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By Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris
All that the soldiers of the 372nd Military Police Company, a Reserve unit out of Cresaptown, Maryland, knew about America's biggest military prison in Iraq, when they arrived there in early October of 2003, was that it was on the front lines. Its official name was Forward Operating Base Abu Ghraib. Never mind that military doctrine and the Geneva Conventions forbid holding prisoners in a combat zone, and require that they be sped to the rear; you had to make the opposite sort of journey to get to Abu Ghraib. You had to travel along some of the deadliest roads in the country, constantly bombed and frequently ambushed, into the Sunni Triangle. The prison squatted on the desert, a wall of sheer concrete traced with barbed wire, picketed by watchtowers. "Like something from a Mad Max movie," Sergeant Javal Davis, of the 372nd, said. "Just like that - like, medieval." There were more than two and a half miles of wall with twenty-four towers, enclosing two hundred and eighty acres of prison ground. And inside, Davis said, "it's nothing but rubble, blown-up buildings, dogs running all over the place, rabid dogs, burnt remains. The stench was unbearable: urine, feces, body rot."
The prisoners - several thousand of them, clad in orange - were crowded behind concertina wire. "The encampment they were in when we saw it at first looked like one of those Hitler things, like a concentration camp, almost," Davis said. "They're in there, in their little jumpsuits, outside in the mud. Their rest rooms was running over. It was just disgusting. You didn't want to touch anything. Whatever the worst thing that comes to your mind, that was it - the place you would never, ever, ever, ever send your worst enemy."
The M.P.s of the 372nd were told to make themselves at home in an abandoned prison block, a compound ravaged by looters and invaded by the desert. The sand lay several inches deep in places, mixed with decomposing trash. Moving in meant digging out and sweeping up, and when you'd purged the debris - weird stuff, some of it; for instance, used syringes, which just made you wonder - what you had were bare prison cells. The military term of art for the place where soldiers sleep and bathe and eat on base is L.S.A., which means "life-support area," and at other forward operating bases around Iraq an L.S.A. meant climate-controlled tents and a mess hall, electricity and hot water, a gym and an Internet café, phones and satellite television, PX shops and fast-food joints. A proper L.S.A. is an outpost of the motherland, and it affirms the sense of pride and tribe that is essential to morale and discipline. At Abu Ghraib, showers were wooden sheds with cold-water drums propped overhead. The unit had no field kitchen, so chow was combat rations - M.R.E.s, meals-ready-to-eat - breakfast, lunch, and dinner in a cardboard box; everything in a polymer packet.
Nobody had expected luxury at Saddam Hussein's old prison, but morale was low to begin with - the M.P.s just wanted to know when they were going home - and there was something about living in cells at Abu Ghraib that never felt right. "We had some kind of incinerator at the end of our building," Specialist Megan Ambuhl said. "It was this huge circular thing. We just didn't know what was incinerated in there. It could have been people, for all we knew - bodies." Sergeant Davis was not in doubt. "It had bones in it," he said, and he called it the crematorium. "But hey, you're at war," he said. "Suck it up or drive on."
The autumn nights were getting cold in the desert, down to forty degrees, which felt colder in a concrete box, where the wind blew in through empty window frames. From some of those windows you could look out over the prison's perimeter wall into the windows of an apartment complex in the city of Abu Ghraib, a sprawling Baghdad suburb long dominated by Saddam's Baath Party functionaries, and the people in those apartments could look back at you. As the M.P.s unpacked their kit in their new quarters, they were told that snipers sometimes made use of this arrangement to shoot into the prison. The trick was not to make yourself a target: stay away from the windows, keep your lamps dim and covered - don't cast a shadow.
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On her first night at the prison, Specialist Sabrina Harman, a twenty-six-year-old M.P. from Virginia, wrote a letter home to the woman she called her wife:
Kelly
Its 9:00 pm and we can hear shots - no white lights are allowed to be on at night no leaving the building after dark. I hope we aren't here long! We drove in and two helicopters were landed taking prisoners off.
I'm scared of helicopters because of the dream. I think I wrote it down before. I saw a helicopter and it looked like the tail was swaying back and forth then it did it again then a huge flame/round shot up and it exploded. I turned around and we were under attack, I didn't have my weapon (gun) so all we could do was hide under these picknick tables. So back to the prison ... we get to our buildings and I step out of my truck right in front of a picknick table. - I almost freaked out. I have a bad feeling about this place. I want to leave as soon as possible! We are still hoping to be home X-mas or soon after. -
I love you.
I'm going to get some sleep.
I'll write you again soon.
Please don't give up on me!
Sabrina
Like many young reservists, Harman had joined the Army to help pay for college. She had never imagined that she'd see war, and Iraq often felt unreal to her; "like a dream," she said. Then she had that dream - about a gunman shooting at a helicopter from a date palm while she hid, unarmed, beneath a picnic table - and it was all too real. "And it kind of came true, maybe two or three weeks later," she said. "Down the road, they started shooting helicopters from date trees."
That was in Al Hillah, a Shiite town near the ruins of ancient Babylon, sixty miles south of Baghdad, where the 372nd M.P.s had been stationed since they started arriving in Iraq, in May. Having sat out the Shock and Awe phase of the invasion at Fort Lee, in Virginia, they were sent in through Kuwait shortly after George W. Bush, standing beneath a "Mission Accomplished" banner, declared, in May of 2003, that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended" - and in Al Hillah, during that first summer of the war, they had. The M.P.s felt safe walking the streets; they made friends among the Iraqis, played with the kids, shopped in the markets, shared meals at the outdoor cafés. Their headquarters, in an abandoned date-processing factory, were minimally fortified, and were never attacked. Their mission was to provide combat support for the First Marine Expeditionary Force, which controlled the city, and to train local policemen for duty under a new national government. They understood their presence to be temporary, expecting that America would hand over the country to democratically elected Iraqis by summer's end, then get out of the way.
To Harman, the assignment felt like a peacekeeping mission, not a tour of combat, and she wasn't complaining. She was known in the unit as someone who hated to see or do violence. "Sabrina literally would not hurt a fly," her team leader, Sergeant Hydrue Joyner, said. "If there's a fly on the floor and you go to step on it, she will stop you." Specialist Jeremy Sivits, a mechanic in the company's motor pool, said, "We'd try to kill a cricket, because it kept us up all night in the tent. She would push us out of the way to get to this cricket, and would go running out of the tent with it. She could care less if she got sleep, as long as that cricket was safe." That made Sivits laugh, but he worried that she wouldn't survive a firefight. Joyner agreed. "As a soldier, you can't allow your heart to get in the way sometimes, because the moment you do you may get killed or may get someone else killed," he said. "But with Sabrina, I think she would have made a better humanitarian than a soldier, and I don't mean that in a negative way." Sivits couldn't figure why she had joined the military. "She was just too nice to be a soldier," he said.
Harman said that she had wanted to be a cop, like her father and her brother, and her idea was to become a forensic photographer. Pictures had always fascinated her. She made an album of the snapshots people took of her: a diapered toddler in a blue knit cap sitting beside a yellow telephone, her mouth wide open with mirth; a little girl with perfectly combed and bobbed bangs, kneeling in an elaborately frilled dress, white stockings, and white gloves, on a green carpet against a studio backdrop of rampantly blooming cherry trees; a girl riding a pony; a teen-age girl with head shorn to a boyish crop, wearing dungarees and boots and a loose oversized flannel shirt beneath a loose black leather motorcycle jacket; a young woman squinting in a sun-blasted parking lot, wearing full camouflage - helmet, flak jacket, cargo pants - and carrying a riot baton. It was an ordinary album except for one thing: the directness with which she met the camera, eye to eye, looking frankly through the lens as if she were the one taking the picture.
She liked to look. She might recoil from violence, but she was drawn to its aftermath. When others wanted to look away, she'd want to look more closely. Wounded and dead bodies fascinated her. "She would not let you step on an ant," Sergeant Davis said. "But if it dies she'd want to know how it died." And taking pictures fascinated her. "Even if somebody is hurt, the first thing I think about is taking photos of that injury," Harman said. "Of course, I'm going to help them first, but the first reaction is to take a photo." In July, she wrote to her father, "On June 23 I saw my first dead body I took pictures! The other day I heard my first grenade go off. Fun!" Later, she paid a visit to an Al Hillah morgue and took pictures: mummified bodies, smoked by decay; extreme closeups of their faces, their lifeless hands, the torn flesh and bone of their wounds; a punctured chest, a severed foot. The photographs are ripe with forensic information. Harman also had her picture taken at the morgue, leaning over one of the blackened corpses, her sun-flushed cheek inches from its crusted eye sockets. She is smiling - a forced but lovely smile - and her right hand is raised in a fist, giving the thumbs-up, as she usually did when a camera was pointed at her.
"I kind of picked up the thumbs-up from the kids in Al Hillah," Harman said. "Whenever I get into a photo, I never know what to do with my hands, so I probably have a thumbs-up because it's just something that automatically happens. Like when you get into a photo you want to smile." There are at least twenty photos from Al Hillah in which she is in the identical pose, same smile, same thumbs-up: bathing in an inflatable wading pool; holding a tiny lizard; standing at the foot of a wall that bears a giant bas-relief of Saddam (the button of his suit jacket is bigger than her head); fooling around with her best Army buddy, Megan Ambuhl, who is giving her the finger and flashing a tongue stud; holding a tiny figurine of Jesus; holding a long, phallic melon; mounting the ancient stone lion of Babylon at the ruins of King Nebuchadnezzar's city; leaning over the shoulder of an M.P. buddy who is holding a Fanta can on top of which sits a dead cat's head; and so on.
The cat's head was one of Harman's gags. She had a kitten that was killed by a dog, and since it had no visible wounds she performed a rough autopsy, discovered organ damage, and then an M.P. buddy mummified its head. They gave it pebbles for eyes, and Sabrina photographed it in various inventive settings: on a bus seat with sunglasses, smoking a cigarette, wearing a tiny camouflage boonie hat, floating on a little pillow in the wading pool, with flowers behind its ears. She took more than ninety photographs and two videos of it. The series, in its weird obsessiveness and dark comedy, has the quality of conceptual art. At one time or another, at least fifteen of Harman's fellow-M.P.s posed for photos with the cat head; several senior officers and a number of Iraqi men and boys also took the time to have their pictures taken with it. The cat head had become a fetish object, like Huckleberry Finn's dead cat, which Tom Sawyer admires - a scene that Norman Rockwell illustrated in a folksy print captioned "Lemme see him, Huck. My, he's pretty stiff!"
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Much of Harman's photo album from Al Hillah looks like a fantasy travel brochure for post-Saddam Iraq: here she is, skin aglow, beaming, amid swarms of joyous Iraqi children - children clambering into her lap, throwing their arms around her, mobbing her in the streets; here she is welcomed into local homes by mustached men in dishdashas bearing tiny cups of tea; here she is visiting the antiquities, with a Bedouin and his camel at the ziggurat of Borsippa, and with fellow-soldiers at the Ishtar gate of Babylon; and here she is in camouflage, with her arm around a pregnant woman swathed in black, her hand on the future-full belly, the woman grinning. Harman bought her Iraqi friends clothes and food and toys. She bought one family a refrigerator, and made sure it was stocked. Sergeant Joyner said, "The Iraqi kids - you couldn't go anywhere without them saying, 'Sabrina, Sabrina.' They just loved themselves some Sabrina. She'll get these kids balloons, toys, sodas, crackers, cookies, snacks, sweet rolls, Ho Hos, Ding Dongs, Twinkies, she didn't care. She would do anything she could to make them kids smile."
Still, the welcome in Al Hillah was brittle. The Americans had not brought what they'd promised: a new order. The war wasn't over, Iraq had no government, the liberators had become occupiers, and the occupation was slapdash, improvised, and inadequate - at best, a disappointment, and more often an insult. So, in the fever heat, month after month of a hundred and ten and a hundred and twenty degrees, alienation set in. Frustration gave way to hostility, hostility gave way to violence, and by summer's end the violence against Americans was increasingly organized. It was demoralizing. Every Iraqi might be the enemy. What was the point of being there, unwanted? Nobody from the 372nd was killed in Al Hillah, but on patrols there was shooting, in the night there were explosions, and Sabrina had her nightmare. At least the picnic tables had seemed to her fanciful, the random furniture of dreamscapes - until she got to Abu Ghraib, and there they were.
As the 372nd M.P.s arrived at Abu Ghraib, they learned that two Military Intelligence officers had just been killed there in a mortar attack that had left a dozen other soldiers badly wounded, and it didn't take long before the M.P.s had their own but-for-this and but-for-that stories of near misses. "A few nights after we got here ... we were sitting in a meeting and heard 3 thumps then explosion," Harman wrote to Kelly. A firefight ensued. "Next day," she wrote, "found out it was an IED (bomb planted in a Coke can wired to a clicker) blew up a vehicle (no one hurt) then they chased down the 3 men that did it and killed them."
It was said that Abu Ghraib was the most-attacked American base in Iraq at the time. The prison made an obvious target for insurgents: immense and immobile and poorly defended, an outpost of the military occupation in its most despised aspect - holding Iraqis captive. At first, the attacks came at nightfall, around the time that the muezzins' call to prayer was broadcast from loudspeakers atop nearby minarets. "When the mosque was playing, that was mortar o'clock," Sabrina Harman said. "In Al Hillah it was kind of soothing and relaxing, and when you get to Abu it was completely different. When they were praying, that's when you knew you were going to get hit at Abu Ghraib."
With time, the attacks ceased to adhere to such a tight schedule. Mortars began falling by day, and Harman said, "I was more afraid of walking outside or going to take a shower. I pretty much didn't. I would use baby wipes. I kind of went infantry for the time I was there, maybe shower once or twice a month if I had to. The showers were outside. They were made of wood, and if a mortar hit, you were going to die. If I could've peed inside, I probably would have." She said, "You had to go to the showers and the bathroom with your flak vest on." At Abu Ghraib, Javal Davis said, even sleep was no refuge. He hated the thought that he could be killed without knowing it: "I always used to say, 'God, if I go out, if I have to die, don't take me in my sleep. I want to feel it.'"
The soldiers had a drill to follow during an attack: run, grab your body armor, run, crowd into a shelter, and wait. After a while, hardly anybody bothered. "If you get hit, you get hit. There's really nothing you could do," Harman said. "If they got lucky, they hit somebody." For the most part, the mortars fell on empty ground: nobody was hurt, no property damaged. But the randomness and imprecision of the persistent bombardments heightened the sense that no place was safe.
Of course, the prisoners in the tented camps couldn't move, and as mortars kept falling on Abu Ghraib, prisoners kept getting killed and maimed. These casualties were promptly recorded in Serious Incident Reports on the military security networks. Then the dead were removed and their remains were sent to a morgue, while the wounded were treated at the prison clinic or, if the damage was severe, evacuated to a hospital before being returned to the camps. The Americans running the prison knew that it was their duty to protect their prisoners, and they knew that at Abu Ghraib that was impossible.
