This is an archive of the former website of the Maoist Internationalist Movement, which was run by the now defunct Maoist Internationalist Party - Amerika. The MIM now consists of many independent cells, many of which have their own indendendent organs both online and off. MIM(Prisons) serves these documents as a service to and reference for the anti-imperialist movement worldwide.
MIM Notes 302 · May 15, 2004 · Page 1
MIM Notes
May 15, 2004, Nº 302
The Official Newsletter of the Maoist Internationalist Movement (MIM)
Free
INSIDE: `Enemy combatants' * Gender and the Iraq abuse story * Prisons
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MIM SCOOP:
TORTURE OF
NAKED PRISONERS
ORIGINATED IN
PENNSYLVANIA
PRISON
by MC17 & MC5
O
n May 5 President Bush told the
world that the torture of Iraqi
prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison
is not typical Amerikan behavior. He said
the soldiers who carried out the torture
"don't represent America" and stated
"This is a free country. We do not tolerate
this kind of abuses." Bush made these
statement in an interview aired on Al-
Arabiya, a station widely viewed by Arab
peoples. He also did an interview on the
Amerikan Arabic propaganda station Al-
Hurra, stating, "What took place in that
prison does not represent the America
that I know."(1)
But what took place at Abu Ghraib does
represent Amerika. It is happening daily
in prisons across the country, the country
that has the highest imprisonment rate in
the world. These statements by President
Bush are exposed as nothing more than
public image cleanup when we look at
the conditions in Amerikan prisons.
Two of the first seven soldiers caught
torturing Iraqis in Abu Ghraib prison
worked as U.$. prison guards before
going to Iraq. Staff Sgt. Ivan Frederick
learned how to torture prisoners at
Buckingham Correctional Center in
Dillwyn Virginia, after working there six
years.(2) MIM Notes reported limitations
of prison visitation and thefts of prisoner
property in Buckingham in 1997.
However, Virginia has imposed
censorship on MIM before and we do
not have as many details about prison
conditions as we would like. Again, it's
the same old story of cover-up.
Charles Graner, another of the seven
caught torturing Iraqis worked in the
AMERIKAN
TORTURE
OF IRAQIS
EXPOSED
by MC12 and MC206
I
n the run up to the Amerikan invasion,
in February 2003, President Bush
declared: "The first to benefit from a
free Iraq would be the Iraqi people
themselves. Today they live in scarcity
and fear under a dictator who has brought
them nothing but war and misery and
torture."(1) Today, they live in scarcity
and fear under a FOREIGN dictator who
has brought them nothing but war and
misery, and--we can now confirm--
torture.
Despite valiant efforts by quick-acting
politicians and media apologists, it has not
been possible to make the torture
practiced by the Amerikan military in the
Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq out to be the
work of a few lone, "sick" individuals.
The story broke when the CBS news
program 60 Minutes released photos of
U$ soldiers gloating over naked and
hooded Iraqi prisoners. However, the
most detailed description (to date) of
torture, abuse and humiliation at the hands
of Amerikan soldiers, contractors and
intelligence agents comes from a U$
army report on Abu Ghraib, which was
leaked to the New Yorker magazine.(2)
The report details how soldiers
humiliated some of the prisoners by
forcing them to simulate sex acts. A photo
included in the report shows an Amerikan
womyn "giving a jaunty thumbs-up sign
and pointing at the genitals of a young
Iraqi, who is naked except for a sandbag
over his head, as he masturbates." One
soldier testifies, "I saw two naked
detainees, one masturbating to another
kneeling with its [sic] mouth open."
Although this soldier claims he refused
to participate in the abuse--"I just didn't
want to be part of anything that looked
criminal"--he repeatedly refers to Iraqis
as "it" and did little to stop the abuse (he
told his superiors, then assumed "the issue
was taken care of").(2)
The army report makes it clear that the
Amerikan occupation
keeps looking to the
future for relief
by MC5 and MC17
May 4--Amerikan Pentagon officials
announced recently their plan to keep
Amerikan troops in Iraq at the current
level (about 135,000) through at least the
end of 2005.(1) Originally the United
$tates had claimed it wanted to reduce
Amerikan occupation forces by 20,000.
Uncle $am believed the transition to a
pseudo-autonomous Iraqi government on
June 30th, 2004 would allow this.
Amerikan troops are needed to keep
the Iraqi population from rising up and
Abuse of Iraqi prisoners and U$ prisons
NAKED HUMILIATION: The Amerikan torture tactic
on display in Iraq (above) -- and following the
supression of the Attica prison uprising in New York
in 1971, when prisoners were paraded around naked
in the mud (below right) and forced to lie prone for
hours (above right).
Imperialists spell relief: D-R-A-F-T
taking back their
country. And
Amerika is
willing to use
whatever force
is necessary to
a c h i e v e
domination of
Iraq.
The increased
U$ "force structure" in Iraq is an
accomplishment of the Iraqi proletariat
and oppressed launching armed struggle,
without so much as the benefit of a Maoist
vanguard party (as far as we know).
Since the time we have written articles
on the draft, "Secretary of Defense" and
nutcase Donald Rumsfeld has reiterated
opposition to the draft and said that he
will find a way to rotate the 1.4 million
people in the Amerikan military to find
135,000 soldiers for combat in Iraq.(2)
Many of the 1.4 million are office and
technical back-up personnel.
MIM reiterates that Rumsfeld (or a like-
minded successor) might be able to pull
that off. The United $tates is not in
England's position yet,(5) which is why
this will be a protracted war against U$
imperialism best handled by pan-Arab
nationalism and proletarian
internationalism over a long haul. We must
steer away from seeing U$ imperialism
as about to fall, but also we must fully
credit the damage already done by the
Iraqi fighters fighting consciously and
Continued on page 4...
Continued on page 6...
Continued on page 7...
MIM Notes 302 · May 15, 2004 · Page 2
What is MIM?
The Maoist Internationalist Movement (MIM) is the collection of existing or emerging
Maoist internationalist parties in the English-speaking imperialist countries and their English-
speaking internal semi-colonies, as well as the existing or emerging Maoist Internationalist
parties in Belgium, France and Quebec and the existing or emerging Spanish-speaking
Maoist Internationalist parties of Aztlan, Puerto Rico and other territories of the U.$. Empire.
MIM Notes is the newspaper of MIM. Notas Rojas is the newspaper of the Spanish-speaking
parties or emerging parties of MIM. MIM upholds the revolutionary communist ideology
of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and is an internationalist organization that works from the
vantage point of the Third World proletariat. MIM struggles to end the oppression of all
groups over other groups: classes, genders, nations. MIM knows this is only possibly by
building public opinion to seize power through armed struggle. Revolution is a reality for
North America as the military becomes over-extended in the government's attempts to
maintain world hegemony. MIM differs from other communist parties on three main
questions: (1) MIM holds that after the proletariat seizes power in socialist revolution, the
potential exists for capitalist restoration under the leadership of a new bourgeoisie within
the communist party itself. In the case of the USSR, the bourgeoisie seized power after the
death of Stalin in 1953; in China, it was after Mao's death and the overthrow of the "Gang
of Four" in 1976. (2) MIM upholds the Chinese Cultural Revolution as the farthest advance
of communism in humyn history. (3) As Marx, Engels and Lenin formulated and MIM has
reiterated through materialist analysis, imperialism extracts super-profits from the Third
World and in part uses this wealth to buy off whole populations of oppressor nation so-
called workers. These so-called workers bought off by imperialism form a new petty-
bourgeoisie called the labor aristocracy. These classes are not the principal vehicles to
advance Maoism within those countries because their standards of living depend on
imperialism. At this time, imperialist super-profits create this situation in the Canada, Quebec,
the United $tates, England, France, Belgium, Germany, Japan, Italy, Switzerland,
Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Israel, Sweden and Denmark. MIM accepts people as
members who agree on these basic principles and accept democratic centralism, the system
of majority rule, on other questions of party line.
"The theory of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin is universally applicable. We should
regard it not as dogma, but as a guide to action. Studying it is not merely a matter of
learning terms and phrases, but of learning Marxism-Leninism as the science of revolution."
- Mao Zedong, Selected Works, Vol. II, p. 208.
Editor, MC206; Production, MC12
Letters
MIM Notes
The Official Newsletter of The Maoist Internationalist Movement
ISSN 1540-8817
MIM Notes is the bi-weekly newsletter of the Maoist Internationalist Movement. MIM
Notes is the official Party voice; more complete statements are published in our journal,
MIM Theory. Material in MIM Notes is the Party's position unless noted. MIM Notes
accepts submissions and critiques from anyone. The editors reserve the right to edit
submissions unless permission is specifically denied by the author; submissions are
published anonymously unless authors insist on identification (prisoners are never
identified by name). MIM is an underground party that does not publish the names of its
comrades in order to avoid the state surveillance and repression that have historically
been directed at communist parties and anti-imperialist movements. MCs, MIM comrades,
are members of the Party. The Revolutionary Anti-Imperialist League (RAIL) is an anti-
imperialist mass organization led by MIM (RCs are RAIL Comrades). MIM's ten-point
program is available to anyone who sends in a SASE.
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WWW: <http//www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext>
I was reading your revolutionary
definitions page. Let me start off by
saying thank you for making the
definitions easy to understand without
"talking down" to readers. However, I
have one question, or perhaps reservation,
considering your definition of a labor
aristocracy. While I agree completely that
workers in the United States benefit from
imperialist exploitation abroad, and
unfortunately this corrupts their
consciousness, I have a question
regarding the statement that they are
therefore no longer exploited. Isn't a
portion of the surplus value of their labor
still exploited by capitalists in the United
States? In other words, aren't they still
exploited even though they benefit from
imperialist exploitation, even if this
exploitation is to a lesser degree than the
exploitation experienced in the third
world. Perhaps it is the contradiciton of
US workers being both an exploiter and
exploited? Just a thought. I look forward
to your response.
--An internet reader
MIM responds: There's one quick
answer to the question of whether
Amerikan "workers" are still exploited,
even though they do receive a part of the
surplus value the imperialists rob from the
Third World: the majority of Amerikan
"workers" are in non-productive jobs.
They do not produce anything and hence
cannot produce surplus value. They are
"necessary" only because the capitalists
need guards, advertising experts,
salespeople and lawyers to keep making
profits. As J Sakai points out in "Settlers:
the Mythology of the White Proletariat,"
already in the 1970s around a third of
Amerikan workers were police, prison
guards, or employed by the military.
The key to understanding unproductive
sector workers via surplus-value is that
they can only preserve or appropriate it;
they cannot expand it. Without
salespeople, capitalists can certainly blow
their chance at obtaining surplus-value,
but no matter how good or how many
salespeople one employs, there is a limit
to the price of a good. Without the
commodities produced by the productive
sector, the sales staff have nothing, even
in the most elementary conditions. If
everyone were a guard, soldier or lawyer,
everyone would die of starvation and
exposure. Life without any guards,
soldiers or lawyers, however, is certainly
possible.
According to the definitions used by the
COMINTERN, the majority of
imperialist-country "workers" are at best
"semi-proletarian." COMINTERN
documents clearly consider the "urban
petty bourgeoisie and broad layers of the
so-called middle class, of office workers
etc." to be non-proletarians. Of course,
the majority of Amerikans is (and sees
itself as) "middle class."
For those Amerikan workers in
productive sector jobs, we have
extensively documented that the amount
of surplus value transferred to them from
the exploited Third World exceeds the
value of their labor. Of course, on the
whole the capitalists must pay workers
less than the value of their product--but
they can afford to bribe a small minority
of workers, and, as Lenin's Imperialism
points out by quoting Cecil Rhodes, such
Amerikan workers both bought-off and exploited?
bribery helps secure the imperialists'
interests in the "home country." Any
Amerikan workers who are truly exploited
are so few and isolated so as to not
constitute a class.
We recommend those interested in
these questions read MIM Theory 1, "A
White Proletariat?" J Sakai's "Settlers,"
and our "Imperialism and its class
structure, 1997," wich is available free
online: http://www.etext.org/Politics/
MIM/mt/imp97/index.html.
`Hey, it's not as easy as it looks...
