For-profit US schools sell off their textbooks

By Doug Saunders

Oct. 30— Students already have to worry about exams, essay deadlines, and staying awake through math class. In Philadelphia, they have a new worry: What if your school becomes a victim of the stock market meltdown?

Facing an educational crisis last year, the city handed 20 of its worst-off high schools, in some of the most abject slums in the country, to a private, for-profit company called Edison Schools Inc. Now, those institutions appear to be going the way of Enron, Tyco, and WorldCom.

Edison, a high-flying firm that was the first school-management company traded on a stock exchange, promised to provide computers, books and new curriculums, and to raise test scores. In exchange, the school board would give the company $881 a student.

Then came the crash. Over the summer, Edison’s shares slid from the year’s high of $21.68 to less than a dollar on the Nasdaq Stock Market. (The company traded yesterday at about 50 cents.)

In the classroom, this has had some bizarre effects.

Days before classes were to begin in September, trucks arrived to take away most of the textbooks, computers, lab supplies, and musical instruments the company had provided — Edison had to sell them off for cash. Many students were left with decades-old books and no equipment.

A few weeks later, some of the company’s executives moved into offices inside the schools so Edison could avoid paying the $8,750 monthly rent on its Philadelphia headquarters. They stayed only a few days, until the school board ordered them out.

As a final humiliation, Chris Whittle, the company’s charismatic chief executive and founder, recently told a meeting of school principals that he’d thought up an ingenious solution to the company’s financial woes: Take advantage of the free supply of child labor, and force each student to work an hour a day, presumably without pay, in the school offices.

“We could have less adult staff,” Whittle reportedly said at a summit for employees and principals in Colorado Springs. “I think it’s an important concept for education and economics.” In a school with 600 students, he said, this unpaid work would be the equivalent of “75 adults” on salary.

Although Whittle said he could have the child-labor plan in place by 2004, school board officials were quick to say they would have nothing to do with the proposal.

Whittle’s past ventures included buying Esquire magazine in the 1970s and introducing Channel One, a commercial-sponsored educational television system, into public schools in the 1980s.

But now he appears to have fallen on hard times, and has put up for sale his 11-acre estate in New York’s Hamptons. The home, which was listed for $46million, has eight bedrooms, a gym, an elevator, a pool, tennis and basketball courts, and a guest house.

Edison operates 150 schools in 23 states, but Philadelphia is its largest and most visible challenge. Last year, the school board picked the 45 worst-managed schools and announced that it would privatize them. At first, Edison was to take control of them all; later, in the face of political protests, 25 of the schools were put into the hands of non-profit school companies.

Edison officials were unable to implement some of their more innovative educational policies, including longer school days and years, because of Philadelphia’s unions and low budgets.

School board officials in Philadelphia are now debating their options. “We want to make sure they have the financial resources to sustain [the schools] through the school year,” said Paul Vallas, the board’s chief executive.

Vallas has taken a tough disciplinary stand with the company, withholding a $5-million payment to Edison this fall because the company was seven weeks late delivering its financial statements.

Edison executives say the company is sound, and that its schools will begin showing educational improvements.

“We are not going bankrupt. There is no threat of bankruptcy. It is simply, flatly not true,” Edison president Chris Cert told Michigan school board officials last week.

Whittle has predicted a profit of $20 million this year and announced Monday he intends to buy back 5.4 million of his company’s shares, or 10 percent.

He also said that 84 percent of his schools have seen “increased student performance,” against 8 percent registering declines. Test-score results for the Philadelphia schools are not yet available.

Source: Toronto Globe and Mail

Texas inmate sues prison system for failing to protect him from sexual abuse

Oct. 15 -- For more than a year, Roderick Johnson was regularly and brutally raped and sexually abused while confined in a Texas state prison. In April 2002, Johnson filed a lawsuit in which he said that prison officials not only condoned sexual slavery and widespread gang rape, but refused Johnson’s repeated requests to be housed in protective custody.

Johnson, a 33-year-old US Navy veteran, is a black homosexual from Marshall, Texas. While serving time in the 2,800-man James V. Allred State Prison in Iowa Park, TX, on a bad check charge, Johnson was subjected to an organized system of gang-run sexual slavery. He was routinely bought and sold as chattel, raped and degraded daily, and threatened with death if he resisted.

In a lurid 25-page complaint filed in US District Court, Wichita Falls Division, Johnson named Gary Johnson (no apparent relation), the Executive Director of the Texas prison system, and 19 other prison officials as defendants. Plaintiff Johnson alleged that from September 2000 until April 2002 at the Allred Prison he was brutalized by a prisoner-run system of sexual slavery in which gang members bought and sold him for as little as $5.

Johnson’s complaint describes his experience in gruesome and explicit detail. According to Johnson, he was forced, on a daily basis, to engage in anal and oral sex and participation in mutual masturbation sessions with other homosexual prisoners as gang members watched, in addition to laundering gang members’ clothing, cooking their meals, and cleaning their cells.

He further alleged that, although the defendants named in the lawsuit were aware of the abuse, they refused to investigate his complaints or house him in protective custody. He said that prison officials made it clear by their words and deeds that they derived sadistic pleasure from Johnson’s victimization; they expressed contempt for non-aggressive homosexuals, and refused to protect prisoners from sexual assault until they were savagely beaten or “gutted.”