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The 372nd M.P.s assumed they had been sent to Abu Ghraib because it was dangerous. They were combat M.P.s, trained to support the operations of front-line forces - to conduct route reconnaissance, escort convoys, run patrols, go on raids. They were abundantly armed and travelled with a fleet of heavy vehicles. "We thought we were going to go kick some behind around the prison and help them out," Sergeant Davis said. "But that's not what happened. Once we got there, they told our guys, no, we're going to be prison guards."
The new assignment - to run one of the overcrowded tented camps and the indoor prison complex known, on account of its concrete-bunker-like solidity, as the hard site - bewildered the company. Combat units don't run prisons. That is the province of another cadre of M.P.s, known as internment and resettlement M.P.s, who are trained according to the Army's extensive doctrine on handling all manner of wartime captives and displaced persons. The 372nd M.P.s had no such specialized experience. A couple of them worked as corrections officers back home, but that gave them no exposure to the Geneva Conventions, and the rest of them didn't know the first thing about prison work. Their company commander, Captain Donald Reese, was a window-blinds salesman in civilian life.
Although they did not know it at the time, the lack of experience and training in handling prisoners in wartime made the soldiers of the 372nd ideally suited to Abu Ghraib, where almost nothing was run according to military doctrine. Since May, 2003, America's war in Iraq had been waged as a chapter in the war on terror, and the military's long-standing rules for running prisons in wartime had largely been ignored. By midsummer, the great majority of prisoners of war who were seized during the invasion had been released. Those who remained in captivity - along with all new prisoners seized by the military - were designated "security detainees," a label that had gained currency in the war on terror, to describe "unlawful combatants" and other prisoners who had been denied P.O.W. status and could be held indefinitely, in isolation and secrecy, without judicial recourse. The great majority of the prisoners held at Abu Ghraib were designated security detainees, and placed under the authority of Military Intelligence officers, who instructed the M.P.s on how to treat them.
Later, when the photographs of crimes committed against Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib were made public, the blame focussed overwhelmingly on the Military Police officers who were assigned to guard duty in the Military Intelligence cellblock - Tiers 1A and 1B - of the hard site. The low-ranking reservist soldiers who took and appeared in the infamous images were singled out for opprobrium and punishment; they were represented, in government reports, in the press, and before courts-martial, as rogues who acted out of depravity. Yet the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib was de facto United States policy. The authorization of torture and the decriminalization of cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of captives in wartime have been among the defining legacies of the current Administration; and the rules of interrogation that produced the abuses documented on the M.I. block in the fall of 2003 were the direct expression of the hostility toward international law and military doctrine that was found in the White House, the Vice-President's office, and at the highest levels of the Justice and Defense Departments.
The Abu Ghraib rules, promulgated by Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of ground forces in Iraq, elaborated on the interrogation rules for Guantánamo Bay, which had been issued by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld; they were designed to create far more license than restriction for interrogators who sought to break prisoners. The M.P.s at Abu Ghraib were enlisted as enforcers of such practices as sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation, sensory disorientation, and the imposition of physical and psychological pain. They never received a standard operating procedure to define what was required and what was allowed, but were repeatedly instructed simply to follow the guidance of Military Intelligence officers. An orthodox standard operating procedure leaves nothing to the imagination, and as Megan Ambuhl settled into her job it occurred to her that the absence of a code was the code at Abu Ghraib. "They couldn't say that we broke the rules because there were no rules," she said. And by taking pictures of the prisoners on the M.I. block the M.P.s demonstrated two things: that they never fully accepted what was happening as normal, and that they assumed they had nothing to hide.
By way of orientation, the soldiers of the 372nd who were assigned guard duty at the hard site were given a tour of the place. They saw the ordinary cellblocks for Iraqi criminals and the highly restricted M.I. block, where the most "high value" security detainees were held, during and pending interrogation, in single-occupancy cells. "That's when I saw the nakedness," Javal Davis said. "I'm like, 'Hey, Sarge, why is everyone naked?' You know - 'Hey, that's the M.I. That's what the M.I. does. That's the M.I. thing. I don't know.' 'Why do these guys have on women's panties?' Like - 'It's to break them.'" Davis was wide-eyed. "Guys handcuffed in stress positions, in cells, no lights, no windows. Open the door, turn the light on - 'Oh my God, Allah.' Click, turn the light off, close the door. It's like, Whoa, what is that? What the hell is up with all this stuff? Something's not right here."
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A delegation of the International Committee of the Red Cross visited the M.I. block of the hard site between October 9 and 12, 2003, and had much the same reaction that Sergeant Davis had. The Geneva Conventions require that I.C.R.C. delegates be given unrestricted access to military prisons, to monitor conditions and interview prisoners in private. At Abu Ghraib, however, they reported that there were "many obstacles" to their mission, "imposed, apparently, at the behest of Military Intelligence," and what they were permitted to see and hear did not please them: men held naked in bare, lightless cells, paraded naked down the hallways, verbally and physically threatened, and so forth. The Red Cross was not reassured when M.I. officers explained that these abuses were part of the interrogation process; and the delegates were indignant when they were told that they wouldn't be allowed to see some prisoners. They broke off their visit, and came back two weeks later to complete their inspection. Based on their two visits, the I.C.R.C. reported that the Military Intelligence operation at Abu Ghraib was plagued by gross and systematic violations of the Geneva Conventions - physical abuses that left prisoners rattled by psychological trauma: "incoherent speech, acute anxiety reactions ... suicidal ideas."
On occasion, interrogators told the M.P.s to reward a prisoner - give him a better meal or a pack of cigarettes and let him smoke in his cell - as an incentive for coöperation in interrogation. But mostly what interrogators wanted when they asked for "special treatment" was punishment: take away his mattress, keep him awake, take away his clothes, or "P.T." him - that is, put him through a "physical training" regimen that might range from squat thrusts and low-crawling naked over concrete to being slapped and knocked around while hooded and made to stand on a cardboard box all night.
The M.P.s on the M.I. cellblock never learned the prisoners' names. Officially, they referred to their wards by their five-digit prison numbers, but the numbering system was confusing, and the numbers told you nothing about a person, which made them hard to remember. So the soldiers gave the prisoners nicknames based on their looks and their behavior. A prisoner who made a shank and tried to stab someone was Shank, and a prisoner who got hold of a razor blade and cut himself was called Slash. A prisoner who kept spraying himself and his cell with water and was always asking for a broom was Mr. Clean. A prisoner who repeatedly soaked his mattress with water was Swamp Thing.
There was a man they called Smiley, and a man they called Froggy, and a man they called Piggy. There was a man with no fingers on one hand, only a thumb, who was called Thumby - not to be confused with the enormous man called the Claw or Dr. Claw, because one of his hands was frozen in a half-clenched curl. The man they called Santa Claus was also called Snowman. There was the man they called Taxi Driver, because he'd been arrested while driving a cab, and there was a gaunt man they called Gus, but nobody knew why that name had stuck, and he was also sometimes called Mr. Burns, after the scrawny villain on "The Simpsons."
The nicknames made the prisoners both more familiar and more like cartoon characters, which kept them comfortably unreal when it was time to mete out punishment. Hydrue Joyner took credit for many of the nicknames. "It was jail, but, you know, you can still laugh in jail," he said. Javal Davis, who had spent six years in the Army, "expecting to learn a career field, get some benefits for college, get a step ahead of my peers, get discipline, become a man," enjoyed gallows humor as much as the next guy. The problem was that when you spend your nights doing nasty things to people you've got to endure them yourself. Davis had violence in him, and he found that making life miserable for men toward whom he had no personal animus could work him into a mounting, generalized rage. But aggression could get you only so far before the depression caught up with it. There were many ways to torment a prisoner according to M.I.'s demands, and for the most part there was nothing funny about them.
"Smells," Davis said. "Put them in a cell where the toilet is blocked - backed up. It smells like urine and crap. That would drive you nuts." And you could keep shifting a prisoner's mealtimes, or simply withhold meals. The prisoners ate the same M.R.E.s that the guards ate, but you could deny them the spoon and all the fixings. "If you got Salisbury steak, they got the Salisbury steak, not the rice that comes with it, not the hot sauce, not the snack, not the juice - the Salisbury steak, and that's it," Davis said. "They were starving by the time they'd get ready to get interrogated." At that point, he said, it would be: "O.K., we'll give you more food if you talk."
And you could inflict pain. "You also had stress positions, and you escalated the stress positions," Davis said. "Hand-cuffs behind their backs, high up, in very uncomfortable positions, or chained down. Then you had the submersion. You put the people in garbage cans, and you'd put ice in it, and water. Or stick them underneath the shower spigot naked. They'd be freezing." It was a routine, he said: "Open a window while it was, like, forty degrees outside and watch them disappear into themselves ... before they go into shock."
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Javal Davis had joined the Reserve in 1997, when he was in college. He was impressed by the R.O.T.C. drill he saw: "saluting, about-face - that looked kind of sharp, the rank and file, the order and everything." He thought it was both an honor and honorable to serve his country, and he was willing to die protecting its freedom. "Especially after 9/11," he said. He was born and raised in Roselle, New Jersey, across New York Harbor from the World Trade towers; he had won trophies in state championships in the hundred-and-ten-metre high hurdle, and he hoped one day to be a Roselle policeman or a New Jersey state trooper. "And to see that happen on my own soil," he said. "It turned it up a notch."
But after four or five nights of running the M.I. block of the Abu Ghraib hard site, Davis said, "I just wanted to go home." He felt that what he did and saw there was wrong. "But it was reaffirmed and reassured through the leadership: We're at war. This is Military Intelligence. This is what they do. And it's just a job," he said. "So, over time, you become numb to it, and it's nothing. It just became the norm. You see it - that sucks. It sucks to be him. And that's it. You move on."
Sabrina Harman also said she felt herself growing numb at Abu Ghraib, yet she kept being startled by her capacity to feel fresh shocks. "In the beginning," she said, "you see somebody naked and you see underwear on their head and you're like, 'Oh, that's pretty bad - I can't believe I just saw that.' And then you go to bed and you come back the next day and you see something worse. Well, it seems like the day before wasn't so bad."
Harman was a runner on the night shift at the hard site, filling in where help was needed. "I really don't remember the first day," she said. "I remember the first day of working in Tier 1A and 1B. The first thing that I noticed was this guy - he had underwear on his head and he was handcuffed backwards to a window, and they were pretty much asking him questions. And then there was another guy who was fully dressed in another cell they were interrogating also, or I guess they had already interrogated. That's the first time I started taking photos." The prisoner with the underwear on his head was the one the M.P.s called Taxi Driver. He was naked, and the position he was in - his hands bound behind his back and raised higher than his shoulders, forcing him to bend forward with his head bowed and his weight suspended from his wrists - is known as a "Palestinian hanging," because it is said to be used in Israeli prisons. Later that evening, Taxi Driver was moved to a bed, and Harman took another picture of him there. Then she saw another prisoner, lying on his bed fully dressed, and she photographed him, too.
As far as Harman knew at the time, nobody else had taken any pictures on Tier 1A, although later she saw one from a few days earlier of a naked man in the corridor, handcuffed to the bars of a cell door. She wasn't surprised. By the end of Harman's first night, three of the M.P.s had taken at least twenty-five photographs, and over the ensuing months the M.P.s on the night shift took hundreds more pictures on the M.I. block. The officer in charge of the block at night, Corporal Charles Graner, said that he made a point of showing his photographs to officers higher up the chain of command, and that nobody objected to what they saw. On the contrary, after a month on the job, and after showing scores of photographs of prisoners in torment to his superiors, Graner received a written assessment from his captain, a frequent visitor to the block, who said, "You are doing a fine job.... You have received many accolades from the M.I. units here."
Most of the photographs from Harman's first night show solitary naked prisoners in stress positions, cuffed to the bars of their cells or stretched and bent, forward or backward, over a bunk bed, with their hands bound to the far railing. Some of the prisoners are hooded with sandbags, some with underpants. One naked man is lying face down on a concrete floor. Several photographs show a row of prisoners in orange jumpsuits doing pushups in the hallway, and in one Staff Sergeant Ivan (Chip) Frederick - the night-shift officer in charge of the whole hard site - can be made out, in the background. Nobody in these photographs appears to be aware of the camera, and the pictures have the quality of stolen glimpses of men rendered into hellish statuary. Harman said that she began photographing what she saw because she found it hard to believe. "If I come up to you and I'm like, 'Hey this is going on,' you probably wouldn't believe me unless I had something to show you," she said. "So if I say, 'Hey this is going on. Look, I have proof,' you can't deny it, I guess." That was the impulse, she said. "Just show what was going on, what was allowed to be done."
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On the same night that she started shooting pictures at the hard site, Harman wrote home:
KELLY,
The days are long here, 12 hour shifts. The prison has been quiet for the past two nights. The night before that another IED went off. No one was killed but it destroyed another Hmvv.
None of our unit has been in the mix of the mortars or IEDs. Not yet. Im afraid to leave the prison to go south to use the phones, they plant those IEDs on the roads and set them off as you pass. The sound is unforgettable....
The prisoners we have range from theft to murder of a US soldier. Until Redcross came we had prisoners the MI put in womens panties trying to get them to talk. Pretty funny but they say it was "cruel." I don't think so. No physical harm was done. We've even got Sadams sons body guard here.... Boy did he fail his job. It sucks working with the prisoners because they all have something wrong. We have people with rashes on their bodies and who-ever is in the cell with them start to get it....
I spoke too soon, its 3am, there's a firefight outside. Its never going to be calm here! We have guys with TB! That sucks cause we can catch that. Some have STDs. You name it. Its just dirty!
The food sucks. I live off cup o noodles, that's my meals. The meals they serve are T-REX which is out of a box. If I do come home, boy am I going to eat!
The next night, Harman was back on duty with Charles Graner on the M.I. cellblock, and she wrote again:
October 20, 03 - 12:29am
Kelly,
The lights went out in the prison so here we were in the dark - in the prison. I have watch of the 18 and younger boys. I hear, misses! Misses! I go downstairs and flash my light on this 16 year old sitting down with his sandal smacking ants. Now these ants are Iraqi ants, LARGE! So large they could carry the family dog away while giving you the finger! LARGE. And this poor boy is being attacked by hundreds. All the ants in the prison came to this one boys cell and decided to take over. All I could do was spray Lysol. The ants laughed at me and kept going. So here we were the boy on one side of the cell and me on the other in the dark with one small flashlight beating ants with our shoes.... Poor kids. Those ants even Im scared of.