--MC12
MIM Notes 302 · May 15, 2004 · Page 3
by mousnonya, April 20, 2004
$pain has decided to withdraw its troops
from Iraq as quickly as possible.(1)
However $pain has also declared itself
willing to send "humanitarian" relief to
Iraq.(2) So $pain is a two-faced
imperialist. However, despite the fact that
the imperialists are treacherous, the
international proletariat is patient. Iraqi
resistance leader Muqtada el Sadr has
called on his troops not to attack Spanish
soldiers and to allow them to return home
safely to their families where they
belong.(3)
Sadr's action contradicts U$
propaganda which calls Iraq's resistance
"bandits." The recent release of Japanese
hostages by the Iraqi resistance also
contradicts U$ lies. These facts should
make people question whether Uncle
$cam is a lying hypocrite or merely
deluded. MIM sees a practice and pattern
of U$ lies and calls it like it is: "your"
government, the capitalists, regards you
as expendable. They will lie to you. They
will tell you to kill. And if you die fighting
the rich man's war he will celebrate your
making him rich with a 21 gun salute.
MIM sees the pull-out of $pain as
probably the first imperialist rat deserting
the sinking ship of the U$ occupation of
Iraq. Honduras, one more Spanish
speaking country with a history of being
attacked by U$ imperialism, has also
declared that it will withdraw its soldiers
from Iraq.(4) Then the Dominican
Republic pulled out its 300 and Thailand
says it may be next. Imperialists of various
stripes are calling for NATO (5) or the
UN (6) to take over the occupation of
Iraq. But who wants to take over? No
one. Because any other imperialist
coalition would face the same fate as the
U$, being bogged down in an unpopular
bloody war.
[mim3@mim.org interjects: The UN is
already taking a greater role in forming
the puppet regime that comes to power
June 30th when the U$ colonial regime
ends in favor of a neo-colonial regime.
Despite the UN role, it still looks like other
major powers such as Russia, India,
France and Germany have not received
a good enough deal from Uncle $am to
send in their own troops. We have to
distinguish between troops and diplomats.
The situation with troops on the ground
has not changed and that's what is
important to the political climate in Iraq.
People should not be confused by the
meaning of the June 30th date Bush is
talking about. Troops in
Germany and Japan have never left
since World War II. Probably the best
thing that could happen to Amerika is that
the Iraqis hand Amerika such a stunning
military defeat that Bush pulls out the
troops June 30th or shortly thereafter.
The Iraqis will no doubt try to make it
happen, but we are still counting on a
protracted struggle running into the next
Bush or Kerry term.]
Each defection of a U$ ally is a major
victory for the anti-imperialists because
it makes the illegal U$ occupation of Iraq
all the more difficult. MIM does not
expect a UN takeover of Iraq. In fact,
some neoconservatives probably wanted
to use Iraq to destroy the UN which they
saw as no longer useful in extending U$
imperialism. Germany and France, both
NATO members, will likely oppose using
NATO (supposedly a defensive alliance)
to occupy a country far from Europe. The
U$ imperialists have painted themselves
into a corner.
We're sure the U$ imperialists are
mad. MIM dares to ask something the
mainstream press and imperialists are too
gutless to say out loud:(7) When will
other U$ allies in Iraq such as Poland,
Italy, Japan, Australia, and Britain send
their troops home? Britain also produces
oil. Japan is oil dependent. So even though
Japan has seen its hostages in Iraq
released we expect to see Japan continue
to lick the b.s.-encrusted cowboy boots
of Amerikan imperialists. Reactionary
Anglo solidarity will increasingly be
stressed by "realities on the ground." The
United $tates will find itself increasingly
isolated and overextended. This is exactly
one of the preconditions MIM sees as
necessary to a revolution in Amerika. The
truth is and will become increasingly
obvious: imperialism means only death for
you and me and riches for large
corporations.
Meanwhile U$ atrocities continue: U$
imperialists killed two more journalists in
Iraq.(8) "[A]t least 26 Iraqi and foreign
journalists and media workers have been
killed" so far in Iraq.(9) So it's no surprise
that Hosni Mubarak, U$ puppet leader of
Egypt, is even saying the U$ is now hated
more than ever in the Arab world.(10)
Once again, MIM is willing to use
scientific materialism to reach the painful
truth that no one else recognizes let alone
says: the continuing murder of journalists
in Iraq is no accident. The imperialists
want the press to report what is good for
imperialism and ignore the ugly truth.
MIM calls on mainstream journalists
unwilling to be censored or to tolerate the
murder of their colleagues: Avenge your
colleagues' deaths. Refuse to be
intimidated. Write for MIM Notes.
Notes:
1. Spain withdrawal from Iraq deals new blow to
US coalition Sun Apr 18, (AFP) http://
story.news.yahoo.com/
news?tmpl=story&cid=1515&ncid
=1515&e=2&u=/afp/20040418/wl_mideast_afp/
iraq_worldwrap; Spanien beginnt mit
Truppenauszug aus dem Irak (German Press
Agency) April 20, 2004, http://
de.news.yahoo.com/040419/3/3zpbu.html;
L'Espagne prépare le retrait de ses troupes
présentes en Irak, Andrew Marshall (Reuters) 19
April 2004 http://fr.news.yahoo.com/040419/85/
Spain, Honduras, Dominican Rep. send their troops home
3r41p.html
2. Spain to Offer U.S. Non-Military Aid in Iraq,
Sun Apr 18, (Reuters) http://www.reuters.com/
newsArticle.jhtml?type=t
opNews&storyID=4856690
3. El Sadr fordert Stopp von Angriffen auf
Spanische Soldaten April 19, 2004, (AP) http://
de.news.yahoo.com/040419/12/3znz8.html; Sadr
veut épargner les Espagnols, qui accélèrent leur
retrait French Press Agency (AFP) http://
fr.news.yahoo.com/040419/202/3r5n5.html
4. Honduras to Pull Its Troops Out of Iraq
Gustavo Palencia (Reuters) http://
story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/
nm/20040420/wl_nm/
iraq_honduras_dc&cid=574&ncid=1480; Auch
Honduras zieht Truppen aus Irak ab April 20,
2004, (German Press Agency) http://
de.news.yahoo.com/040420/3/3zpfb.html;
5. L'OTAN pourrait jouer un rôle dans la
sécurité en Irak, selon le ministre australien de la
Défense April 20, 2004, (AP) http://
fr.news.yahoo.com/040420/5/3r5t1.html
6. Michel Barnier et son homologue russe
appellent à l'intervention de l'ONU en Irak. AP,
April 20, 2004.
7. Colin Powell craint que plusieurs pays ne
suivent l'exemple espagnol et se retirent d'Irak
April 20, 2004, (AP) (Colin Powell fears that
several countries will follow the Spanish
example and withdraw from Iraq) http://
fr.news.yahoo.com/040420/5/3r5t0.html MIM
asks the reader: Why can't you read this in
English?
8. GIs Kill 2 Workers of U.S.-Funded Iraq TV
Mon Apr 19, 2:44 PM ET (AP) http://
story.news.yahoo.com/
news?tmpl=story&cid=540&
ncid=736&e=10&u=/ap/20040419/
ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_journalists_killed
9. See note 8.
10. Mubarak: Arabs Hate U.S. More Than Ever
20 April 2004 (Reuters) http://
story.news.yahoo.com/
news?tmpl=story&cid=574&ncid=72
1&e=1&u=/nm/20040420/wl_nm/
mideast_egypt_usa_dc.
This is the second in a series of
articles. The first (in MN310) covered
drugs, music and art; future
installments will address the topics of
tone, sectarianism and chauvinism.
I'm going to talk about subjectivism and
its relationship to our communist goals by
giving a bunch of examples of
subjectivism--the belief that what one
feels or likes is true or supreme. What's
most important is not the individual evils
of subjectivism, but understanding the
overall approach that we as Maoist
scientists apply to everything. We at MIM
are not saying we have some long list of
behaviors that we tack on to the end of
the "Ten Commandments." It's not our
point to bring attention to hypocrisy in
individual behavior--and this is something
that we from Christian, Jewish and
Islamic cultures have to watch out for.
(Buddhism has a little better intellectual
material to work with on this question.)
We Maoist scientists are interested in the
underlying causes of behavior.
In all likelihood, the revolution will be
successful only through the efforts of
"hypocrites" envisioning future
generations growing up with better social
influences than they had. Understanding
this is part of understanding materialism,
as when Lenin said revolution is always
made with the imperfect social material
at hand, not by divine perfection of
humyn consciousness first.
No one is a 100% pure. Hence, MIM
has acted to push aside the politics of
putting lifestyle first. Whoever comes up
with the idea that a party should set up a
list of lifestyles to condone or not condone
is setting up a huge Liberal fight to divide
the party. We have to come up with a list
of bad things, but our attack has to be on
the causes, not the bearers of those bad
lifestyles. With these warnings, I turn to
several examples of subjectivism.
IV. Love
Now let's look at love. Many see it as
the one refuge from corruption all around.
Too many wimmin are looking for love
only from lone individuals instead of the
international proletariat. People in love
hope they won't see their love stolen for
a pack of cigarettes, a bit of crack, a man
who has a higher paying job or a womyn
with bigger breasts. Ah, but here is the
sad part: for all the people who are looking
at this question, "love" itself is usually
thought of as a refuge of two people. Yet,
where do all these challenges to love
come from? People in love or pursuing
love but who do not ask this question are
already guilty of another kind of
subjectivism. The sources of problems in
love come from society. If we can
question what is going on between two
people, we can also extend that to the
question of love in the whole society.
V. Sex
For the sake of having a definition of
romance culture we've said that sex is a
component of romantic love. Going back
hundreds of years poets and even
preachers have said that womyn is a
creation to remind men of God's power
and what Heaven could be. Milton was
even talking about the question of how
men tempted by Satan would worship
wimmin. While some people say it is
music, some say the rush they got from a
particular drug --probably even more
men would say that there is nothing more
subjectively profound than the experience
of seeing naked wimmin and then having
sex.
Again, MIM has no need to deny that
there is a portion of society is that would
Preparing for the all-round dictatorship of the proletariat
Continued on page 9...
COMBATING SUBJECTIVISM IN
ALL ARENAS
MIM Notes 302 · May 15, 2004 · Page 4
infamous SCI-Greene Prison in
Pennsylvania holding Mumia Abu Jamal.
Graner is the guy smiling with arms folded
in the torture photos. SCI-Greene also
prohibits MIM Notes. On August 15, 1998,
MIM reported this about SCI-Greene in
Pennsylvania: "As a result of result of
the brutal beatings inflicted upon prisoners
(back here in the hole at SCI Greene) by
guards, the grand wizard warden, Ben
Varner had been terminated from his
prestigious and luxurious position.
Unfortunately the same people who
removed him from office decided to
relocate him to another prison within
Pennsylvania. So now he's on the eastern
side of the state implementing the same
dirty tactics. Only now he's been demoted
back to Deputy Superintendent."(3)
Thus, in 1998, we already reported the
important facts of life in Amerikan prisons:
get slapped on the wrist and there is
always another prison willing to take you
and if you don't like that, then there is
always the U.S. Armed Forces which will
take you for torture abroad.
MIM reported what appears to be the
disciplining of someone referred to as
"Grainey" by prisoners in 1998. That's
not definitely a connection to "Graner"
and prison authorities say privacy rules
prevent them from saying if Graner was
disciplined in 1998.
On August 15, 1998, we reported the
following about SCI-Greene: "Plus,
according to the television news, 40
guards/predators are supposed to be
FIRED! They have recovered videotapes
of inmates being beaten down while
NAKED! The inmates/POW's never did
anything to cause these pernicious
predators to assault them." Thus, the
naked video thing came from SCI-
Greene and has now been exported to
Iraq! Graner worked at SCI-Greene from
1996 to today where he is still employed
there.(4)
Perhaps if SCI-Greene had not
censored MIM Notes in 1997(5) and given
us such a hard time and if the imperialist
media were not so pig-headed
reactionary, we could have struggled
successfully to prevent the 1998 events
in SCI-Greene--and maybe even
Graner's role in Abu Ghraib, but the facts
are that the U.S. prison authorities make
it extremely difficult for MIM to do its
work. To this day, SCI-Greene is
censoring MIM. Documents from prison
authorities at SCI-Greene justifying this
cover-up and isolation of prison conditions
can be found at our website. There are
about 50 different documents on SCI-
Greene at the MIM website thanks to all
the horrors there.(6)
In fact it should be no surprise that Abu
Ghraib prisoners were tortured, as this is
common in the Amerikan prison system
in general where beatings, long term
isolation, medical neglect, sexual assault,
and humiliation are all part of a system
that doesn't even pretend to offer
Abuse of Iraqi prisoners and U$ prisons
For President Bush to
claim that Amerikan
doesn't tolerate the kind
of abuses that happened
at Abu Ghraib is a
boldfaced lie.
rehabilitation or education.
