject in an outdoor holding pen under a tent in a large courtyard. A double line of concertina wire separated me from what seemed like hundreds of prisoners. A few of them threw rocks that landed at my feet as I made my way to the tent. The intense heat of the sun soaked right through the canvas roof, my desert camouflage uniform and my body armor, and it felt like it was boiling my blood. A guard brought my subject. I offered him a cold bottle of water. He cried.


    My line of questioning was simple: Tell me about the nuclear material you were transporting. His answers also were simple: I wasn't transporting nuclear material; I didn't do it.. For a while I assumed his tears were a ploy. I applied greater pressure: Stop lying to me; tell me where you got it; we know everything. His crying intensified.

    In the famous deck of cards that depicted Hussein's henchmen, my subject wouldn't even rank as a two of clubs.. The truth is that this old man — caught with car parts patched together to look like a small radioactive-material container — was no more than a con artist. He probably just wanted to make some cash by selling the fake material to a sucker. Almost certainly he was crying in front of me out of genuine despair.

    But my questions were unrelenting. I was determined to eke out any details that could offer clues about Al-Zarqawi. A colleague in the tent gave me a confused look, and later commented that my face was indecipherable during the interrogation. My subject protested his innocence and even tried to take my hands in his, pleading for his family's security. In the end, I turned to the interpreter and whispered, "He doesn't belong here." He promised to tell the commanding officer. My comment was as much about the absurdity of the whole situation as it was about the prisoner's innocence. I had risked the lives of a dozen soldiers to be there — only to find a small-scale confirmation of the ludicrous false premises under which we had invaded and occupied Iraq.. The Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were no more than a bit of improvised sham, a con man's counterfeit goods. In the process I had stumbled into one of the darkest places in wartime Iraq and into the most revealing truth of the conflict: Nobody belonged there.

    When I returned to Washington, some weeks later, it was clear to me that people who hadn't served in Iraq knew little of what was really going on. A friend asked me how the search for weapons of mass destruction was going. I responded wryly, "Well, I'm back, aren't I?" I avoided explaining the enormity of it. I relied on funny stories of swimming in Uday's pool or peeing in Hussein's golden toilets to escape the conversation.

    When the Iraq Survey Group's interim progress report was released, in October 2003, the truth became unavoidable. It offered a thinly veiled admission of failure to find any convincing evidence of recent W.M.D. activity. I had often justified my participation as my duty, but that claim began to sound more and more like an excuse for blind adventurism. It became impossible to square my American sense of free will — our image of ourselves as empowered citizens participating in informed choices — with the reality of the way that we were hoodwinked into going along with the invasion of Iraq. I had been taught throughout my childhood and my military training that America conducts wars based on just cause, but the reality emerging from Iraq was that we had been compelled by deception.

    A few months later, in April 2004, CBS News broke the story of torture at Abu Ghraib prison, revealing that American guards, maybe even some of the people whom I had seen at the prison, had beaten and abused prisoners. I was horrified. There had been little to stop me from harming my interviewee there, but doing so would have required moral bankruptcy. The actions of the guards at Abu Ghraib invalidated the American idea of liberation that I believed in. To me, the cruelty and abuse of power represented a perversion of American values.

    In that moment, it became clear to me that the administration's public narrative of the war was exactly what drove us to that dark place. The time-tested tropes of war for freedom and war of liberation had been used masterfully, and had been enabled by false claims of the Hussein regime's involvement with Al Qaeda. We were fighting in a fantasy and our leaders knew it, even while we were there, yet we persisted.

    I was repulsed by the idea that we could have been so easily manipulated. For a time I considered ending my government career. But I also felt that walking away would make me powerless to do anything to push back against the administration's dishonesty. Instead, I refocused my intelligence career on understanding the underlying causes of war.. Later, as an adjunct professor, I spent time developing an assessment of historical false justifications, and taught on the subject. To this day, I'm chastened by the memory of my experience at Abu Ghraib, and I'm haunted by the unknown fate of my interviewee. Like many veterans, I carry a deep desire to prevent another conflict like the invasion of Iraq, fueled by my understanding of the war's absurdities. But I'm struck by the power of our national momentum toward going to war — especially unnecessary ones — and alarmed that this momentum seems nearly impossible to halt.

