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Today's
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August 28,
2004
Alexander Cockburn
Zombies
for Kerry
August 27,
2004
Gary Leupp
Neocon
Musings
Robin Cook
The
Ghosts of Abu Ghraib
Diane Christian
Disarming
Michael Donnelly
Situational Democracy: the Show Me the Green Party?
Jack Random
4F and Other Heroes: an Army of War Resisters
Mike Ferner
"To the Swift Boats!"
Mazin Qumsiyeh
7000 Palestinian Political Prisoners
Veronza Bowers, Jr.
"You Won't Be Leaving Tomorrow"
Sex, Drugs & the Blues!
Serpents in the Garden
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August 26,
2004
M. Shahid Alam
The
Clash Thesis: a Failing Ideology?
Diane Christian
War
Rules: Bush is No Sun Tzu
Derek Seidman
"They're As Bad As Wal-Mart:" Starbucks Workers Get
Organized
David Lindorff
Court to RNC Protesters: Drop the Rally
Christopher
Brauchli
Signs of Dissent: the Bush in the Bubble
Stew Albert
Reporting Suspicious Activity
Mark Donham
Judgement in Athens: Give the Koreans Their Day in Court
Saul Landau
Pinochet:
the Al Capone of the Southern Cone
Website of
the Day
The Kerry 527 Ad You'll Never See
August 25,
2004
Amelia Peltz
Can
I Have 9.8 Seconds of Your Time?
Noah Leavitt
Defining and Redefining Torture
Ron Jacobs
Takin' It to the Streets: It's Not About the Election, It's About
Democracy
James Brooks
Coronado Crosses the Jordan
Akiva Eldar
How to Win the Jewish Vote: Turn Gaza into a "Mini-Afghanistan"
Gemma Araneta
Chavez's New Brand of Populism
Philip Cryan
Uribe's Boys: the Death Squads of Colombia
CounterPunch Wire
Cheney Opens the Closet Door
August 24,
2004
Jeremy Scahill
John
Kerry: the Warchurian Candidate
Gary Leupp
"We
Want Them to Go Away"
David Domke
God
Willing: an Echoing Press and Political Fundamentalism
William Loren Katz
The Meaning of Hugo Chávez: Black and Indian Power in
Venezuela
Jonah Gindin
With Chavez? Reading the International Private Media
Fran Schor
Denying Atrocities: From Vietnam to Fallujah
Joe Bageant
Driving
on the Bones of God
Website of the Day
The Great America Lockdown: a Primer for the RNC
August 23,
2004
Winslow Wheeler
Don't
Mind If I Do: Porkbarrel and the War on Terror
John Pilger
Bush
May Be the Lesser Evil
Stan Goff
Swift
Boat Dogfight
Bill and Kathleen
Christison
Notes
from the West Bank: Build, Demolish, Rebuild
Mike Whitney
The Unraveling of Afghanistan
William Blum
Brave
New World of Iraqi Sovereignty
Ralph Nader
A Letter to the Washington Post: a Shameful and Unsavory Editorial
August 21 /
22, 2004
Cockburn /
St. Clair
"They
Want Blood:" The Bi-Partisan Origins of the Total War on
Drugs
Landau / Hassen
Failing
the Mission? Form a Commission
Brian Cloughley
The
Bush Team in Iraq: Moral Cowardice, as Practiced by Experts
Josh Frank
Nader as David Duke? The ADL Wants You to Think So
Mike Whitney
Reincarnating Mengele: the Torture Doctors of Abu Ghraib
Ron Jacobs
Day Labor Blues
Mickey Z.
Shooting at Whales: 40 Years After Tonkin
Fred Gardner
Dr. Wolman Comes Out: The Cannabis Consultants
Dave Zirin
Uprising in Athens: Iraqi Soccer Team Gives Bush the Boot
Josh Saxe
Witnessing Police Brutality in LA
Yanar Mohammed
Letter from Baghdad: a Democracy of Killings and Bombings
Helen Williams
Ali's Story: a Taste of Reality from Baghdad
Michael Donnelly
Elemental and NaturalForests, Fire and Recovery
Elizabeth Schulte
The Crisis in Affordable Housing
Poets' Basement
Adler, Albert, Virgil, Ford and Krieger
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante
Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
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Weekend
Edition
August 28 / 29, 2004
Haiti
as Imperial Prison
The
Attica of the Americas
By
JUSTIN FELUX
Both places have a population of several
million, mostly dark-skinned people. In both places, those who
are able to find work can only obtain poverty wages under conditions
that differ from slavery only in name. The right of the people
to vote is not respected. The lights only stay on for a few hours
a day. People are often raped, beaten, and even killed with impunity.
