New Jersey Prisoners Threaten Hunger Over “Abu-Ghraib-like” Conditions

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/12/145247

As many as fourteen hundred prisoners at New Jersey State Prison are threatening to begin a hunger strike today to protest prison conditions. Last week the prisoners complained in a letter that conditions inside were “reminiscent of Abu Ghraib.” [includes rush transcript] As many as fourteen hundred prisoners at New Jersey State Prison are threatening to begin a hunger strike today to protest prison conditions. Last week the prisoners complained in a letter that conditions inside were “reminiscent of Abu Ghraib.” The prisoners wrote they were forced “to wear underwear, reminiscent of Abu Ghraib, with hands held on their heads, while being herded along a gauntlet of offices, with dogs, stretched to the full extent of their lease, barking incessantly for close to an hour at a time.” The prisoners have threatened to begin the hunger strike unless 16 demands are met.

Larry Hamm joins us in our Firehouse studio. He is the chair of the New Jersey-based People’s Organization for Progress. He has been closely monitoring the situation in the New Jersey prisons.

* Larry Hamm. Chairman of the New Jersey-based People’s Organization for Progress.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

This transcript is available free of charge. However, donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution.
Donate - $25, $50, $100, more...

AMY GOODMAN: Larry Hamm joins us now from our firehouse studio here in New York. He’s chair of the New Jersey-based People's Organization for Progress. He’s been closely monitoring the situation in the New Jersey prisons. Welcome, Larry. What’s happening?

LARRY HAMM: It’s good to be here. Well, today is October 12. Today is the day that the prisoners said they would begin their hunger strike. This strike seems to be the result of very oppressive conditions in the prisons that have existed for years. Our organization, together with many of the other advocate organizations, get letters repeatedly about beatings of prisoners, violations of their rights.

There have been several lockdowns in 2005 and 2006. Many of prisoners allege that these lockdowns were sparked by contraband that was planted, in fact, they say, by Department of Corrections officials. And it’s reached a boiling point, and today they said they’re going to begin a hunger strike.

They’ve asked our organization and other organizations to intervene on their behalf, and I was in communication with the Acting Commissioner of Corrections yesterday. We’ll be meeting on Friday, and we will propose that he meet with a larger group that will consist of all the advocate groups and prisoners' rights groups later on this month.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And how have the prisoners been able to organize themselves across the state? That’s unusual to -- you’ll usually find an action in one particular prison.

LARRY HAMM: That’s a good question, and I’m not going to attempt to answer it. They do have ways of communicating with each other. And keep in mind that there were advocacy groups within the prisons that were in communication with one another. After these lockdowns, these groups were disbanded. And this is one of the 16 demands that you mentioned, that they want these groups to be reopened and to be able to engage in their activities.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, again, the prison conditions that they have described to you.

LARRY HAMM: Well, again, as I said, in 2005 and 2006 there were these lockdowns. The prisoners say the conditions are so bad that -- and I have some of their letters here -- that it’s like Abu Ghraib. Their cells have been ransacked. They have been strip-searched. They’ve been forced to strip outside of their cells. They’ve been marched in groups. They’ve been forced to run a gauntlet through a cadre of corrections officers who have attack dogs at full length of the leash, as they said in one of their letters. There have been beatings. It’s very bad. And they’ve asked us to, in fact, let the larger community know, because they feel a lot of this has gotten away with because nobody cares, but we believe a lot of people care.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And the response of corrections officials when you’ve talked to them about these things?

LARRY HAMM: Well, as I said, yesterday was my first direct contact. The Acting Commissioner, Mr. Hayman, called me. However, we have a prisoners’ rights committee within our organization, and the chairs of our committee have been in contact for some time with prison officials about the situation. But it seems that with all the discussion that has gone on, conditions have not improved.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to talk more about the use of dogs inside prisons. Two years ago, the U.S. military was widely criticized after photographs were published showing how dogs were used to terrorize Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. One photograph showed two dogs approaching a naked prisoner. Another showed a prisoner crouching in terror as he was threatened with an un-muzzled German Shepherd.

Well, a new report from Human Rights Watch examines how dogs are used in prisons -- not in Iraq, but here at home. The study reveals five U.S. state prison systems -- Connecticut, Delaware, Iowa, South Dakota and Utah -- authorized the use of large un-muzzled dogs to terrify and even attack prisoners to extract them from their cells. According to Human Rights Watch, no other country in the world authorizes the use of dogs to attack prisoners who will not voluntarily leave their cells.

Jamie Fellner joins us also in our firehouse studio. She is the director of the U.S. Program at Human Rights Watch. Welcome to Democracy Now!

JAMIE FELLNER: Thank you. Glad to be here.

AMY GOODMAN: Tell us about these findings, the use of dogs in U.S. prisons?

JAMIE FELLNER: You know, it’s one of the best kept secrets in corrections in the United States, that there are prison systems that permit dogs, large un-muzzled attack dogs, usually German Shepherds, to be brought to the cell front, and bark and try and intimidate the prisoner into complying with orders to leave his cell. If the prisoner doesn’t comply, the cell door is opened, the dog goes in and bites the prisoner and stays holding on, jaws clamped on the prisoner at whatever limb the dog can get, until he’s called off by the dog handler.