Source: Prison Legal News

Red Squads redux: Portland activists mobilize
against the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force

By Desiree Hellegers and Laurie Mercier

Portland, Oregon, Oct. 31— The Sept. 19 renewal hearing for the Portland Joint Terrorism Task Force (PJTTF) marked another important skirmish in the national struggle to resist President Bush’s administration’s assaults on civil liberties. The renewal of the formal agreement between the Portland Police Bureau (PPB) and the FBI came within days of a headline story by the Portland Tribune, which unearthed thousands of “red squad” style police files on progressive activists, some compiled as recently as 1986.

After four and a half hours of testimony, overwhelmingly by groups opposed to the partnership, Mayor Vera Katz and city commissioners unanimously rubberstamped the agreement in the face of unassailable evidence of PPB and FBI abuses.

The recent disclosures of decades of police surveillance in Portland mirror developments in Denver, CO, where the ACLU has filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of several groups — including the American Friends Service Committee and the Chiapas Coalition — which were among more than two hundred groups and thousands of individuals investigated by the Denver police.

Denver and Portland were among a handful of cities that drew media attention last year for their resistance to post-Sept. 11 “national security” measures. Within days of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, Portland activists persuaded one of four city commissioners to vote against the renewal of the PJTTF. Although the task force agreement was ultimately renewed, arguments against it compelled city officials to uphold state law, even in the face of Justice Department pressures.

Since 1981, Oregon law has barred police-Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) collaboration and police surveillance in the absence of criminal activity. In March 2002 Denver activists got their city council to pass a non-binding resolution to limit the enforcement of the USA PATRIOT Act. Sabin Portillo of Denver Copwatch noted that Portland’s resistance to Attorney General John Ashcroft’s dragnet of Middle Eastern men buoyed Denver activists. “It gave people a little bit of courage -- of hope,” said Portillo.

The Portland city council first formalized the FBI-PPB Joint Terrorism Task Force partnership in 2000, on the heels of the World Trade Organization (WTO) protests in neighboring Seattle, WA. In a September e-mail to concerned activists, Katz claimed its genesis in the 1997 collaboration between the PPB and FBI “investigating and preventing criminal threats to the Nike World Master Games,” in the city where the multinational corporation is headquartered.

However, the task force first came to public light when Dan Handelman, of Portland Copwatch, happened to be present at a September 2000 city council meeting. Handelman was surprised to learn that the PJTTF agreement, which broadly targeted “right” and “left wing” activists for investigation, was slated for routine renewal as an emergency measure. Ultimately Commissioner Charlie Hales convinced the council to temper the original language before it sanctioned the FBI-PPB arrangement.

The following September, as activists geared up for the first public PJTTF renewal hearing, the hijacked planes slammed into the World Trade Center. One city commissioner advised activists in a lobbying meeting that they would be committing political suicide by contesting the PJTTF agreement. But by the Sept. 26 hearing, a broad coalition, including the Oregon ACLU, had emerged to resist the renewal. Activists jammed the chambers of the city council, offering a collective course in the FBI’s historical role in repressing political dissent.

At last month’s renewal hearing, the mayor, commissioners, and Police Chief Mark Kroeker again faced a roomful of angry citizens, still recoiling from the police paramilitary response to protesters during Bush’s August visit, and many waving copies of the Portland Tribune exposé of police spying.

Kroeker’s presentation before the packed council chambers provided strong evidence of the role that corporate interests are playing in shaping the PJTTF agenda. Under the heading “community supporters,” almost all of which were forest products corporations, he quoted an Oregon industry spokesperson who lauded the PJTTF as “a perfect example of the corporate approach to information sharing that needs to occur across agency jurisdictions to bring all terrorist activities to justice.”

Listing “terror crimes in our region,” Kroeker highlighted nine environmentally-related property crimes going back to 1996 and encompassing both Washington and Oregon. Numbering among the “terror crimes,” none of which involved human injuries, were the destruction of “experimental grass seeds at Pure-Seed Testing facility,” an arson fire that destroyed a lumber company office, and a nationally publicized arson fire that destroyed 37 SUVs at a Eugene dealership. Tim Crocker, of the Portland Business Alliance, testified in favor of the PJTTF claiming that Oregon faces a higher threat of “ecoterrorism” than any other state.

The conflation of ecotage with national terrorist threats is significant in this region where environmental activists seemed poised to become heroes to mainstream Oregonians for their landmark success in effecting the cancellation of the controversial Eagle Creek timber sale. Spearheaded by the Cascadia Forest Alliance (CFA), the campaign to save Eagle Creek included three years of coordinated tree sits, road blockades and periodic demonstrations. It drew national attention when local activist Michael Scarpitti, a.k.a. Tre Arrow, scaled the US Forest Service building in downtown Portland and spent eleven days on the building ledge to protest the timber sale.

In the weeks immediately preceding the 2002 renewal hearing, the PJTTF made a series of highly publicized arrests, including three members of Portland State University’s Students for Unity, who were charged in connection with the almost year-old arson of Eagle Creek logging trucks. At the time of the arson, support for the tree sit was mounting. Wyatt Wildewoode of CFA noted that the fire “hurt the cause more than it helped it.”

