Arbitrary imprisonment: a symbol of tyranny
By Mike Whitney
“The very core of liberty secured by our Anglo-Saxon system
of separated powers has been freedom from indefinite imprisonment at
the will of the Executive.” — Judge Antonin Scalia
“[The results of the Padilla case pose] a unique and unprecedented
threat to the freedom of every American citizen... At stake is nothing
less than the essence of a free society... For if this Nation is to
remain true to the ideals symbolized by its flag, it must not wield
the tools of tyrants even to resist an assault by the forces of tyranny.”
— Judge John Paul Stevens
Aug. 6 — By refusing to hear the Padilla case the Supreme
Court condemned an innocent man to continued incarceration without any
opportunity to challenge the terms of his detention. Their refusal serves
as a de facto guilty verdict and overturns the long held principle of
“guilty until proven innocent.”
Additionally, their ruling reinforces the muddled position of the Bush
Administration that prisoners in the apocryphal war on terror can be
dispatched as “unlawful combatants;” the spurious rhetoric
that is without any legal meaning.
Months earlier, the 2nd Court of Appeals dismissed the nonsensical category
that was invented by the Bush Administration and ruled that Padilla
be released immediately. That ruling was ignored by the Administration,
and the case made its way to the High Court.
Now the “felonious five” have again paid homage to the executive
by refusing to try the case on its merits. Instead, they have returned
the case to the lower court for review without even addressing the fact
that Padilla has been deprived of all due process rights.
Their response can only be construed as a complete victory for the administration
who (although they could not get the court to openly overturn the Constitution)
achieved the very same result; “imprisonment into perpetuity”
without any way of disputing his internment.
It is impossible to overstate the significance of the Padilla case.
By any objective standard, it is the most important case in the history
of the court.
This is no exaggeration.
What makes it so extraordinary is that, in its essence, it does not
merely deal with “what rights citizens have” or “what
the parameters of those rights are” but, “whether or not citizens
have rights at all.”
Remember, Padilla has not been deprived of particular rights ... He
has been stripped of ALL his rights. As yet, he hasn’t even been
charged with a crime; just the periodic and prejudicial allegations
from a Justice Dept. that has worked tirelessly to demagogue the case.
Bush is making the untenable claim that he may dispose of all constitutional
protections and imprison suspects indefinitely ENTIRELY AT HIS OWN DESCRETION.
If this is so, then “inalienable rights” are nothing more
than provisional gifts of the state which can be removed at the pleasure
of the President.
This, in fact, is the president’s view on the matter.
It is a perspective that is openly shared by the majority of the court
who have endorsed this position by default.
Their message is quite clear; THEY WILL NOT DEFEND EVEN THE MOST BASIC
TENANTS OF THE CONSTITUTION, but will defer to the executive as the
sole arbiter of justice.
We are no longer a nation of laws; the Padilla case proves that convincingly.
There were warnings of this earlier in the Court’s history. This
same court refused to instruct Vice President Cheney to release the
Energy Task Force papers to the public. These documents certainly would
have shed light on the manipulation of energy markets in California,
as well as exposed the 60 oil companies who colluded with Cheney in
dividing up Iraq’s oilfields -- ultimately, leading the country
to war.
The content of these papers is clearly in the public interest and the
Court’s refusal to force their exposure demonstrates the depth
of their venality.
Similarly, but more spectacularly, this is the same court that subverted
the democratic process by applying a cynical reading of the 14th Amendment
to overturn the 2000 election. By invoking the “equal protection”
clause to suspend the counting of votes in Florida, the court established
its partisan bonafides and savaged the foundational principle of democratic
government.(the right to have one’s vote counted).
In this regard, the Padilla case just finishes the work that began long
ago; dismantling the institutions of self-government. By eviscerating
the safeguards that protect the citizen from the vagaries of the state,
the court only adds to its litany of dubious triumphs.
“Arbitrary imprisonment” remains the enduring symbol of tyranny,
(Apologies to Alexander Hamilton).
Justice will not be restored until the five loathsome occupants of the
present court are duly impeached and removed from the bench.
Source: Counterpunch
Mexico’s dirty war never ended:
inside Puente Grande Prison
By John Ross
Mexico City, Mexico, Aug. 4 — First the prisoners were
stripped naked at gunpoint and forced to lie down face first on the
freezing concrete floor with their hands locked behind their heads for
hours on end while guards took turns walking over them. The women too
were ordered to disrobe under the leering gazes of male guards and locked
into a basement room where they were threatened with rape and sodomy.