Now, you read the five states that authorize it. It’s important to point out that Connecticut and Iowa are the states that actually use dogs for this purpose quite frequently. Our information from the Departments of Corrections in the other three states are that it’s authorized, but it’s rarely, if ever, used. So we’re really focusing -- and then Massachusetts and Arizona, up to early this year, also permitted the use and frequently used the dogs for this purpose.

When we first heard about this, and we were told by a corrections official who was shocked when he had learned about it, we couldn’t believe it. This is the United States. And while we know terrible things go on in U.S. prisons, to have policy permit dogs to maul prisoners, it doesn’t matter what the justification are, this goes beyond the bar, and, in fact, that’s why most states do not permit it. And Arizona and Massachusetts, when they sort of looked at it and thought about it, the new heads of those departments ended the policy. There’s absolutely no need or justification for it.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, the five states listed in your report don’t include New Jersey, but here we’re hearing, at least in the prisoners here, that dogs are being used, if not necessarily to directly attack the prisoners, then definitely as a form of intimidation and threat against them.

JAMIE FELLNER: Well, dogs are used in many prisons for other purposes. And we spoke to actually the former commissioner of New Jersey, Devon Brown, who said they do not use them to attack prisoners in their cells. But dogs are used in many prisons to sniff for contraband, and when there’s a riot, for riot control. Listening to Larry talk, the only good thing you can say about the use of dogs there is at least they were kept on their leash and they weren’t being used to bite the prisoners.

But if I may, I wanted to say, one of the things you see from the situation in New Jersey, but around the country, is, there is no independent oversight of state prisons, or the federal prison, for that -- well, they have an inspector general. And as long as there’s no independent oversight, prisoners really have very little recourse. They can try and get into court, but under -- with the Prison Litigation Reform Act, if they haven’t sustained a physical injury, they can’t get into court. They’re barred from court. We need to have in place in the United States independent monitoring, so when there are serious situations like that, prisoners have someplace to go.

AMY GOODMAN: Jamie Fellner's report is called “Cruel and Degrading.” It is the Human Rights Watch report. The cover is frightening in itself. Yes, you can hold it up. It is a picture of a dog with his teeth bared. I wanted to talk for a moment about the videotape that you obtained, a training video, formerly used by the Arizona Department of Corrections, that shows a series of simulated cell extractions. This is how the video begins.

PRISON GUARD: Inmate [inaudible], this is a direct order! Drop your weapons now! Move over to the staging door and cuff up!

PRISONER: No.

PRISON GUARD: Inmate has failed to comply. State’s K-9s.

K-9 UNIT: Inmate, this is the K-9 unit. I’m giving a direct order to cuff up or I’ll release my dog, and he will bite you! Inmate has failed to comply! Inmate has failed to comply!

PRISONER: [being attacked by dog] Woohoo!

K-9 UNIT: Drop your weapon! Get on the ground!

AMY GOODMAN: The training video from the Arizona Department of Corrections also shows several examples of how dogs should be used to attack prisoners. This is a simulation produced by the prison.

NARRATOR: The Arizona Department of Corrections utilizes service dog teams to assist in narcotic detection at all of its prison units. Selected teams have also been dual-purpose trained, and thus can be used to assist staff in inmate control situations. The four scenarios you are about to see will show how a dual-purpose service dog is employed in a maximum-security setting. This represents an escalation in the use of force to assist in controlling inmates who refuse to cooperate or who are openly combative. The first scenario involves an inmate who refuses the direction to cuff up, even after the use of a chemical agent.

AMY GOODMAN: The training video from the Arizona Department of Corrections also shows several examples of this use. By the way, we will post on our website at democracynow.org these videos that people can watch. Your response.

JAMIE FELLNER: It is important to remind your listeners and viewers that Arizona no longer does this. They find it unnecessary and unjustified. This was a practice begun by the former director of the department there, a Mr. Terry Stewart. And the current director, Dora Schriro, has abolished the practice.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to just make one quick comment. When I was researching Static with my brother, David, we did a chapter called “Exporting Abuse,” and we looked at how the prisons in Iraq were set up. You just mentioned Terry Stewart, former head of the Corrections Department of Arizona. You talked about Utah. One of the heads of that was Lane McCotter. You talked about Connecticut. These are the places that use dogs. John Anderson came out of there, and two prisoners died in that prison system, who were beaten. These are the men, who, though cited in this country, left their positions and went to Iraq to set up Abu Ghraib.