“It’s not unlike the FBI to do something like this,” observed Wildewoode, invoking the car bombing of activist Judi Bari. On June 11 of this year, the FBI was found guilty of framing Bari for the explosion of a bomb planted in her own car, which the FBI claimed she intended to use in an act of ecotage.

With the accused activists still awaiting trial, and each facing up to eighty years in prison, Kroeker showcased the arrests as evidence of the effectiveness of — and need for — the task force.

Labor organizer Bob Marshall was among the first to analyze the chilling effect that the PJTTF would have on organizing efforts. Citing repeated incidents of police surveillance of Powell’s Books workers during their organizing drive in 2000, Marshall remarked before the 2001 renewal hearing that unions viewed the PJTTF as “another gauntlet thrown by corporate America.” At the 2002 hearing, Leal Sundet, of ILWU Local 8, testified that Bush had already threatened to label and prosecute western longshore workers as “economic terrorists” if they called a strike.

If Chief Kroeker’s presentation provided strong indications of the role that the PJTTF will increasingly play in protecting corporate interests from activists’ challenges, it also raised the specter of terrorists among members of the local Muslim community. Along with the Eagle Creek arrests, Kroeker touted the recent high-profile arrest of Sheik Mohamed Abdirahman Kariye, the religious leader of Portland’s largest mosque, the Islamic Center of Portland. An electronic device at Portland International Airport detected trace amounts of TNT on Kariye’s luggage.

When Kroeker highlighted the arrest to justify the task force renewal, some activists shouted “innocent until proven guilty.” Indeed, on the Monday following the Thursday council hearing — and the renewal of the PJTTF agreement and budget — Assistant US Attorney Kent Robinson announced that the FBI’s tests of Kariye’s bags had come back negative for the presence of TNT. Kariye, however, remains in custody on Social Security fraud charges with no indication that the PJTTF will discontinue its involvement in the “case.”

In his testimony before the City Council, Kayse Jama, himself a member of the Islamic Center of Portland, spoke to the heightened fears of members of the Muslim community in the face of Kariye’s arrest. Jama voiced his concerns with being targeted by the PJTTF and possible reprisal for his testimony before the City Council: “I am a Muslim. I am also a Black man. I am also an immigrant.” Jama, who fled political violence in his native Somalia, noted that people in his community now feared calling the police over any issue, believing that they could be arbitrarily detained, prosecuted and/or deported without due process.

The “war on terrorism” and threatened war against Iraq have heightened citizens’ concerns that their own security -- and liberties -- could disappear in the rapid advance of war hysteria. Henry Sakamoto of the Japanese American Citizens League called attention to Ashcroft’s ominous proposal to create camps to incarcerate those deemed “threatening.” Jack Tafari, a leader of Portland’s homeless tent city Dignity Village, told how the PJTTF in the last year had spied on the villagers. Dignity residents, he said, were concerned that these police files would haunt them in the future. “We don’t support terrorists,” Tafari calmly stated.

The equation of property crimes, immigration violations, and labor and other political dissent with terrorism, as several activists noted in their testimony at City Hall, demonstrates even more fundamental problems with Ashcroft’s joint terrorism task force initiative. Professor Tom Hastings, on the faculty in the Conflict Resolution Program at Portland State University, noted that the FBI’s broad definition of terrorism might easily apply to disciplined non-violent civil disobedience. Barbara Dudley, a professor in Portland State University’s Mark Hatfield School of Government, observed that “Terrorism has become the new catch-all label for dissidence.”

While the mayor and city commissioners continue to insist, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that existing oversight of the PPB is adequate, they acknowledged during the hearing that PPB officers involved in the PJTTF are accountable only to the FBI, which is exempt from civilian review. Katz, however, attempted to assuage citizens’ concerns by suggesting that Senator Ron Wyden could review the files. She reiterated the claim at a press conference following the hearing, claiming that because Wyden serves on the Senate Intelligence Committee, “The Oregon delegation has the power to review the files.” Within a few days of the hearing, the Tribune reported that Wyden does not, in fact, have direct access to investigation files, though as Wyden staffer Josh Carden noted, “The FBI briefs the committee on its activities.” In anticipation of the hearing, Commissioners Erik Sten, Dan Saltzman, and Jim Francesconi drafted a self-indicting letter to Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller requesting some minor oversight of PJTTF files. In the letter, they note that “residents of Portland are vigilant in their defense of civil liberties, and this vigilance poses difficulties to the wholesale reaffirmation of the work between the FBI and the Portland Police Bureau.”

Despite the compelling testimony by citizens and activists, the Council, in announcing its decision to vote in favor of the PJTTF renewal, steered the focus away from substantive arguments to chide some in the council chambers for repeatedly heckling the council. The council’s closing remarks attempted to delegitimize the testimony of dozens of groups, including the ACLU, the Sierra Club, League of Women Voters, Physicians for Social Responsibility, and AFSCME, which represented thousands of constituents.

While the Portland city council has yet to acknowledge the significance of the Tribune’s disclosures, the Denver mayor recently convened a three-judge panel to review their city’s police spy files.