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    8) Temperatures at a Florida-Size Glacier Alarm Scientists

    By Shola Lawal, January 29, 2020

    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/29/climate/thwaites-glacier-melting-antarctica.html


    The Thwaites glacier, above, helps to keep the much larger West Antarctic Ice Shelf stable.Credit...NASA/OIB/Jeremy Harbeck


    Scientists in Antarctica have recorded, for the first time, unusually warm water beneath a glacier the size of Florida that is already melting and contributing to a rise in sea levels.

    The researchers, working on the Thwaites Glacier, recorded water temperatures at the base of the ice of more than 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.8 degrees Fahrenheit, above the normal freezing point. Critically, the measurements were taken at the glacier's grounding line, the area where it transitions from resting wholly on bedrock to spreading out on the sea as ice shelves.

    It is unclear how fast the glacier is deteriorating: Studies have forecast its total collapse in a century and also in a few decades. The presence of warm water in the grounding line may support estimates at the faster range.

    That is significant because the Thwaites, along with the Pine Island Glacier and a number of smaller glaciers, acts as a brake on part of the much larger West Antarctic Ice Sheet.. Together, the two bigger glaciers are currently holding back ice that, if melted, would raise the world's oceans by more than a meter, or about four feet, over centuries, an amount that would put many coastal cities underwater.


    "Warm waters in this part of the world, as remote as they may seem, should serve as a warning to all of us about the potential dire changes to the planet brought about by climate change," said David Holland, a lead researcher on the expedition and director of New York University's Environmental Fluid Dynamics Laboratory.

    Glaciologists have previously raised alarm over the presence of warm water melting the Thwaites from below. This is the first time, though, that warm waters have been measured at the glacier's grounding line.


    To observe activity beneath the glacier, Dr. Holland's team drilled a hole from the surface to the bottom and then deployed equipment that measures water temperature and ocean turbulence, or the mixing of freshwater from the glacier and salty ocean water. Warm waters beneath the Thwaites are actively melting it, the team found.

    Drilling the hole — about 30 centimeters wide and 600 meters deep, or roughly one foot by 1,970 feet — and collecting the data took about 96 hours in subzero weather. The results of the study are expected to be published in March. The expedition was part of the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration, a series of research projects aimed at understanding the glacier.


    "It certainly has a big impact on our U.S. coast and in many areas," said Twila Moon, a researcher with the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado Boulder, who was not part of the expedition..

    While scientists may not yet be able to definitively predict how soon glaciers like the Thwaites will melt, human-caused climate change is a key factor. The biggest predictor of "how much ice we will lose and how quickly we will lose it," Dr. Moon said, "is human action."


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    9) For 25 Years in Prison, He Said He Was Innocent. A Judge Just Agreed

    Rafael Ruiz always maintained he did not take part in a gang rape in 1984.

    By Alan Feuer, January 28, 2020

    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/28/nyregion/rafael-ruiz-exonerated-innocence-project.html


    Rafael Ruiz on Jan. 28.Credit...Daniele Selby for the Innocence Project


    Four times, Rafael Ruiz recalled, he rejected offers from New York prosecutors to enter a guilty plea and admit to participating in a gang rape on a Harlem rooftop in 1984, even though it would have meant serving much less time. He was under arrest but he had good reason for turning down the deals.

    "I told them," he said, "I didn't do nothing wrong."

    On Tuesday, a judge finally agreed with him. At a hearing in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, Mr. Ruiz was formally cleared of the crime. But the exoneration came far too late: Though he was released from prison a decade ago, he had already served 25 years.

    "I feel very happy," he said in an interview. "At least I got my life back."

    Mr. Ruiz's ordeal began on May 18, 1984, when, at age 24, he was charged with taking part in the violent rape of an 18-year-old woman who had been found the month before hyperventilating on a sidewalk on First Avenue in East Harlem.

    The woman told the police that a man named "Ronnie" had driven her that night to a building in the Robert F. Wagner Houses, a public housing complex in East Harlem. Ronnie, she said, had taken her to one of the apartments in the building and then up to the roof where she was raped and beaten by at least three men.


    Within two weeks of the assault, the victim led detectives to the apartment she believed she had been to just before the rape, court papers said. The police found Mr. Ruiz, who had been visiting his brother there, and asked him to come down to the station house for questioning. He agreed.

