By William Fisher
I told this story to a few friends last week. They were as blown away as I was. They called it the only "good news" story all week. Since "good news" stories are few and far between in my line of work, let me share it with you.
At one end, it's a story about corruption, cruelty, bad police work, and a criminal justice system that's broken beyond repair and grows more sclerotic by the day, and the rage triggered by injustice "in plain sight" being ignored by authorities.
So far, doesn't sound much like a good news story? Right? Stay with me.
The good news parts of the story are about the determination of the human spirit, the compassion to want to correct injustice, intimate knowledge of the law and all its hazardous potholes and alleys, and the toughness to never give up.
Fifteen years ago, in 1997, a 24-year-old Louisiana man was convicted of the rape and murder of his 14-year-old step cousin, Chrystal Champagne.
The case was had all the earmarks of a slam-dunk: The young man, Damon A. Thibodeaux , had confessed. He admitted his guilt after nine hours of non-stop interrogation by police. He later recanted that confession.
He was sentenced to death. He says he almost gave up hope. "But if you give up hope in here, you begin to die," he said.
He never gave up. And that's one of the main reasons this young man, now 38, walked out of Angola Prison last week, a free man, after an order by a Jefferson Parish court overturning the conviction and dismissing the indictment. Jefferson Parish includes most of the suburbs of New Orleans .
In walking out of what he had to call home after almost 15 years, Damon A. Thibodeaux became the 18th person to serve time on Louisiana's death row, only to be exonerated later by DNA evidence and a bunch of remarkable pro bono lawyers who refused to cave, even facing the entire panoply of prison officials, judges, and other officers of the court.
These brave men and women spent 12 years interviewing figures involved in the case, reading thousands of pages of testimony, and reviewing DNA tests that became more credible as the science itself matured.
Mr. Thibodeaux enjoyed one asset that's not very often present when the requirement is for a full post-mortem of a case: The District Attorney, U.S. District Attorney Paul Connick, Jr. Connick joined the Innocence Project and Thibodeaux's other counsel in agreeing to overturn Thibodeaux's conviction and death sentence after DNA and other evidence proved that he had not committed the crime for which he had been coerced into falsely confessing.
A more conventional scenario finds prosecutors unwilling to re-test DNA samples because of the cost involved, or saying they've been lost. Frequently, both statements are untrue. Fear of professional embarrassment -- and collateral career damage -- is the real reason for their opacity.
That opacity was not part of the Thibodeaux case. That fact and his release gave him the honor of being the 300th person to be exonerated by DNA evidence in the US.
Listen to Barry Scheck -- whom you may remember as the DNA wizard at the OJ Simpson trial: "Like the other 299 DNA exonerees, there is no question that Mr. Thibodeaux suffered terribly because of the faults in the criminal justice system," said Scheck, who is a founder and co-director of the Innocence Project, which is affiliated with the Cardozo School of Law.
"But the incredible cooperation that we have received from District Attorney Connick is a powerful illustration of how transformative DNA evidence has been to the criminal justice system. District Attorneys now recognize that the system doesn't always get it right, and many, like District Attorney Connick and his team, are committed to getting to the truth. This case can serve as a model to other district attorneys around the country who are interested in developing conviction integrity units to review old cases."
Thibodeaux echoed that sentiment, adding "I'm grateful to Mr. Connick and his people for studying my case and for their commitment to justice. I'm looking forward to life as a free man again, but I have great sympathy for the Champagne family that lost their daughter and sister. I sincerely hope that the person who murdered her is found and tried."
Crystal Champagne's family last saw her alive on the afternoon of July 19, 1996 when she left the family's Westwego Apartment for a Winn-Dixie at the nearby strip mall. After she did not return home when expected, her family, several friends, and law enforcement began a search for her that ended on the following evening with the discovery of her body along the levee in Bridge City.
That same evening, law enforcement began interrogating and interviewing potential witnesses, including Thibodeaux. After some nine hours of interrogation, he provided an apparent confession to raping and murdering the victim. That confession was virtually the sole basis for his conviction and death sentence in October 1997.
Thibodeaux's legal team included Denise LeBoeuf and Caroline Tillman of the Capital Post-Conviction Project of Louisiana (LeBoeuf is currently Director of the ACLU's Death Penalty Project and Tillman is now an attorney with the Capital Appeals Project in New Orleans); Barry Scheck and Vanessa Potkin of the Innocence Project; and Steve Kaplan and Richard H. Kyle, Jr., of the Fredrikson & Byron law firm in Minneapolis.
Assisted by several DNA and world-class forensic scientists, homicide and police interrogation methods expert Thomas Streed, PhD, and private investigators, they obtained evidence demonstrating that Thibodeaux was not the murderer, that the victim had not been raped, and that she had also not been murdered in the manner that Thibodeaux had described after some nine hours of interrogation.
In 2007, Thibodeaux's team approached Connick and his staff, and presented the then-known evidence of actual innocence to them. Both sides then began a cooperative process that was rigorous and transparent, including mutual exchanges of evidence and information. Connick was assisted primarily by Steve Wimberly, Esq., and Chief Investigator, Vince Lamia, who reviewed the evidence and actively participated in both the joint investigation and the District Attorney's own independent review of the case.
During the course of this joint investigation, the parties conducted multiple rounds of DNA and forensic evidence testing of the crime scene evidence and the other physical evidence and interviewed numerous fact witnesses. This additional evidence confirmed that the confession that Thibodeaux had given was false in every aspect. In addition, the joint investigation included a thorough examination of the reasons why Thibodeaux had falsely confessed. His lawyers have promised to make this information public at a later time.
The joint effort has also given rise to potential new leads and suspects. Because, however, the investigation into the murder is ongoing, this information cannot be disclosed at present.
"This is a tragic illustration of why law enforcement must record the entire interrogation of any witness or potential suspect in any investigation involving a serious crime," said one of Thibodeaux's legal team.
"When juries learn that the accused has apparently confessed, they invariably have a difficult time questioning the reliability and truthfulness of the confession--unless they can see the entire interrogation and determine whether it's truthful and reliable not only in light of the interrogation methods used in obtaining the confession, but also in light of other evidence that contradicts or disproves the confession."
Another of his attorneys noted, "This journey to freedom was a long time coming. The solitary conditions that Mr. Thibodeaux was forced to live under as a death row inmate were almost more than he could bear at times, but he never gave up hope that one day he would be free."
"The death penalty is a human rights violation in any case, for anyone. But, there can be no stronger argument against capital punishment than the condemnation of a truly innocent man," said Denise LeBoeuf of the Capital Post-Conviction Project of Louisiana (LeBoeuf is currently Director of the ACLU's Death Penalty Project.)
LeBoeuf added, "Louisiana came--to use Justice Blackmon's phrase--"perilously close to simple murder' and Louisiana citizens should demand a moratorium on executions until they can be assured that there are no more miscarriages of justice like the one that occurred in this case." Since 2000, six innocent people have been exonerated from Louisiana's death row, versus just three executions.
The 300 DNA exonerees have served a combined 4013 years in prison, with an average of 13 and a half years each. The real perpetrator was identified in nearly half of the cases, and at least 130 violent crimes could have been prevented if the true perpetrator was initially arrested instead of the wrongly convicted. More than a third of those cleared by DNA have not been compensated for the time they spent wrongly imprisoned.
While DNA testing has been widely available in criminal prosecutions since the late 90s, people convicted as late as 2008 have been cleared by DNA, indicating that this powerful tool will continue to be helpful in proving wrongful convictions for the foreseeable future.
The leading cause of wrongful convictions overturned by DNA is eyewitness misidentification, which has played a role in nearly 75 percent of the 300 exonerations. Unvalidated or improper forensic science played a role in approximately half (51 %) of wrongful convictions later overturned by DNA testing. False confessions and admissions lead to wrongful convictions in just over a quarter (27%). Informants contributed to wrongful convictions in 18 % of cases.
Thibodeaux is the 18th person who served time on death row to be exonerated by DNA in the U.S. The 18 death row exonerees were convicted in 11 states and served a combined 229 years in prison -- including 202 years on death row -- for crimes they didn't commit. Another 16 were charged with capital crimes but not sentenced to death. Seventeen people were threatened with the death penalty but not ultimately charged with a capital offense.
Louisiana has a well-established reputation as the prison capital of the world. Writing in the Louisiana Times-Picayune, Cindy Chang said, "The hidden engine behind the state's well-oiled prison machine is cold, hard cash. A majority of Louisiana inmates are housed in for-profit facilities, which must be supplied with a constant influx of human beings or a $182 million industry will go bankrupt."
She added, "Several homegrown private prison companies command a slice of the market. But in a uniquely Louisiana twist, most prison entrepreneurs are rural sheriffs, who hold tremendous sway in remote parishes like Madison, Avoyelles, East Carroll and Concordia. A good portion of Louisiana law enforcement is financed with dollars legally skimmed off the top of prison operations."
Sunday, September 30, 2012
Friday, September 21, 2012
Giving Voice to the Voiceless
By William Fisher
Have you noticed? Aside from the dangerous mythology we’re fed on the various CSI television programs, we’re reading more and more real stories about innocent people being sent off to death row or serving long jail sentences for crimes they didn’t commit. And then being freed – usually years later – by new evidence or old evidence intentionally buried.
Here’s another:
Michael Keenan, now 62, spent close to a quarter century on death row. He is now free. He walked out of an Ohio courtroom after a judge determined that evidence that could have exonerated him in the 1988 stabbing death of a man found dead in a brook in a Cleveland park was withheld from his trial attorneys.
The judge dismissed the murder charge.
This is clearly a case of prosecutorial misconduct. There are many such cases, and we’re beginning to read about these as well. There is a panoply of groups working to clean up our criminal justice system.
But dishonest or overzealous prosecutors, while able to wield their enormous power to inflict lifetimes of pain on innocent people, are not in fact the major causes of wrongful imprisonment.
Incorrect eyewitness identification is still the Number One cause.
But ranking a very close second is a faut discipline that sometimes appears to be less science and more Kabuki.
This was the case back in the 1980s when the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) laboratory – until that point considered to be the gold standard for forensics – got caught in a fraud – possibly a massive fraud.
A senior forensic agent falsified the result of a test performed on a single strand of human hair, testifying incorrectly that forensic science could identify the hair precisely, thus frequently placing the accused at the scene of the crime.
But this was not a one-trial mishap. It was the standard analysis for most crime labs. So this junk science statement was being introduced as evidence in courts across the country in as many as 10,000 trials simultaneously.
In the 1980s, a DOJ/FBI task force admitted the “error” and one of the agents responsible was fired. But now a different DOJ /FBI Task Force is re-investigating the incident. Sad to say, they have already corrupted the inquiry by advising only the attorneys for the convicted – not the actual prisoners themselves – of the lapse.
In Philadelphia, Frederic W. Whitehurst, a Ph.D. chemist and former supervisory special agent at the FBI, discussed a colleague’s false or misleading forensic testimony in multiple cases. He also described how scientists would “run dead flat into a sledgehammer” when their results didn’t agree with their supervisors’ thinking. Whitehurst’s whistle-blowing led to the 1995 Justice Department investigation of the FBI Lab.
DNA is the star who hit the ball out of the park. Since the late 1980s, DNA analysis has helped identify the guilty and exonerate the innocent nationwide. The Innocence Project (IP) affirms that while DNA testing was developed through extensive scientific research at top academic centers, many other forensic techniques -- including hair microscopy, bite mark comparisons, firearm tool mark analysis, and shoe print comparisons -- have never been subjected to rigorous scientific evaluation.
And the organization added, “forensic techniques that have been properly validated -- including serology, or blood typing -- are sometimes improperly conducted or inaccurately conveyed in trial testimony. In some cases, forensic analysts have fabricated results or engaged in other misconduct.”
Forensics go back a long way in the US. In the 19th century, forensic medicine was a recognized branch of medicine. By 1910, a French criminologist, formulated the basic forensic principle, "Every contact leaves a trace,” and established the world's first crime laboratory.
IP reveals that hair has become one of the most common types of trace evidence. It says hair can help rule out certain populations or help identify an unknown victim. The transfer of hair from a victim to a suspect can raise the probability that the victim and perpetrator came in contact. Like other forensic evidence, information from hair is expressed in terms of probabilities of a match.
But IP points out that hair is never used as definitive proof to indicate guilt because visual comparison is subjective. But when hair is used with DNA, it adds, it becomes a powerful tool for an investigator. Today, hair analysis is only done when DNA tests can also be done.
Still, IP cautions that results from hair analysis can be controversial. The factors that affect these results include where on the body the hair was removed, the person's age and race, and even the color. Because standards vary, a single lab can report different results from the same hair sample and false-positives for illegal drugs are not uncommon.
Because forensic science results can mean the difference between life and death in many cases, fraud and other types of misconduct in the field are particularly troubling. False testimony, exaggerated statistics and laboratory fraud have led to wrongful convictions in several states.