So that was the start of my shift. They've been stripping "the fucked up" prisoners and handcuffing them to the bars. Its pretty sad. I get to laugh at them and throw corn at them. I kind of feel bad for these guys even if they are accused of killing US soldiers. We degrade them but we don't hit and thats a plus even though Im sure they wish we'd kill them. They sleep one hour then we yell and wake them - make them stay up for one hour, then sleep one hour - then up etc. This goes on for 72 hours while we fuck with them. Most have been so scared they piss on themselves. Its sad. It's a little worst than Basic training ie: being naked and handcuffed....
But pictures were taken, you have to see them! A sandbag was put over their heads while it was soaked in hot sauce. Okay, that's bad but these guys have info, we are trying to get them to talk, that's all, we don't do this to all prisoners, just the few we have which is about 30-40 not many.
The othernight at 3, when I wrote you, the firefight ... 3 killed 6 injured - Iraqis....
Its time to wake them again!!!
And later that same day, on her next night shift, Harman wrote:
Oct 20, 03
10:40pm
Kelly,
Okay, I don't like that anymore. At first it was funny but these people are going too far. I ended your letter last night because it was time to wake the MI prisoners and "mess with them" but it went too far even I can't handle whats going on. I cant get it out of my head. I walk down stairs after blowing the whistle and beating on the cells with an asp to find "the taxicab driver" handcuffed backwards to his window naked with his underwear over his head and face. He looked like Jesus Christ. At first I had to laugh so I went on and grabbed the camera and took a picture. One of the guys took my asp and started "poking" at his dick. Again I thought, okay that's funny then it hit me, that's a form of molestation. You can't do that. I took more pictures now to "record" what is going on. They started talking to this man and at first he was talking "I'm just a taxicab driver, I did nothing." He claims he'd never try to hurt US soldiers that he picked up the wrong people. Then he stopped talking. They turned the lights out and slammed the door and left him there while they went down to cell #4. This man had been so fucked that when they grabbed his foot through the cell bars he began screaming and crying. After praying to Allah he moans a constant short Ah, Ah every few seconds for the rest of the night. I don't know what they did to this guy. The first one remained handcuffed for maybe 1 ½-2 hours until he started yelling for Allah. So they went back in and handcuffed him to the top bunk on either side of the bed while he stood on the side. He was there for a little over an hour when he started yelling again for Allah. Not many people know this shit goes on. The only reason I want to be there is to get the pictures and prove that the US is not what they think. But I don't know if I can take it mentally. What if that was me in their shoes. These people will be our future terrorist. Kelly, its awful and you know how fucked I am in the head. Both sides of me think its wrong. I thought I could handle anything. I was wrong.
Sabrina
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Nobody called Sabrina Harman Mother Teresa at the Abu Ghraib hard site. But even on the Military Intelligence block she retained her reputation as the blithe spirit of the unit, obviously not a leader and yet never a true follower, either - more like a tagalong, the soldier who should never have been a soldier. In her letters from those first nights, as she described her reactions to the prisoners' degradation and her part in it - ricocheting from childish mockery to casual swagger to sympathy to cruelty to titillation to self-justification to self-doubt to outrage to identification to despair - she managed to subtract herself from the scenes she sketched. By the end of her outpourings, she had repositioned herself as an outsider at Abu Ghraib, an observer and recorder, shaking her head, and in this way she preserved a sense of her own innocence.
Harman said that she had imagined herself producing an exposé - to "prove that the US is not what they think," as she wrote to Kelly. The idea was abstract, and she had only a vague notion of how to see it through or what its consequences might be. She said she intended to give the photographs to the press after she got home and out of the Army. But she did not pretend to be a whistle-blower-in-waiting; rather, she wished to unburden herself of complicity in conduct that she considered wrong, without ascribing blame or making trouble for anyone in particular. At the outset, when she photographed what was being done to prisoners, she did not include other soldiers in the pictures. In these images, the soldiers, or the order they serve, are the unseen hand in the prisoners' ordeal. As with crime-scene photographs, which show only victims, we are left to wonder: Who done it?
"I was trying to expose what was being allowed" - that phrase again - "what the military was allowing to happen to other people," Harman said. In other words, she wanted to expose a policy; and by assuming the role of a documentarian she had found a way to ride out her time at Abu Ghraib without having to regard herself as an instrument of that policy. But it was not merely her choice to be a witness to the dirty work on Tier 1A: it was her role. As a woman, she was not expected to wrestle prisoners into stress positions or otherwise overpower them but, rather, just by her presence, to amplify their sense of powerlessness. She was there as an instrument of humiliation. The M.P.s knew very little about their Iraqi prisoners or the culture they came from, but at Fort Lee, before being deployed, they were given a session of "cultural awareness" training, from which they'd taken away the understanding - constantly reinforced by M.I. handlers - that Arab men were sexual prudes, with a particular hangup about being seen naked in public, especially by women. What better way to break an Arab, then, than to strip him, tie him up, and have a woman laugh at him? Taking pictures may have seemed an added dash of mortification, but to Harman it was a way of deflecting her own humiliation in the transaction, by acting as a spectator.
Her letters to Kelly functioned in the same way. "Maybe writing home was a release, to help me forget about what was happening," she said. Then, moments later, she said, "I put everything down on paper that I was thinking. And if it weren't for those letters, I don't think I could even tell you anything that went on. That's the only way I can remember things, is letters and photos." The remarks sound contradictory, but Harman seemed to conceive of memory as an external storage device. By downloading her impressions to a document, she could clear them from her mind and transform reality into an artifact. After all, she said, that was how she experienced the things she did and saw done to prisoners on Tier 1A: "It seems like stuff like this only happened on TV. It's not something you really thought was going on. At least I didn't think it was going on. It's just something that you watch and that is not real."
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Real or unreal, participant or bystander, degrader or degraded, overstimulated or numbed out - Harman may have meant no harm but she seemed to understand that in the malignant circumstances of the M.I. block she could not be entirely harmless. Unable or unwilling to reconcile her most disturbing and her most appealing actions and reactions, she equivocated. When she wrote of "both sides of me," she said, "It was military and civilian - the tough side and the non-tough side. You battle out which one is more stronger, I guess.... You're trained to be tough. I was right out of basic, and you're just trained to do what you're told, and to not let things affect you. You're supposed to set all emotions aside, because this is war. I think it's almost impossible. It is emotional."
Megan Ambuhl, who was Harman's roommate at Abu Ghraib, regarded her as a little sister, in need of protection. "She is just so naïve, but awesome," she said. "A good person, but not always aware of the situation." Harman called Ambuhl "Mommy," and accepted the verdict of naïveté with equal measures of solace and regret. Harman wanted to be tough and she wanted to be nice, and she said, "I shouldn't have been there. I mean obviously I didn't do what I was supposed to. I couldn't hit somebody. I can't stomach that ever. I don't like to watch people get hit. I get sick. I know it's kind of weird that I can see a dead person, but I don't like actual violence. I didn't like taking away their blankets when it was really cold. Because if I'm freezing and I'm wearing a jacket and a hat and gloves, and these people don't have anything on and no blanket, no mattress, that's kind of hard to see and do to somebody - even if they are a terrorist." In fact, she said, "I really didn't see them as prisoners there. I just saw them as people that were pretty much in the same situation I was, just trapped in Abu Ghraib." And she said, "I told them that we were prisoners also. So we felt how they were feeling."
It was easier to be nice to the women and children on Tier 1B, but, Harman said, "It was kind of sad that they even had to be there." The youngest prisoner on the tier was just ten years old - "a little kid," she said. "He could have fit through the bars, he was so little." Like a number of the other kids and of the women there, he was being held as a pawn in the military's effort to capture or break his father.
Harman enjoyed spending time with the kids. She let them out to run around the tier in a pack, kicking a soccer ball, and she enlisted them to help sweep the tier and distribute meals - special privileges, reserved only for the most favored prisoners on the M.I. block. "They were fun," she said. "They made the time go by faster." She didn't like seeing children in prison "for no reason, just because of who your father was," but she didn't dwell on that. What was the point? "You can't feel because you'll just go crazy, so you just kind of blow it off," Harman said. "You can only make their stay a little bit acceptable, I guess. You give them all the candy from the M.R.E.s to make their time go by better. But there's only so much you can do or so much you can feel."
On Tier 1A, Harman liked to sneak cigarettes and doses of Tylenol or ibuprofen to prisoners who were being given a hard time. These small gestures gave her comfort, too, and it pleased her that prisoners sometimes turned to her for help. But Harman was generally as forgiving of her buddies as she was of herself. When toughness failed her, and niceness was not an option, Harman took refuge in denial. "That's the only way to get through each day, is to start blocking things out," she said. "Just forget what happened. You go to bed, and then you have the next day to worry about. It's another day closer to home. Then that day's over, and you just block that one out." At the same time, she faulted herself for not being a more enthusiastic soldier when prisoners on Tier 1A were being given the business. When she was asked how other M.P.s could go at it without apparent inhibition, all she could say was "They're more patriotic."
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One night in the first week of November, 2003, an agent of the Army's Criminal Investigative Division - an agency sometimes described as the military's F.B.I. - came to the M.I. block to interrogate a new prisoner, an Iraqi suspected of involvement in the deaths of American soldiers. The story, as the M.P.s understood it, was that the prisoner kept giving a false name and insisting that he was not who the C.I.D. said he was. He was given the nickname Gilligan and subjected to the standard treatment: the yelling, the P.T., the sleep deprivation. Graner, who took charge of Gilligan's harassment, gave him a cardboard box - an M.R.E. carton - which he was ordered to carry around or to stand on for long stretches. Gilligan was hooded, and normally he would have been naked, too, but, because of the cold, Graner had cut a hole in a prison blanket and draped it over him like a poncho. Staff Sergeant Chip Frederick later told Army investigators that he asked the C.I.D. man - whom he identified as Agent Romero - about Gilligan, and that Romero said, "I don't give a fuck what you do to him, just don't kill them."
Frederick said that he took Romero's words "like an order, but not a specific order," and he explained, "To me, Agent Romero was like an authority figure, and when he said he needed the detainee stressed out I wanted to make sure the detainee was stressed out." Frederick found Gilligan where Graner had left him, perched on his box in the shower room of Tier 1A. "There were a lot of detainees that were forced to stand on boxes," he said. Behind Gilligan, he noticed some loose electrical wires hanging from the wall. "I grabbed them and touched them together to make sure they weren't live wires," he said. "When I did that and got nothing, I tied a loop knot on the end, put it on, I believe, his index finger, and left it there." Frederick said that somebody then tied a wire to Gilligan's other hand and Harman said, "I told him not to fall off, that he would be electrocuted if he did."
Harman had been busy for much of the night, keeping awake the prisoner they called the Claw, and attending to another one they called Shitboy, a maniac on Tier 1B who had the habit of smearing himself with his feces and hurling it at passing guards. She was taking a break when she joined the others in the shower room, and although Gilligan understood English, she wasn't sure if he believed her threat. Besides, the whole mock-electrocution business had not lasted more than ten or fifteen minutes - just long enough for a photo session. "I knew he wouldn't be electrocuted," she said. "So it really didn't bother me. I mean, it was just words. There was really no action in it. It would have been meaner if there really was electricity coming out, and he really could be electrocuted. No physical harm was ever done to him." In fact, she said, "He was laughing at us towards the end of the night, maybe because he knew we couldn't break him."
Once the wires were attached to Gilligan, Frederick had stepped back, instructed Gilligan to hold his arms out straight from his sides, like wings, and taken a picture. Then he took another, identical to the first: the hooded man, in his blanket poncho, barefoot atop his box, arms outstretched, wires trailing from his fingers. Snap, snap - two seconds - and three minutes later Harman took a similar shot, but from a few steps back, so that Frederick appears in the foreground at the edge of the frame, studying on the display screen of his camera the picture he's just taken.
These were not the first photographs taken on the block that night, or the last. That afternoon, when the night shift M.P.s reported for duty at the hard site, their platoon commander had called them to a meeting. "He said there was a prisoner who had died in the shower, and he died of a heart attack," Harman said. The body had been left in the shower on Tier 1B, packed in ice, and shortly after the session with Gilligan somebody noticed water trickling out from under the shower door.
As Harman entered the shower room, she snapped a picture of a black rubber body bag lying along the far wall. Then she and Graner, their hands sheathed in turquoise latex surgical gloves, unzipped the bag. "We just checked him out and took photos of him - kind of realized right away that there was no way he died of a heart attack because of all the cuts and blood coming out of his nose," she said, and she added, "You don't think your commander's going to lie to you about something. It made my trust go down, that's for sure. Well, you can't trust your commander now."
Translucent plastic ice bags covered the dead prisoner from the neck down, but his battered, bandaged face was exposed - mouth agape as if in mid-speech. Harman, the aspiring forensic photographer, shot him from a variety of angles, zooming in and out, while Charles Graner swabbed the floor. When he was done, he took a photograph of Harman posing with the corpse, bending low into the frame, flashing her Kodak smile, and giving the thumbs-up with one gloved hand; and she used his camera to take a similar shot of him. After about seven minutes in the shower room, she zipped the body bag shut, and they left.
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"I guess we weren't really thinking, Hey, this guy has family, or, Hey, this guy was just murdered," Harman said. "It was just - Hey, it's a dead guy, it'd be cool to get a photo next to a dead person. I know it looks bad. I mean, even when I look at them, I go, 'Oh Jesus, that does look pretty bad.' But when we were in that situation it wasn't as bad as it looks coming out on the media, I guess, because people have photos of all kinds of things. Like, if a soldier sees somebody dead, normally they'll take photos of it."
Harman might more accurately have said that it's not unusual to take such pictures. Soldiers have always swapped crazy war stories - whether to boast or confess, to moralize or titillate - and the uncritical response of other soldiers at Abu Ghraib to the photographs from the night shift on the M.I. block suggests that they were seen as belonging to this comradely tradition. Javal Davis took no photographs there and he appeared in none, but he said, "Everyone in theatre had a digital camera. Everyone was taking pictures of everything, from detainees to death." He said, "That was nothing, like in Vietnam where guys were taking pictures of the dead guy with a cigarette in his mouth. Like, Hey, Mom, look. It sounds sick, but over there that was commonplace, it was nothing. I mean, when you're surrounded by death and carnage and violence twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, it absorbs you. You walk down the street and you see a dead body on the road, whereas a couple months ago, you would have been like, 'Oh, my God, a dead body,' today you're like, 'Damn, he got messed up, let's go get something to eat.' You could watch someone running down the street burning on fire, as long as it's not an American soldier, it's 'Somebody needs to go put that guy out.' "
The pictures of Harman and Graner with the corpse may have been taken as a gag - "for personal use," as Frederick said of his photos of Gilligan - but they are starkly at odds with Harman's claim of a larger documentary purpose. By contrast, her grisly, intimate portraits of the corpse convey her shock at discovering its wreckage; and later that evening Harman returned to the shower with Frederick to examine the body more carefully. This time, she looked beneath the ice bags and peeled back the bandages, and she stayed out of the pictures.
