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Bay Area United Against War Newsletter
Table of Contents:
A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS
B. SPECIAL APPEALS, VIDEOS AND ONGOING CAMPAIGNS
C. ARTICLES IN FULL
(If you would like to be added to the BAUAW list-serve and receive this newsletter via email, send your name (opitional) and email address to: bonnieweinstein@yahoo.com -- it's free. Please put "Add me to the list" in the subject line.)
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A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS
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KEVIN COOPER IS INNOCENT!
FLASHPOINTS Interview with Innocent San Quentin Death Row Inmate
Kevin Cooper -- Aired Monday, May 18,2009
http://www.flashpoints.net/#GOOGLE_SEARCH_ENGINE
To learn more about Kevin Cooper go to:
savekevincooper.org
LINKS
San Francisco Chronicle article on the recent ruling:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/05/13/BAM517J8T3.DTL
Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling and dissent:
http://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2009/05/11/05-99004o.pdf
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News Flash! Coming to Berkeley Wednesday May 20 - BRITISH MP GEORGE GALLOWAY, with CHRIS HEDGES & LAILA AL-ARIAN!
British MP George Galloway will speak about Gaza - in addition to Chris Hedges & Laila Al-Arian speaking from their book, "Collateral Damage: America's War Against Iraqi Civilians" - see below!
book-cover.jpg
Presented by the Middle East Children's Alliance, co-sponsored by KPFA, 94.1 fm
"We are embarking on an occupation that...will be as damaging to our souls as...to our prestige, power and security."
-Chris Hedges just prior to the US invasion of Iraq
In their book Collateral Damage: America's War Against Iraqi Civilians, journalists CHRIS HEDGES and LAILA AL-ARIAN bring us the voices of fifty U.S. combat vets with the moral courage to speak out: "Civilians are routinely run over or shot to death. Soldiers fire upon Iraqi vehicles with impunity. Late-night detentions...terrify women, traumatize children, and radicalize the young men caught in their dragnet."
Civilians ask: "Can you imagine being innocent and no one understands what you're saying? Not able to stop the car at a check point because the brakes don't work? Having your friends killed because they couldn't avoid a convoy?"
Wednesday, May 20, 2009 - 7pm
Martin Luther King, Jr., Middle School
1781 Rose Street, Berkeley
(near No. Bkly BART, free parking)
Tickets $15; $10 students/low income: www.mecaforpeace.org. $15 tickets also available at these local bookstores: (East Bay) Black Oak, Diesel, Pegasus/Solano, Pegasus/Shattuck, Walden Pond; (SF) Modern Times. Benefit for MECA, no one turned away for lack of funds.
ASL interpreted, Wheelchair Accessible
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer-Prize-winning former New York Times reporter and graduate of Harvard Divinity School. He also received the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism.
27-hedges.jpg
Laila Al-Arian is a writer/producer for Al Jazeera International. Her writings have been published in The Nation, UPI, and Alternet. She is a graduate of Columbia School of Journalism. Her father, professor and activist Sami Al-Arian, has been unjustly imprisoned on bogus charges of . violating the Patriot Act.
LailaAlArian_t.jpg
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End the Siege of Gaza! Rally in San Francisco on June 6
Solidarity Day on the 42nd Anniversary of Israel's seizure of Gaza
Support the Palestinian Right of Return! Stop U.S. Aid to Israel!
Saturday, June 6
12:00 noon
UN Plaza (7th and Market Sts.)
Saturday, June 6 marks the 42nd anniversary of the Israeli seizure of Gaza. Organizations and individuals in solidarity with the people of Palestine will be taking to the streets once again to demand: End the Siege of Gaza!
The world looked on in horror this past winter as Israel mercilessly starved and bombed the people of Gaza, killing around 1,200 Palestinians (at least a third of whom were children). The Arab world now refers to the dark days from the end of December to mid-January "The Gaza Massacre." Although the mainstream media no longer focuses on Gaza, the suffering continues there nonetheless. Using the pretext of combating terrorism, Israel has refused to allow in even one truckload of cement into Gaza. In other words, the city that was reduced to rubble still lies in rubble today. All these months later, people are still living in tents and are scarcely able to secure the necessities of life.
People of conscience around the world continue to raise their voices in outrage at this crime against humanity, and in solidarity with our brothers and sisters in Gaza. We will also stand for all Palestinian people's inalienable right to return to their homes from which they were evicted. Let your voice be heard -- join us Saturday, June 6, at 12 noon at UN Plaza in San Francisco (7th and Market Sts.). There will be a joint action in Washington DC on June 6.
Sponsoring organizations include ANSWER Coalition (Act Now to Stop War & End Racism), Muslim American Society (MAS) Freedom, National Council of Arab Americans (NCA), Free Palestine Alliance (FPA), Al-Awda - Palestine Right of Return Coalition, American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) and more!
Contact us at 415-821-6545 or answer@answersf.org to endorse or volunteer!
The June 6 demonstration is a major undertaking and we can't do it without the support of the large number of people who are standing with Palestine. Please click this link right now to make a generous donation:
https://secure2.convio.net/pep/site/Donation?ACTION=SHOW_DONATION_OPTIONS&CAMPAIGN_ID=1443&JServSessionIdr010=5e0ldsoh91.app6a
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ATTEND THE JULY 10 NATIONAL ASSEMBLY CONFERENCE IN PITTSBURGH!
REGISTER FOR THE CONFERENCE and DOWNLOAD PRINTABLE BROCHURE (8.5 X 14) at:
https://natassembly.org/Home_Page.html
Dear Brothers and Sisters:
On behalf of the National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations, we are writing to invite you and members of your organization to attend a national antiwar conference to be held July 10-12, 2009 at La Roche College in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
The purpose of this conference is to bring together antiwar and social justice activists from across the country to discuss and decide what we can do together to end the wars, occupations, bombing attacks, threats and interventions that are taking place in the Middle East and beyond, which the U.S. government is conducting and promoting.
We believe that such a conference will be welcomed by the peoples of Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Palestine and Iran, who are the victims of these policies. It will also be welcomed by victims of the depression-type conditions in this country, with tens of millions losing jobs, homes, health care coverage and pensions, while trillions of dollars are spent bailing out Wall Street and the banks, waging expansionist wars and occupations, and funding the Pentagon's insatiable appetite.
This will be the National Assembly's second conference. The first was held in Cleveland last June and it was attended by over 400 people, including top leaders of the antiwar movement and activists from many states. After discussion and debate, attendees voted - on the basis of one person, one vote - to urge the movement to join together for united spring actions. The National Assembly endorsed and helped build the March actions in Washington D.C., San Francisco and Los Angeles, and the April actions in New York City.
We are all aware of the developments since our last conference - the election of a new administration in the U.S., the ongoing occupation of Iraq, the escalation in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the horrific Israeli bombing of Gaza, and the extreme peril of an additional war in the Middle East, this time against Iran. Given all this, it is crystal clear that a strong, united, independent antiwar movement is needed now more than ever. We urge you to help build such a movement by attending the July conference and sharing your ideas and proposals with other attendees regarding where the antiwar movement goes from here.
For more information, please visit the National Assembly's website at natassembly.org, email us at natassembly@aol.com, or call 216-736-4704. We will be glad to send you upon request brochures announcing the July conference (a copy is attached) and you can also register for the conference online. [Please be aware that La Roche College is making available private rooms with baths at a very reasonable rate, but will only guarantee them if reserved by June 25.]
Yours for peace, justice and unity,
National Assembly Administrative Body
Zaineb Alani, Author of The Words of an Iraqi War Survivor & More; Colia Clark, Chair, Richard Wright Centennial Committee, Grandmothers for Mumia Abu-Jamal; Greg Coleridge, Coordinator, Northeast Ohio Anti-War Coalition (NOAC) and Economic Justice and Empowerment Program Director, Northeast Ohio American Friends Service Committee (AFSC); Alan Dale, Iraq Peace Action Coalition (MN); Donna Dewitt, President, South Carolina AFL-CIO; Mike Ferner, President, Veterans for Peace; Jerry Gordon, Former National Co-Coordinator of the Vietnam-Era National Peace Action Coalition (NPAC) and Member, U.S. Labor Against the War Steering Committee; Jonathan Hutto, Navy Petty Officer, Author of Anti-War Soldier; Co-Founder of Appeal for Redress; Marilyn Levin, Coordinating Committee, Greater Boston United for Justice with Peace, Middle East Crisis Coalition; Jeff Mackler, Founder, San Francisco Mobilization for Peace, Jobs and Justice; Fred Mason, President, Maryland State and District of Columbia AFL-CIO and Co-Convenor, U.S. Labor Against the War; Mary Nichols-Rhodes, Progressive Democrats of America/Ohio Branch; Lynne Stewart, Lynne Stewart Organization/Long Time Attorney and Defender of Constitutional Rights [Bay Area United Against War also was represented at the founding conference and will be there again this year. Carole Seligman and I initiated the motion to include adding opposition to the War in Afghanistan to the demands and title of the National Assembly.
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B. SPECIAL APPEALS, VIDEOS AND ONGOING CAMPAIGNS
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Alert: This could be it for Troy Davis
Global Day of Action for Troy Davis
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
http://www.amnestyusa.org/death-penalty/troy-davis-finality-over-fairness/sign-up-for-the-day-of-action-for-troy-davis/page.do?id=1011672&ICID=A0904A4&tr=y&auid=4803928
While news channels across the country are consumed with counting up to President Obama's first 100 days in office, Troy Davis has been counting down his last 30 days before a new execution date could be set. Help make these extra days count.
On May 19th help save Troy Davis by putting together any activity, event or creative action that calls attention to his case.
The 30-day stay issued by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals expires on May 15th.
