And now:Ish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: Prisons as Political Suppression/Thought Police http://www.icdc.com/~paulwolf/copap8.htm Other examples are more grim. Leonard Peltier, Geronimo Pratt, the New York 3 and many other victims of earlier COINTELPRO operations remain in prison despite overwhelming evidence that they were railroaded into their respective cells. 82 And additional casualties continue to accrue. For instance, there is Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former BPP member in Philadelphia, convicted and sentenced to death on July 3, 1982, ostensibly for having killed a cop, despite eyewitnesses having identified an entirely different individual as the assailant. On March 6,1989, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court denied Abu-Jamal's last possible appeal prior to the electric chair even while acknowledging that "genuine doubt" exists as to the killer's identity. 83 Indeed, use of the prison system for purposes of political neutralization appears to have become the preferred mode for the FBI and associated police agencies by the end of the 1980s. At present, the U.S. enjoys the dubious distinction of having a greater proportion of its population incarcerated than any western industrialized country. Its imprisonment just of its Euroamerican citizens is tied - at 114 per 100,000 - with Austria for first place. Its rate of imprisonment of African-Americans - 713 per 100,000 - is, however much higher: 25 times the Netherlands' 28 per 100,00 rate of incarcerating its citizenry. 84 The proportion of the black population presently imprisoned in the U.S. is almost exactly double that in South Africa. 85 More, both federal and state policy makers have lately made no secret of their intention to double the number of available prison beds during the coming decade, "privatize" an additional large number of penal facilities, and to develop extensive application of .electronic incarceration techniques" which will require the building of no new physical structures. Following these projections, even the most conservative arithmetic makes it plain the U.S. elite is fully prepared to triple or even quadruple the already burgeoning North American prison population. At the point such plans are consummated, the U.S. citizenry will have become - barring unforeseen eventualities elsewhere - the most imprisoned people on the face of the earth. 86 While such a trend represents an exercise in social engineering going well beyond any conceivable definition of "counterintelligence" per se, it obviously affords modern COINTELPRO operatives a perfect cover under which to conduct their business; hence, the increasing emphasis upon criminalizing political dissidents as "terrorists" and "racketeers" throughout the 1980s. Of late, this process of criminalization has been accelerated considerably under the rubric of a national "war on drugs," headed up by such veteran COINTELPRO specialists as Richard W. Held in San Francisco. Little is said about the fact that the "black street gangs" now decried by the FBI as sources of "drugs and violence in our cities" are exactly the same entities secretly supported by the Bureau in its COINTELPROs against such anti-drug political formations as the Black Panther Party twenty years ago. 87 Even less is mentioned of the CIA's role in establishing these gang- based drug distribution mechanisms during the same period (for the dual purposes of narcotizing political unrest at home and generating revenues with which to fund covert "off the shelf" operations abroad). 88 SAC Held has, however, proven quite vocal in extending utterly unsubstantiated assertions that contemporary political organizations such as the Black Guerrilla Family are important components of the drug scene. 89 Meanwhile, the "drug wars" veneer may well already be in use as a screen behind which the selective assassination of key political activists may be carried out. A notable example of this last was the execution-style murder of Panther founder Huey P. Newton in Oakland, on August 22,1989. 90 In some ways more to the point of what is occurring is the nature of the prison facilities the federal system has begun to spawn. Based generally on the "Stammheim Model" perfected by West Germany during the early 1970s, these include the Marion "super-max" prison for men in southern Illinois, and the Marianna prison's high security unit (HSU) for women in northern Florida. 91 The Marianna facility was piloted at the federal women's prison at Lexington, Kentucky during the 1980's. Its purpose was unabashedly political as is demonstrated in the U.S. Bureau of Prison's official criteria for incarceration: [A] prisoner's past or present affiliation, association or membership in an organization which has been demonstrated as being involved in acts of violence, attempts to disrupt or overthrow the government of the U.S. or whose published ideology include advocating law violations in order to "free" prisoners ... 92 Constructed some thirty feet underground in total isolation from the outside world, painted entirely white to induce sensory deprivation, with naked florescent lights burning 24 hours per day and featuring rules severely restricting diet, correspondence, reading material and visits, the HSU was deliberately designed to psychologically debilitate those imprisoned there. This was coupled to a program of intentional degradation in which the incarcerated women were strip searched, often by male guards, and observed by male guards while showering and using the toilets. Perhaps worst of all, the Bureau of Prisons (BoP) refused to set any formal criteria by which the women might work their way back out of the HSU once they were confined there. The objective was to invoke in them a sense of being totally at the mercy of and dependent upon their keepers. 93 In the polite language of the John Howard Association: Through a year or more of sensory and psychological deprivation, prisoners are stripped of their individual identities in order that compliant behavior patterns can be implanted, a process of mortification and depersonalization. 