JAMIE FELLNER: I think it’s fairly well recognized now that Abu Ghraib was set up -- even saying it was set up is too formal a term. It was badly created, badly staffed, badly run, no oversight. I don't think there’s any reason to believe that any of the U.S. corrections officials who went there intended naked pyramids and men standing with wires attached to them thinking they were going to be electrocuted. But these were not the most advanced professionals in the corrections industry, and it is not clear at all what kind of vetting process was used before they were chosen.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Now, the states that have stopped using dogs are Arizona and Massachusetts. And your report quotes one correction official in Massachusetts saying that there are better ways to get an inmate out of their cell than, quote, “sending an animal to rip their flesh.” Was it public pressure that got these institutions or these states to change their policies, or was it just new management that came in? And what kind of public sentiment do you see generally, in terms of providing humane treatment for our prisoners in America’s jails?

JAMIE FELLNER: First of all, any prison reflects the culture created by leadership. If you have strong leadership at the top that insists that there will not be abuse, that anybody who abuses prisoners will be held accountable, you will not find prisons with much abuse. New management came into these two prison systems. They undertook a review of the use of force in their prison systems, because what they saw concerned them. And they undertook a number of reforms, including getting rid of dogs. I think that’s an absolutely crucial lesson, and it’s the second one. I mentioned earlier the importance of oversight. You also need to make sure that you put in place and hold accountable strong leaders in the prison systems.

In terms of the public, so far I think there still is insufficient public concern about what goes on in prison. People don't think of those in prison as members of their community. They are behind bars, behind walls, out of sight, out of mind, and that also is part of the problem. We need more transparency, more public concern about what’s happening to people’s brothers and fathers and mothers and sisters and daughters and cousins. These are members of our community, and what happens to them in prison is going to come home to the community. If you are abused and raped, mistreated however in prison, when you come back to your community, it is going to be less likely that you are going to be able to return to a law-abiding life than before.

JUAN GONZALEZ: I would like to ask Larry Hamm also on this new leadership in New Jersey. Is there any indication that you’ve seen that the Corzine administration is more sympathetic to humane treatment of the prisoners in the jails?

LARRY HAMM: Suffice it to say that the Acting Commissioner, and he’s the Acting Commissioner, contacted me. He reached out to me after receiving my letter and the information that we forwarded to him. However, as I sit here, prisoners are on hunger strike. And after all the talk is done, the question is: have conditions changed?

And I just want to dovetail on what my colleague here said. Those people who, in Jersey and in the country, who are really concerned about what’s happening to the prisoners in New Jersey State Prison, they need to get on the phone, they need to call the commissioner's office. You can get the number out of the 609 area code information. They need to let them know that the people are watching. See, public involvement is absolutely key. If they think nobody cares about people, they’ll do what they want to do. That’s what happened in Iraq. But what’s happening in Iraq is happening in our own prisons. And if we’re outraged about that, then we have to act. People have to pick up their telephone, make a call and urge the commissioner not just to negotiate with the prison advocacy groups that are acting on behalf of these prisoners, but to meet their demands.

When you read their demands, these are very moderate demands. These are not radical demands. They want things like -- you know, they banned hardcover books. Prisoners can’t have hardcover books. I mean, what is that? You know, they don’t have legal access. They don’t have -- the purpose, the statute -- New Jersey law says the purpose of the prisons is to return the prisoners and reintegrate them into society. They’ve just about cut out or eliminated all the programs that would positively rehabilitate prisoners and bring them back into society in a positive way.

JAMIE FELLNER: May I add something? It is not just to call the commissioner. I think people need to be in touch with their elected officials. Elected officials often run on tough-on-crime, and nobody comes back and says, you know, what about rehabilitation? If you looked at New Jersey, who they send to prison, you have thousands of low-level nonviolent people housed in New Jersey prisons and across the country using up expensive bed space. If you put those people -- gave them alternative sanctions, you then have the money to provide good programs, educational programs, rehabilitative activities for those people who truly need to be in prison.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have to leave it there. I thank you both very much for being with us again. We’re going to post this videotape of the training films on our website. Jamie Fellner, director of U.S. Program of Human Rights Watch. The report is called “Cruel and Degrading.” It’s the one with a picture of a dog with his teeth bared on the cover. Larry Hamm, chair of the New Jersey-based People’s Organization for Progress. Thank you both for joining us.

“A Total Rollback Of Everything This Country Has Stood For”: Sen. Patrick Leahy Blasts Congressional Approval of Detainee Bill

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/29/150254

The Senate has agreed to give President Bush extraordinary power to detain and try prisoners in the so-called war on terror. The legislation strips detainees of the right to challenge their own detention and gives the President the power to detain them indefinitely. The bill also immunizes U.S. officials from prosecution for torturing detainees who the military and the CIA captured before the end of last year. We get reaction from Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights. [includes rush transcript] On Capitol Hill, the Senate has agreed to give President Bush extraordinary power to detain and try prisoners in the so-called war on terror. The editors of the New York Times described the law as tyrannical. They said its passage marks a low point in American democracy and that it is our generation’s version of the Alien and Sedition Acts. The legislation strips detainees of the right to file habeas corpus petitions to challenge their own detention or treatment. It gives the president the power to indefinitely detain anyone it deems to have provided material support to anti-U.S. hostilities. Secret and coerced evidence could be used to try detainees held in U.S. military prisons. The bill also immunizes U.S. officials from prosecution for torturing detainees who the military and the CIA captured before the end of last year.