"I just started taking photos of everything I saw that was wrong, every little bruise and cut," Harman said. "His knees were bruised, his thighs were bruised by his genitals. He had restraint marks on his wrists. You had to look close. I mean, they did a really good job cleaning him up." She said, "The gauze on his eye was put there after he died to make it look like he had medical treatment, because he didn't when he came into the prison." She said, "There were so many things around the bandage, like the blood coming out of his nose and his ears. And his tooth was chipped - I didn't know if that happened there or before - his lip was split open, and it looked like somebody had either butt-stocked him or really got him good or hit him against the wall. It was a pretty good-sized gash. I took a photo of that as well." She said, "I just wanted to document everything I saw. That was the reason I took photos." She said, "It was to prove to pretty much anybody who looked at this guy, Hey, I was just lied to. This guy did not die of a heart attack. Look at all these other existing injuries that they tried to cover up."
The next morning, after nearly thirty hours in the shower, the corpse was removed from the tier disguised as a sick prisoner: draped with a blanket, taped to an I.V., and rolled away on a gurney. Hydrue Joyner was reminded of the Hollywood farce "Weekend at Bernie's," in which two corporate climbers treat their murdered boss as a puppet, pretending he's alive to avoid suspicion in his death. "I was thinking to myself, Un-freaking-believable. But this came from on high," Joyner said of the charade with the I.V. "I took it as they didn't want any of the prisoners thinking we were in there killing folks." Joyner referred to the dead man as Bernie, but Army investigators soon identified him as a suspected insurgent named Manadel al-Jamadi. He was alleged to have provided explosives for the bombing that blew up the Red Cross headquarters in Baghdad a week before his arrest, and he had died while under interrogation by a C.I.A. agent. Within the week that followed, an autopsy concluded that Jamadi had succumbed to "blunt force injuries" and "compromised respiration"; and his death was classified as a homicide.
Jamadi's C.I.A. interrogator has never been charged with a crime. But Sabrina Harman was. As a result of the pictures she took and appeared in at Abu Ghraib, she was convicted by court-martial, in May of 2005, of conspiracy to maltreat prisoners, dereliction of duty, and maltreatment, and sentenced to six months in prison, a reduction in rank, and a bad-conduct discharge. Megan Ambuhl, Javal Davis, Chip Frederick, Charles Graner, and Jeremy Sivits were among the handful of other soldiers who, on account of the photographs, were also sentenced to punishments ranging from a reduction in rank and a loss of pay to ten years in prison. The only person ranked above staff sergeant to face a court-martial was cleared of criminal wrongdoing. No one has ever been charged for abuses at the prison that were not photographed. Originally, Harman's charges included several counts pertaining to her pictures of Jamadi, but these were never brought to trial. The pictures constituted the first public evidence that the man had been killed during an interrogation at Abu Ghraib, and Harman said, "They tried to charge me with destruction of government property, which I don't understand. And then maltreatment for taking the photos of a dead guy. But he's dead. I don't know how that's maltreatment. And then altering evidence for removing the bandage from his eye to take a photo of it and then I placed it back. When he died, they cleaned him all up and then stuck the bandages on. So it's not really altering evidence. They had already done that for me. But in order to make the charges stick they were going to have to bring in the photos, which they didn't want, because obviously they covered up a murder and that would just make them look bad. So they dropped all the charges pertaining to the guy in the shower."
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As for Gilligan, the Criminal Investigation Department determined that he was not, after all, who he had been suspected of being during his ordeal. "So all of that, and the poor guy was innocent," Harman said. He remained on Tier 1A and soon became one of the M.P.s' favorite prisoners. Gilligan was given the privileged status of a block worker, and was regularly let out of his cell to help with the cleaning. Megan Ambuhl called him "pretty decent," and said she had a picture of him sharing a meal and a smoke with Charles Graner. Sabrina Harman said, "He was just a funny, funny guy. If you're going to take someone home, I definitely would have taken him."
Under the circumstances, Harman was baffled that the figure of Gilligan - hooded, caped, and wired on his box - had eventually become the icon of Abu Ghraib and possibly the most recognized emblem of the war on terror after the World Trade towers. The image had proliferated around the globe in uncountable reproductions and representations - in the press, but also on murals and placards, T-shirts and billboards, on mosque walls and in art galleries. Harman had even acquired a Gilligan tattoo on one arm, but she considered that a private souvenir. It was the public's fascination with the photograph of Gilligan - of all the images from Abu Ghraib - that she couldn't fathom. "There's so many worse photos out there. I mean, nothing negative happened to him, really," she said. "I think they thought he was being tortured, which he wasn't."
Harman was right: there were worse pictures than Gilligan. But, leaving aside that photographs of death and nudity, however newsworthy, don't get much play in the press, the power of an image does not necessarily lie in what it depicts. A photograph of a mangled cadaver, or of a naked man trussed in torment, can shock and outrage, provoke protest and investigation, but it leaves little to the imagination. It may be rich in practical information, while being devoid of any broader meaning. To the extent that it represents any circumstances or conditions beyond itself, it does so generically. Such photographs are repellent, in large part because they have a terrible, reductive sameness. Except from a forensic point of view, they are unambiguous, and have the quality of pornography. They are what they show, nothing more. They communicate no vision and, shorn of context, they offer little, if anything, to think about, no occasion for wonder. They have no value as symbols.
Of course, the dominant symbol of Western civilization is the figure of a nearly naked man, tortured to death - or, more simply, the torture implement itself, the cross. But our pictures of the savage death of Jesus are the product of religious imagination and idealization. In reality, he must have been ghastly to behold. Had there been cameras at Calvary, would twenty centuries of believers have been moved to hang photographs of the scene on their altarpieces and in their homes?
The image of Gilligan achieves its power from the fact that it does not show the human form laid bare and reduced to raw matter but creates instead an original image of inhumanity that admits no immediately self-evident reading. Its fascination resides, in large part, in its mystery and inscrutability - in all that is concealed by all that it reveals. It is an image of carnival weirdness: this upright body shrouded from head to foot; those wires; that pose; and the peaked hood that carries so many vague and ghoulish associations. The pose is obviously contrived and theatrical, a deliberate invention that appears to belong to some dark ritual, a primal scene of martyrdom. The picture transfixes us because it looks like the truth, but, looking at it, we can only imagine what that truth is: torture, execution, a scene staged for the camera? So we seize on the figure of Gilligan as a symbol that stands for all that we know was wrong at Abu Ghraib and all that we cannot - or do not want to - understand about how it came to this.
Monday, March 24, 2008
"Pay Day" Loans Exacerbate Housing Crisis
Go to Original
By Nick Carey
Cleveland - As hundreds of thousands of American home owners fall behind on their mortgage payments, more people are turning to short-term loans with sky-high interest rates just to get by.
While hard figures are hard to come by, evidence from nonprofit credit and mortgage counselors suggests that the number of people using these so-called "pay day loans" is growing as the U.S. housing crisis deepens, a negative sign for economic recovery.
"We're hearing from around the country that many folks are buried deep in pay day loan debts as well as struggling with their mortgage payments," said Uriah King, a policy associate at the Center for Responsible Lending (CRL).
A pay day loan is typically for a few hundred dollars, with a term of two weeks, and an interest rate as high as 800 percent. The average borrower ends up paying back $793 for a $325 loan, according to the Center.
The Center also estimates pay day lenders issued more than $28 billion in loans in 2005, the latest available figures.
In the Union Miles district of Cleveland, which has been hit hard by the housing crisis, all the conventional banks have been replaced by pay day lenders with brightly painted signs offering instant cash for a week or two to poor families.
"When distressed home owners come to us it usually takes a while before we find out if they have pay day loans because they don't mention it at first," said Lindsey Sacher, community relations coordinator at nonprofit East Side Organizing Project on a recent tour of the district. "But by the time they come to us for help, they have nothing left."
The loans on offer have an Annual Percentage Rate (APR) of up to 391 percent -- excluding fees and penalties. All you need for a loan like this is proof of regular income, even government benefits will do.
On top of the exorbitant cost, pay day loans have an even darker side, Sacher notes. "We also have to contend with the fact that pay day lenders are very aggressive when it comes to getting paid."
Ohio is on the front line of the U.S. housing crisis. According to the Mortgage Bankers Association, at the end of the fourth quarter Ohio had 3.88 percent of home loans in the process of foreclosure, the highest of all the 50 U.S. states. The "Rust Belt" state's woes have been further compounded by the loss of 235,900 manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2007.
But while the state as a whole has not done well in recent years, pay day lenders have proliferated.
Bill Faith, executive director of COHHIO, an umbrella group representing some 600 nonprofit agencies in Ohio, said the state is home to some 1,650 pay day loan lenders -- more than all of Ohio's McDonald's, Burger Kings and Wendy's fast food franchises put together.
"That's saying something, as the people of Ohio really like their fast food," Faith said. "But pay day loans are insidious because people get trapped in a cycle of debt."
It takes the average borrower two years to get out of a pay day loan, he said.
Robert Frank, an economics professor at Cornell University, equates pay day loans with "handing a suicidal person a noose" because many people can't control their finances and end up mired in debt.
"These loans lead to more bankruptcies and wipe out people's savings, which is bad for the economy," he said. "This is a problem that has been caused by deregulation" of the U.S. financial sector in the 1990s.
Because of the astronomical interest rates there is a movement among more states to implement a cap of 36 percent APR that is currently in place in 13 states and the District of Columbia.
"Thirty-six percent is still very high," said Ozell Brooklin, director of Acorn Housing in Atlanta, Georgia where there is a cap in place. "But it's better than 400 percent."
Springing the Trap
But even in states like New York where pay day loan caps or bans exist, loopholes allow out-of-state lenders to provide loans over the Internet.
Janet Hudson, 40, ran into pay day loans when she and her fiance broke up, leaving her with a young son and a $1,000 monthly mortgage payment. Short on cash, she took out three small pay day loans online totaling $900 but fell behind with her payments. Soon her monthly interest and fees totaled $800.
"It almost equaled my mortgage and I wasn't even touching the principal of the loans," said Hudson, who works as an administrative assistant.
After falling behind on her mortgage, Hudson asked Rochester, New York-based nonprofit Empire Justice Center for help. A lawyer at Empire, Rebecca Case-Grammatico, advised her to stop paying off the pay day loans because the loans were unsecured debt.
"For months after that the pay day lenders left me voice mails threatening to have me thrown in jail, take everything I owned and destroy my credit rating," Hudson said. After several months, the pay day lenders offered to reach a settlement.
But Hudson was already so far behind on her mortgage that she had to sell her home April 2007 to avoid foreclosure.
"Thanks to the (New York state) ban on pay day loans we've been spared large scale problems, but Internet loans have still cost people their homes," Case-Grammatico said.
A national 36 percent cap on pay day loans to members of the military came into effect last October. The cap was proposed by Republican Senator Jim Talent and Democratic Senator Bill Nelson -- citing APR of up to 800 percent as harmful to the battle readiness and morale of the U.S. Armed Forces.
There are now proposals in other states -- including Ohio, Virginia, Arizona and Colorado -- to bring in a 36 percent cap.
And, in Arkansas, attorney general Dustin McDaniel sent a letter to payday lenders on March 18 asking them to shut down or face a lawsuit, saying they have made a "lot of money on the backs of Arkansas consumers, mostly the working poor."
Alan Fisher, executive director of the said up 2 million Californians have pay day loans. There is a proposed 36 percent cap awaiting debate in California's state assembly.
"We expect pay day loans will make the housing crisis worse," said Alan Fisher, executive director of the California Reinvestment Coalition, an umbrella group of housing counseling agencies. California, a state with an estimated 2 million pay day loans, the assembly is set to debate a bill on introducing a 36 percent cap.
"Thanks to the credit crunch and foreclosure crisis, state and federal policy makers are taking a hard look at the policy of credit at any cost," the CRL's King said. "But more needs to be done, fast."
By Nick Carey
Cleveland - As hundreds of thousands of American home owners fall behind on their mortgage payments, more people are turning to short-term loans with sky-high interest rates just to get by.
While hard figures are hard to come by, evidence from nonprofit credit and mortgage counselors suggests that the number of people using these so-called "pay day loans" is growing as the U.S. housing crisis deepens, a negative sign for economic recovery.
"We're hearing from around the country that many folks are buried deep in pay day loan debts as well as struggling with their mortgage payments," said Uriah King, a policy associate at the Center for Responsible Lending (CRL).
A pay day loan is typically for a few hundred dollars, with a term of two weeks, and an interest rate as high as 800 percent. The average borrower ends up paying back $793 for a $325 loan, according to the Center.
The Center also estimates pay day lenders issued more than $28 billion in loans in 2005, the latest available figures.
In the Union Miles district of Cleveland, which has been hit hard by the housing crisis, all the conventional banks have been replaced by pay day lenders with brightly painted signs offering instant cash for a week or two to poor families.
"When distressed home owners come to us it usually takes a while before we find out if they have pay day loans because they don't mention it at first," said Lindsey Sacher, community relations coordinator at nonprofit East Side Organizing Project on a recent tour of the district. "But by the time they come to us for help, they have nothing left."
The loans on offer have an Annual Percentage Rate (APR) of up to 391 percent -- excluding fees and penalties. All you need for a loan like this is proof of regular income, even government benefits will do.
On top of the exorbitant cost, pay day loans have an even darker side, Sacher notes. "We also have to contend with the fact that pay day lenders are very aggressive when it comes to getting paid."
Ohio is on the front line of the U.S. housing crisis. According to the Mortgage Bankers Association, at the end of the fourth quarter Ohio had 3.88 percent of home loans in the process of foreclosure, the highest of all the 50 U.S. states. The "Rust Belt" state's woes have been further compounded by the loss of 235,900 manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2007.
But while the state as a whole has not done well in recent years, pay day lenders have proliferated.
Bill Faith, executive director of COHHIO, an umbrella group representing some 600 nonprofit agencies in Ohio, said the state is home to some 1,650 pay day loan lenders -- more than all of Ohio's McDonald's, Burger Kings and Wendy's fast food franchises put together.
"That's saying something, as the people of Ohio really like their fast food," Faith said. "But pay day loans are insidious because people get trapped in a cycle of debt."
It takes the average borrower two years to get out of a pay day loan, he said.
Robert Frank, an economics professor at Cornell University, equates pay day loans with "handing a suicidal person a noose" because many people can't control their finances and end up mired in debt.
"These loans lead to more bankruptcies and wipe out people's savings, which is bad for the economy," he said. "This is a problem that has been caused by deregulation" of the U.S. financial sector in the 1990s.
Because of the astronomical interest rates there is a movement among more states to implement a cap of 36 percent APR that is currently in place in 13 states and the District of Columbia.