An Army investigation that resulted in
criminal charges against six military police
officers found a number of specific abuses
at Abu Ghraib prison. Below we describe
the findings and explain the similarity to
daily conditions in prisons across this
country.
Soldiers punched, slapped, kicked and
otherwise physically beat Abu Ghraib
prisoners. This is typical day to day
activity for prisons across Amerika where
guards regularly beat prisoners and then
file false reports accusing the prisoners
(often shackled and held down by several
guards) of attacking the guards to avoid
any criminal charges for these actions.
Abu Ghraib prisoners were left naked
for days at a time. Some were videotaped
and photographed. Some were arranged
in sexually explicit positions or to perform
sex acts for the photos. Prisons in
Amerika have video cameras throughout,
taping prisoners with and without their
clothing on. Leaving prisoners naked is
common practice, especially locked in
solitary confinement, but also outside in
cold temperatures. Full body cavity
searches are also daily practices in
Amerikan prisons serving only to
humiliate and degrade prisoners.
One naked Abu Ghraib prisoner was
forced to stand on a box with wires
attacked to his fingers, toes and penis.
While we can't describe specific
instances of this same form of torture in
other Amerikan prisons, the idea is the
same everywhere, it is only the tools used
to torture prisoners than vary.
At Abu Ghraib a male police guard had
sex with a female prisoner. Sexual abuse
by guards and by other prisoners is
common in Amerikan prisons. Guards set
up situations where prisoners will be
raped by another prisoner, if the guards
themselves do not commit the rape. This
happens in both male and female prisons.
These are just the abuses the military
is willing to admit to in a report. Additional
accounts of torture at Abu Ghraib include:
Guards threatened prisoners with guns,
beat them with brooms and chairs,
sodomized one with a chemical light,
poured phosphoric liquid on prisoner, and
allowed military dogs to bite them. Again
these are all common practices in
Amerikan prisons. The form of torture
may differ from one prison to the next,
but the physical and mental abuse by the
guards is common practice throughout this
country's prisons.
In California recent reports on the
prisons have exposed conditions very
similar to what was found at Abu Ghraib.
These reports have even reached the
mainstream media, with frequent stories
appearing in the Los Angeles Times and
San Francisco Chronicle describing the
cover-up at the top of the California
Department of Corrections that stopped
investigators from looking in to brutal
prison guards at Pelican Bay State Prison
among others. This brutality has resulted
in severe physical and mental injuries to
many prisoners and even some deaths. A
recent film from the California Youth
Authority shows guards there brutally
beating and kicking kids locked up in a
facility there. And this guard brutality is
on top of the standard conditions in
Amerikan prisons which include control
units where prisoners are locked in
solitary confinement for years at a time
in conditions that have been condemned
by the United Nations as torture.
For President Bush to claim that
Amerikan doesn't tolerate the kind of
abuses that happened at Abu Ghraib is a
boldfaced lie. The criminal injustice
system in this country is built on a solid
foundation of torture. It is used as a system
of social control. Whether trying to extract
confessions or information, or just trying
to degrade and break the will of prisoners,
the tools used by the system include
torture, humiliation, and degradation.
Stories about these abuses can be found
in the pages of MIM Notes every two
weeks, in a section written by prisoners
called Under Lock and Key. Occasionally
they reach the mainstream media where
politicians scramble to explain away the
abuse as atypical and the fault of a few
individuals (who often escape punishment
as soon as the publicity dies down).
What is unusual about Abu Ghraib is
not the torture of the prisoners there but
that the torture was exposed and that
Amerikan officials are now forced to
disavow it and even punish some
individuals for what happened there. But
punishment of individuals will not change
the criminal injustice system. The more
than two million people locked behind bars
in this country know the truth of the daily
torture that Amerika endorses as a
condition of imprisonment. It will not
change until we dismantle imperialist
system that uses these prisons as a tool
of social control.
Notes:
1. MSNBC, May 5, 2004
2. USA Today 7May 2004, p. 6a.
3. www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/cal/
Waynesburg.txt
4. http://
www.thejerichomovement.com/
charlesgraner.html
5. http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/
ulk/ulk/ulk150.html
6. http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/
agitation/prisons/censor/archive/ To read
detailed accounts of abuses of Amerikan
prisons across the country visit: http://
www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/agitation/
prisons.
Continued from page 1...
MIM Notes 302 · May 15, 2004 · Page 5
The photo below shows U.S. military
reservist Lynndie England mocking a row
of naked Iraqi men with a leer on her face.
In the other photos, the men are forced
to perform sex acts for the cameras.
A lot of people have a hard time
thinking of gender as anything but biology.
When MIM calls Amerikan females-by-
biology "men," we get a lot of blank stares
and snickers. Yet the proof is that Lynndie
England is no one special in Amerikkka.
Any female-biology adult of the right age
could have volunteered to take her place
in the Amerikan Army. That's the proof
that it is a group thing about gender in
Amerika.
On the other hand, it is the Iraqi people
with penises being gender oppressed in
these pictures. Other phrases you will hear
used for this is that Iraqis here are "social
females" or "socially wimmin." Lynndie
England will be referred to as "socially-
speaking a man" and other variations on
the idea.
There will be a lot of speculation
whether the smile on Lynndie England's
face comes from something deep down
in female biology or whether she is just
going along in comradeship with her male
peers in the U.S. Army. That's a
discussion for another day. For this once,
MIM will let the pictures do the talking
for why MIM is the only party of any
kind with a line addressing how this got
to be.
by mousnonya, April 16, 2004
This story was written two weeks
before the Amerikan abuse of Iraqi
prisoners at Abu Ghraib became
common knowledge. It goes to show
that Abu Ghraib is not a case of a few
bad apples, as nutcase Don Rumsfeld
and his posse of generals would have
us believe. Further, it says something
about the degree the U$ media toadies
up to the Amerikan government. If
Amerikan abuses have been so obvious
since the occupation began last April,
why are they only reporting about them
now? How many atrocities go
unreported? Outside of the coastal
cities where magazines like the New
Yorker are actually read, how
successful is the Pentagon in selling
its line that these incidents of brutality
are just that: isolate incidents?
MIM has been reporting on
Amerikan crimes committed in the name
of the "war on terror" since September
2001 (and we're been reporting on the
atrocities committed in Amerikan
prisons since we started publishing
MIM Notes). With your help--financial
and/or practical--we can make MIM
Notes into a voice that the bourgeois
media has to reckon with.
U$ forces are indiscriminately killing
even more Iraqis than usual in the wake
of the 80+ U$ soldiers killed last week. It
is not surprising that the U$ press is
ignoring this fact. Since the imperialists
are bickering about how best to exploit
the Third World, the foreign press is not
reluctant to report some of the facts. For
example, the Agence Presse France notes
that "At Fallujah, after more than a week
of bloody combat, young marines are not
hesitating to kill Iraqis to `avenge their
comrades'" (1) -- killing innocent people
for no reason at all other than their brown
skin.
MIM credits AFP for pointing out the
beating death of one Iraqi by U$
soldiers.(2) Why did the soldiers kill Salem
Hassan? Because he refused to remove
a picture of a cleric Moqtada Sadr from
his car. These people call themselves the
forces of freedom. MIM calls them lying
parasites.
Some bourgeois journalists claim to be
concerned by mercenaries (a.k.a.
"contractors") in Iraq. However the fact
is all imperialist soldiers are mercenary
vampires feeding off the blood of the Third
World. The AFP does not say whether it
was the U$ regular army, the national
guard, marines or private armies who
killed Hassan. To MIM it does not matter
which imperialist hatchet men bludgeoned
Hassan's skull to pulp. The fact is:
imperialism in its death spasms pointlessly
kills even more people. The imperialists'
murderous rampages only hasten
imperialism's doom. Expect more and
more resistance in Iraq, more and more
repression from the United $tates and
ultimately a defeat in Iraq--just like
Vietnam.
We are witnessing today a straight out
power grab: U$ imperialists bet that they
could seize Iraq's oil. They bet they could
buy off the Iraqi ruling class. And they
hoped to be able to threaten any other
oil-dependent imperialist country like
France or Japan by cutting off the Arab
oil. The fact that the war in Iraq is about
oil should be obvious to anyone who
thinks. U$ imperialism has already lost
this gamble: the Iraqi ruling class is not
going to be bribed. Not only that, OPEC
has reacted: oil has gone over $35 per
barrel. Even after devaluing the dollar
from 80 Euro cents to 1.20 euros (a
devaluation of at least 20%) oil still
remains so high that more recession is
just about guaranteed--unless the U$ can
squeeze oil out of Iraq or overthrow the
government of Venezuela (the last time
the U$ tried that it failed). Since
capitalism guarantees recession it also
promises us more pointless wars and more
needless death. These needless deaths
are inherent in imperialism, capitalism's
highest stage.
Arab states are gambling that they can
max out oil profits and justify it as resisting
U$ imperialism. European imperialists are
gambling that they can expand eastward
into the Caucasus and thus at least avoid
energy dependency and possibly also
come to denominate oil contracts in Euros
instead of dollars--which would drive the
value of the dollar down by as much as
40%.
Notes:
1. 15 April, 2004 AFP, http://
fr.news.yahoo.com/040415/202/
3qwhc.html
2. Iraqi `beaten to death' by US troops,
AFP April 14, 2004 http://news.com.au/
c o m m o n / s t o r y _ p a g e /
0,4057,9282015%255E1702,00.html
U$ atrocities in Iraq guarantee U$ defeat
A picture worth 10,000 words about gender
Female biology but gender oppressor: Lynndie England
MIM Notes 302 · May 15, 2004 · Page 6
Militarism is war-mongering or the
advocacy of war or actual carrying out
of war or its preparations.
While true pacifists condemn all
violence as equally repugnant, we
Maoists do not consider self-defense
or the violence of oppressed nations
against imperialism to be militarism.
Militarism is mostly caused by
imperialism at this time. Imperialism
is the highest stage of capitalism--
seen in countries like the United
$tates, England and France.
Under capitalism, capitalists often
profit from war or its preparations.
Yet, it is the proletariat that does the
dying in the wars. The proletariat
wants a system in which people do not
have self-interest on the side of war-
profiteering or war for imperialism.
Militarism is one of the most
important reasons to overthrow
capitalism. It even infects oppressed
nations and causes them to fight each
other.
It is important not to let capitalists
risk our lives in their ideas about war
and peace or the environment. They
have already had two world wars
admitted by themselves in the last 100
years and they are conducting a third
right now against the Third World.
Even a one percent annual chance of
nuclear war destruction caused by
capitalist aggressiveness or "greed" as
the people call it should not be tolerated
by the proletariat. After playing
Russian Roulette (in which the bullet
chamber is different each time and not
related at all to the one that came up in
previous spins) with 100 chambers and
one bullet, the chance of survival is
only 60.5% after 50 turns. In other
words, a seemingly small one percent
annual chance of world war means
eventual doom. After 100 years or turns
of Russian Roulette, the chances of
survival are only 36.6%. After 200
years, survival has only a 13.4%
chance.
What is militarism?
Amerikan torturers were acting at the
direction of the CIA and military
intelligence agents who ran part of the
prison. The abuse was intended to "loosen
up" the prisoners for interrogation.
Although perhaps the most graphic case
to come to light so far, this report should
be seen in the context of widespread civil
rights violations since the so-called "war
on terror" began. Already in October
2001 we reported, "the FBI has been
hinting it wants legal authority to use
torture tactics on `recalcitrant'
suspects."(7)
Not that there aren't sick individuals
involved, including Staff Sergeant Ivan L.
