Stare Kiejkuty, a village in northern Poland, houses the Polish intelligence training academy. On the grounds of the Polish intelligence-training academy and nicknamed “Markus Wolf” for the former East German spy chief, it’s the focal point for a top-secret probe that Polish prosecutors have launched into how their government tolerated rampant violations of international and Polish law.

Posted on Mon, Aug. 13, 2012

Poland peels back layers on CIA detention center

By ROY GUTMAN

McClatchy Newspapers

ROY GUTMAN / MCT

Stare Kiejkuty, a village in northern Poland, houses the Polish intelligence training academy. It was here that the CIA took over the big old villa on the property, allegedly to torture Al Qaida suspects flown into a small airstrip nearby. On an idyllic lake surrounded by woods and a double row of mesh-and-razor-wire fences about 100 miles north of Warsaw, there stands a secluded villa that the CIA once used to interrogate — and allegedly torture —top al Qaida suspects.

On the grounds of the Polish intelligence-training academy and nicknamed “Markus Wolf” for the former East German spy chief, it’s the focal point for a top-secret probe that Polish prosecutors have launched into how their government tolerated rampant violations of international and Polish law.

If former officials are brought to trial, or if the classified files in the prosecutors’ offices are made public, the result will be revelations about an American anti-terrorism operation whose details U.S. officials are fighting to keep secret.

Already the prosecutor has charged Zbigniew Siemiatkowski, Poland’s former interior minister and intelligence chief, with unlawful detention and corporal punishment for allowing the CIA to operate at Stare Kiejkuty from December 2002 to September 2003.

And the prosecutor’s office has given victim status in the case to two men the U.S. is holding indefinitely at Guantánamo: Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, a Saudi charged with orchestrating the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole off Yemen, and Zayn al Abdeen Mohammed Hussein, a Palestinian better known as Abu Zubaydah who was described by the Bush administration as a key catch in the war on terror. Nashiri faces a possible death sentence; Abu Zubaydah, who’s been held for 10 years, hasn’t been charged.

Their status as victims comes from claims that they were kidnapped by U.S. authorities, brought to Poland illegally, tortured, then spirited from Poland to other detention centers without the legally required extradition proceedings.

The villa cannot be seen from the main road or spotted on Google Earth maps. At the request of Polish authorities, its location has been blurred, the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza reported.

That’s what some parts of the Polish government would like to have happen to everything that took place here.

State prosecutors, however, seem motivated to bring the case to court. The Polish investigation is now in its fifth year, has twice been reassigned to new prosecutors and will run at least until mid-February, it was announced last week. It is, to date, the only criminal prosecution in the world related to the CIA’s so-called “black sites.”

The Obama administration has declined to investigate what happened at any of the sites, which included facilities in Thailand, Romania and Lithuania.

The prosecution is slow-going, but serious, according to Mikolaj Pietrzak, the Polish legal counsel for Guantánamo detainee Nashiri. The two prosecutors, Katarzyna Plonczyk and Janusz Sliwa, specialize in organized crime and counter-terrorism and are “very capable, very competent,” said Pietrzak, a former senior staffer of the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights. His costs are borne by the Open Society Institute Justice Initiative, a U.S. foundation.

“The prosecutor is working very robustly. It is a very broad and thorough investigation — which doesn’t mean it’s effective,” he said in Warsaw. “Everything . . . could have been done much, much quicker.”

The prosecution has interviewed 62 witnesses and compiled 20 volumes of material, the Helsinki Foundation said. Pietrzak has yet to see all the documents that have been collected in Nashiri’s case. He’s been allowed to see unclassified files in Krakow, but he’s had only fleeting access to the classified documents — under a previous prosecutor. But what he’s seen convinces him that his client was terribly mistreated in the villa.

“My analysis of those papers has removed any shred of doubt as to the accuracy of statements made in our application” for victim status, he said.

Some of what took place here is already known. According to eclassified U.S. documents, Nashiri was threatened with a mock execution by power drill and handgun early in his seven-month stay at Stare Kiejkuty. Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded and subjected to other so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

Other prisoners were very likely held here and treated in a way that Polish law prohibits.

Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the Pakistani man accused of masterminding the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003, declassified Bush-era documents have revealed. That treatment came at a time he was probably in Poland, said Irmina Pacho, of the Helsinki Foundation’s “strategic litigation” program. But Mohammed is representing himself at Guantánamo, so there’s no way lawyers can plead for him here.

It’s difficult to gauge the likelihood that all facts will be made public.

The Polish political elite is clearly ambivalent about prosecuting former officials, and the U.S. government has stonewalled all known requests for assistance, Polish lawyers say.

At Guantánamo, the U.S. government has insisted that information about Nashiri’s treatment be kept secret. His Pentagon defense attorneys and a group of American news organizations are challenging the idea that Nashiri’s treatment must be considered “classified” and kept secret.