One by one, the prisoners were taken out for interrogation and when
they refused to sign blank confessions, were beaten into unconsciousness.
Sleep deprivation was introduced to break the prisoners down -–
whenever one would close his or her eyes, the guards brutally kicked
them awake. One naked prisoner was “hooded” in a black garbage
bag just as US interrogators tortured Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib
prison near Baghdad. Prisoners were forced to wash their hands and faces
in their own urine.
“When I wouldn’t sign, they pulled down my pants and punched
me so hard in the testicles that I blacked out. When I came back, they
tied a plastic bag around my head and beat me with bats that were wrapped
in sponges so they didn’t leave any marks. When I tried to breath,
the plastic stuck to my nose and mouth and I felt like I was suffocating.
“After I passed out for the third time, they put the wires on my
balls and up my ass and gave me a ‘calienton’ (electric shock)
-– but I never signed the confession,” the young protestor
who goes by the name of “El Mapache” (“Raccoon”)
told human rights investigators proudly.
While the torture sessions continued hour after hour in the basement
of the Palace of Justice, the parents searched frantically for their
disappeared children, chasing from one police precinct to another with
their long lists of names.
Scenes from the “dirty war” that swept through the southern
cone of the Americas in the 1970s and ’80s, Videla in Argentina,
Pinochet’s Chile? Film from Mexico’s own dirty war which preceded
those further south in which hundreds were similarly tortured and disappeared?
The answer is none of the above. These descriptions were assembled from
the testimonies of 43 young men and women, 21 of them -– including
a deaf mute and a 66 year-old man -- still being held incommunicado
in one of Mexico’s three super maximum security prisons despite
an outcry from Mexican human rights advocates and a flurry of urgent
action bulletins issued by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch
(HRW).
“The inhuman behavior of the prison personnel can only have been
ordered from the highest level of command,” wrote HRW’s Jose
Miguel Vivanco to the governor of Jalisco state where the mistreatment
of the so-called “globalfobicos” at Puente Grande prison is
ongoing.
The crime for which the young protestors are being held in maximum lock-up?
Having been in and around downtown Guadalajara. Mexico’s second
city, on the afternoon of May 28th 2004 while 52 heads of state from
Latin America and the European Union gathered nearby in a largely ceremonial
summit focused on combating “terrorism” and expanding free
trade between the two blocs.
After clashes between police and “altermundistas” (“other
worlders” -- anti-globalzation protestors) exploded in a 65 minute
“zipizapi,” the cops went after protestors like Milosevic’s
Cossacks carrying out an ethnic cleansing, sweeping the downtown area
and beating and arresting suspect young people, including eight non-Mexicans
who were summarily deported under Constitutional Article 33 (which gives
authorities fiat to throw anyone out of the country who is deemed “inconvenient”
to the president). 111 were taken to the Justice Palace and charged
with riot, treason, and sedition -- 67 were released after a sleepless
24 hours in the basement interrogation rooms. The 44 comrades left behind
suffered the full brunt of the tortures. One 23 year-old IndyMedia activist
was “disappeared” and, in classic dirty war style, was found
chained to a bed in the civil hospital with a fractured skull four days
later.
The governor of Jalisco, Jose Ramirez Acuna, a member of the right-wing
PAN party whose most notable member is President Vicente Fox, justified
the pogram as being directed at “anarchists and criminals.”
“Guadalajara is not Mexico City” he warned the hated “chilangos”
(Mexico City residents), “you cannot come here and sleep in our
parks. We will not allow these savages to parade around with their faces
covered like highwaymen!”
Anti-globalization activists had gathered in Guadalajara to make their
opposition heard against free trade, ALCA (Bush’s “Free Trade
Area of the Americas”), and the occupation of Iraq, a sub-text
of social movements everywhere these days, to more than half a hundred
heads of Latin American and European states. Among the luminaries: Jacques
Chirac, Brazil’s Lula, Hugo Chavez, and Spain’s newly-elected
Jose Rodriguez Zapatero (the star of the show) but not Fidel Castro
or Tony Blair or George Bush, the latter being excluded for geographical
reasons. Despite Bush’s absence Washington’s shadow hovered
over the conclave like an ominous pterodactyl.