"Thirty-six percent is still very high," said Ozell Brooklin, director of Acorn Housing in Atlanta, Georgia where there is a cap in place. "But it's better than 400 percent."
Springing the Trap
But even in states like New York where pay day loan caps or bans exist, loopholes allow out-of-state lenders to provide loans over the Internet.
Janet Hudson, 40, ran into pay day loans when she and her fiance broke up, leaving her with a young son and a $1,000 monthly mortgage payment. Short on cash, she took out three small pay day loans online totaling $900 but fell behind with her payments. Soon her monthly interest and fees totaled $800.
"It almost equaled my mortgage and I wasn't even touching the principal of the loans," said Hudson, who works as an administrative assistant.
After falling behind on her mortgage, Hudson asked Rochester, New York-based nonprofit Empire Justice Center for help. A lawyer at Empire, Rebecca Case-Grammatico, advised her to stop paying off the pay day loans because the loans were unsecured debt.
"For months after that the pay day lenders left me voice mails threatening to have me thrown in jail, take everything I owned and destroy my credit rating," Hudson said. After several months, the pay day lenders offered to reach a settlement.
But Hudson was already so far behind on her mortgage that she had to sell her home April 2007 to avoid foreclosure.
"Thanks to the (New York state) ban on pay day loans we've been spared large scale problems, but Internet loans have still cost people their homes," Case-Grammatico said.
A national 36 percent cap on pay day loans to members of the military came into effect last October. The cap was proposed by Republican Senator Jim Talent and Democratic Senator Bill Nelson -- citing APR of up to 800 percent as harmful to the battle readiness and morale of the U.S. Armed Forces.
There are now proposals in other states -- including Ohio, Virginia, Arizona and Colorado -- to bring in a 36 percent cap.
And, in Arkansas, attorney general Dustin McDaniel sent a letter to payday lenders on March 18 asking them to shut down or face a lawsuit, saying they have made a "lot of money on the backs of Arkansas consumers, mostly the working poor."
Alan Fisher, executive director of the said up 2 million Californians have pay day loans. There is a proposed 36 percent cap awaiting debate in California's state assembly.
"We expect pay day loans will make the housing crisis worse," said Alan Fisher, executive director of the California Reinvestment Coalition, an umbrella group of housing counseling agencies. California, a state with an estimated 2 million pay day loans, the assembly is set to debate a bill on introducing a 36 percent cap.
"Thanks to the credit crunch and foreclosure crisis, state and federal policy makers are taking a hard look at the policy of credit at any cost," the CRL's King said. "But more needs to be done, fast."
Telecom Lobbyists Tied to McCain
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By Matt Kelley
Washington - Republican presidential candidate John McCain has condemned the influence of "special interest lobbyists," yet dozens of lobbyists have political and financial ties to his presidential campaign - particularly from telecommunications companies, an industry he helps oversee in the Senate.
Of the 66 current or former lobbyists working for the Arizona senator or raising money for his presidential campaign, 23 have lobbied for telecommunications companies in the past decade, Senate lobbying disclosures show.
McCain has netted about $765,000 in political donations from those telecom lobbyists, their spouses, colleagues at their firms and their telecom clients during the past decade, a USA TODAY analysis of campaign-finance records shows.
It's unclear how much more money those lobbyists have raised for McCain. Eighteen of them are listed by the campaign as "bundlers," which are major fundraisers. McCain doesn't disclose how much each bundler has raised - unlike Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, who categorize their bundlers by the amount they raise. For example, Clinton's "Hillraisers" have brought in more than $100,000 each.
McCain is a senior member of the Senate Commerce Committee, which oversees the telecom industry and the Federal Communications Commission. He has repeatedly pushed industry-backed legislation since 2000, particularly during a second stint as committee chairman from 2003 through 2005. His efforts to eliminate taxes and regulations on telecommunications services won him praise from industry executives.
People who lobbied for telecom companies on those issues include McCain's campaign manager, his deputy manager, his finance chief, his top unpaid political adviser and his Senate chief of staff. Telecom companies have paid the lobbying firms that employed those top five McCain advisers more than $4.4 million since 1999, lobbying records show.
McCain "does not do favors for special interests or lobbyists. Period," spokeswoman Jill Hazelbaker said in an e-mail. McCain opposed Internet access taxes, she said, as part of his "consistent record of opposing new taxes."
McCain has repeatedly sought restrictions on lobbyists and campaign donations, saying they create the appearance of corruption. "It is no coincidence that the most influential lobbyists with the greatest access in the nation's Capitol are also the most prolific political fundraisers," McCain says on his campaign website.
Democratic National Committee spokesman Damien LaVera said McCain is taking a "'Do as I say, not as I do' approach to campaign finance, ethics and lobbying reform."
By Matt Kelley
Washington - Republican presidential candidate John McCain has condemned the influence of "special interest lobbyists," yet dozens of lobbyists have political and financial ties to his presidential campaign - particularly from telecommunications companies, an industry he helps oversee in the Senate.
Of the 66 current or former lobbyists working for the Arizona senator or raising money for his presidential campaign, 23 have lobbied for telecommunications companies in the past decade, Senate lobbying disclosures show.
McCain has netted about $765,000 in political donations from those telecom lobbyists, their spouses, colleagues at their firms and their telecom clients during the past decade, a USA TODAY analysis of campaign-finance records shows.
It's unclear how much more money those lobbyists have raised for McCain. Eighteen of them are listed by the campaign as "bundlers," which are major fundraisers. McCain doesn't disclose how much each bundler has raised - unlike Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, who categorize their bundlers by the amount they raise. For example, Clinton's "Hillraisers" have brought in more than $100,000 each.
McCain is a senior member of the Senate Commerce Committee, which oversees the telecom industry and the Federal Communications Commission. He has repeatedly pushed industry-backed legislation since 2000, particularly during a second stint as committee chairman from 2003 through 2005. His efforts to eliminate taxes and regulations on telecommunications services won him praise from industry executives.
People who lobbied for telecom companies on those issues include McCain's campaign manager, his deputy manager, his finance chief, his top unpaid political adviser and his Senate chief of staff. Telecom companies have paid the lobbying firms that employed those top five McCain advisers more than $4.4 million since 1999, lobbying records show.
McCain "does not do favors for special interests or lobbyists. Period," spokeswoman Jill Hazelbaker said in an e-mail. McCain opposed Internet access taxes, she said, as part of his "consistent record of opposing new taxes."
McCain has repeatedly sought restrictions on lobbyists and campaign donations, saying they create the appearance of corruption. "It is no coincidence that the most influential lobbyists with the greatest access in the nation's Capitol are also the most prolific political fundraisers," McCain says on his campaign website.
Democratic National Committee spokesman Damien LaVera said McCain is taking a "'Do as I say, not as I do' approach to campaign finance, ethics and lobbying reform."
Financial Meltdown: Time for a Holiday From Progressive Politics?
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By Dean Baker
Progressives usually fight for the interests of those at the middle and bottom at the expense of those on top. However, during this period of unprecedented financial crisis, when the Wall Street rich are begging for the helping hand of the government, most progressives appear to be on the sidelines. Rather than taking advantage of this extraordinary opportunity to reduce inequality and educate the public about how the economy really works, progressive voices have been unusually quiet.
While the basic story on the economic crisis should be well known, it is nonetheless worth repeating. The Federal Reserve Board allowed the growth of an $8 trillion housing bubble ($110,000 of housing bubble wealth for every homeowner) in the years from 1996 to 2006. While this bubble was easily recognizable to competent economists, the entire political and financial establishments managed to ignore the housing bubble until it began to burst last year.
The collapse of the bubble is now pushing the economy into a recession. This is the result of both the direct effect of the collapse on the housing market and, more importantly, because of the indirect effect the loss of trillions of dollars of housing wealth has on consumption. Homeowners are rapidly scaling back their consumption after losing much of their life's savings in the last year.
The collapse of the housing bubble has inflicted enormous pain on tens of millions of people, but it is also inflicting pain on Wall Street and the financial sector. The honchos in this sector include many of the richest people in the country. With the collapse of the housing bubble, we are finding out they were far less financially sophisticated than any of us could have imagined. Many banks, brokerage houses and investment funds took highly leveraged bets that assumed the housing bubble would not burst. Now that it has burst, some of the richest people in the country face the risk of a middle-class lifestyle - unless the government comes to the rescue.
This is where things really get painful. Rather than taking this opportunity to tighten the screws, many progressives are standing by the sidelines or actually cheering on plans to bail out the ridiculously rich. The same people - who, on other days, are fighting to raise the income tax rate on the rich or for preserving the estate tax - are just watching as the Fed hands taxpayer dollars to Wall Street, and hoping Congress will come up with tens of billions for buying the bankers' bad mortgage debt.
There is, of course, a cover story - there always is. We have to let the Fed bail out the banks or the financial system would collapse. This would hurt everyone, especially ordinary workers. And the mortgage bailout is supposed to help low- and moderate-income homeowners.
But the cover stories don't hold water. We can keep the banks running without bailing out the incredibly rich people who drove them to ruin. England showed us the way earlier this year with its takeover of Northern Rock, a major bank that got itself in trouble with bad mortgage debt.
We can also help homeowners without bailing out the banks. The rescue proposals currently on the table would have the government buy or guarantee mortgages on homes that are still hugely overpriced. These proposals could give hundreds of billions of dollars to the banks, while providing little help to homeowners. Most would still be paying far more on their mortgage, property taxes and insurance than they would to rent a comparable home. Furthermore, the bailout conditions virtually guarantee they will never have a dime in equity.
As an alternative to bailing out the banks, we can temporarily change the rules on foreclosure to give homeowners the right to rent at the fair market rate. This would provide them with security in their home. More importantly, it would likely create a situation where most homeowners stay in their house as owners, since banks would rather renegotiate mortgage terms than end up as landlords.
The Wall Street boys got themselves in a huge mess through their own greed and stupidity. Now is the time to make sure they enjoy the fruits of their labor. These are the same people who don't think they should have to pay higher taxes so kids can get health care and childcare. There is no reason the rest of us should pay higher taxes so they can keep their mansions in the Hamptons, their private jets and retinue of personal services. Let's leave this one to the market.
By Dean Baker
Progressives usually fight for the interests of those at the middle and bottom at the expense of those on top. However, during this period of unprecedented financial crisis, when the Wall Street rich are begging for the helping hand of the government, most progressives appear to be on the sidelines. Rather than taking advantage of this extraordinary opportunity to reduce inequality and educate the public about how the economy really works, progressive voices have been unusually quiet.
While the basic story on the economic crisis should be well known, it is nonetheless worth repeating. The Federal Reserve Board allowed the growth of an $8 trillion housing bubble ($110,000 of housing bubble wealth for every homeowner) in the years from 1996 to 2006. While this bubble was easily recognizable to competent economists, the entire political and financial establishments managed to ignore the housing bubble until it began to burst last year.
The collapse of the bubble is now pushing the economy into a recession. This is the result of both the direct effect of the collapse on the housing market and, more importantly, because of the indirect effect the loss of trillions of dollars of housing wealth has on consumption. Homeowners are rapidly scaling back their consumption after losing much of their life's savings in the last year.
The collapse of the housing bubble has inflicted enormous pain on tens of millions of people, but it is also inflicting pain on Wall Street and the financial sector. The honchos in this sector include many of the richest people in the country. With the collapse of the housing bubble, we are finding out they were far less financially sophisticated than any of us could have imagined. Many banks, brokerage houses and investment funds took highly leveraged bets that assumed the housing bubble would not burst. Now that it has burst, some of the richest people in the country face the risk of a middle-class lifestyle - unless the government comes to the rescue.
This is where things really get painful. Rather than taking this opportunity to tighten the screws, many progressives are standing by the sidelines or actually cheering on plans to bail out the ridiculously rich. The same people - who, on other days, are fighting to raise the income tax rate on the rich or for preserving the estate tax - are just watching as the Fed hands taxpayer dollars to Wall Street, and hoping Congress will come up with tens of billions for buying the bankers' bad mortgage debt.
There is, of course, a cover story - there always is. We have to let the Fed bail out the banks or the financial system would collapse. This would hurt everyone, especially ordinary workers. And the mortgage bailout is supposed to help low- and moderate-income homeowners.
But the cover stories don't hold water. We can keep the banks running without bailing out the incredibly rich people who drove them to ruin. England showed us the way earlier this year with its takeover of Northern Rock, a major bank that got itself in trouble with bad mortgage debt.
We can also help homeowners without bailing out the banks. The rescue proposals currently on the table would have the government buy or guarantee mortgages on homes that are still hugely overpriced. These proposals could give hundreds of billions of dollars to the banks, while providing little help to homeowners. Most would still be paying far more on their mortgage, property taxes and insurance than they would to rent a comparable home. Furthermore, the bailout conditions virtually guarantee they will never have a dime in equity.
As an alternative to bailing out the banks, we can temporarily change the rules on foreclosure to give homeowners the right to rent at the fair market rate. This would provide them with security in their home. More importantly, it would likely create a situation where most homeowners stay in their house as owners, since banks would rather renegotiate mortgage terms than end up as landlords.
The Wall Street boys got themselves in a huge mess through their own greed and stupidity. Now is the time to make sure they enjoy the fruits of their labor. These are the same people who don't think they should have to pay higher taxes so kids can get health care and childcare. There is no reason the rest of us should pay higher taxes so they can keep their mansions in the Hamptons, their private jets and retinue of personal services. Let's leave this one to the market.
White House Balks at E-Mail Search
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By Jason Leopold
The White House’s chief information officer said the Bush administration should not be compelled to search for millions of e-mails on individual computers and hard drives that may have been lost between 2003 and 2005 because it would be too expensive and require hundreds of hours of work, according to a filing the White House made with a federal court.
The court filing late Friday came in response to an order issued by U.S. Magistrate Judge John Facciola demanding that the White House show cause why it should not be ordered to create and preserve a “forensic copy” of e-mails from individual hard drives.
Facciola entered the show cause order in part because the White House admitted that it did not preserve back-up tapes prior to October 2003, meaning that e-mails may have been lost relating to the administration’s invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and its role in blowing the cover of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson in July 2003.
Theresa Payton, the chief information officer at the White House Office of Administration, responded that the White House routinely destroyed its hard drives every three years “in order to run updated software, reduce ongoing maintenance, and enhance security assurance. So it’s unlikely that any lost e-mails would be retrieved anyway.
“When workstations are at the end of their lifecycle and retired... under the refresh program, the hard drives are generally sent offsite to another government entity for physical destruction in accordance with Department of Defense guidelines,” Payton said in a sworn affidavit.
“Even if computer workstations used during the relevant time period are identifiable and locatable, making ‘forensic copies’ (as that term is defined by the court) of the workstations that may or may not contain residual data of e-mails would impose a significant burden,” Payton said.