So now is the time for us to organize to save the life of Troy Anthony Davis. We're asking everybody to come out strong on May 19th - a day marked in human rights calendars across the world as the Global Day of Action for Troy Davis.
Whether you're holding a "Text TROY to 90999" sign on a busy street or organizing your local Amnesty chapter to hold a public demonstration or vigil, we need everybody to contribute their time on May 19th to make sure that the state of Georgia does not kill a man who may well be innocent. Register your Global Day of Action for Troy Davis activity or event now.
We know that time is short for organizing public events, but an execution date could be set as early as late May, so it is essential that action be taken soon. It's also really important that we get an accurate count of how many events and activities are taking place on May 19th, so we can share this information with officials in Georgia. Our emails and phone calls have gone a long way in buying Troy some much-needed time, but now we've got to take our action to the streets.
We appreciate the tens of thousands of you who have stood in Troy's corner while heart-stopping scenes have unfolded. On three separate occasions, Troy has been scheduled for execution. And on three separate occasions, his life was saved within a short period of time, even minutes, of his scheduled execution date.
Each time, those last minute stays came after people like you turned out by the thousands to rally in his defense. It was no coincidence. Troy's sister and long-time Amnesty activist, Martina Correia, has acknowledged Amnesty's powerful role in saving her brother's life each of those times.
Now here we are again with the clock winding down. While we can see little opportunity for legal recourse or second chances, we know that your advocacy has a strong record of making amazing things happen.
When we first introduced you to Troy Davis in early 2007, few people outside of Georgia knew about the injustice taking place. In the past two years, countless people have come to see Troy's case as a prime example of why the death penalty must be abolished - the risk of executing someone for a crime they did not commit is just too high.
We are serious when we say that we need everyone to support Troy Davis on May 19th by organizing their own event or awareness-raising activity.
After all, if you had 30 days left to fight for your life, wouldn't you want to know that you had thousands standing in your corner?
In Solidarity,
Sue Gunawardena-Vaughn
Director, Death Penalty Abolition Campaign
Amnesty International USA
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C. ARTICLES IN FULL
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1) A Journey to New York, and Death at Rikers Island
By CHRISTINE HAUSER
May 17, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/nyregion/17inmate.html?ref=nyregion
2) Brutalizing Prisoners at Gitmo Under Obama
By Jeremy Scahill
May 15, 2009
AlterNet.org
http://www.alternet.org/rights/140022/little_known_military_thug_squad_still_brutalizing_prisoners_at_gitmo_under_obama/
3) Prosecutors Block Access to DNA Testing for Inmates
By SHAILA DEWAN
May 18, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/18/us/18dna.html?hp
4) Prison Workers Fired After Shocking Children With Stun Guns
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
May 18, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/18/us/18shock.html?ref=us
5) Published by the New York Civil Liberties Union (http://www.nyclu.org)
Record Number of Innocent New Yorkers Stopped, Interrogated by NYPD
May 12, 2009
http://www.nyclu.org/node/2389
6) A Newsroom to Cover the Disenfranchised Voices in Harlem
By JASON GRANT
May 18, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/18/nyregion/18harlem.html?ref=nyregion
7) G.M. Seeks More Imports From Low-Wage Regions
By LOUIS UCHITELLE
"General Motors is engaged in negotiating a reorganization that could increase vehicle imports from its plants in Mexico and Asia while closing factories and cutting the work force in the United States."
May 18, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/18/business/18auto.html?ref=business
8) War's Psychic Toll
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
May 19, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/19/opinion/19herbert.html?_r=1
9) Executions Debated as Missouri Plans One
By MONICA DAVEY
May 19, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/19/us/19death.html?ref=us
10) Cost of Cigarette Litter May Fall on San Francisco's Smokers
By JESSE McKINLEY
[Cigarette smoking is a horrible addiction. My mother died of complications from it. Why must we continue to punish the victims of this cold and calculated industry of poison manufacture and sales? Tobacco companies' profits should be taxed 100 percent to pay for the medical needs of those they have gotten addicted as well as all other related problems that they have induced with their lethal products. The tobacco companies should be shut down; their profits commandeered by we, the people! Again, we have the right to choose people over profits!...bw]
May 19, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/19/us/19smoke.html?ref=us
11) Pension Plans May Exclude Pregnancy Leaves, Justices Rule
By ADAM LIPTAK
May 19, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/19/us/19pregnancy.html?ref=us
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1) A Journey to New York, and Death at Rikers Island
By CHRISTINE HAUSER
May 17, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/nyregion/17inmate.html?ref=nyregion
Early one April morning, a man named Clarence Mobley boarded a bus in North Carolina bound for New York City. He wore his customary baseball cap and jeans, splattered with paint from his work as a handyman. In his pockets, he carried phone numbers for relatives and $40 that his brother Jonathan had given him for the trip.
"Last time I saw him he was good to go," said Jonathan Mobley, who took Clarence to the bus station in Charlotte.
At the other end of the journey, Mr. Mobley's son, Darian Mobley, waited for his father's call; they planned to get together soon after the bus arrived at the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Eventually, they were going to join Mr. Mobley's daughter, Ayanna Castro, for a family funeral.
But when the bus pulled away from Charlotte at 12:30 a.m. on April 25, it was the last time any family member heard from Clarence Mobley.
Then on May 4, a friend told Darian Mobley about a newspaper article about a man by that name who had died in custody at a jail on Rikers Island. Darian Mobley called his sister and asked her to check the Internet.
"At that moment I go numb," Mrs. Castro said. "I want to hope against hope that it couldn't possibly be my father."
But it was. The city's Department of Investigation and the Bronx district attorney's office are reviewing what led to Mr. Mobley's death on May 2. The medical examiner's office said Mr. Mobley, 60, died from a tear in his liver that was a result of a blow, but it will not decide whether his death was a homicide until the investigations are completed.
Stephen J. Morello, a spokesman for the city's Correction Department, which runs the jails on Rikers, said Mr. Mobley had menaced a correction officer with a meal tray while in custody on attempted burglary charges. Other officers helped subdue him, and he was placed in a holding cell. When officers checked on him later, they found that Mr. Mobley had died.
Mr. Mobley's relatives said they were unable to reconcile how the slight, loving man known as Eddie could be the same person who, according to the police, court records and interviews, was arrested twice after arriving in New York and seemed to be behaving erratically. In one instance he was spotted jumping on a car, and on another occasion he was seen trying to loosen railings at an apartment building, where residents said he sounded incoherent when they asked what he was doing.
Mrs. Castro, 37, recalled how Mr. Mobley sang at her wedding in 2000 and how he adored his grandchildren.
Jonathan Mobley described how Clarence, the oldest of six boys, took care of them after school when they were growing up in Lancaster, S.C. He made the children laugh at family gatherings, briefly served in the Air Force, and lived for a while in New York City, where he had several jobs including driving a truck.
Clarence Mobley also had his share of struggles, with misdemeanor arrests for drunkenness in South Carolina and for carrying a pocketknife in North Carolina, Jonathan Mobley said. He sometimes came across as incoherent, stuttering violently when he was upset or felt no one was listening, and in recent years suffered from arthritis so crippling that he had to sit on his hands to make them unfold. That made finding odd jobs difficult, his brother said.
The final days of Mr. Mobley's life are partly illuminated by court papers, interviews and official statements about his death. On April 29, Mr. Mobley was arrested about 1 a.m. on 19th Street in Astoria, Queens, on a disorderly conduct charge for jumping atop a Chevy Blazer, according to a criminal complaint. He was released after a court appearance.
A spokesman for the Queens district attorney's office said Mr. Mobley declined his right to make a phone call after his arrest, which baffled Darian Mobley, 31, who lives near where his father was arrested.
"Why didn't he call me? What was he doing?" said the son, who drives a school bus. "Nothing adds up to me, nothing makes sense to me. Sometimes circumstances give you an understanding that helps you deal with grief. To lose my father the way I lost him and have so many questions unanswered, it is hard."
On the morning of April 30, Mr. Mobley was arrested again, this time inside 108-07 101st Street in Richmond Hill, Queens, and charged with trying to break into an apartment there. After hearing scratching noises at their door, Tazeen Danish, who lives in the apartment with her husband and children, said she looked through a stairwell to the ground floor and saw a man trying to unscrew a railing.
"He had a long, new screwdriver and he was waving it like he wanted to kill somebody with it," she said. "We said, 'Who are you? Why are you here?' He said, 'Blah, blah.' We could not understand him." After his arrest, Mr. Mobley was taken to Queens Hospital Center for a psychiatric evaluation and then to the 102nd Precinct station house. He was arraigned on attempted burglary and other charges.
"At court he was very quiet," said Barbara Byrne, Mr. Mobley's court-appointed lawyer, who works for the Legal Aid Society. "I could not get him to say very much. He was staring at the floor and picking at the bars of his cell. Another attorney who had talked to him said he was completely incoherent."
The court ordered Mr. Mobley to remain in custody and undergo another psychiatric evaluation, Ms. Byrne said. He was then sent to Rikers. "They were clearly aware that the gentleman had psychiatric problems," she said.
Mr. Mobley was checked into the Anna M. Kross Center at Rikers at 8:42 a.m. on May 2, his first name misspelled as "Clarnice," said Mr. Morello, the Correction Department spokesman. As he was being prepared to be taken to Bellevue Hospital Center for the examination, he "took a swing at a corrections officer" and was "subdued" by the officer and others, Mr. Morello said.
Mr. Mobley, who was 5 feet 7 inches tall and weighed 115 pounds, was put alone in a holding cell. Mr. Morello said he did not know how much time elapsed before he died.
As part of its review, the city's Investigation Department, officials said, will interview jail personnel and examine surveillance video recorded in the jail's public areas.