Activists, however, are critical of the limited scope of the panel review, which did not include anti-terrorism investigations. Steve Nash, a plaintiff in the Denver ACLU lawsuit, confirmed that to date Denver has had no public JTTF renewal hearings.

“I’ve seen nothing in the press about it. I’ve heard nothing from the police about any kind of renewal process. Sometimes they do public things that aren’t very public. They may have something like that here as well and we weren’t sitting at the right meeting,” said Nash. Portland’s experience demonstrates that once made public, JTTF hearings may serve as critical forums for gauging local governments’ commitments to civil liberties in the post-9-11 era.

Source: CounterPunch

US in denial as poverty rises

By Ed Vulliamy

Nov. 3— The north wind cuts cold and sudden across the historic green of New Haven. It blows through the “tent city” where the homeless huddle. And it blows round the spires and quadrangles of Yale University, one of America’s richest Ivy League colleges.

The contrast is stark: Charlene Johnson, three months pregnant, emerges from her bivouac, worrying about the winter that lies between her and her due date. And all around are Yale’s stone walls, elegant colonial churches and smart people walking past boutiques and coffee shops, carrying their course books.

Charlene fell behind with her rent in June and took a bribe of $200 to move out of her place, so the landlord could hike up the price. “It seemed like I had some money for once, and it was summer.” Her son Nikolas was staying with a friend and Charlene started looking for a place with her boyfriend, Scott, hoping to find one before the cold set in. They were unsuccessful; Scott was laid off on Wednesday from a construction firm. “Not enough work,” he says. “And once you’re out, you’re a speck of dirt on the ground, and they walk over you.”

New Haven’s tent city was established after the authorities closed down a homeless overflow shelter a few weeks ago. At sundown yesterday it was to be cleared by the police, with Charlene, Scott, and 150 others sent on their way into what promises to be a vicious winter.

New Haven is a metaphor for America. It is the country’s fourth poorest city, where the ghetto laps at the walls of a university worth $11 billion in tax-exempt endowments, educating America’s next generation of rulers.

It is a city with the same infant mortality rate as Malaysia and a terrifying rate of deaths from AIDS — one day care center alone commemorated the loss of 600 clients at a memorial service on Wednesday. But it is located in America’ richest state, Connecticut, which has, proportionally, more millionaires than any other.

This is the super-rich New York hinterland for those too wealthy even to feel the pinch on Wall Street. It is called the “Zebra Coast,” laid out in strips of black/white, black/white; poor/rich, poor/rich. And in New Haven the polarity is underpinned by the history of Yale University’s engagement in the slave trade — currently being excavated by some of its own students.

“New Haven,” says the Rev. David Lee of Varick Church in the city’s northwestern ghetto, “is a microcosm of America. It’s the vicious cycle between rich and poor and the system of exploitation. The wealth is in your face all the time, something you can never aspire to. It’s like being a kid in a candy store, being told you can look but you can’t never have a lollipop.”

Statistics released last month by the government census bureau show that for the first time in 10 years the number of people caught in the poverty trap has suddenly increased. Unemployment is up from 4.2 percent in 2000 to 5.7 percent last year. While the middle class shrinks, the numbers living below the official poverty line of $18,104 a year for a family of four has shot up to 33 million — from 11.3 to 11.7 percent. That’s the first increase since 1992.

While President Bush’s windfall tax breaks to the super-rich breezed through Congress (with Democratic help), the proposed increase in the minimum wage is frozen.

The proportion of children without health care has increased from 63.8 percent to 67.1 percent. The poverty rate for children in the US is worse than in 19 “rich” countries, according to a study by the University of Michigan.

Income statistics showed the first significant decline in average income among blacks in two decades; the white average also fell, and only Hispanics maintained their level.

Statisticians are struck by differences between this dive and the usual downward turns that accompany recessions.

“The poor are trailing further behind than in the past,” says Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington. “The increase in poverty is likely to be larger in 2002.”

Such is the power of money in Connecticut and its neighbors that the northeast was the only region in the country in which the mean income did not decline. But the price was paid here where Elm Street, after skirting the mock-Oxbridge walls and towers of Yale, twists abruptly into New Haven’s own nightmare.

Students have been given special maps, and advice not to venture past the CITGO gas station, where the ghetto begins. Houses are boarded up and gas stations take cash only — payable up front — and have bullet-proof glass and bars at the pay point. Sandwich and gift card stores also deal in Western Union money transfers, like the one Carl Robbins is sending back to his family in Kingston, Jamaica — $150 out of the $650 he grossed this week as a hospital janitor.

Monica Osborn works in the operating rooms at Yale and New Haven Hospital, and in 11 years her wages have increased from $8 to $13 an hour (Connecticut calculates that $17 is the “livable wage”). Recently her son suffered a concussion and, although she works at a hospital, health insurance costs extra and she was caught out. Her employer docked the cost of treatment from her wages, leaving her to manage for two months on $300 for a family of four.

“I can feel it getting worse,” she said. “Trying to feed the kids, we all have two, maybe three, jobs. I do hair braiding to get by.”

Wages at the university are a little better, says Mark Wilson, who for years worked on the ancillary workforce before becoming an officer of the hotel and catering workers’ union that fought to close what it calls the “casual pipeline” whereby the university would lay off employees the day before it was obliged to take them on staff.