The military commission judge will consider the issue at Guantánamo next week during hearings in the 9/11 case. Poland’s president, Bronislaw Komorowski, called in May 2011 for a “thorough investigation” rather than excuses about “loyalty to an ally.” But four months later he refused to release his predecessor, Aleksander Kwasniewski, from his pledge to secrecy on state security matters when the prosecutor wanted to question him.

Kwasniewski, who in 2008 denied that there was ever a secret CIA prison in Poland, opposes the prosecution. In an interview with McClatchy, he said that if anyone were to be prosecuted, it should be Americans, not Poles. “Calling to account someone in Poland” for cooperating with the U.S. is “inappropriate,” he said.

Leszek Miller, the left-of-center prime minister at the time the CIA center was operating, has refused to comment on the secret prison. But Donald Tusk, the right-of-center current prime minister, talks tough. “This is not the 19th century, and this is not some Bantu-stan,” he said in late March, after Siemiatkowski was indicted. “This case has to be resolved. Let there be no doubt about that either in Poland or on the other side of the ocean.”

For Tusk, the moment of truth is nigh. Last month, the European Court of Human Rights ordered Poland to explain by Sept. 5 why Nashiri and Abu Zubaydah have been given victim status and to provide the court with all agreements that pertain to the setting up of what the court called “a secret CIA prison” on Polish territory.

Still, there’s much that’s unknown about what happened in the Markus Wolf villa: the role of outside contractors in the prison’s day-to-day operations, the discussions between intelligence agencies that led to the establishment of the prison and what the Poles received in return, if anything, for allowing the black site to operate.

Evidence emerges in bits and pieces, in newspaper reports, in cryptic utterances from the state prosecutor and in the revelations of Jozef Pinior, a member of the Polish Senate and the European Parliament, who’s the one senior politician who’s consistently championed the case. In June, he said he’d seen an order to build an iron cage and deliver it to the villa.

His newest anecdote about the CIA prison centered on a note he’d seen from Polish intelligence officials to CIA personnel at the intelligence compound. It urged them not to throw any more kielbasa or Polish sausage in the trash, lest people think that Muslims are being held at the Stare Kiejkuty villa. “It is a clear message for people in the village that people are being held there.”

Journalist Adam Krzykowski, who in 2009 discovered many of the flight

records and a computer hard disk that had eluded previous investigators, estimates that six to eight suspects, at most 11, were detained at Stare Kiejkuty. Altogether, there were seven special CIA flights to Szymany, an airport about 15 miles away, according to the flight records Krzykowski turned up, with the first arriving from Bangkok on Dec. 5, 2002, with seven passengers, and the last one out in September 2003 with five passengers. Ironically, it was an official visit to Poland by President George W. Bush in June 2003 that led to the closing of the villa. Bush’s thanks for Poland’s cooperation in the war on terrorism were “so profuse” that the Polish president, Kwasniewski, realized “something was not right,” Gazeta Wyborcza reported in June 2011. He ordered an investigation, and on learning that the CIA was flying suspects into Poland for interrogation, ordered the interrogation center closed.

Where the prosecution goes from here isn’t clear. Pietrzak, Nashiri’s Polish attorney, thinks the Tusk government wants to string out the process. “If they charge someone there will be an eruption,” he said.

But others think that however long it takes, the Polish investigation won’t go away.

“For better or worse, there have been too many leaks about what is going on inside that prosecution,” said Crofton Black, a senior investigator at the British prisoner advocacy group Reprieve. “Even if it weren’t very difficult to walk away at this stage, so many documents have been sent to or seen by the prosecutor, so much is in the public domain. The cat’s out of the bag now.”

Miami Herald reporter Carol Rosenberg and McClatchy special correspondent Barbara Dziedzic contributed to this report.

 
© 2012 Miami Herald Media Company. All Rights Reserved.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/08/13/v-print/2950447/poland-peels-back-layers-on-secret.html#storylink=cpy

The list of things in Leviticus that call for death by stoning would take out not only gays and lesbians, but most everybody else as well. Then there’s that wonderful stuff about dashing out the brains of Philistine babies and exterminating the entire population of Canaan. Yet most Christians, outside of Fred Phelps’s bunch, don’t advocate this kind of stuff. And many Christians from the mainline denominations openly condemn it.

What the Elites Want

Promoting Authoritariansim

by KEVIN CARSON

We hear a lot these days about Islam’s misogyny and cultural authoritarianism.. A good example is that idiot lawyer fighting construction of a mosque in Chattanooga, enthralling public hearings with juicy quotes he’s mined from the Quran.

Apparently he’s never read the Bible. The list of things in Leviticus that call for death by stoning would take out not only gays and lesbians, but most everybody else as well. Then there’s that wonderful stuff about dashing out the brains of Philistine babies and exterminating the entire population of Canaan. Yet most Christians, outside of Fred Phelps’s bunch, don’t advocate this kind of stuff. And many Christians from the mainline denominations openly condemn it.