94 The techniques involved have been described by Amnesty International in the accompanying chart. As early as 1962, Dr. Edgar Schein described the methodology at issue rather more straightforwardly in an address to all federal maximum security prison wardens in Washington, D.C.: In order to produce marked changes in behavior, it is necessary to weaken, undermine, or remove supports for old attitudes. I would like you to think of brainwashing not in terms of... ethics and morals, but in terms of the deliberate changing of human behavior by a group of men who have relatively complete control over the environment in which the captives live... [These changes can be induced by] isolation, sensory deprivation, segregation of leaders, spying, tricking men into signing written statements which are then shown to others, placing individuals whose will power has been severely weakened into a living situation with others more advanced in thought reform, character invalidation, humiliations, sleeplessness, rewarding subservience, and fear [emphasis added]. 95 Dr. Richard Kom, in a 1987 report on Lexington commissioned by the ACLU, framed the matter even more clearly. In Kom's estimation, the purpose of an HSU-style facility is to: ... reduce prisoners to a state of submission essential for their ideological conversion. That failing, the next objective is to reduce them to a state of psychological incompetence sufficient to neutralize them as efficient, self-directing antagonists. That failing, the only alternative is to destroy them, preferably by making them desperate enough to destroy themselves.96 Of the three political women incarcerated in the Lexington HSU - Susan Rosenberg and Silvia Baraldini of the RATF case and independentista Alejandrina Torres all had ceased menstruating, were afflicted with insomnia and suffered chronic hallucinations before the facility was ordered closed in 1988. 97 By then, the HSU had been condemned as a violation of elemental human rights by organizations ranging from Amnesty International to the ACLU.98 The BoP response was that it was "satisfied" with its Lexington experiment, and would replicate the HSU's essential features at its Marianna facility, designed to hold several hundred women rather than a mere handful. 99 Marion is even more entrenched. Established in 1963 as a replacement for the infamous Alcatraz super-maximum prison, which had grown cost-prohibitive to maintain, it contains the first (created in 1972) of the federal government's formal Stammheim-style behavior modification "control units." 100 The ideological function intended for control units was made apparent virtually from the outset when independentista Raphael Cancel Miranda was sent there to undergo "thought reform" after having served more than fifteen years in confinement. 101 By 1983, the control unit model was deemed so successful by BoP authorities that the occasion of an "inmate riot" was used as a pretext by which to convert the entire prison into a huge behavior modification center. 102 Since that year, all of Marion has been on "lock down" status, with prisoners confined to their cells, in isolation 23 hours per day, often chained spread-eagled - for "disciplinary reasons" - to their concrete slab "bunks." Strip searches are routine, prisoners are shackled upon leaving their cells for any reason, all contact visits are forbidden and reading material is tightly restricted. As was the case at Lexington, no dear criteria for getting out of Marion have ever been posited by the BoP; the length and extent of prisoners' torment is left entirely to the discretion of prison officials. 103 Also as was the situation in the Lexington HSU, a significant number of those incarcerated at Marion are political prisoners or Prisoners of War. At present, these include independentista Oscar Lopez-Rivera; black liberationists Richard ThompsonEl, and Kojo Bomani Sababu; Virgin Islands Five activist Hanif Shabazz Bey; Euroamerican Prisoners of War Bill Dunne and Ray Luc Levasseur; and Plowshares activist Larry Morlan. Scores of others have spent varying lengths of time there. In another parallel with Lexington, Marion has been repeatedly condemned by a broad range of organizations, including Amnesty International, as systematically violating United Nations proscriptions against torture and other minimum standards required by international law with regard to the maintenance of prison populations. 104 Rather than favorably altering the situation inside Marion, the BoP has indicated that it considers the lockdown permanent, and has begun to clone off comparable environments - such as the N-2 "death unit" at Terre Haute (Indiana) federal prison - in other maximum security facilities for men. Although U.S. District Judge Barrington Parker ordered the Lexington HSU closed on August 15, 1988 - on the specific basis of its use as a political prison - his decision was overturned by a federal appeals court on September 8, 1989. 105 As Susan Rosenberg has put it: "The appeals court held that the government is free to use the political beliefs and association of prisoners as basis for treating us more harshly and placing us in maximum security conditions. Further, the appeals court ruling means that no court can question or dispute the prison's decision even if those decisions involve the prisoner's politics or political identity ... This legal decision gives official sanction to the BoP to place political prisoners into control units." 106 The rulers of Orwell's totalitarian empires could not have put it better than the judiciary of the United States. Biderman's Chart on Penal Coercion Source: Amnesty International Report on Torture, 1983. General Method Effects (Purposes) Variants Isolation Deprives victim of all social supports of his ability to resist. deveolps an intense concern with self. Makes victim dependent upon interrogator. Complete solitary confinement, complete isolation, semi-isolation, group isolation. Monopolization of Perception. Fixes attention upon immediate predicament; fosters introspection. Eliminates stimuli competing with those controlled by captor. Frustrates all actions not consistent with compliance. Physical isolation, darkness or bright light, barren environment, restricted movement, monotonous food. Induced debility; exhaustion. Weakens mental and physical ability to resist. Semi-starvation, exposure, exploitation of wounds, induced illness, sleep deprivation, prolonged constraint, prolonged interrogation, forced writing, overexertion. Threats Cultivates anxiety and despair. Threats of death, threats of non-return, threats of endless interrogation and isolation, threats