Frederick II, known as "Chip," who
previously worked for six years as a
prison guard at the Buckingham
Correctional Center in Dillwyn,
Virginia.(3) In the photos, Frederick is
shown leering at naked Iraqi prisoners
who are set in humiliating sexual poses.
Of course, "sick" needn't mean
"unusual." Any average Amerikan Joe
could have volunteered, taken "Chip's"
place, and done more or less the same.
In fact, the exception in this case was
the soldier who blew the whistle on the
beatings. That says something about the
consciousness of Amerikans as a group.
Witnesses at an Army hearing also
testified that Frederick repeatedly beat
prisoners under his command. Taking a
page from the playbook of Nazi
concentration camp officers during their
war-crimes trials, Frederick's uncle
William Lawson told the Associate Press,
"They're trying to portray him as a
monster ... He's just the guy they put in
charge of the prison."(3)
For Frederick's defense, his lawyers
have released letters he previously sent
to his family, telling them that military
intelligence and the CIA were behind the
torture acts he was performing.(2) The
letters are arguably a self-serving attempt
to create a paper trail that could be used
to pass blame up the chain of command.
While we find his tale credible, that does
not exonerate him. Others who joined the
Amerikan military (perhaps for naïve
reasons like tuition money or "for a
challenge") have refused to serve once
they come to realize their role as
oppressors.(8)
Frederick supposedly wrote: "I
questioned some of the things that I saw
... such things as leaving inmates in their
cell with no clothes or in female
underpants, handcuffing them to the door
of their cell--and the answer I got was,
`This is how military intelligence (MI)
wants it done.' ... . MI has also instructed
us to place a prisoner in an isolation cell
with little or no clothes, no toilet or running
water, no ventilation or window, for as
much as three days. ... [The military-
intelligence officers] encouraged and told
us, `Great job,' they were now getting
positive results and information."(2)
In his letters, home, he also described
AMERIKAN TORTURE OF IRAQIS EXPOSED
a man beaten to death and smuggled out
of the prison without ever being registered
in the prison's records: "They [CIA or its
contractors] stressed him out so bad that
the man passed away. They put his body
in a body bag and packed him in ice for
approximately twenty-four hours in the
shower. ... The next day the medics came
and put his body on a stretcher, placed a
fake IV in his arm and took him
away."(2)
The Abu Ghraib prison was a notorious
site of torture under the formerly-U$-
backed dictator Saddam Hussein. The
Amerikans put the prison back into
operation, detaining thousands of Iraqis
with no due-process rights. In some cases
prisoners were not even registered in
official logs.(2)
The prison was ostensibly run by
Brigadier Gen. Janis Karpinski, the
highest-ranking Amerikan womyn Iraq.
She's now claiming that military
intelligence officers were in charge, and
she didn't even know what was happening
in the prison.(4) She had no trouble
claiming credit for the prison, though, in
an interview she gave to the St.
Petersburg Times last December, when
she said that her prisoners found that
"living conditions now [in Abu Ghraib] are
better in prison than at home. At one point
we were concerned that they wouldn't
want to leave."(2)
That interview was right around the
time Karpinski was interviewed on 60
Minutes, in which she insisted prison
conditions were better at Abu Ghraib now
than they were under the Iraqis. She
claimed that no one was held in the prison
without charges and that prisoners were
allowed visits from family members and
their lawyers. When given contradictory
details on an individual case, however, she
admitted that some prisoners were denied
all visitors and there were not formal
charges against everyone, but, she said,
"there's nobody being held for no reason,"
referring to suspects who may have
committed "crimes against the coalition,"
whatever that means.(5)
Some Amerikan politicians and the
media were up in arms about the torture
reports -- because they hurt the
Amerikan image, and the battle for the
"hearts and minds" of the Iraqis.
Democratic Senator Joseph Biden,
expressing this outrage, "This is the single
most significant undermining act that's
occurred in a decade in that region of the
world in terms of our standing."(6) Boo
hoo -- poor Amerikan image. Before this,
it was going so well!
MIM is quite willing to pass blame up
the chain of command, from Frederick
and Karpinski up to the CIA and beyond.
We'll pass it all the way up to the
imperialist system, which is ultimately the
driving force behind Amerika's latest grab
in the Middle East. We didn't need proof
of Amerikans reopening the "torture
chambers" that Bush and so many others
decried in the build-up to the invasion to
know that this is another war of
aggression waged by U$ imperialists in
their continued quest to bring the labor,
land and resources of the world under
their control. That doesn't exonerate the
people with blood literally on their hands
in this case (or others, like in the Virginia
prisons), but it's what we need to
understand if we are to successfully
combat this system.
Notes:
1. NYTimes 27 Feb. 2003, p. A 10.
2. New Yorker 10 May 2004; posted 5
May 2004 on newyorker.com.
3. Associated Press 29 April 2004.
4. NYTimes 2 May 2004, p. A1.
5. 60 Minutes, 4 Dec. 2003 (http://
www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/12/04/
60minutes/main586841.shtml).
6. Associate Press 2 May 2004.
7. MIM Notes 246. See also: http://
www.commondreams.org/headlines01/
1022-01.htm.
8. E.g. "AWOL youth challenges
Amerikan military" in MIM Notes 280
and " Iraq war conscientious objector
sentenced to prison" in MIM Notes 288.
Continued from page 1...
This Iraqi men was killed during interrogation, then smuggled out of the prison
disguised as a medical patient, according to the Taguba report.
MIM Notes 302 · May 15, 2004 · Page 7
unconsciously against exploitation and
oppression.
Afraid that the public and youth in
particular will wake up and oppose the
war, the Bush administration has thrown
out a new bone of hope. After elections
in 2005, they muse, Iraqis will simmer
down and U$ troops can scale back
somewhat. MIM counsels the youth to
ignore the illusions spread by Democrats
about the UN and the Republicans about
elections. The time to oppose this war is
now.
Donald Rumsfeld's analysis of the
Vietnam War has offended many
Vietnam veterans. According to
Rumsfeld, draftees "added no value, no
advantage, really, to the United States
armed services over any sustained period
of time, because (of) the churning that
took place. It took (an) enormous amount
of effort in terms of training - and then
they were gone."(3) This despite the
deaths of 20,000 draftees.
Addressing these criticisms is Senator
Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, who is also
the Republican Senator most critical of
Imperialists spell relief: D-R-A-F-T
Rumsfeld over the Iraqi torture matter.
According to Hagel, the United $tates
should fight a protracted war against the
world and draft everyone in their late
teenage years for two years, perhaps with
one year for training as some suggest:
"this is a generational--probably 25-year
--war."(2)
To be sure, Rumsfeld's position is
popular among Republicans, as it is
merely an extreme statement of
Reagan's position. It won't be effortless
for the Bush administration to turn to the
draft, but we can expect that loving
sympathy for a senile ex-president will
not prevent them from forwarding their
sinister plans for world domination through
a massive draft.
There is no doubt that the prison
debacle in Iraq has strengthened Senator
Hagel's hand and thus sped up the
possibility of a draft: "`What is our policy?
What are we doing? What is the possibility
of us winning? That's all still in question,'
said Hagel, a member of the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee."(4)
Republicans and military media are
starting to get in on the act of criticizing
Rumsfeld. That's not to mention the unity
of the Democrats and New York Times
in calling for Rumsfeld to step down.
There is even a leak from the Bush
administration that Rumsfeld is not a
personal friend of Bush who he will keep
at any campaign cost.(4) All this means
that Rumsfeld will be politically weaker
and the chances for a draft increased just
by that.
76% of Amerikans polled in October
2001 favored the draft to get tough in the
"war on terrorism." Only 18% opposed.
Now 52% of registered voters oppose the
draft, which is why MIM said in its MIM
Notes 301 article that both Bush and
Kerry will sidestep the draft this year, with
ample leeway through the reshuffling of
1.4 million troops that Rumsfeld is talking
about. The fact that support for the draft
is now down to 41% proves that it is
important to link the draft to Iraq. On the
other hand, it also shows that the rulers
may adjust tactics or come up with
another war to whip up U$ public opinion.
The question of the draft is political--
whether one believes that the rulers of
the United $tates will settle down at the
current level of its military aspirations.
Even if U$ imperialism stands still, the
oppressed nations learn to fight better
each year, so we see the draft coming.
Notes:
1. Pacifica News, March 30, 2004; see
also, http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/
2004/05/05/iraq/main615669.shtml on the
change to 135,000
2. http://www.usatoday.com/news/
washington/2004-04-22-rumsfeld-
draft_x.htm
3. http://www.newsday.com/news/
o p i n i o n / n y -
vppag203764923apr20,0,2339687.story?coll=ny-
viewpoints-headlines
4. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/
2004/05/09/iraq/main616398.shtml
5. Namely, not having enough troops to
fight all the battles they are currently
engaged in. See MIM Notes 290, 1 Nov
2003.
by mim3@mim.org
On April 12, the campaign to elect
George W. Bush president ran ads on
network television in New Hampshire
pointing out that opponent Senator Kerry
voted to raise taxes on gasoline in the past.
A number of papers reported that Bush
ran the same ad in 19 states. The ad
showed quaint footage of someone
pushing a car without gasoline.
This is very significant. Bush is
obviously worried that the labor
aristocracy is going to blame him for the
obvious rise in price of gasoline at the
pump, now setting records (in nominal
terms, not inflation-adjusted prices). The
public will not be able to help wondering
if the price rise is connected to Iraq or
angering the other Arab countries.
Bush's solution consistent, with his
ideology, is to point to how his opponent
supported raising gasoline taxes--even
though the price rise we see now is not
connected to taxes.
Meanwhile, astonishing figures show
that fully one in twenty Amerikkkans
mention gasoline prices as the number
one issue facing Amerika today. That is
what they offered in an open-ended
question, when they could pick anything
they wanted. Others picked "war,"
"terrorism" and the "economy."(1)
Another poll by CNN/USA Today/
Gallup "finds nearly 7 in 10 Americans
saying the cost of gasoline represents a
crisis or major problem for the United
States."(2) That poll shows that gasoline
is the biggest single issue in 2004 for
Amerikans and one of the biggest overall
in the last 10 years.
Thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of
Amerikans had died and were in the
process of dying when the bourgeoisie
conducted the polls, and still gas prices
were the top concern out of all issues for
five percent of the public. We know that
presidential campaigns do not spend their
campaign money on television advertising
unless they have tested the ad and believe
it to work to change the minds of
significant numbers of voters. It says a
lot about Amerikans at this time that
gasoline is such a big issue.
Here's the ad's message to the voters:
support the Iraq War or else you may end
up pushing your car. This does succeed
with rural voters who are going to have
to decide if they can get their gas any
other way. Arkansas for instance, "uses
more gasoline per capita than all but one
or two other states. That's because of
the farm-to-market culture and the
absence of mass transit in the population
centers where people drive to work one
human being per every SUV."(3)
MIM is one of the few parties calling
itself communist in Amerika willing to take
on the pickup-and-SUV driving crowd of
the rural areas. It is not a good idea for
the communists and anti-war movement
to oink with the Amerikans about gasoline
prices. It's an example of how the
economic demands of the petty-
bourgeoisie allied with imperialism are a
dead-end. Not all popular economic
demands are good ideas. Even when we
offer solar energy or whatever
alternatives, we should not complain about
gasoline prices and stir up people already
in an impossible bind.
Too racist to drive small cars they
believe are from Japan and too practical
to want cars that break down (like
Amerikan ones), the rural labor
aristocracy chose wholesale to buy ever-
bigger vehicles that Amerikkkan
manufacturers dominate.
"In an unprecedented blitz [six months
after 911] the auto industry set out to
terrify rural America, claiming that if fuel-
efficiency standards were increased,
SUVs and pick-ups would vanish from
their production lines. Enough voters were
panicked to produce the requisite `flood'
of telephone calls to senators from rural
states."(4) It's just another example of
how capitalist advertising found a ready-
made audience in Amerikkka.
We find nothing admirable in the labor
aristocracy's driving ridiculous vehicles
while sending their children to die in Iraq.
None of these SUV drivers can say for
sure that the imperialists would have
succeeded in justifying the war without
the rural racist lifestyle dependent on
gasoline.