Yale is exempt from paying city taxes, except on commercial property it owns. But a consortium of community groups asked the university to donate a single day’s interest on its invested endowment — that’s $5.2 million — to the city’s public schools. So far, no response.

“We just wanted some kind of partnership,” says the Rev. David Lee, who — as a graduate of Yale Divinity School -- this year harvested enough signatures to seek election to the university board. He was seen off by the architect Maya Li, in what was regarded as a brazen snub to what Lee’s church calls “the host community.”

Dixwell Avenue is where Lee tries “to put a bit of hope back in people’s eyes that’s just been taken away.” He says: “I can feel it, just over the past year; people is sinking back down. It’s hard to keep people off drugs. It’s hard to tell people not to go to crime, when they made that extra effort to straighten out, then got beaten back down again. I had a man in my congregation come to me on Sunday saying his daughter who is 13 was considering suicide.”

Source: Observer (UK)

Veterans say Pentagon still covering up weapons tests

By Katherine Stapp

New York, New York, Oct. 30 (IPS)— The US Defense Department gave them cryptic names like “Fearless Johnny,” “Errand Boy,” and “Rapid Tan.” But Jack Alderson, then a 31-year-old Navy lieutenant, knew the tests were part of a biological weapons project.

He and his men had been deployed in five tugboats to remote Johnston Island in the Pacific Ocean to take part in an operation dubbed Autumn Gold. For weeks, they would head out to sea as jets screamed by overhead, releasing a misty cloud of chemicals.

“We would line up on the grid and get sprayed,” Alderson testified to a Congressional committee 40 years later.

“We would leave the test subjects (rhesus monkeys) outside in cages while the crew were inside in the citadel. We had filters for the air coming inside, but we knew, because we had accumulators in the interior, that we had leaks. We did get agents inside..”

Autumn Gold, it turns out, involved a bacteria called bacillus globigii (BG), which the Department of Defense (DoD) says is harmless to humans. The way BG disperses in the air simulates more deadly pathogens, and it is often used as a stand-in for anthrax in studies.

Other ships were sprayed with far more deadly agents, like VX and Sarin gas. VX, the Pentagon acknowledges, is one of the most dangerous chemicals ever created. Sarin gas gained notoriety in 1995, when an obscure Japanese cult released it in Tokyo’s subway system during the morning rush hour, killing 12 people.

For decades, the DoD suppressed the tests, collectively known as Project SHAD (Shipboard Hazard and Defense). In recent months, after intensive lobbying by veterans like Alderson and some members of Congress, the DoD admitted it had carried out live chemical and biological weapons experiments in the 1960s and ’70s.

Land-based tests were conducted in Alaska, Florida, Hawaii, Maryland, Utah, Canada, and England. Sea-based tests were carried out off the coast of California, Hawaii and Puerto Rico.

Altogether, 113 tests were planned, although the DoD says many were cancelled. It has released brief “fact sheets” on 37 of the tests, and is still investigating others. The Pentagon has notified about 1,400 servicemen about their involvement in SHAD, which lasted from 1962 to 1973.

Government officials insist that SHAD participants were given appropriate protective clothing, and say there is no evidence that anyone -- military or civilian -- was sickened by the tests.

“The purpose of these operational tests was to test equipment, procedures, military tactics, etc., and to learn more about biological and chemical agents,” said William Winkenwerder, assistant defense secretary for health affairs.

“The tests were not conducted to evaluate the effects of dangerous agents on people,” he emphasized.

Alderson is skeptical about this explanation. “The rhesus monkeys were put in cages exterior to the vessel, not inside any citadel,” he said. “If you were going to test the protective capabilities of a ship, you wouldn’t put your test subjects on the exterior.”

Some veterans groups believe the Pentagon is still dragging its feet in disclosing all the details of the tests.

“SHAD veterans were unwitting participants in these tests,” said Rick Weidman, director of government relations for the Vietnam Veterans of America (VVA). “DoD continues to withhold the evidence needed by these veterans to meet the burden of proof that VA [the Veterans Administration] requires for care and compensation.”

“At VVA, we have a phrase to describe this phenomenon: the disposable soldier syndrome,” Weidman said. “This pattern has repeated itself over and over again. Consider the plight of military personnel and veterans concerning the effects of gas in WWI; radiation in WWII; Agent Orange in Vietnam; toxic exposures in the Persian Gulf.”

Weidman is pushing for the creation of an independent National Institute of Veterans Health, under the National Institutes of Health, that would be empowered to investigate controversial Pentagon operations like SHAD.

California Congressman Mike Thompson, who helped lead the long fight to get the SHAD records opened, has also introduced legislation to declassify information on other Cold War era weapons tests dubbed Project 112.

“The Department of Defense has not only subjected our own soldiers to dangerous substances, it may have [put] our civilians it is charged with protecting at risk,” said Thompson. “It is appalling that 40 years have passed and our veterans are just now receiving this information that may be vital to their health and well-being.”

The DoD says it will continue to release details of the SHAD tests as they become available, with a completion date estimated for June 2003. But some feel the Pentagon lacks a sense of urgency in notifying servicemen about what they were exposed to.