IP declares that, since forensic evidence is offered by "experts," jurors routinely give it much more weight than other evidence. But when misconduct occurs, the weight is misplaced. IP finds that, in some instances, labs or their personnel have allied themselves with police and prosecutors, rather than prioritizing the search for truth. Other times, IP says, criminalists lacking the requisite knowledge have embellished findings and eluded detection because judges and juries lacked background in the relevant sciences, themselves.
In some cases, critical evidence has been consumed or destroyed, so that re-testing to uncover misconduct has proven impossible. Evidence in these cases can never be tested again, preventing the truth from being revealed.
The identification, collection, testing, storage, handling and reporting of any piece of forensic evidence involves a number of people. Evidence can be deliberately or accidentally mishandled at any stage of this process.
The Innocence Project has seen forensic misconduct by scientists, experts and prosecutors lead to wrongful conviction in many states. Here is one of the more notorious:
Of the first 289 convictions overturned by DNA testing, 45% involved faulty forensics. One of those exonerations was Ray Krone. An honorably discharged veteran, Krone served 10 years “in a cell the size of most of y’all’s bathroom,” he said in Philadelphia, for a murder in Phoenix he did not commit.
An expert for the prosecution had testified that bite marks on the victim matched an impression Krone made for police on a Styrofoam cup. With help from the Innocence Project, DNA evidence cleared him in 2002. “I can’t tell you what it was like to be called a monster,” he said. “Thank God for DNA.”
But there were many faults revealed.
• A former director of the West Virginia state crime lab, Fred Zain, testified for the prosecution in 12 states over his career, including dozens of cases in West Virginia and Texas. DNA exonerations and new evidence in other cases have shown that Zain fabricated results, lied on the stand about results and willfully omitted evidence from his reports.
• Pamela Fish, a Chicago lab technician, testified for the prosecution about false matches and suspicious results in the trials of at least eight defendants who were convicted, then proven innocent years later by DNA testing.
• A two-year investigation of the Houston crime lab, completed in 2007, showed that evidence in that lab was mishandled and results were misreported.
Other forensic tests lag behind DNA in several ways, IP says. These tests include the bite-mark analysis from Krone’s trial. They cannot point to an individual, and little to no research has been conducted toward standardizing them or defining their error rates.
In an excellent article in the journal of the American Chemical Society, writer Carmen Drahl quotes attorney Josh D. Lee, co-chair of the Forensic Science section of ACS’s Division of Chemistry & the Law, as saying, “problems arise when attorneys, judges, or juries attach the same aura of reliability to all forensic sciences regardless of their scientific merit.”
IP has uncovered these kinds of abuses since 1992 and has developed recommendations for forensic labs, law enforcement agencies and courts to ensure that forensic science misconduct is prevented whenever possible. It is currently acting as a consultant to the DOJ and FBI in the second iteration of the task force investigating the errors made by the lab during the 1980s.
IP is calling on states to impose standards on the preservation and handling of evidence. When exonerations suggest that an analyst engaged in misconduct or that a facility lacked proper procedures or oversight, the Innocence Project advocates for independent audits of their work in other cases that may have also resulted in wrongful convictions.
And bills have been introduced in both the House and the Senate for Congress to play a far more active role in providing oversight, beginning with studies and hearings that, it is hoped, will establish credible standards for the forensics industry.
It’s unlikely that erroneous convictions or even many more exonerations are ever going to become a campaign issue in the presidential election. The U.S. has about 2.5 million people locked up in federal, state prisons and county and town jails. And another 5,000 are under some form of supervision by the prison system.
These people are invisible. They don’t vote. That’s why they’ll never rise to anywhere near the top of politicians’ priorities. That’s why we need groups like The Innocence Project.
To give voice to the voiceless.
Thursday, September 20, 2012
Indefinite Detention
By William Fisher
If President Obama now feels safer, knowing that there’s a law that gives him the power to imprison someone until the end of the “war on terror,” he must have little faith in such legal formalities as charges, indictments, trials, transparency and appeals.
That’s because none of these niceties are required for you to be jailed under the NDAA – the National Defense Authorization Act. President Obama signed the NDAA in mid-December, (after promising during his 2008 campaign that he would veto it).
According to the New York Times, you could be thrown into “indefinite military detention on suspicion that they (you) “substantially supported” Al Qaeda or its allies — at least if they had no connection to the Sept. 11 attacks.”
This is not a new idea. The government has been imprisoning – yes, let’s use the actual word, not the euphemistic “detention,” which sounds like a late homework assignment in grade school.
The United States has been detaining terrorism suspects indefinitely since 2001, basing its actions on Congress’ Afghanistan “use of military force” law against perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks and those who helped them. The NDAA created an actual law governing such imprisonments.
The judge, sitting in the powerful U. S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, said the language of the statute was too broad, too subject to misinterpretation because it covered not only active terrorists but “people who were part of or substantially supported Al Qaeda, the Taliban or associated forces engaged in hostilities against the United States or its allies.”
But there were no specific definitions of words like “associated forces.” The law also failed to specify whether it extended to American citizens and others arrested on United States soil. The Judge felt such lapses could lead to confusion and wrongful convictions. And the government also failed to state unequivocally that no First Amendment-protected activities would subject them to indefinite military detention.
The lawsuit was brought by Chris Hedges and a group of other writers, including Daniel Ellsberg and Noam Chomsky. Hedges is a former N.Y. Times reporter whose reporting involves interactions with terrorists. The other plaintiffs were supporters of WikiLeaks.
The New York Times quoted them as saying, the law’s “existence chilled their constitutional rights by creating a basis to fear that the government might seek to detain them under it by declaring that their activities made them supporters of an enemy group.”
Judge Forrest also weighed in on another piece of legislation. Back in May, The House of Representatives approved (301-118) extension of the FISA Amendments Act until 2012, which would have codified the power of the president to issue FISA warrants without approval from the FISA Court. According to The Times, it also retroactively rejected the George W. Bush administration’s unlawful snooping in broad violation of Americans’ constitutionally protected privacy.
But the House bill was never considered by the Senate, so no new law was passed. Republicans say they intend to re-introduce the legislation after the election in November.
Judge Forrest also slammed provisions of the FISA law, which, in combination with the National Defense Authorization Act, could result in indefinite detention. According to Greenwald, she “emphasized how dangerous this new law is given the extremely broad discretion it vests in the president to order people detained in military custody with no charges.”
But lest you think you’ve read the last page of the last chapter of this book, the Obama DOJ lost no time in filing not only an immediate appeal, but what Glenn Greenwald characterized as “an emergency motion asking the appeals court to lift the injunction pending the appeal.”
“Obama lawyers wrote a breathless attack on the court's ruling, denouncing it as ‘vastly troubling’ and claiming that it ‘threatens tangible and dangerous consequences in the conduct of an ‘active military conflict’ and ‘threatens irreparable harm to national security’. "
No one knows how all this will end. Perhaps in the Supreme Court. But for the moment, the United States does not practice indefinite detention – except in Guantanamo where there are now 167 men in prcisely that condition – a substantial number already cleared for release.
So does the President actually need the NDAA to be able to imprison people indefinitiely without charge or trial? History tells us ‘no.’
George W. Bush shipped 600+ “enemy combatants” into GITMO only with the “law” of Presidential Power. More than half the American people think Barack Obama is twice as smart as George W.
Is there anyone who thinks he won’t find a way?
Wednesday, September 19, 2012
Arab NGOs Getting More Active
By William Fisher
According to The National Center for Charitable Statistics (NCCS), there are currently over 1.5 million – edging up toward two million — nonprofit organizations in the United States.
Of these more than a million are 501(c)(3) organizations, which means they are tax exempt from Section 501 (c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. None of its earnings may inure to any private shareholder or individual. In addition, it may not be an action organization, i.e., it may not attempt to influence legislation as a substantial part of its activities and it may not participate in any campaign activity for or against political candidates.
Organizations described in section 501(c)(3) are commonly referred to as charitable organizations or NGOs—non-governmental organizations.
In the US, non-governmental organizations play a critical role in bringing human rights and many other humanitarian situations to the attention of lawmakers, the president and the executive branch of government – even the courts. These groups mobilize public opinion to put pressure on various parts of government to reach conclusions that will satisfy one charitable organization while disappointing another, or bring victory to a group of organizations acting as a coalition.
This is distinctly not the case in many other parts of the world. In the Middle East, in particular, NGOs are usually thought of as enemies of the government. The government is suspicious of NGOs because of the possibility that they will covertly receive foreign funds to carry out foreign agendas. They fear that NGO executives will provide cover for foreign intelligence agents. And they fear that the NGOs will launch unauthorized programs that will undermine the government’s direction. In Egypt, a group of well-established indigenous and foreign NGOs have been effectively closed down and are being prosecuted by the new Egyptian government.
In the Middle East and North Africa, nearly every government has a law governing NGOs and they are customarily highly restrictive – the government often has the power to stop programs before they start, to discontinue programs already underway, and to vet prospective Board and Staff members, and force resignations in either category.
Government interference substantially reduces the effectiveness of NGOs, and last week a large number of NGOs, under the aegis of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS), were in Geneva to present their complaints to the members of the United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC). CIHRS is able to provide observations and testimonies about the situation of rights in the Arab region through its interventions and reports to the HRC.
In Egypt in 2000-2001, U.S. AID established an MGO Training Center, dedicated to teaching men and women associated with NGOs how to do their work more efficiently and at less cost. It didn’t last long.
In preparation for this week’s session of the HRC, CIHRS has drafted five written interventions. Among the issues dealt with in these written interventions is the situation of human rights defenders in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, including their subjection to judicial harassment and other reprisals. The interventions also address the situation of human rights in Lebanon and Sudan, where the rights situations have deteriorated significantly, as well as the report of the Universal Periodic Review of Morocco, which failed to adequately address the severity of the rights situation in Western Sahara.
CIHRS is also scheduled to participate in a number of oral interventions at the HRC. It will address the rights situations in Egypt, Bahrain, Tunisia, Morocco, Libya, Syria and the occupied Palestinian territories.
These interventions will focus on the most prominent human rights violations witnessed in these countries, as well as the demands related to the implementation of some of the resolutions of the Council or its subsidiary bodies to improve conditions in those countries. CIHRS will also comment on the most evident violations against citizens and activists in these countries as described in the reports of fact-finding missions and of the Special Rapporteurs. For example, CIHRS is expected to present its observations regarding the report of the fact-finding mission to Syria as well as on the follow-up report of the UN Secretary General about the fact-finding mission on “Operation Cast Lead” in the Gaza Strip.
Special attention will be paid to the state of human rights in the Gulf states in general at an event held in cooperation with the Gulf Center for Human Rights and the Bahrain Center for Human Rights. This event will deal with the evident deterioration of the standards of human rights in these countries, seek to identify the nature of violations committed against rights defenders in the Gulf due to their work to protect human rights, and make recommendations in this regard.
CIHRS will also deal with human rights violations and conflict increasing in Lebanon as Conflict from Syria spills-over into Country, the ongoing crackdown on peaceful demonstrators, Human Rights defenders and journalists, in Morocco and the Issue of Western Sahara, and the case of a Saudi human rights defender who risks imprisonment for cooperating with the UN Human Rights Council
CIHRS will report on the “Alarming increase in repression and attacks against civil society in the Gulf region. It will tell the Minister of Justice, state and “Security reform requires political will, not additional repressive laws.”
CIHRS says it is also “deeply concerned by the unresolved issues surrounding the independence of South Sudan, including issues of border demarcation and cross-border trade, which are exacerbating the already severe humanitarian situation in the border states of South Kordofan and Blue Nile and the region of Abyei. We also express alarm regarding the fact that the Government of Sudan has denied international NGOs access to the areas affected by the armed border conflict in these regions, thus severely limiting possibilities for monitoring the situation of human rights in these states.
The organizations also report that aerial bombings of villages continue to be heard from refugees arriving in South Sudan from the two Border States, and internationally condemned weapons like cluster bombs have been allegedly found in civilian areas bombarded by government forces.
Recently, when tensions between the two Sudans intensified in April in the oil-rich area of Higlig, some 4,000 civilians in the area were forced to flee to refugee camps in South Sudan. According to the most recent estimates, approximately 665,000 people have been either internally displaced or severely affected by the ongoing conflict in these two states.
This continued violence has had the added consequence of preventing farmers from cultivating their crops for two seasons. The resulting food shortage has been exacerbated by new laws passed by the government of Sudan to prohibit all trade in the border areas. Such policies have in effect created a food embargo imposed by the Sudanese government on South Kordofan, especially in areas controlled by the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North (SPLM-N), and constitute a violation of Sudan’s obligations to protect its citizens.
Moreover, restrictions to entry have been imposed on aid agencies, thereby preventing them from providing humanitarian relief to thousands of people trapped in the border regions by fighting between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army-North (SPLA-N). As a result, hundreds of thousands of Sudanese in these states faced severe levels of food insecurity entering the second half of 2012.
