By William Fisher
Nearly two dozen of Egypt’s most respected human rights organizations charged yesterday that the changes made by country’s “temporary” military rulers are cosmetic and intended to paper over the “vast gulf” that separates those whose efforts won the revolution and those who are now charged with running the country.
It is believed to be the strongest attack yet made by the human rights community against the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) in Egypt.
In a statement issued yesterday the coalition of human rights groups said it
“decisively condemns the exploitation of the political crisis between the forces of the revolution and those managing the country’s affairs in the transitional period as an excuse to employ the same repressive tools and means that the regime of deposed president Hosni Mubarak used against its enemies and critics.”
The group added, The SCAF has been “foregoing dialogue, negotiations, and political solutions in favor of the old security approach. Such security solutions lead to violence, oppression, and an increasing use of repressive legislation against opponents, be they political activists, media workers, or civil society and rights activists.”
Regrettably, the undersigned organizations have noticed that the policies recently embraced by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) and the government that heeds its dictates have entailed increasing political tension and have strengthened the belief that a vast gulf separates, on one hand, Egyptians’ aspirations for democracy, an end to the legacies of an obsolete despotic regime, and a clean break with the practices and policies of that repressive regime, and, on the other, the tendencies of those administering the country’s affairs, who are clearly and gradually preserving the primary components of the deposed president’s regime while attempting to give it a facelift by sacrificing several old regime figures.”
“This,” they added, “is an insult to the thousands who sacrificed and died in a vicious battle to overthrow the entire regime, not for the sake of a few new faces.”
The groups were most forceful in their condemnation of SCAF Decree (93/2011), “which not only revived the application of the emergency law—which has officially been in force since the Mubarak era—but also expanded the scope of the law to exceed the limits guaranteed in 2010 by the deposed president, who vowed to apply the law only in the context of crimes of terrorism and drug-trafficking.”
The SCAF’s decision “allows the emergency law to be invoked for disturbances to national security and the public order and to confront acts of thuggery, assaults on the freedom to work, vandalism of facilities, the obstruction of transportation and roads, and the dissemination of false news and statements.”
The group added, “The expansive language of the decree permits a broad interpretation of such acts that will allow for the intimidation and harassment of persons involved in peaceful protests, demonstrations, and strikes. It also constitutes a direct threat to freedom of expression and a free media.”
The groups also focused their wrath on what they characterized as the broader picture. They said, “The use of the emergency law to stifle basic liberties and to repress actions by forces of the revolution cannot be viewed separately from the broad, escalating assault on civil society institutions and various media outlets.”
The groups said, “It should be noted that in the run-up to the 2010 elections, the most infamous in Egypt’s history, the Mubarak regime launched an all-out attack on various forms of media, several of the most prominent political talk shows, and human rights organizations and civil society, impeding their ability to monitor the elections and expose irregularities.”
They added, “The course pursued by those currently administering the country’s affairs differs little from the ways of the Mubarak regime. They have clung to an electoral system that has been nearly unanimously rejected by all political forces and human rights groups, although these forces have proposed alternative electoral laws that advocate elections based on unconditional, proportional lists, whether for parties, coalitions, or independents.”
As a result, they said, “The electoral system chosen by the SCAF and the flagrant deficiencies in districting have provoked the anger of various parties, who believe that these measures will only reinstate a parliament dominated by the same forces that controlled Mubarak-era parliaments through the use of money, narrow partisan interests, and religious sentiment.”
“Adhering to the same policies pursued by Mubarak and his dissolved party, those administering the country’s affairs have preceded the impending parliamentary elections with a hostile assault on the media that has involved suspending licenses for new satellite stations and closely monitoring the satellite media as a prelude to taking legal action against satellite channels that “ignite civil strife,” in the words of the Minister of Information.”
“Under the pretexts of alleged ‘media chaos’ and of examining satellite channels’ sources of funding, the campaign began by targeting 16 satellite channels. For example, the office of al-Jazeera Egypt was shut down and the station’s transmitter was confiscated on the grounds that the station had not received a broadcast license, although the station had applied for a license four months ago and had been broadcasting in the interim without government objection,” the groups said, adding:
In tandem with this attack on the media, the campaign against civil society associations, human rights organizations, and some political groups involved in the January 25 revolution was redoubled. After the ouster of Mubarak, these groups have been subject to the same baseless accusations used by the Mubarak regime against human rights defenders and the same allegations by which that regime sought to stoke popular hostility to the revolution and those involved in it.
Under Mubarak, the issues of external funding and foreign agendas were used to stigmatize political activists and impugn the patriotism of hundreds of thousands of people who gathered in Egypt’s public squares, as prelude to an attack by paid bands organized by the network of interests overseen by the ruling NDP and the police state apparatus at that time.
The groups say they “still hope that the SCAF will assume its responsibilities to achieve the democratic aims expressed by the Egyptian revolution, from which the SCAF derives its legitimacy in this transitional period. We emphasize that securing a safe transition to democracy requires those currently administering the country’s affairs to open up the public sphere to a democratic, equitable, institutional dialogue among all active parties in society, in order to reach a social consensus on the political system and the course it will take.”
The groups asked the SCAF to revoke its decision to activate and expand the emergency law, abolish the law criminalizing strikes and sit-ins, end the state of emergency, and suspend all exceptional trials, including trials of civilians in military courts, and all trials in the Emergency Supreme State Security Court.
In addition to urging the SCAF to end its campaign against NGOs, the group calls on the military men to reconsider the electoral system and electoral districting to be responsive to widespread demands for an unconditional, proportional list system in all seats in elections for the People’s Assembly and Shura Council; and release a time-bound agenda for the transitional period that includes specific dates for parliamentary and presidential elections and a referendum on the new constitution.
Some of the better known groups signing the statement include Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, Arab Penal Reform Organization, Arabic Network for Human Rights Information, Center for Egyptian Women’s Legal Assistance, Center for Trade Union and Workers’ Services, and Egyptians Against Religious Discrimination.
Thursday, September 29, 2011
Bahrain’s Doctors
By William Fisher
As 20 of Bahrain’s physicians were being sentenced to prison terms of 5-15 years for treating victims of peaceful demonstrations, the US Government was readying the red bows on a package of $200m in military sales to the tiny Gulf nation.
The arms sale comes less than three months after the US included Bahrain on a list of human rights offenders requiring the United Nations' attention. According to Al Jazeera, the US Government report showed a $112m rise in sales to Bahrain, much of it involving aircraft and military electronics. The US also licensed $760,000 in exports of rifles, shotguns and assault weapons in 2010. US military exports to Bahrain in 2009 totaled $88m.
Bahrain, a tiny island nation that is home to the US Navy's 5th Fleet, occupies a strategic position in White House priorities. That position is enhanced by Bahrain’s proximity to the oil field of East Saudi Arabia. Saudi troops have been assistant Bahraini authorities in putting down the demonstrations.
Since mid-February, the kingdom has confronted demonstrators with cordons of armed military and police firing live ammunition. At least 31 people have died and hundreds more have been injured in the clashes.
The Kingdom is ruled by a Sunni monarch and his family, while the large majority of the king’s subjects are Shia. The Shia have complained for years of discrimination in employment, housing, health care and the minutiae daily life.
The Crown Prince of Bahrain has visited President Obama and State Department officials recently, complaining he was worried about Bahrain’s “image” for tourism. The country has recently retained the services of two high-profile US-based public relations firms to represent it.
In court proceedings, 20 Bahraini male and female doctors have been sentenced to 5-15 years imprisonment by Military Court for treating injured protesters. The sentenced doctors had been detained for 5 or more months, reportedly tortured, and deprived from access to lawyer and family most of time.
The doctors were working in Salmaniya hospital, frantically trying to save the lives of men, woman and children wounded by government security forces. It has been reliably reported that these forces then closed off the entrance to the hospital and would not let anyone in or out. Wounded patients were removed from their beds and taken to unknown government facilities, where many died.
Reuters reports that the possibility that American-built weapons might have been used against protesters has raised questions in the US Congress and led the department to review its defense trade relationships with several Middle East nations.
The Obama administration has been virtually silent on the subject of Bahrain. It has criticized the use of violence against dissenters by police and military units but has not exacted specific repercussions against Bahrain's government.
Jeff Abramson, deputy director of the Arms Control Association, told Mother Jones magazine that “the political upheaval across the Middle East has brought to light the problems of providing arms to repressive regimes. The hope is we'll now begin to see a rethinking of the willingness to do that".
The new report showed that licensed US defense sales to other Middle East and North African nations caught up in democracy protests remained mostly unchanged.
Maria McFarland of Human Rights Watch told Mother Jones, "This is exactly the wrong move after Bahrain brutally suppressed protests and is carrying out a relentless campaign of retribution against its critics. By continuing its relationship as if nothing had happened, the US is furthering an unstable situation."
In another legal case, Ali AlTaweel was sentenced to death by military court and Ali Attiya was sentence to life imprisonment for allegedly killing riot police officer AlMuraisi.
“Ten people were accused in the case of cutting the tongue of the Prayer Caller "Mo'athen" Erfan, two of which were charged with Incitement only. They were all sentenced to 15 years imprisonment despite the lawyers presenting substantial evidence against the allegations of the prosecution.
The military appeal court dismissed the appeal for the 14 prominent figures yesterday and upheld the sentences ranging between three years to life imprisonment. A number of those figures are still on hunger strike since the 24th of September demanding the release of the female detainees.
In a separate case, the Bahrain Youth Society for Human Rights said 32 civilians were sentenced to 15 years imprisonment for arson on a royal family member’s farm. Hussain Ahmed, who the group says “was arrested only because he is Abdulhadi Alkhawaja's son in law”, will have his verdict read on 2nd October. His lawyer stated that Hussain's case is unique because there is absolutely nothing against him, not even the usual posts on facebook or twitter, and all that is being held against him is his extracted confession under torture. He has been detained for 174 days, and is a 22 year old university student,” Abdulhadi Alkhawaja is a prominent human rights activist in Bahrain. He is currently in prison awaiting trial.
Meanwhile, Bahrain said on Tuesday it had released 25 Shi'ite women arrested last week over protest for political reforms and denied that they had been abused in detention.
Police detained 45 women who shouted anti-government slogans in a Manama mall a day before parliamentary by-elections boycotted by the main Shi'ite opposition party, Wefaq.
An Interior Ministry official said allegations of mistreatment in detention were not true, the statement said. Amnesty International said on Monday it feared the detainees had been tortured.
"They were apprehended without arrest orders, interrogated without lawyers present and some of them reportedly tortured or otherwise ill-treated," the London-based group said.
Bahraini security forces have arrested and beaten more than 40 females protesting against the parliamentary by-elections in Bahrain, the country's main opposition group, al-Wefaq, says.
The female Bahrainis, including seven minors aged between 12 and 15, were arrested on Friday, one day before the by-elections -- boycotted by the opposition -- to replace 18 lawmakers who resigned from the parliament in protest to the crackdown on anti-government demonstrators.
"More than 40 Bahraini women were savagely arrested... in a commercial center,” al-Wefaq said in a statement on Monday, adding that they were "beaten and humiliated."
Al-Wefaq condemned the females' arrests as "savage and inhumane,'' saying that they had only been expressing their "right to freedom of expression".
Election results in Bahrain show that more than 80 percent of the electorate refused to vote in the by-elections in the country.
According to a Bahraini government website, less than one in every five voters cast their ballots on Saturday.
Of the 144,513 eligible voters in 14 districts only 25,130 came out to vote, representing a 17.4 percent turnout, the Bahraini government's elections website (www.vote.bh) reported.
The Al-Wefaq leader, Sheikh Ali Salman, said the results showed that Bahrainis rejected the king's reforms, adding, “There is no such thing as Bahraini democracy. There has to be peaceful rotation of power.”
“If there is no transition, Bahrain will remain in a crisis of security and human rights, this is a historic moment,” he added.
Finally, Mahdi Abu Deeb, president of the Bahrain Teacher's Society, who was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment, is “still on hunger strike and his life and well being is at threat.” He started his hunger strike on September 11 and stopped taking his medication on the 16th.
As 20 of Bahrain’s physicians were being sentenced to prison terms of 5-15 years for treating victims of peaceful demonstrations, the US Government was readying the red bows on a package of $200m in military sales to the tiny Gulf nation.
The arms sale comes less than three months after the US included Bahrain on a list of human rights offenders requiring the United Nations' attention. According to Al Jazeera, the US Government report showed a $112m rise in sales to Bahrain, much of it involving aircraft and military electronics. The US also licensed $760,000 in exports of rifles, shotguns and assault weapons in 2010. US military exports to Bahrain in 2009 totaled $88m.
Bahrain, a tiny island nation that is home to the US Navy's 5th Fleet, occupies a strategic position in White House priorities. That position is enhanced by Bahrain’s proximity to the oil field of East Saudi Arabia. Saudi troops have been assistant Bahraini authorities in putting down the demonstrations.
Since mid-February, the kingdom has confronted demonstrators with cordons of armed military and police firing live ammunition. At least 31 people have died and hundreds more have been injured in the clashes.
The Kingdom is ruled by a Sunni monarch and his family, while the large majority of the king’s subjects are Shia. The Shia have complained for years of discrimination in employment, housing, health care and the minutiae daily life.
The Crown Prince of Bahrain has visited President Obama and State Department officials recently, complaining he was worried about Bahrain’s “image” for tourism. The country has recently retained the services of two high-profile US-based public relations firms to represent it.
In court proceedings, 20 Bahraini male and female doctors have been sentenced to 5-15 years imprisonment by Military Court for treating injured protesters. The sentenced doctors had been detained for 5 or more months, reportedly tortured, and deprived from access to lawyer and family most of time.
The doctors were working in Salmaniya hospital, frantically trying to save the lives of men, woman and children wounded by government security forces. It has been reliably reported that these forces then closed off the entrance to the hospital and would not let anyone in or out. Wounded patients were removed from their beds and taken to unknown government facilities, where many died.
Reuters reports that the possibility that American-built weapons might have been used against protesters has raised questions in the US Congress and led the department to review its defense trade relationships with several Middle East nations.
The Obama administration has been virtually silent on the subject of Bahrain. It has criticized the use of violence against dissenters by police and military units but has not exacted specific repercussions against Bahrain's government.
Jeff Abramson, deputy director of the Arms Control Association, told Mother Jones magazine that “the political upheaval across the Middle East has brought to light the problems of providing arms to repressive regimes. The hope is we'll now begin to see a rethinking of the willingness to do that".
The new report showed that licensed US defense sales to other Middle East and North African nations caught up in democracy protests remained mostly unchanged.
Maria McFarland of Human Rights Watch told Mother Jones, "This is exactly the wrong move after Bahrain brutally suppressed protests and is carrying out a relentless campaign of retribution against its critics. By continuing its relationship as if nothing had happened, the US is furthering an unstable situation."
In another legal case, Ali AlTaweel was sentenced to death by military court and Ali Attiya was sentence to life imprisonment for allegedly killing riot police officer AlMuraisi.
“Ten people were accused in the case of cutting the tongue of the Prayer Caller "Mo'athen" Erfan, two of which were charged with Incitement only. They were all sentenced to 15 years imprisonment despite the lawyers presenting substantial evidence against the allegations of the prosecution.
The military appeal court dismissed the appeal for the 14 prominent figures yesterday and upheld the sentences ranging between three years to life imprisonment. A number of those figures are still on hunger strike since the 24th of September demanding the release of the female detainees.
In a separate case, the Bahrain Youth Society for Human Rights said 32 civilians were sentenced to 15 years imprisonment for arson on a royal family member’s farm. Hussain Ahmed, who the group says “was arrested only because he is Abdulhadi Alkhawaja's son in law”, will have his verdict read on 2nd October. His lawyer stated that Hussain's case is unique because there is absolutely nothing against him, not even the usual posts on facebook or twitter, and all that is being held against him is his extracted confession under torture. He has been detained for 174 days, and is a 22 year old university student,” Abdulhadi Alkhawaja is a prominent human rights activist in Bahrain. He is currently in prison awaiting trial.
Meanwhile, Bahrain said on Tuesday it had released 25 Shi'ite women arrested last week over protest for political reforms and denied that they had been abused in detention.
Police detained 45 women who shouted anti-government slogans in a Manama mall a day before parliamentary by-elections boycotted by the main Shi'ite opposition party, Wefaq.
An Interior Ministry official said allegations of mistreatment in detention were not true, the statement said. Amnesty International said on Monday it feared the detainees had been tortured.
"They were apprehended without arrest orders, interrogated without lawyers present and some of them reportedly tortured or otherwise ill-treated," the London-based group said.
Bahraini security forces have arrested and beaten more than 40 females protesting against the parliamentary by-elections in Bahrain, the country's main opposition group, al-Wefaq, says.
The female Bahrainis, including seven minors aged between 12 and 15, were arrested on Friday, one day before the by-elections -- boycotted by the opposition -- to replace 18 lawmakers who resigned from the parliament in protest to the crackdown on anti-government demonstrators.
"More than 40 Bahraini women were savagely arrested... in a commercial center,” al-Wefaq said in a statement on Monday, adding that they were "beaten and humiliated."
Al-Wefaq condemned the females' arrests as "savage and inhumane,'' saying that they had only been expressing their "right to freedom of expression".
Election results in Bahrain show that more than 80 percent of the electorate refused to vote in the by-elections in the country.
According to a Bahraini government website, less than one in every five voters cast their ballots on Saturday.
Of the 144,513 eligible voters in 14 districts only 25,130 came out to vote, representing a 17.4 percent turnout, the Bahraini government's elections website (www.vote.bh) reported.
The Al-Wefaq leader, Sheikh Ali Salman, said the results showed that Bahrainis rejected the king's reforms, adding, “There is no such thing as Bahraini democracy. There has to be peaceful rotation of power.”
“If there is no transition, Bahrain will remain in a crisis of security and human rights, this is a historic moment,” he added.
Finally, Mahdi Abu Deeb, president of the Bahrain Teacher's Society, who was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment, is “still on hunger strike and his life and well being is at threat.” He started his hunger strike on September 11 and stopped taking his medication on the 16th.