“One of the reasons that we want the sailors of Project SHAD looked at is there is no way that somebody today would consider something that happened 35 years ago the cause of health problems today,” said Alderson, who himself suffers from skin and prostate cancer.

According to Veterans Administration documents obtained by the VVA, the mortality rate from respiratory and brain disease among SHAD participants is three times the expected rate.

“I come from a rural area of Northern California,” Alderson said. “There is no way that a doctor in Humbolt County is going to recognize symptoms of some of the things that we were exposed to. He would not know what to look for. He just wouldn’t recognize it. He would be looking for something else.”

People to Bush: ‘war is terrorism’

Compiled by Willy Rosencrans

Nov. 5 (AGR)— Popular outcry against two of President George W. Bush’s administration’s key post-9/11 “terror” strategies, the USA PATRIOT Act and the impending Iraq war, continued this week. A Maryland community city council became the latest to pass a resolution protesting federal violations of civil liberties; peaceful demonstrators in Louisville were attacked by police but held their ground; and thousands gathered in Boston to voice their opposition to war.

Around 25,000 people listen to author and
historian Howard Zinn at an anti-war rally
in Boston, MA, on Sunday, Nov. 3, 2002.

The city council of Takoma Park, MD adopted a sweeping resolution on Oct. 28 condemning repressive surveillance measures authorized by the USA PATRIOT Act.  With its unanimous vote, Takoma Park became the 11th municipality to speak out in recent months against Bush administration policies.

In addition to language instructing local law enforcement officials to “refrain from participating in enforcement of federal immigration laws,” the resolution adopted by Takoma Park calls for the repeal of all federal and state legislation that violates fundamental rights and liberties. The resolution also seeks details on the extent of electronic surveillance and the infiltration of political and religious activities in Takoma Park.

Other communities that have adopted resolutions protesting repressive federal action since Sept. 11 include Madison, WI; Ann Arbor, MI; Boulder, CO; Carrboro, NC; and Northampton, MA. More than 30 other localities around the country are considering similar initiatives.

Laura Murphy of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said the ACLU would work with dozens of communities around the country to go on the record against repressive legislation. “Local governments have the power to tell their law enforcement officers not to spy without evidence of crime,” Murphy said.
In Louisville, KY, on Nov. 1, about 300 protesters gathered opposite a convention center where Bush was scheduled to appear during a Republican rally for several GOP candidates.

Police blocked protesters as they attempted to move with the line of Bush supporters waiting to enter the center. Horses were used against the crowd, but the protesters briefly held their position in the middle of 4th Street.

At that point the horses were guided into the crowd. One person was stomped by a horse and fell to the ground; others were forcefully shoved backwards by police on foot. Officers kept ordering the crowd to move backwards, but people found themselves trapped between the police line and the corner building as well as a line of cars on the corner. Still, police insisted that the crowd “move back!” and followed up with more shoving.

People fell to the ground in the middle and back of the crowd as the police shoved the front of the crowd backwards, creating a potentially dangerous situation.

Six protesters were arrested. The names of those arrested were not immediately released, but police Maj. Don Burbrink said the six likely would face charges of failure to disperse.

Sister Miriam Corcoran said the arrests struck her as un-American. But she said the bigger issue at the protest was making it known that opposition to the president’s policies regarding Iraq was growing.

“There have been protests all over the country and all over the world,” she said.

Alicia Smiley, a police department spokeswoman, said a suspicious package found in the protest area was taken aside and detonated. She said authorities couldn’t determine what had been in the package but that it wasn’t anything harmful.

And in Boston, about 25,000 protesters gathered Nov. 3 to voice their opposition to an Iraq war. The turnout rivaled any Boston peace rally since the Gulf War, organizers said.

“War breeds terrorism; war is terrorism,” author Howard Zinn told the crowd. “We need a regime change right here…It’s shameful to drop bombs on people who need food and medicine. You can’t bomb a country into democracy.”

“I just think it’s really a testament to how uneasy the public is with this war that we got this massive a turnout even before the troops invade,” said Jennifer Horan, an organizer with United for Justice with Peace, which sponsored the rally.

Michael Alaimo said he worries that an invasion of Iraq would encourage retaliatory terrorist attacks. “I think they’re going to really make Americans — if they’re not already — pariahs to the rest of the world,” said Alaimo, a pharmaceutical research scientist.

Nick Fuller carried a large mock-American flag that displayed a white peace sign where the 50 stars would normally be.

“There’s this whole issue that if you protest war, you’re not patriotic,” Fuller said. “Dissent is patriotic.”

After the speeches protesters marched downtown, forming a parade that stretched nearly a mile and a half. Passersby, who gave thumbs-up in support of the protest, said they were shocked by the size of the march. ‘’I was surprised to see so many people,’’ said Imge Erguvanli. “If it’s widespread, like in the ’60s, it could have an effect.”

Sources: American Civil Liberties Union, Boston Globe, The Harvard Crimson, Infoshop.org, Louisville Courier-Journal

ACLU charges racial discrimination
in second Texas drug bust scandal

Austin, Texas, Nov. 1— The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) today filed a class action lawsuit charging racial discrimination in an undercover drug bust that led to the arrest of 15 percent of African-American men between the ages of 18 and 34 in Hearne, a rural community of 5,000 in eastern Texas.