Mr. Mobley's family started searching for him after he failed to contact his family after his bus arrived. "The alarm bells started going off when it hit nightfall," said Mrs. Castro, who lives in Laurel, Md. They called Greyhound and confirmed that he had transferred buses in Washington to continue his trip to Manhattan.
After a few days, Darian Mobley contacted the station house in the Midtown South precinct. He was told the family needed to file a missing-persons report in South Carolina because Mr. Mobley was from there.
"It is unfortunate," Mrs. Castro said. "He fell through the cracks."
She recalled her father's last words to her before he boarded the bus to New York. "He said when he got off the phone, 'Baby girl, I love you, see you soon,' " Mrs. Castro said. "That was pretty much it."
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2) Brutalizing Prisoners at Gitmo Under Obama
By Jeremy Scahill
May 15, 2009
AlterNet.org
http://www.alternet.org/rights/140022/little_known_military_thug_squad_still_brutalizing_prisoners_at_gitmo_under_obama/
The "Black Shirts" of Guantanamo routinely terrorize prisoners, breaking bones, gouging eyes, squeezing testicles, and "dousing" them with chemicals.
As the Obama administration continues to fight the release of some 2,000 photos that graphically document U.S. military abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, an ongoing Spanish investigation is adding harrowing details to the ever-emerging portrait of the torture inside and outside Guantánamo. Among them: "blows to [the] testicles;" "detention underground in total darkness for three weeks with deprivation of food and sleep;" being "inoculated ... through injection with 'a disease for dog cysts;'" the smearing of feces on prisoners; and waterboarding. The torture, according to the Spanish investigation, all occurred "under the authority of American military personnel" and was sometimes conducted in the presence of medical professionals.
More significantly, however, the investigation could for the first time place an intense focus on a notorious, but seldom discussed, thug squad deployed by the U.S. military to retaliate with excessive violence to the slightest resistance by prisoners at Guantánamo.
The force is officially known as the Immediate Reaction Force or Emergency Reaction Force, but inside the walls of Guantánamo, it is known to the prisoners as the Extreme Repression Force. Despite President Barack Obama's publicized pledge to close the prison camp and end torture-and analysis from human rights lawyers who call these forces' actions illegal-IRFs remain very much active at Guantánamo.
IRF: An extrajudicial terror squad
The existence of these forces has been documented since the early days of Guantánamo, but it has rarely been mentioned in the U.S. media or in congressional inquiries into torture. On paper, IRF teams are made up of five military police officers who are on constant stand-by to respond to emergencies. "The IRF team is intended to be used primarily as a forced-extraction team, specializing in the extraction of a detainee who is combative, resistive, or if the possibility of a weapon is in the cell at the time of the extraction," according to a declassified copy of the Standard Operating Procedures for Camp Delta at Guantánamo. The document was signed on March 27, 2003, by Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the man credited with eventually "Gitmoizing" Abu Ghraib and other U.S.-run prisons and who reportedly ordered subordinates to treat prisoners "like dogs." Gen. Miller ran Guantánamo from November 2002 until August 2003 before moving to Iraq in 2004.
When an IRF team is called in, its members are dressed in full riot gear, which some prisoners and their attorneys have compared to "Darth Vader" suits. Each officer is assigned a body part of the prisoner to restrain: head, right arm, left arm, left leg, right leg. According to the SOP memo, the teams are to give verbal warnings to prisoners before storming the cell: "Prior to the use of the IRF team, an interpreter will be used to tell the detainee of the discipline measures to be taken against him and ask whether he intends to resist. Regardless of his answer, his recent behavior and demeanor should be taken into account in determining the validity of his answer." The IRF team is authorized to spray the detainee in the face with mace twice before entering the cell.
According to Gen. Miller's memo: "The physical security of U.S. forces and detainees in U.S. care is paramount. Use the minimum force necessary for mission accomplishment and force protection ... Use of the IRF team and levels of force are not to be used as a method of punishment."
But human rights lawyers, former prisoners and former IRF team members with extensive experience at Guantánamo paint a very different picture of the role these teams played. "They are the Black Shirts of Guantánamo," says Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has represented the most Guantánamo prisoners. "IRFs can't be separated from torture. They are a part of the brutalization of humans treated as less than human."
Clive Stafford Smith, who has represented 50 Guantánamo prisoners, including 31 still imprisoned there, has seen the IRF teams up close. "They're goons," he says. "They've played a huge role."
While much of the "torture debate" has emphasized the so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" defined by the twisted legal framework of the Office of Legal Council memos, IRF teams in effect operate at Guantánamo as an extrajudicial terror squad that has regularly brutalized prisoners outside of the interrogation room, gang beating them, forcing their heads into toilets, breaking bones, gouging their eyes, squeezing their testicles, urinating on a prisoner's head, banging their heads on concrete floors and hog-tying them-sometimes leaving prisoners tied in excruciating positions for hours on end.
The IRF teams "were fully approved at the highest levels [of the Bush administration], including the Secretary of Defense and with outside consultation of the Justice Department," says Scott Horton, one of the leading experts on U.S. Military and Constitutional law. This force "was designed to disabuse the prisoners of any idea that they would be free from physical assault while in U.S. custody," he says. "They were trained to brutally punish prisoners in a brief period of time, and ridiculous pretexts were taken to justify" the beatings.
So notorious are these teams that a new lexicon was created and used by prisoners and guards alike to describe the beatings: IRFing prisoners or to be IRFed.
Former Guantánamo Army Chaplain James Yee, who witnessed IRFings, described "the seemingly harmless behaviors that brought it on [like] not responding when a guard spoke." Yee said he believed that during daily cell sweeps, guards would intentionally do invasive searches of the Muslim prisoners' "private areas" and Korans to "rile the detainees," saying it "seemed like harassment for the sake of harassment, and the prisoners fought it. Those who did were always IRFed."
"I'll put it like this," Stafford Smith says. "My clients are afraid of them."
"Up to 15 people attempted to commit suicide at Camp Delta due to the abuses of the IRF officials," according to the Spanish investigation. Combined with other documentation, including prisoner testimony and legal memos, the IRF teams appear to be one of the most significant forces in the abuse of prisoners at Guantánamo, worthy of an investigation by U.S. prosecutors in and of themselves.
The IRF-ing of Omar Deghayes
Perhaps the worst abuses in the Spanish case involve Omar Deghayes, whose torture began long before he reached Guantánamo, and intensified upon his arrival.
A Libyan citizen who had lived in Britain since 1986, in the late 1990s, Deghayes was a law student when he traveled to Afghanistan, "for the simple reason that he is a Muslim and he wanted to see what it was like," according to his lawyer, Stafford Smith. While there, he met and married an Afghan woman with whom he had a son.
After 9/11, Deghayes was detained in Lahore, Pakistan, for a month, where he allegedly was subjected to "systematic beatings" and "electric shocks done with a tool that looked like a small gun."
He was then transferred to Islamabad, Pakistan, where he claims he was interrogated by both U.S. and British personnel. There, the torture continued; in a March 2005 memo written by a lawyer who later visited Deghayes at Guantánamo, he described a particularly ghoulish incident:
"One day they took me to a room that had very large snakes in glass boxes. The room was all painted black-and-white, with dim lights. They threatened to leave me there and let the snakes out with me in the room. This really got to me, as there were such sick people that they must have had this room specially made."
Deghayes was eventually moved to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, where he was beaten and "kept nude, as part of the process of humiliation due to his religion." U.S. personnel placed Deghayes "inside a closed box with a lock and limited air." He also described seeing U.S. guards sodomize an African prisoner and alleged guards "forced petrol and benzene up the anuses of the prisoners."
"The camp looked like the Nazi camps that I saw in films," Deghayes said.
When Deghayes finally arrived at Guantánamo in September 2002, he found himself the target of the feared IRF teams.
"The IRF team sprayed Mr. Deghayes with mace; they threw him in the air and let him fall on his face ... " according to the Spanish investigation. Deghayes says he also endured a "sexual attack." In March 2004, after being "sprayed in the eyes with mace," Deghayes says authorities refused to provide him with medical attention, causing him to permanently lose sight in his right eye. Stafford Smith described the incident:
"They brought their pepper spray and held him down. They held both of his eyes open and sprayed it into his eyes and later took a towel soaked in pepper spray and rubbed it in his eyes.
"Omar could not see from either eye for two weeks, but he gradually got sight back in one eye.
"He's totally blind in the right eye. I can report that his right eye is all white and milky-he can't see out of it because he has been blinded by the U.S. in Guantánamo."
In fact, Stafford Smith says his blindness was caused by a combination of the pepper spray and the fact that an IRF team member pushed his finger into Deghayes' eye.
The Spanish investigation into Deghayes' torture draws much from the March 2005 memo, which described several acts of abuse of Deghayes at the hands of the IRF teams. (The memo refers to IRF by its alternative acronym ERF):
ERF-ing Omar-The feces incident
On one of the ERFing incidents where Omar was abused, the officer in charge himself came into the cell with the feces of another prisoners [sic] and smeared it onto Omar's face. While some prisoners had thrown feces at the abusive guards, Omar had always emphatically refused to sink to this level. The experience was one of the most disgusting in Omar's life.
ERF-ing Omar-The toilet incident
In April or May 2004, when the Guantánamo administration insisted on taking Omar's English-language Quran, he objected. The ERF team came into Omar's cell and put him in shackles. He was not resisting. They then put his head in the toilet, pressed his face into the water. They repeatedly flushed it.
ERFing Omar-The beating
In one ERFing incident, Omar was shackled by three American soldiers in their black Darth Vader Star Wars uniforms. The first was going to punch Omar, but before he could, the second kneed Omar in the nose, trying to break it. The third queried this, and the second said, "If his nose is broken, that's good. We want to break his ******* nose." The third soldier then took him to hospital.
