Civil liberties – Page 16

Kangaroo Courts as Wingnut Welfare?

Published on October 31, 20071 Comment

Bryan Finoki writes at BagNewsNotes and in more depth at his own blog, Subtopia, about the militarisation of public life and public space.

His latest post is about the US’ “Expeditionary Legal Complex”, aka ‘Camp Justice’.

Camp Justice

Camp Justice is a moveable, tent-city courtroom and jail complex that can be dopped down virtually anywhere to dispense American ‘justice’ on the spot, presumably at the barrel of a gun.

Judge Roy Bean would be proud.

It’s currently located at Gitmo and is primed and ready to convict innocent and guilty alike for offences they’ve never been properly charged with using coerced evidence in order to retrospectively justify their kidnapping and detention in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, a handy imperial posession now reinvented as a legal black hole for the purpose of hiding and torturing foreign citizens for political purposes. As Bryan puts it:

“In a frighteningly lucid and surgical essay The Vanishing Point geographer Derek Gregory describes the war on terror as a “war on law”, or a “war through law” – through the suspension of law. While emergency is the state’s tactic it is ultimately the law itself that is the most critical site of political struggle, he contends. If I recall correctly, Derek explains how Guantanamo Bay was established as a purposefully ambiguous political space camouflaged in the folds of legal uncertainty. In short, the U.S. left Cuba while still claiming jurisdiction over the base but not official territorial sovereignty, which allowed it to exist in between a place of law and lawlessness – essentially a place of “indeterminate time” and “indefinite detention.” He calls it a “site of non-place” created for a “site of non-people” located on the peripheral edge – or the “the vanishing point” – of the legal spectrum where international law is no longer enforceable (and therefore non-existent), and where American sovereignty has no application. It is the ultimate space of legal oblivion, you might say.

It is neither a legal nor an illegal space and in all juridical dimensions is neither existent nor non-existent: it is – as far as I can make of it – the production of a convenient and sub-legal nowhere.

If that isn’t Kafkaesque and terrifying enough (and we’re only talking about Gitmo here: we haven’t even touched secret prisons in Diego Garcia, Afganistan and elsewhere) now this criminal administration has created a convenient and sublegal nowhere that can go travelling.

This is not the first Camp Justice.Here’s the permanent one on Diego Garcia: there’s one in Baghdad and more are planned:

… let me remind you, according to an older Times story additional complexes have been planned for various regions in Iraq, and I’d be willing to bet that if we took a closer look we might even find similar justice-in-a-can deployments in Afghanistan, Libya, the West Bank, etc. I don’t think it would be difficult to predict the future geographies of portable justice, if you know what I’m sayin’.

I know what you’re sayin’, Bryan.

But what also interests me is who will be dispensing this ‘justice’. There is known to be dissent amongst top-ranking military lawyers about the administration’s continued illegal outrages and I also wonder, on a practical level, if JAG even has enough military legal staff to run these camps, even if military lawyers were prepared to co-operate.

If they’re not willing, then that means outsourcing.

Cue the traditional handing over of plum posts to right-thinking associates of the administration. I predict a rush of applications to be prosecutors, not only from the Bush government’s favourite fundy law school, Pat Robertson’s Regent law school, but also from those good ~~germans~~ fron the late Jerry Falwell’s Liberty law school – which is conveniently producing its first graduating classes just at the right time. Even the necessary ancillary staff are being trained as I type, at a Department of Homeland Security sponsored hugh school. The Camp Justice buildings may look temporary, but they’re thinking long-term and long-range here.

Evita North and South

Published on October 30, 20073 Comments

Peronist President-elect of Argentina Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner‘s election might be said to presage the almost inevitable (she has Murdoch money) anointment of Hillary Clinton to succeed her husband in office, in what seems to be becoming rather a trend amongst a certain class of well-off and well-connected women. Mind you, there’s not a lot of sisterhood on display despite the superficial similarities; Kirchner is not happy to be compared to Clinton:

“Hillary (Rodham Clinton) was able to position herself nationally because her husband was president. She didn’t have a political career beforehand and that isn’t my case,” Fernández de Kirchner said in an interview with CNN en Español, referring to her 30-year career in Argentine politics.

That doesn’t bode well for future US/Argentine relations, does it?