    Later that night, the victim identified Mr. Ruiz in a photo array of suspects as one of the men who had attacked her, even though he did not fit her original description of her attackers. Shortly after, she identified him again in an unusual process called a "one-on-one show-up," picking him out as one of her assailants as he stood alone in a room behind a one-way mirror.

    The police typically use single person show-ups, instead of line-ups with several people who look similar, only in emergencies, when a victim is ill or close to death.

    Mr. Ruiz's lawyers sought to keep the identification of him from being used as evidence, but it was allowed to stand, court papers said, and Mr. Ruiz was indicted. At his trial, prosecutors from the Manhattan district attorney's office relied mostly on the victim's testimony and her initial identification of Mr. Ruiz as one of her attackers.

    Mr. Ruiz took the stand in his own defense and said that he could not have taken part in the rape. He was Hispanic, he said, and the young woman had initially said all of her attackers were black. He also said that he could not be Ronnie — the man who had driven the woman to the public housing project — because he didn't know how to drive.


    He was nonetheless convicted and sentenced to eight to 25 years in prison.

    In 2003, 15 years after losing his appeal, Mr. Ruiz and his family hired a lawyer, William M. Tendy, who began to reinvestigate his case. A year later, Mr. Tendy made a startling discovery, court papers said.

    Mr. Ruiz's brother — the man he had been staying with at the time of his arrest — lived in Apartment 16B at 2400 Second Avenue, one of the buildings in the Wagner Houses. Around the same time, a woman who lived across the hall in Apartment 16C had a boyfriend named Ronnie.

    Mr. Tendy believed the victim had accidentally led the police to the wrong apartment and then mistakenly put them onto Mr. Ruiz's trail.

    Mr. Tendy was unable to track down the woman to corroborate this story before she died in 2009. After Mr. Tendy turned the case over to the Innocence Project, lawyers from the organization worked with the Conviction Integrity Program of the Manhattan district attorney's office to find the victim.

    When prosecutors interviewed the victim in September 2018, she said that she remembered "feeling pressure" from the original detectives to identify a suspect, the court documents said. The detectives, she recalled, were "being pushy," according to the papers, and had told her that whoever had attacked her was "hurting women." She also admitted she was still uncertain she had picked the right man.

    In late 2019, after years of fruitless searching, the Innocence Project found its own piece of the puzzle: the rape kit from the victim's case. When lawyers from the project checked samples of Mr. Ruiz's DNA with samples from the kit, they did not match, court papers said.

    By that point, Mr. Ruiz had been out of prison for nearly a decade, a time during which his family had supported him because, as a felon, he had a hard time finding jobs.


    Now 60 years old and living in the Bronx, Mr. Ruiz said he is not sure anyone would still want to hire him.

    "My record is clean and my life is given back to me, but what am I supposed to do?" he said. "I'll just stay out of trouble and wait until something comes around."

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    10) Give Us Back What Our Ancestors Made

    Africans shouldn't have to travel to Western museums to see the artworks looted from their continent.

    By Victor Ehikhamenor, January 28, 2020

    https://www..nytimes.com/2020/01/28/opinion/looted-benin-bronzes.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

    The Benin Bronzes on display at the British Museum.Credit...Lauren Fleishman for The New York Times



    The author's digital rendering of his iconography on a photo of the Queen Idia mask.Credit...Victor Ehikhamenor


    LAGOS, Nigeria — There is an axiom of my elders: The earthworm says it used to own a lot of gold jewelry, but now that it burrows the earth and covers itself in mud, no one believes it. As a Nigerian, I'm reminded of that whenever I encounter some of the exquisite objects looted from Benin City, in southern Nigeria, in Western museums.

    I always feel a strong urge to tell others around me that these works belong to my country, but I know they would doubt me because a revered Western institution claims them as its own. These artworks, recognized as masterpieces but sometimes dismissed as primitive, ethnographic or animist, have inspired my art over the years, even in my few encounters with them. If returned to where they belong, these artworks would have a great impact on the future of Nigerian contemporary art.

    In 2017, when I was preparing for a solo exhibition in London, I visited the British Museum for the first time to see the famed works known as the Benin Bronzes — which, despite the name, are not all bronzes — and other artifacts that were looted during a devastating lash of desecration in 1897. That year, British troops sacked Benin City, which was then the capital of the Kingdom of Benin, and ousted the ruler, Oba Ovonramwen.

