LA PROGRESSIVE– “More African American men are in prison or jail, on probation or parole than were enslaved in 1850, before the Civil War began,” Michelle Alexander told a standing room only house at the Pasadena Main Library this past Wednesday, the first of many jarring points she made in a riveting presentation.

Alexander, currently a law professor at Ohio State, had been brought in to discuss her year-old bestseller, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Interest ran so high beforehand that the organizers had to move the event to a location that could accommodate the eager attendees. That evening, more than 200 people braved the pouring rain and inevitable traffic jams to crowd into the library’s main room, with dozens more shuffled into an overflow room, and even more latecomers turned away altogether. Alexander and her topic had struck a nerve.

Growing crime rates over the past 30 years don’t explain the skyrocketing numbers of black — and increasingly brown — men caught in America’s prison system, according to Alexander, who clerked for Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun after attending Stanford Law. “In fact, crime rates have fluctuated over the years and are now at historical lows.”“Most of that increase is due to the War on Drugs, a war waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color,” she said, even though studies have shown that whites use and sell illegal drugs at rates equal to or above blacks. In some black inner-city communities, four of five black youth can expect to be caught up in the criminal justice system during their lifetimes.

As a consequence, a great many black men are disenfranchised, said Alexander — prevented because of their felony convictions from voting and from living in public housing, discriminated in hiring, excluded from juries, and denied educational opportunities.

“What do we expect them to do?” she asked, who researched her ground-breaking book while serving as Director of the Racial Justice Project at the ACLU of Northern California. “Well, seventy percent return to prison within two years, that’s what they do.”

Organized by the Pasadena Public Library and the Flintridge Center, with a dozen or more cosponsors, including the ACLU Pasadena/Foothills Chapter and Neighborhood Church, and the LA Progressive as the sole media sponsor, the event drew a crowd of the converted, frankly — more than two-thirds from Pasadena’s well-established black community and others drawn from activists circles. Although Alexander is a polished speaker on a deeply researched topic, little she said stunned the crowd, which, after all, was the choir. So the question is what to do about this glaring injustice.

Married to a federal prosecutor, Alexander briefly touched on the differing opinion in the Alexander household. “You can imagine the arguments we have,” Alexander said in relating discussions she has with her husband. “He thinks there are changes we can make within the system,” she said, agreeing that there are good people working on the issues and that improvements can be made. “But I think there has to be a revolution of some kind.”

However change is to come, a big impediment will be the massive prison-industrial system.

“If we were to return prison populations to 1970 levels, before the War on Drugs began,” she said. “More than a million people working in the system would see their jobs disappear.”

So it’s like America’s current war addiction. We have built a massive war machine — one bigger than all the other countries in the world combined — with millions of well-paid defense industry and billions of dollars at stake. With a hammer that big, every foreign policy issue looks like a nail — another bomb to drop, another country to invade, another massive weapons development project to build.

Similarly, with such a well-entrenched prison-industrial complex in place — also with a million jobs and billions of dollars at stake — every criminal justice issue also looks like a nail — another prison sentence to pass down, another third strike to enforce, another prison to build in some job-starved small town, another chance at a better life to deny.

Alexander, who drew her early inspiration from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., devotes the last part of “The New Jim Crow” to steps people can take to combat this gross injustice. In particular, she recommended supporting the Drug Policy Alliance. At the book signing afterwards, Dr. Anthony Samad recruited Michelle Alexander to appear this fall at one his Urban Issues Forums, typically at the California African American Museum next to USC.

Written by Dick Price

© Copyright Dick Price, 2011

Photo by flickr user mocvdleung

SALON– One of the most intense scandals the field of psychology has faced over the last decade is the involvement of several of its members in enabling Bush’s worldwide torture regime.  Numerous health professionals worked for the U.S. government to help understand how best to mentally degrade and break down detainees. At the center of that controversy was — and is — Dr. Larry James.  James, a retired Army colonel, was the Chief Psychologist at Guantanamo in 2003, at the height of the abuses at that camp, and then served in the same position at Abu Ghraib during 2004.  

Today, Dr. James circulated an excited email announcing, “with great pride,” that he has now been selected to serve on the “White House Task Force entitled Enhancing the Psychological Well-Being of The Military Family.”  In his new position, he will be meeting at the White House with Michelle Obama and other White House officials on Tuesday.

For his work at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, Dr. James was the subject of two formal ethics complaints in the two states where he is licensed to practice: Louisiana and Ohio.  Those complaints — 50 pages long and full of detailed and well-documented allegations — were filed by the International Human Rights Clinic of Harvard Law School’s Human Rights Program, on behalf of veterans, mental health professionals and others.  The complaints detailed how James “was the senior psychologist of the Guantánamo BSCT, a small but influential group of mental health professionals whose job it was to advise on and participate in the interrogations, and to help create an environment designed to break down prisoners.”  Specifically:

During his tenure at the prison, boys and men were threatened with rape and death for themselves and their family members; sexually, culturally, and religiously humiliated; forced naked; deprived of sleep; subjected to sensory deprivation, over-stimulation, and extreme isolation; short-shackled into stress positions for hours; and physically assaulted. The evidence indicates that abuse of this kind was systemic, that BSCT health professionals played an integral role in its planning and practice. . . .