Will the Generals Ever Leave?
By William Fisher
Nearly two dozen of Egypt’s most respected human rights organizations charged yesterday that the changes made by country’s “temporary” military rulers are cosmetic and intended to paper over the “vast gulf” that separates those whose efforts won the revolution and those who are now charged with running the country.
It is believed to be the strongest attack yet made by the human rights community against the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) in Egypt.
In a statement issued yesterday the coalition of human rights groups said it
“decisively condemns the exploitation of the political crisis between the forces of the revolution and those managing the country’s affairs in the transitional period as an excuse to employ the same repressive tools and means that the regime of deposed president Hosni Mubarak used against its enemies and critics.”
The group added, The SCAF has been “foregoing dialogue, negotiations, and political solutions in favor of the old security approach. Such security solutions lead to violence, oppression, and an increasing use of repressive legislation against opponents, be they political activists, media workers, or civil society and rights activists.”
Regrettably, the undersigned organizations have noticed that the policies recently embraced by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) and the government that heeds its dictates have entailed increasing political tension and have strengthened the belief that a vast gulf separates, on one hand, Egyptians’ aspirations for democracy, an end to the legacies of an obsolete despotic regime, and a clean break with the practices and policies of that repressive regime, and, on the other, the tendencies of those administering the country’s affairs, who are clearly and gradually preserving the primary components of the deposed president’s regime while attempting to give it a facelift by sacrificing several old regime figures.”
“This,” they added, “is an insult to the thousands who sacrificed and died in a vicious battle to overthrow the entire regime, not for the sake of a few new faces.”
The groups were most forceful in their condemnation of SCAF Decree (193/2011), “which not only revived the application of the emergency law—which has officially been in force since the Mubarak era—but also expanded the scope of the law to exceed the limits guaranteed in 2010 by the deposed president, who vowed to apply the law only in the context of crimes of terrorism and drug-trafficking.”
The SCAF’s decision “allows the emergency law to be invoked for disturbances to national security and the public order and to confront acts of thuggery, assaults on the freedom to work, vandalism of facilities, the obstruction of transportation and roads, and the dissemination of false news and statements.”
The group added, “The expansive language of the decree permits a broad interpretation of such acts that will allow for the intimidation and harassment of persons involved in peaceful protests, demonstrations, and strikes. It also constitutes a direct threat to freedom of expression and a free media.”
The groups also focused their wrath on what they characterized as the broader picture. They said, “The use of the emergency law to stifle basic liberties and to repress actions by forces of the revolution cannot be viewed separately from the broad, escalating assault on civil society institutions and various media outlets.”
The groups said, “It should be noted that in the run-up to the 2010 elections, the most infamous in Egypt’s history, the Mubarak regime launched an all-out attack on various forms of media, several of the most prominent political talk shows, and human rights organizations and civil society, impeding their ability to monitor the elections and expose irregularities.”
They added, “The course pursued by those currently administering the country’s affairs differs little from the ways of the Mubarak regime. They have clung to an electoral system that has been nearly unanimously rejected by all political forces and human rights groups, although these forces have proposed alternative electoral laws that advocate elections based on unconditional, proportional lists, whether for parties, coalitions, or independents.”
As a result, they said, “The electoral system chosen by the SCAF and the flagrant deficiencies in districting have provoked the anger of various parties, who believe that these measures will only reinstate a parliament dominated by the same forces that controlled Mubarak-era parliaments through the use of money, narrow partisan interests, and religious sentiment.”
“Adhering to the same policies pursued by Mubarak and his dissolved party, those administering the country’s affairs have preceded the impending parliamentary elections with a hostile assault on the media that has involved suspending licenses for new satellite stations and closely monitoring the satellite media as a prelude to taking legal action against satellite channels that “ignite civil strife,” in the words of the Minister of Information.”
“Under the pretexts of alleged ‘media chaos’ and of examining satellite channels’ sources of funding, the campaign began by targeting 16 satellite channels. For example, the office of al-Jazeera Egypt was shut down and the station’s transmitter was confiscated on the grounds that the station had not received a broadcast license, although the station had applied for a license four months ago and had been broadcasting in the interim without government objection,” the groups said, adding:
In tandem with this attack on the media, the campaign against civil society associations, human rights organizations, and some political groups involved in the January 25 revolution was redoubled. After the ouster of Mubarak, these groups have been subject to the same baseless accusations used by the Mubarak regime against human rights defenders and the same allegations by which that regime sought to stoke popular hostility to the revolution and those involved in it.
Under Mubarak, the issues of external funding and foreign agendas were used to stigmatize political activists and impugn the patriotism of hundreds of thousands of people who gathered in Egypt’s public squares, as prelude to an attack by paid bands organized by the network of interests overseen by the ruling NDP and the police state apparatus at that time.
The groups say they “still hope that the SCAF will assume its responsibilities to achieve the democratic aims expressed by the Egyptian revolution, from which the SCAF derives its legitimacy in this transitional period. We emphasize that securing a safe transition to democracy requires those currently administering the country’s affairs to open up the public sphere to a democratic, equitable, institutional dialogue among all active parties in society, in order to reach a social consensus on the political system and the course it will take.”
The groups asked the SCAF to revoke its decision to activate and expand the emergency law, abolish the law criminalizing strikes and sit-ins, end the state of emergency, and suspend all exceptional trials, including trials of civilians in military courts, and all trials in the Emergency Supreme State Security Court.
In addition to urging the SCAF to end its campaign against NGOs, the group calls on the military men to reconsider the electoral system and electoral districting to be responsive to widespread demands for an unconditional, proportional list system in all seats in elections for the People’s Assembly and Shura Council; and release a time-bound agenda for the transitional period that includes specific dates for parliamentary and presidential elections and a referendum on the new constitution.
Some of the better known groups signing the statement include Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, Arab Penal Reform Organization, Arabic Network for Human Rights Information, Center for Egyptian Women’s Legal Assistance, Center for Trade Union and Workers’ Services, and Egyptians Against Religious Discrimination.
Nearly two dozen of Egypt’s most respected human rights organizations charged yesterday that the changes made by country’s “temporary” military rulers are cosmetic and intended to paper over the “vast gulf” that separates those whose efforts won the revolution and those who are now charged with running the country.
It is believed to be the strongest attack yet made by the human rights community against the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) in Egypt.
In a statement issued yesterday the coalition of human rights groups said it
“decisively condemns the exploitation of the political crisis between the forces of the revolution and those managing the country’s affairs in the transitional period as an excuse to employ the same repressive tools and means that the regime of deposed president Hosni Mubarak used against its enemies and critics.”
The group added, The SCAF has been “foregoing dialogue, negotiations, and political solutions in favor of the old security approach. Such security solutions lead to violence, oppression, and an increasing use of repressive legislation against opponents, be they political activists, media workers, or civil society and rights activists.”
Regrettably, the undersigned organizations have noticed that the policies recently embraced by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) and the government that heeds its dictates have entailed increasing political tension and have strengthened the belief that a vast gulf separates, on one hand, Egyptians’ aspirations for democracy, an end to the legacies of an obsolete despotic regime, and a clean break with the practices and policies of that repressive regime, and, on the other, the tendencies of those administering the country’s affairs, who are clearly and gradually preserving the primary components of the deposed president’s regime while attempting to give it a facelift by sacrificing several old regime figures.”
“This,” they added, “is an insult to the thousands who sacrificed and died in a vicious battle to overthrow the entire regime, not for the sake of a few new faces.”
The groups were most forceful in their condemnation of SCAF Decree (193/2011), “which not only revived the application of the emergency law—which has officially been in force since the Mubarak era—but also expanded the scope of the law to exceed the limits guaranteed in 2010 by the deposed president, who vowed to apply the law only in the context of crimes of terrorism and drug-trafficking.”
The SCAF’s decision “allows the emergency law to be invoked for disturbances to national security and the public order and to confront acts of thuggery, assaults on the freedom to work, vandalism of facilities, the obstruction of transportation and roads, and the dissemination of false news and statements.”
The group added, “The expansive language of the decree permits a broad interpretation of such acts that will allow for the intimidation and harassment of persons involved in peaceful protests, demonstrations, and strikes. It also constitutes a direct threat to freedom of expression and a free media.”
The groups also focused their wrath on what they characterized as the broader picture. They said, “The use of the emergency law to stifle basic liberties and to repress actions by forces of the revolution cannot be viewed separately from the broad, escalating assault on civil society institutions and various media outlets.”
The groups said, “It should be noted that in the run-up to the 2010 elections, the most infamous in Egypt’s history, the Mubarak regime launched an all-out attack on various forms of media, several of the most prominent political talk shows, and human rights organizations and civil society, impeding their ability to monitor the elections and expose irregularities.”
They added, “The course pursued by those currently administering the country’s affairs differs little from the ways of the Mubarak regime. They have clung to an electoral system that has been nearly unanimously rejected by all political forces and human rights groups, although these forces have proposed alternative electoral laws that advocate elections based on unconditional, proportional lists, whether for parties, coalitions, or independents.”
As a result, they said, “The electoral system chosen by the SCAF and the flagrant deficiencies in districting have provoked the anger of various parties, who believe that these measures will only reinstate a parliament dominated by the same forces that controlled Mubarak-era parliaments through the use of money, narrow partisan interests, and religious sentiment.”
“Adhering to the same policies pursued by Mubarak and his dissolved party, those administering the country’s affairs have preceded the impending parliamentary elections with a hostile assault on the media that has involved suspending licenses for new satellite stations and closely monitoring the satellite media as a prelude to taking legal action against satellite channels that “ignite civil strife,” in the words of the Minister of Information.”
“Under the pretexts of alleged ‘media chaos’ and of examining satellite channels’ sources of funding, the campaign began by targeting 16 satellite channels. For example, the office of al-Jazeera Egypt was shut down and the station’s transmitter was confiscated on the grounds that the station had not received a broadcast license, although the station had applied for a license four months ago and had been broadcasting in the interim without government objection,” the groups said, adding:
In tandem with this attack on the media, the campaign against civil society associations, human rights organizations, and some political groups involved in the January 25 revolution was redoubled. After the ouster of Mubarak, these groups have been subject to the same baseless accusations used by the Mubarak regime against human rights defenders and the same allegations by which that regime sought to stoke popular hostility to the revolution and those involved in it.
Under Mubarak, the issues of external funding and foreign agendas were used to stigmatize political activists and impugn the patriotism of hundreds of thousands of people who gathered in Egypt’s public squares, as prelude to an attack by paid bands organized by the network of interests overseen by the ruling NDP and the police state apparatus at that time.
The groups say they “still hope that the SCAF will assume its responsibilities to achieve the democratic aims expressed by the Egyptian revolution, from which the SCAF derives its legitimacy in this transitional period. We emphasize that securing a safe transition to democracy requires those currently administering the country’s affairs to open up the public sphere to a democratic, equitable, institutional dialogue among all active parties in society, in order to reach a social consensus on the political system and the course it will take.”
The groups asked the SCAF to revoke its decision to activate and expand the emergency law, abolish the law criminalizing strikes and sit-ins, end the state of emergency, and suspend all exceptional trials, including trials of civilians in military courts, and all trials in the Emergency Supreme State Security Court.
In addition to urging the SCAF to end its campaign against NGOs, the group calls on the military men to reconsider the electoral system and electoral districting to be responsive to widespread demands for an unconditional, proportional list system in all seats in elections for the People’s Assembly and Shura Council; and release a time-bound agenda for the transitional period that includes specific dates for parliamentary and presidential elections and a referendum on the new constitution.
Some of the better known groups signing the statement include Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, Arab Penal Reform Organization, Arabic Network for Human Rights Information, Center for Egyptian Women’s Legal Assistance, Center for Trade Union and Workers’ Services, and Egyptians Against Religious Discrimination.
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
Rick Perry, The For-Profit Jailer
By William Fisher
Given what we know about Gov. Rick Perry’s keen predilection toward ‘crony capitalism,’ we should not be surprised to learn that he’s a big fan of private for-profit prisons.
Lobbyists and executives from that industry have contributed generously to Perry’s reelection campaign, and he returned the favor by proposing policies that would benefit the prison industry. “Coincidence?” asks Tim Murphy of Mother Jones magazine in a major article that examines the governor’s relationships with the for-profit prison industry.
Murphy writes: “Under the banner of closing the state's $27 billion deficit last winter, Texas Gov. Rick Perry floated a proposal to privatize the state's prison health care network. Whether the plan would actually save the state any money was a matter of debate, but one thing was clear: The move would have been a boon for private-prison executives and lobbyists, including Perry's former chief of staff, who had donated generously to his 2010 reelection campaign.”
He added, “The plan met bipartisan resistance in the state Legislature, but it was just one of a handful of recent proposals by Perry's office that would have benefited the industry—all in the name of deficit reduction.”
Murphy goes on to tell us that private prisons are a big business in Texas, where the combination of federal immigration policies and one of the nation's largest inmate populations has led to a boom in construction over the last two decades.
Murphy continues: “As governor, Perry, the front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination, has supported privatizing everything from public lands to highways, but according to Scott Henson, a criminal-justice watchdog who runs the blog Grits for Breakfast, the governor had remained largely quiet on the prisons issue—until this year. That coincided with an influx of campaign contributions from private-prison executives and lobbyists, among them his former top aide, Michael Toomey, a political powerbroker who represents the nation's largest private corrections contractor, Corrections Corporation of America.”
CCA, per its website, "provides health care services to male and female inmates and youthful offenders who are housed in local jails, detention facilities, and correctional institutions around the country."
And there are more private prisons in Texas than in any other state in the country.
(Toomey told Mother Jones he had not lobbied Perry's office or the state Legislature on the prison health care plan; Perry's campaign did not respond to a request for comment.)
For-profit private prison companies primarily use three strategies to influence policy: lobbying, direct campaign contributions, and building relationships, networks, and associations. The industry’s so-called “think tank”, known as ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council), employs all three strategies and also undertakes to prepare “templates” for legislation that will benefit its members.
For example, there is significant evidence that ALEC worked with Arizona officials in the crafting of the infamous “papers please” legislation. It is also reported that, on the basis of that work, it was also able to help Alabama with the crafting of its immigration law.
Given Perry’s record in similar situations – for example, the contributions from Merck & Co. and their relationship to Perry’s executive order mandating HTD inoculations to help young Texas girls avoid cervical cancer – the Justice Policy Institute was not a minute too late in issuing a new report, “Gaming the System: How the Political Strategies of Private Prison Companies Promote Ineffective Incarceration Policies.”
The report examines how private prison companies are able to influence legislators and criminal justice policy, a collaboration that ultimately results in harsher criminal justice policies and the incarceration of more people, the JPI asserts.
The report says that over the past 15 years, the number of people held in all prisons in the United States has increased by 49.6 percent. Private prison populations, during the same period, increased by 353.7 percent, according to recent federal statistics.
The providers of private prisons have been reaping the benefits. In 2010 alone, the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and the GEO Group, the two largest private prison companies, had combined revenues of $2.9 billion.
The JPI report says, “not only have private prison companies benefited from this increased incarceration, but they have helped fuel it.”
The report notes a “triangle of influence” built on campaign contributions, lobbying and relationships with current and former elected and appointed officials. Through this strategy, private prison companies have gained access to local, state, and federal policymakers and have back-channel influence to pass legislation that puts more people behind bars, adds to private prison populations and generates tremendous profits at U.S. taxpayers’ expense.
“For-profit companies exercise their political influence to protect their market share, which in the case of corporations like GEO Group and CCA primarily means the number of people locked up behind bars,” said Tracy Velázquez, executive director of JPI. “We need to take a hard look at what the cost of this influence is, both to taxpayers and to the community as a whole, in terms of the policies being lobbied for and the outcomes for people put in private prisons.
That their lobbying and political contributions is funded by taxpayers, through their profits on government contracts, makes it all the more important that people understand the role of private prisons in our political system,” Velasquez says.
Paul Ashton, principal author of “Gaming the System,” noted, “This report is built on concrete examples of the political strategies of private prison companies.
From noting campaign donations, $835,514 to federal candidates and $6,092,331 to state-level candidates since 2000, to the proposed plan from Ohio Governor John Kasich to privatize five Ohio prisons followed by the appointment of a former CCA employee to run the Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections, “Gaming the System” shows that private prison companies’ interests lie in promoting their business through maintaining political relationships rather than saving taxpayer
dollars and effectively ensuring public safety,” Ashton says.
Other organizations have also investigated the private prison industry and have their own serious concerns about their political influence. “In the South and Southwest, the private prison industry has consistently targeted poor
communities,” said Bob Libal the Texas Campaigns Coordinator for Grassroots Leadership.
“We believe that it’s important to fight, particularly in these communities, to end for-profit incarceration and reduce reliance on criminalization and detention, and ultimately build lasting movements for social justice. This important report helps shed light onto this particularly troubling industry,” he said.
Shakyra Diaz, policy director of American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Ohio added, “Research has shown that private prisons do not save taxpayer dollars and can in fact cost taxpayers more than public prisons. Additionally, privatizing prisons may undermine cost effective sentencing reforms and increase recidivism rates.
Despite these well-documented concerns, private prison companies continue to promote policies that put money in their pockets and people behind bars.”
The JPI declared that “if states and the federal government are interested in providing cost-effective, proven public safety strategies, investments in private prison companies will not help achieve that goal. “Gaming the System” includes a number of recommendations for criminal justice policies that are cost-effective and will improve public safety:
The report says that states and the federal government “should look for real solutions to the problem of growing jail and prison populations. A number of states are already utilizing innovative strategies for reducing the number of people behind bars in their state. Reducing the number of people entering the justice system, and the amount of time that they spend there, can lower prison populations, making private, for-profit prisons unnecessary, and improving public safety and the lives of individuals.”
“Private prison companies have been very successful in their effort to promote harsher sentencing policies and the privatization of correctional systems, and when they win, we all lose,” added Tracy Velázquez, executive director of JPI.
“Taxpayers lose when their money is used to generate profits for shareholders and to promote policies that increase incarceration; communities lose when policies proven to be ineffective for public safety are pushed through state legislatures, and people involved in the criminal justice system lose when they are locked up in underfunded and sometimes unsafe facilities,” she says.