    An untold number of artworks were seized from the oba's palace. Some of these artworks ended up in other countries, but many are now housed at the British Museum and other British institutions. In recent years, it has become clear that some of the soldiers involved in the expedition — carried out to punish the kingdom for an earlier encounter that ended in British deaths — also kept objects for themselves, leaving a gaping hole in Nigeria's art history.


    Nothing prepared me for the emotional wrench I felt when I stood before the columns of brass plaques suspended from vertical rods at the lower level of the museum as if they were washed old underwear left to dry in the wind. At shrines and altars back home, such works have context and meaning; in the clinical setting of the museum, they seemed diminished and out of place.

    The work that left me the most dejected was the Queen Idia mask, an ivory pendant from the 16th century honoring the mother of Oba Esigie, who wore it on his hip during ceremonies. It was like happening on a long-lost family member in a foreign country. I had the same sense of melancholy when I encountered another Queen Idia mask, which I have incorporated in my own artwork, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2019.

    Since the works were removed from their rightful place, the importance and meaning of the Queen Idia mask were not lost on subsequent kings, artisans and artists from Benin City and Nigeria in general. In the 1960s, the image of Queen Idia was used as the icon for the new Society of Nigerian Artists. In the 1970s the mask was the emblem of the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, known as FESTAC '77. Sadly, when the Nigerian government requested to show the original during the festival, Britain refused, claiming the piece was too fragile to travel. Nigeria had to do with a reproduction by Joseph Alufa Igbinovia, who had to rely on photographs taken of the one in London.

    That wintry day at the British Museum, I realized that many Nigerians have never laid their eyes on such an important part of their history. There in a foreign land, behind glass cases, were heirlooms whose significance was lost on the vast majority of the museum visitors sauntering by.

    The bronze heads and carved ivory tusks we see in Western museums today once formed greater cultural purposes at the oba's palace. The bronze plaques like the ones at the British Museum served as records of rites and documents of visits by dignitaries.


    Today, only a very few of our ancestors' early artifacts can be seen at museums in Africa. Many artists of my own and future generations would greatly benefit from having emblematic artworks, such as the Queen Idia masks, nearby for reference.. Artists would be able to create their own vernacular based on the close study of these works.


    Most of the bronze statuettes that formed part of my installation at the 2017 Venice Biennale, where I was part of the Nigeria Pavilion, were made in the traditional way, the lost wax process, by bronze casters on Igun Street in Benin City, where the majority of the ancient Benin Bronzes were made. The casters are finding little work these days, as appreciation for their work dwindles in a society that is far removed from its cultural relics.

    The British Museum, the institution that holds the largest trove of the art from Benin City in need of restitution, has been adamant about keeping the works. It has offered only to lend some of the Benin Bronzes, and for a few years, when the Benin Royal Museum, scheduled to be completed by 2023, is ready. This is an insult.

    Generations of Africans have already lost incalculable history and cultural reference points because of the absence of some of the best artworks created on the continent. We shouldn't have to ask, over and over, to get back what is ours.

    Victor Ehikhamenor is an artist and the author of the essay collection "Excuse Me! One Nigerian's Funny Outsized Reality."

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    11) Trump Administration Moves to Ease Rules Against Killing Birds

    By Lisa Friedman, January 30, 2020

    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/30/climate/trump-bird-deaths.html?action=click&module=News&pgtype=Homepage

    Since 1918, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act has helped restore the populations of birds like the great egret, and covers more than 1,000 species.Credit...Brandon Thibodeaux for The New York Times


    WASHINGTON — The Trump administration will move on Thursday to weaken a century-old law protecting migratory birds by dropping the threat of punishment to oil and gas companies, construction crews and other organizations that kill birds "incidentally" in the course of their operations.

    The proposed regulation, if finalized, would cement a legal opinion that the Department of Interior issued in 2017. The agency's top lawyer argued that previous administrations had interpreted the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 too broadly, and that only actions explicitly intended to kill birds should be forbidden under the federal law. The death of a bird from an oil slick, the blade of a wind turbine or the spraying of illegal pesticides would no longer trigger penalties.