Violence in Darfur similarly continues. Most recently, in early August 2012, a militia attacked the Kassab camp for internally displaced persons (IDPs), looting homes and markets and committing several extrajudicial killings, and the entire population of the camp – some 25,000 people, according to UN statements – was forced to flee to the wilderness where they struggle to survive without shelter. No serious investigations or protection strategies for the IDPs have been carried out.
Who Guards the Guards?
By William Fisher
Fabian Avery III was seventeen when he died.
And were it not for how he died, we might offer our condolences, maybe we’d say he was in prison anyway, but we probably would not be reading this story. There’d have been no one to write it.
You’re reading about his death because he was yet another victim of a prison system that is utterly broken and whose inmates are just about utterly forgotten.
If you have a strong stomach, here’s Fabian’s story as told by Jean Casella and James Ridgeway in the Atlanta Constitution.
He died last year in solitary confinement. He died because the jail he was locked up in had only the services of a doctor and a nurse who allegedly failed to try to get any specialist professional help from anywhere else.
Fabian was sick, very sick. He died of appendicitis and complications from a bowel obstruction, according to investigative documents compiled by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. He first reported being ill on Feb. 24, 2011 and was given minimal attention. He complained of nausea, stomach pains, vomiting and lower back pains, as well as frequently vomiting and defecating on himself and failing to clean himself up – reportedly the reason he was placed in solitary. Jail staff allegedly did little to help get Avery the necessary care.
He had been arrested in December 2010 on armed robbery charges. He was transferred from the Fulton County jail in late February 2011 to alleviate overcrowding and placed in a small-town lockup at the Mize Street Municipal jail in the South Georgia town of Pelham.
According to Casela and Ridgeway, Fabian Avery III weighed 153 pounds when he was transferred to Pelham. He was found dead nearly a month later -- on the morning of March 18, 2011 -- on a mattress on the floor of his 6-by-10-foot isolation cell. They write that his 6-foot-1-inch frame had shriveled to 108 pounds.
The Atlanta Journal Constitution reported that the Georgia Bureau of Investigation found that the teenager had been placed in “the hole” after he first reported being sick, ”because he began frequently soiling himself and not cleaning up or showering.” The jail’s nurse reportedly “suggested that Avery might have been faking some of his symptoms,” despite his apparent extreme weight loss.
Now, Fabian’s mother has filed a federal lawsuit against the town of 4,500, the jail’s nurse and doctor, its police department, and four correctional officers, claiming wrongful death and civil rights violations, based on allegations that her son’s serious medical condition was ignored.
The defendants’ attorney reportedly told the AJC: “This is an unfortunate case…If [the jail staff] had any indication that he needed any more medication, it would have been provided.”
Right!
OK, you say, this is a tragic story but surely it is not the norm. Well, probably not the norm. In 1930, the year the Federal Bureau of Prisons was founded, there were eleven federal prisons. In 2000, 84 Federal facilities were in operation, 9% more than in 1995
Today, there are 116 institutions, 6 regional offices, a Central Office (headquarters), and community corrections offices that oversee residential reentry centers and home confinement programs.
At the State Prison level, there are 1,320 facilities, 3% more than in 1995; and 264 private facilities, 140% more than in 1995. The maximum number of beds or inmates assigned by a rating official, known as rated capacity, expanded 31%, from 975,719 in 1995 to 1,278,471 in 2000.
In addition, there are thousands of county and town jails. And that’s not counting the infamous immigration detention centers operated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, part of the Department of Homeland Security.
But even this humongous number is not enough to house the 1,278,471 prisoners recorded in 2000, up 31% from 975,719 in 1995. On June 30, 2000, State prisons were operating at 1% above their rated capacity, down from 4% over capacity in 1995. The Federal prison system was operating at 34% over capacity at midyear 2000, up from 25% over capacity in 1995.
So with the largest prison population of any modern industrialized country – and easily a third of inmates suffering from mental illness – I could be reasonably sure that we haven’t heard the last of a lot more deaths.
People opt for prison jobs for many different reasons. Some might actually want to do some good.
But putting a prisoner in solitary confinement instead of a hospital because he’s very sick – come on now. Who was it who interviewed these folks for their jobs? Or were they?
Can We Turn Hatred Into Dialogue?
By William Fisher
I’ve been racking my brain to find something – anything -- good to say about the US-made pathologically Islamophobic film that has triggered the deadly riots now creating bloodshed across the Muslim world.
My conclusion: There is nothing good to say about this film.
Is there anything at all to salvage from the dangerous contretemps is has caused?
Well, maybe.
If Egyptian Muslims – and all Muslims – could come to understand two things: The US government had nothing to do with this film at any point – the US Government doesn’t make films attacking – or praising – particular religions. In America, it’s known as the Separation Between Church and State. And it is a cornerstone of our Bill of Rights.
The second thing angry Muslims need to understand is much harder because it runs counter to so much of Arab culture. It is a quote usually attributed to Voltaire. It says: “I disagree with what you have to say but will fight to the death to protect your right to say it."
“Protect your right to say it” – this is the essence of free speech. At the risk of restating the obvious, this is the free speech that Muslim and Arab revolutionaries throughout the Middle East have only so recently won.
Yet it would be unreasonable of us to suggest that “protect your right to say it” is a construct about which Middle Eastern peoples know anything at all. In fact, it is totally alien to them. And, quite likely, rejected out of hand.
Whether this thought will ever find a home in the majority of Arab minds is a work in progress. Today there are literally thousands of Arab and Muslim intellectuals who are totally comfortable with Voltaire’s words – who live his aspirations every day of their lives.
It is going to be largely up to these men and women to adopt this cornerstone of free speech. It’s difficult to see how George W. Bush’s “Democracy-Building” programs could make a substantial contribution.
But whoever works at it can be certain that it won’t happen quickly and without pain.
Monday, September 17, 2012
Who Guards the Guards?
By William Fisher
Fabian Avery III was seventeen when he died.
And were it not for how he died, we might offer our condolences, maybe we’d say he was in prison anyway, but we probably would not be reading this story. There’d have been no one to write it.
You’re reading about his death because he was yet another victim of a prison system that is utterly broken and whose inmates are just about utterly forgotten.
If you have a strong stomach, here’s Fabian’s story as told by Jean Casella and James Ridgeway in the Atlanta Constitution,
He died last year in solitary confinement. He died because the jail he was locked up in had only the services of a doctor and a nurse who allegedly failed to try to get any specialist professional help from anywhere else.
Fabian was sick, very sick. He died of appendicitis and complications from a bowel obstruction, according to investigative documents compiled by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. He first reported being ill on Feb. 24, 2011 and was given minimal attention. He complained of nausea, stomach pains, vomiting and lower back pains, as well as frequently vomiting and defecating on himself and failing to clean himself up – reportedly the reason he was placed in solitary. Jail staff allegedly did little to help get Avery the necessary care.
He had been arrested in December 2010 on armed robbery charges. He was transferred from the Fulton County jail in late February 2011 to alleviate overcrowding and placed in a small-town lockup at the Mize Street Municipal jail in the South Georgia town of Pelham.
According to Casela and Ridgeway, Fabian Avery III weighed 153 pounds when he was transferred to Pelham. He was found dead nearly a month later -- on the morning of March 18, 2011 -- on a mattress on the floor of his 6-by-10-foot isolation cell. They write that his 6-foot-1-inch frame had shriveled to 108 pounds.
The Atlanta Journal Constitution reported that the Georgia Bureau of Investigation found that the teenager had been placed in “the hole” after he first reported being sick, ”because he began frequently soiling himself and not cleaning up or showering.” The jail’s nurse reportedly “suggested that Avery might have been faking some of his symptoms,” despite his apparent extreme weight loss.
Now, Fabian’s mother has filed a federal lawsuit against the town of 4,500, the jail’s nurse and doctor, its police department, and four correctional officers, claiming wrongful death and civil rights violations, based on allegations that her son’s serious medical condition was ignored.
The defendants’ attorney reportedly told the AJC: “This is an unfortunate case…If [the jail staff] had any indication that he needed any more medication, it would have been provided.”
Right!
OK, you say, this is a tragic story but surely it is not the norm. Well, probably not the norm. In 1930, the year the Federal Bureau of Prisons was founded, there were eleven federal prisons. In 2000, 84 Federal facilities were in operation, 9% more than in 1995
Today, there are 116 institutions, 6 regional offices, a Central Office (headquarters), and community corrections offices that oversee residential reentry centers and home confinement programs. At the State Prison level, there are 1,320 facilities, 3% more than in 1995; and 264 private facilities, 140% more than in 1995. The maximum number of beds or inmates assigned by a rating official, known as rated capacity, expanded 31%, from 975,719 in 1995 to 1,278,471 in 2000.
In addition, there are thousands of county and town jails. And that’s not counting the infamous immigration detention centers operated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, part of the Department of Homeland Security.
But even this humongous number is not enough to house the 1,278,471 prisoners recorded in 2000, up 31% from 975,719 in 1995. On June 30, 2000, State prisons were operating at 1% above their rated capacity, down from 4% over capacity in 1995. The Federal prison system was operating at 34% over capacity at midyear 2000, up from 25% over capacity in 1995.
So with the largest prison population of any modern industrialized country – and easily a third of inmates suffering from mental illness – I could be reasonably sure that we haven’t heard the last of a lot more deaths.
People opt for prison jobs for many different reasons. Some might actually want to do some good.
But putting a prisoner in solitary confinement instead of a hospital because he’s very sick – come on now. Who was it who interviewed these folks for their jobs? Or were they?
EGYPT'S NGOs
According to The National Center for Charitable Statistics (NCCS), there are currently over 1.5 million – edging up toward two million — nonprofit organizations in the United States.
Of these more than a million are 501(c)(3) organizations, which means they are tax exempt from Section 501 (c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. None of its earnings may inure to any private shareholder or individual. In addition, it may not be an action organization, i.e., it may not attempt to influence legislation as a substantial part of its activities and it may not participate in any campaign activity for or against political candidates.
Organizations described in section 501(c)(3) are commonly referred to as charitable organizations or NGOs—non-governmental organizations.
In the US, non-governmental organizations play a critical role in bringing human rights and many other humanitarian situations to the attention of lawmakers, the president and the executive branch of government – even the courts. These groups mobilize public opinion to put pressure on various parts of government to reach conclusions that will satisfy one charitable organization while disappointing another, or bring victory to a group of organizations acting as a coalition.
This is distinctly not the case in many other parts of the world. In the Middle East, in particular, NGOs are usually thought of as enemies of the government. The government is suspicious of NGOs because of the possibility that they will covertly receive foreign funds to carry out foreign agendas. They fear that NGO executives will provide cover for foreign intelligence agents. And they fear that the NGOs will launch unauthorized programs that will undermine the government’s direction. In Egypt, a group of well-established indigenous and foreign NGOs have been effectively closed down and are being prosecuted by the new Egyptian government.
In the Middle East and North Africa, nearly every government has a law governing NGOs and they are customarily highly restrictive – the government often has the power to stop programs before they start, to discontinue programs already underway, and to vet prospective Board and Staff members, and force resignations in either category.
Government interference substantially reduces the effectiveness of NGOs, and last week a large number of NGOs, under the aegis of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS), were in Geneva to present their complaints to the members of the United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC). CIHRS is able to provide observations and testimonies about the situation of rights in the Arab region through its interventions and reports to the HRC.
In Egypt in 2000-2001, U.S. AID established an MGO Training Center, dedicated to teaching men and women associated with NGOs how to do their work more efficiently and at less cost. It didn’t last long.
In preparation for this week’s session of the HRC, CIHRS has drafted five written interventions. Among the issues dealt with in these written interventions is the situation of human rights defenders in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, including their subjection to judicial harassment and other reprisals. The interventions also address the situation of human rights in Lebanon and Sudan, where the rights situations have deteriorated significantly, as well as the report of the Universal Periodic Review of Morocco, which failed to adequately address the severity of the rights situation in Western Sahara.
CIHRS is also scheduled to participate in a number of oral interventions at the HRC. It will address the rights situations in Egypt, Bahrain, Tunisia, Morocco, Libya, Syria and the occupied Palestinian territories.
These interventions will focus on the most prominent human rights violations witnessed in these countries, as well as the demands related to the implementation of some of the resolutions of the Council or its subsidiary bodies to improve conditions in those countries. CIHRS will also comment on the most evident violations against citizens and activists in these countries as described in the reports of fact-finding missions and of the Special Rapporteurs. For example, CIHRS is expected to present its observations regarding the report of the fact-finding mission to Syria as well as on the follow-up report of the UN Secretary General about the fact-finding mission on “Operation Cast Lead” in the Gaza Strip.
