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Questions Labor's Leaders Daren't Ask: Where and Why Did We Go Wrong? by JoAnn Wypijewski; Oil on Ice: How Bush Won ANWR, with an Assist from the Dems by Jeffrey St. Clair; The Self-Rehab of George Kennan by Alexander Cockburn; The State and Terri Schiavo: a Conversation with Ralph Nader; Lisa Frittko: She Escorted Walter Benjamin Across the Pyrennes by Lawrence Reichard. Remember these stories are available exclusively in the print edition of CounterPunch. CounterPunch Online is read by millions of viewers each month! But remember, we are funded solely by the subscribers to the print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this website by buying a subscription to our newsletter, which contains fresh material you won't find anywhere else, or by making a donation for the online edition. Remember contributions are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! or write CounterPunch, PO BOX 228, Petrolia, CA 95558 |
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Other Lands Have Dreams: From Baghdad to Pekin Prison by KATHY KELLY  Today's Stories April 16 / 17, 2005 Alexander Cockburn April 15, 2005 Brian Cloughley Bill Glahn Mickey Z. Stephanie McMillan Josh Mahan David Russitano Jorge Mariscal Rodolfo "Corky"
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Weekend Edition Inside America's Immigration GulagThe Art of JailingBy MARK DOW
In late spring 1995 immigration detainees in Elizabeth, New Jersey, engaged in a situation, an uprising, a melee, a riot, or a disturbance, depending on your terminology. They broke a lot of glass and destroyed furniture. The contract guards, none of them harmed, fled to the parking lot and called for local law enforcement backup. The most surprising part of this milestone in INS detention history is the Service's own postmortem of it. The three-hundred-bed facility housing primarily asylum seekers was owned and operated for the INS by the Esmor Corporation. INS Commissioner Doris Meissner directed the Headquarters Detention and Deportation Division to review and investigate the June incident. The result was a seventy-two-page report1 that reads very much like a report from Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch. It details complaints that immigrants' advocates could recite in their sleep: meaningless prisoner grievance procedures, arbitrary use of disciplinary segregation, verbal harassment, physical abuse. The report also noted the theft of detainee property (a category often overlooked by advocacy groups), the practice of waking detainees in the middle of the night "on the pretext" of security checks, and complaints by female detainees "that they had been issued male underwear on which large question marks had been made in the area of the crotch." One distinguishing feature of the INS report is the concern with public relations: "Some of the decisions made by Esmor had a serious negative impact upon relations between the INS and the general public since, in the public perception, INS is inextricably linked to the operations of the Elizabeth facility." In fact, the INS's Michael Rozos, formally assistant administrator of Miami's Krome detention center, was the officer-in-charge at the Esmor facility when it erupted. What happened at Esmor could hardly have come as a surprise. Elizabeth Llorente's excellent reporting on the detention center for the Bergen Record had practically predicted it. But in a bureaucracy, especially one in which the potential victims have no political or economic leverage, prediction is less important than damage control after the fact. According to George Taylor, Atlanta INS chief of detention, headquarters officials exploited the buffer of private prison companies to shield themselves from accountability. He added: "There's no real governing body to drop the hammer when the hammer needs to be dropped." Private company and government agency used one another. In 1988 Esmor had submitted a proposal to the Justice Department for an INS detention center to be built in the San Diego area. Confronted with the red tape of "state and local government agencies, local zoning regulations, environmental requirements and community organizations," Esmor suggested a "bold and innovative" solution. It would contract with the Viejas Indian tribe to lease acreage. "Because the Viejas reservation is considered a sovereign nation by the Federal Government, it therefore is not bound by the same state and local governmental and environmental regulations as are other locations in the San Diego area." Barbara Muller, a member of the Viejas tribe and an activist with one of the community organizations with which Esmor seemed concerned, said, "It's kind of ironic to put a prison facility on an Indian reservation in America to house people from Mexico and Central America who are also Indian." Muller's sister Elida said, "We're already a prison, we don't need another jail."2 The deal never went through; tribal chairman Anthony Pico later told me the counsel had turned instead to gaming "to establish an economic base for the tribe." After the Elizabeth debacle, the Long Island-;based Esmor Corporation became the Sarasota-based Correctional Services Corporation. CSC operated a non-INS juvenile detention center in Tallulah, Louisiana, that was taken over by the state after repeated allegations of prisoner abuse. CSC was also forced to give up operation of its Youth Development Center in Pahokee, Florida, after a judge compared it to a "'Third World country that is controlled by . . . some type of evil power.'"3 In the Pacific Northwest, CSC was having more success, and in 2002 the company received a new contract with the INS for a detention center in Tacoma to relieve overcrowding in the CSC/INS facility in Seattle. The