Last
week, I was lucky enough to be in the audience for a truly remarkable
event: a conversation between two men whose lives have been indelibly
altered by American’s brutal prison regime, Robert King and Omar
Deghayes. At first glance, it might seem as if these two men have nothing in common. King
grew up in New Orleans in an era of violent racial repression and is a
Black Panther to this day; he was convicted by an all-white jury in 1973
for a murder he did not commit, and spent 32 years in Louisiana state
prison. In
his earliest childhood, Deghayes lived in Libya, but after his father
was murdered by Gaddafi, he and his family fled to the UK. Deghayes
was arrested in Pakistan in 2002, where he had been living with his
Afghan wife and child, and spent over six years detained at Guantanamo
without charge or trial.
Angola,
Louisiana and Guantanamo Bay are actually quite near to each other. But
for anyone present at the event, it was clear that what Omar and Robert
had in common was more than geographic proximity during their
confinement. After all, they were both unjustly imprisoned. They both
fought for years for their freedom. And they both endured the same
torture whilst on the inside: long-term solitary confinement.
Now
that the words "Guantanamo Bay" have become synonymous with torture,
it’s easy to assume that the tiny isolations cells where Omar and many
others were kept, are something new, invented for the Muslim bogeyman.
But solitary confinement in America’s "supermax" prisons didn’t begin at
Gitmo; it began long before 9/11, long before the War on Terror, long
before al-Qaeda or the Taliban. In the 1970s, "control units" were put
in place, first in Marion prison (which replaced Alcatraz) and then elsewhere. These
control units were largely implemented to neutralize activists
imprisoned for struggling for Black and Third World liberation - people
like Robert King, Ojore Lutalo, Ray Luc Levasseur, Siliva Baraldini, Leonard Peltier, Assata Shakur, and many others. The idea
has always been to break prisoners by invoking in them a sense of total
dependence on their captors. As Ralph Arons, a former warden at Marion,
once testified in federal court, "The purpose of the Marion Control
Unit is to control revolutionary attitudes in the prison system and in
the society at large".
Nor is the use of solitary to control political or politicized prisoners something confined to the era of COINTELPRO.
Take Ojore Lutala, who survived 22 years in solitary in the Management
Control Unit in Trenton State Prison, New Jersey. In February 2008,
the Review Committee rejected Ojore’s requested to be released into
general population for the umpteenth time, noting:
"The
[Committee] notes your concerns regarding your feelings of persecution
and discrimination based on your political affiliation. The Committee
continues to show concern regarding your admitted affiliation with the
Black Liberation army and the Anarchist Black Cross Foundation. Your radical views and ability to influence others poses a threat to the orderly operation of this Institution..."
Interestingly, Marion – where control units were first born - now houses a Communication Management Unit (CMU), in which Muslims are overrepresented
by over 1000%. The two CMUs are so strikingly similar to that dark
place where Omar was held, that they’ve been nicknamed "Guantanamo
North": they both hold Muslim prisoners with political affiliations
deemed to be dubious, in tortuous conditions of long-term solitary
confinement.
Control units now exist in almost every state in the nation, and have also morphed into large supermax prisons like ADX Florence. In fact, it’s estimated that
today, at least 80,000 people are suffering in solitary confinement in
America’s prisons, overwhelmingly poor people and people and colour.
And it’s not just the "most dangerous" (read: most political) prisoners
languishing in solitary anymore. Oftentimes, it’s the most vulnerable
prisoners who end up in solitary – people who are mentally ill, mentally
retarded, learning-disabled, or illiterate; these are people who find
it the most difficult to follow the minutia of prison rules. More
recently, its people perceived to be associated with prison gangs -
though as recently explored in an excellent series inMother Jones, prisoners in Pelican Bay in California may be "gang validated" for seemingly innocuous items like a Christmas card or a drinking cup with a dragon drawn on it.
Solitary confinement... can you imagine it? This is how one inmate at Pelican Bay, Gabriel Reyes, describes it in a 2012 article:
"Unless
you have lived it, you cannot imagine what it feels like to be by
yourself, between four cold walls, with little concept of time, no one
to confide in, and only a pillow for comfort - for years on end. It is a
living tomb. I eat alone and exercise alone in a small, dank, cement
enclosure known as the "dog-pen." I am not allowed telephone calls, nor
can my family visit me very often; the prison is hundreds of miles from
the nearest city. I have not been allowed physical contact with any of
my loved ones since 1995. I have developed severe insomnia, I suffer
frequent headaches, and I feel helpless and hopeless. In short, I am
being psychologically tortured."
