Update 10/19/11: Méndez argues to ban solitary confinement, ‘The News Media & The Law’ focuses on whistle-blowers
From #OccupyCharlestonWV
UN Special Rapporteur on torture Juan E. Méndez addressed the UN general assembly and he called on countries to stop using solitary confinement as punishment, using PFC Bradley Manning as an example. Extended and indeterminate periods of time in isolation cause long lasting damage, and periods of over 15 days in solitary confinement should be outright prohibited. “‘Segregation, isolation, separation, cellular, lockdown, supermax, the hole, secure housing unit … whatever the name, solitary confinement should be banned by states as a punishment or extortion (of information) technique,’ Mendez said.”
Méndez states he will be releasing a report “in the next few weeks”, but that he has had “productive communications” with the U.S. regarding PFC Manning.
Mendez pointed out that over 20,000 people are held in solitary confinement in the US, and that such treatment works against rehabilitation. Also read this Counterpunch article reporting that “there are some 25,000 inmates in long-term isolation in the nation’s supermax prisons, and as many as 80,000 more in solitary in other prisons and jails”. Read more here.
Matthew Russell Lee wonders if Méndez is dodging important questions. He asks what kind of “productive communications” Mendez could be having with the U.S. when his requests to visit privately with Bradley Manning have been blocked. Link.
Jennifer Lynch and Trevor Timm write about the “’WikiLeaks’ Executive Order”, in their article “The Dangers in Classifying the News.” They point out that at the government collects far more sensitive information than it ever did in the past, and it unnecessarily classifies too much of the information it collects. Further, “government secrecy has only increased since Obama took office” which they point out contradicts Obama’s earlier intentions of creating “an unprecedented level of openness“. Link.
A new edition of The News Media & The Law focuses on “Journalists, Whistleblowers and National Security.”
One article raises a question about what is to come of courageous whistle-blowers who expose corruption and crime? It explains that two bills being proposed could profoundly limit the ability of news organizations to publish what the government deems classified.
“The first bill would make it a crime to publish classified information concerning the human intelligence activities of the United States or any foreign government, or concerning the identity of a classified source or informant of an element of the intelligence community of the United States. The second would make it a crime for anyone with unauthorized possession of any classified information to willfully communicate the information to someone not entitled to receive it.” Link.
It has been documented that the government keeps too many secrets – some inexcusable. Proof of this lies in the Collateral Murder video, and in the 200,000 government cables that have been published through Wikileaks. Much of the information released should never have been classified in the first place, and with thousands of articles being published in reputable news organizations around the world the fact that the information has public value is now widely accepted. In fact, the article reports that The Wall Street Journal and Al Jazeera have both setup Wikileaks like drop boxes. Rather than crack down on whistle-blowers shouldn’t the government crack down on war crimes, and unjustified secrecy?
In “WikiLeaks and the Espionage Act of 1917”, Emily Peterson asks if Congress can make the release of this information a crime. She writes that the First Amendment has in the past protected journalists, and she quotes law professor Geoffrey Stone who argues that “throughout American history, our government has excessively restricted public discourse in the name of national security” . Thankfully, no journalists have been convicted under the espionage act as it currently stands. The new bills being worked on will certainly spread fear among journalists and prove the Obama’s administration to be the most secretive yet.
I just thought it apt to quote from Naomi Wolf’s 10 Steps to Fascism (2007):
QUOTE . . .
9th Step: DISSENT EQUALS TREASON
Cast dissent as “treason” and criticism as “espionage’. Every closing society does this, just as it elaborates laws that increasingly criminalise certain kinds of speech and expand the definition of “spy” and “traitor”. When Bill Keller, the publisher of the New York Times, ran the Lichtblau/Risen stories, Bush called the Times’ leaking of classified information “disgraceful”, while Republicans in Congress called for Keller to be charged with treason, and rightwing commentators and news outlets kept up the “treason” drumbeat. Some commentators, as Conason noted, reminded readers smugly that one penalty for violating the Espionage Act is execution.
Conason is right to note how serious a threat that attack represented. It is also important to recall that the 1938 Moscow show trial accused the editor of Izvestia, Nikolai Bukharin, of treason; Bukharin was, in fact, executed. And it is important to remind Americans that when the 1917 Espionage Act was last widely invoked, during the infamous 1919 Palmer Raids, leftist activists were arrested without warrants in sweeping roundups, kept in jail for up to five months, and “beaten, starved, suffocated, tortured and threatened with death”, according to the historian Myra MacPherson. After that, dissent was muted in America for a decade.
In Stalin’s Soviet Union, dissidents were “enemies of the people”. National Socialists called those who supported Weimar democracy “November traitors”.
And here is where the circle closes: most Americans do not realise that since September of last year – when Congress wrongly, foolishly, passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 – the president has the power to call any US citizen an “enemy combatant”. He has the power to define what “enemy combatant” means. The president can also delegate to anyone he chooses in the executive branch the right to define “enemy combatant” any way he or she wants and then seize Americans accordingly.
Even if you or I are American citizens, even if we turn out to be completely innocent of what he has accused us of doing, he has the power to have us seized as we are changing planes at Newark tomorrow, or have us taken with a knock on the door; ship you or me to a navy brig; and keep you or me in isolation, possibly for months, while awaiting trial. (Prolonged isolation, as psychiatrists know, triggers psychosis in otherwise mentally healthy prisoners. That is why Stalin’s gulag had an isolation cell, like Guantánamo’s, in every satellite prison. Camp 6, the newest, most brutal facility at Guantánamo, is all isolation cells.)
We US citizens will get a trial eventually – for now. But legal rights activists at the Center for Constitutional Rights say that the Bush administration is trying increasingly aggressively to find ways to get around giving even US citizens fair trials. “Enemy combatant” is a status offence – it is not even something you have to have done. “We have absolutely moved over into a preventive detention model – you look like you could do something bad, you might do something bad, so we’re going to hold you,” says a spokeswoman of the CCR.
Most Americans surely do not get this yet. No wonder: it is hard to believe, even though it is true. In every closing society, at a certain point there are some high-profile arrests – usually of opposition leaders, clergy and journalists. Then everything goes quiet. After those arrests, there are still newspapers, courts, TV and radio, and the facades of a civil society. There just isn’t real dissent. There just isn’t freedom. If you look at history, just before those arrests is where we are now.
UNQUOTE