Special attention will be paid to the state of human rights in the Gulf states in general at an event held in cooperation with the Gulf Center for Human Rights and the Bahrain Center for Human Rights. This event will deal with the evident deterioration of the standards of human rights in these countries, seek to identify the nature of violations committed against rights defenders in the Gulf due to their work to protect human rights, and make recommendations in this regard.
CIHRS will also deal with human rights violations and conflict increasing in Lebanon as Conflict from Syria spills-over into Country, the ongoing crackdown on peaceful demonstrators, Human Rights defenders and journalists, in Morocco and the Issue of Western Sahara, and the case of a Saudi human rights defender who risks imprisonment for cooperating with the UN Human Rights Council.
CIHRS will report on the “Alarming increase in repression and attacks against civil society in the Gulf region. It will tell the Minister of Justice, state and “Security reform requires political will, not additional repressive laws.”
CIHRS says it is also “deeply concerned by the unresolved issues surrounding the independence of South Sudan, including issues of border demarcation and cross-border trade, which are exacerbating the already severe humanitarian situation in the border states of South Kordofan and Blue Nile and the region of Abyei. We also express alarm regarding the fact that the Government of Sudan has denied international NGOs access to the areas affected by the armed border conflict in these regions, thus severely limiting possibilities for monitoring the situation of human rights in these states.
The organizations also report that aerial bombings of villages continue to be heard from refugees arriving in South Sudan from the two Border States, and internationally condemned weapons like cluster bombs have been allegedly found in civilian areas bombarded by government forces.
Recently, when tensions between the two Sudans intensified in April in the oil-rich area of Higlig, some 4,000 civilians in the area were forced to flee to refugee camps in South Sudan. According to the most recent estimates, approximately 665,000 people have been either internally displaced or severely affected by the ongoing conflict in these two states.
This continued violence has had the added consequence of preventing farmers from cultivating their crops for two seasons. The resulting food shortage has been exacerbated by new laws passed by the government of Sudan to prohibit all trade in the border areas. Such policies have in effect created a food embargo imposed by the Sudanese government on South Kordofan, especially in areas controlled by the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North (SPLM-N), and constitute a violation of Sudan’s obligations to protect its citizens.
Moreover, restrictions to entry have been imposed on aid agencies, thereby preventing them from providing humanitarian relief to thousands of people trapped in the border regions by fighting between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army-North (SPLA-N). As a result, hundreds of thousands of Sudanese in these states faced severe levels of food insecurity entering the second half of 2012.
Violence in Darfur similarly continues. Most recently, in early August 2012, a militia attacked the Kassab camp for internally displaced persons (IDPs), looting homes and markets and committing several extrajudicial killings, and the entire population of the camp – some 25,000 people, according to UN statements – was forced to flee to the wilderness where they struggle to survive without shelter. No serious investigations or protection strategies for the IDPs have been carried out.
Of these more than a million are 501(c)(3) organizations, which means they are tax exempt from Section 501 (c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. None of its earnings may inure to any private shareholder or individual. In addition, it may not be an action organization, i.e., it may not attempt to influence legislation as a substantial part of its activities and it may not participate in any campaign activity for or against political candidates.
Organizations described in section 501(c)(3) are commonly referred to as charitable organizations or NGOs—non-governmental organizations.
In the US, non-governmental organizations play a critical role in bringing human rights and many other humanitarian situations to the attention of lawmakers, the president and the executive branch of government – even the courts. These groups mobilize public opinion to put pressure on various parts of government to reach conclusions that will satisfy one charitable organization while disappointing another, or bring victory to a group of organizations acting as a coalition.
This is distinctly not the case in many other parts of the world. In the Middle East, in particular, NGOs are usually thought of as enemies of the government. The government is suspicious of NGOs because of the possibility that they will covertly receive foreign funds to carry out foreign agendas. They fear that NGO executives will provide cover for foreign intelligence agents. And they fear that the NGOs will launch unauthorized programs that will undermine the government’s direction. In Egypt, a group of well-established indigenous and foreign NGOs have been effectively closed down and are being prosecuted by the new Egyptian government.
In the Middle East and North Africa, nearly every government has a law governing NGOs and they are customarily highly restrictive – the government often has the power to stop programs before they start, to discontinue programs already underway, and to vet prospective Board and Staff members, and force resignations in either category.
Government interference substantially reduces the effectiveness of NGOs, and last week a large number of NGOs, under the aegis of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS), were in Geneva to present their complaints to the members of the United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC). CIHRS is able to provide observations and testimonies about the situation of rights in the Arab region through its interventions and reports to the HRC.
In Egypt in 2000-2001, U.S. AID established an MGO Training Center, dedicated to teaching men and women associated with NGOs how to do their work more efficiently and at less cost. It didn’t last long.
In preparation for this week’s session of the HRC, CIHRS has drafted five written interventions. Among the issues dealt with in these written interventions is the situation of human rights defenders in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, including their subjection to judicial harassment and other reprisals. The interventions also address the situation of human rights in Lebanon and Sudan, where the rights situations have deteriorated significantly, as well as the report of the Universal Periodic Review of Morocco, which failed to adequately address the severity of the rights situation in Western Sahara.
CIHRS is also scheduled to participate in a number of oral interventions at the HRC. It will address the rights situations in Egypt, Bahrain, Tunisia, Morocco, Libya, Syria and the occupied Palestinian territories.
These interventions will focus on the most prominent human rights violations witnessed in these countries, as well as the demands related to the implementation of some of the resolutions of the Council or its subsidiary bodies to improve conditions in those countries. CIHRS will also comment on the most evident violations against citizens and activists in these countries as described in the reports of fact-finding missions and of the Special Rapporteurs. For example, CIHRS is expected to present its observations regarding the report of the fact-finding mission to Syria as well as on the follow-up report of the UN Secretary General about the fact-finding mission on “Operation Cast Lead” in the Gaza Strip.
Special attention will be paid to the state of human rights in the Gulf states in general at an event held in cooperation with the Gulf Center for Human Rights and the Bahrain Center for Human Rights. This event will deal with the evident deterioration of the standards of human rights in these countries, seek to identify the nature of violations committed against rights defenders in the Gulf due to their work to protect human rights, and make recommendations in this regard.
CIHRS will also deal with human rights violations and conflict increasing in Lebanon as Conflict from Syria spills-over into Country, the ongoing crackdown on peaceful demonstrators, Human Rights defenders and journalists, in Morocco and the Issue of Western Sahara, and the case of a Saudi human rights defender who risks imprisonment for cooperating with the UN Human Rights Council.
CIHRS will report on the “Alarming increase in repression and attacks against civil society in the Gulf region. It will tell the Minister of Justice, state and “Security reform requires political will, not additional repressive laws.”
CIHRS says it is also “deeply concerned by the unresolved issues surrounding the independence of South Sudan, including issues of border demarcation and cross-border trade, which are exacerbating the already severe humanitarian situation in the border states of South Kordofan and Blue Nile and the region of Abyei. We also express alarm regarding the fact that the Government of Sudan has denied international NGOs access to the areas affected by the armed border conflict in these regions, thus severely limiting possibilities for monitoring the situation of human rights in these states.
The organizations also report that aerial bombings of villages continue to be heard from refugees arriving in South Sudan from the two Border States, and internationally condemned weapons like cluster bombs have been allegedly found in civilian areas bombarded by government forces.
Recently, when tensions between the two Sudans intensified in April in the oil-rich area of Higlig, some 4,000 civilians in the area were forced to flee to refugee camps in South Sudan. According to the most recent estimates, approximately 665,000 people have been either internally displaced or severely affected by the ongoing conflict in these two states.
This continued violence has had the added consequence of preventing farmers from cultivating their crops for two seasons. The resulting food shortage has been exacerbated by new laws passed by the government of Sudan to prohibit all trade in the border areas. Such policies have in effect created a food embargo imposed by the Sudanese government on South Kordofan, especially in areas controlled by the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North (SPLM-N), and constitute a violation of Sudan’s obligations to protect its citizens.
Moreover, restrictions to entry have been imposed on aid agencies, thereby preventing them from providing humanitarian relief to thousands of people trapped in the border regions by fighting between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army-North (SPLA-N). As a result, hundreds of thousands of Sudanese in these states faced severe levels of food insecurity entering the second half of 2012.
Violence in Darfur similarly continues. Most recently, in early August 2012, a militia attacked the Kassab camp for internally displaced persons (IDPs), looting homes and markets and committing several extrajudicial killings, and the entire population of the camp – some 25,000 people, according to UN statements – was forced to flee to the wilderness where they struggle to survive without shelter. No serious investigations or protection strategies for the IDPs have been carried out.
Saturday, September 15, 2012
Can We Turn Hate Into Reason?
By William Fisher
I’ve been racking my brain to find something – anything -- good to say about the US-made pathologically Islamophobic film that has triggered the deadly riots now creating bloodshed across the Muslim world.
My conclusion: There is nothing good to say about this film.
Is there anything at all to salvage from the dangerous contretemps is has caused?
Well, maybe.
If Egyptian Muslims – and all Muslims – could come to understand two things: The US government had nothing to do with this film at any point – the US Government doesn’t make films attacking – or praising – particular religions. In America, it’s known as the Separation Between Church and State. And it is a cornerstone of our Bill of Rights.
The second thing angry Muslims need to understand is much harder because it runs counter to so much of Arab culture. It is a quote usually attributed to Voltaire. It says: “I disagree with what you have to say but will fight to the death to protect your right to say it."
“Protect your right to say it” – this is the essence of free speech. At the risk of restating the obvious, this is the free speech that Muslim and Arab revolutionaries throughout the Middle East have only so recently won.
Yet it would be unreasonable of us to suggest that “protect your right to say it” is a construct about which Middle Eastern peoples know anything at all. In fact, it is totally alien to them. And, quite likely, rejected out of hand.
Whether this thought will ever find a home in the majority of Arab minds is a work in progress. Today there are literally thousands of Arab and Muslim intellectuals who are totally comfortable with Voltaire’s words – who live his aspirations every day of their lives.
It is going to be largely up to these men and women to adopt this cornerstone of free speech. It’s difficult to see how George W. Bush’s “Democracy-Building” programs could make a substantial contribution.
But whoever works at it can be certain that it won’t happen quickly and without pain.
Friday, September 14, 2012
Not for the Faint-Hearted
Here are two stories you're not like to see very often in the mainstream press. Why, you ask? Well, for openers, they're not feelgood stories. One is about a mentally ill prison inmate who gets bounced about from one solitary confinement to another. And who never should have been in the slammer in the first place. The second is about another mental illness victim who ended up in solitary in the place that's become a sad substitute for a mental hospital.
Secondly, these are not the kind of stories one finds easily on the web, unless you're looking for specialized or highly technical subject matter. Third, most mainstream reporters hate jailhouse reporting. You usually have to travel a good bit before they get to the slammer. Then, there's all that paperwork to verify that they are who you say they are. And then there's a search. And when you're done, you start at the end and work forward until you're out.
Finally, there are a few reporters who've made jailhouse reporting sexy. Dana Priest of the Washington Post, who exposed the CIA black site secret prisons, and Nina Bernstein of the New York Times,who wrote about the deaths and cover-up of undocumented workers while they waited in detention facilities before being deported by ICE.
So here, for those who yearn for a Fourth Estate that is mostly dead, are a couple of stories.
Pennsylvania inmate Derrick Stanley has been released from prison after over 22 years of incarceration, more than half of which was served in solitary confinement. Stanley was among six inmates in State Correctional Institution-Dallas’s Restricted Housing Unit (RHU) charged with rioting after a peaceful protest against mistreatment of another inmate in April 2010.
Stanley, who represented himself in court, was granted his habeus corpus petition by the Luzerne County Court of Common Pleas on December 30th, 2011, after a judge dismissed the riot charge against Stanley. According to the Human Rights Coalition, the judge ruled that the circumstances surrounding the riot charge would “lead to ‘absurd’ charges of riot in the future.” Stanley maxed out of his underlying criminal conviction for armed robbery on February 7th, and agreed to be interviewed by Solitary Watch.
The riot charge stemmed from an April 29th incident in which Stanley and five other inmates, who collectively would be referred to as the Dallas 6, obstructed their cell door windows in protest of the withholding of food from and violent cell extractions of two other inmates. All six were subject to cell extractions over the course of two-three hours. Stanley was the fifth to be extracted, which was done by approximately half a dozen officers, who tasered and beat him before stripping him naked and keeping him restrained in a “hard cell” for 24 hours before being transferred to SCI-Mahanoy, where he would spent over a year in solitary confinement.
Read the whole piece: http://solitarywatch.com/tag/derrick-stanley/
Criminalizing Mental Illness: The Story of Adam Hall
When he was five years old, Adam Hall tried to burn down his family home outside Utica in upstate New York. Afterwards, he drew a picture of his family having a happy reunion in heaven. Adam’s mother, Carole Hall, knew the incident was a cry for help–and possibly an early suicide attempt–but she had no money to get Adam decent treatment. Through the rest of his childhood, the boy would be in and out of psychiatric institutions and group homes. Carole Hall says he was molested in two of them, but never effectively treated for what would eventually be diagnosed as a panoply of mental illnesses, including bipolar disorder.