So it’s obvious that the actual content of sacred texts means a lot less than the cultural evolution of their adherents. The texts themselves, arguably, are more the products than the sources of authoritarian culture.

In a college Middle Eastern history class, I read a historian (I can’t for the life of me track him down) who posited an “Irano-Mediterranean Oikoumene” with a shared culture of machismo and patriarchal domination of women. St. Paul’s admonition to women to cover their heads in church was entirely in keeping with this culture in Greece. In the classical Greece of Socrates, women commonly appeared in public in something very like a hijab; Aristophanes’ “Assembly of Women,” and the tradition that Socrates’ wife Xanthippe publicly henpecked him, were both considered especially comical against this cultural backdrop.

Most conservative cultural traditions concerning women in contemporary Islam are not mentioned in the Quran, but were found in the preexisting culture of the pagan Arabs. And many misogynistic pagan traditions that Islam condemned, like the exposure of female infants, reemerged among the Bedouin after Muhammad’s time. Muhammad himself was quite liberal toward women in his personal life, compared both to the preexisting pagan culture and later “Islamic” culture, with some women figuring prominently in the early Muslim community at Medina.

Islam was arguably evolving past its cultural authoritarianism earlier than Christianity. At its height, the medieval Islamic civilization was far more liberal and forward-looking than Christian Europe at the same time. This was brought to an end by the Mongol conquest of the Middle East. The Islamic world was set back by centuries, becoming pessimistic, authoritarian and inward-looking, and adopting a reactionary attitude toward Europe’s subsequent cultural progress.

Western imperialism played a similar role in the colonial world. Colonial regimes atomized or perverted local social institutions (as an example of perversion, look at what Hastings’ Permanent Settlement in Bengal, and similar policies later for all of India, did to property relations within the village commune). They decimated social capital and uprooted local institutions that might have provided the basis for evolution of a more liberal society. They deliberately drew colonial boundaries that cut across natural ethnic lines, promoting ethnic hostility as part of a divide-and-rule strategy (much of the Hutu-Tutsi hostility in Rwanda is traceable to such policies under Belgian rule). Much as in Russia, an authoritarian state led to the corruption and atrophy of civil society; and when that authoritarian state withdrew from the scene, it left a vacuum to be filled by military juntas and kleptocrats.

The bipolar superpower dynamic also contributed to greater political authoritarianism in much of the post-colonial Third World. Left-wing nationalist regimes, in the face of Western economic blockades, subversion and outright invasion, adopted garrison state cultures and developed closer ties with the Soviet bloc.

Take Cuba, for example. Although Castro had studied Marx and had a nondescript Marxist politics, he’d also studied the New Deal in prison and saw it as a model for post-revolutionary Cuban development. His 26 July Movement avoided close ties with the pro-Soviet and doctrinaire Marxist-Leninist PSP. After the Revolution, the new regime liquidated the PSP and pursued a fairly liberal economic agenda consisting of land reform and the encouragement of urban cooperatives. Orthodox Marxist-Leninists like Che Guevara formed a distinct subgroup within the 26 July Movement. Only after a full-blown US campaign of destabilization did Castro proclaim himself a Marxist-Leninist and align Cuba with the Soviet bloc.

In South Vietnam, Noam Chomsky has argued, the NLF (“Viet Cong”), while certainly engaging in authoritarian activities, was also a grass-roots populist movement with close ties to the local peasantry, engaged in many of the same kinds of local economic development and self-help activities as the Black Panthers in Oakland. The counter-insurgency campaign in the South eviscerated the NLF and the civil society it was embedded in, leaving a hollow shell for the North Vietnamese Army and the official Marxist-Leninists in Hanoi to take over.

In a sense these were both victories for the United States. The US government arguably has a conscious interest in promoting this kind of authoritarianism. From the standpoint of the American ruling elite, it was far preferable to have the anti-American Third World dominated by authoritarian regimes subject to discipline by the white male three-piece-suited bureaucrats in Moscow (the kind of people Nixon and Kissinger were quite sympatico with), than a liberal anti-American regime providing the demonstration effect of successful economic development outside the global capitalist system.

Kevin Carson is a senior fellow of the Center for a Stateless Society and holds the Center’s Karl Hess Chair in Social Theory. He is a mutualist and individualist anarchist and the author of Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective, and The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto, all of which are freely available online. He is also the author of articles in publications including The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty and a variety of internet-based journals and blogs, includingJust Things, The Art of the Possible, the P2P Foundation, and his own Mutualist Blog.