Those who manage to get out of either place are usually apprehended
by the authorities and returned, regardless of whether or not
their return is warranted. One is the country of Haiti. The other
is the U.S. prison-industrial complex. At first glance, the U.S.
government's policy of black mass incarceration and its policy
of undermining democracy in Haiti don't seem to have much in
common, but on a basic level, they have nearly everything in
common.
Dostoevsky once said, "The
degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering
its prisons." If this is true, the United States suffers
from a great civilization deficit. Over two million people are
in jail or prison in the U.S., and the whole correctional population
(including those on parole or probation) is almost seven million.
When civil unrest was sweeping across the Haitian countryside
earlier in the year, preparations were made to interdict upward
of 50,000 refugees in the infamous Guantanamo Bay naval base
in Cuba, where Arab inmates have made numerous charges of physical
abuse and torture. Incarcerating people of color would seem to
be one of the few things the U.S. government does with any efficiency.
After the recent and unfortunate
death of Frank "Big Black" Smith, it is an appropriate
time to be talking about prisons. Smith was one of the leaders
of the 1971 rebellion in Attica prison, during which inmates
took control of the prison and held the guards hostage. The prisoners
made several demands of the government which involved job training,
education, health care, and religious freedom, among other things.
Most of the demands were modest reforms that would allow the
prisoners to be treated as human beings. The standoff ended when
Governor Nelson Rockefeller had a thousand troopers storm the
prison, killing 29 inmates and 10 guards in the process.
But it wasn't enough for the
guards to simply retake the prison. The inmates had forced the
nation to recognize their humanity for those brief moments during
the rebellion, and it was important to snatch that humanity away
from them as soon as possible. Otherwise, Attica could have been
the first of many rebellions. Big Black later described the torture
he and his comrades endured at the hands of the guards afterwards:
"It was very, very barbaric;
you know, very, very cruel. They ripped our clothes off. They
made us crawl on the ground like we were animals. And they snatched
me. And they lay me on a table and beat me in my testicles. And
they burned me with cigarettes and dropped hot shells on me and
put a football up under my throat and they kept telling me that
if it dropped, they were going to kill me ... It just hurt. You
see one human being treating another human being this way and
they really hurt me. I never thought it would happen. I never
thought so many would be treated like animals."
Decades later, not much has
changed. According to Human Rights Watch, "In recent years,
U.S. prison inmates have been beaten with fists and batons, stomped
on, kicked, shot, stunned with electronic devices, doused with
chemical sprays, choked, and slammed face first onto concrete
floors by the officers whose job it is to guard them." Prison
rape is an epidemic. According to a study in The Prison Journal,
one in five male inmates reported a pressured or forced sex incident
while incarcerated. The United States also exports its culture
of prison terror to the rest of the world, the most recent example
being the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where teenagers were tortured,
women were impregnated through rape, and detainees were subjected
to now familiar forms of sexual humiliation and abuse.
Many reasons are often cited
for the growth of the prison-industrial complex in America. One
is that the prison industry provides jobs and a Keynesian stimulus
to the economy. Another is that prisons provide cheap labor for
American corporations. While these are certainly factors, they
actually provide very little economic benefit to the ruling class.
To them, the real utility of prisons lies in their use as a form
of social control. They help contain the (darker) more troublesome
segments of the population while frightening the rest of the
(whiter) population into submission. Prisons have been a remarkably
effective tool in keeping America's prevailing race and class
divisions in place.
As C.L.R. James pointed out
in 1943, "The contrasts between their situation and the
privileges enjoyed by those around them have always made the
Negroes that section of American society most receptive to revolutionary
ideas and the radical solution of social problems." This
is what President Nixon was talking about when he said, according
to an aide, "the whole problem is really the blacks. The
key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing
to." The system he came up with was the racially-charged
"War on Drugs." After the civil rights and black power
movements brought down America's formal apartheid, the prison-industrial
complex took its place as the new means of maintaining white
supremacy and undermining the momentum of black political movements.
Many reasons are likewise cited
for the U.S. government's support of the recent coup in Haiti,
such as access to cheap sweatshop labor, control of the windward
passage leading to the Panama Canal, policy differences with
the Aristide government, and others. The main reason, however,
is the same reason our country is littered with so many prisons.
Much like African Americans are a threat to the domestic order
of things, Haiti is a threat to the international order of things.
This explains the eagerness of other rich, white countries such
as France and Canada to play an active role in such a dirty affair.
If a poor, black nation such as Haiti were to succeed in establishing
a stable democracy and an economic system that benefits its own
people rather than multinational corporations, then other poor
countries would follow suit. Therefore it was necessary to send
a message to dark-skinned people across the world: know your
place, or suffer the consequences.