The Senate passed the measure sixty five to thirty four. Twelve Democrats joined the Republican majority. The House passed virtually the same legislation on Wednesday. Legal groups, including the Center for Constitutional Rights, are already preparing to challenge the constitutionality of the law in court.

* Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.). Ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee. See Senator Leahy’s statement on the detainee bill here.

* Michael Ratner. President of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

This transcript is available free of charge. However, donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution.
Donate - $25, $50, $100, more...

AMY GOODMAN: On Thursday, Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont condemned the legislation from the floor of the Senate.

SEN. PATRICK LEAHY: It grieves me to think that three decades in this body that I stand here in the Senate, knowing that we’re thinking of doing this. It is so wrong. It is unconstitutional. It is un-American. It is designed to ensure the Bush-Cheney administration will never again be embarrassed by a United States Supreme Court decision reviewing its unlawful abuses of power. The Supreme Court said, ‘You abused your power.’ He said, ‘Ha, we’ll fix that. We have a rubber stamp, a rubber stamp, Congress, that will just set that aside and give us power that nobody, no king or anybody else set foot in this land, ever thought of having.’

AMY GOODMAN: Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy speaking Thursday prior to the vote. He joins us now on the telephone. Welcome to Democracy Now!

SEN. PATRICK LEAHY: Thank you. It’s good to be with you.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us, Senator. Now, if you could explain exactly what this bill that the Senate has just approved with a number of Democrats joining with the Republicans, what exactly it does.

SEN. PATRICK LEAHY: First off, as you probably gathered from what I was saying on the floor, it’s a terrible bill. It removes as many checks and balances as possible so that any president can basically set the law, determine what laws they’ll follow and what laws they’ll break and not have anybody be able to question them on it.

In this case, the particular section I was speaking about at that point was the so-called habeas protection. Now, habeas corpus was first brought in the Magna Carta in the 1200s. It’s been a tenet of our rights as Americans. And what they're saying is that if you’re an alien, even if you’re in the United States legally, a legal alien, may have been here ten years, fifteen years, twenty years legally, if a determination is made by anybody in the executive that you may be a threat, they can hold you indefinitely, they could put you in Guantanamo, not bring any charges, not allow you to have a lawyer, not allow you to ever question what they’ve done, even in cases, as they now acknowledge, where they have large numbers of people in Guantanamo who are there by mistake, that they put you -- say you’re a college professor who has written on Islam or for whatever reason, and they lock you up. You’re not even allowed to question it. You’re not allowed to have a lawyer, not allowed to say, “Wait a minute, you’ve got the wrong person. Or you’ve got -- the one you’re looking for, their name is spelled similar to mine, but it’s not me.” It makes no difference. You have no recourse whatsoever.

This goes so much against everything we've ever done. Now, we’ve had some on the other side say, ‘Well, they're trying to give rights to terrorists.’ No, we’re just saying that the United States will follow the rules it has before and will protect rights of people. We’re not giving any new rights. We’re just saying that if, for example, if you picked up the wrong person, you at least have a chance to get somebody independent to make that judgment.

AMY GOODMAN: Senator Leahy, on this issue of habeas corpus, I want to play a clip from yesterday’s Senate debate and have you respond. This is Republican Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama.

SEN. JEFF SESSIONS: It was never, ever, ever, ever intended or imagined that during the War of 1812, that it British soldiers were captured burning of the Capitol of the United States, as they did, that they would have been given habeas corpus rights. It was never thought to be. habeas corpus was applied to citizens, really, at that time, and I believe that that’s so plain as to be without dispute.

AMY GOODMAN: Republican Senator Jeff Sessions. Senator Leahy, your response.

SEN. PATRICK LEAHY: Well, I wish it was as plain as he says. Of course, in the Hamdan decision, the U.S. Supreme Court has made it very clear that it is available in somebody captured. In a case like what he was talking about, if somebody had been captured there and held in prison, and they said, “You have the wrong person,” they could at least raise it. And you also have, of course, under the Constitution, that habeas can be suspended if there is an invasion, if there is an insurrection. We have neither case here. Even the most conservative Republican legal thinkers have said this is not a case to suspend habeas corpus.

You know, they can set up all the straw men they want, but the fact is this allows the Bush administration to act totally arbitrarily with no court or anybody else to raise any questions about it. It allows them to cover up any mistakes they make. And this goes beyond just marking everything “secret,” as they do now. Every mistake they make, they just mark it “secret.” But this is even worse. This means somebody could be locked up for five years, ten years, fifteen years, twenty years. They have the wrong person, and they have no rights to be able to say, “Hey guys, you’ve got the wrong person.” It goes against everything that we’ve done as Americans.

You know, when things like this were done during the Cold War in some of the Iron Curtain countries, I remember all the speeches on the Senate floor, Democrats and Republicans alike saying, “How horrible this is! Thank God we don’t do things like this in America.” I wish they’d go back and listen to some of their speeches at that time.