Notes:
1. http://www.boston.com/news/nation/
washington/artic les/2004/04/14/
concerns_over_war_rise_poll_says/
2. http://www.gallup.com/content/
?ci=11257
3. http://www.arkansasnews.com/
archive/2004/04/04/JohnBrummett/
170847.html
4. http://www.tompaine.com/
feature2.cfm/ID/5258/view/print
Labor aristocracy sends children to die for the SUV
Continued from page 1...
From the
collection of
posters at
www.whitehouse.org
MIM Notes 302 · May 15, 2004 · Page 8
ACTIVISTS FEAR COURT-
SANCTIONED FASCISM
By MC32 and MC206
The U$ Supreme Court recently heard
three major cases related to the "war on
terror".
The first oral argument, heard on April
20, 2004, was the case of Rasul v. Bush,
brought on behalf of 16 detainees at
Guantanamo Bay. The issue in this case
was whether so-called "enemy
combatants" are entitled to any due
process in either a U$ civil court or a
military tribunal. The plaintiffs are from
Britain, Australia, and Kuwait. The Bush
administration--assuming what has to be
proven under the Amerikan "innocent-
until-proven-guilty" legal system--argued
that these detainees have no due process
rights because they were waging war
against the United $tates and were not
following the rules of the Geneva
Convention and international law.
The other two cases, Hamdi v.
Rumsfeld and Rumsfeld v. Padilla, were
heard on April 28, 2004. Yaser Hamdi and
Jose Padilla are both citizens of the United
$tates. The issue in these cases is
whether the president has unchecked
executive power to detain U$ citizens as
"enemy combatants" with no access to
lawyers or the courts. Jose Padilla got a
favorable ruling from the 2nd Circuit
federal court, which the government then
appealed to the Supreme Court.
The ACLU, along with many other civil
liberties organizations, filed "friend of the
court" briefs in all three cases. While
MIM has some fundamental
disagreements with the ACLU on matters
of Amerikan "democracy," we applaud
its efforts to hold Bush and his cronies
responsible for the massive assaults on
civil liberties since September 11, 2001.
Guantanamo case
Formally, the Guantanamo case may
turn on the issue of jurisdiction.
Substantively, the case is about whether
Amerikan "liberty and justice" really is
"for all," or just whomever the president
thinks deserves it.
Although Guantanamo Bay is
technically within Cuban borders, it is
leased to the United $tates. The lawyers
for the detainees argued that this lease
effectively means that the prisoners--
held there under Amerikan authority--
should be given the benefit of Amerikan
due process. The Bush lawyers argued
that the United $tates is at war, and
granting the Guantanamo detainees rights
to prove their innocence then every
"enemy" would want that right.
The "friends of the court" brief in this
case pointed out that the detainees claim
that they "never engaged in hostilities
against America."(1) "They say they are
innocents caught up in the fog of war,
and they have now been imprisoned for
more than a year and a half. Yet
according to the Court of Appeals, [for
the D.C. Circuit] no court has jurisdiction
to hear their claims. ... According to the
Court of Appeals, the principle is: the
Executive can do what it wishes to aliens
abroad--even innocent aliens--because
no law protects them and no court may
hear their pleas."(1) The brief correctly
goes on to emphatically reject this
"stunning proposition."
The brief notes that "in addition to the
Petitioners' claims of non-combatancy, it
is clear that some detainees were
apprehended far from battlefields
[contrary to government claims]. For
instance, Guantanamo holds six Bosnians
and Algerians who were arrested by
Bosnian police in Bosnia and then handed
over to U.S. troops at the request of the
United States."(1)
Paul W. Butler, special assistant to
Donald Rumsfeld, spoke to the Boston
Globe about the detainees at Guantanamo,
and acknowledged that "[m]ost of the 595
suspected terrorists detained by the
United States at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba,
will be held indefinitely, even though there
is not yet enough evidence to charge them
with crimes..."(2) Unless the U$
Supreme court intervenes in its decision
in the Rasul case, the Bush administration
plans to continue to hold these prisoners
as they have been for more than two
years. Only two of the 595 prisoners have
been actually charged with crimes to
date.(2)
Posters in Arabic with sayings like,
"Daddy, please tell them what you know
and come home" adorn the interrogation
stations at Guantanamo. The government
rates the detainees according to
intelligence value, threat, and potential for
prosecution.(2) The government
continues to try to "gather intelligence"
(i.e. use physical and psychological torture
to get any information) about "terrorist"
activities, and then decides what to do
with these prisoners. The ones who have
been milked of all useful information, or
deemed to be less dangerous, may be sent
back to their countries of origin. But the
U$ government wants assurance from
these other governments that the
Guantanamo prisoners will not then be
released in their home countries. The U$
either tries to insist that the prisoners be
detained in those countries, or at least tried
there.(2) The irony is that the closer the
legal system in those countries is to the
Amerikan system (including Miranda-type
rights, rules about evidence gathering, due
process, etc.), the less likely it is that those
prisoners will be prosecutable with the
information gathered at Guantanamo.
Padilla and Hamdi
The Amerikan government has held
Jose Padilla for more than two years and
has yet to charge him with a crime! He
was arrested in Chicago, held in the
custody of civilian authorities, and then
transferred to military detention in June
2002. He is currently held in near isolation
in a military brig in South Carolina.(3) The
government has publicly accused Padilla
of planning to detonate a radioactive "dirty
bomb" in the United $tates but has not
formally charged him. Until shortly before
the argument at the Supreme Court, he
never even met with his lawyers. The U$
monitored and tape-recorded that
meeting, leaving the attorneys no choice
but to give their client a lesson on the laws
at issue, while avoiding all discussion of
any facts or evidence in Padilla's favor.
Yaser Hamdi was arrested in the
weeks after 9/11, and the government
says he was fighting with the Taliban
against Amerikan forces in Afghanistan.
He was born in Louisiana and is a U$
citizen. Hamdi also did not have access
to an attorney until shortly before his case
went to the Supreme Court. Shortly after
Hamdi was arrested his father filed a
petition for writ of habeas corpus, asking
that Hamdi be allowed to appear before
a tribunal to rebut the evidence against
him. The district court that received the
petition did not grant the writ but did order
Hamdi to have access to counsel. The
government appealed that order, and the
Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit
(among the most reactionary of the
federal courts) said that the case had to
be sent back to the district court for it to
consider the "implications of allowing
Hamdi to meet with counsel..."(4)
In other words, a federal circuit court
was saying that a U$ citizen should not
even be allowed to see a lawyer, let alone
confront his accusers! Not that MIM
completely agrees with the solutions
Amerika's "founding fathers" came up
with, but at least they saw the problem
with this sort of thing. Perhaps the Court
of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit needs
to go back to school to learn how to read;
we suggest they start with the Sixth
Amendment to the U$ Constitution.
The more decadent, parasitic, and
exploitative Amerikan imperialism
becomes, the more it is forced to turn its
back on the anti-colonial and anti-
monarchical principles of the original
American revolutionaries. All fair-minded
people, and especially political activists,
should be very alarmed by the
government's latest moves to do away
with bourgeois democratic rights. In
practice, the Amerikan government can
now detain whomever it wants, call him
or her an "enemy combatant", and throw
away the key!
"If the government's position were
accepted," argued Padilla's lawyers, "it
would mean that for the foreseeable
future, any citizen, anywhere, at any time,
would be subject to indefinite military
detention on the unilateral order of the
president."(3)
A few of the Supreme Court justices
asked questions during the arguments of
all three cases that suggest they are
concerned about letting Bush continue to
have the power to hold so-called "enemy
combatants" for as long as he says
Amerika is "waging war on terror". As
the justices pointed out, no one has any
idea how long that will be, and the
government is asking to hold these
prisoners at Guantanamo and military
brigs in the United $tates indefinitely. The
Supreme Court is expected to issue rulings
in all three cases by June or July, and
MIM will continue to report new
developments.
If you are as outraged as MIM is about
the Amerikan government's assault on
civil liberties, get involved and join us in
our fight against the injustice system! Visit
our civil liberties agitation page on the web
(5) for news, flyers and petitions!
Notes:
1. ACLU, et al amicus brief in Rasul v. Bush, 03-
334, pp. 5, 7, 9, 23-24, at http://www.aclu.org/
court/court.cfm?ID=14741&c=261.
2. The Boston Globe, 25 April 2004, http://
www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/
articles/2004/04/25/
us_to_hold_detainees_at_guantanamo_indefinitely/
3.http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/
ap/20040428/ap_on_go_su_co/
scotus_enemy_combatants_7.
4. ACLU, et al amicus brief in Hamdi v.
Rumsfeld, 03-6696, at http://www.aclu.org/
news/NewsPrint.cfm?ID=15039&c=261.
5. (http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/agitation/
civlib/index.html.
Straight from the
horses' mouths
We couldn't make this shit up--
imperialist bigwigs' and mid-level
lackeys' own words indict them.
"`If you have no idea what's going to
happen to you, that's extremely stressful.
... But if the mission is to collect
intelligence and get information that is
beneficial to our side, then despair and
depression may be a good thing.'"
--John VanNatta, warden of a
maximum-security prison in Indiana,
serving at Guantanamo and
describing the prisoners' high rate of
suicide attempts there.(1) In case there
was any doubt that the incidents at Abu
Ghraib were not exceptions...
"The sessions are not videotaped or
tape recorded. ... The interrogations are
designed primarily to yield intelligence, not
evidence for a court. ... taping `causes
us legal problems.' Detainees might gain
access to tapes through court
proceedings. `Then, it becomes
exculpatory.'"
--U$ Army General Geoffrey D.
Miller, until recently the commander of
the detention operation at
Guantanamo.(1) Heaven forbid the
detainees use these "interviews" to
prove their innocence...
"`What I'm saying is that there is a
large percentage right now who are either
high threat or high intelligence value, that
right now there's no intention to try them
before a military commission. ... [W]e
have a responsibility, both to our forces
... and the rest of the world, to not let
those people back out.'
--Paul W. Butler, special assistant to
Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld.(2)
Notes
1. The Washington Post, 2 May 2004.
2. The Boston Globe, 25 April 2004.
Supreme Court hears "enemy combatant" and civil liberties cases
MIM Notes 302 · May 15, 2004 · Page 9
say some kind of sexual experience is the
most profound, emotion-stirring
experience. Still, whether this pleasure is
100% natural or if it is totally constructed
by for-profit pornography or something
else social, MIM asks, is it is good for
wimmin? Would we rather live in a society
in which pornography was not such an
overwhelming subjective experience for
many men?
What heroin does to people is also
"natural." It takes advantage of
something in humyns' biological wiring.
That does not mean it is necessary and
good. We can conquer heroin and we
should.
Just as "art for its own sake" is poison,
so too is "sex for its own sake" when
raised against the party and the
dictatorship of the proletariat. In the
communist future they may be able to
have both or maybe the very thought of
both will disappear, but right now and for
a foreseeable stage of time, the
subjectivism of art or sex for its own sake
is a weapon in the arsenal of the enemy.
We had a womyn quit the party's circles
solely on the basis of the line that
monogamy is second-best to asexuality.
She claimed to agree with every other
single line of the party, but wanted multiple
partners. She asked us to change the line.
The womyn recruiting her came back with
this sad news to the party and pointed
out, yeah, but if she would break with us
"just for that," she could not have been
serious about the rest. Indeed, that's how
we look at it: the stands on subjective
matters relative to the party often tell us
a lot about ourselves and our overall line.
Supposing that for this womyn, the most
profound subjective experience in life--
more profound than the subjective thrill
of everything else MIM stood for--was
having multiple sexual partners. Then we
might think that what MIM was doing to
her with this monogamy line was
"depressing." This is actually a very
important point. The truth may hurt and
be depressing. It does not mean we can
afford to do without the truth of
oppression and exploitation. We have
always said that if people do not find the
current reality depressing and hurtful, then
there is something wrong with them. They
need to be taken out of the "Matrix."
What is worse, of course, in theory the
party can make mistakes and worsen that
depression and hurt for some people. A
comrade wanting multiple sex partners
might think that having the line in her face
all the time would make her a hypocrite,
because she did not feel it emotionally.
Yet it's guaranteed that we are all
hypocrites, because the party can never
be 100% in line with people subjectively.