No one can predict the future but we can work hard to shape the outcomes

Human Security for Global Security

Demilitarization is Not a Dirty Word

by JODY WILLIAMS

The political, social and economic changes we all face are serious. Some might call the state of the world today chaos. The ongoing, dramatic changes in technology and communications are other elements adding to uncertainty and the feelings of insecurity that people around the globe are confronting. No one can predict the future but we can work hard to shape the outcomes.

Clearly there are huge obstacles to creating a world of sustainable peace with justice, equality and an end to impunity. A world free of militarism, armaments and the arms trade in which human and other resources are focused on meeting the needs of humanity rather than fueling conflicts and war. A world of sustainable development that nurtures our planet instead of continuing to devastate the environment and threaten life on earth. This will not happen over night. But worrying about the future is not a strategy for shaping it.

My own work, beginning with protests against the Vietnam War, has been against weapons, war and militarism. It is based on an understanding that sustainable peace is not simply the absence of armed conflict. The absence of armed conflict provides the bare minimum for the possibility of constructing sustainable peace based on socio-economic justice and equality. And to accomplish that we must change the understanding of security.

For centuries security has been defined as “national security” – which essentially has meant assuring the security of those in power and the apparatus of the state. Defending the state requires military power based on nationalism and patriotism. “Us” against “them.” How else could armies be formed that send other people’s children off to fight battles for resources, territory and to project the power of the state?

Now, with globalization where all aspects of life are increasingly and more rapidly interconnected around the world, it is time to move away from state-centric security to security based on the individual – “human security” not “national security.” The human security framework understands “security” as directing policies and resources toward meeting the basic needs of the majority of people on the planet: providing decent housing, education, access to medical care, employment with dignity, protection of civil and human rights and governments that respond to the needs of citizens. It means creating a world where people live with freedom from want and freedom from fear.

One part of being able to create that world is reclaiming and reasserting the meaning of “world peace.” It isn’t meditation, a rainbow with a dove flying over it, or singing peace songs. Nonviolence is not inaction and building sustainable peace must be understood as hard work every single day. We must all be active participants in change for the good. It doesn’t matter what issues people choose to work on – it could be global warming, an end to militarism, an end to poverty, or HIV/Aids for example.

What matters is that we all work on issues we feel passionate about and that our actions are for the benefit of everyone. By doing that our combined efforts enhance human security. We also must talk about our work in the context of human security so that people become familiar with the concept and understand the various elements that contribute to promoting and protecting human security.

Another aspect of creating a world based on human security not national security is to tackle demilitarization and the glorification of violence head on. It is an abomination that with the current global economic shake-down, countries still managed to find billions of dollars for weapons and the military while at the same time they are cutting funds for education, health care, job training, social services –the elements of daily life that are the basis of human security.

Demilitarization is not a dirty word. Civil society and national nongovernmental organization should confront demilitarization in our own countries. At the same time we must collectively press regional bodies such as the European Union, the African Union, the Organization of American States, and so on for global demilitarization. We also have another means of collective action, which is Article 26 of the UN Charter – not that we have illusions about the ability of the UN to seriously work for demilitarization. But every country that joins the UN commits to fulfilling the articles of the charter and Article 26 states:

In order to promote the establishment and maintenance of international peace and security with the least diversion for armaments of the world’s human and economic resources, the Security Council shall be responsible for formulating…plans to be submitted to the members of the United Nations for the establishment of a system for the regulation of armaments.

In the more than six decades since the establishment of the UN, the Security Council has done absolutely nothing to fulfill its Article 26 obligation. But the member states of the UN have not done a thing to pressure the Security Council on Article 26 either.

Collectively, global civil society should begin actions to force the Security Council to “formulate plans” under Article 26 as soon as possible. Knowing that they will do everything in their formidable power to continue to ignore those obligations, global civil society should draw up its own plans and recommendations for demilitarization and how to use the resources resulting from demilitarization to enhance global human security. We can develop strategies and tactics around our plans and recommendations to pressure governments nationally, regionally and internationally to begin the process of demilitarization.

With demilitarization, the possibilities of positive change and human security in our world would be limitless. Humanity has the right to the real security of sustainable peace not the false “security” of militarism, armaments and war.

Jody Williams was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997.

The U.S. (in)justice system is an updated, more sophisticated continuation of repression and containment, and profiting off the misery of NewAfrikan/Black people.

The South is Risen

Old Jim Crow Thrives Inside Oregon Prisons

by KEVIN RASHID JOHNSON

In her book, The New Jim Crow[1], legal scholar Michelle Alexander did a masterful job of exposing the U.S. criminal (in)justice system for what it is: namely, an updated, more sophisticated, continuation of repression and containment, and profiting off the misery, of New Afrikan/Black people. Her work, and that of other critical race writers like Tim Wise[2], counter the b.s. of those who pretend that Amerika is finally a race-neutral society.

