Louima ruling protested in Brooklyn

Marchers protesting the US 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision to overturn the conviction of three police officers sentenced for violating Abner Louima’s civil rights demonstrate outside Brooklyn Federal Court on March 3 in New York.
Photo: Stacy Walsh Rosenstock

By Mike Burke

New York, New York, Mar. 4— On Sunday, four days after a federal court overturned the convictions of three New York City police officers in the torture case of Abner Louima, about 75 protesters marched to the federal courthouse in Brooklyn to protest the ruling.

“We are disappointed but not surprised. We have seen it too often,” said the Rev. Hebert Daughtry, who recalled a string of racist court rulings dating back to the Dred Scott case of 1846. “Across the years we have watched these court decisions and for so many of us we have reached the point that we feel we have no justice.”

Thursday’s ruling came slightly more than a year after four New York police officers were acquitted in the fatal shooting of Amadou Diallo, the unarmed West African immigrant who was hit with 19 out of 41 shots fired by police officers who claimed to have mistaken his wallet for a gun.

“This is madness,” said City Councilor Charles Barron. “We have petitioned this government on many occasions. Forty one bullets and the killers walk free. A shot in the chest for (Patrick) Dorismond who was doing nothing and the killers walk free. What do we tell our people to do now?”

Unlike Diallo and Dorismond, Abner Louima survived his night of torture and lived to tell the story of how officer Justin Volpe brutally sodomized him with a cut-off broomstick in the 70th Precinct police station on August 7, 1997. Louima, a Haitian immigrant, nearly died that night.

“[It was] one of the most sadistic, savage acts that a human mind can conjure,” said Barron.

Volpe plead guilty in 1999 and was sentenced to 30 years. Prosecutors charged three other officers, Charles Schwarz, Thomas Bruder, and Thomas Wiese, for offenses connected to the crime. Schwarz was convicted in 1999 of holding Louima during the assault. All three were convicted of obstruction of justice before a grand jury.

According to press accounts, the court ruled that Schwarz’s attorney had conflicting interests by representing Schwarz while under contract with the police officers union. The court threw out the conviction despite Schwarz’s waiver to allow Stephen Worth to represent him.

The three obstruction of justice charges were tossed on a technicality. Had prosecutors charged the offices with the lesser crime of obstructing justice in a police investigation, sufficient evidence existed that the officers had lied to investigators, according to news reports.

“The court said the evidence at trial was ‘plainly sufficient’ for a jury to find that Schwarz, Bruder, and Wiese had agreed to impede investigators by ‘putting forth and corroborating a false version of what occurred,’” Newsday reported today.

Schwarz will likely be retried. It remains unclear whether Bruder and Wiese will face new charges.

Barron criticized the court for basing its decision on technicalities and failing to take the proper steps to ensure a conviction.

“It is not our fault that Schwarz’ lawyer did not call in Volpe to testify. That is his option, he choose not to. That is not a reason to overturn. It is not our fault that the DA and US Attorney decided to only have obstruction on the grand jury end and not the whole federal investigation,” said Barron. “These things are the technicalities that turned this case around. You can get technical all you want, but there is a time when people have had enough. We are saying enough is enough is enough.”

At the vigil Daughtry and City Councilor James Davis predicted that the courts probably would have managed to find a way to free all of the officers if the opportunity existed.

Added Daughtry, “The mistake they made with Louima is that they didn’t kill him. Had they killed him they could have said: he had a shiny object... or he went for his wallet or he had something bulging in his shirt pocket or something that would justify the killing of him. But they didn’t kill him, so he could talk,” said Daughtry.

Added Davis, who recently became the first active police officer to be elected to City Council, “What frightens me is, had Volpe said he didn’t do it, he would probably be on the streets today... this system would have protected Volpe as well. He too would have been let out on a technicality.”

Source: NYC Indymedia

DOE ordered to release energy documents

By Cat Lazaroff

Washington, DC, Feb. 28 (ENS)— The Department of Energy has been ordered by a federal court to release 7,584 pages of documents related to meetings between Vice President Dick Cheney’s national energy task force and representatives from the energy industry. The ruling is a victory for the environmental group that sued for access to the records, and could foretell similar success in a lawsuit filed last week by the investigative arm of Congress.

If the government fails to release the documents as ordered, administration officials can be held in contempt of court and risk going to jail.

On Wednesday, a federal district court notified the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) that it had ordered the Department of Energy (DOE) to release thousands of pages of documents related to Cheney’s energy task force. The NRDC called the court opinion, which came in response to an NRDC lawsuit filed under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), a “stinging condemnation” of the agency’s refusal to obey the law.

“Justice was finally served,” said NRDC senior attorney Sharon Buccino. “By forcing the Department of Energy to quit its stonewalling, the court has protected the public’s fundamental right to know what its government is doing.”

The task force information, she added, is directly relevant to the current energy debate in Congress.

The NRDC originally asked the agency last April for basic information about its role in the Cheney task force, called the National Energy Policy Development Group, which was commissioned by President George W. Bush in January 2001. The DOE was the lead agency working with the task force to develop the president’s policy.

In her opinion, US District Judge Gladys Kessler described DOE as “woefully tardy,” and called its initial response to NRDC “virtually meaningless.” She also observed that the agency had “no legal, or practical, justification for working at a glacial pace” to fulfill NRDC’s request, noting that “the material which [NRDC] seeks is of extraordinary public interest.”