ERF-ing Omar-The drowning
The ERF team came into the cell with a water hose under very high pressure. He was totally shackled, and they would hold his head fixed still. They would force water up his nose until he was suffocating and would scream for them to stop. This was done with medical staff present, and they would join in. Omar is particularly affected by the fact that there was one nurse who "had been very beautiful and kind" to him to [sic] took part in the process. This happened three times.
ERF-ing Omar-Tango block
Omar was out on the Tango block rec yard when 15 ERF soldiers came, with two other soldiers in the towers, armed with guns. They grabbed him (and others) and sprayed him.
They then pulled him up into the air and slammed his face down, on the left side, on the concrete. They had someone from the hospital there, and she just watched. She then came up to him and asked whether he was OK. He was taken off to isolation after that.
A medical examination cited in the Spanish investigation confirmed that Deghayes suffered from blindness of the right eye, fracture of the nasal bone and fracture of the right index finger, as well as post-traumatic stress disorder and "profound" depression.
Evidence destroyed?
At the Pentagon, an official paper trail should exist that documents the IRFing of Deghayes. What's more, according to Gen. Miller's SOP memo, all of the actions of the IRF teams were to be videotaped as well.
After a prisoner was IRFed, "The medical personnel on site will conduct a medical evaluation of the detainee to check for any injuries sustained during the IRF," and, "all IRF Team members are required to submit sworn statements." These statements, reports and video were "to be kept as evidence."
As of early 2005, there were reportedly 500 hours of video; the ACLU attempted to force their release, but they never have been produced.
"Where are those tapes?" asks CCR President Michael Ratner. In some cases, the answer may well be that they never existed or no longer do. "When an IRFing took place a camera was supposed to be present to capture the IRFing," said Army Spec. Brandon Neely, who was on one of the first IRF teams at Guantánamo. "Every time I witnessed an IRFing a camera was present, but one of two things would happen: (1) the camera would never be turned on, or (2) the camera would be on, but pointed straight at the ground."
Neeley recently gave testimony to the University of California, Davis' Guantánamo Testimonials Project. He also described one IRFing where the video of the incident was destroyed.
Regarding the videos, Stafford Smith says, "There are some things I can't talk about, but I will confirm there is photographic evidence. I am absolutely confident that if all of the photographs were revealed to the world, they would provide irrefutable physical evidence that the prisoners had been" abused by the IRFs.
As for the "sworn statements" by IRF team members, a review of hundreds of pages of declassified incident reports reveals an almost robotic uniformity in the handwritten accounts, overwhelmingly composed of succinct portrayals of operations that went off without a hitch. Almost all of them contain the phrases "minimum amount of force necessary" and the prisoner "received medical attention and evaluation" before being returned.
"All internal investigations of Gitmo so far have completely whitewashed the IRF process," says Horton. "They did so for obvious reasons."
"The IRF program was supported by advice secured from the Justice Department suggesting that insubordinate behavior could be cited to justify a departure from guidelines against physical force. It has a conspiratorial odor to it," says Horton. "In fact the use of IRFs was illegal, a violation of Common Article 3 [of the Geneva Convention] and a violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which forbids the use of unnecessary force against prisoners."
While Spain will probably pursue the role the IRF teams played in the torture of its citizens or residents, its scope goes far beyond those specific incidents.
"I have seen detainees IRFed while they were praying, or for refusing medication."
Deghayes' treatment at the hands of the feared IRF teams mirrors that of several other released Guantánamo prisoners.
David Hicks, an Australian citizen held at Guantánamo, said in a sworn affidavit, "I have witnessed the activities of the [IRF], which consists of a squad of soldiers that enter a detainee's cell and brutalize him with the aid of an attack dog ... I have seen detainees suffer serious injuries as a result of being IRFed. I have seen detainees IRFed while they were praying, or for refusing medication."
Binyam Mohamed, released in February, has also described an IRF assault: "They nearly broke my back. The guy on top was twisting me one way, the guys on my legs the other. They marched me out of the cell to the fingerprint room, still cuffed. I clenched my fists behind me so they couldn't take [finger] prints, so they tried to take them by force. The guy at my head sticks his fingers up my nose and wrenches my head back, jerking it around by the nostrils. Then he put his fingers in my eyes. It felt as if he was trying to gouge them out. Another guy was punching my ribs, and another was squeezing my testicles. Finally, I couldn't take it any more. I let them take the prints."
A report prepared by British human rights lawyer Gareth Peirce, documents the alleged abuse of a Bahraini citizen, Jumah al Dousari by an IRF team. Before being taken to Guantánamo, al Dousari was widely known to be "mentally ill." On one occasion, the IRF Team was called into his cell after al Dousari allegedly insulted a female soldier. Another prisoner who witnessed the incident described what happened:
"There were usually five people on an ERF team. On this occasion there were eight of them. When Jumah saw them coming, he realized something was wrong and was lying on the floor with his head in his hands. If you're on the floor with your hands on your head, then you would hope that all they would do would be to come in and put the chains on you. That is what they're supposed to do.
"The first man is meant to go in with a shield. On this occasion, the man with the shield threw the shield away, took his helmet off, when the door was unlocked ran in and did a knee drop onto Jumah's back just between his shoulder blades with his full weight. He must have been about 240 pounds in weight. His name was Smith. He was a sergeant E-5. Once he had done that, the others came in and were punching and kicking Jumah. While they were doing that the female officer then came in and was kicking his stomach. Jumah had had an operation and had metal rods in his stomach clamped together in the operation.
"The officer Smith was the MP sergeant who was punching him. He grabbed his head with one hand and with the other hand punched him repeatedly in the face. His nose was broken. He pushed his face, and he smashed it into the concrete floor. All of this should be on video. There was blood everywhere. When they took him out, they hosed the cell down and the water ran red with blood. We all saw it."
Force-feeding as a form of torture
The IRF teams were also used to force-feed hunger-striking prisoners at Guantánamo, including in August 2005. Deghayes was among the hunger strikers, writing in a letter, "I am slowly dying in this solitary prison cell, I have no rights, no hope. So why not take my destiny into my own hands, and die for a principle?"
While the U.S. government portrayed a situation where the hunger strikers were being given medical attention, lawyers for some of the men claim that the tubes used to force feed them were "the thickness of a finger" and "were viewed by the detainees as objects of torture."
According to attorney Julia Tarver, one of her clients, Yousef al-Shehri, had a tube inserted with "one [IRF member] holding his chin while the other held him back by his hair, and a medical staff member forcibly inserted the tube in his nose and down his throat" and into his stomach. "No anesthesia or sedative was provided to alleviate the obvious trauma of the procedure." Tarver said this method caused al-Shehri and others to vomit "substantial amounts of blood."
This was painful enough, but al-Shehri, described the removal of the tubes as "unbearable," causing him to pass out from the pain.
According to Tarver, "Nasal gastric (NG) tubes [were removed] by placing a foot on one end of the tube and yanking the detainee's head back by his hair, causing the tube to be painfully ejected from the detainee's nose. Then, in front of the Guantanamo physicians ... the guards took NG tubes from one detainee, and with no sanitization whatsoever, reinserted it into the nose of a different detainee. When these tubes were reinserted, the detainees could see the blood and stomach bile from the other detainees remaining on the tubes." Medical staff, according to Tarver, made no effort to intervene. This was one of many incidents where IRF teams facilitated such force-feeding.
Aside from hunger strikes, other forms of resistance were met with brutal reprisal. Tarek Dergoul, a prisoner interviewed by Human Rights Watch, described how IRF teams beat him because he "often refused to cooperate with cell searches during prayer time. One reason was that they would abuse the Quran. Another was that the guards deliberately felt up my private parts under the guise of searching me."
Dergoul said, "If I refused a cell search, MPs would call the Extreme Reaction Force, who came in riot gear with plastic shields and pepper spray. The Extreme Reaction Force entered the cell, ran in and pinned me down after spraying me with pepper spray and attacked me. The pepper spray caused me to vomit on several occasions. They poked their fingers in my eyes, banged my head on the floor and kicked and punched me and tied me up like a beast. They often forced my head into the toilet."
Jamal al-Harith claims he was beaten by a five-man IRF team for refusing an injection: "I was terrified of what they were going to do. I had seen victims of [IRF] being paraded in front of my cell. They were battered and bruised into submission. It was a horrible sight and a frequent sight. ... They were really gung-ho, hyped up and aggressive. One of them attacked me really hard and left me with a deep red mark from my backbone down to my knee. I thought I was bleeding, but it was just really bad bruising."
The IRF-ing of Army Sgt. 1st Class Sean Baker
Ironically, perhaps the most well-publicized case of abuse by this force was not inflicted on a Guantanamo prisoner, but on an active-duty U.S. soldier and Gulf War veteran.
In January 2003, Sgt. Sean Baker was ordered to participate in an IRF training drill at Guantánamo where he would play the role of an uncooperative prisoner. Sgt. Baker says he was ordered by his superior to take off his military uniform and put on an orange jumpsuit like those worn by prisoners. He was told to yell out the code word "red" if the situation became unbearable, or he wanted his fellow soldiers to stop.
According to sworn statements, upon entering his cell, IRF members thought they were restraining an actual prisoner. As Sgt. Baker later described:
"They grabbed my arms, my legs, twisted me up and, unfortunately, one of the individuals got up on my back from behind and put pressure down on me while I was face down. Then he-the same individual-reached around and began to choke me and press my head down against the steel floor. After several seconds, 20 to 30 seconds, it seemed like an eternity because I couldn't breathe. When I couldn't breathe, I began to panic and I gave the code word I was supposed to give to stop the exercise, which was 'red.' ... That individual slammed my head against the floor and continued to choke me. Somehow I got enough air. I muttered out: 'I'm a U.S. soldier. I'm a U.S. soldier.'"