Writing in 2009, Law Professor Bill Quigley and Deborah Popowski, a Fellow at the Harvard Law School Human Rights Program, described James’ role in this particularly notorious incident:

In 2003, Louisiana psychologist and retired Col. Larry James watched behind a one-way mirror in a US prison camp while an interrogator and three prison guards wrestled a screaming, near-naked man on the floor.

The prisoner had been forced into pink women’s panties, lipstick and a wig; the men then pinned the prisoner to the floor in an effort “to outfit him with the matching pink nightgown.” As he recounts in his memoir, “Fixing Hell,” Dr. James initially chose not to respond. He “opened [his] thermos, poured a cup of coffee, and watched the episode play out, hoping it would take a better turn and not wanting to interfere without good reason …”

Although he claims to eventually find “good reason” to intervene, the Army colonel never reported the incident or even so much as reprimanded men who had engaged in activities that constituted war crimes.

Read full article about Top Bush-era Psychologist Obama’s Newest Appointment.

Written by Glenn Greenwald

(Video below)

FREE LANCE STAR– Twice this weekend, police put plastic riot cuffs on Daniel Ellsberg’s hands.

The man who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971 was arrested Saturday in Washington and again Sunday in Quantico.

Ellsberg was one of about 35 protesters taken into custody for refusing to leave U.S. 1 in front of the main gate of the Marine Corps base.

Hundreds rallied in support of Pfc. Bradley Manning, an Army intelligence analyst accused of leaking classified documents to Wikileaks.

Manning has been in the Quantico brig since May, awaiting a court martial. Supporters said the 23-year-old Manning is confined to his cell for 23 hours each day. He is given a tear-proof smock to wear to bed, but until recently was required to sleep naked.

To decry these conditions, some protesters donned prison garb and carried signs saying “I am Bradley Manning.” Many wore masks with Manning’s boyish face and shy smile.

They kept their clothes on this time. But at earlier rallies, protesters stripped to their underwear as a visual protest of Manning’s treatment.

The rally began with a spate of speakers. Then the protesters marched to the intersection of U.S. 1 and Joplin Road. There police placed a barricade to keep the rally off the street.

The protest closed U.S. 1 for about four hours for the rally. Even some distance from Quantico, motorists on U.S. 1 encountered significant delays during and immediately after the rally.

©2011 Free Lance Star

Written by Amy Flowers Umble

Police brutality at Free Bradley Manning protest as Colonel (Ret.) Ann Wright and Daniel Ellsberg become victims of targeted assault

CNN– P.J. Crowley abruptly resigned Sunday as State Department spokesman over controversial comments he made about the Bradley Manning case.

Sources close to the matter said the resignation, first reported by CNN, came under pressure from the White House, where officials were furious about his suggestion that the Obama administration is mistreating Manning, the Army private who is being held in solitary confinement in Quantico, Virginia, under suspicion that he leaked highly classified State Department cables to the website WikiLeaks.

Speaking to a small group at MIT last week, Crowley was asked about allegations that Manning is being tortured and kicked up a firestorm by answering that what is being done to Manning by Defense Department officials “is ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid.”

Crowley did add that “nonetheless, Bradley Manning is in the right place” because of his alleged crimes, according to a blog post by BBC reporter Philippa Thomas, who was present at Crowley’s talk.

“The unauthorized disclosure of classified information is a serious crime under U.S. law,” Crowley said in a statement Sunday. “My recent comments regarding the conditions of the pre-trial detention of Private First Class Bradley Manning were intended to highlight the broader, even strategic impact of discreet actions undertaken by national security agencies every day and their impact on our global standing and leadership.

Read full article about Crowley Resigns as State Department Spokesman.

© CNN 2011

Photo by flickr user Anna Tesar

DAILY MAIL– Colonel Gaddafi’s forces today blasted an oil terminal to smithereens as Libya’s bloody civil war entered its blackest day.

Rebels retaliated by firing back with rockets as a fireball exploded from one of the oil tanks and the sky above the Es Sider terminal, in the east of the country, filled with hideous smoke.

A witness said one of the smoke plumes was the biggest he had seen in the conflict so far.

The fresh onslaught came as Gaddafi deployed tanks and snipers to ‘shoot anything that moves’.

Forces loyal to the Libyan dictator poured into the city of Zawiyah in a desperate bid to oust the hardcore band of protesters and army defectors who have taken control.

Witnesses said dead bodies were lying in the ruins of many buildings destroyed in air raids earlier in the week and there was no one in the streets of the centre of the city of 290,000.

‘We can see the tanks. The tanks are everywhere,’ one rebel fighter said by telephone.

Eye witnesses said that the city had been almost flattened after a 13-and-a-half hour barrage from rockets, tanks and war planes

The hellish scenes unfolded as senior officials in the U.S. spoke of their fears that the country had reached a painful stalemate.

Senior officials believe that Gaddafi has solidified his control over some cities but ant-government protesters have a strong enough hold on other regions to remain locked in the stand off.

Read more about Gaddafi Scorching the Earth.

© Copyright DAILY MAIL 2011

Photo by AFP