But
prisoners have been fighting back. Last year, inmates at Pelican Bay
went on two hunger strikes, and at least 12,000 inmates in 13 of
California’s prisons eventually joined in solidarity with them. There
have also been various lawsuits brought against particular prison
wardens and the Bureau of Prisons. Most recently, in June 2012, several
inmates of ADX Florence filed a class-action lawsuit against federal
officials, arguing that they have violated
prisoners’ constitutional rights by failing to provide basic treatment
for mentally ill prisoners.
The lawsuit describes how mentally ill
prisoners crumble on the inside:
"Prisoners interminably wail, scream
and bang on the walls of their cells. Some mutilate their bodies with
razors, shards of glass, writing utensils and whatever other objects
they can obtain. Some swallow razor blades, nail clippers, parts of
radios and televisions, broken glass and other dangerous objects."
Another lawsuit, filed in May 2012, alleges that BOP officials were
"deliberately indifferent" to the medical needs of a prisoner, Jose
Martin Vega, who committed suicide while at ADX Florence.
At the Secure
Housing Unit in Pelican Bay, 41% of inmates reported experiencing
hallucinations, 27% have thought about killing themselves, and inmates
successfully commit suicide at 8 times the rate of those in general
population.
Torture
to the point of insanity, hunger strikes, suicides of despair... Sound
familiar? Sounds like Guantanamo.
You might remember hearing about
Albert Biderman, a sociologist in the 1950s who studied the treatment of
American POWs captured in Korea. They were kept in solitary
confinement in order to make them "compliant", ie. in order to force
them to make false confessions. Biderman’s research was later integral
to designing the SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape)
training that US military receive before they go into the field; but at
Guantanamo Bay, military personnel borrowed his work to "reverse-engineer" the ideal
environment in which to break detainees. (See below for Biderman’s
chart entitled "Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual
Compliance, lifted directly by the US military when they were designing
interrogation methods). Breaking detainees and inducing them to confess
also happens on American soil. Many War on Terror defendants (most
notably, Fahad Hashmi) have been held for years in
pre-trial solitary confinement, before they eventually plead guilty,
willing to do whatever they have to in order to imagine they’ll walk out
of solitary alive, even if it takes decades.
That
brings us back to last week’s events, held in response to the recent
extradition of Babar Ahmad, Talha Ahsan, and three others from the UK to
the US. I imagine Talha, Babar and the others may in pre-trial
solidarity confinement right now, prison conditions which are illegal
and non-existent in the UK. Meanwhile, Gary McKinnon has stayed on UK
soil, since Theresa May is worried that sending him to the US
would violate his human rights. It’s a shameful day when the European
Court of Human Rights (ECHR) shrugs their shoulders, and rule that
conditions of solitary confinement in the US don’t constitute torture –
when even the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture vehemently disagrees with
them. But it’s rather chilling when May can invoke compassion for
McKinnon just days after Talha is whisked away to American soil, when he
has also been diagnosed with Asperger’s and has an evaluated suicide
risk. (Note: Of the 1.5 million people in prison in the US, about
80,000 are in solitary – yet about 39% of inmate suicides happen in
isolation units). How telling that she can discuss bringing a forum bar
into force, to safeguard British citizens (of course!), when Babar and
Talha are already locked away, far away from home, when the entirety of
there purported crime was committed in the UK..
During the civil case brought by Binyam Mohamed, we learned that the British government had never opposed the transfer of its own
citizens to Guantanamo – in fact, Tony Blair personally rejected the
Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s (FCO) request to access British
prisoners detained by the US.
In a 2002 memo from the FCO, officials
commented, "We
accept that the transfer of UK nationals held by US forces in
Afghanistan to the US base in Guantánamo is the best way to meet out
counter-terrorism objective by ensuring that they are securely held."
As May’s differential treatment of Talha and Gary makes clear, the
fundamental policies that were in place under Blair continue through
today… one rule of white Brits, and another for Muslims. If the
government has made anything clear to British Muslims in the past 10+
years, it’s that their citizenship rights are revocable, because they
are undesirable subjects.
The
extraditions of Babar, Talha and the others marks a new chapter in the
continuing saga of American torture and British indifference: a tale
that weaves from the brutal isolation of Robert King in Angola State
Prison to Guantanamo Bay; from those struggling for Black liberation to
those eager to fight the American occupation in Afghanistan and
elsewhere; from British complicity in the rendition of Omar Deghayes to
that of Babar, Talha and the others. But last week’s events also marked
a break from this long history. It was an event that spanned across
continents, generations, political perspectives, faiths, and racial
identities, linking our common opposition to the torture of inhumane use of solitary
confinement and our solidarity with Talha, Babar and their families for
the challenges to come.
Written by Aviva Stahl
Source:
http://www.cageprisoners.com/our-work/opinion-editorial/item/5234-%E2%80%9Ccaged-in-the-usa%E2%80%9D-torture-in-america%E2%80%99s-many-prisons