But less flippantly, how did Argentina get to the political point where Peronism is once again in fashion? What happened to the people’s movements born out of the 2001 economic collapse? Bring yourself up to basic speed on the politics of the greater American continent and the contnuing malign influence of US foreign policy with John Pilger’s documentary, The War On Democracy. It’s now up on YouTube in ten parts here: if you have an acccount, load them all into ‘playlist’ and play back to back. Here’s part one to start you off:

Award-winning documentary maker John Pilger suggests that, far from bringing democracy to the world as it claims, the US is doing its best to stifle its progress. Talking exclusively to American government officials, including agents who reveal for the first time on film how the CIA ran its war in Latin America in the 80s, Pilger argues that true popular democracy is more likely to be found among the poorest in Latin America, whose movements are often
ignored in the West.

She may be female but Kirchner is no Michelle Bachelet. I’ll have no truck with the brand of feminsim that says any woman elected is better than none – a woman can govern just as badly and undemocratically as any man and that goes for Hillary Clinton as well as Kirchner. The Democrats and the Peronists both purport to be the champions of the poor, the little guys, the blue-collar and the dispossessed, but both actually work to advance neoliberal economic policy and corporate profit. It’s no coincidence that like the Peronistas both Clintons have adopted the Third Wayas their defining political stance, along with Tony Blair.

Kirchner may have more elected political experience than Clinton but just like Clinton there’s no denying she’s used her husband’s reflected popularity to boost her own quest for presidential power. Both are so firmly wedded to the notion of a corporate state they married it. That’s dedication to a cause, the cause of Evita Peronism.

By the time Nestor Kirchner announced he was stepping down to let his wife run, observers said she had fuller lips, tighter skin and a more lustrous auburn mane, prompting speculation about surgery and hair extensions.

It remains an open question whether this was a personal decision to offset the effects of age, a political strategy to court votes in an aesthetic-obsessed era, or both.

Newspapers gleefully reported that on foreign trips she brought large trunks of clothes and fashion helpers, and changed her outfit up to four times a day. Critics said the makeover was an effort to evoke the magic of Eva Peron, the icon who died in 1952 aged just 33.

Just like Evita, Kirchner’s clothes, shoes, handbags and hair are the stuff of gossip magazines and like Clinton she’s alleged to not be a stranger to Botox. It’s described as vanity but it’s something more insidious. It’s all about the image. masking state corporatism with an attractive, warm and fuzzy media-friendly facade. Don’t look at the policies, look at the hair!

To my mind Clinton’s at the very least a quasi-Evita Peronist. Trading on reflected glory? Check. Image management? Check. Cult of personality? Third Way-ist? Check. Corporately funded? Check. Hawkish on the military and defence? Soft on neofascism and torture? Check…

If the ascendance of Kirchner and Clinton tells women anything at all, it’s that we can only succeed to high office a] by marrying advantageously b] putting a softer, feminine face on the perpetuation of a political and economic system which keeps other women down and c] pandering to the corporate media’s trivialisation of politics. This is no big step foward for women.

This is how The Times described the Argentinian election – ‘Fatty’ v the new Evita in all-girl fight for Argentina” Murdoch himself may be bankrolling a woman for US president but that says it all about what the global press really thinks of women in presidential politics, doesn’t it?

The election of a woman in Argentina and the potential election of another in the US is not a sudden blossoming of equality, it’s the corporate status quo donning a velvet Prada glove over the hand holding the cattleprod.

Because to get back to my original point, that US and Argentinian politics are beginning to echo one another, the ironic thing about all this is that while the US (as Pilger shows) has been meddling in Argentinian politics for years in the cause of corporate world hegemony it’s rebounded and now both countries’ politics seem to be converging. Both have a politicised military, a greedy plutocracy, entrenched and growing social inequality and a fatal taste for the firm smack of authoritarian government. They’re more alike than they’d admit.

The US now has also a falling currency and an economy that’s could nosedive and has the potential to cause untold social disorder and chaos, just as Argentina did six years ago. What’s Hillary’s plan for that, if any? Will we see disposessed Americans selling their all on the streets like the residents of Buenos Aires had to? Americans north and south may find they have much more in common than they think.

Oh well, never mind. Let’s look on the bright side – at least their potential misery‘ll be misery with a kinder, gentler, less wrinkled face.

Shooting Yourself In The Foot

Published on October 22, 2007

Interesting events in Phoenix as a litigious sheriff unhappy with the way Phoenix New Times journalists covered him allegedly takes his revenge:

Michael Lacey, the executive editor, and Jim Larkin, chief executive, were arrested at their homes after they wrote a story that revealed that the Village Voice Media company, its executives, its reporters and even the names of the readers of its website had been subpoenaed by a special prosecutor. The special prosecutor had been appointed to look into allegations that the newspaper had violated the law in publishing the home address of Maricopa Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s home address on its website more than three years ago.