Sgt. Baker said his head was slammed once more, and after groaning "I'm a U.S. soldier" one more time, "I heard them say, 'Whoa, whoa, whoa,' you know, like ... he was telling the other guy to stop."
According to CBS:
Bloodied and disoriented, Baker somehow made it back to his unit, and his first thought was to get hold of the videotape. "I said, 'Go get the tape,'" recalls Baker. "'They've got a tape. Go get the tape.' My squad leader went to get the tape."
Every extraction drill at Guantanamo was routinely videotaped, and the tape of this drill would show what happened. But Baker says his squad leader came back and said, "There is no tape."
The New York Times later reported that the military "says it can't find a videotape that is believed to have been made of the incident." Baker was soon diagnosed with traumatic brain injury. He began suffering seizures, sometimes 10 to 12 per day.
"This was just one typical incident, and Baker was recognizable as an American," says Horton. "But it gives a good flavor of what the Gitmo detainees went through, which was generally worse."
IRFing continues under Obama
On January 7, 2009, a prisoner named Yasin Ismael threw a shoe in frustration at the inside of a cage to which he had been confined. The guards accused Ismael of attacking them and called in an IRF team.
According to his attorneys, "The team shackled him, and he put up no resistance. They then beat him. They blocked his nose and mouth until he felt that he would suffocate and hit him repeatedly in the ribs and head. They then took him back to his cell. As he was being taken back, a guard urinated on his head. Mr. Ismael was badly injured, and his ear started to bleed, leaving a large stain on his pillow."
Less than two weeks later, on Jan. 22, newly inaugurated President Obama issued an executive order requiring the closure of Guantánamo within a year and also ordered a review of the status of the prisoners held there, requiring "humane standards of confinement" in accordance with the Geneva Conventions.
But one month later, the Center for Constitutional Rights released a report titled "Conditions of Confinement at Guantánamo: Still In Violation of the Law," which found that abuses continued. In fact, one Guantanamo lawyer, Ahmed Ghappour, said that his clients were reporting "a ramping up in abuse" since Obama was elected, including "beatings, the dislocation of limbs, spraying of pepper spray into closed cells, applying pepper spray to toilet paper and over-force feeding detainees who are on hunger strike," according to Reuters.
"Certainly in my experience there have been many, many more reported incidents of abuse since the inauguration," Ghappour said.
While the dominant media coverage of the U.S. torture apparatus has portrayed these tactics as part of a "Bush era" system that Obama has now ended, when it comes to the IRF teams, that is simply not true. "[D]etainees live in constant fear of physical violence. Frequent attacks by IRF teams heighten this anxiety and reinforce that violence and can be inflicted by the guards at any moment for any perceived infraction, or sometimes without provocation or explanation," according to CCR.
In early February 2009, at least 16 men were on hunger strike at Guantanamo's Camp 6 and refused to leave their cells for "force feeding." IRF teams violently extracted them from their cells with the "men being dragged, beaten and stepped on, and their arms and fingers twisted painfully." Tubes were then forced down their noses, which one prisoner described as "torture, torture, torture."
In April, Mohammad al-Qurani, a 21-year-old Guantánamo prisoner from Chad managed to call Al-Jazeera and described a recent beating: "This treatment started about 20 days before Obama came into power, and since then I've been subjected to it almost every day," he said. "Since Obama took charge, he has not shown us that anything will change."
Al-Jazeera reported:
Describing a specific incident, which took place after change in the U.S. administration, al-Qurani said he had refused to leave his cell because they were "not granting me my rights," such as being able to walk around, interact with other inmates and have "normal food."
A group of six soldiers wearing protective gear and helmets entered his cell, accompanied by one soldier carrying a camera and one with tear gas, he said.
"They had a thick rubber or plastic baton they beat me with. They emptied out about two canisters of tear gas on me," he told Al-Jazeera.
"After I stopped talking, and tears were flowing from my eyes, I could hardly see or breathe.
"They then beat me again to the ground, one of them held my head and beat it against the ground. I started screaming to his senior 'see what he's doing, see what he's doing' [but] his senior started laughing and said 'he's doing his job.'"
In another incident after Obama's inauguration, prisoner Khan Tumani began smearing excrement on the walls of his cell to protest his treatment. According to his lawyer, when he "did not clean up the excrement, a large IRF team of ten guards was ordered to his cell and beat him severely. The guards sprayed so much tear gas or other noxious substance after the beating that it made at least one of the guards vomit. Mr. Khan Tumani's skin was still red and burning from the gas days later."
The CCR has called on the Obama administration to immediately end the use of the IRF teams at Guantánamo. Horton, meanwhile, says "detainees should be entitled to compensation for injuries they suffered."
As the abuse continues at Guantánamo, and powerful congressional leaders from both parties and the White House fiercely resist the appointment of an independent special prosecutor, the sad fact is that the best chance for justice for the victims of U.S. torture may well be an ocean away in Madrid, Spain.
"The Obama administration should not need pressure from abroad to uphold our own laws and initiate a criminal investigation in the U.S.," says Vince Warren, CCR's executive director. "I hope the Spanish cases will impress on the president and Attorney General Eric Holder how seriously the rest of the world takes these crimes and show them the issue will not go away."
Jeremy Scahill, an independent journalist who reports frequently for the national radio and TV program Democracy Now, has spent extensive time reporting from Iraq and Yugoslavia. He is currently a Puffin Writing fellow at The Nation Institute. Scahill is the author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army. His writing and reporting is available at Rebel Reports.
- AlterNet.org, May 15, 2009
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3) Prosecutors Block Access to DNA Testing for Inmates
By SHAILA DEWAN
May 18, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/18/us/18dna.html?hp
In an age of advanced forensic science, the first step toward ending Kenneth Reed's prolonged series of legal appeals should be simple and quick: a DNA test, for which he has offered to pay, on evidence from the 1991 rape of which he was convicted.
Louisiana, where Mr. Reed is in prison, is one of 46 states that have passed laws to enable inmates like him to get such a test. But in many jurisdictions, prosecutors are using new arguments to get around the intent of those laws, particularly in cases with multiple defendants, when it is not clear how many DNA profiles will be found in a sample.
The laws were enacted after DNA evidence exonerated a first wave of prisoners in the early 1990s, when law enforcement authorities strongly resisted reopening old cases. Continued resistance by prosecutors is causing years of delay and, in some cases, eliminating the chance to try other suspects because the statute of limitations has passed by the time the test is granted.
Mr. Reed has been seeking a DNA test for three years, saying it will prove his innocence. But prosecutors have refused, saying he was identified by witnesses, making his identification by DNA unnecessary.
A recent analysis of 225 DNA exonerations by Brandon L. Garrett, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, found that prosecutors opposed DNA testing in almost one out of five cases. In many of the others, they initially opposed testing but ultimately agreed to it. In 98 of those 225 cases, the DNA test identified the real culprit.
In Illinois, prosecutors have opposed a DNA test for Johnnie Lee Savory, convicted of committing a double murder when he was 14, on the grounds that a jury was convinced of his guilt without DNA and that the 175 convicts already exonerated by DNA were "statistically insignificant."
In the case of Robert Conway, a mentally incapacitated man convicted of stabbing a shopkeeper to death in 1986 in Pennsylvania, prosecutors have objected that DNA tests on evidence from the scene would not be enough to prove his innocence.
And in Tennessee, prosecutors withdrew their consent to DNA testing for Rudolph Powers, convicted of a 1980 rape, because the victim had an unidentified consensual sex partner shortly before the attack.
Such arguments, defense lawyers say, often ignore scientific advances like the ability to identify multiple DNA profiles in a single sample.
Defense lawyers also say the arguments ignore the proven power of DNA to refute almost every other type of evidence.
In a case before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, for example, Lynne Abraham, the Philadelphia district attorney, argued that the defendant, Anthony Wright, was not entitled to DNA testing because of the overwhelming evidence presented at trial, including his confession, four witnesses and clothing stained with the victims' blood that the police said was found at Mr. Wright's home. The Pennsylvania DNA statute requires the courts to determine if there is a "reasonable possibility" that the test would prove innocence.
Prosecutors say they are concerned that convicts will seek DNA testing as a delay tactic or a fishing expedition, and that allowing DNA tests undermines hard-won jury verdicts and opens the floodgates to overwhelming requests.
"It's definitely a matter of drawing the line somewhere," said Peter Carr, the assistant district attorney who handled the case of Mr. Wright, who was accused of raping and killing a 77-year-old woman. The defendant did not request testing until 2005, three years after the statute was passed, Mr. Carr said, and in his view there was no possibility that the test would show innocence.
"There's also the idea that you want finality for the victim's sake," Mr. Carr said. "If someone else's semen was found at the crime scene, we'd have to talk to the victim's family about whether the victim was sexually active."
Barry Scheck, a co-founder of the Innocence Project, a New York legal advocacy group that uses DNA to help the wrongfully convicted, said that most prosecutors no longer resisted testing in cases like Mr. Wright's, where there is one perpetrator. More obstacles arise, Mr. Scheck said, in cases with multiple defendants or cases where a test result might point to another suspect, even if it does not clearly prove the innocence of the defendant.
In one such case near Austin, Tex., a defendant who was convicted in the bludgeoning death of his wife requested a DNA test on a bloody bandanna found 100 feet from the house. On its own, a test of the bandanna would not prove the guilt or innocence of the defendant the same way testing semen in a rape case might. But if it matched DNA found at the scene of a similar crime in the same county, or DNA in a database of convicted felons, it would be significant evidence that someone else might be responsible - the kind of evidence that might plant a reasonable doubt in a juror's mind or lead to a confession by a perpetrator.