    That interpretation has already had significant consequences for thousands of migratory birds. According to internal agency documents recently obtained by The New York Times, the Trump administration has discouraged local governments and businesses from taking simple precautionary measures to protect birds, and federal wildlife officials have all but stopped investigating most bird deaths.


    With the outcome of November's presidential election uncertain, the Trump administration is moving quickly to finalize dozens of regulatory rollbacks and other actions to weaken environmental protections viewed as burdensome by industry.


    In recent weeks, the administration has scrapped a clean water regulation aimed at protecting streams and wetlands, and blocked an effort to require Americans to use energy-efficient light bulbs. Within the next month the administration plans to weaken vehicle emissions standards and a rule restricting mercury, a toxic chemical emitted from coal-burning power plants. Completing the rule curtailing the Migratory Bird Treaty Act before the November presidential election will be difficult, but the agency has indicated it will push aggressively to do so.

    "It's a race against the clock," Bob Dreher, senior vice president of conservation programs at Defenders of Wildlife, an environmental organization, said of the proposed regulation.


    Any legal guideline, like the one now governing bird-death enforcement, can be easily overturned; the 2017 opinion on "incidental" avian deaths reversed guidelines written by the Obama administration to enshrine the government's ability to fine and prosecute those who accidentally kill migratory birds. Mr. Dreher noted that codifying the opinion into regulation, as the Trump administration is trying to do, would make it harder for a future Democratic president to issue a quick reversal.


    "They're trying to entrench this as much as they can, and get stuff locked into place," he said, but added, "We're going to fight it."


    Six conservation groups and eight states have already sued to block the underlying legal opinion. Last week, a group of former Interior Department officials from both Republican and Democratic administrations filed an amicus brief in support of the lawsuit.

    Oil industry officials argued that they have worked voluntarily to protect birds and will continue to do so. They also accused the Obama administration of abusing the law by singling out oil and gas companies for prosecution. The new rule, several business leaders said, brings regulatory certainty to companies worried that bird deaths would make them criminally liable for millions of dollars.

    The Migratory Bird Treaty Act makes it illegal "by any means or in any manner" to hunt, take, capture or kill birds, nests or eggs from listed species without a permit. Beginning in the 1970s, federal officials used the act to prosecute and fine companies up to $15,000 per bird for accidental deaths on power lines, in oil pits, in wind turbines and by other industrial hazards.

    In 2010, the Deepwater Horizon disaster killed 11 people and spewed more than 210 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Hundreds of thousands of birds were killed, and BP agreed to pay $100 million for criminal violations under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

    Under the current legal guidance and the proposed regulatory changes, that incident would no longer trigger criminal liability because the birds were killed unintentionally. Illegal acts are also protected under the plan. For example, a farmer who sprayed a banned pesticide that killed birds would not be held liable as long as the birds were not the "intended target."


    My NYT Comment:

    "There is only one reason to "roll back" protections for birds and other wildlife caused by careless corporate construction, production or distribution of products from skyscrapers to factories, farms and oil pipelines and that's to maximize profits—to hell with everything and everyone else. The profits aren't shared. They are hoarded by the wealthy elite ever in search of ways to grab more wealth. This is capitalism's end-game. "More money for me. No food for you!" We, the overwhelming majority of human and all other life on the planet must fight for scraps of bread to eat or shelters to keep warm in. We do the work, but we get the bare minimum while the wealthy have morel then they can spend in a hundred lifetimes. Capitalism—production for private profit—is ruining the planet. Socialism—production for want, need and environmental health—is the only system that will save all of us."  —Bonnie Weinstein

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    12) The Supreme Court's Collapsing Center on Religion

    A case over vouchers threatens to breach the wall separating church and state.

    By Linda Greenhouse, January 30, 2020

    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/30/opinion/supreme-court-religion.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage


    People lined up outside the Supreme Court to hear oral arguments in a case about religious freedom and school choice.Credit...Lawrence Hurley/Reuters


    Every Supreme Court case tells a story. Both sides vie to persuade the justices — and, in big cases, the public as well — to see the issues through one particular narrative lens. Heading into last week's argument on whether Montana was obliged by the federal Constitution to keep subsidizing religious-school tuition under a scholarship program that violated the state Constitution, it was easy to see which story line was winning. "School Choice Battle May Boost Religious Freedom" was the headline on USA Today's preview of the argument.