“Our clients have experienced a gross miscarriage of justice,” said Graham Boyd, Director of the ACLU’s Drug Policy Litigation Project and lead attorney in the case. “The arrests were based on nothing more than the word of an informant who had no history of reliability and who was himself facing serious criminal charges.”

The ACLU lawsuit, Regina Kelly v. John Paschall, was filed on behalf of 28 African-American residents of Hearne who were indicted in November 2000 on drug charges after being rounded up in a series of unlawful paramilitary drug “sweeps.”  The case closely resembles the notorious 1999 drug bust scandal in nearby Tulia, where 45 people — all but three of them African-American — were arrested and indicted on bogus drug charges.

According to the ACLU’s complaint, “for the past 15 years, based on the uncorroborated tales of informants, Task Force members annually raid the African American community in eastern Hearne to arrest the residents identified by the confidential informants, resulting in the arrest and harassment of innocent citizens without cause.” 

Of the ACLU clients named in today’s complaint, one woman was accused of taking part in a drug buy that occurred while she was giving birth in a local hospital.  Another man was arrested at the funeral of his 18-month-old daughter and held for a month before charges were dropped.  Others were able to show through time cards and witnesses that they were at work during the time they were accused of participating in drug deals.  

“Cases like Hearne and Tulia begin to explain the troubling fact that America has more black men in prison than college,” Boyd said. “The ACLU is calling for an end to racial profiling in drug arrests, both in Texas and throughout the nation.”

Today’s lawsuit was filed against the South Central Texas Regional Narcotics Task Force and all of its agents, including the City of Hearne and the County of Robertson. Also named as a defendant is John Paschall, the Hearne District Attorney and former head of the task force’s Hearne unit.

“These race-based sweeps and unwarranted detentions of innocent citizens violated the Constitution’s protections against discrimination on the basis of race, unreasonable searches and seizures, and the deprivation of liberty without the due process of law,” the ACLU complaint charged.

Will Harrell, Executive Director of the ACLU of Texas, said that the Tulia and Hearne cases are not an aberration.  To receive federal funding, he said, task forces must have good arrest numbers, and targeting minorities is an easy way for the task forces to pad their statistics. “The Justice Department should take a serious look at how their money is being used in Texas,” he said.

The ACLU of Texas has asked the Justice Department to freeze all federal funding for Texas’s regional drug task forces because of racially unjust practices by law enforcement in Tulia, Hearne and elsewhere in the state, Harrell said. To date, no action has been taken.

All of the ACLU’s Hearne clients spent considerable time in jail before the charges brought against them were dropped in February 2001 because of insufficient evidence and the questionable credibility of a confidential informant. 

Regina Kelly, 26, a mother of three, was arrested and indicted on drug charges in November 2000 and is the lead plaintiff in the case.  Since charges against her were dropped she has had a difficult time dealing with the stigma of the arrest.  

“I am hopeful that this lawsuit will clear my name once and for all,” Kelly said.  “Hearne is a small town, and I can’t get a good job or enroll in college because everyone knows me as a person involved in a drug arrest.” 

The ACLU is seeking a court order preventing the Task Force and local law enforcement from conducting drug “sweeps” targeted at African-American residents in Hearne and the unlawful arrest, detention, and prosecution of residents based solely on their race.  ACLU attorneys are also seeking damages on behalf of the clients for emotional distress, loss of earning capacity and permanent damage to their reputations.

Source: American Civil Liberties Union

NATION BRIEFS

US may mimic
British spy system

Following the intelligence slips that failed to raise the alarm before the Sept. 11 attacks, deep misgivings have grown concerning the FBI and CIA’s ability to prevent future terrorist outrages. Senior Bush administration officials believe that the FBI’s focus on law enforcement to the detriment of domestic intelligence-gathering has been a fatal flaw in the US defenses against terrorism.

Consideration is being given to modify the FBI after the model of the British domestic spying organization, M15, according to US intelligence sources. US homeland security director Tom Ridge is scheduled to meet with directors of M15, M16 and the Scotland Yard this week to “take a look at your anti-terrorism legislation — what you can and cannot do in relationship to people you suspect of terrorism. There are some practical lessons to be learned,” Ridge said.

Some US officials believe that the FBI’s “police” culture is so entrenched that it cannot be transformed into an effective intelligence agency. One of the options Ridge will be looking at is creating a new domestic spying agency. (Telegraph UK)

‘Goon squads’
ready for protests

Fellow cops call them “goon squads” but the Chicago Police Department calls them the Special Response Team, a group of 6-foot-4 and taller patrol officers selected to collar any violent demonstrators next week during the two-day TransAtlantic Business Dialogue conference. About 130 of the towering officers have been picked for the mission, a top department official said. They will cross police lines and wade into the crowd to control any dangerous activity, the official said. “They’re our ace in the hole.”

Protest organizers are anticipating 20,000 people to participate in the demonstration Nov. 7-8 at the Sheraton Chicago Motel where the meetings will take place. There is also a call for an anarchist economics summit to counter the business conference. (Chicago Sun-Times)

Thought police

Ruben Gur, a neuropsychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, says new kinds of brain scans can reveal when a person recognizes a familiar face, no matter how hard he or she tries to conceal it. The scanning machine, called a functional MRI, could revolutionize police work, change national security, and threaten personal privacy. He acknowledges the concerns about brain scans eventually reading private thoughts. The balance between security and privacy is something society will have to come to grips with, he said.