new prison would be converted from an old meatpacking plant.4 It is worth pausing over the career of one member of CSC's board of directors, William Slattery. Slattery had been New York INS district director and was then promoted to the headquarters position of executive associate commissioner for field operations. In 1996 some of Slattery's colleagues demanded that Commissioner Meissner remove him. According to the New York Daily News, Slattery's colleagues said that he "sat on allegations of brutality on the Mexican border that exposed poor training and supervision of border agents. Slattery was [also] accused of threatening disciplinary action against managers who reported problems." The Washington Post reported allegations that Slattery called off raids on Korean garment factories "after he was invited to social events with factory owners." The Daily News reported that "a former INS agent has alleged that Slattery obstructed a 1994 conflict-of-interest probe of Slattery's romance with agent Rosemary LaGuardia." The couple was later married. LaGuardia taught an ethics course at the INS officer training center in Glynco, Georgia, and she was later convicted of stealing from a department store.5 Slattery left the INS and joined the CSC board. Back in New Jersey, INS officials
had decided for the sake of efficiency that Esmor itself should
sell the rights to and equipment in the detention center, which
it did, to the Corrections Corporation of America. The reaction
of a New York Times columnist, John Tierney, can help
us to understand how little the media seems to understand about
the way the U.S. government operates. It is certainly a positive
sign that the details of INS contracts made it into a column
at all. But Tierney misses the point by accepting the INS's pallid
mea culpa in the Esmor report, because he seems to have no knowledge
of the agency's long-standing evasion of accountability.
Tierney writes that CCA, which took over the Elizabeth contract,
is "still running it to the satisfaction of the INS"-hardly
reassuring to anyone who knows a little about INS or CCA About a year later the New Jersey INS district director banned the Jesuit Refugee Service from giving Bible classes at the CCA-run facility because it had discussed a taboo subject with the detainees: detention. The class had been reading Matthew 25: "I was a stranger and you took me in. . . . I was in prison, and ye came unto me." District Director Andrea Quarantillo said, "It was understood by all parties that detention issues would not be topics for discussion." Quarantillo also explained, "INS has no objection to Matthew 25 or any other Bible passage and does not seek to censor them. We only request that detention issues not be included in the lesson plans." Almost comical-but for the fact that the rate of suicide attempts in INS detention in Elizabeth is higher than in the New Jersey Department of Corrections, Llorente discovered.8 A young Swiss detainee-noting that not all of the guards are "compliant" and that many of them "suffer as well"-told me, "It's very clear that whole system is designed for intimidation." He had been detained in Elizabeth for just five days. "Discipline, or rather 'dis'plin,' was their slogan," writes Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka of what he calls the "poli-thug state" of Nigeria under military dictatorship in the 1980s.9 The military and police "notion of 'dis'plin' was not to take offenders to the local magistrate court . . . but to make them do the frog-jump. For the uninitiated, this exercise requires that you attach your hands to both ears while you jump up and down in a squatting position." Felix Oviawe, a state assemblyman from Benin State in Nigeria, got down on the floor of his friend's house in Canarsie, Queens, to show me a variation on this ritual of humiliation. Because he was a democratically elected local politician who had opposed the military regime, Oviawe felt his life was in danger after the 1993 coup d'etat in Nigeria, and he fled the country in search of political asylum. But he was not harmed in Nigeria. Arriving at New York's Kennedy airport, he acknowledged having a false passport and told U.S. immigration officials that he wished to apply for asylum. He was sent to the INS Esmor detention center in Elizabeth. After the 1995 disturbance, Oviawe-who had not been among the protesters-was transferred with about two dozen other immigration detainees to the nearby Union County Jail in Elizabeth. It was there that corrections officers forced him to kneel naked on the floor. Oviawe loves politics. At his friend's house in Canarsie, on a short visit to New York, he spends his days watching C-SPAN on a giant-screen television. On the day that we speak, in May 1998, Congress is debating tobacco legislation. I convince Oviawe to turn off the volume so that I can record our interview. The only furniture is the tall director's chairs we're sitting in. On the walls are a couple of African masks and a poster of Malcom X. "Right from time, when I was young, I picked interest in politics," he tells me. He is forty-three. "I read about people . . . who fought for the independence of Nigeria from Britain." His father was a miller who sold wood to carpenters. Felix earned a bachelor's degree in mining engineering and was elected student association president at Federal Polytechnic in Akure. After graduating, he became the production manager in a cement company. He also taught physics and engineering at a technical college. In 1991 he was elected to the House of Assembly, the equivalent of a state legislature in the United States. He campaigned to improve the standard of living for the people in his district, the majority of whom were subsistence farmers-better roads would make it easier for them to bring their