The weekly and its leadership has been in a long running battle with Mr. Arpaio, after the weekly published a series of stories about his real estate dealings.

“They did not have a warrant, but they told me that I was being arrested for unlawful disclosure of grand jury information,” Mr. Larkin said by phone from his home early this morning, after he was released from jail. Mr. Lacey remained in jail early this morning. Captain Paul Chagolla, a spokesman for the sheriff did not return a call for comment.

Steve Suskin, legal counsel for Village Voice Media, said that the arrests on misdemeanor charges of the newspaper executives represent an escalation in the conflict between The Phoenix New Times and Sheriff Arpaio, who has received national attention for his reputation for running tough jails.

“It is an extraordinary sequence of events,” Mr. Suskin said. “The arrests were not totally unexpected, but they represent an act of revenge and a vindictive response on the part of an out of control sheriff.”

Here’s one of the articles Sheriff Joe Arpaio is so unhappy about:

You get elected to public office, say, sheriff.

You start scowling like John Wayne and jam the jails full. You put the cons in stripes and house them in surplus Army tents, where four guards oversee 1,800 inmates.

Your detention officers beat up prisoners, while feeding them food unfit for a dog. A paranoid public afraid of crime is grateful because it naively believes your abusive policies will scare people from committing that next robbery and shooting.

Who cares if this is all baloney?

You drum up a few death threats along the way, because that generates free publicity chronicling what a bad-ass you are.

Who cares if innocent people go to jail?

The voters love it. Even as your office is besieged by tens of millions of dollars in lawsuits stemming from beatings and deaths in your Mother of All Dungeons.

The dead guys were druggies anyway, your public relations machine claims. And, hey, that’s what the county’s insurance policy is for — settling claims of distraught survivors.

What matters most is that your image as “toughest sheriff in America” has made you into a valuable commodity.

And that image is worth a lot.

More…

If Arpaiao hadn’t had those media executives arrested and the NY Times hadn’t picked it up, I and many thousands of others nation and worldwide never would have read that and known of the terrible allegations against him.

Hubris begets nemesis. You’d think an officer of the law would know that. Silly sheriff.

Hey! Trutex! Leave Them Kids Alone

Published on October 21, 2007

Via Archrights: first it was the co-option of teachers into fingerprinting every British child, whether they or their parents agreed or not.

Now even the school uniform suppliers are to be drafted into the suburban stasi:.

The chip connects with teachers’ computers to show a photograph of the pupil, data about academic performance and whether he or she is in the correct classroom. It can also restrict access to areas of the school. The radio frequency identification system is being tested at Hungerhill School in Doncaster, South Yorkshire. Ten pupils began wearing a chip sewn into their uniforms eight months ago.

The scheme has drawn criticism from human rights campaigners. “Tagging is what we do to criminals we let out of prison early,” said David Cleater, from Leave Them Kids Alone, which campaigns against the finger-printing of pupils. “It is appalling.”

It is, but that’s just a science experiment, Chipped uniforms are on the horizon though and a line of chipped uniform items is apparently going into production, made by Trutex. (Anyone British who has children or who has been a child knows Trutex. They’re one of the biggest suppliers of school uniforms and clothing in the country.)

A school uniform maker said yesterday it was “seriously considering” adding tracking devices to its clothes after a survey found many parents would be interested in knowing where their offspring were.
Trutex would not say whether it was studying a spy in the waistband or a bug in the blazer but admitted teenagers were less keen than younger children on the “big brother” idea.

What, you mean they get a choice?

Nope, didn’t think so.

Even leaving aside privacy concerns this will no doubt add to the cost. It cost over 600 pounds to kit my younger son out when he went to senior school, (and that as ten years ago) because you have to buy specific items in specific colours and patterns by specific manufacturers in specific shops: but if he’d turned up at school in the wrong thing, he’d’ve been a laughing stock, as my sister and I were when we had the wrong brand and colour of games skirts. Thirty years and it still rankles.

That kind of snobbery and financial bullying can drive some children, and some parents, to despair and self-harm. That’s bad enough. How much more is obliging parents and children to pay to be spied on going to cost?

Remember The Bastille

Published on October 9, 2007

I wonder if any of these torturing US prison guards have ever considered the eventuality that one day all the prisoners they have abused will be free. What do they think will happen then? Do they think their victim’lll shake hands, laugh ruefully and agree it was all in good sport?