What happened next is all too typical of what happens to young people with untreated psychiatric disabilities in New York and throughout the United States, in an era when psychiatric hospitals have closed and jails and prisons have become the default inpatient facilities for the nation’s mentally ill. Adam Hall ended up in prison for a relatively minor felony, then in solitary confinement. Before long, he would have years added to his sentence for offenses committed in prison–offenses once again stemming from his mental illness. If the pattern continues, he could end up spending decades behind bars.
Hall’s erratic and sometimes violent behavior got him in trouble with the law while he was still a teenager. By the time he was 22, in 2009, he had been convicted of assault after stealing a car and resisting arrest. Sentenced to three years, he joined the estimated 5,000 or more prisoners in New York State’s prison who are suffering from mental illness.
According to correspondence with Adam Hall and interviews with his mother, he bounced around the prison system for a while. And like many people with mental illness, he quickly got in trouble for breaking prison rules and was disciplined by being placed in lockdown. A 2003 report by New York’s Correctional Association found that while inmates diagnosed with mental illness made up 11 percent of the state’s overall prison population, they constituted nearly a quarter of the inmates in isolated confinement in the state’s Special Housing Units (SHUs). Many of the SHU prisoners the CA interviewed for the report were “actively psychotic, manic, paranoid or seemingly overmedicated.”
Eventually Hall landed in the Residential Mental Health Unit (RMHU) at Marcy State Correctional Facility. The RMHU is considered an alternative to long-term solitary confinement for difficult to control prisoners with mental illness. In these units, inmates are locked down for much of the day, but receive they a greater measure of out-of-cell time and mental health treatment. Recent litigation and 2008’s so-called SHU Exclusion Law were designed to reduce the population of mentally ill inmates in solitary, in part by increasing the number of RMHU beds. And considering the alternatives, it was probably the best placement available to Adam Hall within the prison system.
But Adam Hall remained unstable and suicidal, and in 2011 he attempted to kill himself the same way he had when he was five: he set fire to his RMHU cell. Prison officials had the option to treat the incident as a symptom of Hall’s mental illness, and address it through internal disciplinary and classification processes. Instead, they chose to send Hall’s case to a grand jury in Utica, where he was indicted for arson. Facing up to 25 years, Hall let his public defender enter a guilty plea to third-degree arson, and was sentenced to three to six additional years in prison.
Hall was shipped to another RMHU, this one in Attica, where he remains today. The Department of Corrections has charged him for damages to his cell totaling more than $4,000, which he cannot pay. Because of his debts to the prison, his mother says, any money sent to him to buy food and sundries from the canteen is requisitioned by the state. Adam says he has to sell his prison food to get enough to buy postage stamps.
Adam’s situation–spelled out in a rap sheet he sent to Solitary Watch along with health records provided by his mother–appears to fly in the face of the intent of the state’s hard-won SHU exclusion law. The law is designed to protect and help mentally ill inmates who face prison disciplinary proceedings. But it leaves prison officials the option to deal with behavior problems as crimes rather than as mental health issues, and ship them out to the local DA. (Some laws, in fact, appear to have been passed for this express purpose. It is now a felony in New York, for example, to throw feces at a prison officer–and offense that is committed almost exclusively by mentally ill inmates in the SHU, as well as those driven mad by solitary.)
“The part that bothers me,’’ said one attorney with experience representing prisoners, “is: why did DOCCS refer this particular case to the DA for outside prosecution? We don’t have a lot of info, but it appears that if he did have a discipline hearing for this incident it was dismissed, and it may have been dismissed because of his mental health. That they would refer for outside prosecution a case that does not even warrant internal discipline is quite troubling. However, I know of no law that applies. As far as I know, DOCCS simply has discretion to refer cases to local DAs.”
Another attorney who defends prisoners’ rights confirmed that “many disciplinary tickets are written for incidents that could be charged as crimes. If the DOCCS determines to handle it through the prison system, then there is no criminal case. DOCCS does call in the DA for some incidents–this is a discretionary decision.” Under the SHU exclusion law, if the incident is dealt with inside the prison system, “New York State regulations “require that mental health is taken into consideration for the purpose of mitigation and possible dismissal of infractions under certain circumstances. Those regulations are pretty much going to be in effect for anyone who is in an RMHU–meaning that for all disciplinary hearings arising out of incidents in an RMHU, it is likely that the regulations require mental health testimony at the hearing and consideration of mental illness in the disposition.” But if the case is kicked to the local DA–no such protections apply.
She continues: “If the incident is related to his mental illness, the lack of adequate treatment for that illness, and his inability to conform to the prison environment due to his illness–isn’t charging him with a crime the ultimate criminalization of the status of his having mental illness? What purpose does the criminal case serve if these are the facts? It isn’t deterrence or rehabilitation–it appears to solely be retribution–is that a sufficient purpose?”
When we described this case to a veteran former New York State corrections officer, he said people like Hall were often doomed from the moment they arrived in prison, if not before. They tended to rack up small felony charges, one after the other, so that they effectively served a life sentence, shut away out of sight in some form of solitary confinement.
In a letter written on April 9, 2012, Hall said: “It’s hard in here for me. I feel like killing myself most of the time like I said but end up cutting myself to relieve the pain or just do things that help me relieve pain. Cutting myself seems the best way but one day I’m going to really cut myself and not tell no one so I can bleed out. That’s how I am feeling nowadays. My life’s gone down the drain.”
The Buffalo office of Prisoner Legal Services of New York, the small but tenacious nonprofit that acts on behalf of inmates in state prisons, sent a letter to Attica asking the mental health unit to look into the situation. Hall wrote both his mother and us that he was making deeper cuts in his arms, cutting into the muscle, building up to a final suicide slitting. On the advice of Prisoner Legal Services, Carole Hall phoned the head of the mental health unit at Attica and told him about the threats. He told Hall he knew nothing about the case but assured her he would look into it.
Whether Hall is alive or dead, whether he has gotten better treatment or simply had his possessions removed and been thrown nearly naked into a suicide cell, his mother doesn’t know.Here's the rest of his story:
http://solitarywatch.com/2012/05/14/criminalizing-mental-illness-the-story-of-adam-hall/#more-5366
Want more? Visit http:// solitarywatch.com/
Secondly, these are not the kind of stories one finds easily on the web, unless you're looking for specialized or highly technical subject matter. Third, most mainstream reporters hate jailhouse reporting. You usually have to travel a good bit before they get to the slammer. Then, there's all that paperwork to verify that they are who you say they are. And then there's a search. And when you're done, you start at the end and work forward until you're out.
Finally, there are a few reporters who've made jailhouse reporting sexy. Dana Priest of the Washington Post, who exposed the CIA black site secret prisons, and Nina Bernstein of the New York Times,who wrote about the deaths and cover-up of undocumented workers while they waited in detention facilities before being deported by ICE.
So here, for those who yearn for a Fourth Estate that is mostly dead, are a couple of stories.
Pennsylvania inmate Derrick Stanley has been released from prison after over 22 years of incarceration, more than half of which was served in solitary confinement. Stanley was among six inmates in State Correctional Institution-Dallas’s Restricted Housing Unit (RHU) charged with rioting after a peaceful protest against mistreatment of another inmate in April 2010.
Stanley, who represented himself in court, was granted his habeus corpus petition by the Luzerne County Court of Common Pleas on December 30th, 2011, after a judge dismissed the riot charge against Stanley. According to the Human Rights Coalition, the judge ruled that the circumstances surrounding the riot charge would “lead to ‘absurd’ charges of riot in the future.” Stanley maxed out of his underlying criminal conviction for armed robbery on February 7th, and agreed to be interviewed by Solitary Watch.
The riot charge stemmed from an April 29th incident in which Stanley and five other inmates, who collectively would be referred to as the Dallas 6, obstructed their cell door windows in protest of the withholding of food from and violent cell extractions of two other inmates. All six were subject to cell extractions over the course of two-three hours. Stanley was the fifth to be extracted, which was done by approximately half a dozen officers, who tasered and beat him before stripping him naked and keeping him restrained in a “hard cell” for 24 hours before being transferred to SCI-Mahanoy, where he would spent over a year in solitary confinement.
Read the whole piece: http://solitarywatch.com/tag/derrick-stanley/
Criminalizing Mental Illness: The Story of Adam Hall
When he was five years old, Adam Hall tried to burn down his family home outside Utica in upstate New York. Afterwards, he drew a picture of his family having a happy reunion in heaven. Adam’s mother, Carole Hall, knew the incident was a cry for help–and possibly an early suicide attempt–but she had no money to get Adam decent treatment. Through the rest of his childhood, the boy would be in and out of psychiatric institutions and group homes. Carole Hall says he was molested in two of them, but never effectively treated for what would eventually be diagnosed as a panoply of mental illnesses, including bipolar disorder.
What happened next is all too typical of what happens to young people with untreated psychiatric disabilities in New York and throughout the United States, in an era when psychiatric hospitals have closed and jails and prisons have become the default inpatient facilities for the nation’s mentally ill. Adam Hall ended up in prison for a relatively minor felony, then in solitary confinement. Before long, he would have years added to his sentence for offenses committed in prison–offenses once again stemming from his mental illness. If the pattern continues, he could end up spending decades behind bars.
Hall’s erratic and sometimes violent behavior got him in trouble with the law while he was still a teenager. By the time he was 22, in 2009, he had been convicted of assault after stealing a car and resisting arrest. Sentenced to three years, he joined the estimated 5,000 or more prisoners in New York State’s prison who are suffering from mental illness.
According to correspondence with Adam Hall and interviews with his mother, he bounced around the prison system for a while. And like many people with mental illness, he quickly got in trouble for breaking prison rules and was disciplined by being placed in lockdown. A 2003 report by New York’s Correctional Association found that while inmates diagnosed with mental illness made up 11 percent of the state’s overall prison population, they constituted nearly a quarter of the inmates in isolated confinement in the state’s Special Housing Units (SHUs). Many of the SHU prisoners the CA interviewed for the report were “actively psychotic, manic, paranoid or seemingly overmedicated.”
Eventually Hall landed in the Residential Mental Health Unit (RMHU) at Marcy State Correctional Facility. The RMHU is considered an alternative to long-term solitary confinement for difficult to control prisoners with mental illness. In these units, inmates are locked down for much of the day, but receive they a greater measure of out-of-cell time and mental health treatment. Recent litigation and 2008’s so-called SHU Exclusion Law were designed to reduce the population of mentally ill inmates in solitary, in part by increasing the number of RMHU beds. And considering the alternatives, it was probably the best placement available to Adam Hall within the prison system.
But Adam Hall remained unstable and suicidal, and in 2011 he attempted to kill himself the same way he had when he was five: he set fire to his RMHU cell. Prison officials had the option to treat the incident as a symptom of Hall’s mental illness, and address it through internal disciplinary and classification processes. Instead, they chose to send Hall’s case to a grand jury in Utica, where he was indicted for arson. Facing up to 25 years, Hall let his public defender enter a guilty plea to third-degree arson, and was sentenced to three to six additional years in prison.
Hall was shipped to another RMHU, this one in Attica, where he remains today. The Department of Corrections has charged him for damages to his cell totaling more than $4,000, which he cannot pay. Because of his debts to the prison, his mother says, any money sent to him to buy food and sundries from the canteen is requisitioned by the state. Adam says he has to sell his prison food to get enough to buy postage stamps.
Adam’s situation–spelled out in a rap sheet he sent to Solitary Watch along with health records provided by his mother–appears to fly in the face of the intent of the state’s hard-won SHU exclusion law. The law is designed to protect and help mentally ill inmates who face prison disciplinary proceedings. But it leaves prison officials the option to deal with behavior problems as crimes rather than as mental health issues, and ship them out to the local DA. (Some laws, in fact, appear to have been passed for this express purpose. It is now a felony in New York, for example, to throw feces at a prison officer–and offense that is committed almost exclusively by mentally ill inmates in the SHU, as well as those driven mad by solitary.)
“The part that bothers me,’’ said one attorney with experience representing prisoners, “is: why did DOCCS refer this particular case to the DA for outside prosecution? We don’t have a lot of info, but it appears that if he did have a discipline hearing for this incident it was dismissed, and it may have been dismissed because of his mental health. That they would refer for outside prosecution a case that does not even warrant internal discipline is quite troubling. However, I know of no law that applies. As far as I know, DOCCS simply has discretion to refer cases to local DAs.”