produce to market-while others worked in the oil industry. "There will be grading of roads and tarring of roads, and provision of water for my people," he said, as a congressman filled the screen; he had muted the volume but left the set on. As chairman of the Lands and Mineral Committee of the House of Assembly, he resolved a dispute with a neighboring state over oil deposits discovered by Shell. Twenty-two months after he was elected, on November 17, 1993, General Sani Abacha overthrew the democratically elected government of Moshood Abiola. The Houses of Assembly across the country were dissolved. "The crisis was on," said Oviawe. "I had no alternative. . . . I came seeking political asylum." His brothers were already living legally in this country. One was an engineer in Los Angeles, the other a pharmacist in Miami. They bought a plane ticket for Felix, and he arranged a false passport because his diplomatic one had been seized. "I came in a different name," he explains. "When I got to the international airport, JFK, I went straight to Immigration, asking for political asylum. Then the Immigration took all my documents. I now presented myself as Honorable Felix Oviawe, because I came in a different name, you understand, and I told them the reason." Oviawe stands up to tell me what happened after the transfer to the Union County Jail. "We are coming out from the van, about thirteen of us. As we are coming out, your hands are tied. A guard would grab you, throw you on the floor. You understand me? And someone else grab you, throw you back to the van. Somebody push you out again, then they throw you on the floor, another one would pick you, just continuous like that. They started beating us. Started beating us. Even while they were taking us to the cell, [a guard] said he feel like killing somebody. One of the guards, he said he feel like killing somebody. So he grabbed me by my shirt." Oviawe grabs my shirt from behind to demonstrate. "Beated my head on the wall. You understand me?" "So we were now taken to the cell. 'Get into the cell.' We were asked to strip ourself naked. Three of us: myself, a Ghanian, and another Indian boy. We were three. We were asked to strip ourself naked, right in the cell there. Then we were asked to kneel down. We were asked to be on our knee. You are naked. Then, the next person to you, you grab his ear, you draw him by the ear, as you are on your knee, then the other one would drag the other person. We were there for more than three hours." In the Canarsie living room, Oviawe explains that he and his two cellmates formed a small circle, each holding the ears of the person in front of him. "The guards, they started coming around. When they come around, one of them, very huge guy, he spat mucus. In short, it was so horrible. You understand? Some other [officers] started coming, to come and see if we had ever stood up from that kneel. We were there for more than three hours." Oviawe pauses a long time. He had told this story many times by now. I asked him what he had been thinking as he kneeled naked on the jail floor. "My thinking was that maybe they were going to kill us. That was where my mind was going. It was the Ghanian boy who told me that they won't kill us, that I should have hope." It didn't seem like such a stretch for Oviawe to think he might be killed. "I just couldn't believe that things like that could happen here when they started doing that to us. For a good two days, it was continuous. In the night, at about nine, they would come around. You would remove even your underwear . . . we didn't have blanket, no nothing. They would increase the AC." He tells me that when the guards left, but left them naked, he wrapped himself in toilet paper to try to keep warm. "In short, I just don't want to remember. I started having different kind of dream. There is a brother of mine who died here in 1988. I dreamt of him. He came and he said, 'What are you doing here?' In a dream. I told him: Here am I. He said I shouldn't worry, that he was coming to get me out of there." Oviawe tried to speak with the correctional officers. "I told them, you know I am a majority leader. Please. Don't do this to me. And they started teasing me and said, 'Majority leader! Majority leader!' And they grabbed me"-Oviawe himself is laughing now-"and they hit my head on the wall. You understand me? They started teasing." His laughter trails off, and he says, "Oh no." He pauses again and takes a breath. "I think I lived to respect this country because of what's happened in the long run. You don't just do things like that and go free." His very next sentence returns him to the van: "I thought they were now going to kill us. That was my thought." But this drive was to the next jail. It was a long drive, and the guards were armed. At some point Oviawe realized they were in Pennsylvania. "Since I was already out of Union County, I knew I was going to make it." Felix Oviawe had arrived at the Union County Jail along with about two dozen other detainees. These included a number of Indian Sikhs, as well as men from Finland, Albania, Nigeria, and Mauritania. The detainees were met by a gauntlet of correctional officers, some working their normal shifts, others called in especially for the "Esmor detail." The "beat and greet" reception included kicking, punching, and, according to the indictment brought by the New Jersey prosecutor's office, "plucking detainees' body hairs with pliers, forcing detainees to place their heads in toilet bowls, encouraging and ordering detainees to perform sexual acts upon one another, forcing detainees to assume unusual and degrading positions while naked, and cursing at and verbally insulting the detainees."10 The pliers, it would turn out, were pincers used to cut plastic flex cuffs. Officers were also