http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2010/08/political-prisoners-in-america.html
August 09, 2010
by Stephen Lendman
Noted journalist HL Menchen described "The most dangerous man to any
government (as someone) who is able to think things out for himself,
without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost
inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives
under is dishonest, insane, and intolerable," yet resisting, he faces
recrimination - political imprisonment for his beliefs and activism,
officials tolerating no opposition to their authority, no matter how
extreme or lawless.
In his book "Race to Incarcerate," Marc Mauer focuses on America's
obsession with imprisonment, punishment, and the commodification of
prisoners to fill beds - harming society's most vulnerable, targeted
for supporting ethnic justice, racial emancipation, and political,
economic and social equality across gender and color lines, locked
away in the "Land of the Free." In submitting a new report to the UN,
National conference of Black Lawyers activist/attorney Stan Willis said:
"The United States is very, very concerned when its citizens begin to
raise questions in these international forums, because (America)
still prefers to posture itself, including the Obama administration,
as the leader of the free world and that they don't have any human
rights violations, and they certainly don't have any political
prisoners, and we have to dispel that notion in the international community."
American officials don't "want to have these issues reach the world's
people. How do you go into Iraq (and) Afghanistan telling people
about their democracy when (you've got innocent people) locked down
in prison for 30 - 40 years as political prisoners....(activists)
against social injustice, colonialism, and/or imperialism,
(incarcerated for) their political commitments."
Others are victimized by judicial unfairness, get tough on crime
policies, a guilty unless proved innocent mentality, three strikes
and you're out, and what the Innocence Project calls "McJustice - the
crisis of indigent defense."
Also for being undocumented, violating the racist drug laws, for
being Black, Latino or Muslim, to fill prison beds, to satisfy the
prison-industrial complex, one of America's fastest growing,
including a private gulag, prisons for profit, nearly a score of
corporations running dozens of facilities with tens of thousands of
prisoners, about 8% of state and federal inmates, expected to
increase exponentially in the next decade, the Wall Street Journal saying:
"This multimillion-dollar industry has its own advertising campaigns,
architecture companies, construction companies, investment houses on
Wall Street, plumbing supply companies, food supply companies, armed
security, and padded cells in a large variety of colors."
Over 2.4 million prisoners are held in federal and state facilities,
local jails, Indian, juvenile, and military ones, US territories, and
numbers held by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), half
for nonviolent offenses, many for political activism, the Truth &
Justice Foundation (the National Innocence Project) estimating up to
15% wrongfully convicted overall.
Using modern-day slave labor, the Left Business Observer reports that
American prisons produce 100% of US military helmets, ammunition
belts, bullet-proof vests, ID tags, shirts, pants, tents, bags, and
canteens." They also supply 98% of equipment assembly services, 93%
of paints and paintbrushes, 92% of stove assemblies, 46% of body
armor, 36% of home appliances, 30% of headphones, microphones and
speakers, 21% of office furniture, and much more.
Captives in America's gulag, political and other prisoners have
languished for decades, under cruel and inhumane conditions. Some die
their. Others rot, endure years of solitary confinement, poor medical
care, other forms of abuse, and perfunctory parole hearings denying
their right to justice.
America's Longstanding Political Repression Agenda
COINTELPRO targeted political activists, J. Edgar Hoover's illegal
counterintelligence program to neutralize political dissidents,
including communists; anti-war, human and civil rights activists; the
American Indian Movement; Black Panther Party; Puerto Rican
nationalists; the Chicano Movement; environmentalists, and others
challenging state authority - "threats" to "domestic tranquility" for
supporting equity and justice, the rule of law, and right over wrong.
Today they're called "terrorists."
Yale Law Professor/constitutional scholar Thomas I. Emerson (1908 -
1981) expressed outrage saying:
"The FBI jeopardizes the whole system of free expression which is the
cornerstone of our society (raising) the specter of a police
state....In essence, the FBI conceives of itself as an instrument to
prevent radical social change in America....The Bureau's view of its
function leads it beyond data collection into political warfare,"
protecting privilege from beneficial social change, denying due
process and judicial fairness to society's most vulnerable, easy
pickings for America's criminal injustice system.
Definitions of Political Prisoners
The Free Dictionary call them people "who have been imprisoned for
holding or advocating dissenting political views....for holding,
expressing, or acting in accord with particular political beliefs."
In the 1960s, Amnesty International (AI) coined the term "prisoner of
conscience," referring to anyone incarcerated for their race,
religion, ethnicity, language, sexual orientation, beliefs, or lifestyle.
In a London Observer May 28, 1961 article titled, "The Forgotten
Prisoners," AI's founder Peter Benenson (1921 - 2005) defined the
term as follows:
"Any person who is physically restrained (in prison or otherwise) for
expressing any opinion which he honestly holds and which does not
advocate or condone personal violence."
"Open your newspaper any day of the week and you will find a report
from somewhere in the world of someone being imprisoned, tortured or
executed because his opinions or religion are unacceptable to his
government." Millions are affected globally - "by no means (all)
behind the Iron and Bamboo Curtains, and their numbers are growing."