From Jill at Feministe:

The prison guards stand over their captives with electric cattle prods, stun guns, and dogs. Many of the prisoners have been ordered to strip naked. The guards are yelling abuse at them, ordering them to lie on the ground and crawl. ‘Crawl, motherf*****s, crawl.’

If a prisoner doesn’t drop to the ground fast enough, a guard kicks him or stamps on his back. There’s a high-pitched scream from one man as a dog clamps its teeth onto his lower leg.

Another prisoner has a broken ankle. He can’t crawl fast enough so a guard jabs a stun gun onto his buttocks. The jolt of electricity zaps through his naked flesh and genitals. For hours afterwards his whole body shakes.

Lines of men are now slithering across the floor of the cellblock while the guards stand over them shouting, prodding and kicking.

Second by second, their humiliation is captured on a video camera by one of the guards.

The images of abuse and brutality he records are horrifyingly familiar. These were exactly the kind of pictures from inside Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad that shocked the world this time last year.

And they are similar, too, to the images of brutality against Iraqi prisoners that this week led to the conviction of three British soldiers.

But there is a difference. These prisoners are not caught up in a war zone. They are Americans, and the video comes from inside a prison in Texas.

Jill’s post brings together many disparate aspects of the prison/industrial complex to give a chilling picture of what awaits those criminal, stupid or unfortunate enough to fall into the hands of the justice system under Bush.

Something about which I’ve blogged a lot is the tendency for pyschopaths to drift towards the military, mercenary, police and correctional industries and especially the privatised prisons, both in the UK and US, as a venue in which they can indulge their most shameful dreams of power and abuse upon a literally captive population.

Punishment is not only a crucial and ever-larger state function, it is also big business. Private ownership and/or operation of prisons, while an increasingly significant part of the corrections system, represents only a fraction of the “prison-industrial complex.” The cost of corrections-in cluding state, local, and federal corrections budgets-ran to more than $20 billion a year in the early 1990s. The cost of constructing enough cells just to keep up with the constant increase in prisoners is estimated at $6 billion a year. This figure does not address existing overcrowding, which is pandemic from city jails to federal prisons. The public sector imprisonment industry employs more than 50,000 guards, as well as additional tens of thousands of administrators, and health, education, and food service providers. Especially in rural communities where other employment is scarce, corrections assumes huge economic im portance as a growth industry which provides stable jobs.

The punishment juggernaut of the Reagan-Bush years also spawned an array of private enterprises locked in a parasitic embrace with the state. From architectural firms and construction companies, to drug treatment and food service contractors, to prison industries, to the whole gamut of equipment and hardware suppliers-steel doors, razor wire, communications systems, uniforms, etc.-the business of imprisonment boasts a powerful assortment of well-or ganized and well-represented vested interests. Privatized prisons, then, are not a quantum leap toward dismantling the state but simply an extension of the already significant private sector involvement in corrections. The public-private symbiotic relationship was well-established long before 1984, when CCA first contracted with the INS to operate detention centers for illegal aliens. With private firms already providing everything from health care to drug treatment, the private management of entire prisons was a natural progression, especially given the tenor of the times.

If the profit to be made by controlling and incarcerating fellow citizens were to disappear, the US economy would be in even bigger trouble than it is now.

There’s a lot of nastiness that can be turned a blind eye to when livelihoods’re on the line: prison officers in privatised prisons get between $7 and $10 an hour, or around $31 per diem and their positions are shaky. The boat cannot be rocked or poverty (and worse) can result. In state and federal prisons there are pensions and benefits to be protected: whistleblowing is not what they do. A steady job with benefits is preciousin uncertain times.

After all they’re just criminals anyway, and overwhelmingly dark-skinned criminals at at that. Who gives a shit? Out of sight, out of mind, invisible people with no rights.

Those paid by government to run prisons, who then torture their fellow citizens simply for the pleasure of it, are indeed psychopaths and should be treated as such. But what about the complicity of industry bosses and the state and federal government? If the guards are psychopaths, what does that make their superiors? They hire these people, knowing and not caring (or choosing not to know) that they have a proclivity for sadism. Why?

Pour encourager les autres. That means you and me. This is not an aberration, this is the way it’s meant to be.

But if one day the torture they’ve committed or condoned returns to bite them or their loved ones on the ass well, karma’s a bitch and what goes around comes around. You won’t catch me shedding many tears.