But they have not been anywhere near as successful in operating professional-grade lockups. The Federal Government and several States have shut down a number of facilities that were found to be overcrowded, unsafe, and deficient in health and hygiene. There have been a number of deaths in detention. There has also been a lack of transparency in dealings between the public and several leading private prison companies.
According to Paul Ashton, principal author of the report, “While private prison companies may try to present themselves as just meeting existing demand for prison beds and responding to current market conditions, in fact they have worked hard over the past decade to create markets for their product. As revenues of private prison companies have grown over the past decade, the companies have had more resources with which to build political power, and they have used this power to promote policies that lead to higher rates of incarceration.”
He added: “As policymakers and the public are increasingly coming to understand that incarceration is not only breaking the bank, but it’s also not making us safer, will this shrink the influence of private prison companies? Or will they use their growing financial muscle to consolidate and expand into even more areas of the justice system?”
He continues: “Much will depend on the extent that people understand the role for-profit private prison companies have already played in raising incarceration rates and harming people and communities, and take steps to ensure that in the future, community safety and well-being, and not profits, drive our justice policies. One thing is certain: in this political game, the private prison industry will look out for their own interests.”
Given what we know about Gov. Rick Perry’s keen predilection toward ‘crony capitalism,’ we should not be surprised to learn that he’s a big fan of private for-profit prisons.
Lobbyists and executives from that industry have contributed generously to Perry’s reelection campaign, and he returned the favor by proposing policies that would benefit the prison industry. “Coincidence?” asks Tim Murphy of Mother Jones magazine in a major article that examines the governor’s relationships with the for-profit prison industry.
Murphy writes: “Under the banner of closing the state's $27 billion deficit last winter, Texas Gov. Rick Perry floated a proposal to privatize the state's prison health care network. Whether the plan would actually save the state any money was a matter of debate, but one thing was clear: The move would have been a boon for private-prison executives and lobbyists, including Perry's former chief of staff, who had donated generously to his 2010 reelection campaign.”
He added, “The plan met bipartisan resistance in the state Legislature, but it was just one of a handful of recent proposals by Perry's office that would have benefited the industry—all in the name of deficit reduction.”
Murphy goes on to tell us that private prisons are a big business in Texas, where the combination of federal immigration policies and one of the nation's largest inmate populations has led to a boom in construction over the last two decades.
Murphy continues: “As governor, Perry, the front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination, has supported privatizing everything from public lands to highways, but according to Scott Henson, a criminal-justice watchdog who runs the blog Grits for Breakfast, the governor had remained largely quiet on the prisons issue—until this year. That coincided with an influx of campaign contributions from private-prison executives and lobbyists, among them his former top aide, Michael Toomey, a political powerbroker who represents the nation's largest private corrections contractor, Corrections Corporation of America.”
CCA, per its website, "provides health care services to male and female inmates and youthful offenders who are housed in local jails, detention facilities, and correctional institutions around the country."
And there are more private prisons in Texas than in any other state in the country.
(Toomey told Mother Jones he had not lobbied Perry's office or the state Legislature on the prison health care plan; Perry's campaign did not respond to a request for comment.)
For-profit private prison companies primarily use three strategies to influence policy: lobbying, direct campaign contributions, and building relationships, networks, and associations. The industry’s so-called “think tank”, known as ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council), employs all three strategies and also undertakes to prepare “templates” for legislation that will benefit its members.
For example, there is significant evidence that ALEC worked with Arizona officials in the crafting of the infamous “papers please” legislation. It is also reported that, on the basis of that work, it was also able to help Alabama with the crafting of its immigration law.
Given Perry’s record in similar situations – for example, the contributions from Merck & Co. and their relationship to Perry’s executive order mandating HTD inoculations to help young Texas girls avoid cervical cancer – the Justice Policy Institute was not a minute too late in issuing a new report, “Gaming the System: How the Political Strategies of Private Prison Companies Promote Ineffective Incarceration Policies.”
The report examines how private prison companies are able to influence legislators and criminal justice policy, a collaboration that ultimately results in harsher criminal justice policies and the incarceration of more people, the JPI asserts.
The report says that over the past 15 years, the number of people held in all prisons in the United States has increased by 49.6 percent. Private prison populations, during the same period, increased by 353.7 percent, according to recent federal statistics.
The providers of private prisons have been reaping the benefits. In 2010 alone, the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and the GEO Group, the two largest private prison companies, had combined revenues of $2.9 billion.
The JPI report says, “not only have private prison companies benefited from this increased incarceration, but they have helped fuel it.”
The report notes a “triangle of influence” built on campaign contributions, lobbying and relationships with current and former elected and appointed officials. Through this strategy, private prison companies have gained access to local, state, and federal policymakers and have back-channel influence to pass legislation that puts more people behind bars, adds to private prison populations and generates tremendous profits at U.S. taxpayers’ expense.
“For-profit companies exercise their political influence to protect their market share, which in the case of corporations like GEO Group and CCA primarily means the number of people locked up behind bars,” said Tracy Velázquez, executive director of JPI. “We need to take a hard look at what the cost of this influence is, both to taxpayers and to the community as a whole, in terms of the policies being lobbied for and the outcomes for people put in private prisons.
That their lobbying and political contributions is funded by taxpayers, through their profits on government contracts, makes it all the more important that people understand the role of private prisons in our political system,” Velasquez says.
Paul Ashton, principal author of “Gaming the System,” noted, “This report is built on concrete examples of the political strategies of private prison companies.
From noting campaign donations, $835,514 to federal candidates and $6,092,331 to state-level candidates since 2000, to the proposed plan from Ohio Governor John Kasich to privatize five Ohio prisons followed by the appointment of a former CCA employee to run the Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections, “Gaming the System” shows that private prison companies’ interests lie in promoting their business through maintaining political relationships rather than saving taxpayer
dollars and effectively ensuring public safety,” Ashton says.
Other organizations have also investigated the private prison industry and have their own serious concerns about their political influence. “In the South and Southwest, the private prison industry has consistently targeted poor
communities,” said Bob Libal the Texas Campaigns Coordinator for Grassroots Leadership.
“We believe that it’s important to fight, particularly in these communities, to end for-profit incarceration and reduce reliance on criminalization and detention, and ultimately build lasting movements for social justice. This important report helps shed light onto this particularly troubling industry,” he said.
Shakyra Diaz, policy director of American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Ohio added, “Research has shown that private prisons do not save taxpayer dollars and can in fact cost taxpayers more than public prisons. Additionally, privatizing prisons may undermine cost effective sentencing reforms and increase recidivism rates.
Despite these well-documented concerns, private prison companies continue to promote policies that put money in their pockets and people behind bars.”
The JPI declared that “if states and the federal government are interested in providing cost-effective, proven public safety strategies, investments in private prison companies will not help achieve that goal. “Gaming the System” includes a number of recommendations for criminal justice policies that are cost-effective and will improve public safety:
The report says that states and the federal government “should look for real solutions to the problem of growing jail and prison populations. A number of states are already utilizing innovative strategies for reducing the number of people behind bars in their state. Reducing the number of people entering the justice system, and the amount of time that they spend there, can lower prison populations, making private, for-profit prisons unnecessary, and improving public safety and the lives of individuals.”
“Private prison companies have been very successful in their effort to promote harsher sentencing policies and the privatization of correctional systems, and when they win, we all lose,” added Tracy Velázquez, executive director of JPI.
“Taxpayers lose when their money is used to generate profits for shareholders and to promote policies that increase incarceration; communities lose when policies proven to be ineffective for public safety are pushed through state legislatures, and people involved in the criminal justice system lose when they are locked up in underfunded and sometimes unsafe facilities,” she says.
But they have not been anywhere near as successful in operating professional-grade lockups. The Federal Government and several States have shut down a number of facilities that were found to be overcrowded, unsafe, and deficient in health and hygiene. There have been a number of deaths in detention. There has also been a lack of transparency in dealings between the public and several leading private prison companies.
According to Paul Ashton, principal author of the report, “While private prison companies may try to present themselves as just meeting existing demand for prison beds and responding to current market conditions, in fact they have worked hard over the past decade to create markets for their product. As revenues of private prison companies have grown over the past decade, the companies have had more resources with which to build political power, and they have used this power to promote policies that lead to higher rates of incarceration.”
He added: “As policymakers and the public are increasingly coming to understand that incarceration is not only breaking the bank, but it’s also not making us safer, will this shrink the influence of private prison companies? Or will they use their growing financial muscle to consolidate and expand into even more areas of the justice system?”
He continues: “Much will depend on the extent that people understand the role for-profit private prison companies have already played in raising incarceration rates and harming people and communities, and take steps to ensure that in the future, community safety and well-being, and not profits, drive our justice policies. One thing is certain: in this political game, the private prison industry will look out for their own interests.”
Sunday, September 18, 2011
Egypt: The Murder of Dissent
By William Fisher
On August 14, two young bloggers, Asma Mahfouz and Loay Nagaty, were arrested on charges of defaming Egypt’s military rulers. In a blogpost that went viral on YouTube, Mahfouz called them a "council of dogs."
Both were referred to a military court. That prompted activists, as well as presidential hopefuls including Mohamed ElBaradei and Ayman Nour, to protest their being charged in a military court.
(To date, more than 12,000 Egyptians have been charged before military courts, whose use has become the subject of a major point of conflict and contention between the pro-democracy forces and the military council.)
The outcry of popular support for the two was deafening. It was particularly strong for Mahfouz, a 26-year-old university student who was well known as one of the founders of the April 6 movement and credited with major contributions to the incredible revolution that begin in Tahrir Square.
On August 18, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) caved to the will of the people and ordered the military prosecution drop all charges.
But other voices of dissent have not been so lucky. Bloggers are routinely arrested – and NOT released. Instead, they are scheduled for trials before military courts. The more traditional journalistic communities – newspapers, magazines, radio and television channels – expected that the overthrow of the Mubarak regime would open a new avenue to press freedom. And they are deeply disappointed since the country’s military rulers have changed almost nothing to improve on Mubarak’s hawk-eyed censors.
One of the most revelatory of the military’s attitudes toward press freedom came this week with the military council reactivating the emergency law. In effect under Mubarak for three decades, it gives the state security apparatus broad powers to arrest and detain, without charges, and with the victims having no access to lawyers or to their families.
As reported in The Guardian, journalists fear that this law, ostensibly reintroduced in the wake of the storming of the Israeli embassy in Cairo, will be used to muzzle the media.
Earlier, the military council committed to annul the law by September -- this has always been central to the demands of the protesters.
The Guardian reported: “A day after the old law was re-introduced, police raided the offices of an Al-Jazeera affiliate, Mubasher Misr, and shut it down. Broadcasting equipment was seized and the station's chief engineer, Islam al-Banna, was arrested and detained overnight. The authorities also jammed the station's live broadcasts from another location, at the media production city, outside Cairo.”
The Al-Jazeera affiliate began broadcasting in February. Its director, Ayman
Gaballah, said it had been promised a license. But the license never appeared and Al Jazeera’s staff say they were “repeatedly told by the ministry that they could go on broadcasting without a problem.”
The Guardian reports that research by local representatives of the New York-based press freedom watchdog, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), indicates that this was merely a pretext to silence the critical broadcaster.
The nation’s military rulers have now placed a "temporary freeze" on issuing broadcasting licences for new satellite television stations, the news channel Al-Arabiya reported.
Al Jazeera reports that hundreds of people have gathered in Cairo's Tahrir Square to protest against the recent expansion of the Egypt's emergency law, amid palpable anger over the military's handling of transition from autocratic rule. Earlier this week, following a violent attack on the Israeli embassy in Cairo and attempts to storm security buildings, the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces said it would enforce the Emergency Law at least until the end of this year, on articles relating to the spreading of misinformation, arms possession and interfering with traffic.
The highly respected Reporters Without Borders (RWB) organization says it is “very disturbed by information minister Osama Heikal’s 7 September decision, after consulting with the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, to temporarily freeze the granting of satellite TV licences to recent applicants without saying how long the freeze will last.”
RWB also charged that Heikal threatened other TV stations, accusing them of indiscipline and saying he was asking the relevant agency to “take legal measures against satellite TV stations that jeopardize stability and security.” He said the measures were needed to restore order to the “increasingly chaotic media scene” and because of “concerns over incitement to violence.”
“His announcement and comments amount to a declaration of war on the broadcast media and, in particular, independent satellite TV stations that dare to criticize the Supreme Council’s policies. It is very disturbing that the council regards news media as sources of ‘harm to the country’s security and stability,’” RWB added.
The group said, “It is a return to the past, to the era of the ousted dictator Hosni Mubarak. Since taking over after Mubarak’s removal, the Supreme Council has repeatedly taken decisions that negatively affect media freedom in Egypt, endangering something that Egyptians fought hard for during their 18-day uprising.”
The crackdown has affected scores of individual journalists as well as journalistic institutions.
Here are several examples – though the list is far from complete.
Imad Bazzi, a Lebanese blogger who is the founder of the Arab Blogging Forum, was denied entry at Cairo airport last week and deported after being told he had been "blacklisted" as a security concern.
A popular TV personality, Dina Abd-Al Rahman, was fired as a presenter of the Dream TV program, “Sabah Dream,” following an altercation on the air with a former air force officer, Abd Al-Monem Kato.
Many online commentators and activists have expressed their outrage about her dismissal, describing Dream TV owner Ahmed Bahgat, an ally of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces as a businessman opposed to media freedom on his own TV channel. While there is no evidence that the council had a role in her dismissal, the military has taken direct action against journalists on many occasions in recent months.
For example, a fine of 20,000 Egyptian pounds was imposed on Kareem Reda, who writes the blog Sarkha, was upheld on appeal. The blogger was fined as a result of a suit by Petrograde, a natural gas company, that accused him of defaming and insulting the company, damaging its interests and trying to harm the national economy because he launched a page on Facebook calling on people to boycott its services and not pay their gas bills it as long as it continued to export gas to Israel at below-market prices.
Maikel Nabil Sanad, a blogger and conscientious objector, was sentenced to three years in prison on 10 April for posting a report on his blog disputing the apparent neutrality of the armed forces during the January and February demonstrations and accusing them of arresting and torturing protesters.
He was convicted of insulting the armed forces, spreading false information and disturbing public order. He began a hunger strike in Cairo’s Al-Marg prison on 23 August despite suffering from heart problems. He subsequently stopped drinking as well, with the result that he had to be rushed to the prison infirmary. He insists that he will resume the hunger strike regardless of the outcome.
Another blogger, Botheina Kamel, was summoned by a military court for interrogation on 15 May after she criticized the armed forces in a program on Nile TV.
The blogger Hossam Al-Hamalawy and journalists Rim Magued and Nabil Sharaf Al-Din were interrogated on 31 May for nearly three hours about their appearances on the station ON-TV. Speaking on Magued’s program on 26 May, Al-Hamalawy accused military police of violating human rights.
The next day, Al-Din talked about the chances of an alliance between the Muslim Brotherhood and the army as part of a political transition.
Rasha Azab, a reporter for the newspaper Al-Fajr, and Adel Hammuda, its editor, were interrogated by a military prosecutor on 19 June and were told they are to be tried because an article Azab wrote for Al-Fajr’s 12 June issue. Azab is facing a possible jail sentence for publishing “false information liable to disturb public security” while Hammuda is facing a possible fine for alleged negligence in his role as editor.
Hassan Bahgat, 70, a former army officer who used to head ABC’s Cairo bureau, was sentenced to six months in prison by a military court on 17 August on a charge of “chanting anti-army slogans liable to defame the armed forces” in Tahrir Square at 1 a.m. on 6 August. The sentence was suspended but it could be activated at any time.
A smear campaign has meanwhile been launched in the government media against Egyptian NGOs that get funding from the United States. It is targeting only those that criticize the Supreme Council and poses a threat to many national human rights organizations.
Mohamed Abdel Dayem, the CPJ's Middle East and north Africa program coordinator, summed up the current state of play: "For months now, the ruling Supreme Military Council of the Armed Forces has been going to great lengths to hamstring the media and snuff out critical reporting. As the self-proclaimed guardian of the revolution, the military council ought to facilitate the work of long-silenced voices in the media instead of shutting them down and threatening them with repressive state security proceedings."
But this is unlikely to happen any time soon. The generals who sit on the Supreme Council are generals; they tend to know little about the need for press freedom. Indeed, they seem to fear it. Moreover, they know little about governing. They also appear to have great difficulty actually hearing what their constituents are telling them; a major reason is that they don’t regard the heroes of Tahrir Square as constituents.
And we should remember that all of these men were Mubarak’s military comrades. It must pain them greatly to see their fellow soldier being tried in open court for murder and corruption. It would appear that this was at least one of their motivations in closing the Mubarak court proceedings to the press.
To a significant extent, the generals are looking at a self-inflicted wound. They have failed to lay out any long-term vision for Egypt’s future. That sows confusion and contention among those who risked so much to give Egypt another chance to join the 21st Century. Absent such a vision, the Tahrir Square protestors are chaotically clamoring for an unconnected series of populist “fixes.”
But, as Egypt apparently must learn the hard way, populism is not policy.
On August 14, two young bloggers, Asma Mahfouz and Loay Nagaty, were arrested on charges of defaming Egypt’s military rulers. In a blogpost that went viral on YouTube, Mahfouz called them a "council of dogs."
Both were referred to a military court. That prompted activists, as well as presidential hopefuls including Mohamed ElBaradei and Ayman Nour, to protest their being charged in a military court.
(To date, more than 12,000 Egyptians have been charged before military courts, whose use has become the subject of a major point of conflict and contention between the pro-democracy forces and the military council.)
The outcry of popular support for the two was deafening. It was particularly strong for Mahfouz, a 26-year-old university student who was well known as one of the founders of the April 6 movement and credited with major contributions to the incredible revolution that begin in Tahrir Square.
On August 18, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) caved to the will of the people and ordered the military prosecution drop all charges.