    That is indeed the narrative put forward by lawyers for the school-choice movement, which seeks to use this case to break through the barriers that in many states have prevented parents from using school tuition vouchers for parochial school tuition. The libertarian Institute for Justice, long a leading proponent of vouchers, is framing its appeal, Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, as a case about religious freedom. (It's worth noting that this is not a religion case brought by the religious right; conservative religious groups, along with the Trump administration, are riding the Institute for Justice's libertarian coattails in a symbiosis of convenience.)

    The state, defending its high court's decision to shut down the scholarship program for all private schools, secular and religious, has no correspondingly snappy one-liner to offer. It argues that religious freedom is enhanced rather than threatened by preventing the flow of public money to religious institutions. That argument gained no traction last week with a Supreme Court majority determined to lower the constitutional barrier between church and state. That this odd case is a glaringly defective vehicle for reaching that goal only shows the depth of the majority's determination.

    The case is also a perfect vehicle for showing something else: the contradiction at the heart of the religious claims being pressed on increasingly receptive federal courts. Those making these claims say that religion and nonreligion must be treated equally. "The rule is religious neutrality," Richard D. Komer, a senior attorney with the Institute for Justice, told the justices. So if parents are able use publicly financed scholarships for secular private school tuition, this argument goes, there should be no difference when it comes to religious school tuition.


    When pressed, however, as they are in this case, religion advocates seek something more than equal treatment. It turns out that what they want is special treatment. That's this case. The plaintiffs are claiming a continued entitlement to scholarships for their parochial school tuition despite the fact that the state court ended the scholarship program for religious and secular schools alike. No one gets the money.

    It's not enough that all parents are being treated the same, no matter where they choose to enroll their children. It's different from the invitingly simple "religious freedom" story line, more complex, with deep implications for how Americans will live in an increasingly diverse society.

    Montana's Constitution, which the voters ratified in 1972, carried forward the principle of no aid to religious schools that was part of the state's original 1889 Constitution. The current Article X prohibits using state money "for any sectarian purpose or to aid any church, school, academy, seminary, college, university, or other literary or scientific institution, controlled in whole or in part by any church, sect, or denomination."

    The one exception was something new in the state's Constitution: an exception for money from federal grants "provided to the state for the express purpose of distribution to nonpublic education," which may pass through the state's hands and into the coffers of religious schools. This exception won the Montana Catholic Conference's support for the new Constitution. A brief filed by a majority of the surviving constitutional convention delegates cites the Catholic support to refute the allegation — offered forcefully in the briefs and during the argument — that the no-aid clause reflects anti-Catholic bigotry.

    In 2015, following a model used in other states, the Montana Legislature established a tax credit of up to $150 for taxpayers who donated to a "student scholarship organization." That organization in turn would use the pooled money to offer need-based scholarships to parents for use at any private school. As in most states, the majority of Montana's private schools are religious; in Montana, all the religious schools are Christian. (No non-Christian religion claims more than 1 percent of Montana's population.) Thirteen schools participated in the program, of which 12 were religious; the single secular school serves children with disabilities.


    Parents who were using the scholarships at religious schools sued in state court after the state's Department of Revenue issued a rule requiring the program to conform to the Constitution's no-aid clause. The Montana Supreme Court, declaring itself bound by the clause, invalidated the entire tax-credit program; there are no more scholarships for use at any private school, religious or secular.

    "And the consequence of this decision is that there is no discrimination," Justice Elena Kagan told Mr. Komer. "Neither set of parents is getting what they want," she went on. "Now, you might say, well, both should get what they want, and maybe that would be a better world. Maybe. But the constitutional harm that it seems that you have to allege here is the discrimination. And there is no discrimination."

    Exactly.

    When the clock ran out on Mr. Komer, the administration's principal deputy solicitor general, Jeffrey Wall, picked up the plaintiffs' argument. It was a question, Mr. Wall said, of the religious school parents' constitutional right to free exercise of religion. "Their free exercise is being penalized," he said.

    There is so much about this case that is simply backward. The administration argues in its brief that "the constitutional violation in this case is especially egregious because it involves the education of children." But to the contrary, that's exactly where the wall of separation has to be maintained with the greatest care.. Religious education serves a purpose, inculcating religious values and preserving religious traditions. A parochial school is not just another neighborhood school down the block.