But even putting aside the hundreds of hours of work involved, Payton said, there is no evidence to support allegations made in a lawsuit filed by two watchdog groups that the White House has lost as many as 10 million e-mails, or that the extra searching would do any good.
“Even if some older computer workstations were in use, finding them and copying their hard drives with the hope that the residual data contains relevant e-mail information would create an ‘awfully expensive needle to justify searching a haystack,’” the White House said in a separate filing.
“Because the allegation of missing e-mail from archives is unconfirmed, because the allegation of missing e-mails from back-up tapes is conjectural, and because the computer workstations are unlikely to house significant, if any, relevant material the costs of a forensic copy process would far outweigh any speculative benefits,” the White House said.
The Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and George Washington University’s National Security Archive sued the Bush administration last year alleging the White House violated the Presidential Records Act by not archiving e-mails from 2003 to 2005.
The lawsuit followed an internal investigation by officials in Payton’s office who said computer experts could not locate any e-mails from the office of Vice President Dick Cheney between Sept. 30, 2003, and Oct. 6, 2003.
That was the week when the Justice Department launched an investigation into the Plame Wilson leak and set a deadline for Bush administration officials to turn over documents and e-mails containing any reference to Plame Wilson or her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson.
Additionally, Office of Administration staffers said there were at least 400 other days between March 2003 and October 2005 when e-mails could not be located in either Cheney’s office or the Executive Office of the President.
Payton admitted last January that the White House “recycled” its computer back-up tapes until October 2003, making it much more difficult to retrieve e-mails. However, Payton maintains that while e-mails may have been deleted or “recycled,” they can still be recovered.
At a February hearing before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Payton said she felt "very comfortable" that her office would succeed in recovering lost e-mails from "disaster recovery backup tapes." But her office has so far not attempted to do so.
Documents obtained by Rep. Henry Waxman, committee chair, show that Payton’s office advised former White House counsel Harriet Miers in late 2003 or early 2004 about the administration’s failure to archive e-mails.
Miers is said to have immediately informed Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who was investigating the leak of Plame Wilson’s undercover CIA status. Fitzgerald had subpoenaed White House e-mails sent in 2003.
In January 2006, Fitzgerald informed the U.S. District Court in Washington that he "learned that not all e-mail of the Office of the Vice President and the Executive Office of the President for certain time periods in 2003 was preserved through the normal archiving process on the White House computer system."
That document was filed during the discovery phase of the perjury and obstruction of justice trial against former vice presidential staffer I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.
On Feb. 6, 2006, the White House then turned over to Fitzgerald 250 pages of e-mails that it said it had “discovered.” The White House offered no official explanation concerning the circumstances regarding the sudden reappearance of the e-mails, nor comment on whether Fitzgerald's allegations that the e-mails had not been automatically archived were true.
At the time, a White House spokeswoman would only tell me that staffers had "discovered" the batch of documents during a search.
The belated delivery of documents calls into question the integrity of Fitzgerald’s probe, suggesting that he may not have obtained all the evidence related to White House officials’ role in the leak in a timely fashion.
Fitzgerald obtained Libby’s indictment on five counts of perjury and obstruction of justice in October 2005 and tried Libby in early 2007, winning a conviction on four counts. Libby was sentenced to 30 months in prison but President George W. Bush spared the former White House aide any jail time by issuing a commutation.
Testimony and documents implicated several other Bush administration officials in the leaking of Plame Wilson’s identity – including Bush’s chief political adviser Karl Rove and Vice President Dick Cheney – but Fitzgerald has brought no one else to trial and has refused to publicly discuss his prosecutorial judgments.
It is unclear if the possibility of missing e-mails impaired Fitzgerald’s inquiry. Anne Weismann, chief counsel for CREW, told me that she believes there “are unanswered questions about what the special counsel knew, particularly as to scope of e-mail problem.”
”We wrote Fitzgerald a letter last April … suggesting that he reopen the investigation,” Weismann said in an e-mail to me. “To date, we have heard nothing. We have also written to Attorney General Michael Mukasey requesting that he appoint a special prosecutor to investigate and likewise have heard nothing.”
CREW filed a federal court motion earlier this month asking that Payton be held in civil contempt for knowingly submitting false, misleading and incomplete testimony in an affidavit filed with a federal court on Jan. 15.
In that affidavit, Payton said one employee in the Office of Administration — Steve McDevitt, who worked with Payton from 2002 to 2006 — conducted the internal e-mail probe and that the findings are in dispute. She added that she was unaware whether e-mails were properly archived.
CREW said Payton’s responses in her affidavit are “false and appear designed to mislead the court into believing that both discovery and any additional interim relief are unnecessary.”
By Jason Leopold
The White House’s chief information officer said the Bush administration should not be compelled to search for millions of e-mails on individual computers and hard drives that may have been lost between 2003 and 2005 because it would be too expensive and require hundreds of hours of work, according to a filing the White House made with a federal court.
The court filing late Friday came in response to an order issued by U.S. Magistrate Judge John Facciola demanding that the White House show cause why it should not be ordered to create and preserve a “forensic copy” of e-mails from individual hard drives.
Facciola entered the show cause order in part because the White House admitted that it did not preserve back-up tapes prior to October 2003, meaning that e-mails may have been lost relating to the administration’s invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and its role in blowing the cover of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson in July 2003.
Theresa Payton, the chief information officer at the White House Office of Administration, responded that the White House routinely destroyed its hard drives every three years “in order to run updated software, reduce ongoing maintenance, and enhance security assurance. So it’s unlikely that any lost e-mails would be retrieved anyway.
“When workstations are at the end of their lifecycle and retired... under the refresh program, the hard drives are generally sent offsite to another government entity for physical destruction in accordance with Department of Defense guidelines,” Payton said in a sworn affidavit.
“Even if computer workstations used during the relevant time period are identifiable and locatable, making ‘forensic copies’ (as that term is defined by the court) of the workstations that may or may not contain residual data of e-mails would impose a significant burden,” Payton said.
But even putting aside the hundreds of hours of work involved, Payton said, there is no evidence to support allegations made in a lawsuit filed by two watchdog groups that the White House has lost as many as 10 million e-mails, or that the extra searching would do any good.
“Even if some older computer workstations were in use, finding them and copying their hard drives with the hope that the residual data contains relevant e-mail information would create an ‘awfully expensive needle to justify searching a haystack,’” the White House said in a separate filing.
“Because the allegation of missing e-mail from archives is unconfirmed, because the allegation of missing e-mails from back-up tapes is conjectural, and because the computer workstations are unlikely to house significant, if any, relevant material the costs of a forensic copy process would far outweigh any speculative benefits,” the White House said.
The Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and George Washington University’s National Security Archive sued the Bush administration last year alleging the White House violated the Presidential Records Act by not archiving e-mails from 2003 to 2005.
The lawsuit followed an internal investigation by officials in Payton’s office who said computer experts could not locate any e-mails from the office of Vice President Dick Cheney between Sept. 30, 2003, and Oct. 6, 2003.
That was the week when the Justice Department launched an investigation into the Plame Wilson leak and set a deadline for Bush administration officials to turn over documents and e-mails containing any reference to Plame Wilson or her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson.
Additionally, Office of Administration staffers said there were at least 400 other days between March 2003 and October 2005 when e-mails could not be located in either Cheney’s office or the Executive Office of the President.
Payton admitted last January that the White House “recycled” its computer back-up tapes until October 2003, making it much more difficult to retrieve e-mails. However, Payton maintains that while e-mails may have been deleted or “recycled,” they can still be recovered.
At a February hearing before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Payton said she felt "very comfortable" that her office would succeed in recovering lost e-mails from "disaster recovery backup tapes." But her office has so far not attempted to do so.
Documents obtained by Rep. Henry Waxman, committee chair, show that Payton’s office advised former White House counsel Harriet Miers in late 2003 or early 2004 about the administration’s failure to archive e-mails.
Miers is said to have immediately informed Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who was investigating the leak of Plame Wilson’s undercover CIA status. Fitzgerald had subpoenaed White House e-mails sent in 2003.
In January 2006, Fitzgerald informed the U.S. District Court in Washington that he "learned that not all e-mail of the Office of the Vice President and the Executive Office of the President for certain time periods in 2003 was preserved through the normal archiving process on the White House computer system."
That document was filed during the discovery phase of the perjury and obstruction of justice trial against former vice presidential staffer I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.
On Feb. 6, 2006, the White House then turned over to Fitzgerald 250 pages of e-mails that it said it had “discovered.” The White House offered no official explanation concerning the circumstances regarding the sudden reappearance of the e-mails, nor comment on whether Fitzgerald's allegations that the e-mails had not been automatically archived were true.
At the time, a White House spokeswoman would only tell me that staffers had "discovered" the batch of documents during a search.
The belated delivery of documents calls into question the integrity of Fitzgerald’s probe, suggesting that he may not have obtained all the evidence related to White House officials’ role in the leak in a timely fashion.
Fitzgerald obtained Libby’s indictment on five counts of perjury and obstruction of justice in October 2005 and tried Libby in early 2007, winning a conviction on four counts. Libby was sentenced to 30 months in prison but President George W. Bush spared the former White House aide any jail time by issuing a commutation.
Testimony and documents implicated several other Bush administration officials in the leaking of Plame Wilson’s identity – including Bush’s chief political adviser Karl Rove and Vice President Dick Cheney – but Fitzgerald has brought no one else to trial and has refused to publicly discuss his prosecutorial judgments.
It is unclear if the possibility of missing e-mails impaired Fitzgerald’s inquiry. Anne Weismann, chief counsel for CREW, told me that she believes there “are unanswered questions about what the special counsel knew, particularly as to scope of e-mail problem.”
”We wrote Fitzgerald a letter last April … suggesting that he reopen the investigation,” Weismann said in an e-mail to me. “To date, we have heard nothing. We have also written to Attorney General Michael Mukasey requesting that he appoint a special prosecutor to investigate and likewise have heard nothing.”
CREW filed a federal court motion earlier this month asking that Payton be held in civil contempt for knowingly submitting false, misleading and incomplete testimony in an affidavit filed with a federal court on Jan. 15.
In that affidavit, Payton said one employee in the Office of Administration — Steve McDevitt, who worked with Payton from 2002 to 2006 — conducted the internal e-mail probe and that the findings are in dispute. She added that she was unaware whether e-mails were properly archived.
CREW said Payton’s responses in her affidavit are “false and appear designed to mislead the court into believing that both discovery and any additional interim relief are unnecessary.”
Manta Air Base Tied to Colombian Raid on FARC Camp
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By Kintto Lucas
Military and diplomatic sources see a link between the Manta air base, operated by the United States in Ecuadorean territory, and this month’s bombing raid by Colombia on a FARC guerrilla camp in Ecuador.
The U.S. air force was granted a 10-year concession in 1999 to use the base, located in the port city of Manta on Ecuador’s northern Pacific coast, in its counter-drug trafficking activities in the region.
A high-level Ecuadorean military officer, who preferred to remain anonymous, told IPS that "a large proportion of senior officers" in Ecuador share "the conviction that the United States was an accomplice in the attack" launched Mar. 1 by the Colombian military on a FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) camp in Ecuador, near the Colombian border.
FARC’s international spokesman Raúl Reyes and 24 other people were killed in the bombing raid, which prompted Quito to break off diplomatic relations with Colombia, although ties were restored several days later.
"Since Plan Colombia was launched in 2000, a strategic alliance between the United States and Colombia has taken shape, first to combat the insurgents and later to involve neighbouring countries in that war," said the officer. "What is happening today is a consequence of that."
Plan Colombia is a U.S.-financed and supported counterinsurgency and anti-drug strategy carried out by Bogotá.
The information gathered by IPS from military and diplomatic sources indicates that the Manta air base played a role in locating, and carrying out reconnaissance of, the FARC camp in Ecuador.
Ecuadorean Defence Minister Wellington Sandoval said there should be an investigation of whether the Manta air base was used for the attack on the rebel camp in Ecuador. According to the agreement signed by Washington and Quito, it is the Ecuadorean armed forces that should carry out such a probe.
The Manta air base lease clearly stipulates that the base can only be used for counter-narcotics operations.
Sandoval said he cannot provide any information until an investigation has been conducted.
The military source who spoke to IPS said that what should be verified "above all are the flights from the base in the 20 days prior to the bombing, who was on them, the routes they took, and what they were investigating. This data should be complemented by other inquiries and information."
On Mar. 13, Ecuadorean Foreign Minister María Isabel Salvador said she had had "a conversation with (U.S.) Ambassador Linda Jewell who ensured us that the planes (at the base) were not involved in any way" in the bombing of the FARC camp.
But the military source said that "the technology used, first to locate the target, in other words the camp, and later to attack it, was from the United States."
Sandoval declared that "equipment that the Latin American armed forces do not have" was used in the Mar. 1 bombing.
"They dropped around five 'smart bombs'," the kind used by the United States in the First Gulf War (1991), "with impressive precision and a margin of error of just one metre, at night, from planes travelling at high speeds," said the minister.
The military source said that "an attack with smart bombs requires pilots who have experience in such operations, which means U.S. pilots. That’s why I think they did the job and later told the Colombians ‘now go in and find the bodies’, which is when Colombian helicopters and troops showed up" at the site of the raid.
According to the official version of events that the Colombian government gave an Organisation of American States (OAS) fact-finding commission that visited both countries, 10 "conventional" bombs were dropped from five Brazilian-made Super Tucano aircraft and three U.S.-made A-37 planes.
The A-37s dropped bombs guided by GPS (Global Positioning System) and the five Super Tucanos have the technological means to launch bombs at targets with a five-metre margin of error, said the OAS delegation’s report.
But according to the sources who spoke to IPS, the U.S. role in the incident could have been even greater.
The military officer said the bombing raid in Ecuadorean air space was actually led by "U.S. pilots, possibly from DynCorp," a U.S.-based private military contractor that has contracts under Plan Colombia.
The aircraft took off from the Tres Esquinas air base in the southern Colombian department of Caquetá, said the source.
"The planes used to fumigate coca crops or to attack the guerrillas are piloted by serving members of the U.S. military or (former) military men at the service of companies like DynCorp," said the officer.
Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa said on Mar. 15 that his government would not allow "any foreign soldier, whether regular or irregular, to affect the soil of our fatherland. That is why there will be no more foreign bases after 2009."
U.S. usage rights for Manta expire on Nov. 12, 2009.
A committee in the Constituent Assembly that is rewriting the Ecuadorean constitution approved the chapter on territorial sovereignty on Mar. 17.
One of the articles states that "Ecuador is a territory of peace. The establishment of foreign military bases, or foreign installations for military purposes, is not permitted. National military bases cannot be leased to foreign security forces."
In its refusal to renew the air base lease, Ecuador can argue "many causes: direct or indirect participation (by U.S. forces from Manta) in the bombing; negligence for failure to detect the FARC camp with their technology, first of all, and the attack, in second place; and, in case they did detect the camp and the raid, for failing to inform authorities in the partner country, Ecuador," said a diplomatic source who spoke with IPS on condition of anonymity.