But other voices of dissent have not been so lucky. Bloggers are routinely arrested – and NOT released. Instead, they are scheduled for trials before military courts. The more traditional journalistic communities – newspapers, magazines, radio and television channels – expected that the overthrow of the Mubarak regime would open a new avenue to press freedom. And they are deeply disappointed since the country’s military rulers have changed almost nothing to improve on Mubarak’s hawk-eyed censors.
One of the most revelatory of the military’s attitudes toward press freedom came this week with the military council reactivating the emergency law. In effect under Mubarak for three decades, it gives the state security apparatus broad powers to arrest and detain, without charges, and with the victims having no access to lawyers or to their families.
As reported in The Guardian, journalists fear that this law, ostensibly reintroduced in the wake of the storming of the Israeli embassy in Cairo, will be used to muzzle the media.
Earlier, the military council committed to annul the law by September -- this has always been central to the demands of the protesters.
The Guardian reported: “A day after the old law was re-introduced, police raided the offices of an Al-Jazeera affiliate, Mubasher Misr, and shut it down. Broadcasting equipment was seized and the station's chief engineer, Islam al-Banna, was arrested and detained overnight. The authorities also jammed the station's live broadcasts from another location, at the media production city, outside Cairo.”
The Al-Jazeera affiliate began broadcasting in February. Its director, Ayman
Gaballah, said it had been promised a license. But the license never appeared and Al Jazeera’s staff say they were “repeatedly told by the ministry that they could go on broadcasting without a problem.”
The Guardian reports that research by local representatives of the New York-based press freedom watchdog, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), indicates that this was merely a pretext to silence the critical broadcaster.
The nation’s military rulers have now placed a "temporary freeze" on issuing broadcasting licences for new satellite television stations, the news channel Al-Arabiya reported.
Al Jazeera reports that hundreds of people have gathered in Cairo's Tahrir Square to protest against the recent expansion of the Egypt's emergency law, amid palpable anger over the military's handling of transition from autocratic rule. Earlier this week, following a violent attack on the Israeli embassy in Cairo and attempts to storm security buildings, the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces said it would enforce the Emergency Law at least until the end of this year, on articles relating to the spreading of misinformation, arms possession and interfering with traffic.
The highly respected Reporters Without Borders (RWB) organization says it is “very disturbed by information minister Osama Heikal’s 7 September decision, after consulting with the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, to temporarily freeze the granting of satellite TV licences to recent applicants without saying how long the freeze will last.”
RWB also charged that Heikal threatened other TV stations, accusing them of indiscipline and saying he was asking the relevant agency to “take legal measures against satellite TV stations that jeopardize stability and security.” He said the measures were needed to restore order to the “increasingly chaotic media scene” and because of “concerns over incitement to violence.”
“His announcement and comments amount to a declaration of war on the broadcast media and, in particular, independent satellite TV stations that dare to criticize the Supreme Council’s policies. It is very disturbing that the council regards news media as sources of ‘harm to the country’s security and stability,’” RWB added.
The group said, “It is a return to the past, to the era of the ousted dictator Hosni Mubarak. Since taking over after Mubarak’s removal, the Supreme Council has repeatedly taken decisions that negatively affect media freedom in Egypt, endangering something that Egyptians fought hard for during their 18-day uprising.”
The crackdown has affected scores of individual journalists as well as journalistic institutions.
Here are several examples – though the list is far from complete.
Imad Bazzi, a Lebanese blogger who is the founder of the Arab Blogging Forum, was denied entry at Cairo airport last week and deported after being told he had been "blacklisted" as a security concern.
A popular TV personality, Dina Abd-Al Rahman, was fired as a presenter of the Dream TV program, “Sabah Dream,” following an altercation on the air with a former air force officer, Abd Al-Monem Kato.
Many online commentators and activists have expressed their outrage about her dismissal, describing Dream TV owner Ahmed Bahgat, an ally of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces as a businessman opposed to media freedom on his own TV channel. While there is no evidence that the council had a role in her dismissal, the military has taken direct action against journalists on many occasions in recent months.
For example, a fine of 20,000 Egyptian pounds was imposed on Kareem Reda, who writes the blog Sarkha, was upheld on appeal. The blogger was fined as a result of a suit by Petrograde, a natural gas company, that accused him of defaming and insulting the company, damaging its interests and trying to harm the national economy because he launched a page on Facebook calling on people to boycott its services and not pay their gas bills it as long as it continued to export gas to Israel at below-market prices.
Maikel Nabil Sanad, a blogger and conscientious objector, was sentenced to three years in prison on 10 April for posting a report on his blog disputing the apparent neutrality of the armed forces during the January and February demonstrations and accusing them of arresting and torturing protesters.
He was convicted of insulting the armed forces, spreading false information and disturbing public order. He began a hunger strike in Cairo’s Al-Marg prison on 23 August despite suffering from heart problems. He subsequently stopped drinking as well, with the result that he had to be rushed to the prison infirmary. He insists that he will resume the hunger strike regardless of the outcome.
Another blogger, Botheina Kamel, was summoned by a military court for interrogation on 15 May after she criticized the armed forces in a program on Nile TV.
The blogger Hossam Al-Hamalawy and journalists Rim Magued and Nabil Sharaf Al-Din were interrogated on 31 May for nearly three hours about their appearances on the station ON-TV. Speaking on Magued’s program on 26 May, Al-Hamalawy accused military police of violating human rights.
The next day, Al-Din talked about the chances of an alliance between the Muslim Brotherhood and the army as part of a political transition.
Rasha Azab, a reporter for the newspaper Al-Fajr, and Adel Hammuda, its editor, were interrogated by a military prosecutor on 19 June and were told they are to be tried because an article Azab wrote for Al-Fajr’s 12 June issue. Azab is facing a possible jail sentence for publishing “false information liable to disturb public security” while Hammuda is facing a possible fine for alleged negligence in his role as editor.
Hassan Bahgat, 70, a former army officer who used to head ABC’s Cairo bureau, was sentenced to six months in prison by a military court on 17 August on a charge of “chanting anti-army slogans liable to defame the armed forces” in Tahrir Square at 1 a.m. on 6 August. The sentence was suspended but it could be activated at any time.
A smear campaign has meanwhile been launched in the government media against Egyptian NGOs that get funding from the United States. It is targeting only those that criticize the Supreme Council and poses a threat to many national human rights organizations.
Mohamed Abdel Dayem, the CPJ's Middle East and north Africa program coordinator, summed up the current state of play: "For months now, the ruling Supreme Military Council of the Armed Forces has been going to great lengths to hamstring the media and snuff out critical reporting. As the self-proclaimed guardian of the revolution, the military council ought to facilitate the work of long-silenced voices in the media instead of shutting them down and threatening them with repressive state security proceedings."
But this is unlikely to happen any time soon. The generals who sit on the Supreme Council are generals; they tend to know little about the need for press freedom. Indeed, they seem to fear it. Moreover, they know little about governing. They also appear to have great difficulty actually hearing what their constituents are telling them; a major reason is that they don’t regard the heroes of Tahrir Square as constituents.
And we should remember that all of these men were Mubarak’s military comrades. It must pain them greatly to see their fellow soldier being tried in open court for murder and corruption. It would appear that this was at least one of their motivations in closing the Mubarak court proceedings to the press.
To a significant extent, the generals are looking at a self-inflicted wound. They have failed to lay out any long-term vision for Egypt’s future. That sows confusion and contention among those who risked so much to give Egypt another chance to join the 21st Century. Absent such a vision, the Tahrir Square protestors are chaotically clamoring for an unconnected series of populist “fixes.”
But, as Egypt apparently must learn the hard way, populism is not policy.
Saturday, September 17, 2011
THE “ENGINEERING OF CONSENT?”
By William Fisher
Well, Matt Lauer’s got his hands full.
No, not the TV Matt Lauer. The other Matt Lauer. The one who used to do public diplomacy work for the US State Department and now does PR for a Washington company called Qorvis Communications.
Why are his hands full? The good news is that his firm just got a big new account. The bad news is that it’s the Kingdom of Bahrain.
That’s bad news because it’s a little like getting the Pol Pot account; there wouldn’t seem to be a lot a PR firm could do to burnish Mr. Pol Pot’s “image.” Not even for $40,000 a month plus expenses.
King Hamad-Bin-Isa-Al-Khalifa is no Pol Pot. But he has unleashed the full fury of the government apparatus on peaceful demonstrators. His security police and army have killed many of these demonstrators. Hundreds have been wounded. Even larger numbers have been arrested and, according to reputable human rights groups, have been tortured and otherwise abused in prison, where they have little access to lawyers or even family members.
What do PR firms customarily do with high profile clients with deeply tarnished “images?” They’ll construct a narrative presenting the King’s version of what’s happened. They will have the King say, as he did this week, that he will forgive all the miscreants. He will make speeches about the openness of the government to “dialogue.” He may even empty his prisons of political prisoners as a pre-condition to dialogue.
They’ll issue an endless stream of press releases and films designed to reassure the world – and especially the tourist trade – that peace has been restored and all is well in the Kingdom. And they will need to reassure the sponsors of Formula One auto racing that it’s OK for them to drive in Bahrain.
Meanwhile, the improvised, home-grown PR machinery of the demonstrators will continue to push out story after story designed to heighten awareness of the dire human rights situation still prevailing in the tiny Kingdom. Journalists covering this story – and there are very few of them – will continue to receive pictures of corpses butchered by their jailers.
And e-mailed statements from those leaders not yet arrested or out on bail. And daily tallies of deaths and detentions and military trials and the usual array of police state toys.
Mr. Lauer’s task may be made a bit easier by the presence of Bahrain’s two most powerful friends. One is Saudi Arabia – also a client of Lauer’s firm --- which is just 20 minutes over the causeway to Bahrain. Saudi Arabia actually sent troops into Bahrain, where they are currently helping the King and his family to quell the protests. The last thing the Saudis want is a Shia controlled country 20 minutes away from their Eastern oilfields.
So Mr. Lauer and his colleagues are going to have to deal with the religious aspects of their client’s situation. The King and his family, you see, are Sunni Muslims, like the Saudis. The majority of the people of Bahrain are Shia Muslims, just like the Iranians. One of the Shia’s main protests is that they are systematically excluded from any job with any authority.
Mr. Lauer’s other advantage is the silence of the United States. The Crown Prince – the King’s son – has been dispatched to Washington to reassure the State Department and President Obama that his government is eager to engage in dialogue with the protesters but that they won’t play until unacceptable conditions have been met. The US Government has helped by emphasizing the important of dialogue.
Bahrain is of strategic importance to the US. Its Fifth Fleet is housed there. And the US can’t afford to annoy the Saudis too much, because we buy their oil, they’re still fretting about Obama letting Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak resign too soon, and they represent the Sunni balance of power in the Mideast.
When the Crown Prince visited Washington, he told the folks at the State Department that he was worried about Bahrain’s “image” and its negative impact on tourism. So that’s what Mr. Lauer and his team of warriors will try to correct in the eyes of the US Government and the Congress and in major nation capitals in Europe.
So we will see whether “the engineering of consent” – the phrase used by the father of PR to define this form of art – can trump the suffering of an undervalued, abused, and gutsy populace.
How will a public relations program explain – perhaps even attempt to justify – the death of a 14-year-old boy, Ali Jawad, who was participating with thousands of other peaceful Bahrainis in an Eid celebration. A member of the security forces fired a teargas canister at him at point-blank range.
The point is that most honest public relations practitioners will tell you that only limited change can be made in people’s attitudes until there are substantial and well-communicated changes in the policies that caused the problem in the first place.
If Mr. Lauer and his colleagues can do that, they should get a raise to $80,000 a month!
PS: After this post was written, I learned that Joe Trippi, the internet fund-raising guru who landed John Edwards' 2008 presidential campaign among the big boys, has become the latest to join Bahrain's PR team. This is a huge disappointment to those of us who developed a great respect for Trippi during the campaign. Sadly, it reminded me of Andy Hatcher, JFK's African-American Deputy Press Secretary, who ended up flacking for the apartheid regime of South Africa before Mandela.
Well, Matt Lauer’s got his hands full.
No, not the TV Matt Lauer. The other Matt Lauer. The one who used to do public diplomacy work for the US State Department and now does PR for a Washington company called Qorvis Communications.
Why are his hands full? The good news is that his firm just got a big new account. The bad news is that it’s the Kingdom of Bahrain.
That’s bad news because it’s a little like getting the Pol Pot account; there wouldn’t seem to be a lot a PR firm could do to burnish Mr. Pol Pot’s “image.” Not even for $40,000 a month plus expenses.
King Hamad-Bin-Isa-Al-Khalifa is no Pol Pot. But he has unleashed the full fury of the government apparatus on peaceful demonstrators. His security police and army have killed many of these demonstrators. Hundreds have been wounded. Even larger numbers have been arrested and, according to reputable human rights groups, have been tortured and otherwise abused in prison, where they have little access to lawyers or even family members.
What do PR firms customarily do with high profile clients with deeply tarnished “images?” They’ll construct a narrative presenting the King’s version of what’s happened. They will have the King say, as he did this week, that he will forgive all the miscreants. He will make speeches about the openness of the government to “dialogue.” He may even empty his prisons of political prisoners as a pre-condition to dialogue.
They’ll issue an endless stream of press releases and films designed to reassure the world – and especially the tourist trade – that peace has been restored and all is well in the Kingdom. And they will need to reassure the sponsors of Formula One auto racing that it’s OK for them to drive in Bahrain.
Meanwhile, the improvised, home-grown PR machinery of the demonstrators will continue to push out story after story designed to heighten awareness of the dire human rights situation still prevailing in the tiny Kingdom. Journalists covering this story – and there are very few of them – will continue to receive pictures of corpses butchered by their jailers.
And e-mailed statements from those leaders not yet arrested or out on bail. And daily tallies of deaths and detentions and military trials and the usual array of police state toys.
Mr. Lauer’s task may be made a bit easier by the presence of Bahrain’s two most powerful friends. One is Saudi Arabia – also a client of Lauer’s firm --- which is just 20 minutes over the causeway to Bahrain. Saudi Arabia actually sent troops into Bahrain, where they are currently helping the King and his family to quell the protests. The last thing the Saudis want is a Shia controlled country 20 minutes away from their Eastern oilfields.
So Mr. Lauer and his colleagues are going to have to deal with the religious aspects of their client’s situation. The King and his family, you see, are Sunni Muslims, like the Saudis. The majority of the people of Bahrain are Shia Muslims, just like the Iranians. One of the Shia’s main protests is that they are systematically excluded from any job with any authority.
Mr. Lauer’s other advantage is the silence of the United States. The Crown Prince – the King’s son – has been dispatched to Washington to reassure the State Department and President Obama that his government is eager to engage in dialogue with the protesters but that they won’t play until unacceptable conditions have been met. The US Government has helped by emphasizing the important of dialogue.
Bahrain is of strategic importance to the US. Its Fifth Fleet is housed there. And the US can’t afford to annoy the Saudis too much, because we buy their oil, they’re still fretting about Obama letting Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak resign too soon, and they represent the Sunni balance of power in the Mideast.
When the Crown Prince visited Washington, he told the folks at the State Department that he was worried about Bahrain’s “image” and its negative impact on tourism. So that’s what Mr. Lauer and his team of warriors will try to correct in the eyes of the US Government and the Congress and in major nation capitals in Europe.
So we will see whether “the engineering of consent” – the phrase used by the father of PR to define this form of art – can trump the suffering of an undervalued, abused, and gutsy populace.
How will a public relations program explain – perhaps even attempt to justify – the death of a 14-year-old boy, Ali Jawad, who was participating with thousands of other peaceful Bahrainis in an Eid celebration. A member of the security forces fired a teargas canister at him at point-blank range.
The point is that most honest public relations practitioners will tell you that only limited change can be made in people’s attitudes until there are substantial and well-communicated changes in the policies that caused the problem in the first place.
If Mr. Lauer and his colleagues can do that, they should get a raise to $80,000 a month!
PS: After this post was written, I learned that Joe Trippi, the internet fund-raising guru who landed John Edwards' 2008 presidential campaign among the big boys, has become the latest to join Bahrain's PR team. This is a huge disappointment to those of us who developed a great respect for Trippi during the campaign. Sadly, it reminded me of Andy Hatcher, JFK's African-American Deputy Press Secretary, who ended up flacking for the apartheid regime of South Africa before Mandela.
Muslim Advocates Calls for Investigation of FBI Training
By William Fisher
A prominent Muslim organization is calling for an immediate investigation into the FBI's use of “grossly inaccurate and bigoted trainers and training materials for its counterterrorism agents and other law enforcement.”
Muslim Advocates filed the complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice Inspector General.
The organization said that in materials disclosed to Wired magazine, “FBI agents were presented with slides and materials that, for example, stated that zakat, or charity, given by Muslims, is a ‘funding mechanism for combat’," and that the Prophet Muhammad was a "cult leader."
The group said this was “just the latest in a string of reports that the FBI has been using inflammatory and woefully inaccurate materials to train its agents across the country.”
The FBI has thus far either denied that the materials are being used or defended the use of bigots as welcoming a range of opinions. But Muslim Advocates said, “One cannot reasonably imagine the FBI defending the use of David Duke or a white supremacist leader as a trainer”
It added that “an investigation by the government watchdog overseeing the FBI is long overdue. That is why Muslim Advocates today filed a complaint with the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Justice. The Inspector General is tasked with investigating allegations of misconduct by employees of the Justice Department, including the FBI.”
The disclosures regarding the FBI training materials and instructors were unearthed by a journalist, Spencer Ackerman of Wired. He presented his material on a popular television program, The Rachel Maddow Show, on MSNBC, last Thursday. The content was based upon Ackerman’s acquisition of FBI counterterrorism training documents.
Ackerman writes in Wired, “The FBI is teaching its counterterrorism agents that ‘main stream’ [sic] American Muslims are likely to be terrorist sympathizers; that the Prophet Mohammed was a “cult leader”; and that the Islamic practice of giving charity is no more than a “funding mechanism for combat.”
At the Bureau’s training ground in Quantico, Virginia, he adds, “agents are shown a chart contending that the more ‘devout’ a Muslim, the more likely he is to be ‘violent’,” he said.