Another troublesome issue is what to
do with comrades when they fail in
practice in their lifestyles. We're not going
to get into all of it here, but merely
avoiding MIM, because one line or even
several would make someone a hypocrite
subjectively speaking is wrong. It would
Preparing for the all-round dictatorship of the proletariat
be like the smoking parent who gave his/
her kids cigarettes to avoid being a
hypocrite.
Since the 1980s, we've had multiple
comrades disappear out of
embarrassment over sex questions. We
even had one comrade disappear for
something no one was opposed to! In
most cases, MIM does not cast people
out of our circles for sexual practice out
of synch with our line. What happens is
people treat it like Christianity as if the
lifestyle itself were the goal and since they
failed the supposed goal, they should give
up politics they imagine. This is wrong
and we must fight to expunge Christian,
Jewish and Islamic thinking on this from
our circles by an active fight. And by the
way, our challenge stands to any
comrades who left in the midst of sexual
embarrassment to come back to party
circles. Just send us a letter or even join
our struggle anonymously as many do.
The struggle against gender oppression
does not advance by people giving up
politics. If the People's Wars have to use
bullets and bombs to feed, clothe and
shelter the people, we in the imperialist
countries can stand a little embarrassment
with each other over subjective trifles.
It could even be the case that what is
hurtful for one persyn is uplifting for
another because of how subjectivities are
constructed currently. That's why Mao
called it steering and they used that
"helmsman" image in China. A party can
never steer in such a way as not to
depress somebody. Individualists can try
to adjust everything in their private lives,
but scientific bodies including vanguard
parties have to take votes and go one way
or another. Trotsky and the Liberals try
to make it appear contrary, but it just isn't
true. It is better to make decisions in the
open through a vanguard party vote than
by individuals in private life or corporate
boardrooms.
It is well known that MIM is willing to
take "extreme" stands by U$ public
standards. We even appreciate some of
what Gandhi said that first people ignore
you; then they laugh at you; then they
imprison you and then they join you. Black
bourgeois Nelson Mandela even
experienced the last part of this where
the white rulers put him in prison and then
decided capitalism will survive if it has a
Black face leading it.
Countless opportunists have asked us
why we are willing to take such a public
opinion beating on our position that "all
sex is rape." Of course we know it is
unpopular. However, there are two kinds
of unpopularity in politics relevant to
MIM: 1) lost popularity because the road
to communism is difficult 2) popularity lost
because we surrendered our political
credibility. No matter what anyone might
say, the two reasons for surrendering
popularity are not the same.
Anybody with the "all sex is rape" line
is not going to be elected president of the
United $tates any time soon. Reflexive
and hardened reformists are going to
dismiss us on that account alone. The truth
is that it is much better to be an amorphous
character that serves various corporate
interests to win elections. For a Maoist
party, the question is different, because
we're not saying the solution to gender
oppression is for the masses to abstain
from sex. The masses can't abstain from
their jobs and end exploitation either.
We're saying that for party members, we
expect them to put aside their persynal
feelings about social behavior and dig to
their causes. Otherwise, they can't join
and have a vote on scientific matters. If
people think sex in society in general is
above the dictatorship of the proletariat,
because s/he thinks it's the most profound
and best subjective experience as is, then
we don't want them in our party. We can't
let anything get in the way of our mission
to end oppression and exploitation.
If an "illegal alien" migrant farm-
worker says he had a "nice day at work"
picking oranges or tomatoes, OK, that's
his subjectivity for the day. It does not
mean he was not super-exploited,
whether he thinks so or not. If someone
experiences pleasure in sex, it does not
mean there is no gender oppression
interconnected with that. MIM is
definitely going to lose some support for
saying that, but so be it. We are
communists and we only want people
voting in our party who are going to put
science of ending oppression above the
subjective experiences of all kinds. The
only proper way to oppose the party line
is with evidence for entire groups of
people, not by persynal experience alone.
If someone wants to provide evidence
that pornography improved the reading
comprehension, vocabulary and grammar
of both girls and boys exposed to
pornography in high school--such being
a fanciful assumption but raised to
illustrate a point of principle-- then the
party would have to consider that. The
fact that pornography has completely
taken over the last two generations of men
in the United $tates and that men like it is
not an argument against having no
pornography corporations under
socialism. That would be supporting the
subjectivism of patriarchy.
When it comes to the party pointing the
road to revolution, the task has to be
conceived differently. The "all sex is
rape" line lays it down hard and firmly,
and to be blunt, especially for men who
are hopping hot for sex, that there is
nothing, nothing at all that MIM holds
above analytical scrutiny. And when we
get done taking down the profit system,
it's going to be the same way: we're going
to be there looking at what it takes to get
done with battering, rape and even just
hurt feelings, because Marx said that
when the species takes over its destiny
people will know not even to fall in love
with the wrong persyn and thus avoid hurt
feelings. Granted, that's quite a while
down the line, but the point is that we
communists are relentless in nailing down
the underlying problems in society and
moving forward to a happy and
harmonious one.
VI. Friends
Another one of those subjective areas
is friends. Mao already addressed this in
"Combat Liberalism." Who in the United
$tates does not have high school
classmates as friends that did not later
go on to be police or serve in some country
killing people? No, the point is not that
100% of the cops and military personnel
we all have as neighbors in the U$A are
"bad." Nonetheless, when it comes time
for a communist party, we need to know
that politics goes above those old
classmates. The fact that we like our
friends can be another source of
reticence and paralysis on the behalf of
revolutionaries, because we are the
underdog and more often than not people
will not be able to take their ordinary
friends from apolitical circles and have
things work out OK for revolutionary
politics. So we have to be objective about
the sources of some feelings around the
U$A. As Sakai pointed out, it's virtually
impossible to be white in Amerika and
not know some police-affiliated neighbor.
Then when we consider the millions who
have gone through the armed services, a
picture adds up. People we knew as kids
are now active agents of the state. That's
not to say there is not revolutionary
struggle in the Army. There most
assuredly is. On the whole though,
veterans of an undefeated imperialist
military power are a negative political
influence--something that even the
bourgeois revolutionaries and veterans of
1776 recognized.
Continued from page 3...
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can also keep up
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the latest on the
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more. MIM's
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movement. Get
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www.etext.org/
Politics/MIM
MIM Notes 302 · May 15, 2004 · Page 10
MIM on
Prisons & Prisoners
MIM seeks to build public opinion
against Amerika's criminal injustice sys-
tem, and to eventually replace the bour-
geois injustice system with proletarian jus-
tice. The bourgeois injustice system im-
prisons and executes a disproportionately
large and growing number of oppressed
people while letting the biggest mass mur-
derers -- the imperialists and their lack-
eys -- roam free. Imperialism is not op-
posed to murder or theft, it only insists that
these crimes be committed in the interests
of the bourgeoisie.
"All U.S. citizens are criminals--
accomplices and accessories to the crimes
of U.$. oppression globally until the day
U.$. imperialism is overcome. All U.S.
citizens should start from the point of view
that they are reforming criminals."
MIM does not advocate that all
prisoners go free today; we have a
more effective program for fighting
crime as was demonstrated in China
prior to the restoration of capitalism
there in 1976. We say that all prisoners
are political prisoners because under
the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, all
imprisonment is substantively
political. It is our responsibility to
exert revolutionary leadership and
conduct political agitation and
organization among prisoners --
whose material conditions make them
an overwhelmingly revolutionary
group. Some prisoners should and will
work on self-criticism under a future
dictatorship of the proletariat in those
cases in which prisoners really did do
something wrong by proletarian
standards.
Under Lock & Key
News from Prisons & Prisoners
Join the fight against
the injustice system
While we fight to end the criminal
injustice system MIM engages in
reformist battles to improve the lives
of prisoners. Below are some of the
campaigns we are currently waging,
and ways people behind the bars and
on the outside can get involved. More
info can be found on our prison web
site: http://www.etext.org/Politics/
MIM/agitation/prisons
Stop Censorship in Prison: Prisons
frequently censor books, newspapers
and magazines coming from MIM's
books for prisoners program. We need
help from lawyers, paralegals and
jailhouse lawyers to fight this
censorship.
Books for Prisoners: This program
focuses on political education of
prisoners. Send donations of books and
money for our Books for Prisoners
program.
End the Three Strikes laws: This
campaign is actively fighting the
repressive California laws, but similar
laws exist in other states. Write to us
to request a petition to collect
signatures. Send articles and
information on three strike laws.
Shut Down the Control Units: Across
the country there are a growing number
of prison control units. These are
permanently designated prisons or cells
in prisons that lock prisoners up in
solitary or small group confinement for
22 or more hours a day with no
congregate dining, exercise or other
services, and virtually no programs for
prisoners. Prisoners are placed in
control units for extended periods of
time. These units cause both mental and
physical problems for prisoners.
Write to us to request a petition to
collect signatures. Get your
organization to sign the statement
demanding control units be shut down.
Send us information about where there
are control units in your state. Include
the names of the prisons as well as the
number of control unit beds/cells in
each prison if that is known. Send us
anti-control unit artwork.
MIM's Re-Lease on Life Program:
This program provides support for our
comrades who have been recently
released from the prison system, to help
them meet their basic needs and also
continue with their revolutionary
organizing on the outside. We need
funds, housing, and job resources. We
also need prisoner's input on the
following survey questions:
1. What are the biggest challenges
you face being released from prison?
2. How can these problems be
addressed?
3. What are the important elements
of a successful release program?
California Prisoncrat
Governor Schwarzenegger campaigned on
the platform of cleaning up how politics are
conducted in California. Due to a budget
deficit of $14 billion, no state agency will be
able to escape across-the-board cut-backs.
However, corrections has an unholy
advantage over all other segments of state
government.
The California Department of Corrections
(CDC) is an unmanageable conglomerate of
32 state prisons, with a $5.3 billion budget.
The Schwarzenegger administration has
offered a number of cost-cutting ideas--from
releasing inmates early, revamping the parole
system, and closing down prisons.
There are two opposing schools-of-
thought on the issue of drugs, crime, and
public safety in California. On one side are
the bipartisan proponents of the drug war
and prison industrialism. They are dogmatic
in their support for all manners of unforgiving
criminal justice precepts, no matter how ill-
conceived or ineffective. These advocates of
heavy-handed punishments are well-funded
and lead by the California Correctional Peace
Officers Association (CCPOA). They are
brilliant in their tactics by investing in
candidates on both sides of the political
spectrum. With their annual $20 million war
chest, they have no equal.
On the other side of the debate are the anti-
drug war, pro-human rights opponents of the
American prison phenomenon--i.e., those of
us locked-up, our loved ones, and a very small
number of dedicated prisoner-advocates. Our
allies are generally volunteer activists who
operate on shoestring budgets.
On its face, the CCPOA is simply a union
looking out for the interests of their
constituents. However, their successes have
created a power-vacuum. Corrections is an
industry lavishly rewarded for a generation
of miserable recidivism rates, scandals, and
controversies. They have been allowed to
expand and grow despite their failures.
The contemporary criminal justice ideology
of punishment over rehabilitation relieves
prison administrators from the burden of being
required to manage in a results-oriented
atmosphere. This has allowed the prison
system to concentrate its resources on their
guards, as opposed to the inmates.
Points to consider:
- From 1984 to 1994, twenty-one state
prisons were built and only one state
university.
- College fees are raised every year and
education budgets for students K-12 always
get hit hard.
- Prison guards are paid better than all state
educators, including tenured CSU professors.
- Prison vocational classes were virtually
eliminated when the CDC had to lay- off
workers. It was determined that correctional
educators--CDC employees who actually
provide a meaningful service--not guards,
were expendable.
- The CCPOA negotiated a 34 percent pay
raise in 2002 when the state was in the middle
of a fiscal crisis.
As far as corrections go, the CDC is too
large and the union representing the 29,000
prison guards too powerful. A number of
things have to happen if the CDC is ever to
assume their place alongside, not above,
other state agencies.
1. All nonviolent drug offenders, including
second and third strikers, need to be placed
in community-based treatment facilities.
Incarcerating drug offenders in $30,000 a year
prison beds for lengthy and life sentences
needs to come to an end.
2. Change the state's recidivist sentencing
schemes so that lengthy and life sentences
are only given to violent criminals and sexual
predators.