    Certainly, parents are constitutionally entitled to choose a religious education for their children. And under a 2002 Supreme Court decision, Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, states are free to offer parents the choice of using vouchers to help pay for religious education. That was a bitterly fought 5-to-4 decision. The administration now would go further: not only that a state mayinclude religious schools in a voucher program, but that it must include them, if it wants to have a voucher program at all.

    And where is the stopping point of that argument? Justice Stephen Breyer pressed that question on Deputy Solicitor General Wall. Cities and states support public schools, Justice Breyer observed, asking: "If I decide for you, am I saying that they have to give money — same amounts, proportionate — to the parochial school?"

    Mr. Wall deflected the question, instead pointing to the court's decision three years ago that a state program in Missouri to enhance playground safety couldn't exclude the playgrounds of church-run schools.


    "The court said you can't deny a generally available public benefit to an entity that's otherwise qualified based solely on its religious character or nature," Mr. Wall said of that 2017 ruling.

    In fact, the court both did and didn't say that in the decision. Chief Justice John Roberts's opinion in Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia v. Comer contained a footnote: "This case involves express discrimination based on religious identity with respect to playground resurfacing. We do not address religious uses of funding or other forms of discrimination."

    "That rule applies equally to schools as to playgrounds," Mr. Wall nonetheless asserted.

    Does it? Will it? How can it not, now?

    The footnote in the Trinity Lutheran case was extremely odd. It provoked an objection from Justice Neil Gorsuch that the Supreme Court rules on general principles rather than specific facts, and that "general principles here do not permit discrimination against religious exercise — whether on the playground or not."

    Chief Justice Roberts no doubt included the footnote as a necessary play to the center to satisfy some member or members of a majority more fragile than the eventual 7-to-2 vote made it appear. Justice Kagan? Justice Anthony Kennedy, whose seat is now filled by Justice Brett Kavanaugh? The chief justice himself?

    "The center cannot hold," Yeats wrote in "The Second Coming." He didn't have the United States Supreme Court in mind when he wrote that line. That doesn't mean it doesn't fit.

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    13) 12 Deaths in Mississippi Tell a Grim Story

    The only way to "fix" a problem like the American prison system is to end it.

    "The history of Parchman is a prime example of how dehumanization and neglect are intrinsic to separating people from their freedom."

    By Jamelle Bouie, January 31, 2020

    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/31/opinion/mississippi-prison-deaths.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage


    Demonstrators alarmed by deaths at Mississippi prisons protested at the State Capitol in Jackson last week.Credit...Rogelio V. Solis/Associated Press


    Twelve people have died in Mississippi state prisons since the start of the new year. Nine deaths occurred in the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman. At least one was a suicide. Most were a result of violence between inmates: beatings, stabbings and other fatal altercations.

    State officials have promised to stop the violence. After news of two of those deaths broke last week, Gov. Tate Reeves, a Republican who took office earlier this month, said he would work "around the clock" with the state Department of Corrections to "respond immediately" and prevent new incidents "going forward."

    What's striking about this situation is how little of it is new.. The Parchman prison, which dates to 1904, has a long and infamous history of violence and abuse. It also has a history of reform. But no amount of change has been able to break the cycle of brutality. And why would it? The history of Parchman is a prime example of how dehumanization and neglect are intrinsic to separating people from their freedom.


    The Mississippi of the late 19th century was a rigid apartheid state, its criminal justice system defined by cruel, gratuitous punishment. Black suspects bore the brunt of state violence. Often arrested for petty crimes like theft, gambling and "vagrancy" — traveling without a work permit or evidence of a job — black Mississippians were given hefty fines and lengthy sentences. They were then leased out to private companies for de facto slave labor on railroads and plantations. Conditions were abysmal.


    "The prisoners ate and slept on bare ground, without blankets or mattresses, and often without clothes," writes the historian David Oshinsky in "Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice." "Convicts dropped from exhaustion, pneumonia, malaria, frostbite, consumption, sunstroke, dysentery, gunshot wounds, and 'shackle poisoning' (the constant rubbing of chains and leg irons against bare flesh)." In the 1880s, Oshinsky notes, the annual mortality rate for Mississippi's convict population ranged from 9 percent to 16 percent.


