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http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100104/stevens According to this excellent article in the "Nation" magazine, written by Jacqueline Stevens, the federal agency ICE is running a chain of secret prisons inside the borders of the United States. What better way to keep relatives, friends, and lawyers, in the dark about the status of their disappeared clients or significant others? It'is like a police bureaucrat's wet dream. Now you see them, now you don't. It's a perfect set up for keeping people with ambiguous legal status locked up until their cases can be resolved, but it also sets the scene for abuse, torture, and possibly worse. Plus, it violates certain international agreements on human rights to which the US government is a signatory, allowing the Obama administration to treat immigrants in a worse manner than the current treatment meted out to terror suspects in Guantanamo. The article gives a detailed synchronic account of what could best be described as an office park gulag, but it fails to provide a diachronic account of its antecedents. As I read this expose, it reminded me of similar treatment I had experienced many years ago as an organizer for CISPES. More than twenty years ago, I was one of hundreds who were arrested in a blockade of the Federal Building in NYC to protest the US war in El Salvador, but that day only two of us were detained over night. To keep our lawyers in the dark as to our whereabouts, we were shackled to other inmates and shuttled from prison to prison in vans in the middle of the night, and transferred from holding cell to holding cell. We were neither fed nor were we allowed to sleep. We found space on the floor of the group temporary cell, under the harsh lights which were kept on 24 hours a day. This went on for only 36 hours or so, until our lawyers located us and secured our release. In the meantime, our FBI handlers tormented us psychologically, with sleep deprivation and worse. This is the exact same modus operandi used by ICE in their gulag system to keep secret the status and location of detained immigrants from people who are wondering why in the hell they were disappeared in the first place. And we also find the same type of psychological and physical torture. But while we were in its grips for only 36 hours, the people currently caught up in this hell hole are being held for weeks, sometimes months. The same treatment we received has now become an institutionalized, off the books system. Kind of a paradox, I know, but that's the best way I can describe it. In the 1980's, we were on the receiving end of a large scale COINTELPRO-type operation created by Reagan and enacted by the FBI. For more than five years, the FBI, the CIA, and the police, surveilled, interviewed and investigated more than 100,000 people in 59 cities. But as was the case for CISPES and Salvadorans in the 1980's, so it is the case today. Our Latino and Latina comrades suffered much more than we ever did. Sure, I had my apartment broken into, and did that little stint in jail, but I was never deported back to El Salvador, tortured, and shot. The FBI would inform the Salvadoran National Guard when certain Salvadorans would be arriving at the airport in San Salvador. One wonders if something similar is occurring to immigrants who are being processed and deported through this gulag system today. Greg McDonald ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