Maddow said that WorldNetDaily, a right-wing Internet-based journal, is providing some of the trainers who are working with the FBI. The publication has been an outspoken representative of Islamophobia.
Maddow described their FBI mission as essentially “trying to make a buck off the more gullible elements of the conservative base.”
She pointed to some of the group’s previous projects, such as their reports on the need to wage a war on Islam itself rather than on terrorists acting under their own fundamentalist interpretations.
Her guest, Wired‘s Spencer Ackerman, charged that the person behind WorldNetDaily’s reports regarding Islam has been instructing FBI counter-terrorism officers. Ackerman explains:
“What they [the FBI] did tell me is that this was training that agents who had two to three years of experience in counter-terrorism have gone through. And they said to me that this is just the opinions of this one particular author…We’re still trying to find out the extent of this training.”
When asked why someone within or close to the FBI is now offering him this information, Ackerman explained that the training has been “deeply upsetting” to counter-terrorism experts inside the FBI concerned over civil rights of Muslim Americans and the impression this sort of attitude might have on their impression of those meant to protect them and all law-abiding Americans.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) commented: “Seeing the materials FBI agents are being trained with certainly helps explain why we’ve seen so many inappropriate FBI surveillance operations broadly targeting the Muslim-American community, from infiltrating mosques with agents provocateur to racial- and ethnic-mapping programs,” Mike German, a former FBI agent now with the American Civil Liberties Union, tells Danger Room after being shown the documents. ”Biased police training can only result in biased policing.”
In another case, Muslim Advocates has filed a Friend of the Court brief supporting compensation in a computer destruction case. It is supporting Majd Kam-Almaz’s lawsuit, which demands compensation for the destruction of his laptop by the Department of Homeland Security. Mr. Kam-Almaz, a U.S. citizen, works in the area of disaster relief services, and had his business computer seized at Dulles Airport during a trip returning home from work travel.
His computer was destroyed while in the possession of border agents, causing him to lose contracts of substantial value.
Muslim Advocates’ claims that travelers across the country have experienced similar improper searches and questioning at the border, including in some cases the destruction of their cell phones and laptops. Their amicus brief argues that individuals whose electronic devices are damaged or destroyed while in the possession of government agents should be compensated for their loss.
A prominent Muslim organization is calling for an immediate investigation into the FBI's use of “grossly inaccurate and bigoted trainers and training materials for its counterterrorism agents and other law enforcement.”
Muslim Advocates filed the complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice Inspector General.
The organization said that in materials disclosed to Wired magazine, “FBI agents were presented with slides and materials that, for example, stated that zakat, or charity, given by Muslims, is a ‘funding mechanism for combat’," and that the Prophet Muhammad was a "cult leader."
The group said this was “just the latest in a string of reports that the FBI has been using inflammatory and woefully inaccurate materials to train its agents across the country.”
The FBI has thus far either denied that the materials are being used or defended the use of bigots as welcoming a range of opinions. But Muslim Advocates said, “One cannot reasonably imagine the FBI defending the use of David Duke or a white supremacist leader as a trainer”
It added that “an investigation by the government watchdog overseeing the FBI is long overdue. That is why Muslim Advocates today filed a complaint with the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Justice. The Inspector General is tasked with investigating allegations of misconduct by employees of the Justice Department, including the FBI.”
The disclosures regarding the FBI training materials and instructors were unearthed by a journalist, Spencer Ackerman of Wired. He presented his material on a popular television program, The Rachel Maddow Show, on MSNBC, last Thursday. The content was based upon Ackerman’s acquisition of FBI counterterrorism training documents.
Ackerman writes in Wired, “The FBI is teaching its counterterrorism agents that ‘main stream’ [sic] American Muslims are likely to be terrorist sympathizers; that the Prophet Mohammed was a “cult leader”; and that the Islamic practice of giving charity is no more than a “funding mechanism for combat.”
At the Bureau’s training ground in Quantico, Virginia, he adds, “agents are shown a chart contending that the more ‘devout’ a Muslim, the more likely he is to be ‘violent’,” he said.
Maddow said that WorldNetDaily, a right-wing Internet-based journal, is providing some of the trainers who are working with the FBI. The publication has been an outspoken representative of Islamophobia.
Maddow described their FBI mission as essentially “trying to make a buck off the more gullible elements of the conservative base.”
She pointed to some of the group’s previous projects, such as their reports on the need to wage a war on Islam itself rather than on terrorists acting under their own fundamentalist interpretations.
Her guest, Wired‘s Spencer Ackerman, charged that the person behind WorldNetDaily’s reports regarding Islam has been instructing FBI counter-terrorism officers. Ackerman explains:
“What they [the FBI] did tell me is that this was training that agents who had two to three years of experience in counter-terrorism have gone through. And they said to me that this is just the opinions of this one particular author…We’re still trying to find out the extent of this training.”
When asked why someone within or close to the FBI is now offering him this information, Ackerman explained that the training has been “deeply upsetting” to counter-terrorism experts inside the FBI concerned over civil rights of Muslim Americans and the impression this sort of attitude might have on their impression of those meant to protect them and all law-abiding Americans.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) commented: “Seeing the materials FBI agents are being trained with certainly helps explain why we’ve seen so many inappropriate FBI surveillance operations broadly targeting the Muslim-American community, from infiltrating mosques with agents provocateur to racial- and ethnic-mapping programs,” Mike German, a former FBI agent now with the American Civil Liberties Union, tells Danger Room after being shown the documents. ”Biased police training can only result in biased policing.”
In another case, Muslim Advocates has filed a Friend of the Court brief supporting compensation in a computer destruction case. It is supporting Majd Kam-Almaz’s lawsuit, which demands compensation for the destruction of his laptop by the Department of Homeland Security. Mr. Kam-Almaz, a U.S. citizen, works in the area of disaster relief services, and had his business computer seized at Dulles Airport during a trip returning home from work travel.
His computer was destroyed while in the possession of border agents, causing him to lose contracts of substantial value.
Muslim Advocates’ claims that travelers across the country have experienced similar improper searches and questioning at the border, including in some cases the destruction of their cell phones and laptops. Their amicus brief argues that individuals whose electronic devices are damaged or destroyed while in the possession of government agents should be compensated for their loss.
Monday, September 12, 2011
Being in Prison While Muslim
By William Fisher
In March of this year, Reuters Correspondent David Morgan filed a story following a Congressional hearing stating that “American Muslims face a rising tide of religious discrimination in US communities, workplaces and schools nearly a decade after the September 11 attacks….”
Civil rights and Muslim advocacy groups hailed the hearing as a positive step forward for the Obama Administration’s efforts to stamp out Islamophobia. It had been preceded by a hearing sponsored by New York Congressman Peter King, which many felt was distinctly anti-Muslim in tone.
But one Muslim constituency went totally unnoticed at the hearing. It’s probably not a very important constituency for Congress people because it consists of Muslims who can’t vote – they’re serving time in Federal prison.
So most Muslim leaders were pleased when the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) and the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) announced they would be “probing fresh allegations that federal prison employees abused Muslim inmates.”
These allegations are contained in a DOJ quarterly report required by the USA PATRIOT Act. According to the Justice Department’s website, the report “disclosed several new complaints by Muslim inmates who allege they faced discrimination from BOP employees.” The report does not reveal the inmates’ names or specify where they are incarcerated.
What are inmates complaining about? And what is the Justice Department doing about it? Complaints range from a prison chaplain trying to deny Muslims access to the prison’s religious facilities, to prison staff telling others to stop helping Islamic inmates, to an employee spraying a Muslim inmate with chemicals while he was physically and mentally tortured, to providing meals containing pork products contrary to his religious diet, to “being placed in the [special housing unit] for no reason.”
Based on the material displayed on the DOJ website, the OIG’s investigators find most complaints without merit. Most but not all. For example:
The IG’s office is investigating two BOP employees who allegedly said they hated a Muslim inmate because he is Arab and insulted his religion. The inmate also said they told the other inmates to assault him and prevented him from receiving immediate medical treatment after the attack.
Several cases have ended in sanctions against BOP agents, according to the report. In one case, a bureau employee resigned and another received a
written admonishment after sending a racially inflammatory email. Another BOP officer retired after throwing a prisoner’s Quran into the garbage and later lying about his actions.
A Muslim inmate alleged that a correctional officer lied in an incident report in which he wrote that the inmate’s Koran and personal letters were confiscated and given to the sheriff’s deputy escorts for disposition. The inmate alleged that the correctional officer actually threw the items in the trash. A search confirmed that the Koran and letters had been thrown away and not given to the deputies. This correctional officer subsequently retired from the BOP because he reached mandatory retirement age.
But many complaints never reach the BOP or the IG. Here is an example of one that comes from a Muslim inmate. It deals with what appears to be a frequent source of inmate discontent: Placing indiscriminate restrictions on the inmates’ freedom to practice his faith. The inmate said:
"A good number of inmates fast Mondays and Thursdays as well as three additional days every month for religious reasons. This is something highly recommended in Islam. This practice was recognized from day one here [at the CMU]. On fasting days we will take our trays and keep them in our rooms until sunset when we eat. There is no special requirement from the
kitchen people whatsoever.
"As of Jan. 4 this year, Administration decided that no food is allowed to leave the eating area at all regardless of our fasting. We pleaded with them that this was unfair and is depriving us of a religious practice. An appeal to the Chaplain here went unanswered.
"This is a religious practice that we did not invent. It is something we did since day one and was recognized. We are not asking for any special arrangement, no special meals, no special added work. We simply are asking that we are allowed to have our own meals stored until we are allowed to eat at sunset. If they don’t like us to store it in our rooms ( which is what we did for over two years now with no problem), there is an empty refrigerator in the eating area where they can store it and lock it until sunset. We will not remove anything outside the eating area thereby complying with their regulations. (This) is a clear violation of our religious rights."
Of the complaints that reach the IG or the BOP, it appears that many more complaints are rejected. Here are a few:
· A BOP inmate alleged that during a “shakedown,” a correctional
officer took another inmate’s Koran and threw it in the trash. According to the complainant, the correctional officer allegedly stated that the Koran was institutional property and noted that it had been altered with various writings and markings on the pages. BOP interviewed the correctional officer who stated that she found a Koran while conducting a search of an inmate’s cell
and that the Koran had been altered from its original condition with markings on the pages and binding.
The Office of the DOJ Inspector General said that because the book did not contain the name of an inmate or a register number, the correctional officer discarded it as contraband. A BOP investigation determined that an inmate later retrieved the Koran from the trash. When a staff lieutenant asked the correctional officer about the incident, the correctional officer stated that, rather than throw it away, a better solution would have been to give the Koran to the prison chaplain for appropriate disposition. The correctional officer apologized to the inmate for discarding the Koran. The BOP decided that, since the Koran was not the personal property of the inmate and the correctional officer apologized for having exercised poor judgment, no disciplinary action was necessary.
· A Muslim inmate alleged that he was targeted by staff for no reason other than their hatred toward Islam and Muslims. The inmate alleged that he was sent to the Special Housing Unit (SHU) three times in 16 months because of staff discrimination against Muslim inmates. BOP’s investigation revealed that the inmate was placed in the SHU due to allegations that he was attempting to radicalize the Muslim inmate population and incite inmates to assault staff. Based on inmate interviews, information received from staff, and the fact that the compound became more secure when complainant and other inmates were temporarily removed from the general population, BOP concluded there was insufficient evidence to substantiate the allegations and closed its investigation.
· A BOP inmate complained about being designated a terrorist and alleged unlawful continuation of Special Administrative Measures (SAM) restrictions. He alleged that the restrictions resulted in his being locked down 24 hours a day and having no communication with his family and friends. The inmate also alleged that he was denied necessary medication and was the victim of theft of personal property and legal work from his cell.
The inmate did not provide the names of any specific staff regarding his allegations. BOP determined there was no evidence that the inmate was designated as a terrorist. BOP found further that the inmate had previously been under SAMs, but was placed in the general population when the restrictions were no longer necessary. Moreover, according to the BOP, the
inmate was participating in a program that provided him the opportunity to be transferred to an open penitentiary upon demonstrating and maintaining good behavior. BOP investigators interviewed the prison staff and found no evidence that the staff failed to follow policy, discriminated against the
Office of the Inspector General, U.S. Department of Justice inmate, or stole the inmate’s property. BOP concluded that the allegations were not substantiated and the investigation was closed.
(SAMS – Special Administrative Procedures -- are intended to prevent terrorists from threatening national security by communicating plans to the outside.)
At any given time, a substantial number of complaints is being investigated. This is a sampling:
· A Muslim inmate alleged that a BOP employee encouraged staff to issue fabricated incident reports against him and other Muslim inmates and to find the Muslim inmates guilty of the fictitious offenses. The inmate also alleged that Muslim inmates receive more restrictive sanctions than non-Muslim inmates for misconduct.
· A Muslim inmate alleged that he was assaulted because he is Muslim and of Arab descent. The inmate alleged he was unjustly placed in the SHU for 28 days, which caused him to lose his job at the facility. The inmate also alleged that every time he asked staff about filing an administrative remedy he was threatened with being sent to the SHU. The inmate stated that he believes the staff possesses a deep-rooted hatred toward Muslim inmates.
· A Muslim inmate alleged that (i) BOP employees have suggested that all Taliban and Al-Qaida should be killed; (ii) Muslim inmates are not permitted to pray individually at the workplace or to return to their cells for prayers during their work assignments; (iii) Muslim inmates are placed in the SHU more frequently than non-Muslim inmates; (iv) Muslim inmates’ administrative remedy requests are ignored; and (v) BOP staff, Office of the Inspector General, U.S. Department of Justice, have threatened Muslim inmates to discourage them from filing administrative remedy requests. The complainant stated that efforts to address these issues have been unsuccessful.
· A Muslim inmate alleged that a BOP physician sexually harassed her during an examination. The inmate further alleged that she has been racially profiled since September 11, 2001. The inmate also stated that a BOP employee would not permit her to wear loose-fitting clothing and long sleeved shirts as required by her religion, and that she was placed in the SHU for having worn a loose-fitting shirt.
Complaints by inmates are expected by their captors. Even in general prison populations, the life of an inmate is difficult. According to one CMU inmate, in a CMU, with its severe restrictions on family visits and other restrictive regulations, life is palpably more trying. Under those conditions, inmates might tend to complain about more things more often.
They also point out that the Federal Bureau of Prisons is a huge bureaucracy and, like most bureaucracies, its members may be reluctant to “rat out” their colleagues and generally tend to support one another in denying wrongdoing.
While the OIG and the BOP do not reveal where the complainants are being held, some observers believe the Muslim inmates are located principally in one of the two Federal prisons that contain so-called “Communications Management Units (CMUs).
One CMU is located in Terre Haute, Indiana; the other is in Marion, Illinois.
The Units are prisons within prisons. They were opened to hold prisoners who had posed threats to national security via terrorism or other means. Most of their inmates are Muslims.
The rationale for keeping Muslims together is different depending on where you sit. Government officials say segregating people convicted of terror-related crimes prevents them from radicalizing other prisoners in the general population. In a remark that has to be considered gratuitous, one official says it’s better for the inmates since they all speak Arabic (they don’t). But no Federal official has publicly provided any reasonable rationale for CMUs.
Opponents of the CMU approach say the units were established to subject people convicted of terror-related crimes to rules and regulations that are far harsher than those applied to the general prison population. Opponents charge that prison authorities practice religious profiling, retaliation and arbitrary punishment. Terror-related crime is an overbroad phrase that can include someone who plants an IED at the door of a school house or a person who collects clothing to send to children on the wrong side of a war zone.
For example, inmates in a CMU are categorically banned from any physical contact with visiting friends and family, including babies, infants, and minor children. They may not hug, touch or embrace their children or spouse during visits.
David C. Fathi, Director of the ACLU National Prison Project, told Truthout, “These (CMU conditions) are extremely severe deprivations, imposed in a Star Chamber proceeding that lacks any meaningful safeguards. We don’t know that CMU placement decisions are made on discriminatory grounds, but given the utter lack of transparency in the process, it’s impossible to rule that out.”
David Shapiro of the ACLU told Truthout, “CMUs were created secretly in 2006. There were no hearings and the public was not given any opportunity to contribute ideas or raise objections.”
The result, he says, was “the most minimal standards, all written so broadly that almost any convicted person could be placed in a CMU.” Moreover, he adds, “The Bureau of Prisons devised a draconian set of rules governing the inmate’s relationship to the outside world. The visiting rules, for example, are designed to destroy families.”
Chip Pitts, a well-known law professor and human rights activist who is the
former chair of Amnesty International USA, told Truthout the CMUs “represent a dangerous new precedent.”
He said, “These overbroad, harsh, discriminatory, counterproductive, and probably unconstitutional restrictions on mainly Muslim prisoners suffer from defects in basic humanity as well as law. Even assuming the guilt of those incarcerated – which cannot be assumed given rampant over-incarceration, so-called “preemptive prosecution,” guilt-by-association, and the ambiguous and flawed definitions of “terrorism” these days – why deny a child or family member a hug as a means of supposedly ensuring security?”
He added, “Less intrusive means such as more competent observation clearly exist to address whatever legitimate ends the government may have. Instead of the ‘land of the free and home of the brave’, our nation has increasingly been reduced to the ‘land ironically imprisoned, paralyzed, and made ugly by our own fears’.”
Severe restrictions are also placed on inmates’ access to phone calls and letters, as well as work and educational opportunities. Transfers to the CMU are not explained; nor are prisoners told how to earn release into less restrictive confinement, as there is no review process.
Lawyers say that because these transfers are not based on facts or discipline for infractions, a pattern of religious and political discrimination and retaliation for prisoners’ lawful advocacy has emerged.
If that’s true, it should come as a shocker – and a wakeup call -- to members of the Judiciary Committees in both the House and the Senate. These Committees are mandated to maintain oversight over our country’s huge prison population, including the CMUs. They need to start doing so.