AMY GOODMAN: Senator Leahy, this was not a close vote: 65 to 34. The twelve Democrats who joined with the Republicans, except for Senator Chafee of Rhode Island, the twelve Democrats are Tom Carper of Delaware, Tim Johnson of South Dakota, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey, as well as Senator Menendez of New Jersey, Bill Nelson of Florida, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Senator Pryor of Arkansas, Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, Ken Salazar of Colorado, Debbie Stabenow of Michigan and Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut. They joined with the Republicans. You are working very hard to get a Democratic majority in the Senate in these next elections and in Congress overall. What difference would it make?

SEN. PATRICK LEAHY: In their defense, all but one of them voted with me when we moved to strike the habeas provisions out. That was the Specter-Leahy amendment, and we had, I think it was, 51-48, I think, was the final vote on that. All but one of the Democrats joined with me on that. If we had gotten three or four more Republicans, we would have at least struck out the habeas provision. There are -- you know, I --

AMY GOODMAN: But they voted for this bill without that, with the habeas provision being stripped out.

SEN. PATRICK LEAHY: I’ll let each one speak for themselves. The fact that the Republicans were virtually lockstep in it, though, should be what I would look at. And maybe we’re blessed in Vermont --

AMY GOODMAN: But that larger question, that larger question of, what would be any different if Democrats were in power?

SEN. PATRICK LEAHY: For one thing, we would have been asking the questions about what’s been going on for six years. We’ve had a rubberstamp congress that automatically has given the President anything he wants, because nobody’s asked questions. Nobody’s asked the questions that are in the Woodward book that’s coming out this weekend, where you find all the mistakes were made because they will acknowledge no mistakes. The Republicans control both the House and the Senate. They will not call hearings. They won’t try to find out how did Halliburton walk off with billions of dollars in cost overruns in Iraq. Why did the Bush administration refuse to send the body armor our troops needed in Iraq? Why did they send inferior material?

And, of course, the two questions that the Congress would not ask, because the Republicans won’t allow it, is, why did 9/11 happen on George Bush's watch when he had clear warnings that it was going to happen? Why did they allow it to happen? And secondly, when they had Osama bin Laden cornered, why didn’t they get him? Had there been an independent congress, one that could ask questions, these questions would have been asked years ago. We’d be much better off. We would have had the answers to that. I think with those answers, we would not have the fiasco we have in Iraq today, we would have caught Osama bin Laden, Afghanistan would be a more stable place, and the world would be safer.

AMY GOODMAN: Was President Bush on Capitol Hill yesterday?

SEN. PATRICK LEAHY: Oh, yes, indeed. You can always tell, because virtually the whole city comes to a screeching halt with the motorcades, although it’s sort of like that when Dick Cheney comes up to give orders to the Republican Caucus. He comes up with a 15 to 25 vehicle caravan. It’s amazing to watch.

AMY GOODMAN: And what was Bush doing yesterday on Capitol Hill?

SEN. PATRICK LEAHY: Oh, he was just telling them they had to vote this way. They had to vote. They couldn’t hand him a defeat. They had to go with him They had to trust him. It’ll get us past the election. We had offered a -- you know, five years ago, I and others had suggested there is a way to have military tribunals for the detainees, where it would meet all our standards and basic international standards. They rejected that. And now, five weeks before the elections, they say, ‘Oh, yes, we need something like that.’ No, basically what he was saying to them, don’t ask questions, get us past the elections, because if you ask questions, the answers are going to be embarrassing, and it could hurt you in the elections.

AMY GOODMAN: Senator Leahy, we have to break for one minute. We ask you to stay with us. We’ll also be joined by CCR president, Center for Constitutional Rights president, Michael Ratner.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: Our guests are Vermont Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy and Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights. He is president there. Michael Ratner, your response, as we speak with the senator about this groundbreaking legislation?

MICHAEL RATNER: Well, I think Senator Leahy really got it right. I mean, what this bill authorizes is really the authority of an authoritarian despot to the president. I mean, what it gives him is the power, as the senator said, to detain any person anywhere in the world, citizen or non-citizen, whether living in the United States or anywhere else. I mean, what kind of authority is that? No checks and balances. Nothing. Now, if you’re a citizen, you still get your right of habeas corpus. If you’re a non-citizen, as the senator pointed out, you’re completely finished. Picked up, legal permanent resident in the United States, detained forever, no writ of habeas corpus.

It was incredibly shocking. I watched that vote yesterday. I had been in Washington for two or three days trying to line up the votes for Senator Leahy’s amendment that would have restored habeas. We thought we had them. We lost at 51 to 48. I have to tell you, Amy, I just -- I basically broke down at that point. I had been working like a dog on this thing. And there I saw the President come to Capitol Hill and persuade two or three or four of the Republicans who we thought we had to vote to strip habeas corpus from this legislation. It was a shock. I mean, an utter shock.