In the eyes of most, and even of these writers, the overt old Jim Crow forms of racism and national oppression, e.g. government-enforced segregation such as “whites only” eating facilities, Blacks seated in the backs of buses, and so on, are practices of a bygone era. Even I thought as much. That is, until I found myself imprisoned within the Oregon Department of Corrections (ODOC).

The DOC with its ‘Enlightened’ Self

Even during the most blatant stages of U.S. racism, such as chattel slavery; or when lynching was the norm; or when Blacks were fleeing by the millions to cities of the North and West from the Klan, lynch mobs and desperate poverty of the old South; or when ‘zoot suits’ and Bebop jazz were the rave and symbolized our cultural resistance to the white supremacist status quo, military draft and financial exploitation of Black art and music; or when Blacks were being shot, billy-clubbed, tear-gassed, water-hosed by cops and bitten by their dogs for demanding equality; or when over 80% of urban Blacks supported the Black Panther Party, its community service programs and its resistance to police oppression, etc., whites were claiming racism didn’t exist, that racial tranquility was the order of the day, that Blacks were happy and content, and that those who said otherwise were just outside troublemakers out to upset racial ‘harmony’ or agents of enemy foreign governments.

So it was no surprise when ODOC officials assured me upon my arrival from the notoriously racist and abusive supermax prisons of Virginia (the old Confederate South) in February 2012, that theirs is a progressive prison system. They boasted that Oregon ranks in the top ten percentile of U.S. prisons for humane and enlightened treatment of its prisoners, while Virginia is in the lowest ten percentile for prison systems that abuse and mistreat prisoners.

I was of course skeptical. Twenty-two years in prison and a lifetime of living in capitalist Amerika taught me that self-promotional claims of officials work just like corporate advertising. They emphasize only the good and divert attention from the bad in their practices and products. And it’s purely opportunistic and lying advertising. Like the salesperson working for company A, so long as that company pays their bills they zealously promote its goods as superior in quality to rival Company B’s. But should they switch employers, then they will in turn promote Company B’s as the best merchandise.

So I wasn’t exactly shocked to discover in 2012, right in the ODOC and in a prison situated in Oregon’s capital city of Salem, the old Jim Crow was still being practiced almost perfectly in fact.

Back to Separate But Equal

On March 1, 2012 I was assigned to Oregon State Penitentiary (OSP) in Salem.

The transition from Virginia to Oregon has been interesting to say the least. And not just because I was allowed in a general prison population after 17 years of solitary confinement.

The racial demographics in Oregon prisons are basically the reverse of Virginia’s, and most everywhere else in Amerika. In Virginia about two out of every twenty prisoners are white. The vast majority of Virginia’s prisoners are Black, although Blacks make up only about 20% of Virginia’s social population. In Oregon, however, only about two or three out of every twenty prisoners are Black. And Oregon’s Black incarceration ratio is still grossly disproportionate to that of whites. Bottom line, the vast majority of Oregon prisoners are white. Seeing all these white folks in prison was the first oddity that struck me on assignment to the ODOC.

The second oddity was finding old JIm Crow alive and well at OSP. And I’m told by all that OSP is the ODOC’s most ‘liberal’ men’s prison, with the most racially ‘tolerant’ staff. Other ODOC prisons “out east,” like Snake River, where their Security Housing Units are called “Cowboy Country,” where staff with attitudes like the Klan “do things their own way.” But here’s an example of what I found in OSP: a prisoner cafeteria right out of the Old South.

The prisoner chow hall seats several hundred prisoners, four to a table. It’s one large room with an equal number of tables on either side, divided by a walking aisle down the middle. At the rear are two food service windows where trays are prepared, one on the left side of the cafeteria, one on the right. To reach the service windows prisoners enter through one or the other of two doors situated at the front on the far left and far right sides of the cafeteria. They then proceed in straight lines along the right or left wall to the rear, and collect their tray, utensils, and food at the service window.

The serving lines, service windows, and seating arrangements are divided by race. Whites use the line food service window, and sit on the right side of the cafeteria. All other races use and sit on the left side; Blacks sit in the very back. Asians, Mexicans and Latinos and Native Americans sit in the middle. And up in the front where groups of guards stand nearby, is where sex-offenders sit — this shunned group is generally white. Food service staff and guards assign only white prisoners to work the serving windows on the right or white side, all others, including white outcasts, work the left or ‘colored’ side.

An Outsider Making Waves

When I first observed this arrangement, I thought instantly of George Jackson’s description in Soledad Brother[3] of the t.v. room in 1960s California prisons, where guards enforced segregated seating with whites up front and Blacks in the rear. And how when he dared to sit up front with the whites, he was jumped and guards punished only him as the troublemaker.

I too decided to defy this OSP seating arrangement, and leading by example, sat at a table near the front on the white side. And, consistent with Comrade George’s t.v. room experience, the Black prisoners all cast me nervous or fearful sidelong glances. The guards and white prisoners looked at me like I was crazy or a confused or lost child. Whites seated at the table quickly moved, leaving me to sit alone. Everyone obviously expected me to be jumped. Although I was prepared, nothing happened.