3. Permanently close-down a number of
prisons in response to these moves. Begin
with the older, dilapidated prisons--but don't
stop there. The sweetheart deals the CCPOA
received for generous campaign contributions
need to be identified and undone. These are
inexcusable quid pro quos.
Case in point, CDC overtime: Recalled
Governor Gray Davis was unconditionally
indebted to the CCPOA for million in
campaign contributions. In addition to giving
the guards a $1 billion pay raise in 2002, he
restricted a warden's power to discipline
guards who abuse the process of calling in
sick. The CDC was already a state agency
depending heavily on overtime. Davis allowed
the CDC to become even more so dependent
on overtime by knowingly providing rank-
and-file guards the power to write their own
rules. Because the union runs corrections,
not upper echelon administrators, chronic
overtime abuses result in the department
going over budget by half a billion dollars a
year. This is how a prison guard is able to
earn a salary of over $100,000.
While the Schwarzenegger administration
talks about inmate population cuts and prison
closures, California is the recipient of a
skewed state government. And the guard's
power-base is still unmatched. A whole
generation of CCPOA-owned lawmakers are
still in Sacramento waiting to do the guard's
bidding.
It is not my position that corrections is the
only problem plaguing our society. Nor do I
attempt to diminish society's justifiable
concern with public safety. But the
correctional special interests have been a
corrupting influence for so long something
drastic needs to be done. As an inmate I've
lived under the reign of the CCPOA for over
half a decade as a nonviolent three strikes
drug offender. I see firsthand what society
cannot. I see an army of overpaid correctional
officers absolutely bloated on government
funds. They own this state and think it's
funny. They need to be placed on half rations,
not us.
California inmates as a demographic have
nothing else to give. We are forced to spend
the rest of our lives in these Gulags of pillaged
humanity. The guards have taken in all. It is
through mismanagement and greed that a $5.3
billion state agency looks to the inmate
population when pressured by the legislature
to trim costs. They extort us--we are the
economic hostages. All the money we receive
from our loved ones and the collect-only
telephone calls we place are both heavily
taxed. Currently, 33 percent is deducted from
all incoming moneys--which will increase to
an astounding 55 percent in mid-2004. All of
it under the guise of restitution. The telephone
service providers have been awarded the
lucrative California prison contract without
even having to place a bid--with the CDC
receiving tens of millions in kickbacks. We
receive the worst deal imaginable due to this
"no-bid" arrangement.
These are merely a few examples. Welcome
to the world of the California state prisoner
where cumulative injustices are inflicted on
the entire population who simply have no
voice, no rights, no representation.
As state prisoners in the California prison
system, we are mere fodder. We are the king's
peasants and treated accordingly. Taxation
without representation has a renewed
meaning for 160,000 of us and our loved ones.
Oppression comes to mind.
This is not just about budget problems,
pork barrel politics, and spending cuts--this
is about people. This is about society. As a
member of a voiceless population, I speak for
all when I say: "Enough is enough. We have
MIM Notes 302 · May 15, 2004 · Page 11
nothing more to give. You've taken it all. Give
some of it back and leave us alone." When
looking for some other miserable demographic
to demonize--the prisoncrat should simply
look in the mirror.
-A California Prisoner, January 2004
Short term USW goals
Greetings Comrades,
Here are a few suggestions for short term
goals:
1. In order to double MIM subscribers in
prisons, get other prison publications to run
free ads for MIM's Books for Prisoners
programs. We can establish a reciprocal
relationship with these other prison
publications, as well as other free book
programs (Lucy Parsons Center Bookstore,
Books Through Bars, Books to Prisoners,
Open Door Books, etc.), by offering to run
free ads for them in our publications. Also we
may be able to establish like relationships
with companies that offer services to prisoners
selling audio tapes, electronics, clothes, etc.
specifically geared towards prison
populations. These companies are based in
different states and serve different prisoners
nationwide, which would be good for MIM.
2. The idea of producing pamphlets is very
good. I believe that any USW leader at any
facility should have the responsibility of
soliciting articles for these pamphlets on
specific(relevant) topics. Creating a title and
table of contents page, as well as editing said
articles. This solicitation of articles (and also
artwork) can be an aspect of specific USW
study groups, or any mandatory reading that
the USW leader may establish for supporters.
This will give supporters more of an active
role. Leaders may even be able to use the
submission of articles to be included in
pamphlets as a reward each month for those
supporters who show most devotion, thus
creating an incentive. Competition of this
caliber could prove beneficial.
3. I believe that solidifying USW leaders in
each state is a process that should move
forward with a degree of caution. Many of
these leaders may very well have ulterior
motives, and be using MIM (USW) as a
means of garnering support for gangs, or non-
revolutionary organizations. I believe that
MIM should put more emphasis on
establishing some sort of criteria in deciding
its USW leaders and not just allot those
positions to anyone who wants one.
4. I believe that a secure line of
communication must be established between
USW leaders in each prison in specific states.
Due to security issues, it's nearly impossible
for USW leaders to share ideas (even if they
know each others identity). And this line of
communication is also in regards to USW
leaders and MIM contacts, as well as the
people at RAIL that you (MIM) urge them to
work with. How can they be worked with when
they're not even known to USW leaders? By
establishing this secure line of
communication, it will allow USW to be more
well organized and its coordinated works with
RAIL to be more stable.
5. In identifying ways that like
organizations, or individuals on the outside
can support our battles, we have to first
establish ways to be notified (in real time) as
to what those battles are, specifically. This
goes to establishing a real line of
communication between USW leaders
themselves, and USW leaders and MIM and
RAIL- allowing everyone to be on the same
page... But communication is important so that
we'll all know what battles are being fought
at a particular time, and exactly what kind of
support is needed.
Constant in the Struggle,
- A New York Prisoner, March 2004
MIM responds: The points on
communication and leadership both bring up
questions of organization and security. The
fact is that comrades behind bars generally
have to rely on U.$. mail to communicate with
those on the outside. Without any direct
contact there is always a limit to the amount
of trust on either end. This is unavoidable. If
a comrade steps up as a leader in a prison
where there is no USW leadership, they
automatically become the leadership. This is
just how things develop. Being a leader does
not grant anyone information that will make
them a danger to our organizing.
There is always a threat of MIM/USW being
misrepresented, but the best way to combat
that is through our newspaper and other
constant communication with the masses as
to what we are about. The same thing can
happen on the streets where anyone could
pick up a stack of MIM Notes and claim to
represent the party. But if they are spreading
disinformation, a look at our paper or webpage
will demonstrate this to the masses. So our
best assurance of preventing misleadership
is build our presence among the masses by
spreading the paper and linking up leaders
who do represent us.
The question of a more secure/faster
communication also opens us up to
disinformation campaigns by the pigs. While
we certainly encourage USW leaders to
communicate however they best can, the best
way to do so is through MIM and by writing
for Under Lock and Key. That way we can be
accountable for where the information is
coming from.
With the pamphlets that prisoners are
creating, we can do dedicated issues of
Under Lock and Key in MIM Notes rather
than printing these up separately, when
appropriate.
MIM looks to get our programs listed in
resource directories wherever we can. Most
organizations that provide programs for
prisoners do not have publications, so there
is no opportunity for ad exchanges. And there
are already organizations out there doing a
good job compiling comprehensive resource
lists for prisoners. Rather than duplicating
this work we refer our comrades to directories
like the one put out by the Prison Activist
Resource Center.
Corcoran cuts
education and visits
Let me share or expose a little bite about
Corcoran state prison on this four yard 180.
This might help United Struggle from Within
(USW). About one year ago they took the
education and trades classes. A education
channel is on television three hours a day
but what about those inmates without a TV?
They took one and a half days of our visits
because they put level two prisoners in the
gym on the same yard as us, and we can't
come in contact with those inmates. So we
have to suffer because these penitentiaries
are over crowded. That's just a few of many
things wrong around here in Corcoran.
- a California prisoner, March 2004
California segregates
activists
I have received your recent letter. The
letters are being funneled through mail room
to the records department and then to my
counselor Dixon who most likely over reads.
Due to them getting suspicious of my political
activism. My mail is not being stopped but
they are reading it. I am currently in the
process of attempting to challenge them in
their policy relating mail.
Currently I am in the administrative
segregation in Correctional Training Facility.
I have been passing out information in hopes
to rally prisoners to get involved. I have
reached another person and am talking with
others, exchanging essays and thoughts. Sine
I am kept off the mainlines I do not know if
there are other MIM activists in this prison. I
am kept off the main line because they have
set me up and labeled me a "gang" associate.
The administration has been corrupted and
abuses authority since the 50s, working hand
in hand with fascist groups and other groups
of inmates to oppress other inmates and make
money out of the deal. Since I started doing
my own thing and educating myself the
administration has labeled me a threat to the
institution and keeps me segregated from
other inmates.
Social change happened within the penal
institutions a long time ago. The
administration was no longer in control. So
they made laws and rules to punish anyone
who attempts to open the eyes of other
inmates. They have created a system that
racially profiles you. Automatically you are
being discriminated for your race and
punished. They call this "population control."
Then they have created a special set of
officers to monitor your activities. If you are
seen or believed to be working to undermine
the administration's efforts to drag the people
through the mud, then you are scooped off
the mainline and placed in SHUs for "security
reasons" to protect the interest of "penal
corrections."
The administration is attempting to win the
trust of the inmates by creating a committee
that the inmates vote for you and then you
can work with the administration to "attempt"
to come to terms with regards to "conditions
of confinement" and other "privileges and
incentives." But a lot of the inmates see
through their attempts to cloud inmates into
thinking they are in control of their time. A lot
of inmates have been scared for life and will
never put their trust in the penal
administration, they just literally raped, killed
and extorted from inmates.
The inmates who are made aware of this
and continue to do their own program are set
up and labeled members or associates of
gangs such as I have been. And they are kept
in segregation: it's just a tool that is utilized
by the administration to down play any
person who tries to spread truth and keep
them away from other inmates so that one
can not expose their true intentions.
-a California prisoner, November 2003
Designing failures:
rehabilitation in
prison
When I first reached prison, I didn't
understand why so many people come back
after being here so many years. Now that I've
been here a few years, I find that I know a
great deal about this system but have no
understanding as to why it's allowed to
function as it does. I've just recently come to
accept the bizarre idea that the prison system
is not a failure. That it's doing what it has
been fine tuned to do: create failures by
insuring that a large majority of those released
from prison will eventually return. The high
recidivism rate is not an indication of failure.
It's proof that the system is doing its job quite
well actually.
Just how bizarre is this idea, you ask? I
don't have all the answers but I've come to
see a few reasons why this type of prison
system would be desirable. It lowers the
unemployment rate. Consider that crime/
prisoners create jobs: police, lawyers, judges,
prosecutors, clerks, prison guards, prison
medical personnel, prison administration, etc.
Consider, also, that people in prison are not
counted when unemployment statistics are
collected. It creates a scapegoat class for the
rich people and politicians to focus blame
upon for the ills of society so that they can
maintain power and control. Consider that
poverty and racism, the lack of education
(academic and education-vocational) and
unemployment are the root cause of crime.
Yet we blame the criminal instead of the
conditions that created the crime/criminal. We
do little to correct either. The prison system
is a tool to control certain racial minorities in
our society, as well as the poor.
If this idea still seems bizarre, consider the
fact that millions of dollars are made from the
cheap labor of prisoners. Just think of what
would happen if the state really started to
rehabilitate prisoners instead of just
warehousing them? Obviously, they would
come out of prison looking for a job rather
than looking to pull a job and would be less
likely to return to prison. This would mean
that California would have to stop building
prisons and start closing them down. This
would mean finding another purpose for those
closed prisons. It seems to me that a lot of
people have a vested interest in seeing that
rehabilitation does not take place behind
prison walls.
Dostoevsky got it right when he said, "The
degree of civilization can be judged by
entering its prisons." Prisons have been
renamed and are now called "correctional
facilities" because of the rehabilitation which
is supposed to go on inside. Then when the
public looks at the high recidivism rate or
hears stories about parolees committing new
crimes, they are led to believe that
rehabilitation is a failure. That it isn't possible.