So you have this ability to detain anyone anywhere in the world. You deny them the writ of habeas corpus. And when they're in detention, you have a right to do all kinds of coercive techniques on them: hooding, stripping, anything really the president says goes, short of what he defines as torture. And then, if you are lucky enough to be tried, and I say “lucky enough,” because, for example, the 460 people the Center represents at Guantanamo may never get trials. In fact, only ten have even been charged. Those people, they’ve been stripped of their right to go to court and test their detention by habeas corpus. They’re just -- they’ve been there five years. Right now, under this legislation, they could be there forever.

Let me tell you, this bill will be struck down and struck down badly. But meanwhile, for two more years or whatever it’s going to take us to litigate it, we’re going to be litigating what was a basic right, as the senator said, since the Magna Carta of 1215, the right of any human being to test their detention in court. It’s one of the saddest days I’ve seen. You’ve called it “groundbreaking,” Amy. It’s really Constitution-breaking. It’s Constitution-shattering. It shatters really basic rights that we've had for a very long time.

AMY GOODMAN: Senator Leahy, how long have you been a senator?

SEN. PATRICK LEAHY: I’ve been there 32 years. I have to absolutely agree with what I just heard. I mean, this is -- it’s Kafka. But it’s more than that. It’s just a total rollback of everything this country has stood for. I mean, you have 100 people, very privileged, members of the Senate voting this way and with no realization of what it would be like if you were the one who was picked up. Maybe you’re guilty, but quite often, as we’ve seen, purely by accident and then held for years.

You know, I was a prosecutor for eight years. I prosecuted an awful lot of people, sent a lot of people to prison. But I did it arguing that everybody's rights had to be protected, because mistakes are often made. You want to make sure that if you’re prosecuting somebody, you’re prosecuting the right person. Here, they don't care whether mistakes are made or not.

And you have to stand up. I mean, it was a Vermonter -- you go way back in history -- it was a Vermonter who stood up against the Alien and Sedition Act, Matthew Lyon. He was prosecuted on that, put in jail, as a congressman, put in jail. And Vermont showed what they thought of these unconstitutional laws. We in Vermont reelected him, and eventually the laws fell down. There was another Vermonter, Ralph Flanders, who stood up to Joseph McCarthy and his reign of fear and stopped that. I mean, you have to stand. What has happened, here we are, a great powerful good nation, and we’re running scared. We’re willing to set aside all our values and running scared. What an example that is to the rest of the world.

AMY GOODMAN: You gave an example, Senator Leahy, when you talked about what would happen here. And, I mean, even the fact that “habeas corpus” is in Latin, I think, distances people. They don’t quite understand what this is about.

SEN. PATRICK LEAHY: “Bring the body.”

AMY GOODMAN: You gave a very -- sorry?

SEN. PATRICK LEAHY: “Bring the body.”

AMY GOODMAN: You gave a very graphic example. You said, “Imagine you’re a law-abiding lawful permanent resident. In your spare time you do charitable fundraising for international relief agencies that lend a hand in disasters.” Take that story from there, the example you used.

SEN. PATRICK LEAHY: You send money. You don’t care which particular religious group or civic group it is. They’re doing humanitarian work. You send the money. It turns out that one of them is giving money to various Islamic causes that the United States is concerned about. They come to your house. Maybe somebody has called into one of these anonymous tipster lines, saying, “You know, this Amy Goodman. I’m somewhat worried about her, simply because she’s going -- and I think I’ve seen some Muslim-looking people coming to her house.” They come in there, and they say, “We want to talk to you.” They bring you downtown. You’re a legal alien, legal resident here. And you say, “Well, look, I’ve got my rights. I’d like to talk to a lawyer.” They say, “No, no. You don’t have any rights.” “Well, then I’m not going to talk to you.” “Well, then now we’re twice as concerned about you. We’re going to spirit you down to Guantanamo, and we’ll get back to in a few years.” And, I mean, that could actually happen under this. And these are not far-fetched ideas, as the professor knows. He’s seen similar things.

And with that, and I would love to continue this conversation, unfortunately I’ve got to go back to my day job, back to the judiciary. I think this is going to go down as one of those black marks in the Congress. You know, I wasn’t there at the time, but virtually everybody voted for the Tonkin Gulf resolution. When I came to the Senate, you couldn’t find anybody there who thought that was a good idea. They knew it was a terrible mistake. You had members of congress supported the internment of the Japanese Americans during World War II. Everybody knows that was a terrible mistake now. That day will come when everybody will look at this and say, “What were we thinking?”

AMY GOODMAN: Patrick Leahy, thanks very much for joining us. We only have about 30 seconds. Michael Ratner, president of Center for Constitutional Rights, your final comment on this.

MICHAEL RATNER: This was really, as the senator said, probably the worst piece of legislation I’ve seen in my 40-year career as a lawyer. The idea, and even the example Senator Leahy gave, of someone being picked up, you don’t need anything. The President can decide tomorrow that you, Amy, or me, or particularly a non-citizen, can be picked up, put in jail forever, essentially, and if you're a non-citizen in Guantanamo or anywhere else in the world, you never get a chance to go to court to test your detention. It’s an incredible thing, and any senator who voted for this, in my view, is essentially guilty, guilty, guilty of undermining basic fundamental rights and may well be guilty of war crimes, as well.