The next day, I went around the white serving line to ‘their’ serving window, and was this time intercepted by a white guard who told me if I sat on the white side again I’d be taken as trying to incite a riot and would be thrown in the hole. So I went and sat in the Black section looking to gauge the thinking and responses of other Blacks. They literally begged me not to sit on the white side again.

For days afterward I patiently questioned and challenged their thinking, pointing out among other things: 1) They are victims of government-enforced Jim Crow eating and seating arrangements exactly like in the Old South, which Rosa Parks, student sit-ins and others had defied; 2) Their attitudes were just like those of complacent ‘broken’ Blacks who “went along to get along,” fearing white backlash to defying Jim Crow segregation; 3) That the key challenges to Jim Crow were initiated by people from other places like me, such as Northern Black college students and white supporters — ‘Freedom Riders’ — who rode buses through the South defying segregated seating laws; 4) Just like in the Old South, OSP officials justify tolerating and enforcing segregated conditions and punishing those who defy them in the name of preventing white mob violence; and 5) The entire game of racial division plays right into the hands of the administration and guards who oppress everyone — that it is an old tactic taken from the Willie Lynch playbook of Divide and Rule.

Although most of them accepted the history lesson, they all resisted following its example. And to save face, they all pretended to be satisfied with sitting on ‘their’ side in the rear of the cafeteria. “We don’t want to sit with the whites anyway,” they proclaimed, but admitted not to be speaking for everyone. I pointed out also that they didn’t seem to want to sit with each other either, since they most frequently bickered and fought each other and there was no Black unity either. And oddly, whites frequently sit in the Black area without protest. I questioned this and what it said of them that even pedophiles and rapists got more considerate front row seating than them. I haven’t gotten a satisfactory rebuttal to either of these points yet.

And no OSP administrator, including the warden/superintendent can claim ignorance or plausible denial, since they all routinely sit or stand right in the cafeteria observing the meals.

We’re Not Racists!

Prison officials love to sermonize that prisoners must learn to accept responsibility for their actions. Woe unto them but did they practice what they preach. Perhaps they could be taken more seriously if they began their sermons with a confession in the tradition of Alcoholics Anonymous, “Hi. I’m an Oregon prison official and I’m a bigot.” But these folks aren’t interested in curing themselves or their system Hypocrites ….

In fact, I’ve seldom seen as reflexive an angry response as when calling them on their racism. Some of the more ‘professional’ ones temper their reactions with strong silence, changing several shades of red, changing the subject, or simply changing places by charging me with being the racist for noticing racial issues at all. Whether they react, evade or deny, the responses are always defensive. And one only becomes defensive when one has something to protect or hide.

In most cases, when I’ve told guards and administrators here that they practice racism and jingoism, they react negatively. From threats to throw me in the hole to actually doing so, to angry blanket denials, to locking me in the cell as a threat to staff. The truth hurts I suppose. Truth also exposes what one wishes to deny. And denying the obvious in racial matters is an old Amerikan tradition. As old as Amerika itself, actually.

As Stan Goff, the white veteran and career U.S. Special Operations soldier, who exposed blatant Special Ops racism and exclusion of Blacks from their units, once observed, “White America will kill to preserve its lies.”[4] The Old South taught us that too.

So, no, Old South Jim Crow and the South didn’t fall. They just moved out West and merged with the New Jim Crow to become what Oregon officials call an enlightened and humane approach to prison administration. They definitely have Virginia beat! I was just shipped from a plantation run by wolves, to one run by foxes. Either way, as Malcolm X observed, I’m still in the doghouse. Only this time, with back row seats.

Kevin Rashid Johnson has spent most of his adult life in prison. He spent 17 years in solitary in Virginia, and has recently been transferred to Oregon.

Notes.





[1] Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (The New Press, NY, 2010)



[2] Tim Wise, Between Barack and a Hard Place: Racism and White Denial in the Age of Obama (City Lights, Cal., 2009)



[3] George Jackson, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (Lawrence Hill Books, Chicago, 1970)



[4] Stan Goff, Full Spectrum Disorder: The Military In the New American Century (Soft Skull, NY, 2004)

The New York Times Magazine’s recent feature on Oakland — “the last refuge of radical America”— seemed to have one overriding purpose: to convince the rest of the nation that Oakland’s uniquely strong social movements are a quirk with no relevance to the rest of America.

What the New York Times Missed

Oakland: Incubator for Meaningful Local Politics

by DARWIN BOND-GRAHAM

Oakland, California.