Although such matches have been found in many cases, most state DNA statutes focus only on whether a test alone could prove innocence. The purpose of Tennessee's DNA statute, a court there said, was "to establish the innocence of the petitioner and not to create conjecture or speculation that the act may have possibly been perpetrated by a phantom defendant."
Law enforcement officials often say, " 'We're not going to consider the possibility that a third party did it,' " Mr. Scheck said, adding, "which is completely crazy because you use the databank every day to make new criminal cases."
In Mr. Reed's case in East Baton Rouge Parish, the district attorney who first prosecuted the case and now his successor, Hillar C. Moore III, have appealed every DNA-related ruling in Mr. Reed's favor and objected to even a hearing on the matter.
They have argued that Mr. Reed's identity was not an issue in the trial because he was identified by the defendant, even though DNA evidence has repeatedly contradicted eyewitness identifications. They have argued that there was no way of knowing whether the evidence would yield a usable DNA profile - a question that would be settled by testing it.
The victim testified that two attackers had sexual intercourse with her, but the prosecutors now argue that it might have been only one, Mr. Reed's accomplice. Even if Mr. Reed's DNA was nowhere to be found, said Prem Burns, the first assistant district attorney, he would still be guilty of aiding the rapist.
Mr. Reed's lawyers have argued that a test on a rape kit and semen could prove his innocence if it shows two distinct profiles and neither is a match.
But Ms. Burns said that under her reading of the law, the mere possibility that the test would show two profiles is not enough - Mr. Reed has to demonstrate, in advance, that a favorable test result would resolve his innocence without question.
But the prosecutors also seem to believe that Mr. Reed's arguments are far-fetched. "There are simply too many 'ifs' in this case," Mr. Moore wrote in a recent appeal.
Prosecutors said much the same when Douglas Warney, convicted of murder in Rochester in 1997, argued that a DNA test could lead to the real killer. They called his assertion "a drawn-out kind of sequence of if, if, if." Yet that is exactly what happened after Mr. Warney's DNA test, and the killer, when he was identified, confessed.
Nina Morrison, a lawyer for Mr. Wright, said: "The one thing I've learned in doing this for seven years is there's no reason to guess or speculate. You can just do the test."
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4) Prison Workers Fired After Shocking Children With Stun Guns
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
May 18, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/18/us/18shock.html?ref=us
MIAMI (AP) - Demonstrations at three Florida prisons where more than 40 children were shocked with stun guns have led to the dismissal of three employees and the resignation of two others, the Department of Corrections said.
The incidents took place on April 23, national Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day. As part of demonstrations at two prisons, children held hands in a circle, and one was shocked with the stun gun, passing the shock around the circle. At another prison, children were shocked individually.
The children, ages 5 to 17, felt the shocks either directly or indirectly, but none of the children were seriously hurt, the department said.
All of the children had parents who work for the department and some parents gave permission for their children to be shocked.
That did not excuse officers' using the stun guns, the Department of Corrections secretary, Walter McNeil, said on Friday.
"We believe this behavior is inexcusable," Mr. McNeil said in a telephone interview. "I apologize to the children and parents. None of these kids should have been exposed to these devices."
Mr. McNeil said that he had never been shocked by a stun gun but that the circle demonstration was commonly done in training classes for correctional officers.
Officials are also investigating a demonstration of tear gas at Lake Correctional Institution in Clermont. Children there were accidentally exposed to the gas when the wind shifted, but none required medical care. That investigation is not complete.
The circle stun gun demonstrations were at two prison in the southern part of the state, Indian River Correctional Institution in Vero Beach and Martin Correctional Institution in Indiantown. Seven other children were shocked directly at Franklin Correctional Institution in Carrabelle, southwest of Tallahassee.
Unlike a Taser gun, which shoots a probe that delivers a shock, the devices used at the prisons were stun guns, which work when touched to a person's skin and affect a smaller area of the body. The result is two temporary marks that look like mosquito bites but may later turn into bruises about the width of a pencil eraser.
The department said that 55 of its prisons, just under half, participated in the national event. Many of the facilities had pancake breakfasts, speakers, canine demonstrations and tours of the outside of prisons. Some facilities had trainers demonstrate stun guns on themselves, not a violation of the department's policy.
None of the wardens knew the devices would be used with children, Mr. McNeil said.
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5) Published by the New York Civil Liberties Union (http://www.nyclu.org)
Record Number of Innocent New Yorkers Stopped, Interrogated by NYPD
May 12, 2009
http://www.nyclu.org/node/2389
Related
# The NYCLU's Letter to Commissioner Kelly (PDF)[1]
# The First Quarter Stop-and-Frisk Report (PDF) [2]
The NYPD stopped and interrogated more innocent people during the first three months of 2009 than during any three-month period since the Department began collecting data on its troubling stop-and-frisk program. Police made more than 151,000 stops of completely innocent New Yorkers - the overwhelming majority of whom were black and Latino. These innocent people did nothing wrong, but their names and addresses are now stored in a police database.
"In just three months, the NYPD stopped enough totally innocent New Yorkers to fill the new Yankee Stadium three times over. What's worse is that the disrespect suffered in the stop is not the end of it - these New Yorkers' personal information is now stored in an NYPD database," said Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. "The mayor and the Police Department's top brass must immediately address this racially-targeted, counterproductive tactic. New Yorkers shouldn't have to be afraid when they see a police officer walking toward them."
According to an NYPD report obtained by the NYCLU and released today, police stopped and interrogated New Yorkers 171,094 times between January and March - a record for total stops. Nearly nine out of 10 of these stops resulted in no charges or citations. This record number of stops fell disproportionately on the city's communities of color - 89,000 of those stopped were black and 56,000 were Latino, while only 16,000 were white.
Overall, this record number of stops represents a 22 percent increase from the 140,151 stops conducted during the last three months of 2008, and an 18 percent increase from the 145,098 stops conducted during the first three months of 2008 - the prior record. If stops continue at this pace, the NYPD will conduct a record 626,767 stops in 2009. In 2008, the current record, police stopped New Yorkers 531,159 times.
Over the past five years, New Yorkers have been subjected to the practice more than 2 million times - a rate of nearly 1,250 every day.
In a letter sent today to NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly, the NYCLU expressed deep concern about the blanket use of the stop-and-frisk practice and about the NYPD retention of the name and home address of everyone it stops. Calling the database "a gross violation of privacy," the NYCLU called on Kelly to end the practice of recording the names and addresses of everyone stopped and to expunge from the database the names and addresses of everyone stopped without being arrested or given a summons as well as the names and addresses of all people who were arrested or given a summons but whose charges were dismissed or otherwise disposed of.
"The NYPD is, in effect, building a massive database of black and brown New Yorkers," said NYCLU Associate Legal Director Christopher Dunn. "Innocent New Yorkers who are the victims of unjustified police stops should not suffer the further harm of having their personal information kept in an NYPD database, which simply makes them a target for future investigations."
In the summer of 2007, the NYCLU served the NYPD with a formal legal request to turn over the complete stop-and-frisk database under the state's Freedom of Information Law. The Department resisted transparency and so, in November 2007, the NYCLU filed a lawsuit in State Supreme Court challenging the NYPD. In May of 2008, the NYCLU won that case and received the database in October, 2008. The NYCLU is currently analyzing that database and will publish its findings this year.
The NYCLU requested the information to allow for an independent analysis of the Department's stop-and-frisk practices, which have been the subject of enormous controversy since the 1999 shooting death of Amadou Diallo.
"Every year hundreds of thousands of innocent New Yorkers are stopped, searched and interrogated by the police for doing nothing more than walking down the street," Lieberman said. "We are deeply concerned about this practice and about racial profiling by the police, and we believe the department must take aggressive measures to address this problem."
The NYCLU's concerns about excessive numbers of stops are supported by the RAND Corporation study commissioned by the Department in 2007. That report estimated that, "[e]ven with the most liberal assumptions," one would expect the NYPD to have "roughly 250,000 to 330,000 stops" each year. Even when measured against the most permissive of standards, the NYPD is on its way to conducting 300,000 more stops than would be expected.
Source URL:
http://www.nyclu.org/node/2389
Links:
[1] http://www.nyclu.org/files/NYCLU_Ltr_ Stop-and Frisk_5-12-09.pdf
[2] http://www.nyclu.org/files/NYPD_Stop-and-Frisk_Report_1stQtr2009.pdf
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6) A Newsroom to Cover the Disenfranchised Voices in Harlem
By JASON GRANT
May 18, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/18/nyregion/18harlem.html?ref=nyregion
Cable news radiates from the giant flat-screen television over the green-tile fireplace with a jutting wooden mantel. The rest of the apartment, in a regal town house on Strivers' Row in central Harlem, is crammed with computers, office furniture, handheld video cameras and other electronic equipment.
Two young men sitting side by side edit video reports on large computer monitors. Their boss, Joseph Hayden, occasionally glances up at the television as Nellie Hester Bailey, the director of the Harlem Tenants Council, stands nearby, suggesting ways to promote Mr. Hayden's one-man crusade - building a "CNN for Harlem."
Mr. Hayden, 68, calls himself a news junkie, but adds that what he sees or, more to the point, does not see on the news can be infuriating.
"There's not enough air time for low-income communities and our issues and ideas," he said as he leaned back into his newsroom's couch, a small jade Buddha and gold chain hanging from his neck. "All they talk about is the middle class. They never look down. No one talks to us. They never ask my opinion." During last year's presidential campaign, he said, he "stayed virtually in a state of rage because the mainstream media. They talked with such arrogance and such certitude about what the American people felt."