Another reason that could be set forth is the direct support that the U.S. Southern Command, under which the U.S. armed forces at the Manta air base operate, has provided the Colombian military.
Admiral James Stavridis, the commander of the Southern Command, told the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee on Mar. 6 that he was monitoring the movement of Ecuadorean and Venezuelan troops to the Colombian border.
Stavridis said that with continuous U.S. support, Colombia has won "hard-fought successes" in the armed conflict. He added that "this key strategic ally" was making irreversible progress towards peace and against "terrorism."
He also told the Senate Committee that the FARC had been reduced from 17,500 guerrillas in 2002 to around 9,000 today.
In July 2001, retired colonel Fausto Cobo, former director of the Ecuadorean army’s Escuela de Guerra (war collage), had told IPS that "Manta, for the purposes of Plan Colombia," is a "U.S. aircraft carrier, on land."
By April 2001, when work began on the expansion of the Manta air strip, an average of 100 troops were taking part in up to three missions a day in F-3 reconnaissance planes.
A diplomatic source from the United States told Britain’s Financial Times at the time that by October the number would go up by 200, and by 200 more within the following few months.
After the expansion of the air strip, bigger, more sophisticated aircraft began to be used for reconnaissance missions.
Manta is one of the four "forward operating locations" (FOLs), along with Curaçao, Aruba and El Salvador, that make up the U.S. network of counter-narcotics bases in Latin America and the Caribbean.
In August 2006, the Expreso de Guayaquil newspaper reported that Colombian pilots were operating alongside Ecuadorean pilots on flights out of the Manta air base.
The commander of an Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) squadron based out of Manta, Rich Boyd, told the Guayaquil newspaper that one of the AWACS aircraft was operated by a Colombian air force officer.
But Boyd said that each country's sensitive and confidential information is protected, because the Colombian officer exits the cockpit when the plane is in Ecuadorean air space, and the Ecuadorean pilot leaves when the plane overflies Colombia.
According to Boyd, three of the U.S. military’s 27 AWACS were at the Manta base. Each one has a price tag of one billion dollars -- nearly double the entire 2005 budget of the Ecuadorean air force.
By Kintto Lucas
Military and diplomatic sources see a link between the Manta air base, operated by the United States in Ecuadorean territory, and this month’s bombing raid by Colombia on a FARC guerrilla camp in Ecuador.
The U.S. air force was granted a 10-year concession in 1999 to use the base, located in the port city of Manta on Ecuador’s northern Pacific coast, in its counter-drug trafficking activities in the region.
A high-level Ecuadorean military officer, who preferred to remain anonymous, told IPS that "a large proportion of senior officers" in Ecuador share "the conviction that the United States was an accomplice in the attack" launched Mar. 1 by the Colombian military on a FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) camp in Ecuador, near the Colombian border.
FARC’s international spokesman Raúl Reyes and 24 other people were killed in the bombing raid, which prompted Quito to break off diplomatic relations with Colombia, although ties were restored several days later.
"Since Plan Colombia was launched in 2000, a strategic alliance between the United States and Colombia has taken shape, first to combat the insurgents and later to involve neighbouring countries in that war," said the officer. "What is happening today is a consequence of that."
Plan Colombia is a U.S.-financed and supported counterinsurgency and anti-drug strategy carried out by Bogotá.
The information gathered by IPS from military and diplomatic sources indicates that the Manta air base played a role in locating, and carrying out reconnaissance of, the FARC camp in Ecuador.
Ecuadorean Defence Minister Wellington Sandoval said there should be an investigation of whether the Manta air base was used for the attack on the rebel camp in Ecuador. According to the agreement signed by Washington and Quito, it is the Ecuadorean armed forces that should carry out such a probe.
The Manta air base lease clearly stipulates that the base can only be used for counter-narcotics operations.
Sandoval said he cannot provide any information until an investigation has been conducted.
The military source who spoke to IPS said that what should be verified "above all are the flights from the base in the 20 days prior to the bombing, who was on them, the routes they took, and what they were investigating. This data should be complemented by other inquiries and information."
On Mar. 13, Ecuadorean Foreign Minister María Isabel Salvador said she had had "a conversation with (U.S.) Ambassador Linda Jewell who ensured us that the planes (at the base) were not involved in any way" in the bombing of the FARC camp.
But the military source said that "the technology used, first to locate the target, in other words the camp, and later to attack it, was from the United States."
Sandoval declared that "equipment that the Latin American armed forces do not have" was used in the Mar. 1 bombing.
"They dropped around five 'smart bombs'," the kind used by the United States in the First Gulf War (1991), "with impressive precision and a margin of error of just one metre, at night, from planes travelling at high speeds," said the minister.
The military source said that "an attack with smart bombs requires pilots who have experience in such operations, which means U.S. pilots. That’s why I think they did the job and later told the Colombians ‘now go in and find the bodies’, which is when Colombian helicopters and troops showed up" at the site of the raid.
According to the official version of events that the Colombian government gave an Organisation of American States (OAS) fact-finding commission that visited both countries, 10 "conventional" bombs were dropped from five Brazilian-made Super Tucano aircraft and three U.S.-made A-37 planes.
The A-37s dropped bombs guided by GPS (Global Positioning System) and the five Super Tucanos have the technological means to launch bombs at targets with a five-metre margin of error, said the OAS delegation’s report.
But according to the sources who spoke to IPS, the U.S. role in the incident could have been even greater.
The military officer said the bombing raid in Ecuadorean air space was actually led by "U.S. pilots, possibly from DynCorp," a U.S.-based private military contractor that has contracts under Plan Colombia.
The aircraft took off from the Tres Esquinas air base in the southern Colombian department of Caquetá, said the source.
"The planes used to fumigate coca crops or to attack the guerrillas are piloted by serving members of the U.S. military or (former) military men at the service of companies like DynCorp," said the officer.
Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa said on Mar. 15 that his government would not allow "any foreign soldier, whether regular or irregular, to affect the soil of our fatherland. That is why there will be no more foreign bases after 2009."
U.S. usage rights for Manta expire on Nov. 12, 2009.
A committee in the Constituent Assembly that is rewriting the Ecuadorean constitution approved the chapter on territorial sovereignty on Mar. 17.
One of the articles states that "Ecuador is a territory of peace. The establishment of foreign military bases, or foreign installations for military purposes, is not permitted. National military bases cannot be leased to foreign security forces."
In its refusal to renew the air base lease, Ecuador can argue "many causes: direct or indirect participation (by U.S. forces from Manta) in the bombing; negligence for failure to detect the FARC camp with their technology, first of all, and the attack, in second place; and, in case they did detect the camp and the raid, for failing to inform authorities in the partner country, Ecuador," said a diplomatic source who spoke with IPS on condition of anonymity.
Another reason that could be set forth is the direct support that the U.S. Southern Command, under which the U.S. armed forces at the Manta air base operate, has provided the Colombian military.
Admiral James Stavridis, the commander of the Southern Command, told the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee on Mar. 6 that he was monitoring the movement of Ecuadorean and Venezuelan troops to the Colombian border.
Stavridis said that with continuous U.S. support, Colombia has won "hard-fought successes" in the armed conflict. He added that "this key strategic ally" was making irreversible progress towards peace and against "terrorism."
He also told the Senate Committee that the FARC had been reduced from 17,500 guerrillas in 2002 to around 9,000 today.
In July 2001, retired colonel Fausto Cobo, former director of the Ecuadorean army’s Escuela de Guerra (war collage), had told IPS that "Manta, for the purposes of Plan Colombia," is a "U.S. aircraft carrier, on land."
By April 2001, when work began on the expansion of the Manta air strip, an average of 100 troops were taking part in up to three missions a day in F-3 reconnaissance planes.
A diplomatic source from the United States told Britain’s Financial Times at the time that by October the number would go up by 200, and by 200 more within the following few months.
After the expansion of the air strip, bigger, more sophisticated aircraft began to be used for reconnaissance missions.
Manta is one of the four "forward operating locations" (FOLs), along with Curaçao, Aruba and El Salvador, that make up the U.S. network of counter-narcotics bases in Latin America and the Caribbean.
In August 2006, the Expreso de Guayaquil newspaper reported that Colombian pilots were operating alongside Ecuadorean pilots on flights out of the Manta air base.
The commander of an Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) squadron based out of Manta, Rich Boyd, told the Guayaquil newspaper that one of the AWACS aircraft was operated by a Colombian air force officer.
But Boyd said that each country's sensitive and confidential information is protected, because the Colombian officer exits the cockpit when the plane is in Ecuadorean air space, and the Ecuadorean pilot leaves when the plane overflies Colombia.
According to Boyd, three of the U.S. military’s 27 AWACS were at the Manta base. Each one has a price tag of one billion dollars -- nearly double the entire 2005 budget of the Ecuadorean air force.
Torture in Our Own Backyards: the Fight Against Supermax Prisons
Go to Original
By Jessica Pupovac
In supermax prisons, 23 hours a day of solitary confinement is the norm. How did our prison system become so cruel?
Imagine living in an 8-by-12 prison cell, in solitary confinement, for eight years straight. Your entire world consists of a dank, cinder block room with a narrow window only three inches high, opening up to an outdoor cement cage, cynically dubbed, "the yard." If you're lucky, you spend one hour, five days a week in that outdoor cage, where you gaze up through a wire mesh roof and hope for a glimpse of the sun. If you talk back to the guards or act out in any way, you might only venture outside one precious hour per week.
You go eight years without shaking a hand or experiencing any physical human contact. The prison guards bark orders and touch you only while wearing leather gloves, and then it's only to put you in full cuffs and shackles before escorting you to the cold showers, where they watch your every move.
You cannot make phone calls to your friends or family and must "earn" two visits per month, which inevitably take place through a Plexiglass wall. You are kept in full shackles the entire time you visit with your wife and children, and have to strain to hear their voices through speakers that record your every word. With no religious or educational programs to break up the time or elevate your thoughts, it's a daily struggle to keep your mind from unraveling.
This is how Reginald Akeem Berry describes his time in Tamms Correctional Facility, a "Supermax" state prison in southern Illinois, where he was held from March 1998 until July 2006. He now works to draw attention to conditions inside Tamms, where 261 inmates continue to be held in extreme isolation.
Once exclusively employed as a short-term punishment for particularly violent jailhouse infractions, today, 44 states hold "supermax" facilities, or "control units," designed specifically to hold large numbers of inmates in long-term solitary confinement. A concept that spread like wildfire in the 1990s, today an estimated 20,000 prisoners live in these modern-day dungeons, judged to be "unmanageable" by prison officials and moved from other penitentiaries to the nearest supermax.
Life in supermax institutions is grueling. Inmates stay in their cells for at least 23 hours per day, and never so much as lay eyes on another prisoner. While many live under these conditions for five years, others continue, uncertain of how to earn their way out, for ten, 15, or even 20 years.
The effects of such extended periods of isolation on prisoners' physical and mental health, their chances of meaningful rehabilitation, and, ultimately, on the communities to which they will eventually return are coming under increasing fire, from lawyers, human rights advocates and the medical professionals who have treated them. Bolstered by growing concern over the U.S.' sanctioning of torture, and the effect that has on the country's international standing, their calls to action are gaining ground. In 2000, and again in 2006, the United Nations Committee Against Torture condemned the kind of isolation imposed by the U.S. government in federal, state and county-run supermax prisons, calling it "extremely harsh." "The Committee is concerned about the prolonged isolation periods detainees are subjected to," they stated, "the effect such treatment has on their mental health, and that its purpose may be retribution, in which case it would constitute cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment."
"Sending Someone to a Supermax Is Punishment"
Defense attorney Jean Maclean Snyder, who has represented several Tamms prisoners, says the U.N. declaration is dead-on. "It is suspected that many [Tamms] prisoners have been sent there in retaliation for filing lawsuits about prison policies; because serious mental illnesses cause them to be disruptive; or simply because wardens at other prisons do not like them," she wrote in 2000, shortly after the original declaration was issued. Allan Mills of the Uptown People's Law Office in Chicago, IL thinks that the ambiguity surrounding how and why inmates are sent to supermax facilities constitutes a violation of due process. "Sending someone to a supermax is punishment," Mills told AlterNet, "and before someone gets punished, they have a right to a fair hearing." "Just like if you were to get a traffic ticket, you have a right to say 'I didn't do it' and bring witnesses, and the police would have to come and testify against you," he said. "The same should go for prisoners who are being subjected to this horrendous long-term confinement." Mills claims he has "tracked a pattern of prisoners being sent to Tamms because of them filing grievances or lawsuits and being jailhouse lawyers."
Assistant Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) Director Sergio Molina told AlterNet that, "Their behavior is their input," and although he claims the decision to transfer an inmate to Tamms is made on a "case-by-case basis," he wasn't able to expand further on the process.
Reginald Berry says he believes he was sent there for being "influential," among the general prison population. A former five-star leader of Chicago's infamous Vice Lords gang, he says he had the opportunity to turn in the "pistol" in a murder case, in return for a five-year sentence. However, he says, cooperating with the police against a fellow Vice Lord would have been "against the code," - so instead he fought a first-degree murder charge in court and wound up with a 33-year jail sentence.
At first, life in Illinois state penitentiaries -- he was transferred to several over the years - was manageable, since, in his words, "the animals were running the zoo." Through what he describes as a vast web of corruption and incompetence, "the guys who was the beast of the place were being rewarded by the warden," and were granted preferential job placements and access to coveted programs. "Might made right."
Following a series of prison riots and attacks on staff in the early 1990s (neither of which Berry had ever witnessed or been involved in) the Illinois General Assembly decided to construct the Tamms Closed Maximum Security Facility, or "CMAX." With a price tag of $72 million, Tamms CMAX opened its doors on March 10, 1998. The prison is capable of housing up to 500 of the department's "most disruptive, violent and problematic inmates," according to an IDOC brochure. IDOC also claims it costs approximately $60,000 per inmate per year to keep the facility running, a figure over three times higher than the per-inmate annual cost at other IDOC facilities.
Berry says that although he heard supermax rumors swirling throughout the jailhouse, he never imagined that he would end up in one. As he tells it, he hadn't been involved in a violent altercation for years. Nonetheless, "they came back and punished all the guys they had given fringe benefits to, and I had been one of those brothers." Days after the Tamms facility opened, ten police officers in full riot gear came to his cell and escorted him out. One of those guards offered him what would be his last cigarette for the next eight years, before putting him on an IDOC van and sending him off to Tamms.
"Many of These Inmates Have Become Psychotic"
The moment he arrived at Tamms, Berry says, he knew "it was a different world." All his belongings were immediately confiscated, right down to his underwear. He was then cavity searched before being escorted, in full shackles and leg irons, to his cell. "Imagine if you've been smoking 20 years," he says. "Overnight you can't smoke no more, overnight you can't talk to your kids no more." The coffee was gone. Work and educational programs were gone. Human interaction was out of reach. Guards barked orders and harassed him.