“It is very hard to discern from the declaration of the Department’s FOIA Officer … what in the world Department personnel were doing from July 2001 through December 2001 when they were conducting ‘periodic’ reviews of the 2,149 documents (comprising 7,584 pages) deemed responsive to the request,” added Kessler.

On Jan. 24, in a cryptic legal statement, the DOE denied that its officials have refused to disclose names of outside interests working with the task force — while at the same time refusing to provide that information. The agency did not claim executive privilege in response to the lawsuit nor specify any legal justification for withholding the information.

Judge Kessler directed the government to turn over the “vast majority” of the documents requested by NRDC by Mar. 25, 2002. She called it “distressing” that the NRDC is not the only entity seeking the information - others include news organizations and members of Congress.

“DOE concedes that it has at least 11 other similar FOIA requests seeking access to documents relating to the work of the Energy Task Force, and it would appear that none of those other requests have been responded to,” she wrote in her decision.

The DOE said it would comply with the judge’s order. The NRDC says it will publicly release all the documents it receives, including the names of participants, dates of meetings, and the topics discussed.

That information will reveal which energy companies or industry lobbyists may have influenced the work that DOE staff did on the Bush-Cheney energy plan. The plan, unveiled on May 17, 2001, included more than $34 billion in subsidies for energy industries, primarily oil and gas, coal, and nuclear power.

“An honest government requires transparency,” said Buccino. “Unfortunately, it took a court order to force open a door that this administration fought hard to keep closed. After being shut out of the process for nearly a year, the public will finally get to see if the administration acted on behalf of the public interest in formulating its energy plan, or for the exclusive benefit of a few industry friends like Enron and other big energy companies.”

Buccino referred to at least six known meetings between Vice President Cheney and top officials from the now bankrupt Enron.

Concerns over the administration’s ties to Enron and other major energy companies prompted the General Accounting Office (GAO), the investigative arm of Congress, to sue Vice President Cheney to release the names of all attendees of the energy task force’s meetings. The filing represented the first lawsuit in the GAO’s 80-year history directed against a member of the executive branch over access to records.

“We take this step reluctantly,” said David Walker, Comptroller General of the United States and director of the GAO. “Nevertheless, given GAO’s responsibility to Congress and the American people, we have no other choice.”

At the request of two Democratic Representatives - Henry Waxman of California and John Dingell of Michigan - the GAO asked Cheney’s office for the documents in April 2001. At first, the GAO requested all minutes and records of the task force, which the White House refused to release on the grounds that such a broad request lay outside the agency’s authority.

In August, the GAO revised its request to cover only the dates, locations, and subjects of task force meetings, as well as the names of all attendees. The agency argues that “allowing the Vice President to withhold basic factual information also would violate the principles of transparency and accountability that are essential elements of a democracy.”

“Our repeated attempts to reach a reasonable accommodation on this matter have not been successful,” Walker said in a statement last week. “Now that the matter has been submitted to the judicial branch, we are hopeful that the litigation will be resolved expeditiously.”

The files ordered released to the NRDC may not include all the details sought by the GAO, as the documents requested by the NRDC come from the Energy Department — not the Vice President’s office. However, as Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham is believed to have attended most of the meetings with energy industry executives, a great deal of overlap with the GAO request is expected.

Nuclear testing caused cancers around the globe

By Cat Lazaroff

Takoma Park, Maryland, Mar. 4 (ENS)— Atmospheric nuclear weapons testing exposed millions of people around the globe to radioactive fallout, and may have led to the cancer deaths of more than 15,000 people, suggests an analysis of government studies by the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER).

An estimated 80,000 people who lived in or were born in the United States between the years 1951 and 2000 will contract cancer as a result of the fallout caused by atmospheric nuclear weapons testing, warns the Institute.

A recent government report, prepared by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), estimates radiation doses from testing at the Nevada Test Site as well as from testing outside of the continental United States. The latter category includes US tests in the Marshall Islands and Johnston Atoll in the Pacific region, Soviet tests in Semipalatinsk - now in Kazakhstan - Novaya Zemlya, Russia, and British tests on Christmas Island.

“This report and other official data show that hot spots occurred thousands of miles away from the test sites,” said Dr. Arjun Makhijani, president of the IEER. “Hot spots due to testing in Nevada occurred as far away as New York and Maine. Hot spots from US Pacific area testing and also Soviet testing were scattered across the United States from California, Oregon, Washington, and in the West to New Hampshire, Vermont, and North Carolina in the East.”

The maps show cumulative fallout and county by county radiation dose and fallout patterns. These fallout areas demonstrate where excess cancers could occur because of the radiation.

“Despite the fact that its own studies have long shown extensive harm to people, including children, the US government has had no effective public health response,” said Lisa Ledwidge, a biologist and IEER’s outreach director for the United States.

In the 1950s, for example, the government informed photographic film producers of expected fallout patterns so they could protect their film supply, but did nothing to inform milk producers so that they could protect a vital component of the food supply.

While the United States already has a compensation program for people who lived downwind of the Nevada Test Site, site of several above ground nuclear tests, it does not cover the majority of Americans who may have been exposed to radioactive fallout, IEER warns.

“There are hot spots thousands of miles from tests sites and the new definition of ‘downwinder’ should include all of them,” explained Ledwidge.

“The new fallout maps and radiation dose estimates show that nuclear weapons states not only harmed their own people but also people in other countries,” added Dr. Makhijani. “US, Soviet, and other testing likely created hot spots in Canada and Scandinavia, for instance. There may have been hot spots in many other countries all over the world.”