But the truth of the matter is that no valid
efforts are being made to bring about
rehabilitation. From what I've seen,
rehabilitation did not fail, it was not achieved
because the system isn't interested in
rehabilitating anyone. Most prison programs
look good on paper but have little or no
rehabilitation value. The only valid
rehabilitation program the prison system ever
had was the college program which
significantly lowered the recidivism rate. In
1992, this program was taken away from
prisoners. The saddest aspect of this whole
matter is that prisoners are not only receptive
to rehabilitation efforts and programs, but
they are anxious--even desperate--for them.
Instead of rehabilitation, they go through
dehumanization and when finally released
back into society, they are in worse shape
than when they first entered prison.
The system can judge its success by how
quickly the released return to prison. Its
failures are those that some how manage to
beat the odds to become law-abiding
productive members of society.
- A California Prisoner, April 2004
MIM Notes 302 · May 15, 2004 · Page 12
Notas Rojas
mayo 15, 2004, Nº 302 Fragmento del Periodico Oficial del Movimiento Internacionalista Maoista
Gratis
¿Que es el MIM?
El Movimiento Internacionalista Maoísta (MIM) es un partido revolucionario
comunista que ejerce el Marxismo-Leninismo-Maoísmo. El MIM es una organización
internacionalista que trabaja desde el punto de vista del proletariado del Tercer Mundo;
es por esto que sus miembros no son amerikanos sino ciudadanos del mundo.
El MIM lucha para acabar con la opresión de todos los grupos sobre cualquier otro,
naciones por naciones, clases por clases, y géneros por géneros. La revolución es una
realidad para los Estados Unidos mientras su ejército continúa extendiendose en su
esfuerzo por asegurar la hegemonía mundial.
El MIM difiere de otros partidos en tres puntos basicos: (1) El MIM sostiene que
después que el proletariado conquiste el poder estatal, existira aún el potencial para una
restauración de tipo capitalista, bajo la dirección de una burguesía nueva dentro del
mismo partido comunista. En el caso de la Unión Soviética, la burguesía se apoderó del
gobierno después de la muerte de Stalin, en 1953; y en China después de la muerte de
Mao y del derrocamiento de la llamada "banda de los cuatro' en 1976. (2) El MIM
sostiene que la Revolución Cultural en China es la fase ms avanzada a la que llegó el
comunismo en la historia. (3) El MIM afirma que la clase trabajadora blanca de los
EE.UU. es primordialmente, una élite trabajadora no revolucionaria en el presente. Es
por esto que no es el principal vehículo para avanzar el Maoísmo en este país.
El MIM acepta como miembro a cualquier individuo que esté de acuerdo con estos
tres puntos basicos, y que acepte al centralismo democrtico, el método de gobierno por
la mayoría en lo que se refiere a cuestiones de línea del partido. El MIM es un partido
clandestino que no publica los nombres de sus miembros para evitar la represión estatal
dirigida históricamente contra los movimientos revolucionarios comunistas, y anti-
imperialistas. Si Ud. desea una suscripción para cualquiera de nuestros periódicos o
libros teóricos, en español o en inglés, por favor mandar dinero en efectivo o un cheque
al nombre de MIM a esta dirección:
MIM · P.O. Box 29670 · Los Angeles CA 90029-0670
No nos sorprende que los presos paguen
desproporcionadamente cuando los
presupuestos estatales de muchos estados
en el país sufren grandísimas insuficiencias.
El MIM ha recibido muchas cartas de
presos en el estado de Tejas indicando que
este estado se ha empeñado viciosamente en
eliminar los servicios básicos de comida y
ayuda médica para poder ahorrar dinero. Un
activista que lucha contra el sistema carcelario
de Tejas nos informa que "muchas prisiones
sólo ofrecen dos comidas diarias mientras que
en otras cárceles se reduce el tamaño y el
contenido calórico de lo que consumen los
presos diariamente."
Un preso nos escribe: "Las cosas han
empeorado desde la última vez que les escribí.
Aquí en el TDCJ (Departamento de Justicia
Criminal de Tejas) se ha retenido la comida.
Al principio hemos oído varios rumores al
respecto, pero ahora los rumores se han hecho
realidad. El postre se ha retenido tres veces
por semana y ahora la cárcel produce su
propio almíbar. ¡Guácala! Además, ahora nos
dan el desayuno en una bolsita de papel. Pero
lo más diabólico que se ha ingeniado el TDCJ
es la violación de nuestros derechos
religiosos. Ahora por razones presupuestarias
no nos permiten mantener una dieta sin carne
de puerco. Los musulmanes y otros que no
comen carne de puerco no tienen la opción
de sustituir la carne de puerco por otro tipo
de comida (como frijoles, queso o pan). El
menú general se aplica a todos los presos. El
lema del TDCJ es: "Si no te gusta, no te lo
comas."
Un camarada de otra unidad nos cuenta
que "el comedor está muy sucio. Yo no trabajo
para el Departamento de Sanidad pero si ese
fuera el caso, calificaría muy bajo al comedor.
En la entrada del comedor hay charcos de
agua estancada. Las paredes están cubiertas
de insectos muertos. El agua gotea entre las
grietas de las paredes quebradas. No nos
dan los 20 minutos que tenemos garantizados
para comer y las bandejas y los tenedores de
plástico están bien sucios, con restos de
comida pegados desde hace dos o tres días.
Además, siempre se les acaba comida y no
hay hielo en el comedor..."
Mientras los presos pasan hambre y siguen
trabajando gratis por largas horas, los
guardianes siguen viviendo una buena vida.
Según el informe del activista, "el hambre
nunca llega al comedor de los guardianes.
Ahí nunca faltan sopas, ensaladas, huevos,
carne, condimentos, helado, tortas, pasteles
y una gran variedad de otros postres que
provienen gratis en cantidades ilimitadas para
ser distribuidos entre los 40 mil empleados
del TDCJ." Y como el comedor de guardianes
queda abierto las 24 horas todos los días del
año, "algunos de los guardianes van a comer
ahí en sus días libres para no tener que pagar
por su comida en algún restaurante o para no
tener que cocinar en casa."
Resulta que la dieta especial de los
guardianes es una violación de la ley estatal.
El activista nos cuenta que la "sección 13
dice que el TDCJ puede proveer comida a los
guardianes sólo después de que se hayan
satisfecho las necesidades de los presos."
Pero las necesidades de los presos nunca se
satisfacen porque a ellos nunca les toca la
variedad de comida que se les da a los
guardianes. Los guardias reciben lo mejor de
todo y a los presos les tocan restos y migajas.
La sección 13 también estipula que la comida
que reciben los presos debe ser la misma
comida que reciben todos los empleados. Los
directores de las prisiones siempre creen que
la ley no se les aplica a ellos y, por lo tanto,
pasan por alto dicha parte de la sección 13."
Nuestros camaradas de Tejas también nos
han dicho los servicios médicos han sido
retenidos a causa de los problemas
presupuestarios. "Han eliminado a los
trabajadores médicos y han despedido al
técnico del laboratorio. Pasará mucho tiempo
antes de que los presos tengan acceso a
pruebas de SIDA, hepatitis y otros análisis
de sangre. Yo sigo esperando una prueba de
sangre para saber si sufro de una úlcera o no.
Ya llevo tres semanas esperando y aún no me
Traducido por Células de Estudio para la
Liberación de Aztlán y América Latina.
Las unidades de máxima seguridad son
cárceles especiales dentro de una cárcel
diseñadas para impedir la organización de los
presos.
En California, el MIM y la LRAI están
llevando a cabo una lucha prolongada para
cerrar las unidades de máxima seguridad.
Éstas representan un ejemplo de las
condiciones más bárbaras que existen en el
sistema carcelario de EE.UU.
En nuestras presentaciones abordamos el
tema de dichas cárceles rindiéndoles a los
estudiantes testimonios de abusos y
privación sensorial que sufren los presos.
Muchos de los estudiantes reconocieron que
estas condiciones no tendrían ningún
beneficio social cuando los presos salieran
libres.
Muchos estudiantes también reconocieron
paralelos entre sus vidas y las acusaciones
en contra de "pandilleros" que se usan para
meter a gente en las unidades de máxima
seguridad. Un estudiante dijo que sólo
bastaba que tres personas vestidas del mismo
color se juntaran en una esquina para que la
policía los molestara. Muchos otros contaron
que la policía de la ciudad de Oakland siempre
usa violencia excesiva como, por ejemplo, el
apuntar el barril de una pistolas contra la
cabeza de un detenido.
Durante la manifestación subsiguiente, un
invitado retomó este tema mencionando las
leyes contra la vagancia y la holgazanería que
existen en la ciudad de Oakland. Dijo que
estas leyes equivalen a la reacción del estado
frente a la liberación de esclavos africanos
que dio como resultado una creación de una
ola superflua de fuerza laboral desperdiciada
en EE.UU. Una estudiante de la preparatoria
contó que en su escuela ella había sido
castigada de una manera injusta por discutir
temas políticos. Además mencionó el hecho
de que el año pasado el distrito escolar pidió
ayuda al servicio secreto para investigar el
caso de dos estudiantes que habían dicho
que George Bush estaba loco.
Tomando en cuenta las pláticas y las
manifestaciones en las que participamos,
podemos concluir con confianza que esta
semana valió la pena. Apoyamos a los
jóvenes de las naciones oprimidas en
California y respaldamos su demanda de que
el dinero que hoy se usa para mandarlos a la
cárcel se use para educarlos. Como dijimos
en julio en nuestro informe sobre el foro
educativo en Oakland: "El contenido
revolucionario de esta campaña proviene del
carácter de clase de los involucrados.
Pedimos que el dinero no se use para la
represión y que se invierta en las necesidades
básicas"(1).
En nuestro último informe también dijimos
que "el impacto principal de tal campaña sólo
será fuerte en conjunto con nuestros
esfuerzos para que el dinero no sólo se use
de otra forma sino para que también podamos
decidir cómo utilizarlo."
De las más de 200 personas que participaron
en la manifestación en el palacio municipal
de Oakland el día 19 de noviembre, casi todos
venían de dos pequeños colegios
independientes: La Academia de las Calles y
la Escuela para la Justicia Social. Estos
colegios existen dentro del sistema escolar
público pero su organización y currículos son
independientes, como si fueran colegios
"Charter" (colegios que reciben fondos
especiales (estatales) y operan bajo reglas
diferentes a las de los demás colegios del
distrito escolar). Aunque son parte del
sistema estos colegios, sin embargo, parecen
ser una fuente progresista y productiva entre
los estudiantes de Oakland. No sabemos
mucho sobre sus programas, pero los
estudiantes que asistieron a la conferencia y
en particular los que expresaron sus opiniones
desde el escenario, pasaron todo el día
hablando en contra de la violencia policial, el
sistema carcelario y hasta en contra de los
demás colegios del distrito de Oakland.
Los líderes estudiantiles de este
movimiento saben reconocer las relaciones
entre el sistema carcelario, el capitalismo y
cientos de años de opresión. Y casi todos
los estudiantes con los que hablamos
sostienen una opinión negativa sobre el
sistema carcelario. Pero cuando les
preguntamos cuál sería la solución al
problema de crímenes violentos, no supieron
responder. La mayoría opina que los seres
humanos seguirán violando y asesinando y
que así son las cosas. Esto parece ser el
obstáculo mas grande para desencadenar un
poderoso movimiento de jóvenes para
transformar la sociedad. Cuando las Panteras
Negras demostraron que el pueblo podía
llevar a cabo el cambio, el apoyo que
recibieron de su comunidad aumentó
muchísimo. Debemos seguir el ejemplo de
las Panteras Negras para organizar al pueblo
sirviéndole bajo una estrategia que haga
posible un cambio general del sistema.
Fuentes consultadas: 1. MIM Notes 286,
Septiembre 1, 2003.
Las prisiones de Tejas retienen comida, ayuda médica
han hecho la prueba. Hombre, en este lugar
se aplica la Ley de Herodes: o te chingas o te
jodes.
A los activistas que luchan contra el sistema
carcelario no les sorprende el hecho de que
los recortes presupuestarios sean dirigidos
contra la población más pobre del estado,
pero este hecho debería darnos rabia a todos.
Les pedimos a todos nuestros lectores que
se involucren en nuestras campañas en contra
de las injusticias del sistema carcelario
estadounidense.
"Educación no Encarcelación"