Determined to change that, at least on a local level, he and two other men last year invested $40,000 to start a news organization, Still Here Harlem Productions, that would, in the words of its mission statement, "cover every aspect of the community life of the marginalized and voiceless in Harlem," which stretches, as Mr. Hayden is fond of saying, "from West 110th Street to Washington Heights, and river to river."
Still Here's half-hour videos began appearing on the Manhattan Neighborhood Network cable channel in September, and in February Mr. Hayden started a Web site, All Things Harlem, which posts video news reports and recordings of Harlem political, social and cultural events.
Mr. Hayden was born in Harlem, and though his current life revolves around television and the Internet, his earlier decades read like chapters in a crime novel. The son of a housecleaner who raised the family by herself, he was first locked up at 16, for heroin possession. He landed in Attica on another conviction (which he said was later overturned), for the attempted murder of a police officer, and he left right before inmates seized the prison. By the time he was in his 30s, he was running nightclubs and had become an associate of Nicky Barnes, the leader of one of the city's largest heroin rings.
"To me, crime is a response," Mr. Hayden said. "You play the hand you're dealt in life. And the hand I was dealt was very harsh."
He was among those indicted with Mr. Barnes on federal charges in 1977, and he was convicted of money laundering. He plays down his connection to the Barnes ring, though Mr. Barnes himself once testified that Mr. Hayden was one of his top lieutenants.
After his release from federal prison, he was convicted of manslaughter - he insisted that he acted in self-defense - but in state prison he earned bachelor's and master's degrees and began teaching. Upon his release he became a community organizer. "As I educated myself and developed, I began to see opportunity in other areas," Mr. Hayden said. "I started to work on changing the system - on trying to reform the system." Community organizing, he added, "felt like the most natural thing in the world to me."
Hitting the street with a video camera seems to come naturally to him as well. On a recent Wednesday, Mr. Hayden and Paolo Walker, one of his producers, were on Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard asking passers-by to grade President Obama on his first 100 days in office. That evening they posted their report on their Web site and on CNN's iReport.
A day earlier, Mr. Hayden had covered a rally on gun and gang violence at 135th Street and Malcolm X Boulevard that focused on the shooting of a 13-year-old boy at a party a couple of days before (he later died).
And while covering a symposium and book party at Riverside Church with Mr. Walker the previous weekend, Mr. Hayden saw several familiar faces, including one of the speakers, Jamal Joseph, the chairman of Columbia University's graduate film program.
"It was good to see our news team on the ground," said Mr. Joseph, a former Black Panther, who has known Mr. Hayden for decades. "People will care about the news when it relates to them."
Back in his newsroom, the huge television was still on and Mr. Hayden's hands swept the air as he discussed how his vision was unfolding. "Everybody in the world knows about Harlem," he said. "So I figured if I could limit my coverage, if I could just cover this community effectively, then I could build a model here."
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7) G.M. Seeks More Imports From Low-Wage Regions
By LOUIS UCHITELLE
"General Motors is engaged in negotiating a reorganization that could increase vehicle imports from its plants in Mexico and Asia while closing factories and cutting the work force in the United States."
May 18, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/18/business/18auto.html?ref=business
General Motors is engaged in negotiating a reorganization that could increase vehicle imports from its plants in Mexico and Asia while closing factories and cutting the work force in the United States.
That approach drew a sharp rebuke from the United Automobile Workers union on Friday. In a letter to each member of Congress, the U.A.W., which represents G.M. factory workers, argued that to qualify for more government assistance, the auto giant should be required "to maintain the maximum number of jobs in the United States."
The administration, however, appears to accept the proposition that to return to profitability as quickly as possible, G.M. must import a significant percentage of cars from its plants in low-wage countries, like Mexico and China, or low-cost countries, like Japan.
G.M. already imports a third of the vehicles that go to showrooms in this country. That percentage would not change in the plan that G.M. is preparing to submit to the administration to justify billions of dollars in new loans to stave off collapse. G.M. would emerge a smaller company, with fewer employees and less output in this country and abroad. But imports would rise from low-cost countries, particularly Mexico and China, and that would be offset by fewer imports from Canada and Europe.
Some economists, like David Autor of M.I.T., say that G.M. cars made in China, among other countries, "are pretty competitive and could be sold here."
Others, like Harley Shaiken, at the University of California, Berkeley, argue that if G.M. focused more intensely on technology and auto quality, it could concentrate production in the United States and still be competitive. "The other way to go," he said, "is to cut costs by importing more vehicles from Mexico and China, and lifting the bottom line that way."
A Treasury spokeswoman said over the weekend that "G.M. and the U.A.W. are in active and constructive deliberations around all aspects of their plan. This is one of several issues they are focused on and the administration is supportive of their efforts to come to a resolution."
G.M. is asking Washington for billions of dollars more in federal loans to survive, on top of the $15.4 billion already borrowed. In a presentation to Congress, the company laid out the plan for the shifts in production to lower-cost countries. In the United States, G.M. would close 16 of its remaining 47 plants and eliminate an additional 21,000 jobs. The company also announced on Friday that 1,100 dealers would be eliminated from its American network by the fall of next year.
In the letter to Congress on Friday, Alan Reuther, the U.A.W.'s legislative director, also argued that if G.M. cut back production in Canada, it would hurt small manufacturers in the United States that supply parts to G.M.'s Canadian assembly plants.
But the Obama administration apparently sees interference in such plans as crossing a line into industrial policy, rather than helping a giant multinational get back on its feet as a successful, privately managed global operation. Insisting that G.M. preserve American jobs by shifting production to the United States from abroad, this argument goes, would require many times more in federal aid than the $16.3 billion in loans now anticipated.
"The idea is to get G.M. off the government dole," Mr. Autor said. "And if that is the case, then one has to take the steps that a free-standing company must take to be profitable."
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8) War's Psychic Toll
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
May 19, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/19/opinion/19herbert.html?_r=1
I couldn't have been less surprised to read last week that an American G.I. had been charged with gunning down five of his fellow service members in Iraq. The fact that this occurred at a mental health counseling center in the war zone just served to add an extra layer of poignancy and a chilling ironic element to the fundamental tragedy.
The psychic toll of this foolish and apparently endless war has been profound since day one. And the nation's willful denial of that toll has been just as profound.
According to authorities, John Russell, a 44-year-old Army sergeant who had been recognized as deeply troubled and was on his third tour in Iraq, went into the counseling center on the afternoon of May 11 and opened fire - killing an Army officer, a Navy officer and three enlisted soldiers. The three enlistees were 19, 20 and 25 years old.
This is what happens in wars. Wars are about killing, and once the killing is unleashed it takes many, many forms. Which is why it's so sick to fight unnecessary wars, and so immoral to send other people's children off to wars - psychic as well as physical - from which one's own children are carefully protected.
The fallout from the psychic stress of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has been vast, but there was no reason for its destructive effects to have surprised anyone. There was plenty of evidence that this would be an enormous problem. Speaking of Iraq back in 2004, Dr. Stephen C. Joseph, who had been an assistant secretary of defense during the Clinton administration, said, "I have a very strong sense that the mental health consequences are going to be the medical story of this war."
I remember writing a column about Jeffrey Lucey, a 23-year-old Marine who was deeply depressed and suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, or P.T.S.D., when he returned from Iraq after serving in the earliest months of the war. He described gruesome events that he had encountered and was harshly critical of himself. He drank to excess, had nightmares, withdrew from friends and wrecked the family car.
On the afternoon of June 22, 2004, he wrote a note that said, "It's 4:35 p.m. and I am near completing my death." He then hanged himself with a garden hose in the basement of his parents' home.
Because we have chosen not to share the sacrifices of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the terrible burden of these conflicts is being shouldered by an obscenely small portion of the population. Since this warrior class is so small, the same troops have to be sent into the war zones for tour after harrowing tour.
As the tours mount up, so do the mental health problems. Combat is crazy-making to start with. Multiple tours are recipes for complete meltdowns.
As the RAND Corporation reported in a study released last year:
"Not only is a higher proportion of the armed forces being deployed, but deployments have been longer, redeployment to combat has been common, and breaks between deployments have been infrequent."
Recent attempts by the military to deal with some of the most egregious aspects of its deployment policies have amounted to much too little, much too late. The RAND study found that approximately 300,000 men and women who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan were already suffering from P.T.S.D. or major depression. That's nearly one in every five returning veterans.
The mass-produced tragedies of war go far beyond combat deaths. Behind the abstract wall of RAND's statistics is the immense real-life suffering of very real people. The toll includes the victims of violence and drunkenness and broken homes and suicides. Most of the stories never make their way into print. The public that professes such admiration and support for our fighting men and women are not interested.
Other studies have paralleled RAND's in spotlighting the psychic toll of these wars. A CBS News survey found that veterans aged 20 to 24 were two to four times as likely to commit suicide as nonveterans the same age. A Time magazine cover story last year disclosed that "for the first time in history, a sizable and growing number of U.S. combat troops are taking daily doses of antidepressants to calm nerves strained by repeated and lengthy tours in Iraq and Afghanistan."
We're brutally and cold-bloodedly sacrificing the psychological well-being of these men and women, which should be a scandal. If these wars are so important to our national security, we should all be engaging in some form of serious sacrifice, and many more of us should be serving.
But the country soothes its conscience and tamps down its guilt with the cowardly invocation: "Oh, they're volunteers. They knew what they were getting into."
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9) Executions Debated as Missouri Plans One
By MONICA DAVEY
May 19, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/19/us/19death.html?ref=us
KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Officials in this state are preparing to execute a prisoner for the first time since 2005, when criticisms about the state's lethal injection method emerged and one doctor who carried out executions acknowledged being dyslexic and sometimes "improvising" when it came to the amounts of chemicals he administered.