In post-coup Haiti, prisons
that once held thieves, murderers, and rapists now hold journalists,
activists, and teachers. The former were set free by the rebel
forces, the latter rounded up by the puppet government for their
political views. Rooms designed to hold ten people now have a
hundred prisoners packed in like sardines. A journalist for Radyo
Timoun that had been arrested reported that the drinking water
for prisoners was their own previously used bath water. In Les
Cayes, prison conditions are so bad that epidemics have broken
out.
Part of the United States solution
to this crisis was sending Terry Stewart and John Nielsen to
help "reform" Haiti's prisons and police units. Stewart
is the same consultant who was sent to "reform" the
Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. He is also the former director of
Arizona's prison system, where the U.S. Justice Department sued
the state's Department of Corrections for allowing an environment
in which female inmates were raped and sodomized by guards. Nielsen,
who will be making a "mid-six-figure salary," formerly
worked in Albany, where the Coalition for Accountable Police
and Government urged that he be fired, "on the grounds that
his leadership has resulted in a climate of distrust both within
the police department and between the police department and the
community."
All this is simply the next
chapter in a 200-year-old economic, political, and cultural assault
on Haiti's well-being. As Frederick Douglass explained in 1893,
"Haiti is black, and we have not yet forgiven Haiti for
being black or forgiven the Almighty for making her black ...
While slavery existed amongst us, her example was a sharp thorn
in our side and a source of alarm and terror. She came into the
sisterhood of nations through blood ... She was a startling and
frightful surprise and a threat to all slave-holders throughout
the world, and the slave-holding world has had its questioning
eye upon her career ever since." Back then, Haiti posed
the same threat that it does now: the threat of a good example.
It is no wonder then that Haiti
is the country the world powers choose to make their own example
of. Two-hundred years ago black slaves outwitted and outfought
the mighty army of Napoleon Bonaparte. It was one of those hitherto
rare moments in history where justice rolled down, not like water,
but like lava from an exploding volcano. Jean-Jacques Dessalines,
the revolutionary leader who bore the marks of his former master's
whip on his back, would proclaim after his victory, "I have
given the French cannibals blood for blood," and that, "nothing
shall prevent us from punishing the murderers who have taken
pleasure in bathing their hands in the blood of the sons of Hayti."
What was once a very profitable colony for foreign powers now
rang with slogans such as "Hayti for the Haytians."
The resilience of the Haitian
people even impressed their foes. Lemmonier-Delafosse was a pro-slavery
officer in Napoleon's army. Years after the revolution, he wrote
in his memoirs, "But what men these blacks are! How they
fight and how they die! One has to make war against them to know
their reckless courage in braving danger when they can no longer
have recourse to stratagem. I have seen a solid column, torn
by grape-shot from four pieces of cannon, advance without making
a retrograde step. The more they fell, the greater seemed to
be the courage of the rest. They advanced singing, for the Negro
sings everywhere, makes songs on everything ... One must have
seen this bravery to have any conception of it."
The same spirit of courage
and resistance can be seen today as young Haitian activists defiantly
hold five fingers -- signifying the five-year mandate of President
Aristide -- in the faces of American occupying forces with total
disregard for the loaded machine guns trained on their bodies.
It can be seen in the recent Lavalas demonstrations held in Cap
Haitien, despite the fact that the armed paramilitaries still
control that area of the country. And it can be seen in the words
of Annette Auguste, who when speaking from her prison cell said,
"They may imprison my body but they will never imprison
the truth I know in my soul. I will continue to fight for justice
and truth in Haiti until I draw my last breath."
Justin Felux is a writer and activist based in
San Antonio, Texas. He can be reached at justins@alacrityisp.net
Weekend
Edition Features for August 7 / 8, 2004
James Petras
The
Anatomy of "Terror Experts": Meet the Mandarins of
Abu Ghraib
Fred Gardner
Run
Ricky Run: Football, Pot and Pain
Justin Delacour
Anti-Chavez Pollsters Panic: Fix Numbers; Reinvent Venezuela
Brian Cloughley
Persecuted by All; Supported by None: Who Would Be A Kurd?
Joshua Frank
The
Outsider: a Talk with Ralph Nader
Iain A. Boal
On "Shame": Warmed-Over Orientalism and Racist Projection
Chris Floyd
All About Eve: Open Season on Women in DC and Rome
Andrew Fenton
Fighting for Democracy and Justice in Haiti
Aseem Shrivastava
Saga of an Anguished Afghan
Neil Corbett
See Cuba: Sometimes a Cigar is Just a Cigar, Mr. Bush
Carol Miller
/ Forrest Hill
Rigged Convention; Divided Party: How David Cobb Won with Only
12% of the Vote
Tarek Milleron
Breaking the Principled Voter
Donald Macintyre
The
Battle of Najaf
Ron Jacobs
Spirits of The Dead: Why I Love My Petty Bourgeois Tendencies
Mickey Z.
Kid
Gavilan's Grave: Propaganda Scores a TKO
Poets' Basement
Adler, Ford and Albert
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