In March of this year, Reuters Correspondent David Morgan filed a story following a Congressional hearing stating that “American Muslims face a rising tide of religious discrimination in US communities, workplaces and schools nearly a decade after the September 11 attacks….”
Civil rights and Muslim advocacy groups hailed the hearing as a positive step forward for the Obama Administration’s efforts to stamp out Islamophobia. It had been preceded by a hearing sponsored by New York Congressman Peter King, which many felt was distinctly anti-Muslim in tone.
But one Muslim constituency went totally unnoticed at the hearing. It’s probably not a very important constituency for Congress people because it consists of Muslims who can’t vote – they’re serving time in Federal prison.
So most Muslim leaders were pleased when the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) and the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) announced they would be “probing fresh allegations that federal prison employees abused Muslim inmates.”
These allegations are contained in a DOJ quarterly report required by the USA PATRIOT Act. According to the Justice Department’s website, the report “disclosed several new complaints by Muslim inmates who allege they faced discrimination from BOP employees.” The report does not reveal the inmates’ names or specify where they are incarcerated.
What are inmates complaining about? And what is the Justice Department doing about it? Complaints range from a prison chaplain trying to deny Muslims access to the prison’s religious facilities, to prison staff telling others to stop helping Islamic inmates, to an employee spraying a Muslim inmate with chemicals while he was physically and mentally tortured, to providing meals containing pork products contrary to his religious diet, to “being placed in the [special housing unit] for no reason.”
Based on the material displayed on the DOJ website, the OIG’s investigators find most complaints without merit. Most but not all. For example:
The IG’s office is investigating two BOP employees who allegedly said they hated a Muslim inmate because he is Arab and insulted his religion. The inmate also said they told the other inmates to assault him and prevented him from receiving immediate medical treatment after the attack.
Several cases have ended in sanctions against BOP agents, according to the report. In one case, a bureau employee resigned and another received a
written admonishment after sending a racially inflammatory email. Another BOP officer retired after throwing a prisoner’s Quran into the garbage and later lying about his actions.
A Muslim inmate alleged that a correctional officer lied in an incident report in which he wrote that the inmate’s Koran and personal letters were confiscated and given to the sheriff’s deputy escorts for disposition. The inmate alleged that the correctional officer actually threw the items in the trash. A search confirmed that the Koran and letters had been thrown away and not given to the deputies. This correctional officer subsequently retired from the BOP because he reached mandatory retirement age.
But many complaints never reach the BOP or the IG. Here is an example of one that comes from a Muslim inmate. It deals with what appears to be a frequent source of inmate discontent: Placing indiscriminate restrictions on the inmates’ freedom to practice his faith. The inmate said:
"A good number of inmates fast Mondays and Thursdays as well as three additional days every month for religious reasons. This is something highly recommended in Islam. This practice was recognized from day one here [at the CMU]. On fasting days we will take our trays and keep them in our rooms until sunset when we eat. There is no special requirement from the
kitchen people whatsoever.
"As of Jan. 4 this year, Administration decided that no food is allowed to leave the eating area at all regardless of our fasting. We pleaded with them that this was unfair and is depriving us of a religious practice. An appeal to the Chaplain here went unanswered.
"This is a religious practice that we did not invent. It is something we did since day one and was recognized. We are not asking for any special arrangement, no special meals, no special added work. We simply are asking that we are allowed to have our own meals stored until we are allowed to eat at sunset. If they don’t like us to store it in our rooms ( which is what we did for over two years now with no problem), there is an empty refrigerator in the eating area where they can store it and lock it until sunset. We will not remove anything outside the eating area thereby complying with their regulations. (This) is a clear violation of our religious rights."
Of the complaints that reach the IG or the BOP, it appears that many more complaints are rejected. Here are a few:
· A BOP inmate alleged that during a “shakedown,” a correctional
officer took another inmate’s Koran and threw it in the trash. According to the complainant, the correctional officer allegedly stated that the Koran was institutional property and noted that it had been altered with various writings and markings on the pages. BOP interviewed the correctional officer who stated that she found a Koran while conducting a search of an inmate’s cell
and that the Koran had been altered from its original condition with markings on the pages and binding.
The Office of the DOJ Inspector General said that because the book did not contain the name of an inmate or a register number, the correctional officer discarded it as contraband. A BOP investigation determined that an inmate later retrieved the Koran from the trash. When a staff lieutenant asked the correctional officer about the incident, the correctional officer stated that, rather than throw it away, a better solution would have been to give the Koran to the prison chaplain for appropriate disposition. The correctional officer apologized to the inmate for discarding the Koran. The BOP decided that, since the Koran was not the personal property of the inmate and the correctional officer apologized for having exercised poor judgment, no disciplinary action was necessary.
· A Muslim inmate alleged that he was targeted by staff for no reason other than their hatred toward Islam and Muslims. The inmate alleged that he was sent to the Special Housing Unit (SHU) three times in 16 months because of staff discrimination against Muslim inmates. BOP’s investigation revealed that the inmate was placed in the SHU due to allegations that he was attempting to radicalize the Muslim inmate population and incite inmates to assault staff. Based on inmate interviews, information received from staff, and the fact that the compound became more secure when complainant and other inmates were temporarily removed from the general population, BOP concluded there was insufficient evidence to substantiate the allegations and closed its investigation.
· A BOP inmate complained about being designated a terrorist and alleged unlawful continuation of Special Administrative Measures (SAM) restrictions. He alleged that the restrictions resulted in his being locked down 24 hours a day and having no communication with his family and friends. The inmate also alleged that he was denied necessary medication and was the victim of theft of personal property and legal work from his cell.
The inmate did not provide the names of any specific staff regarding his allegations. BOP determined there was no evidence that the inmate was designated as a terrorist. BOP found further that the inmate had previously been under SAMs, but was placed in the general population when the restrictions were no longer necessary. Moreover, according to the BOP, the
inmate was participating in a program that provided him the opportunity to be transferred to an open penitentiary upon demonstrating and maintaining good behavior. BOP investigators interviewed the prison staff and found no evidence that the staff failed to follow policy, discriminated against the
Office of the Inspector General, U.S. Department of Justice inmate, or stole the inmate’s property. BOP concluded that the allegations were not substantiated and the investigation was closed.
(SAMS – Special Administrative Procedures -- are intended to prevent terrorists from threatening national security by communicating plans to the outside.)
At any given time, a substantial number of complaints is being investigated. This is a sampling:
· A Muslim inmate alleged that a BOP employee encouraged staff to issue fabricated incident reports against him and other Muslim inmates and to find the Muslim inmates guilty of the fictitious offenses. The inmate also alleged that Muslim inmates receive more restrictive sanctions than non-Muslim inmates for misconduct.
· A Muslim inmate alleged that he was assaulted because he is Muslim and of Arab descent. The inmate alleged he was unjustly placed in the SHU for 28 days, which caused him to lose his job at the facility. The inmate also alleged that every time he asked staff about filing an administrative remedy he was threatened with being sent to the SHU. The inmate stated that he believes the staff possesses a deep-rooted hatred toward Muslim inmates.
· A Muslim inmate alleged that (i) BOP employees have suggested that all Taliban and Al-Qaida should be killed; (ii) Muslim inmates are not permitted to pray individually at the workplace or to return to their cells for prayers during their work assignments; (iii) Muslim inmates are placed in the SHU more frequently than non-Muslim inmates; (iv) Muslim inmates’ administrative remedy requests are ignored; and (v) BOP staff, Office of the Inspector General, U.S. Department of Justice, have threatened Muslim inmates to discourage them from filing administrative remedy requests. The complainant stated that efforts to address these issues have been unsuccessful.
· A Muslim inmate alleged that a BOP physician sexually harassed her during an examination. The inmate further alleged that she has been racially profiled since September 11, 2001. The inmate also stated that a BOP employee would not permit her to wear loose-fitting clothing and long sleeved shirts as required by her religion, and that she was placed in the SHU for having worn a loose-fitting shirt.
Complaints by inmates are expected by their captors. Even in general prison populations, the life of an inmate is difficult. According to one CMU inmate, in a CMU, with its severe restrictions on family visits and other restrictive regulations, life is palpably more trying. Under those conditions, inmates might tend to complain about more things more often.
They also point out that the Federal Bureau of Prisons is a huge bureaucracy and, like most bureaucracies, its members may be reluctant to “rat out” their colleagues and generally tend to support one another in denying wrongdoing.
While the OIG and the BOP do not reveal where the complainants are being held, some observers believe the Muslim inmates are located principally in one of the two Federal prisons that contain so-called “Communications Management Units (CMUs).
One CMU is located in Terre Haute, Indiana; the other is in Marion, Illinois.
The Units are prisons within prisons. They were opened to hold prisoners who had posed threats to national security via terrorism or other means. Most of their inmates are Muslims.
The rationale for keeping Muslims together is different depending on where you sit. Government officials say segregating people convicted of terror-related crimes prevents them from radicalizing other prisoners in the general population. In a remark that has to be considered gratuitous, one official says it’s better for the inmates since they all speak Arabic (they don’t). But no Federal official has publicly provided any reasonable rationale for CMUs.
Opponents of the CMU approach say the units were established to subject people convicted of terror-related crimes to rules and regulations that are far harsher than those applied to the general prison population. Opponents charge that prison authorities practice religious profiling, retaliation and arbitrary punishment. Terror-related crime is an overbroad phrase that can include someone who plants an IED at the door of a school house or a person who collects clothing to send to children on the wrong side of a war zone.
For example, inmates in a CMU are categorically banned from any physical contact with visiting friends and family, including babies, infants, and minor children. They may not hug, touch or embrace their children or spouse during visits.
David C. Fathi, Director of the ACLU National Prison Project, told Truthout, “These (CMU conditions) are extremely severe deprivations, imposed in a Star Chamber proceeding that lacks any meaningful safeguards. We don’t know that CMU placement decisions are made on discriminatory grounds, but given the utter lack of transparency in the process, it’s impossible to rule that out.”
David Shapiro of the ACLU told Truthout, “CMUs were created secretly in 2006. There were no hearings and the public was not given any opportunity to contribute ideas or raise objections.”
The result, he says, was “the most minimal standards, all written so broadly that almost any convicted person could be placed in a CMU.” Moreover, he adds, “The Bureau of Prisons devised a draconian set of rules governing the inmate’s relationship to the outside world. The visiting rules, for example, are designed to destroy families.”
Chip Pitts, a well-known law professor and human rights activist who is the
former chair of Amnesty International USA, told Truthout the CMUs “represent a dangerous new precedent.”
He said, “These overbroad, harsh, discriminatory, counterproductive, and probably unconstitutional restrictions on mainly Muslim prisoners suffer from defects in basic humanity as well as law. Even assuming the guilt of those incarcerated – which cannot be assumed given rampant over-incarceration, so-called “preemptive prosecution,” guilt-by-association, and the ambiguous and flawed definitions of “terrorism” these days – why deny a child or family member a hug as a means of supposedly ensuring security?”
He added, “Less intrusive means such as more competent observation clearly exist to address whatever legitimate ends the government may have. Instead of the ‘land of the free and home of the brave’, our nation has increasingly been reduced to the ‘land ironically imprisoned, paralyzed, and made ugly by our own fears’.”
Severe restrictions are also placed on inmates’ access to phone calls and letters, as well as work and educational opportunities. Transfers to the CMU are not explained; nor are prisoners told how to earn release into less restrictive confinement, as there is no review process.
Lawyers say that because these transfers are not based on facts or discipline for infractions, a pattern of religious and political discrimination and retaliation for prisoners’ lawful advocacy has emerged.
If that’s true, it should come as a shocker – and a wakeup call -- to members of the Judiciary Committees in both the House and the Senate. These Committees are mandated to maintain oversight over our country’s huge prison population, including the CMUs. They need to start doing so.
When Secrets Aren’t
By William Fisher
It’s been a bad week for keepers of government secrets. A very bad week.
First came a 2006 Wikileaks cable containing a letter from a UN Rapporteur to the U.S. Mission in Geneva revealing that in a raid by multinational troops on an Iraqi village called Ishaqi, 10 people were handcuffed and shot in the head - a farmer, his wife, family members and children ranging in age from five months to five years old. The incident was followed the by-now familiar cover up, which contended that weapons were being fired from the family house, so multinational forces called in an airstrike. The aircraft dropped a 2000 lb. bomb on the house to obliterate signs of the executions.
Then came the revelation from CNN that UK and US intelligence agencies had built very cozy links with Muammar Gaddafi since the King of Kings gave up his nuclear ambitions. According to documents found in secret files in Libyan government offices, and turned over to CNN by Human Rights Watch, the intelligence agencies allegedly handed over detailed information to assist his regime. The documents claim that the British MI6 supplied its counterparts in Libya with details on exiled opponents living in the UK, and chart how the CIA abducted several suspected militants before handing them over to Tripoli.
They also contain communications between British and Libyan security officials ahead of Tony Blair's visit in 2004, and show that British officials helped write a draft speech for Gaddafi when he was being encouraged to give up his weapons program.
Then, Yahoo News’s Laura Rozen revealed that details of the CIA's “extraordinary rendition” program – kidnapping terrorist suspects and jetting them to CIA black sites for interrogation--have been further exposed in a mundane court case upstate New York. The case involves a billing dispute between two charter flight companies that provided airplanes to the CIA.
The CIA has been fighting to keep cases of this type and all of its details out of courts for years, contesting that if any case were allowed to go forward it would inevitably lead to the disclosure of highly secret information. So the government has consistently invoked the “state secrets” privilege to persuade judges to throw the cases out. The bottom line is that not a single victim of “extraordinary rendition” has had his day in court. That includes the publisher of this journal.
The flight logs for a Gulfstream IV plane leased by a one-man Long Island firm are among the 1,500 pages of documentation in court records filed in conjunction with a 2009 breach-of-contract suit filed in Columbia County, New York. The records show, among other things, a curious itinerary for the plane over a four-day period in August 2003 -- northern Virginia's Dulles airport, Bangkok, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, the United Arab Emirates, Tripoli, Ireland.
And the Washington Post's Peter Finn and Julie Tate report that, "The
Gulfstream IV's itinerary, as well as the $339,228.05 price tag for the journey, are among the details about shadowy CIA flights that have emerged….” from the case.
Despite the rhetoric of the leaders of both the US and UK pledging transparency, it is clear that these secrets might have remained secrets forever, save for some lucky coincidences and some very dedicated truth-tellers.
The Libyan rebels rummaging through old files in one of Gaddafi’s abandoned offices weren’t looking for CIA and MI5 files. Their discovery just happened, and it’s doubtful that they would have understood what they found without a CIA or similar presence. The UN rapporteur and the journalists who made the other violations public were simply doing their jobs.
We should be grateful to all of them.
It’s been a bad week for keepers of government secrets. A very bad week.
First came a 2006 Wikileaks cable containing a letter from a UN Rapporteur to the U.S. Mission in Geneva revealing that in a raid by multinational troops on an Iraqi village called Ishaqi, 10 people were handcuffed and shot in the head - a farmer, his wife, family members and children ranging in age from five months to five years old. The incident was followed the by-now familiar cover up, which contended that weapons were being fired from the family house, so multinational forces called in an airstrike. The aircraft dropped a 2000 lb. bomb on the house to obliterate signs of the executions.
Then came the revelation from CNN that UK and US intelligence agencies had built very cozy links with Muammar Gaddafi since the King of Kings gave up his nuclear ambitions. According to documents found in secret files in Libyan government offices, and turned over to CNN by Human Rights Watch, the intelligence agencies allegedly handed over detailed information to assist his regime. The documents claim that the British MI6 supplied its counterparts in Libya with details on exiled opponents living in the UK, and chart how the CIA abducted several suspected militants before handing them over to Tripoli.
They also contain communications between British and Libyan security officials ahead of Tony Blair's visit in 2004, and show that British officials helped write a draft speech for Gaddafi when he was being encouraged to give up his weapons program.
Then, Yahoo News’s Laura Rozen revealed that details of the CIA's “extraordinary rendition” program – kidnapping terrorist suspects and jetting them to CIA black sites for interrogation--have been further exposed in a mundane court case upstate New York. The case involves a billing dispute between two charter flight companies that provided airplanes to the CIA.
The CIA has been fighting to keep cases of this type and all of its details out of courts for years, contesting that if any case were allowed to go forward it would inevitably lead to the disclosure of highly secret information. So the government has consistently invoked the “state secrets” privilege to persuade judges to throw the cases out. The bottom line is that not a single victim of “extraordinary rendition” has had his day in court. That includes the publisher of this journal.
The flight logs for a Gulfstream IV plane leased by a one-man Long Island firm are among the 1,500 pages of documentation in court records filed in conjunction with a 2009 breach-of-contract suit filed in Columbia County, New York. The records show, among other things, a curious itinerary for the plane over a four-day period in August 2003 -- northern Virginia's Dulles airport, Bangkok, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, the United Arab Emirates, Tripoli, Ireland.
And the Washington Post's Peter Finn and Julie Tate report that, "The
Gulfstream IV's itinerary, as well as the $339,228.05 price tag for the journey, are among the details about shadowy CIA flights that have emerged….” from the case.
Despite the rhetoric of the leaders of both the US and UK pledging transparency, it is clear that these secrets might have remained secrets forever, save for some lucky coincidences and some very dedicated truth-tellers.
The Libyan rebels rummaging through old files in one of Gaddafi’s abandoned offices weren’t looking for CIA and MI5 files. Their discovery just happened, and it’s doubtful that they would have understood what they found without a CIA or similar presence. The UN rapporteur and the journalists who made the other violations public were simply doing their jobs.
We should be grateful to all of them.
Outsourcing War
By William Fisher
More than a quarter of a million security contractors have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan since 2002, and between them they have managed to "lose" at least $31 billion of the $190 billion spent on their contracts and grants, or approximately 30 per cent of taxpayer funds they received, according to a government watchdog commission.
The Commission on Wartime Contracting estimates that the U.S. contractor workforce has at times exceeded 260,000, outnumbering deployed
military."
It charged that the $31 billion loss was "due to lack of oversight" over the private companies providing national security and support services.
The eight-member, bipartisan Commission submitted its last report to Congress this week.