    Convict leasing was on the wane by the turn of the last century, but Mississippi's white elite was still obsessed with "Negro crime." Enter Gov. James K. Vardaman. Elected in 1903 on a demagogic platform of rural chauvinism and white supremacy — he promised to tax the planters, give aid to the (white) poor and turn back "social equality" — Vardaman was a kind of reformer. He opposedconvict leasing as a public giveaway to wealthy landowners and an oppressive burden on impoverished offenders, including blacks.

    "Vardaman would spend a lifetime fighting to deny blacks political rights and social equality," explains Oshinsky, "Yet he also believed that Negroes who accepted their lowly place in the human order should be protected from abuse."


    Vardaman wanted a prison that would socialize black criminals into, as Oshinsky paraphrases the idea, "proper discipline, strong work habits, and respect for white authority." He also wanted it to turn a profit. Under his leadership, the state cleared thousands of acres near the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta in an area called Parchman place, named after the family that had owned it for years. Workers planted crops and constructed prison buildings. The Parchman Penitentiary was born. By the 1910s it was self-sufficient, operating on the same principles as an antebellum plantation, with black convict laborers supervised by white overseers, although the share of white prisoners would increase with time.


    Prisoners of the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman, equipped with hoes, marching to work in the cotton fields in 1939.Credit....Associated Press


    Parchman would, in short order, become notorious for its hard labor and brutality. (The blues musician Bukka White immortalized his experience of the prison in a 1940 song, "Parchman Farm Blues.") Inmates slept on dirt floors. Violence was common. In 1954 officials added a maximum security unit where one prisoner recalled, "they just beat the living crap out of you." Serious reform would come after the Civil Rights movement with Gates v. Collier, a class-action lawsuit filed in 1971 on behalf of four inmates but constructed with testimony from hundreds of prisoners. They attested to murders, rapes, beatings and tortures — one inmate, Danny Bennett, died after he was shocked with cattle prods and left unconscious under the sun in 100-degree heat. They also spoke to poor conditions, from open sewage and polluted water supplies to "kitchens overrun with insects, rodents, and the stench of decay." A federal judge would describe the prison as "unfit for human habitation."

    Decided for good in 1974, Gates would essentially create minimum standards for incarceration in the United States. At Parchman, this meant desegregation and civilian guards, freedom of worship, minimum living space and an end to forced labor. It also spurred the state of Mississippi to create a Department of Corrections to oversee its penal facilities.

    But reform had limits. New facilities and professional staff doesn't change the fact that prisons are a place of confinement, where society isolates many of its least-wanted and most vulnerable members. By the 1990s, according to a report from the American Civil Liberties Union, death row prisoners at Parchman — renamed Mississippi State Penitentiary — reported "profound isolation, unrelieved idleness and monotony, denial of exercise, intolerable stench and pervasive filth, grossly malfunctioning plumbing, and constant exposure to human excrement." H.I.V. positive prisoners in the general population told lawyers from the A.C.L.U. that they "were living in squalor, categorically segregated from the rest of the prison population, and barred from all prison educational and vocational programs and jobs." Assaults between inmates, often part of rival gangs, remained common.


    Parchman is hardly alone in its history of violence and neglect. If anything, it's just an extreme example of conditions that occur throughout American prisons. Even so, there's worse. Last year, the Department of Justice released a 56-page report on the Alabama prison system, where guards are few and far between and where prisoners experience high rates of homicide and sexual assault, where — The New York Times reported — "One prisoner had been dead for so long that when he was discovered lying face down, his face was flattened." The nation's jails — local facilities where arrestees are placed pending trial or sentencing — aren't much better. According to the most recent data, a 2015 report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1,053 people died in local jails in 2014. The leading cause, suicide, accounted for 35 percent of those deaths.


    Change, for Parchman and other facilities, will almost certainly come. We should understand, however, that reform is only ever temporary. There's only so much you can do within the paradigm of incarceration. A prison may or may not be humane, but it will always be dehumanizing. The isolation, the lack of liberty — the separation from family and community — are antithetical to human life. In which case, the only way to "fix" a problem like the American prison system is to end it. But for an unequal, racially stratified country like ours, that destination is on the far horizon, if it's on the horizon at all.

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    Posted by: Bonnie Weinstein <bonnieweinstein@yahoo.com>
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