Another attorney who defends prisoners’ rights confirmed that “many disciplinary tickets are written for incidents that could be charged as crimes. If the DOCCS determines to handle it through the prison system, then there is no criminal case. DOCCS does call in the DA for some incidents–this is a discretionary decision.” Under the SHU exclusion law, if the incident is dealt with inside the prison system, “New York State regulations “require that mental health is taken into consideration for the purpose of mitigation and possible dismissal of infractions under certain circumstances. Those regulations are pretty much going to be in effect for anyone who is in an RMHU–meaning that for all disciplinary hearings arising out of incidents in an RMHU, it is likely that the regulations require mental health testimony at the hearing and consideration of mental illness in the disposition.” But if the case is kicked to the local DA–no such protections apply.
She continues: “If the incident is related to his mental illness, the lack of adequate treatment for that illness, and his inability to conform to the prison environment due to his illness–isn’t charging him with a crime the ultimate criminalization of the status of his having mental illness? What purpose does the criminal case serve if these are the facts? It isn’t deterrence or rehabilitation–it appears to solely be retribution–is that a sufficient purpose?”
When we described this case to a veteran former New York State corrections officer, he said people like Hall were often doomed from the moment they arrived in prison, if not before. They tended to rack up small felony charges, one after the other, so that they effectively served a life sentence, shut away out of sight in some form of solitary confinement.
In a letter written on April 9, 2012, Hall said: “It’s hard in here for me. I feel like killing myself most of the time like I said but end up cutting myself to relieve the pain or just do things that help me relieve pain. Cutting myself seems the best way but one day I’m going to really cut myself and not tell no one so I can bleed out. That’s how I am feeling nowadays. My life’s gone down the drain.”
The Buffalo office of Prisoner Legal Services of New York, the small but tenacious nonprofit that acts on behalf of inmates in state prisons, sent a letter to Attica asking the mental health unit to look into the situation. Hall wrote both his mother and us that he was making deeper cuts in his arms, cutting into the muscle, building up to a final suicide slitting. On the advice of Prisoner Legal Services, Carole Hall phoned the head of the mental health unit at Attica and told him about the threats. He told Hall he knew nothing about the case but assured her he would look into it.
Whether Hall is alive or dead, whether he has gotten better treatment or simply had his possessions removed and been thrown nearly naked into a suicide cell, his mother doesn’t know.Here's the rest of his story:
http://solitarywatch.com/2012/05/14/criminalizing-mental-illness-the-story-of-adam-hall/#more-5366
Want more? Visit http:// solitarywatch.com/
Saturday, September 08, 2012
Bahrain: Despite Sham Ruling the Revolution Continues
This article originally appeared in Prism Magazine.
___________________________________________________________________________________
By William Fisher
As a Bahraini appeals court upheld life sentences for seven “activists,” the tiny kingdom’s public relations apparatus appeared to be on steroids as it issued multiple press releases trumpeting positive developments toward ending a year of violent death and destruction.
The appeals for 13 other opposition figures were also denied. Most life sentences were upheld and a few sentences were reduced.
The near-simultaneous actions of the court and the government left some observers scratching their heads, seeking clarity for what they saw as the country’s schizophrenic policies. But human rights organizations were in no doubt: they condemned the harsh sentences and largely ignored the King’s claims of progress.
“The regime fears that releasing them means they will lead the revolution and gain more momentum,” Maryam Al-Khawaja told Prism. She is Acting President of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights and one of two activist daughters of one of the eight activists whose life term in prison was confirmed by the Appeals Court. Her father is leading rights activist Abdulhadi al-Khawaja, who staged a 110-day hunger strike earlier this year in protest.
The strategically important island nation, which is home to the US Fifth Fleet, is ruled by Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, a Sunni Muslim. The majority of the population, however, is Shia. The Shia majority charges that it is systematically discriminated against.
Bahrain has been gripped by conflict since the winter of 2011, after protesters took to the streets, inspired by uprisings that toppled the leaders of Egypt and Tunisia. At least 50 people have died in the conflict thus far.
In the Appeals Court, seven activists’ life sentences were upheld. The sentence of a prominent Sunni opposition activist was reduced to five years. A government prosecutor said many of those convicted were in “intelligence contact” with Iran and Hezbollah, and the official charges range from “violation of the Constitution, conspiring to overthrow the government, [and] espionage.” Seven of the defendants were tried in absentia.
In addition to the eight sentenced to life in prison, 12 others were given lesser prison terms, ranging from five to 15 years, with seven of them convicted in absentia.
Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui, Deputy Director of Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa Program, condemned the sentences. “The decision by Bahrain’s appeal court to uphold sentences against 13 opposition activists and prisoners of conscience is outrageous and the authorities must ensure it is overturned and the activists immediately and unconditionally released,” he said.
But the consensus is that release is not going to happen any time soon. Rather, a number of observers said the Bahraini authorities may want to try to use the imprisoned activists as bargaining chips to further their leverage in peace talks.
This week’s sentencing of the 20 is only one of the Kingdom’s many court actions that have drawn angry charges from the human rights community.
The group Physicians for Human Rights denounced the sentences and called on the government to set aside the verdicts against all the medics. “Eighteen of the accused medical professionals have alleged that Bahraini security forces tortured them while in detention,” the group said in a statement.
Maryam Alkhawaja, vice president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, and daughter of one of the men receiving life sentences, tweeted that the nine acquittals should not be seen as an achievement, because “they shouldn’t have been arrested and tortured to begin with.”
Some of the medics say they were treating people injured in last year’s protests against the government. Many were arrested in the hospital while treating patients.
Of the 11 whose convictions stand, two are at large, five will be released on time served and the other four can appeal their sentences again, the Bahrain Information Affairs Authority announced.
Meanwhile, the Bahraini government says it is proceeding with implementation of recommendations made by the independent commission facilitated and funded by the king. One of those recommendations was the establishment of an Ombudsman for the Ministry of Interior, which deals with most police matters.
The Ministry has announced that “the new office will conduct independent investigations and adopt an honest, neutral, professional and transparent approach to all investigations of police misconduct.”
The Office of Ombudsman will investigate complaints from civilians against public security force personnel; and is also in charge of overseeing the Internal Affairs Office, keeping records and evidence relating to the investigations and proposing disciplinary actions in appropriate cases.
The Ministry said it was committed to upholding the principles within the new Police Code of Conduct and know that this is an important step in beginning to build trust and mutual respect between the community and the police.”
In another development announced by the government, three human rights organizations will address Family Law for Shiite Women at the UN’s Universal Periodic Review (UPR) on September 19, headed by Faisal Fulad. The groups will attend the event in Geneva in which the Government of Bahrain will provide their responses on 176 recommendations, including the one concerning the Jaffari(Shi’ite) Court’s ruling on family law.
Amending the family law to cover Shiite women has been cited by HRH Princess Sabeeka bint Ibrahim Al Khalifa as a necessity for the protection of Bahraini families. MPs of the Bahrain Bloc have made the proposed family law for Shiites their top priority for when they resume their sessions in October.
Meanwhile, arrests and violence continue. But on the whole only human rights organizations and large international bodies like the United Nations are raising their voices in full throated opposition.
For example, ANHRI (Arabic Network for Human Rights Information) is condemning renewal of the imprisonment of the Journalist and blogger Ahmed El-Radah on charges of assembling and breach of public security.
The public prosecution renewed the imprisonment of the journalist and the blogger Ahmed El-Radah for another 15 days due to new charges by Bahraini authorities. These include “initiation of fire in execution of terroristic purposes and having combustible materials (Molotov) and assembling by the intention of breaching the public security through using violence.”
ANHRI charged that the renewal of Ahmed El-Radah’s imprisonment of “proves that the statement of the king of the country that no journalist will be imprisoned because of his opinion, is deemed to be ink on a paper.”
While encouraging royal accommodation leading to peaceful resolution of the conflict, the Bahraini Government’s actions have “put US foreign policy makers in an awkward position,” according to Abolghasem Bayyenat, an independent political analyst and a current Ph.D candidate of political science at Syracuse University .
Writing in Foreign Policy Journal, he said:
“The US government has largely lent its diplomatic weight to the Saudi regime in stifling popular uprising in Bahrain for fear that any democratic transformation in that country would work in Iran’s advantage, thus undermining its own interests in the Persian Gulf region.”
He added, “This posture has further undermined the image of the US before the Middle Eastern public due to its perceived double standards towards regional political developments, and it is likely to work to the detriment of US strategic interests in the region in the long run.”
And, last month, a group of independent United Nations experts voiced serious concerns about the “campaign of persecution” by the Bahraini authorities against those working to promote human rights in the country, and called for the prompt release of a prominent human rights defender recently sentenced to three years imprisonment.
“It is time for the Bahraini authorities to comply with the rights to peaceful assembly and expression and immediately release those arbitrarily detained for exercising their legitimate freedoms,” the experts said in a news release issued by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights
___________________________________________________________________________________
By William Fisher
As a Bahraini appeals court upheld life sentences for seven “activists,” the tiny kingdom’s public relations apparatus appeared to be on steroids as it issued multiple press releases trumpeting positive developments toward ending a year of violent death and destruction.
The appeals for 13 other opposition figures were also denied. Most life sentences were upheld and a few sentences were reduced.
The near-simultaneous actions of the court and the government left some observers scratching their heads, seeking clarity for what they saw as the country’s schizophrenic policies. But human rights organizations were in no doubt: they condemned the harsh sentences and largely ignored the King’s claims of progress.
“The regime fears that releasing them means they will lead the revolution and gain more momentum,” Maryam Al-Khawaja told Prism. She is Acting President of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights and one of two activist daughters of one of the eight activists whose life term in prison was confirmed by the Appeals Court. Her father is leading rights activist Abdulhadi al-Khawaja, who staged a 110-day hunger strike earlier this year in protest.
The strategically important island nation, which is home to the US Fifth Fleet, is ruled by Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, a Sunni Muslim. The majority of the population, however, is Shia. The Shia majority charges that it is systematically discriminated against.
Bahrain has been gripped by conflict since the winter of 2011, after protesters took to the streets, inspired by uprisings that toppled the leaders of Egypt and Tunisia. At least 50 people have died in the conflict thus far.
In the Appeals Court, seven activists’ life sentences were upheld. The sentence of a prominent Sunni opposition activist was reduced to five years. A government prosecutor said many of those convicted were in “intelligence contact” with Iran and Hezbollah, and the official charges range from “violation of the Constitution, conspiring to overthrow the government, [and] espionage.” Seven of the defendants were tried in absentia.
In addition to the eight sentenced to life in prison, 12 others were given lesser prison terms, ranging from five to 15 years, with seven of them convicted in absentia.
Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui, Deputy Director of Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa Program, condemned the sentences. “The decision by Bahrain’s appeal court to uphold sentences against 13 opposition activists and prisoners of conscience is outrageous and the authorities must ensure it is overturned and the activists immediately and unconditionally released,” he said.
But the consensus is that release is not going to happen any time soon. Rather, a number of observers said the Bahraini authorities may want to try to use the imprisoned activists as bargaining chips to further their leverage in peace talks.
This week’s sentencing of the 20 is only one of the Kingdom’s many court actions that have drawn angry charges from the human rights community.
The group Physicians for Human Rights denounced the sentences and called on the government to set aside the verdicts against all the medics. “Eighteen of the accused medical professionals have alleged that Bahraini security forces tortured them while in detention,” the group said in a statement.
Maryam Alkhawaja, vice president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, and daughter of one of the men receiving life sentences, tweeted that the nine acquittals should not be seen as an achievement, because “they shouldn’t have been arrested and tortured to begin with.”
Some of the medics say they were treating people injured in last year’s protests against the government. Many were arrested in the hospital while treating patients.
Of the 11 whose convictions stand, two are at large, five will be released on time served and the other four can appeal their sentences again, the Bahrain Information Affairs Authority announced.
Meanwhile, the Bahraini government says it is proceeding with implementation of recommendations made by the independent commission facilitated and funded by the king. One of those recommendations was the establishment of an Ombudsman for the Ministry of Interior, which deals with most police matters.
The Ministry has announced that “the new office will conduct independent investigations and adopt an honest, neutral, professional and transparent approach to all investigations of police misconduct.”
The Office of Ombudsman will investigate complaints from civilians against public security force personnel; and is also in charge of overseeing the Internal Affairs Office, keeping records and evidence relating to the investigations and proposing disciplinary actions in appropriate cases.
The Ministry said it was committed to upholding the principles within the new Police Code of Conduct and know that this is an important step in beginning to build trust and mutual respect between the community and the police.”
In another development announced by the government, three human rights organizations will address Family Law for Shiite Women at the UN’s Universal Periodic Review (UPR) on September 19, headed by Faisal Fulad. The groups will attend the event in Geneva in which the Government of Bahrain will provide their responses on 176 recommendations, including the one concerning the Jaffari(Shi’ite) Court’s ruling on family law.
Amending the family law to cover Shiite women has been cited by HRH Princess Sabeeka bint Ibrahim Al Khalifa as a necessity for the protection of Bahraini families. MPs of the Bahrain Bloc have made the proposed family law for Shiites their top priority for when they resume their sessions in October.