alleged to forced have their prisoners to chant "America is number one!" Three Union County Jail officers were convicted on multiple criminal charges, including official misconduct and witness tampering. (One of the three primary defendants was not accused of abusing the detainees but of orchestrating officers' perjured testimonies to the grand jury.) The three men received prison sentences of seven years, with parole eligibility after a year or a year and a half. Jimmy Rice, Charles Popovic, and Michael Sica all, if I am not mistaken, shed tears at their sentencing. About eleven other officers subsequently pled guilty, and most received sentences of community service. Defense attorney Anthony Pope's strategy was to depict the correctional officers alternately as heroes and victims. In his opening statement he criticized the "gross overreaction" of the prosecutor's office, calling it "the most unjust thing . . . you've ever seen in your life." As Americans, he instructed the jury, it is not just an opportunity but "by God, your obligation . . . to question your government." Bob Valaducci, another defense attorney, added depth to the anti-authoritarian argument. Our forefathers understood, he said, that when the enormous resources of the state are used "against one individual . . . it's not a very fair fight." Pope took every opportunity to remind jurors that the detainees were "illegals." "You know you had no right to come into this country, correct?" he asked an Indian man. In his closing statement, Pope repeated that what happened at the Union County Jail really began at Esmor, "which is housing people who came here illegally"-a fact that tells us "what kind of people they are." The prosecutor's office went so far as to locate victims who had been deported and bring them back to Elizabeth for their testimony. Although Pope was right that much of the detainee testimony seemed rehearsed, possibly for the purposes of a civil suit that was being filed and would depend on evidence of lasting injuries, the overwhelming and consistent testimony of what happened that day was simply too much for the defense team. Witness Harpal Singh described the way that he was moved from the van into the jail: "Like you have a bundle of wood-he just picked me up and threw me outside." And if the testimony of a succession of detainees was not enough, the testimony of other correctional officers (COs) who had been promised immunity sealed the outcome. CO Juan Espinosa said of the detainees, "They were just mild people who just took it, actually." Pope also did his best to challenge the repeated usage by witnesses of words like abuse, beating, and torture, and he tried to take advantage of the linguistic babble to imply that the detainees' testimony was coached. In his cross-examination of Balvir Shah, Pope first got the witness to answer yes to the question, "Do you feel that someone using a curse word at you is a form of abuse?" Shah had said that guards forced him to kneel and then told him to fuck himself. "So they used the word fuck?" asked Pope. "You realize that the word F-U-C-K is used in a lot of different ways?" Shah said, through the interpreter, "All I know is that this means you have sex." "So you heard the word, and you assumed that someone wanted you to have sex, correct?" "This is what he meant, the two of you [prisoners] have sex together." "Sir, how do you know what he meant?" "It could only mean that. It mean nothing else." "Excuse me," Pope said to the court, and then, to the witness: "If someone said go fuck yourself, you would think that meant go have sex?" "You can't do it on yourself," Shah responded. There was laughter throughout the courtroom, which made the witness smile, and Pope himself smiled. The judge said: "He told you." Pope wrapped it up: "You heard the word F-U-C-K and you believed in your mind that's what he wanted you to do?" "Yes." Margarita Smishkewych, the supervisor of court interpreting services, who loved talking about the Spanish landscape and passionately quoted lines from García Lorca as we stood outside the courtoom, told me this trial was the most challenging of her career.11 Balvir Shah testified that "it was paining a lot" when he was thrown around by officers, so he "made a big sigh." Prosecutor: "What do you mean you made a big sigh?" "I said hi," Shah seemed to say. "You said hi?" "Yes. In Punjabi, when you get injured, this sound comes out of your mouth automatically." Pope's cross-examination on cursing was a fascinating if flailing excursion into linguistics, but it did not seem to help his clients much. On the other hand, when he broke down witnesses' accounts of heads being pushed into toilets, he seemed to break down their credibility as well. Pope managed to take the mind's moving picture of a CO forcing a prisoner's head into the toilet and edit it down to a single frame. What came before or after became indiscernible. Pope asked a detainee who claimed to have pushed back against a CO's hand, "If someone was constantly trying to put your head down, that would mean, wouldn't it, that your head was up?" Detainees who testified to having seen this act now admitted seeing a prisoner's head poised above a toilet but not in it, not touching the water. Pope returned to another of his themes by reminding jurors that not only is prison a different world from the one we are used to, but these detainees were from the Third World, and they had been in transit all day in the June heat, and the toilets had been cleaned the night before, and the prisoners might have just been drinking-the civilized COs might have been pulling their heads out of the toilets. Far-fetched as this may seem, Pope had made an impression by showing that so much of the testimony seemed overly practiced. There was no doubt that terrible things |