"That is why we have started Appeal for Amnesty (AI), 1961. The
campaign, which opens today, is the result of an initiative by a
group of lawyers, writers and publishers in London, who share the
underlying conviction expressed by Voltaire: 'I detest your views,
but am prepared to die for your right to express them.' "
Howard Zinn called dissent "the highest form of patriotism. In fact,
if patriotism means being true to the principles for which your
country is supposed to stand, then certainly the right to dissent is
one of those principles. And if we're exercising that right to
dissent, it's a patriotic act....One of the great mistakes (about)
patriotism....is to think (it) means support for your
government....(ignoring America's Declaration of Independence
principle that) when governments have become destructive (of life,
liberty and equality) it is the right of the people....to alter or abolish" it.
Incarceration as an Instrument of Social Control
In her 1999 article titled, "Prisons, Social Control and Political
Prisoners," former political prisoner Marilyn Buck called prisons
warehouses to "disappear the unacceptable....to deprive their
captives of their liberties, their human agency, and to
punish....(to) stigmatize prisoners through moralistic denunciations
and indictment based on bad genes - skin color (ethnicity, or other
characteristics) as a crime."
Millions of prisoners aren't incarcerated "because they are
'criminal,' but because they've been accused of breaking (a law)
designed to exert tighter social control and State repression,"
scapegoating, demonizing, and criminalizing them for their beliefs
and activism.
America's militarized police state brutalizes them, locking them in
cages for advocating peace, not war, for their courage to resist
injustice, defend freedom, equality, and human rights, and believe
another world isn't just possible but struggling for it nonviolently
is noble and needed.
In a 1986 Quinn v. Robinson ruling, the US Court of Appeals for the
9th Circuit differentiated between political and other crimes, saying:
"It is the fact that the insurgents are seeking to change their
governments that makes the political offense exception applicable,
not the reasons for wishing to do so or the nature of the acts by
which they hope to accomplish that goal."
In other words, advocating beneficial social or political change is
criminal, turning justice on its head, the same kind that imprisons
lawyers for defending unpopular clients to intimidate others not to try.
In the Vol. 18, 2002 Harvard BlackLetter Law Journal, J. Soffiyah
Elijah headlined, "The Reality of Political Prisoners in the United
States: What September 11 Taught Us About Defending Them," saying:
In a post-9/11 climate, they "and their lawyers have been targeted
for renewed abuse," constitutional protections not shielding against
spurious charges, corrupt prosecutors, hanging judges, and long
imprisonments, many under extremely harsh conditions, including
long-term isolation, over time producing severe anxiety, panic
attacks, irrational anger, social withdrawal, and a profound sense of
hopelessness and despair, for many a totally dysfunctional state and
inability ever to live normally outside of confinement.
Always unfair, American justice is now worse than ever, unjustly
affecting undocumented immigrants, Blacks and Latinos, anyone of
color, Muslims for their faith, ethnicity, activism and prominence,
and those challenging state authority, its imperial marauding, and
sweeping homeland repression, turning America into a police state.
Activists were always targeted, noted civil liberties writer Stephen
Kohn documenting nearly 1,000 cases in his 1994 book titled,
"American Political Prisoners: Prosecutions Under the Espionage and
Sedition Acts." Today, it's under the 1996 Effective Death Penalty
and Anti-Terrorism Act, and post-9/11 ones, including:
-- the 2001 USA Patriot Act, eroding Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment
due process rights; First Amendment free expression and association
ones; and Fourth Amendment freedom from unreasonable searches and
seizures, enabling vast extralegal surveillance powers to destroy the
right of privacy;
-- the 2001 Military Order Number 1, letting the president usurp
authority to capture, kidnap, arrest and torture accused terrorists,
holding them indefinitely without charge; trying them in Military
Commissions with no right of appeal; denying them due process and
judicial fairness;
-- the 2002 Homeland Security Act, a sweeping anti-terrorism bill
creating a national Gestapo, centralizing unprecedented military and
law enforcement power in the executive branch, enhanced by US
Northern Command (USNORTHCOM), established in 2002 to militarize the
homeland, Canada, Mexico, Gulf of Mexico, Straits of Florida, and,
for the first time, let troops deploy on US streets to protect
"national security," and
-- other repressive laws, Executive Orders, National and Homeland
Security Presidential Directives, and other measures targeting anyone
threatening state authority by any means, including those advocating
nonviolent political or social change.
Using previously unavailable FBI, Bureau of Prisons and other DOJ
divisions files, Kohn covered earlier cases, including activists for
"blowing the whistle" on WW I participation, unionists fighting for
worker rights, pacifists, socialists, and others for having unpopular
political or religious beliefs.
In three parts, he chronicled the history and use of the law to
imprison anyone for their political or religious views, described
prison life in their own words, and covered hundreds of people
affected, discussing their beliefs, length of imprisonment, and treatment.
Earlier through today, they've been targeted, hunted down, rounded
up, held in detention, kept in isolation, denied bail, restricted in
their right to counsel, provided the "McJustice" kind, tried on
secret evidence, convicted on spurious charges, given long sentences,
then incarcerated and abused in America's gulag, its hell, for Dante
its entrance inscription saying "Abandon hope all ye who enter here,"
the fate of many locked away in the "land of the free."
A Final Note
On July 15, political prisoner Marilyn Buck was released from the
federal prison medical center in Carswell, TX and paroled to New
York. Three weeks later on August 3, she died.
She served 25 years of an 80 year sentence for opposing racial
injustice and US imperialism. Late last year, she was diagnosed with
uterine sarcoma, a rare aggressive cancer that took her life. To the
end, she heroically maintained her beliefs.
--
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at
lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
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