Meanwhile, arrests and violence continue. But on the whole only human rights organizations and large international bodies like the United Nations are raising their voices in full throated opposition.
For example, ANHRI (Arabic Network for Human Rights Information) is condemning renewal of the imprisonment of the Journalist and blogger Ahmed El-Radah on charges of assembling and breach of public security.
The public prosecution renewed the imprisonment of the journalist and the blogger Ahmed El-Radah for another 15 days due to new charges by Bahraini authorities. These include “initiation of fire in execution of terroristic purposes and having combustible materials (Molotov) and assembling by the intention of breaching the public security through using violence.”
ANHRI charged that the renewal of Ahmed El-Radah’s imprisonment of “proves that the statement of the king of the country that no journalist will be imprisoned because of his opinion, is deemed to be ink on a paper.”
While encouraging royal accommodation leading to peaceful resolution of the conflict, the Bahraini Government’s actions have “put US foreign policy makers in an awkward position,” according to Abolghasem Bayyenat, an independent political analyst and a current Ph.D candidate of political science at Syracuse University .
Writing in Foreign Policy Journal, he said:
“The US government has largely lent its diplomatic weight to the Saudi regime in stifling popular uprising in Bahrain for fear that any democratic transformation in that country would work in Iran’s advantage, thus undermining its own interests in the Persian Gulf region.”
He added, “This posture has further undermined the image of the US before the Middle Eastern public due to its perceived double standards towards regional political developments, and it is likely to work to the detriment of US strategic interests in the region in the long run.”
And, last month, a group of independent United Nations experts voiced serious concerns about the “campaign of persecution” by the Bahraini authorities against those working to promote human rights in the country, and called for the prompt release of a prominent human rights defender recently sentenced to three years imprisonment.
“It is time for the Bahraini authorities to comply with the rights to peaceful assembly and expression and immediately release those arbitrarily detained for exercising their legitimate freedoms,” the experts said in a news release issued by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights
Back to the Future With the GOP
By William Fisher
When my friend Brian Foley sent me a copy of the Republican Party 1956 Platform, I had to ask him whether he was acting as a law professor (which he is) or as a stand-up comic and author of a very funny book (which he also is).
“You read it. And then you decide,” he told me. “But read it.”
OK, with such a challenge how could I refuse?
Would the platform bring me visions of Dickens’ Scrooge? Or would it be more like Florence Nightingale?
Only time would tell, so I jumped in feet first.
The GOP Platform that year was 49 pages long. I couldn’t possibly critique it all. So I decided to look at a few 1956 issues that are still issues today, and one or two issues today that seem to have been hidden in plain sight back then. That, plus stuff that just jumped off the page into my computer!
Maybe a bit of context would help the reader (maybe the writer as well). 1956 was the year our President, Dwight David Eisenhower – Ike – was running for his second term. His first term is sometimes described as “quiet” – decompressing from World War Two. But no sooner that war ended, we began the combat of the Cold War, which was expensive and also shaped the national psyche for generations to come. There was the Korean War, to which an “honorable” peace had come. There were what we then called “The Communist Chinese” – once brave allies in the hot war, now being denied by the US a seat at the UN security Council. There were, of course, the expected labor troubles, Taft-Hartley and such, and the usual ups and downs of the capital markets. The biggest worry people seemed to have back then was inflation But, by and large, these were years of pretty good prosperity for many people and years of embarrassing wealth for the very few – and, on many critical issues, a parade of ostriches whistling past the graveyard (how’s that for a mixed-up metaphor?).
So now I began my digging into the Platform and the first thing that jumped off the very first page was this: Our great President Dwight D. Eisenhower has counseled us further: "In all those things which deal with people, be liberal, be human. In all those things which deal with people's money, or their economy, or their form of government, be conservative."
Could you find a paragraph like that in today”s GOP platform? I doubt it.
Or this one: “We are proud of and shall continue our far-reaching and sound advances in matters of basic human needs—expansion of social security—broadened coverage in unemployment insurance —improved housing—and better health protection for all our people. We are determined that our government remain warmly responsive to the urgent social and economic problems of our people.”
Then came this bit of triumphalist rhetoric: “We have balanced the budget. We believe and will continue to prove that thrift, prudence and a sensible respect for living within income applies as surely to the management of our Government's budget as it does to the family budget.”
Funny, didn’t we believe that Bill Clinton was the first president in decades to balance the federal budget?
What the Grand Old Party really meant to say was that Ike became the first Republican in 40 years to balance a budget.
(Dwight Eisenhower was last Republican President to preside over a balanced budget. He had a balanced budget in 1956 and 1957. Since then, there have been two presidents to preside over balanced budgets, LBJ in 1969 and Clinton in 1998 through 2001. During the last 40 years there have been five budget surpluses, all five were under Democratic Presidents: 1969, 1998, 1999, 2000, and 2001.)
Then came a familiar meme: “We hold that the major world issue today is whether Government shall be the servant or the master of men. We hold that the Bill of Rights is the sacred foundation of personal liberty. That men are created equal needs no affirmation, but they must have equality of opportunity and protection of their civil rights under the law.”
Sure, we’re familiar with that clarion call for small government. Ike used it. Reagan patented it – “government is the problem.” Bush mouthed the words and grew the government until it collapsed.
This year, both Republicans and Democrats are trying to frame their conventions and campaigns as “choices for the voter” – government should get out of the way or government should provide a strong safety net for all Americans.
We’re also all-too-familiar with other GOP mantras, which they apparently think never wear out and need replacing. For example, the 1956 Platform pledges: “
“Gradual reduction of the national debt; further reductions in taxes with particular consideration for low and middle income families; initiation of a sound policy of tax reductions which will encourage small independent businesses to modernize and progress; continual study of additional ways to correct inequities in the effect of various taxes.”
When my friend Brian Foley sent me a copy of the Republican Party 1956 Platform, I had to ask him whether he was acting as a law professor (which he is) or as a stand-up comic and author of a very funny book (which he also is).
“You read it. And then you decide,” he told me. “But read it.”
OK, with such a challenge how could I refuse?
Would the platform bring me visions of Dickens’ Scrooge? Or would it be more like Florence Nightingale?
Only time would tell, so I jumped in feet first.
The GOP Platform that year was 49 pages long. I couldn’t possibly critique it all. So I decided to look at a few 1956 issues that are still issues today, and one or two issues today that seem to have been hidden in plain sight back then. That, plus stuff that just jumped off the page into my computer!
Maybe a bit of context would help the reader (maybe the writer as well). 1956 was the year our President, Dwight David Eisenhower – Ike – was running for his second term. His first term is sometimes described as “quiet” – decompressing from World War Two. But no sooner that war ended, we began the combat of the Cold War, which was expensive and also shaped the national psyche for generations to come. There was the Korean War, to which an “honorable” peace had come. There were what we then called “The Communist Chinese” – once brave allies in the hot war, now being denied by the US a seat at the UN security Council. There were, of course, the expected labor troubles, Taft-Hartley and such, and the usual ups and downs of the capital markets. The biggest worry people seemed to have back then was inflation But, by and large, these were years of pretty good prosperity for many people and years of embarrassing wealth for the very few – and, on many critical issues, a parade of ostriches whistling past the graveyard (how’s that for a mixed-up metaphor?).
So now I began my digging into the Platform and the first thing that jumped off the very first page was this: Our great President Dwight D. Eisenhower has counseled us further: "In all those things which deal with people, be liberal, be human. In all those things which deal with people's money, or their economy, or their form of government, be conservative."
Could you find a paragraph like that in today”s GOP platform? I doubt it.
Or this one: “We are proud of and shall continue our far-reaching and sound advances in matters of basic human needs—expansion of social security—broadened coverage in unemployment insurance —improved housing—and better health protection for all our people. We are determined that our government remain warmly responsive to the urgent social and economic problems of our people.”
Then came this bit of triumphalist rhetoric: “We have balanced the budget. We believe and will continue to prove that thrift, prudence and a sensible respect for living within income applies as surely to the management of our Government's budget as it does to the family budget.”
Funny, didn’t we believe that Bill Clinton was the first president in decades to balance the federal budget?
What the Grand Old Party really meant to say was that Ike became the first Republican in 40 years to balance a budget.
(Dwight Eisenhower was last Republican President to preside over a balanced budget. He had a balanced budget in 1956 and 1957. Since then, there have been two presidents to preside over balanced budgets, LBJ in 1969 and Clinton in 1998 through 2001. During the last 40 years there have been five budget surpluses, all five were under Democratic Presidents: 1969, 1998, 1999, 2000, and 2001.)
Then came a familiar meme: “We hold that the major world issue today is whether Government shall be the servant or the master of men. We hold that the Bill of Rights is the sacred foundation of personal liberty. That men are created equal needs no affirmation, but they must have equality of opportunity and protection of their civil rights under the law.”
Sure, we’re familiar with that clarion call for small government. Ike used it. Reagan patented it – “government is the problem.” Bush mouthed the words and grew the government until it collapsed.
This year, both Republicans and Democrats are trying to frame their conventions and campaigns as “choices for the voter” – government should get out of the way or government should provide a strong safety net for all Americans.
We’re also all-too-familiar with other GOP mantras, which they apparently think never wear out and need replacing. For example, the 1956 Platform pledges: “
“Gradual reduction of the national debt; further reductions in taxes with particular consideration for low and middle income families; initiation of a sound policy of tax reductions which will encourage small independent businesses to modernize and progress; continual study of additional ways to correct inequities in the effect of various taxes.”
Holder: Torture Investigation Adieu
The article below By William Fisher originally appeared in the pages of Prism Magazine.
When President Obama said of the issue of the CIA torturing our prisoners that he’d rather go forward than backward, many of us saw this decision coming. Others were hopeful that justice would rise above politics. We wanted those who designed, administered and implemented torture to be held accountable in the only way that matters in our rule-of-law country.
We lost.
“The End,” as described by Scott Horton in Harper’s Magazine:
“Mr. Holder had already ruled out any charges related to the use of waterboarding and other methods that most human rights experts consider to be torture. His announcement closes a contentious three-year investigation by the Justice Department and brings to an end years of dispute over whether line intelligence or military personnel or their superiors would be held accountable for the abuse of prisoners in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The closing of the two cases means that the Obama administration’s limited effort to scrutinize the counterterrorism programs carried out under President George W. Bush has come to an end.”
What this decision means is that, unless it is undone at some point, the United States will hold no one accountable for the stain of shame that will forever more blemish the reputation of the country that has held itself out as the gold standard for justice under law. What it means is that we will face the same kinds of problems when the next war rolls around.
I’m writing this over Labor Day weekend, but I’m far from the only one who’s livid over this decision.
One of Prism’s sources struck a philosophical tone. He is Col. Morris Davis (USAF Ret.) He was appointed to serve as the third Chief Prosecutor in the Guantanamo military commissions but resigned as a protest to the military commissions. He retired from active duty in October 2008, and now teaches law. Here’s what he told us:
“The decision was disappointing, but frankly it came as no surprise. We’re always slow to hold up the mirror to see the warts that detract from our self-image as the most exceptional people on the planet. Slavery, Jim Crow laws, internment of Japanese-Americans, forced sterilization of those labeled ‘defective’, gender discrimination: it’s often many, many years before we’re able to acknowledge a wrong. In the meantime, those who turned us into a torture state are held up as heroes and rewarded – they write books and appear on television, and they hold top positions on government boards, in major corporations, in academia, and even the federal judiciary – while most of us who spoke out against torture are persecuted and, in some cases, prosecuted.”
He added, “It’s a bizarre twist that in America talking about torture, but not committing torture, can get you sent to prison. It’s easy to get discouraged, and the current decision to keep our head buried in the sand awhile longer adds to the discouragement, but I reminded myself every day what Winston Churchill said in 1941: ‘Never, never, never give in.’ We have to keep lifting up the mirror until people look and see the ugly reflection.”
Anger more than disappointment is evident in the comment of Jameel Jaffer, ACLU deputy legal director, who told Prism, “That the Justice Department will hold no one accountable for the killing of prisoners in CIA custody is nothing short of a scandal. The Justice Department has declined to bring charges against the officials who authorized torture, the lawyers who sought to legitimate it, and the interrogators who used it. It has successfully shut down every legal suit meant to hold officials civilly liable.”
He added, “Continuing impunity threatens to undermine the universally recognized prohibition on torture and other abusive treatment and sends the dangerous signal to government officials that there will be no consequences for their use of torture and other cruelty. Today’s decision not to file charges against individuals who tortured prisoners to death is yet another entry in what is already a shameful record.”
Continuing impunity threatens to undermine the universally recognized prohibition on torture and other abusive treatment and sends the dangerous signal to government officials that there will be no consequences for their use of torture and other cruelty.