The New York Times Magazine’s recent feature on Oakland — “the last refuge of radical America”— seemed to have one overriding purpose: to convince the rest of the nation that Oakland’s uniquely strong social movements are a quirk with no relevance to the rest of America. Don’t try this at home. Reporter Jonathan Mahler and his editor seemed to be operating under a directive to undermine any notion that the Occupy Movement’s specific trajectory in this West Coast city can provide models for politics elsewhere.

Instead, Mahler and the Times depict a city paralyzed by dysfunctional politicians and activists, a sort of zoo in which the loony remainders of a broken American Left are allowed to play amidst the wreckage of a post-industrial economy. The Occupy Movement is caricatured as a brawling child interested only in irrational running street battles with the police. Gentrification, the further impoverishment of the city’s working class, and displacement of its Black, Latino, and Asian communities is inevitable, we are told. Get used to it.

Locally Mahler’s article has been given the birdcage treatment. It’s such an obviously sloppy and uninformed rant to most of us who live in Oakland or who have carefully studied the region’s politics. The downside is that because it was printed in the Times’ Magazine, the glossy paper doesn’t work well even for cleaning up pet waste. The other downside, the serious one, is that the Times’ coverage may have been somewhat effective in its political purpose on the national level. Many readers unfamiliar with Oakland or the Bay Area have probably accepted the narrative about kooky radicals and the city they’re tearing apart from the inside even as capital radically transforms parts of it into a bobo paradise.

Davey D, an Oakland-based journalist and deeply informed commentator on the city’s political scene penned an excellent response to Mahler’s article just days after its publication. According to Davey D, the New York Times article, “in no way describes what people are all about here in Oakland. It diminishes the true grind that organizers put in day-in and day-out to improve their community and better this city. Those who take direct action in the face of oppression do so because they have little or no choice. It’s not something to be romanticized, it’s not a game, even if this writer came across a few individuals who thought it was.”

Davey D goes on to describe the big omission from Mahler’s piece, the lack of any information or analysis about the major preexisting social movement in Oakland through which Occupy and any current political mobilizations must be understood: the Oscar Grant Rebellion. It’s an almost criminal omission from the Times’ feature coverage of Oakland because without understanding the conflict between Oakland’s flatland communities and the police department, and how the Oakland Police Department is at the center of virtually every problem the city confronts, from debt to economic under-development, one simply can’t make sense of the what’s going on here.

So Mahler and the Times, in their laziness, their cynicism, or perhaps it was a malevolent desire to slander genuinely radical political struggles, took the easy route, and wrote a fantasy story designed to lead readers to one conclusion: Oakland is a place where crazy people with quaint 20th Century ideologies do things that have no meaning or application to politics elsewhere. Neoliberal urban transformation is unstoppable.

Another informed and responsible writer based in the East Bay, Alex Schafran, responded to Mahler’s article by calling it a “hit piece,” as in an assassination attempt. “Mahler is profoundly uninterested in understanding Oakland, or even in truly understanding his surface goal, which is to explain the vitality of Occupy and various forms of ‘radical’ street protest in Oakland,” writes Schafran. “Mahler, like far too many people who write about cities, is simply using Oakland to make a broader argument about politics and society.” “Mahler sees those who would dream of a more equal city as fools,” concludes Schafran about the Times’ coverage.

Back in October of last year my impression of Occupy Oakland was that while it was certainly a local manifestation of the Occupy Wall Street movement and was running with some of its slogans and energy, Oaklanders had dispensed with distant targets like Wall Street and Washington from the very start, focusing instead on the problems it could actually address. As I reported for CounterPunch then: “from the very beginning Occupy Oakland took a radical stance and localized the terms of struggle. At the first rally cries of ‘fuck the police’ peppered comments equally critical of local government and powerful Bay Area corporations which have pressed harmful budget cuts upon Oaklanders”.

Occupy Oakland was never about the boring liberal politics of advocating for change from the federal government or other distant forces that could only be appealed to with signs and slogans and moral suasion. For those who have taken part in it, Oakland’s most recent wave of protests was always about taking direct action to confront the immediate and real problems Oaklanders are facing, not just because of the financial crisis, but because of decades of disinvestment, police militarization, and austerity measures imposed by local politicians. Oaklanders were contesting the shut down schools, shuttered libraries, derelict parks, and the policies that have left much of the city in a state of disrepair.

This week a group of activist reopened a former library in a flatlands neighborhood off International Boulevard in Oakland’s sprawling east, in just another local direct action that will otherwise escape national attention. Naming it the “Victor Martinez People’s Library,” the building’s new tenants quickly cleaned graffiti from the walls and removed piles of garbage that had accumulated on the site after years of illegal dumping on the derelict city property. The activists, who didn’t say they were part of Occupy Oakland, although some familiar faces were peppered amongst the group, released a statement:

“If you live in this community, we only ask that you think about how you can use this building. Name it anything you like. Purpose it to any goal that benefits the community—library, social or political neighborhood center. The grounds can even be used for a community garden, where we can grow healthy food in a food desert neighborhood. All we ask is that you keep it out of the hands of a city which will only seal the fence and doors again, turning the space back into an aggregator of the city’s trash and a dark hole in the middle of an embattled community. The doors here are opened. And there are many other simply waiting to be.”