The Congressionally chartered panel has held 25 hearings, participated in more than 1,000 meetings and has previously published two interim reports and five special reports to Congress. Many of the group's findings have indicated a lack of strict oversight in keeping track of the more than 200,000 contractor employees working in Iraq & Afghanistan.
The Commission members include: Michael Thibault and Christopher Shays, co-chairs; Clark Kent Ervin, Grant Green, Robert Henke, Katherine Schinasi, Charles Tiefer, and Dov Zakheim.
Commission Co-Chair Michael Thibault, former deputy director of the Defense Contract Audit Agency, said, "The government has known for 20 years that contractors would be a key part of any major response to large or sustained hostilities or major disasters. Yet the government was not prepared to go into Afghanistan in 2001 or Iraq in 2003 using large numbers of contractors, and is still unable to provide effective management and oversight of contract spending that will have exceeded $206 billion by the end of September. That has to change."
The Commission recommended reform objectives including improving federal planning for use of contracts, strengthening contract management and oversight, expanding competition, improving interagency coordination, and modifying or canceling U.S.-funded projects that host nations cannot sustain.
Co-Chair Christopher Shays, a former U.S. Representative for Connecticut, said, "The Commission finds the government is over-relying on contractors.”
He added, “Some contractors have been performing tasks that only federal employees should perform, while others are doing work that is permissible but still too risky or inappropriate for contractors. And overall, there is simply too much contracting for the federal contract-management and oversight workforce to handle. From every angle, that's over-reliance."
The co-chairs said the biggest problem in wartime contracting is waste. Thibault said, "We have founds billions of dollars of waste stemming from a variety of shortcomings-poor decision making, vague contract requirements, lack of adequately trained federal oversight people in the field, duplicative or unnecessary work, failure to revise or recompete contracts, unsustainable projects, inadequate business processes among contractors, and delayed audits."
The Commission estimates that waste and fraud could possibly reach as much as $60 billion in Iraq and Afghanistan. The additional waste may develop if host countries cannot or will not sustain U.S.-funded projects and programs after the United States hands them over or reduces its support.
Shays said the Commission report lays blame at the doorsteps of both government and the contracting industry. "Many of the convictions and guilty pleas for bribery, kickbacks, theft, and other offenses involve federal civilians and members of the military," he said.
"Likewise, poor performance shows up both in government and contractor operations. We've had soldiers injured or electrocuted because of faulty wiring in base showers, and we've had federal officials tolerating a far greater supply of contract labor than was needed for military-vehicle maintenance. There is plenty of blame to go around." Shays called attention to a key paragraph in the executive summary of the Commission's final report. It said:
"Much of the contingency-contract waste and fraud could have been avoided. Unless changes are made, continued waste and fraud will undercut the effectiveness of money spent in future operations, whether they involve hostile threats overseas or national emergencies here at home requiring military participation and interagency response.
"Responsibility for this state of affairs lies with Congress, the White House, federal departments, the military services, agency leadership, contractors, and individuals who abuse the system."
Before President Eisenhower warned us about the military-industrial complex, Senator Harry Truman led a special investigative committee to go after war profiteers. Two years later, Truman's team discovered that aerospace firm Curtiss-Wright was delivering defective motors to the Air Force. While military officials denied the accusations, Truman took testimony from company employees and military officials confirming that the company was selling leaky motors to the government and covering it up with forged inspection reports.
While Truman's subject matter was different, the need now is even greater. The country has a compelling and urgent need for a permanent, dedicated, high-level, Congressionally-chartered watchdog unit capable of ferreting out waste, fraud and abuse, not in the past tense, as the current Commission was obliged to do, but in real time.
The military-contractor complex is likely to be with us for generations. And so is the need to continually look over its shoulder to ensure that taxpayer funds are going where they're supposed to go.
We have seen examples of the effective use of such units. Witness Stuart Bowen, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. Mr. Bowen is tasked with auditing and investigating the use of taxpayer funds appropriated for the Iraq reconstruction effort. Since 2004, he has produced over 350 audits and inspections, resulting in financial benefits in excess of $1.1 billion; his investigations have yielded over 50 convictions, with recoveries in excess of $150 million via forfeiture orders, fines, and seizures.
Stuart Ackerman of Wired reports that Bowen is being stonewalled by Hilary Clinton regarding State’s contractor plans after US troops largely depart. There are also a few stealthy efforts by some in Congress to scuttle his whole operation. Yet it remains in place doing its job and doing it well.
Come to think of it, Stuart Bowen would be an ideal candidate to use his Iraq experience to head a new unit providing oversight of security contractors in both Iraq and Afghanistan. But a watchdog like Bowen can only recommend. He needs the cooperation of Congress. And it's up to Congress to act - to move aggressively against those who can be found guilty of waste, fraud and abuse.
More than a quarter of a million security contractors have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan since 2002, and between them they have managed to "lose" at least $31 billion of the $190 billion spent on their contracts and grants, or approximately 30 per cent of taxpayer funds they received, according to a government watchdog commission.
The Commission on Wartime Contracting estimates that the U.S. contractor workforce has at times exceeded 260,000, outnumbering deployed
military."
It charged that the $31 billion loss was "due to lack of oversight" over the private companies providing national security and support services.
The eight-member, bipartisan Commission submitted its last report to Congress this week.
The Congressionally chartered panel has held 25 hearings, participated in more than 1,000 meetings and has previously published two interim reports and five special reports to Congress. Many of the group's findings have indicated a lack of strict oversight in keeping track of the more than 200,000 contractor employees working in Iraq & Afghanistan.
The Commission members include: Michael Thibault and Christopher Shays, co-chairs; Clark Kent Ervin, Grant Green, Robert Henke, Katherine Schinasi, Charles Tiefer, and Dov Zakheim.
Commission Co-Chair Michael Thibault, former deputy director of the Defense Contract Audit Agency, said, "The government has known for 20 years that contractors would be a key part of any major response to large or sustained hostilities or major disasters. Yet the government was not prepared to go into Afghanistan in 2001 or Iraq in 2003 using large numbers of contractors, and is still unable to provide effective management and oversight of contract spending that will have exceeded $206 billion by the end of September. That has to change."
The Commission recommended reform objectives including improving federal planning for use of contracts, strengthening contract management and oversight, expanding competition, improving interagency coordination, and modifying or canceling U.S.-funded projects that host nations cannot sustain.
Co-Chair Christopher Shays, a former U.S. Representative for Connecticut, said, "The Commission finds the government is over-relying on contractors.”
He added, “Some contractors have been performing tasks that only federal employees should perform, while others are doing work that is permissible but still too risky or inappropriate for contractors. And overall, there is simply too much contracting for the federal contract-management and oversight workforce to handle. From every angle, that's over-reliance."
The co-chairs said the biggest problem in wartime contracting is waste. Thibault said, "We have founds billions of dollars of waste stemming from a variety of shortcomings-poor decision making, vague contract requirements, lack of adequately trained federal oversight people in the field, duplicative or unnecessary work, failure to revise or recompete contracts, unsustainable projects, inadequate business processes among contractors, and delayed audits."
The Commission estimates that waste and fraud could possibly reach as much as $60 billion in Iraq and Afghanistan. The additional waste may develop if host countries cannot or will not sustain U.S.-funded projects and programs after the United States hands them over or reduces its support.
Shays said the Commission report lays blame at the doorsteps of both government and the contracting industry. "Many of the convictions and guilty pleas for bribery, kickbacks, theft, and other offenses involve federal civilians and members of the military," he said.
"Likewise, poor performance shows up both in government and contractor operations. We've had soldiers injured or electrocuted because of faulty wiring in base showers, and we've had federal officials tolerating a far greater supply of contract labor than was needed for military-vehicle maintenance. There is plenty of blame to go around." Shays called attention to a key paragraph in the executive summary of the Commission's final report. It said:
"Much of the contingency-contract waste and fraud could have been avoided. Unless changes are made, continued waste and fraud will undercut the effectiveness of money spent in future operations, whether they involve hostile threats overseas or national emergencies here at home requiring military participation and interagency response.
"Responsibility for this state of affairs lies with Congress, the White House, federal departments, the military services, agency leadership, contractors, and individuals who abuse the system."
Before President Eisenhower warned us about the military-industrial complex, Senator Harry Truman led a special investigative committee to go after war profiteers. Two years later, Truman's team discovered that aerospace firm Curtiss-Wright was delivering defective motors to the Air Force. While military officials denied the accusations, Truman took testimony from company employees and military officials confirming that the company was selling leaky motors to the government and covering it up with forged inspection reports.
While Truman's subject matter was different, the need now is even greater. The country has a compelling and urgent need for a permanent, dedicated, high-level, Congressionally-chartered watchdog unit capable of ferreting out waste, fraud and abuse, not in the past tense, as the current Commission was obliged to do, but in real time.
The military-contractor complex is likely to be with us for generations. And so is the need to continually look over its shoulder to ensure that taxpayer funds are going where they're supposed to go.
We have seen examples of the effective use of such units. Witness Stuart Bowen, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. Mr. Bowen is tasked with auditing and investigating the use of taxpayer funds appropriated for the Iraq reconstruction effort. Since 2004, he has produced over 350 audits and inspections, resulting in financial benefits in excess of $1.1 billion; his investigations have yielded over 50 convictions, with recoveries in excess of $150 million via forfeiture orders, fines, and seizures.
Stuart Ackerman of Wired reports that Bowen is being stonewalled by Hilary Clinton regarding State’s contractor plans after US troops largely depart. There are also a few stealthy efforts by some in Congress to scuttle his whole operation. Yet it remains in place doing its job and doing it well.
Come to think of it, Stuart Bowen would be an ideal candidate to use his Iraq experience to head a new unit providing oversight of security contractors in both Iraq and Afghanistan. But a watchdog like Bowen can only recommend. He needs the cooperation of Congress. And it's up to Congress to act - to move aggressively against those who can be found guilty of waste, fraud and abuse.
A New Gig for Trippi
By William Fisher
Joe Trippi, the Internet guru who was largely responsible for catapulting the 2008 John Edwards presidential campaign into the big leagues, has a new gig.
He’s just been hired as one of a growing cadre of PR flaks for the Kingdom of Bahrain. Yep, that’s the same Bahrain that human rights groups have been calling out as one of the most cruel and repressive of the Middle East’s Arab regimes.
From Trippi’s website, we learn that “In 2008, Trippi signed on with Senator John Edwards’ presidential bid as a senior advisor, focusing on messaging, Internet strategy and online engagement. He was also responsible for producing the campaign’s television spots, which were widely applauded as “innovative” and “highly creative” and among the best spots of the 2007-2008 election cycle.”
Trippi’s company, Trippi and Associates, will “provide strategic counsel, public affairs and other media communications services for the purpose of supporting the needs of the government of the Kingdom of Bahrain,” according to papers Trippi filed to register as an agent of a foreign power.
Trippi will be joined by another Washington, DC PR firm, Sanitas, which lists among its specialties Crisis Management, Global Media Relations, and
Reputation and Image Management.
Earlier, Bahrain appointed a PR firm called Qorvis Communications, which also represents Bahrain’s pal, Saudi Arabia. The firm’s fee is $40,000 a month plus expenses.
I guess it’s to be expected that a client with such a badly tarnished image would mobilize as many heavy hitters as possible to persuade the international community that the gross violations of human rights perpetrated by the royal family didn’t really happen and that the whole thing has been a “breakdown in communications.”
Turns out that Bahrain is more worried about losing big chunks of its tourist trade than it is about its human rights record. Formula One auto racing, one of the centerpieces of Bahrain’s tourist business, recently put a scheduled event on the back burner. The sponsors of that event will need to be persuaded that it’s safe to drive in Bahrain.
That’s going to be a tall order. Because it would be a major stretch to describe Bahrain as safe. The fact is that King Hamad-Bin-Isa-Al-Khalifa has unleashed the full fury of the government security apparatus on peaceful demonstrators. His security police and army have killed many of these demonstrators. Hundreds have been wounded. Doctors and nurses who tried to treat the wounded in a main hospital were arrested, imprisoned, and scheduled for military trials.
The heads of two of the country’s leading unions, nurses and teachers, were arrested and jailed. They went on a 9-day hunger strike, and were joined by dozens of other demonstrators who were imprisoned for peaceful protests. According to reputable human rights groups, prisoners have been tortured and otherwise abused in prison, where they have little access to lawyers or even family members.
Saudi Arabia, Bahrain’s neighbor, sent several thousand troops across the short causeway that separates the two nations. The Gulf Cooperation Council also dispatched troops from the United Arab Emirates. These forces are working with Bahraini police and soldiers to quell any further uprisings – yet the uprisings persist.
The King and his family are Sunni Arabs. Most of the rest of Bahrain’s population is Shia. The Shia complain that they are discriminated against in every facet of Bahraini life – frozen out of the better jobs and housing in better neighborhoods. The Royal family denies the charge.
Through this ordeal, most of the so-called international community – including the United States – has been dead silent. Its posture has been 180 degrees from its actions in Libya.
There are a few reasons. First, Bahrain is of strategic important to the US, which houses its Fifth Fleet there. Second, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia are joined at the hip, and the US moves very cautiously when its actions might offend the Saudis. Saudi Arabia is important to the US because its Sunni population presents a counter-balance to Iran’s Shia majority. Bahrain has complained that Iran is secretly providing resources to the protesters.
Bahrain’s Crown Prince met recently with a number of State Department officials and with President Obama in the Oval Office. He expressed worry that Bahrain’s image was being damaged and said he feared the impact on the country’s tourism business.
The King has appointed an independent committee to look into the violence, but its report is not yet complete.
No doubt, Bahrain’s new PR team has its work cut out for it. What do PR firms customarily do with high profile clients with deeply tarnished “images?” They construct a narrative presenting the King’s version of what’s happened. They will have the King say, as he did this week, that he will forgive all the miscreants. He will make speeches about the openness of the government to “dialogue.” He may even empty his prisons of political prisoners as a pre-condition to dialogue.
They’ll issue an endless stream of press releases designed to reassure the world – and especially the tourist trade – that peace has been restored and all is well in the Kingdom. They might produce a film about Bahrain as An attractive tourist destination. They might sponsor intellectual symposia and high profile awards; I’m sure the world would welcome The First Annual Bahrain Human Rights Award. It will of course be judged by a distinguished panel of journalists, intellectuals, statesmen and human rights defenders. And of course there will be an award dinner with a keynote speaker of impeccable reputation, who has been convinced that Bahrain is aggressively laying the groundwork for an inclusive democratic society.
All this may also succeed in reassuring the sponsors of Formula One auto racing that it’s OK for them to drive in Bahrain.
Meanwhile, the improvised, home-grown PR machinery of the demonstrators will continue to push out story after story designed to heighten awareness of the dire human rights situation still prevailing in the tiny Kingdom. Journalists covering this story – and there are very few of them – will continue to receive pictures of corpses butchered by their jailers.
And e-mailed statements from those leaders not yet arrested or out on bail. And daily tallies of deaths and detentions and military trials and the usual array of police state toys.
The ensuing war of the press releases may help determine whether “the engineering of consent” – the phrase used by the father of PR to define this form of art – will trump the suffering of an undervalued, abused, and gutsy populace.
How will a public relations program explain – perhaps even attempt to justify – the death of a 14-year-old boy, Ali Jawad, who was participating with thousands of other peaceful Bahrainis in an Eid celebration. A member of the security forces fired a teargas canister at him at point-blank range.
The point is that most honest public relations practitioners will tell you that only very limited change can be made in people’s attitudes until there are substantial and well-communicated changes in the policies that caused the problems in the first place.
Only the most powerful public relations practitioners have the clout to effect policy changes; their customary role is to “sell” existing policies to the stakeholders. Often, when public relations people inject themselves into the policy arena with suggestions for improvements, their clients ignore them.
In any event, those policy changes haven’t visited Bahrain as yet. If they do, it will be a victory, not for the public relations practitioners, but for Bahrain.
Joe Trippi, the Internet guru who was largely responsible for catapulting the 2008 John Edwards presidential campaign into the big leagues, has a new gig.
He’s just been hired as one of a growing cadre of PR flaks for the Kingdom of Bahrain. Yep, that’s the same Bahrain that human rights groups have been calling out as one of the most cruel and repressive of the Middle East’s Arab regimes.
From Trippi’s website, we learn that “In 2008, Trippi signed on with Senator John Edwards’ presidential bid as a senior advisor, focusing on messaging, Internet strategy and online engagement. He was also responsible for producing the campaign’s television spots, which were widely applauded as “innovative” and “highly creative” and among the best spots of the 2007-2008 election cycle.”
Trippi’s company, Trippi and Associates, will “provide strategic counsel, public affairs and other media communications services for the purpose of supporting the needs of the government of the Kingdom of Bahrain,” according to papers Trippi filed to register as an agent of a foreign power.
Trippi will be joined by another Washington, DC PR firm, Sanitas, which lists among its specialties Crisis Management, Global Media Relations, and
Reputation and Image Management.
Earlier, Bahrain appointed a PR firm called Qorvis Communications, which also represents Bahrain’s pal, Saudi Arabia. The firm’s fee is $40,000 a month plus expenses.
I guess it’s to be expected that a client with such a badly tarnished image would mobilize as many heavy hitters as possible to persuade the international community that the gross violations of human rights perpetrated by the royal family didn’t really happen and that the whole thing has been a “breakdown in communications.”
Turns out that Bahrain is more worried about losing big chunks of its tourist trade than it is about its human rights record. Formula One auto racing, one of the centerpieces of Bahrain’s tourist business, recently put a scheduled event on the back burner. The sponsors of that event will need to be persuaded that it’s safe to drive in Bahrain.
That’s going to be a tall order. Because it would be a major stretch to describe Bahrain as safe. The fact is that King Hamad-Bin-Isa-Al-Khalifa has unleashed the full fury of the government security apparatus on peaceful demonstrators. His security police and army have killed many of these demonstrators. Hundreds have been wounded. Doctors and nurses who tried to treat the wounded in a main hospital were arrested, imprisoned, and scheduled for military trials.