Perhaps because Bush’s exclusion did not give the summit a clear
target, the protestors’ numbers were reduced to a handful of activists
from the venerable Mexican Network Against Free Trade (RMALC), the Authentic
Workers Front (FAT), a few electricity workers representing the powerful
SME union, laid-off Euskadi tire workers, a posse of gays and lesbians
from the city’s combative community, the usual spike-haired anarco-punks,
and the highly inflammable (and infiltrateable) General Strike Council,
the final remnants of a long-ago student strike at the national university.
The clash between 300 demonstrators maximum and 1,500 heavily armed
state and local police was like the chronicle of a massacre foretold.
“[This is a] clear [police] provocation” avowed Jaime Aviles,
special correspondent for the national daily La Jornada. Aviles wrote
of encountering a pair of burly police types (in shorts) handing out
leaflets addressed to “the students of the national university
who have been shot, killed or expelled” to resist police aggression.
Later, at the zenith of the clash, he would see the same men direct
uniformed police to an alcove where their billyclubs were stockpiled.
Mortally offended by the left daily’s charges of provocateurs,
the Bloque Negro (“Black Bloc”) issued an e-mail communiqué
taking full responsibility for confronting the police with marbles and
slingshots to demonstrate to the rest of the movement that some militants
still took the struggle seriously.
Mexico has a checkered history in handling the anti-globalization protestors.
In Cancun in February 2001, 60 demonstrators trying to reach the hotel
zone where a road show of the Davos World Economic Forum was being addressed
by President Fox were clobbered so badly by police that their blood
dappled the white sands of that luxury Caribbean resort. In Monterrey
in March 2002 at a United Nations development summit, protests were
muted when dissident non-governmental organizations were invited in
from the cold to speak their mind. The heavy presence of U.S. military
that locked down the city in anticipation of Bush’s arrival also
deterred the globalphobes. When the World Trade Organization played
Cancun in September 2003, thousands of enraged anti-globalization farmers
rushed police barricades and one Korean activist committed suicide in
desperation, a gesture that subsequently sobered up both the security
forces and the black bloc.
But Guadalajara was enemy territory for the altermundistas, a bastion
of orthodox Catholicism guided by the most intolerant Cardinal in Mexico
and a PAN government drawn from the right wing of that right-wing party.
The city has often been a stage for “wars” between good and
evil and served as the capital for “Cristero” guerrilla groups
that fought the federal government from 1926 to 1929 after all churches
were closed down by strongman Plutarco Elias Calles. During the 1960s
and ’70s, leftist urban guerilleros fought gun battles with Falange-like
right-wing youth on Guadalajara’s streets.
To add to their troubles, the altermundistas walked into a crossfire
between would-be PAN presidential candidates to succeed Vicente Fox,
each trying to show they were more macho than the other. When the hardliner
Jalisco governor Ramirez Acuna stole the summit spotlight to unveil
then-energy secretary Felipe Calderon as his choice, Fox, who had been
boosting the fortunes of his wife Marta to succeed him, took umbrage.
So did Interior secretary Santiago Creel who is in charge of the nation’s
internal security.
While the three hassle over taking credit for the crackdown on the protestors,
21 altermundistas are subject to daily torture in Puente Grande, an
annex of Abu Ghraib prison.
The treatment meted out to the Guadalajara prisoners is hard evidence
that Mexico’s dirty war, the systematic persecution of dissidents
by security forces, has never abated.
Although social historians peg the “Guerra sucia” to the suppression
of multiple guerrilla fronts throughout the country under beleaguered
former president Luis Echeverria (1970-76 - see the Dirty War Today
I), his predecessor Gustavo Diaz Ordaz (1964-70) and his late successor
Jose Lopez Portillo (1976-82), the persecution of dissidents continued
long after.
More than 500 supporters of the upstart Party of the Democratic Revolution
were slain in political warfare following the stolen 1988 presidential
election. Hundreds more died in Chiapas in the aftermath of the 1994
Zapatista uprising. Approximately 80 political prisoners are still being
held in Mexican penitentiaries, most of them accused members of armed
groups like the Popular Revolutionary Army and its offshoots and the
Chiapas-based Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN). Torture,
which is outlawed as a tool of extracting confessions, is still a high
police art as the continuing ordeal of the altermundistas abundantly
illustrates, further proof – as if it was needed – that the
dirty war in Mexico has never ended.
Source: Counterpunch