And this was the view expressed in the Huffington Post by Daphne Eviatar, senior counsel at Human Rights First:
“In his statement yesterday, [Attorney General] Holder said he’d declined to prosecute anyone in the CIA ‘because the admissible evidence would not be sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction beyond a reasonable doubt’. He didn’t explain what kind of evidence he’d judged not ‘admissible’. But certainly all CIA agents who’d participated in or witnessed the abuse of the two detainees whose deaths were being investigated would have similarly ‘had access to classified intelligence sources and methods’ that the government doesn’t want revealed.”
Eviatar noted that, in a 2006 report, Human Rights First “documented that up to 12 men had been tortured to death in U.S. custody since 2002. Reviewing documents we’ve received more recently through a Freedom of Information Act request to the government, it now appears that up to 19 of 247 deaths involved torture. In only six of those cases was anyone held criminally liable. According to military documents, many more detainees — we’ve counted 72 so far — are believed to have been murdered. While in some cases charges were brought, in many they were dropped or the perpetrators received only administrative sanctions.”
Then she reminded us that CIA Director “David Petraeus sent a statement to CIA employees assuring them that the matter has been put to rest. ‘As intelligence officers, our inclination, of course, is to look ahead to the challenges of the future rather than backwards at those of the past’.
She concluded with: “That may be the CIA’s inclination, but the agency is still obligated to investigate when its agents break the law. And surely the Justice Department has no excuse. Its role is always to investigate what happened in the past and to hold those responsible for crimes accountable. When it comes to the treatment of detainees in U.S. custody, many of whom were clearly tortured to death, all relevant branches of the U.S. government have fallen down on the job.”
Chip Pitts, former CEO of Amnesty USA and now a lecturer at Stanford and Oxford, weighed in with this:
“When those in power break the rules merely because they can, it inspires mistrust and derision instead of trust and confidence. The reverberations from this nauseating decision extend much farther than the Obama administration realizes, because (contrary to the arguments of its defenders) it cavalierly ignores the rule of law just as the Bush administration did – and on a subject (torture) and an area (legally required accountability) of universal import.”
Such “hypocritical and politically opportunistic decisions have systemic implications. Those systemic implications cannot be avoided or cloaked by the administration’s ludicrous claims of insufficient evidence in these well-documented extreme cases (in which not even one person has been held accountable for torture), or by this obviously self-interested precedent established in hopes of avoiding the administration’s own future accountability for assassination and other illegal acts.
Pitts added, “All of this is exquisitely ironic in light of the administration’s aggressive pursuit of the whistleblowers who’ve sought to shed light on such crimes. The implications for US foreign policy and for international law generally could not be clearer: Our country’s actions will be less effective and our calls for legal compliance more ridiculed, than before.”
And he concluded: “The trust reposed in those in power and in our legal and other institutions erodes further, whether from the perspective of those at home or abroad.
And greater play is given not only to torturers but more generally to similarly horrendous and illegal ongoing and future policies and to the coarse, violent, and uncivilized actions currently continuing to lead our nation in a downward spiral of dramatic relative decline.”
So there you have it. It’s over. As Glenn Greenwald wrote in The Guardian, “The Obama administration’s aggressive, full-scale whitewashing of the ‘war on terror’ crimes committed by Bush officials is now complete. Thursday, Attorney General Eric Holder announced the closing without charges of the only two cases under investigation relating to the US torture program: one that resulted in the 2002 death of an Afghan detainee at a secret CIA prison near Kabul, and the other the 2003 death of an Iraqi citizen while in CIA custody at Abu Ghraib. This decision, says the New York Times Friday, “eliminat[es] the last possibility that any criminal charges will be brought as a result of the brutal interrogations carried out by the CIA”.
This news was consigned to the Friday afternoon dump, and distributed during the Republican National Convention, so as to attract minimal media attention. By and large, our stenographic press corps obliged; few major publications carried this bombshell.
Romney was their dish of the day.
Well, the Romneys of the world will come and go. But the historic nature of this day – September 1st, 2012 — will be with us forever.
But perhaps there is one more slender chance left. The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) reminds us:
“Once again, the United States has shown it is committed to absolving itself of any responsibility for its crimes over the past decade. Today’s announcement belies U.S. claims that it can be trusted to hold accountable Americans who have perpetrated torture and other human rights abuses, and underscores the need for independent investigations elsewhere, such as the investigation underway in Spain, to continue. Impunity does not always cross borders.”
Morsi Between Censorship and Freedom of the Press
The article below originally appeared in the pages of Prism Magazine.
By William Fisher
Ten years ago, when I retired from my work with USAID and the US State Department, I reverted to my first love – journalism.
My plan was modest: I would draw on my experience in the Middle East and elsewhere to report on US reactions to developments in the region, particularly in Egypt, which had been my last posting, I had no idea how labor-intensive this work would become. I had no idea that an Arab Spring was in the offing. Lamentably, I expected to be writing pretty depressing pieces about the worst excesses of the Mubarak regime – the crony capitalism, the highly partisan justice system, the torture in prison, the imposition of the so-called emergency laws, the faux elections, and the absence of any semblance of free speech and free expression.
These were the same ugly deficits I experienced during my years in Egypt while trying to help the country’s trade sector to compete effectively for world markets and begin to realize the promise of globalization.
I remember that my first articles were submitted to the Middle East Times. When I received copies of that paper from the publisher, I didn’t know whether to be enraged or amused. There were large sections of the front page where nothing was printed. I learned later that one of those blanks was what I’d written. Well, at least I had the satisfaction of knowing that the editor intended to put my work on his front page.
Now what I had written was totally non-controversial. It was clear that it was chopped simply because the government censors didn’t understand it.
An inauspicious beginning, to be sure. But I decided there was nothing to gain from being enraged and so I settled for being amused.
Then came The Arab Spring, as the media named it. The promise was that everything would be different. The people would write a new constitution and be allowed to vote freely for multiple candidates for the first time in centuries. There would be jobs for all the college graduates now driving taxies. There would be trials and convictions and incarcerations for the members of the Mubarak inner circle who had become wealthy from the favors heaped on them by the supreme dictator. That inner circle included the military, which had effectively ruled the country since the Tahir Square revolution of January 25, 2011.
But now, eleven months after the Revolution, too many aspects of current Egypt are slipping back into standard Mubarak behavior.
One of these is the heavy-handed censorship of print and electronic media actually taking place in real time – almost as if there had never been a Revolution.
For example:
The Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI ) Condemned the Monitoring and Confiscation Policy through Stopping the Opinion Articles in the National Newspapers
ANHRI denounced the attack on the freedom of opinion and speech, which represented in the stopping of publishing of several articles in the national newspapers. The organization said, “The attack reached its climax when ‘Al-Akhbar’ stopped publishing the articles of the writer and the novelist Ibrahim Abdulmeged, which used to be published on every Thursday morning.
The writer said, “The decision of stopping my articles is consistent with the new editing policy launched by the new editor in chief, “Mohamed Hasan El-Bana” the writer, who was appointed by the Shura Council.
“Abdelmeeged” indicated that the policy of the new editor in chief is to stop dealing with the writers who criticize the Muslim Brotherhood Group. He quoted the newspaper’s officials saying that “all the opinion articles, for whom outside of the newspaper, will be stopped.”
He added “it is regretful to say that the editors in chief appointed by the National Democratic party were more professionals”.
In the same context, “Medhat El-Adl” said that he stopped writing to Al-Akhbar after the clear interference in his articles, “due to the editing policy changed in the favor of the Islamic trend.”
The news spread that the stopping of “Free Opinion Page” in “Al-Akhbar” Newspaper”, which is a page full with several Egyptian writers and creators as “Mohamod El-Werdani”, “Medhat El-Adl” and “Abdelmeeged”.
“Al-Qaeed” said this matter is conducted because the writings that criticizes the Muslim brotherhood policies, as well as accusing the editors-in chief that he tends to them and he won’t publish opinions against the MB in the newspaper.
Last week “Al-Akhbar” banned the publishing of an article to the big writer “Ableeah El-rewaini” as she described the appointing of the new editor in chief as “Brotherization” of the newspapers. The publishing officials asked her to delete the expression of “Brotherization”, but she refused so the article was banned.
“Al-Ahram” took the same steps through banning the publishing of the ex-leader in MB article, who used to criticizes them in his articles.
It is also stopped the publishing of “A hundred days of the president’s promises” by the decision of the new editor in chief, Abdulnasser Salama, without reasons. The page aimed to monitor the president to fulfill his promises of the first hundred days of his rule.
ANHRI said it resents this “severe attack targeted the freedom of speech and opinion.” It warned of “getting back to the practices of the old regime which aim to silence the mouths and harass the freedom of journalism which are the important guarantee to a good political life.”
ANHRI said, “We fear that the newspapers’ new policy aims to ban criticisms of the Muslim brotherhood group in the light of the control, of Shura Council of the MB’s majority, on the process of appointing the leaders of these newspapers. ANHRI calls for the necessity of changing the ownership of these newspapers and liberating it from the government as well as taking the procedures to fix the media to guarantee creating an independent, professional and credible media.
The reaction of Egypt’s human rights community was predictable and expected. It was also surprising that it was triggered so soon after the Revolution under the steel-soled boots of the military-led government.
For example, in a statement, the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights (EOHR) “expressed its most sincere concern at the continued use of censorship as a State policy in dealing with media and journalism professionals.”
EOHR charged that “the most recent implementation of this stifling practice includes the State order to confiscate a series of publications by the ‘El Dostor’ Newspaper that were scheduled for publication on Saturday, 11th of August, 2012. This action was based on the investigations carried out by the Prosecutor General within the context of the reports submitted to the Prosecutor General’s Office. The ‘El Dostor’ Newspaper was charged with the alleged incitement of sectarian sedition, the insult of the President, and the incitement of social chaos.”
Several individuals were noted to have submitted formal complaints to the Publishing Crime Department within the Ministry of Interior, accusing the “El Dostor” Newspaper, and the Newspaper’s Chairman, Reda Edward and Editor-in-Chief Islam Afifi, of slandering the President and inciting sectarian sedition in several consecutive issues.
Could there be a move torn more directly from the Mubarak playbook?
Furthermore, the issued complaints also held that “El Dostor’s” headlines were a principle cause to the sectarian clashes of Dahshour, and subsequently requested that appropriate legal action be taken against the Chairman of the Newspaper, as well as the Editor-in-Chief. Authorities called for the appearance of Editor-in-Chief Islam Afifi before the Prosecutor General for questioning in light of the submitted complaints and the investigation’s findings.
ANHRI is severely annoyed of the increasing of the Monitoring and confiscation policy imposed on the Egyptian newspapers. Algomhuria stopped a page deal with the freedom of speech and confiscation in Egypt, which is the culture page. El-Mosawr Magazine stopped publishing the rest of the series of the book "returning from the Brotherhood's paradise". In the same time, an edition of El-Shab newspaper was confiscated, which was prepared to be distributing due to an article of the Egyptian Intelligence body.
The group said, “This is the most violent attack on the Egyptian newspapers and media after the 25th revolution and after Dr. Morsi became the president, such attacks contradicted with the president Morsi speech of respecting the freedom of speech as a guarantee to the civil state.”
ANHRI said, “The attempts to justify the confiscation, monitoring and the criminal prosecution bring the journalists back to square zero and threatens of an era free from criticizing and fears of jail or oppression due to a word and an opinion".
It also declared “the absence of the political will to fix the Egyptian media, which suffers from a long decades of un-professionality and the lack of impartiality and was the reason of several crimes against the revolution and the revolutionaries, such as incitement against the Egyptian Christians which has become known as ‘Maspero’.
But President Morsi found himself under extreme public pressure from the journalists. In what appeared to be a rush by President Morsi to create distance between his actions and the press, Morsi backed off the decree that jailed journalist Islam Afifi, a newsletter editor. The Associated Press reported that Morsi “intervened to release a journalist jailed over accusations of insulting him.” The AP reported that Morsi issued a law for the first time since he assumed legislative powers earlier this month.
President Morsi's ban on detention for journalists accused of publishing-related offenses takes precedence over a court decision that kept the editor in prison pending trial this month. It was the first decree Morsi enacted since taking office.
The court's decision and case against Afifi, accused of slandering the president and undermining public interest, has caused uproar in Egypt among journalists and intellectuals, with dozens holding a protest Thursday night in Cairo demanding the protection of free speech.
It seems clear at this point that Morsi is hearing Egypt’s journalists. They need to be able to write whatever seems true to them. Much of this prose is not going to cause Morsi to break into a smile. He will be very angry with much of it.
But this is one of the prices that has to be paid by those who would govern a multi-factional Egypt. Democracy is messy. Dictatorship is far more orderly and predictable. But Tahrir Square proved that Egyptians favor democracy over order and predictability.
Which means that, over time, Mr. Morsi will learn to live with his critics – he will not throw them in jail. Just as hopefully, Egypt will continue to develop a mature, independent, responsible, fact-based press capable of criticizing its Government without committing treason.
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