The heads of two of the country’s leading unions, nurses and teachers, were arrested and jailed. They went on a 9-day hunger strike, and were joined by dozens of other demonstrators who were imprisoned for peaceful protests. According to reputable human rights groups, prisoners have been tortured and otherwise abused in prison, where they have little access to lawyers or even family members.
Saudi Arabia, Bahrain’s neighbor, sent several thousand troops across the short causeway that separates the two nations. The Gulf Cooperation Council also dispatched troops from the United Arab Emirates. These forces are working with Bahraini police and soldiers to quell any further uprisings – yet the uprisings persist.
The King and his family are Sunni Arabs. Most of the rest of Bahrain’s population is Shia. The Shia complain that they are discriminated against in every facet of Bahraini life – frozen out of the better jobs and housing in better neighborhoods. The Royal family denies the charge.
Through this ordeal, most of the so-called international community – including the United States – has been dead silent. Its posture has been 180 degrees from its actions in Libya.
There are a few reasons. First, Bahrain is of strategic important to the US, which houses its Fifth Fleet there. Second, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia are joined at the hip, and the US moves very cautiously when its actions might offend the Saudis. Saudi Arabia is important to the US because its Sunni population presents a counter-balance to Iran’s Shia majority. Bahrain has complained that Iran is secretly providing resources to the protesters.
Bahrain’s Crown Prince met recently with a number of State Department officials and with President Obama in the Oval Office. He expressed worry that Bahrain’s image was being damaged and said he feared the impact on the country’s tourism business.
The King has appointed an independent committee to look into the violence, but its report is not yet complete.
No doubt, Bahrain’s new PR team has its work cut out for it. What do PR firms customarily do with high profile clients with deeply tarnished “images?” They construct a narrative presenting the King’s version of what’s happened. They will have the King say, as he did this week, that he will forgive all the miscreants. He will make speeches about the openness of the government to “dialogue.” He may even empty his prisons of political prisoners as a pre-condition to dialogue.
They’ll issue an endless stream of press releases designed to reassure the world – and especially the tourist trade – that peace has been restored and all is well in the Kingdom. They might produce a film about Bahrain as An attractive tourist destination. They might sponsor intellectual symposia and high profile awards; I’m sure the world would welcome The First Annual Bahrain Human Rights Award. It will of course be judged by a distinguished panel of journalists, intellectuals, statesmen and human rights defenders. And of course there will be an award dinner with a keynote speaker of impeccable reputation, who has been convinced that Bahrain is aggressively laying the groundwork for an inclusive democratic society.
All this may also succeed in reassuring the sponsors of Formula One auto racing that it’s OK for them to drive in Bahrain.
Meanwhile, the improvised, home-grown PR machinery of the demonstrators will continue to push out story after story designed to heighten awareness of the dire human rights situation still prevailing in the tiny Kingdom. Journalists covering this story – and there are very few of them – will continue to receive pictures of corpses butchered by their jailers.
And e-mailed statements from those leaders not yet arrested or out on bail. And daily tallies of deaths and detentions and military trials and the usual array of police state toys.
The ensuing war of the press releases may help determine whether “the engineering of consent” – the phrase used by the father of PR to define this form of art – will trump the suffering of an undervalued, abused, and gutsy populace.
How will a public relations program explain – perhaps even attempt to justify – the death of a 14-year-old boy, Ali Jawad, who was participating with thousands of other peaceful Bahrainis in an Eid celebration. A member of the security forces fired a teargas canister at him at point-blank range.
The point is that most honest public relations practitioners will tell you that only very limited change can be made in people’s attitudes until there are substantial and well-communicated changes in the policies that caused the problems in the first place.
Only the most powerful public relations practitioners have the clout to effect policy changes; their customary role is to “sell” existing policies to the stakeholders. Often, when public relations people inject themselves into the policy arena with suggestions for improvements, their clients ignore them.
In any event, those policy changes haven’t visited Bahrain as yet. If they do, it will be a victory, not for the public relations practitioners, but for Bahrain.
Monday, September 05, 2011
AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM
By William Fisher
This is apparently the season when the American commentariat trots out its love of America. They express this deep emotion in many ways.
Rick Perry tells us it’s exceptional to link the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 60s to the struggle of the Republic Party to absolve the wealthiest Americans from paying a fair share of their debt to their country. He also thinks it’s exceptional to secede from the USA. Sarah Palen finds us exceptional because she can have her guns, Michelle Bachmann seems to define American exceptionalism as our ability to achieve just about anything we set our sights on, no matter how unlikely, if our oversized, over-regulating government would only get out of the way.
For Mr. Romney, American execptionalism seems to turn on the ability of entrepreneurs to innovate and make a ton of money, even if we’re selling
off bits and pieces of once-healthy companies. For TV Host Chris Matthews, (I’m paraphrasing) it’s his riff about Obama being born of mixed race and yet making it to the presidency. Chris then goes on to say this couldn’t happen in any other country in the world. “You can’t go to China or Japan and become Chinese or Japanese. Obama came to the US and became an American and is now in the White House (Chris leaves out the minor truth that Obama didn’t have to become American -- he already was, having been born in Hawaii).
Virtually since the beginning of our Republic we have been spinning a variety of narratives to reassure ourselves that we are the greatest nation ever invented and that no other comes even close. That, presumably is one of the reasons we seem to have this irresistible urge to teach the rest of the world how to be exceptional too.
But one of the wisest men I know is injecting a dose of reality into the patriotic mishmash being cooked up by those seeking to get themselves elected to something.
That man is Doug Speth or more formally, James Gustave Speth. A Rhodes Scholar, he graduated from Yale Law School, after which he became a co-founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Then on the White House, as a Member and then for two years as Chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality in the Executive Office of the President. Later, he was Professor of Law at Georgetown, teaching environmental and constitutional law.
In 1982 he founded the World Resources Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based environmental think tank; served as its president until January 1993. He was a senior adviser to President-elect Bill Clinton's transition team, heading the group that examined the U.S.'s role in natural resources, energy and the environment.
Still later, he served as Administrator of the United Nations Development Program; dean of the Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. He retired from Yale in 2009 to assume a professorship at Vermont Law School.
Now, why I am going to such lengths to introduce you to some of the details of this outstanding career? Because those folks who believe in American exceptionalism – or think they’re simply good for the political aspirations – are wont to blame the messenger who brings actual proof that Americans may once have been exceptional but today that achievement is crumbling and our favorites narratives with it.
Prof. Speth has produced an index that should embarrass the exceptionalists by shining a bit of light on those areas where we’re not so exceptional.
For example, among the 20 major advanced countries America now has:
the highest poverty rate, both generally and for children;
the greatest inequality of incomes;
the lowest government spending as a percentage of GDP on social programs for the disadvantaged;
the lowest number of paid holiday, annual, and maternity leaves;
the lowest score on the United Nations’ index of “material well-being of
children”;
the worst score on the United Nations’ gender inequality index;
the lowest social mobility;
the highest public and private expenditure on health care as a portion
of GDP, the highest infant mortality rate; prevalence of mental health problems; obesity rate; portion of people going without health care due to cost; low-birth-weight children per capita (except for Japan); consumption of antidepressants per capita;
the shortest life expectancy at birth (except for Denmark and Portugal);
the highest carbon dioxide emissions and water consumption per capita;
the lowest score on the World Economic Forum’s environmental performance index (except for Belgium), and the largest ecological footprint per capita (except for Belgium and Denmark);
the highest rate of failing to ratify international agreements;
the lowest spending on international development and humanitarian assistance as a percentage of GDP;
the highest military spending as a portion of GDP;
the largest international arms sales;
the most negative balance of payments (except New Zealand, Spain, and
Portugal);
the lowest scores for student performance in math (except for Portugal
and Italy) (and far from the top in both science and reading);
the highest high school dropout rate (except for Spain);
the highest homicide rate;
and the largest prison population per capita.
Now this is a pretty sorry scoresheet for our country – which used to excel in many of these categories.
The reasons for our fall from exceptionalism are far too lengthy to explore here, but some of the major factors, in no particular order, are substandard education; globalization; the voracious greed and dishonesty of banks, mortgage brokers, government institutions and rating agencies, whose actions created a bubble which they knew was unsustainable and issued insurance guarantees which they knew to be bogus.
There there’s the US Tax Code, which encourages foreign investment and demands local, not American, labor; a health care system that provides first-rate health to the very wealthy or the very old – but not to the poor, who have no health insurance; unemployment and under employment, partly because of the Great Recession, but starting long before that catastrophe as a result of the increase in worker productivity caused by substituting machines for humans in the workplace; and the consequent widening income disparity between the very rich and the very poor.
But the picture is not all hopeless. Gus Speth says, “It took a generation or more for most of these challenges to mature, and it will take a generation or more to climb out of the depths into which we have let things slide. More realistically, given that the U.S. government today is nowhere near ready to launch such efforts, it will take longer.”
He says, “If this analysis is correct, the devastating conclusion is that most of America’s problems will get worse or, at best, will continue to fester more or less as they currently are for the foreseeable future. That is a difficult
conclusion to have to face. But face it we must. Of course, we have to fight to correct these problems with all the strength progressive communities can muster, but we must also prepare and pursue another path forward.”
In short, he says, “America must complement ongoing efforts at reform and working within the system with at least equal efforts aimed at transformative change leading to a new political economy—a new operating system that routinely delivers good results for people and planet at home and around the world. The current system is simply not delivering economically, socially, environmentally, or politically. We need a new one. This type of systemic change will require a great struggle, and it will not come quickly. The truth is we are still in the design stage of building a new operating system.”
He adds: “That system won’t be socialism, by the way, and it won’t be today’s American capitalism either.”
“The possibility of system change suggests there can be a very bright light at
the end of this gloomy tunnel. America is in the midst of a period of decline,
and it hasn’t hit bottom yet. The imperatives its citizens face are therefore
fourfold:
(1) to slow and then halt the descent, minimizing human suffering and planetary damage along the way;
(2) to prevent a collapse, the emergence of a fortress world, or any of the dark scenarios that have been plotted for us in science fiction and increasingly in serious analysis;
(3) to minimize the time at the bottom and to start the climb upward, building a new operating system; and
(4) to complete, inhabit, and flourish in the diversity of alternative social arrangements, each far superior to what we will have left behind.
“There is hope especially in three things. The decline now occurring will
progressively delegitimize the current order. Who wants an operating system that is capable of generating and perpetuating such suffering and destruction? The one good thing about the decline of today’s political economy is that it opens the door to something much better. Second, people will eventually rise up, raise a loud shout, and demand major changes. That is already happening with some people in some places. Eventually, the chorus will grow to become a national and global movement for transformation. And third, Americans are already busy with numerous, mostly local initiatives that point the way to the future.”
“AMID ongoing decline, Americans must now summon the hope and courage to dream up something new and better and to fight for it. It has been said that the genius of America is to turn crisis into opportunity. Let us now dream a new America, the country we want for our grandchildren.”
That’s a Herculean order. And the question is: Will our political leaders find the smarts and the courage and the humility to become truly exceptional Americans?
On the basis of what we’ve seen so far, what do you think?
This is apparently the season when the American commentariat trots out its love of America. They express this deep emotion in many ways.
Rick Perry tells us it’s exceptional to link the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 60s to the struggle of the Republic Party to absolve the wealthiest Americans from paying a fair share of their debt to their country. He also thinks it’s exceptional to secede from the USA. Sarah Palen finds us exceptional because she can have her guns, Michelle Bachmann seems to define American exceptionalism as our ability to achieve just about anything we set our sights on, no matter how unlikely, if our oversized, over-regulating government would only get out of the way.
For Mr. Romney, American execptionalism seems to turn on the ability of entrepreneurs to innovate and make a ton of money, even if we’re selling
off bits and pieces of once-healthy companies. For TV Host Chris Matthews, (I’m paraphrasing) it’s his riff about Obama being born of mixed race and yet making it to the presidency. Chris then goes on to say this couldn’t happen in any other country in the world. “You can’t go to China or Japan and become Chinese or Japanese. Obama came to the US and became an American and is now in the White House (Chris leaves out the minor truth that Obama didn’t have to become American -- he already was, having been born in Hawaii).
Virtually since the beginning of our Republic we have been spinning a variety of narratives to reassure ourselves that we are the greatest nation ever invented and that no other comes even close. That, presumably is one of the reasons we seem to have this irresistible urge to teach the rest of the world how to be exceptional too.
But one of the wisest men I know is injecting a dose of reality into the patriotic mishmash being cooked up by those seeking to get themselves elected to something.
That man is Doug Speth or more formally, James Gustave Speth. A Rhodes Scholar, he graduated from Yale Law School, after which he became a co-founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Then on the White House, as a Member and then for two years as Chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality in the Executive Office of the President. Later, he was Professor of Law at Georgetown, teaching environmental and constitutional law.
In 1982 he founded the World Resources Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based environmental think tank; served as its president until January 1993. He was a senior adviser to President-elect Bill Clinton's transition team, heading the group that examined the U.S.'s role in natural resources, energy and the environment.
Still later, he served as Administrator of the United Nations Development Program; dean of the Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. He retired from Yale in 2009 to assume a professorship at Vermont Law School.
Now, why I am going to such lengths to introduce you to some of the details of this outstanding career? Because those folks who believe in American exceptionalism – or think they’re simply good for the political aspirations – are wont to blame the messenger who brings actual proof that Americans may once have been exceptional but today that achievement is crumbling and our favorites narratives with it.
Prof. Speth has produced an index that should embarrass the exceptionalists by shining a bit of light on those areas where we’re not so exceptional.
For example, among the 20 major advanced countries America now has:
the highest poverty rate, both generally and for children;
the greatest inequality of incomes;
the lowest government spending as a percentage of GDP on social programs for the disadvantaged;
the lowest number of paid holiday, annual, and maternity leaves;
the lowest score on the United Nations’ index of “material well-being of
children”;
the worst score on the United Nations’ gender inequality index;
the lowest social mobility;
the highest public and private expenditure on health care as a portion
of GDP, the highest infant mortality rate; prevalence of mental health problems; obesity rate; portion of people going without health care due to cost; low-birth-weight children per capita (except for Japan); consumption of antidepressants per capita;
the shortest life expectancy at birth (except for Denmark and Portugal);
the highest carbon dioxide emissions and water consumption per capita;
the lowest score on the World Economic Forum’s environmental performance index (except for Belgium), and the largest ecological footprint per capita (except for Belgium and Denmark);
the highest rate of failing to ratify international agreements;
the lowest spending on international development and humanitarian assistance as a percentage of GDP;
the highest military spending as a portion of GDP;
the largest international arms sales;
the most negative balance of payments (except New Zealand, Spain, and
Portugal);
the lowest scores for student performance in math (except for Portugal
and Italy) (and far from the top in both science and reading);
the highest high school dropout rate (except for Spain);
the highest homicide rate;
and the largest prison population per capita.
Now this is a pretty sorry scoresheet for our country – which used to excel in many of these categories.
The reasons for our fall from exceptionalism are far too lengthy to explore here, but some of the major factors, in no particular order, are substandard education; globalization; the voracious greed and dishonesty of banks, mortgage brokers, government institutions and rating agencies, whose actions created a bubble which they knew was unsustainable and issued insurance guarantees which they knew to be bogus.
There there’s the US Tax Code, which encourages foreign investment and demands local, not American, labor; a health care system that provides first-rate health to the very wealthy or the very old – but not to the poor, who have no health insurance; unemployment and under employment, partly because of the Great Recession, but starting long before that catastrophe as a result of the increase in worker productivity caused by substituting machines for humans in the workplace; and the consequent widening income disparity between the very rich and the very poor.
But the picture is not all hopeless. Gus Speth says, “It took a generation or more for most of these challenges to mature, and it will take a generation or more to climb out of the depths into which we have let things slide. More realistically, given that the U.S. government today is nowhere near ready to launch such efforts, it will take longer.”
He says, “If this analysis is correct, the devastating conclusion is that most of America’s problems will get worse or, at best, will continue to fester more or less as they currently are for the foreseeable future. That is a difficult
conclusion to have to face. But face it we must. Of course, we have to fight to correct these problems with all the strength progressive communities can muster, but we must also prepare and pursue another path forward.”
In short, he says, “America must complement ongoing efforts at reform and working within the system with at least equal efforts aimed at transformative change leading to a new political economy—a new operating system that routinely delivers good results for people and planet at home and around the world. The current system is simply not delivering economically, socially, environmentally, or politically. We need a new one. This type of systemic change will require a great struggle, and it will not come quickly. The truth is we are still in the design stage of building a new operating system.”
He adds: “That system won’t be socialism, by the way, and it won’t be today’s American capitalism either.”
“The possibility of system change suggests there can be a very bright light at
the end of this gloomy tunnel. America is in the midst of a period of decline,
and it hasn’t hit bottom yet. The imperatives its citizens face are therefore
fourfold:
(1) to slow and then halt the descent, minimizing human suffering and planetary damage along the way;
(2) to prevent a collapse, the emergence of a fortress world, or any of the dark scenarios that have been plotted for us in science fiction and increasingly in serious analysis;
(3) to minimize the time at the bottom and to start the climb upward, building a new operating system; and
(4) to complete, inhabit, and flourish in the diversity of alternative social arrangements, each far superior to what we will have left behind.
“There is hope especially in three things. The decline now occurring will
progressively delegitimize the current order. Who wants an operating system that is capable of generating and perpetuating such suffering and destruction? The one good thing about the decline of today’s political economy is that it opens the door to something much better. Second, people will eventually rise up, raise a loud shout, and demand major changes. That is already happening with some people in some places. Eventually, the chorus will grow to become a national and global movement for transformation. And third, Americans are already busy with numerous, mostly local initiatives that point the way to the future.”
“AMID ongoing decline, Americans must now summon the hope and courage to dream up something new and better and to fight for it. It has been said that the genius of America is to turn crisis into opportunity. Let us now dream a new America, the country we want for our grandchildren.”
That’s a Herculean order. And the question is: Will our political leaders find the smarts and the courage and the humility to become truly exceptional Americans?
On the basis of what we’ve seen so far, what do you think?
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