By 5pm the new Victor Martinez Library was bustling with dozens of people, many of them young activists, the sorts derided by the New York Times for their idealism and dreams of a more equitable city. Handfuls of neighbors trickled in and out of the building curiously looking over the scene, chatting with the library’s liberators who were busying themselves with sweeping and other chores. Children from nearby houses ran in and out of the library and its yard. A mother and her two daughters who lived in a house nearby shyly told me they’d like to see the reopened library become a place for children to safely gather and play. There is no park or playground close by; the neighborhood around Miller Avenue and International instead is dotted with auto shops, industrial supply warehouses, apartment buildings, and dangerously busy streets.

A man standing out front is busy giving an impromptu lecture about the building’s history. “During the Chicano movement in the early 1970s this was closed as a library, so the community took it over and turned it into a school,” said Jose Rivera, a Richmond resident who grew up in the neighborhood. “Between roughly 1973 and 1988 or 89 this was one of the community schools, Emiliano Zapata Street Acadamy, that was created by the movement to educate our youth. People know all about the history of the Black Panthers and the anti-war movement in Oakland, but there was also a powerful Chicano movement that made changes here.”

Rivera, a scholar of the Chicano movement in Oakland, is carrying copies of articles, maps, and other documents he’s researched that provide some insights into the neighborhood’s past, and specifically the old library’s role in previous social movements. A San Francisco Examiner article from May 12, 1982 he hands me describes the Street Academy as “an experimental school,” and the direct product of the Chicano movement’s direct action-oriented politics. Classes discussed current events affecting their communities and made studies relevant to the troubles confronting youth.

“In a basement one recent day civics teacher Bernard Stringer led a spirited discussion on the Immigration and Naturalization Service,” reads the Examiner piece.

“‘What did the INS do this week?’ Stringer asked, his voice booming out at his nine eager students.”

“‘They were swooping down,’ said one of his students referring to the recent INS roundup of [undocumented immigrants].’”

“‘What were they swooping down for?’ asked Stringer.”

“‘Because people had jobs but they didn’t have their green cards,’ the students replied.”

Countering recent ICE raids against workers in Berkeley, and raids targeting the Mexican and Central American communities of East Oakland has been a major focus of activists in the Bay Area, just another important part of Oakland’s current politics that was omitted from the recent Times’ coverage.

When the Emiliano Zapata Street Acadamy moved away to its current location, the building at 1449 Miller Street was more or less abandoned by the city. It had successfully incubated a community school that still exists, but the 1990s and 2000s was a decade in which the old Carnegie Library sat mostly empty, its façade falling apart, and the grounds around it accumulating trash.

To an outsider unfamiliar with Oakland’s history the building’s newest incarnation as the Victor Martinez People’s Library could seem like just another direct action carried out by Occupy Movement activists, but couched in Oakland’s long and productive history of social movements it’s obviously something more. There’s continuity in the struggle to save and reopen libraries as a means of improving neighborhoods and empowering communities.

Upon leaving the library last night I approached three young men standing on the corner across from the scene who were passing a blunt around and surveying the scene. “How long do you think this will last?” I asked the.

“I hope it last forever,” said one of them with an earnestness that surprised me. “We need a library in this neighborhood. The closest one is way out in Fruitvale, the Cesar Chavez branch, or else you have to go all the way downtown.”

Another one of the youngsters said with equal seriousness, “a book can save a life.”

“So you guys think this can succeed, the community will use it?”

They nodded their heads affirmatively and pointed at a little boy rolling past the new library on his scooter.

“The city spends all their money on cops and they don’t have any left over to run things like this,” one of them said.

It was an observation also noted by one of the activists earlier in the day. “Larry Reid, chair of the council said he’d rather have cut libraries and other services two years ago, rather than lay off police officers,” said the organizer in front of the new library.

Indeed, Reid told the San Francisco Chronicle recently that he and his fellow city councilors “could have made cuts in other areas without laying off 80 police officers,” but concluded that “the political will was not there”.

Just before midnight last evening the Oakland police swooped in. Evicting the activists the cops boarded up the Victor Martinez People’s Library. In less than 24 hours this place has been transformed from an abandoned Carnegie library into a busy community center, and back into a “dark hole in the middle of an embattled community.”

But in taking it over, even if it was a brief occupation, the building has been transformed into a potent symbol of political conflict and priorities, stemming back to the Chicano movement’s efforts to create a more just and equitable city, revived by a current crop of activists.

Darwin Bond-Graham is a sociologist and author who lives and works in Oakland, CA. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, forthcoming from AK Press.