Another Penn scientist, Daniel Langleben, has found that the functional MRI can act as a lie detector.

“In the long term, I think we will have technologies powerful enough to understand what people are thinking in ways unimaginable now,” Langleben said. “I think in 50 years we will have a way to essentially read minds.” He says he’s not particularly happy about that prospect.

To Gur and Langleben, visions of Orwellian thought police do not overshadow the potential benefits and the ever-tantalizing scientific prospect of understanding how the mind works. (Philadelphia Inquirer)

Demonstrators
sue city officials after protest

A suit was filed on Oct. 25 in US District Court against the City of Portland, Mayor Vera Katz, Police Chief Mark Kroeker and others. The lawsuit seeks monetary damages for pain and suffering and violation of First Amendment rights, an order establishing a civilian police-review board, and a cease-and-desist order banning the use of pepper spray and rubber bullets at peaceful gatherings. The suit is being filed because of police response to a protest at the Hilton Hotel where President Bush was holding a fund-raiser for Sen. Gordon Smith, R-OR, on Aug. 22.

Plaintiffs include Lloyd Marbet and Don Joughin and Corinna Andrews and their three young children, aged 11 months to six years. The children’s parents said they took them to a hospital after they were doused with pepper spray at the protest which activists claim was peaceful and legal. (Associated Press)

Answers sought for Halloween mayhem

Apparently incited by a flier handed out at East Aurora High School in East Aurora, New York, as many as 200 teenagers pelted police cars with eggs, bottles and rocks on Halloween night, police said. Seventeen people ages 15 to 18 were arrested for disorderly conduct, criminal mischief, “a couple” of charges of resisting arrest, and one felony charge of second-degree assault against a boy who threw three eggs at an officer.

The flier stated, “Halloween equals war on the police state” and “has become the one night a year when the kids wake up, join together, and revolt against the police that have abused their power for a year straight.”

Lt. Ron Krowka said, “They started yelling profanities and we started getting pelted with eggs at point-blank range in the cars. They started throwing bottles on the street.”

The teens were not the problem, one father said. All year, certain village police harass local youth, feeding animosity, he said. He also believes what happened Halloween night was typical of police abusing their position. (Associated Press, Buffalo News)

$2 million
awarded in police brutality case

Kentin Waits, a gay Chicago man, won a $2 million verdict Friday in a police brutality case against the City of Chicago that was sparked after he squirted water at an officer following a Cubs game in 2000. He will be awarded $15,000 in compensatory damages, to be paid by the city, and $2 million in punitive damages, to be paid by the sergeant and officer named in the case.

Waits sued last year claiming he was the victim of excessive force and a hate crime at the hands of officer Daniel Durst, and that Sgt. Michael Prusank and others tried to cover up the alleged beating in an interrogation room at the police station. Waits said he was held at the station for 22 hours, where he was handcuffed, called a “faggot” and slapped in the face about 15 to 20 times by Durst. (Chicago Sun-Times)

Court rules in
Earth First! pepper spray case

The Supreme Court refused Nov. 4 to keep a California sheriff and his deputy from being sued for ordering the pepper-spraying of shackled anti-logging protesters.

The court turned aside the case without comment.

The case involves the arrests of nine people, members of Earth First!, who staged sit-ins at Pacific Lumber Co. headquarters and a congressman’s office. They were protesting the cutting of ancient redwood trees.

When the demonstrators, who had chained themselves with a 25-pound steel device, would not leave, law officers swabbed pepper spray near the demonstrators’ eyes, sometimes repeatedly. Those who refused to surrender were sprayed in their face at close range.

Attorneys for Humboldt County Sheriff Dennis Lewis and Chief Deputy Gary Philp argued that the lawmen consulted with legal experts first, and that the protesters were not injured.

Deputies’ videotapes of the sit-ins show demonstrators screaming after the spray was applied.

The case was at the Supreme Court for the second time in a year. Last fall, justices threw out a lower court ruling that ordered a trial for the protesters. The appeals court reconsidered and again said protesters were entitled to sue the sheriff and deputy. (AP)

Justice of the
peace caught on video cursing,
using racial slurs

Justice of the Peace Matt Zepeda of Brazoria County, TX was caught by surveillance cameras berating inmates with racial slurs and obscenities at the Pearland City Jail. Pearland police officers witnessed the incident and informed their supervisors, and city officials requested a state investigation. Brazoria County District Attorney Jeri Yenne said that she had seen the tape and had forwarded it to the judicial commission.

The State Commission on Judicial Conduct is responsible for investigating complaints against judges and can issue sanctions, including seeking the judge’s removal from office. Although Pearland officials confirmed they had informed the judicial review commission of the incidents involving Zepeda, Seana Willing, the commission’s general counsel, said state law forbids her from saying whether a judge is under investigation.

Yenne said Texas district attorneys have the authority to remove public officials from office when there are allegations of misconduct. (Houston Chronicle)