AMY GOODMAN: Michael Ratner, thanks very much for joining us, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

Police State: Torture, Indefinite Detention, No Right to a Trial Now All Legal

***Article originally posted on the World Socialist Website***

http://playahata.com/hatablog/?p=1906

Following in the footsteps of the House, the Senate yesterday approved the bill which vests in the President the power of indefinite, unreviewable detention (even of U.S. citizens) and which also legalizes various torture techniques. It is not hyperbole to say that this is one of the most tyrannical and dangerous bills to be enacted in American history.
THis is 2 links, first you should know http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92_s58Yr-XM
OK the story goes like this, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuXWpYPHahU
2 videos toal 5 minutes. Understand what this means

US Congress legalizes torture and indefinite detention
By the WSWS.org editorial board
29 September 2006

The legislation adopted by the House of Representatives Wednesday and the Senate Thursday, legalizing the Bush administration’s policy of torture and indefinite detention without trial, as well as kangaroo-court procedures for Guantánamo detainees, marks a watershed for the United States.

For the first time in American history, Congress and the White House have agreed to set aside the provisions of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and formally adopt methods traditionally identified with police states.

This bill is the outcome of a protracted process of decay of American democracy, which has accompanied the immense growth in social inequality and reached a turning point in the stolen election of 2000. In early December of 2000, on the eve of the US Supreme Court ruling that halted the counting of votes in Florida and awarded the presidency to George W. Bush, who had lost the popular vote nationally to his Democratic opponent Al Gore, David North, the national secretary of the Socialist Equality Party of the US and chairman of the international editorial board of the World Socialist Web Site, in a report on the US election crisis said:

“What the decision of this court will reveal is how far the American ruling class is prepared to go in breaking with traditional bourgeois-democratic and constitutional norms. Is it prepared to sanction ballot fraud and the suppression of votes and install in the White House a candidate who has attained that office through blatantly illegal and anti-democratic methods?

“A substantial section of the bourgeoisie, and perhaps even a majority of the US Supreme Court, is prepared to do just that. There has been a dramatic erosion of support within the ruling elites for the traditional forms of bourgeois democracy in the United States.”

The Supreme Court ruling and the refusal of the Democratic Party to oppose it demonstrated that there remained no significant constituency within the American ruling elite for the defense of democratic rights.

The battery of police state measures enacted by the Bush administration, without any serious opposition from within the political establishment, has confirmed this analysis.

The Military Commission Act of 2006 will do far more than set down the procedures to be used to rubber-stamp the incarceration of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and other US-run detention camps throughout the world. It attacks the rights of all American citizens as well as all legal residents and other immigrants, who will now be subject to the threat of arrest and imprisonment for life, on the order of the president alone, without judicial review.

The legislation now goes back to the House of Representatives for a final vote Friday, to reconcile minor language differences between the two versions. President Bush is expected to receive the bill for signing by the weekend.

Under the terms of this law, the president may designate any person as an “unlawful enemy combatant,” to be rounded up by intelligence agents and jailed indefinitely without legal recourse. The law defines an “unlawful enemy combatant” as “an individual engaged in hostilities against the United States” who is not a regular member of an opposing army.

Given the Bush administration’s elastic view as to what constitutes “hostilities,” this definition has the potential to erase any legal distinction between an actual Al Qaeda terrorist, an Arab immigrant who makes a charitable donation to Lebanese relief, and an American college student who clashes with police during a protest demonstration against the Iraq war.

The legislation passed the House Wednesday with the support of 34 Democrats, who joined 219 Republicans in the lopsided vote of 253-168. The Senate adopted the bill the next day, by an even wider 65-34 margin, with 12 Democrats joining a near-unanimous Republican bloc.

Before voting on the overall bill, senators defeated four amendments: to restore habeas corpus rights for prisoners, defeated 51-48; to increase congressional oversight of the CIA torture program, which lost 53-46; to impose a five-year limit on the military commissions, which lost 52-47; and to ban specific, named torture techniques, which lost by a similar margin.

The sweeping legislation meets all the desires of the Bush administration except for an explicit repeal of the Geneva Convention. The White House agreed to slightly weaker language that gives the president the power to “interpret” the Geneva Convention to permit lesser forms of torture.

Its major provisions include:

* Authorizing the president to establish military commissions to prosecute detainees taken into US custody, either overseas or within the United States.

* Giving the military commissions power to determine punishment, up to and including death.

* Rules of evidence that permit hearsay evidence and testimony coerced from witnesses.

* Permitting the use of testimony obtained by “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” if the torture took place before December 30, 2005, when it was banned by Congress.

* Allowing prosecutors to withhold from defendants evidence given to a jury, if it involves classified information, and substitute unclassified summaries.

* Stripping US courts of jurisdiction over detainees, and stripping detainees of their right to seek a writ of habeas corpus.