against family, vague threats, mysterious changes of treatment. Occasional Indulgences. Provieds positive motivation for compliance. Hinders adjustment to deprivation. Occasional favors, fluctuations of interrogation attitudes, promises, rewards for partial compliance, tantalizing. Demonstrating "omnipotence." Suggests futility of resistance. Confrontation, pretending cooperation taken for granted, demonstrating complete control over victim's fate. Degradation Makes cost of resistance appear more damaging to self esteem than capitulation. Reduces prisoners to "animal level" concerns. Personal hygeine prevented. Filthy, infested surroundings, demeaning punishments, insults and taunts, denial of privacy. Enforcing trivial demands. Develops habit of compliance. Forced writing, enforcement of minute rules. The Shape of Things to Come This may well be the shape of things to come, and in a frighteningly generalized way. A pattern is emerging in which the "attitude adjustment" represented by police and prison becomes a normative rather than exceptional experience of power in the U.S. If the present dynamics of spiraling police power and state sanctioned secrecy, proliferating penal facilities and judicial abandonment of basic constitutional principles is allowed to continue unabated, it is easily predictable that upwards of 20% of the next generation of Americans will spend appreciable time behind bars in prison environments making present day Sing Sing and San Quentin seem benign by comparison. Another not inconsiderable percentage of the population maybe expected to undergo some form of "electronic incarceration," either in their homes or at some government-designated "private" facility. The technologies for this last have been developed over the past twenty years, are even now being "field tested" (i.e.: used on real prisoners), and will undoubtedly be perfected during the coming decade. 107 In such a context, the classic role of domestic counterintelligence operations will logically be diminished; any hint of politically "deviant" behavior will likely be met with more-or-less immediate arrest, packaging as a "criminal" by the FBI and its interactive counterparts in the state and local police, processing through the courts and delivery to one or another prison for an appropriate measure of behavior modification. The social message - "don't even think about rocking the boat, under any circumstances" - is both undeniable and overwhelming At this point, it will be necessary to assess the legacy of COINTELPRO not only as having perpetuated, but of having quite literally transcended itself. It will have moved from covert and relatively selective or "surgical" repression of dissent to the overt and uniform suppression of political diversity per se, from a secretive safeguarding of the parameters of "acceptable" political expression to the open imposition of orthodoxy, from somewhat constrained service to to socio-economic status quo to outright social pacification and maintenance of a rigid social order. It is perhaps ironic that it is at precisely the moment the police state apparatus inherent to the Soviet Union and its various eastern European satellites appears to be crumbling that the U.S. police state shows every indication of consolidating itself at a new and unparalleled level of intensity and sophistication. But it should certainly come as no surprise. The entire 70 year history of the FBI has given fair warning. The COINTELPRO era provided a detailed preview of what was to come. And, not only the continuation, but the systematic legitimation of all that was worst about COINTELPRO during the 1970s and '80s has been sufficiently blatant to set alarm bells ringing loudly in the mind of anyone wishing to consider the matter. The sad fact is, however, that other than during certain peak periods of repression notably the Palmer Raids, the McCarthy period, and at the very end of the COINTELPRO era - such things have received only scant attention from the left. Instead, concern with questions of police power and the function of prisons has been consigned mainly to lawyers and a scattering of researcher-activists whose work has been typically viewed as "marginal," "esoteric" and even "paranoid," and thus of little utility to the "positive" and "more important" agendas of progressives. A dismal -but entirely plausible- prospect is that such circumstances have long since foreclosed on our collective ability to do much about the danger in which we are now engulfed. U.S. progressivism presently seems to stand vis a vis the "law enforcement" establishment like a person who has walked to the middle of a railway bridge and suddenly faces a locomotive bearing down on him or her at miles per hour. There is no way to outrun the engine of destruction, and no place to turn for safety. Worse, the posture of far too many people on the left suggests they are continuing to amble along with their backs to the train, still remaining unaware that they are just about to be run over. This last is readily borne out by the number of progressives who have rallied nationally to the cause of removing assault rifles and other semi-automatic weapons from the hands of the populace, while doing nothing to confront the rampant proliferation of SWAT capabilities among police forces throughout the country. 108 Another choice indicator may be apprehended in the range of ostensibly progressive individuals and groups which have lately queued up to "take back ... streets" they never had in the first place, righteously endorsing a government-sponsored "war on drugs" entailing unprecedented police prerogatives to engage in no-knock entry, warrantless search and seizure, the routine "interdiction" of people of color driving along the nation's highways, uncompensated impoundment of personal property, massive applications of physical and electronic surveillance, the use of preventive detention on a wholesale basis, and myriad other abridgements of civil rights and liberties which would have remained unthinkable just five years ago. 109 Reprinted under the fair use http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html doctrine of international copyright law. &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& Tsonkwadiyonrat (We are ONE Spirit) Unenh onhwa' Awayaton http://www.tdi.net/ishgooda/ &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