That doctor will no longer take part, and a United States Supreme Court ruling last year upheld a lethal injection procedure similar to the one Missouri will use, but some lawmakers, including some prominent Republicans, say they have lingering questions about the state's system of capital punishment.
The focus of those questions has shifted some, no longer centering on the method of execution but turning toward which prisoners are condemned and which are not, and whether those choices make sense.
"I still favor the death penalty, but I just want to make sure we put the right people to death," said State Representative Bill Deeken, a Republican, explaining why he last week proposed delaying the death penalty for two years more until a study can determine whether it is meted out fairly in this state. "At this point, we just do not know."
In 2006, a federal judge had found the state's methods so chilling that he ordered a stop to executions - and a remaking of the system here - until state officials issued a protocol for lethal injection that satisfied him.
At 12:01 a.m. Wednesday, Dennis J. Skillicorn is to be executed for his role in the murder of Richard Drummond, a businessman who had offered help to Mr. Skillicorn and two others when he saw their car broken down on the side of a road one night in August 1994. Mr. Drummond was forced to drive to a remote area, then was shot and killed, and the men drove away in his car.
In the final days of the state legislative session in Jefferson City last week, a death penalty moratorium was rejected, but the House, which Republicans control, passed a provision calling for a commission to study the question. The Senate, also controlled by Republicans, did not vote on the issue.
House leaders say their chamber's vote sent a signal to Gov. Jay Nixon, a Democrat in his first term, who has yet to issue a decision on Mr. Skillicorn's request for clemency.
People here are deeply split over Mr. Skillicorn. His supporters say that while he participated in robbing Mr. Drummond and was convicted of murder, another man (now also awaiting execution) was the one who fired the gun that killed Mr. Drummond. They point to Mr. Skillicorn's work in prison leading a hospice program, editing a magazine for death row inmates, and, in the view of even some prison workers, helping to create a calmer, safer atmosphere behind bars.
"He is not the one who actually killed the person, and that just says to me: 'Whoa! Let's take a step back,' " said State Representative Steven Tilley, the Republican leader. "Look, I'm not soft on crime, but we can't redo this once we've executed this person," Mr. Tilley said, adding that he has been a supporter of the death penalty, but fears it is flawed as it is being carried out.
But State Representative Bob Nance of Excelsior Springs, the community not far from Kansas City where Mr. Drummond had lived, said Mr. Skillicorn "should hardly be held up as a poster child for what's wrong with the death penalty."
Mr. Skillicorn was implicated for his involvement in other murders - though never, he says, as the gunman. He was convicted of second-degree murder in a 1979 burglary with accomplices in which a farmer was killed. And in the days after Mr. Drummond's death, he and his accomplice went on a cross- country spree and, the authorities say, his accomplice shot and killed an Arizona couple. Mr. Skillicorn pleaded guilty to murder in that case.
"When we look back on our lives, it is the sum of all the stories," Mr. Nance said, "and frankly, it's hard to believe someone would be at the wrong place at the wrong time so many different times."
On Monday, the State Supreme Court rejected a request for a stay, and lawyers for Mr. Skillicorn filed a similar request with the United States Supreme Court. They have three other appeals pending in the federal courts, and met on Monday with counsel to Mr. Nixon, who previously served as attorney general.
Mr. Nixon declined interview requests. His aides said he was giving Mr. Skillicorn's clemency request "a full and fair review."
Mr. Skillicorn, 49, had by last week been transferred to the facility at Bonne Terre where executions take place. In a telephone interview, he said he was sorry for his drug-addled behavior of years past, but that he considered his death sentence arbitrary in a way, and said that he was not the worst of the worst. "I was there," he said, "But in my case, I didn't kill anybody."
He said he was drawing strength from his wife, a former reporter for The Kansas City Star who met him after he was behind bars, and from his religious faith, a notion he was quick to note some people will find phony. "What good would it do me now," Mr. Skillicorn said of his faith, "if it wasn't real to me?"
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10) Cost of Cigarette Litter May Fall on San Francisco's Smokers
By JESSE McKINLEY
[Cigarette smoking is a horrible addiction. My mother died of complications from it. Why must we continue to punish the victims of this cold and calculated industry of poison manufacture and sales? Tobacco companies' profits should be taxed 100 percent to pay for the medical needs of those they have gotten addicted as well as all other related problems that they have induced with their lethal products. The tobacco companies should be shut down; their profits commandeered by we, the people!...bw]
May 19, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/19/us/19smoke.html?ref=us
SAN FRANCISCO - In what he casts as an attack on litterbugs and nicotine addiction alike, Mayor Gavin Newsom wants to impose a fee on an age-old inhabitant of city streets: the cigarette butt.
The proposal, to be introduced next month to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, would add 33 cents to the cost of a pack of cigarettes, to offset the estimated $10.7 million the city spends annually removing discarded butts from gutters, drainpipes and sidewalks.
The added cost, Mr. Newsom hopes, will also dampen smokers' urge to light up.
"In general, fees help reduce the consumption and use of tobacco," he said in an interview. "And we think that will have a very beneficial public health component."
Officials here say the municipal fee would be the first in the country to take aim specifically at cigarette butts, particularly filters, which are not biodegradable. But the idea is expected to run into fierce opposition from tobacco companies.
"Obviously we think people should follow the littering laws, in California and elsewhere," said Frank Lester, a spokesman for Reynolds American Inc., the nation's second-largest manufacturer of cigarettes. "But we oppose any additional taxation on smokers to pay for that."
Philip Morris USA, the nation's biggest cigarette company, generally echoed that anti-fee sentiment, though it said it would not comment on Mr. Newsom's proposal specifically until it was formally presented to the board.
San Francisco has already proved to be tough on smokers. Last year the city imposed a ban on the sale of tobacco at drugstores, a restriction that is being challenged in state and federal courts.
Mr. Newsom, moreover, has shown a willingness to legislate good health in other ways, proposing a fee in 2007 on any large store that sells drinks with high levels of fructose corn syrup. This so-called soda tax has not yet been taken up by the Board of Supervisors but is expected to be debated there this summer, said Nathan Ballard, a mayoral spokesman.
Mr. Newsom said cigarette butts became a target after San Francisco's annual "litter audit" found that cigarette detritus made up a quarter of all the trash in the city's public spaces. With the city spending some $44 million a year on litter cleanup - and facing a $500 million deficit for the coming fiscal year - a fee was born.
"It's not a huge part of the overall budget," the mayor said of the $11 million or so in annual revenue that the fee could generate. "But it's enough to keep street sweepers employed."
But Mr. Lester, of Reynolds American, said smokers were often targets of budget-crunched legislators, most recently on April 1, when the federal excise tax on cigarettes rose 62 cents a pack, to $1.01. "We feel smokers are already paying their fair share," he said.
Serena Chen, regional director of policy and tobacco programs for the American Lung Association in California, said litter-mitigation efforts aimed specifically at cigarettes had been proposed in legislatures in a couple of states (though never enacted), but that a city-level approach was new and welcome.
"Anytime you raise the price of cigarettes, you discourage new starters," Ms. Chen said, "and you increase the motivation of people who want to quit."
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11) Pension Plans May Exclude Pregnancy Leaves, Justices Rule
By ADAM LIPTAK
May 19, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/19/us/19pregnancy.html?ref=us
WASHINGTON - Employers need not give women credit for some pregnancy leaves in calculating their pension benefits when they retire, the Supreme Court ruled on Monday in a 7-to-2 decision.
The case involved four women who took maternity leaves from AT&T between 1968 and 1976. At the time, it was lawful for employers to treat pregnancy leaves different from leaves for other sorts of disabilities.
That changed in 1978, when Congress passed the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, which made discrimination based on pregnancy-related conditions a form of sex discrimination. But the 1978 law was not retroactive, and companies were not required, for instance, to provide back pay to women who had taken unpaid leaves while their colleagues were paid for leaves for other kinds of disabilities.
The question in the case decided Monday, AT&T v. Hulteen, No. 07-543, was what should happen when companies calculate pension and similar benefits when women retire decades after taking such pregnancy leaves.
In an opinion by Justice David H. Souter, the court said the four women were not entitled to full credit for their leaves and so will receive smaller pensions.
AT&T's pension system, Justice Souter wrote, "provides future benefits based on past, completed events that were entirely lawful at the time they occurred." Indeed, the Supreme Court ruled, in General Electric v. Gilbert in 1976, that differential treatment of pregnancy leaves did not amount to sex discrimination.
Not requiring recalculation of pension benefits to take account of leaves before 1979, Justice Souter said, results in "predictable financial consequences, both for the employer who pays the bill and for the employee who gets the benefit."
Justice Souter was joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices John Paul Stevens, Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, joined by Justice Stephen G. Breyer, dissented.
Justice Ginsburg said the court had "erred egregiously" in Gilbert, which she described as advancing "the strange notion that a benefits classification excluding some women ('pregnant women') is not sex-based because other women are among the favored class ('non-pregnant persons')."
She said Congress in 1978 "intended no continuing reduction of women's compensation, pension benefits included, attributable to their placement on pregnancy leave."
The plaintiffs, Justice Ginsburg said, "will receive, for the rest of their lives, lower pension benefits than colleagues who worked for AT&T for no longer than they did." Indeed, she said, the logic of Gilbert brought to mind a critique of legal reasoning more generally.
"Perhaps the admonition of Professor Thomas Reed Powell to his law students is apt," she wrote, quoting a 1974 trial court decision. "If you can think of something which is inextricably related to some other thing and not think of the other thing, you have a legal mind."
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