Violations of the Constitution

Many of the provisions of this legislation are flagrant violations of the US Constitution. This was acknowledged by Republican Senator Arlen Specter, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, who nonetheless voted for the bill after his amendment to restore habeas corpus rights was defeated.

Specter said in the debate that in denying habeas corpus rights for suspects detained in the “war on terror,” the bill “would take our civilized society back some 900 years” to the time before the adoption of the Magna Carta—the first elaboration of democratic principles under English law.

“What this entire controversy boils down to is whether Congress is going to legislate to deny a constitutional right which is explicit in the document of the Constitution itself and which has been applied to aliens by the Supreme Court of the United States,” he said.

Article I, Section 9 of the US Constitution declares: “The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.” No one in the Bush administration or the congressional Republican leadership has suggested that the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 constituted such an invasion. They simply ignore the clear language of the Constitution.

The bill’s other provisions also violate the Sixth Amendment of the Constitution, which spell out the requirements of a fair trial, based on the colonists’ bitter experience with the injustices of the British Crown. The Amendment reads:

“In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense.”

Prisoners in Guantánamo and other US concentration camps will face trial by a panel of military officers, can be denied the right to see the evidence or witnesses against them, and will have lawyers hamstrung by being under the direct surveillance of the military and working under the authority of the commander-in-chief.

From the standpoint of the Bush administration and the congressional Republican leadership, these gross constitutional violations are not a regrettable necessity but a positive good. They are whipping up public fear of terrorism not merely for short-term electoral purposes, but to lay the basis for a permanent shift to authoritarian forms of rule in the United States.

The role of the Democrats

The votes on four amendments Thursday allowed Senate Democrats to posture as defenders of civil liberties and constitutional freedoms. Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, for instance, denounced the elimination of habeas corpus protection for 12 million legal resident immigrants, as well as for immigrants without legal papers. The provision “makes a mockery of the Bush-Cheney lofty rhetoric about exporting freedom across the globe,” he said, adding, “What hypocrisy!”

Senator Carl Levin of Michigan said, “The habeas corpus language in this bill is as legally abusive of rights guaranteed in the Constitution as the actions at Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo and secret prisons that were physically abusive of detainees.”

But Leahy and Levin did not explain why they and other Democratic leaders refused to block a vote on the legislation through a filibuster, which requires only 40 votes to sustain. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid reached an agreement Wednesday evening with Majority Leader Bill Frist to allow votes on the four amendments in return for the Democrats refraining from any filibuster—although the Democrats filibustered on much less weighty issues, such as the appointment of a number of federal appeals court judges.

In his Senate floor speech, Leahy declared, “We are about to put the darkest blot possible on the nation’s conscience. This is so wrong. . . . It is unconstitutional. It is un-American.” Apparently not so wrong, or so dark a blot, as to impel the Democrats to actually oppose the Bush administration one month before an election.

Instead, Democrat after Democrat facing close contests sided with the Bush administration. The 12 Democratic senators who voted for final passage of the bill included, besides such open right-wingers as Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, liberals facing re-election contests such as Robert Menendez of New Jersey, Debbie Stabenow of Michigan and Bill Nelson of Florida.

The 34 House Democrats included a number of right-wing Southern Democrats, but also several members of the Congessional Black Caucus and two congressmen who are Democratic candidates for the US Senate in next month’s election—Harold Ford of Tennessee and Sherrod Brown of Ohio.

Brown, a liberal, has sought to appeal to antiwar sentiment in Ohio, a state which has lost a disproportionate number of young men and women in Iraq, including two dozen from a single National Guard unit based in the Cleveland suburb of Brook Park. In an interview with MSNBC.com, Brown said that detainees “are not soldiers, not combatants representing a government, these are terrorists.”

Of course, the ostensible purpose of a judicial proceeding is to determine, on the basis of evidence, whether the accused are actually guilty of the charges against them. Brown, like the Bush administration, assumes that all those seized by the CIA and the US military are guilty, and uses that presumption of guilt to justify star-chamber proceedings.

Brown rejected criticism of his complicity with the Bush administration, saying, “Some people just don’t want me to agree with George Bush on anything.”

The New York Times observed, in its editorial deploring in advance the passage of the bill, the year 2006 will go down in history for the passage of “a tyrannical law that will be ranked with the low points in American democracy, our generation’s version of the Alien and Sedition Acts.” But the newspaper did not attempt to give a serious explanation for this turn toward tyranny, or suggest a basis for fighting against it.

Nor could it, since the Times, along with the rest of the establishment media and both political parties of the American corporate elite, supports the so-called “war on terror,” which is a political fig leaf for the use of militarism and war in pursuit of the global aims of US imperialism. A policy of military aggression and conquest abroad is ultimately incompatible with democracy at home.

The struggle against authoritarian methods of rule must be taken up by the working class, the only social force within American society that retains a deep attachment to the defense of democratic rights. The prerequisite for this struggle is a break with the two parties of the American ruling elite and the building of a mass socialist movement of the working class.