After about a month of sitting in his cell, he began to hear other inmates' mental health slipping. "You get these guys and they don't know how to acclimate so they start cutting themselves up," he recalled, adding that some would go so far as "taking a pen and sticking it all the way up into their penis," or even worse, attempting suicide.
One expert on the effects of solitary confinement, Dr. Terry Kupers, who consults prison agencies on mental health services, says it is not uncommon for "psychiatric symptoms [to] emerge in previously healthy prisoners ... in this context of near-total isolation and idleness." Psychiatrist and Harvard Medical School professor Dr. Stuart Grassian concurs. In 2005 he told the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America's Prisons that he had evaluated of "scores of inmates" who "psychiatrically deteriorated during the course of their confinement in solitary." "Many of these inmates," he said. "have become psychotic, and many have engaged in self-injurious and self-mutilatory behavior."
Annibal Santiago, who has been incarcerated at Tamms since 1998, describes how it feels from the inside: "The mentally ill prisoners drive the normal prisoners crazy by screaming, crying, yelling into the pod at all hours of the day and night for days non-stop, by banging on toilets, doors, walls, and/or by shaking or kicking the doors so hard that it sounds like rumbling thunder, flooding the wing with toilet water, and by throwing feces at other prisoners or inserting feces into the air vents so that the whole wing receives a dose of the smell for months." "The constant bombardment of unrelenting stress takes its toll like a flurry of well-placed punches on a tired boxer's head," he wrote in a survey compiled by Tamms Year Ten Campaign, and activist group working to shut down the facility.
The Innocent Victims
Berry says that when he was first sentenced, he told his wife, Denise, that he would understand if he had to let her go. "I told her, you didn't commit this crime, you had no part of it and I love you enough not to punish you with the hardships that's to come," he recounted. But she didn't. When he was transferred to Tamms, six hours south of Chicago, she moved the family to nearby Springfield so that they could visit as often as possible. Since the Illinois General Assembly approved funding for Tamms with IDOC's claim that it would serve as nothing more than a temporary, one-year-long "shock treatment" for problem inmates, Mrs. Berry thought it would be temporary move. However, two years later, when it became clear that IDOC had no intention of transferring Berry in the foreseeable future, the family moved back to Chicago. Denise says she wasn't prepared for how difficult it would be to see her husband deteriorate so rapidly at Tamms, after having spent ten years in the general prison population. It was particularly hard for his teenage son, who watched as his father grew emaciated from a meager diet and lack of exercise and saw dark circles form under his eyes from lack of sunlight. "What I had a problem with, being an inmate's wife," Denise says, "was how they degraded the inmates." She described her husband being shackled and forced to sit on a small cement stool for the duration of their visits. When officers would deny him a trip to the restroom, encouraging him to instead prematurely end their visit, she says it made her feel like an accomplice to his suffering.
Berry says one thing that kept him going was keeping his family at the forefront of his mind. It bothered him that Tamms prisoners were only allowed to keep 15 pictures in their cells. "Every time my wife sent me pictures, she'd send me sets of 24, and I'd say, 'ok, I got to decide right here which ones I want,' because if you get caught with more than that they can give you a ticket and send you back down to seg [disciplinary segregation, a unit in which inmates have only one shower and one yard visit per week]." Inmates remain in 'seg' for a minimum of 90 days and are not allowed visits for the duration. Once, says Berry, in what would be a devastating error, he tried to mail a picture to his son rather than throw it away. Because in the photo his son's hat was tilted to one side, the officers gave Berry a disciplinary ticket, allegedly for participating in gang-related activity. "My heart dropped to my knees," he says, "I told them, 'ya'll let this picture in here!'"
The violation earned him a ticket to "seg" for six months -- months that were tacked onto his sentence, which had been reduced for "good time." The decision meant that Berry's sentence would effectively be extended, forcing him to miss his youngest son's college graduation. "I was thinking, 'You missed the eighth grade graduation, you missed the high school graduation, you've got to make this college graduation," Berry recalls. According to Denise, prison officials told her that if she could get proof that the people in the picture -- Berry's brother, Michael, his oldest son, Reggie Jr, and Willie Ware Jr., his nephew -- were not affiliated with gangs, they would reconsider his punishment. "I had to obtain their birth certificates," she says. Denise went to 28th Ward Representative Anazette Collins's office, as did the three men, with their IDs. Their efforts proved futile. In the end, she says, "all this was compiled and sent to Tamms and they did nothing."
Berry's son, Joe, graduated in May of 2006. Berry got home four months later. "I missed my son's graduation," he said, "and it crushed me."
Long-Term Effects
A 2007 Federal Bureau of Prisons (BoP) report lists family ties as integral to rehabilitation and successful re-entry into the general community. However, for many Tamms inmates, the lack of phone access, a prohibitive visitation process, and the distance from Chicago, where two-thirds of Tamms inmates are from, makes it nearly impossible to maintain those ties. The scheduling and approval process at Tamms requires weeks of planning and multiple rounds of paperwork. If a visitor arrives late for their appointment, they are forced to begin the process all over again. With no public transportation near the site, the process become more than some people can handle - or realistically afford.
The BoP also cites access to educational and vocational programs - especially for minority populations - as another key element in prisoner rehabilitation. Yet no such opportunities exist in supermax prisons, other than upper-level, self-guided study for the few inmates who have "earned" it.
According to a March 2008 study published in Prisons Journal, "the rapid expansion of the supermax has occurred despite no empirical evidence substantiating its effectiveness or value." Yet Tamms is just one portion of the billions of dollars that have been invested in supermax prisons. IDOC officials confirmed that they do not collect separate recidivism [or return] statistics for Tamms prisoners - an alarming admission for prisoners, their families, and the broader community that many critics say points to a massive cover-up surrounding the human cost of supermax facilities.
As Paul Beachamp, a Tamms prisoner since 2002, puts it, "What happens when you lock up a dog in a cage for years at a time and constantly harass the dog and treat it bad while it's in the cage? Do you actually think that dog will act right once you let it out?" Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), Chair of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Corrections and Rehabilitation, issued a similar warning before a Senate hearing in 2006. "The experiences inmates have in prison - whether violent or redemptive - do not stay within prison walls, but spill over into the rest of society," he said. "Federal, state, and local governments must address the problems faced by their respective institutions and develop tangible and attainable solutions."
Meanwhile, a range of alternative responses have yet to be explored. A 2006 national survey of 601 prison wardens, funded by the U.S. Department of Justice and administered by the Urban League, showed 62.5% of wardens agreeing or strongly agreeing that "staff training" would be an "effective alternative to supermax prisons." It was the number one choice selected in the survey. Other popular alternatives, in order of preference, were to "use segregation cells in each prison facility," "provide targeted rehabilitative services," and "provide opportunities for spiritual development."
Prison activists across the country are working to shed light on this. Enlisting the support of lawmakers and lawyers who share their concern over the treatment of supermax prisoners - and the rationale behind it - they are fighting for legal precedents that would bring more services to supermax prisons, grant prisoners more mobility and opportunity and, ultimately, shut the facilities down. The Tamms Year Ten Campaign is one such coalition; it recently persuaded the Illinois House of Representatives to hold a hearing, scheduled for April 28th, to consider arguments for and against the effectiveness and legality of Tamms.
Reginald Berry is part of that movement in Chicago, organized under the banner of the Tamms Ten Year campaign, which works to draw attention to the 88 prisoners who have been at Tamms since the day it opened its doors. Today, in addition to raising awareness of conditions inside supermax prisons, he's also working to cut off the "school-to-prisons pipeline" in his community by sharing his experiences in Tamms with Chicago teenagers, through an organization he founded, "Saving Our Sons."
Berry's work is one of the reasons he counts himself among the lucky ones. After spending eight years in a facility where he was told he would have to "relinquish everything, even your personality," Berry has done more than survive; he has thrived, and he is fighting back. Within the current debate over state-sanctioned torture abroad, his voice is an important reminder of the cruel, unusual, and too-often ignored contradictions of our own criminal justice system.
By Jessica Pupovac
In supermax prisons, 23 hours a day of solitary confinement is the norm. How did our prison system become so cruel?
Imagine living in an 8-by-12 prison cell, in solitary confinement, for eight years straight. Your entire world consists of a dank, cinder block room with a narrow window only three inches high, opening up to an outdoor cement cage, cynically dubbed, "the yard." If you're lucky, you spend one hour, five days a week in that outdoor cage, where you gaze up through a wire mesh roof and hope for a glimpse of the sun. If you talk back to the guards or act out in any way, you might only venture outside one precious hour per week.
You go eight years without shaking a hand or experiencing any physical human contact. The prison guards bark orders and touch you only while wearing leather gloves, and then it's only to put you in full cuffs and shackles before escorting you to the cold showers, where they watch your every move.
You cannot make phone calls to your friends or family and must "earn" two visits per month, which inevitably take place through a Plexiglass wall. You are kept in full shackles the entire time you visit with your wife and children, and have to strain to hear their voices through speakers that record your every word. With no religious or educational programs to break up the time or elevate your thoughts, it's a daily struggle to keep your mind from unraveling.
This is how Reginald Akeem Berry describes his time in Tamms Correctional Facility, a "Supermax" state prison in southern Illinois, where he was held from March 1998 until July 2006. He now works to draw attention to conditions inside Tamms, where 261 inmates continue to be held in extreme isolation.
Once exclusively employed as a short-term punishment for particularly violent jailhouse infractions, today, 44 states hold "supermax" facilities, or "control units," designed specifically to hold large numbers of inmates in long-term solitary confinement. A concept that spread like wildfire in the 1990s, today an estimated 20,000 prisoners live in these modern-day dungeons, judged to be "unmanageable" by prison officials and moved from other penitentiaries to the nearest supermax.
Life in supermax institutions is grueling. Inmates stay in their cells for at least 23 hours per day, and never so much as lay eyes on another prisoner. While many live under these conditions for five years, others continue, uncertain of how to earn their way out, for ten, 15, or even 20 years.
The effects of such extended periods of isolation on prisoners' physical and mental health, their chances of meaningful rehabilitation, and, ultimately, on the communities to which they will eventually return are coming under increasing fire, from lawyers, human rights advocates and the medical professionals who have treated them. Bolstered by growing concern over the U.S.' sanctioning of torture, and the effect that has on the country's international standing, their calls to action are gaining ground. In 2000, and again in 2006, the United Nations Committee Against Torture condemned the kind of isolation imposed by the U.S. government in federal, state and county-run supermax prisons, calling it "extremely harsh." "The Committee is concerned about the prolonged isolation periods detainees are subjected to," they stated, "the effect such treatment has on their mental health, and that its purpose may be retribution, in which case it would constitute cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment."
"Sending Someone to a Supermax Is Punishment"
Defense attorney Jean Maclean Snyder, who has represented several Tamms prisoners, says the U.N. declaration is dead-on. "It is suspected that many [Tamms] prisoners have been sent there in retaliation for filing lawsuits about prison policies; because serious mental illnesses cause them to be disruptive; or simply because wardens at other prisons do not like them," she wrote in 2000, shortly after the original declaration was issued. Allan Mills of the Uptown People's Law Office in Chicago, IL thinks that the ambiguity surrounding how and why inmates are sent to supermax facilities constitutes a violation of due process. "Sending someone to a supermax is punishment," Mills told AlterNet, "and before someone gets punished, they have a right to a fair hearing." "Just like if you were to get a traffic ticket, you have a right to say 'I didn't do it' and bring witnesses, and the police would have to come and testify against you," he said. "The same should go for prisoners who are being subjected to this horrendous long-term confinement." Mills claims he has "tracked a pattern of prisoners being sent to Tamms because of them filing grievances or lawsuits and being jailhouse lawyers."
Assistant Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) Director Sergio Molina told AlterNet that, "Their behavior is their input," and although he claims the decision to transfer an inmate to Tamms is made on a "case-by-case basis," he wasn't able to expand further on the process.
Reginald Berry says he believes he was sent there for being "influential," among the general prison population. A former five-star leader of Chicago's infamous Vice Lords gang, he says he had the opportunity to turn in the "pistol" in a murder case, in return for a five-year sentence. However, he says, cooperating with the police against a fellow Vice Lord would have been "against the code," - so instead he fought a first-degree murder charge in court and wound up with a 33-year jail sentence.
At first, life in Illinois state penitentiaries -- he was transferred to several over the years - was manageable, since, in his words, "the animals were running the zoo." Through what he describes as a vast web of corruption and incompetence, "the guys who was the beast of the place were being rewarded by the warden," and were granted preferential job placements and access to coveted programs. "Might made right."
Following a series of prison riots and attacks on staff in the early 1990s (neither of which Berry had ever witnessed or been involved in) the Illinois General Assembly decided to construct the Tamms Closed Maximum Security Facility, or "CMAX." With a price tag of $72 million, Tamms CMAX opened its doors on March 10, 1998. The prison is capable of housing up to 500 of the department's "most disruptive, violent and problematic inmates," according to an IDOC brochure. IDOC also claims it costs approximately $60,000 per inmate per year to keep the facility running, a figure over three times higher than the per-inmate annual cost at other IDOC facilities.
Berry says that although he heard supermax rumors swirling throughout the jailhouse, he never imagined that he would end up in one. As he tells it, he hadn't been involved in a violent altercation for years. Nonetheless, "they came back and punished all the guys they had given fringe benefits to, and I had been one of those brothers." Days after the Tamms facility opened, ten police officers in full riot gear came to his cell and escorted him out. One of those guards offered him what would be his last cigarette for the next eight years, before putting him on an IDOC van and sending him off to Tamms.
"Many of These Inmates Have Become Psychotic"
The moment he arrived at Tamms, Berry says, he knew "it was a different world." All his belongings were immediately confiscated, right down to his underwear. He was then cavity searched before being escorted, in full shackles and leg irons, to his cell. "Imagine if you've been smoking 20 years," he says. "Overnight you can't smoke no more, overnight you can't talk to your kids no more." The coffee was gone. Work and educational programs were gone. Human interaction was out of reach. Guards barked orders and harassed him.
After about a month of sitting in his cell, he began to hear other inmates' mental health slipping. "You get these guys and they don't know how to acclimate so they start cutting themselves up," he recalled, adding that some would go so far as "taking a pen and sticking it all the way up into their penis," or even worse, attempting suicide.
One expert on the effects of solitary confinement, Dr. Terry Kupers, who consults prison agencies on mental health services, says it is not uncommon for "psychiatric symptoms [to] emerge in previously healthy prisoners ... in this context of near-total isolation and idleness." Psychiatrist and Harvard Medical School professor Dr. Stuart Grassian concurs. In 2005 he told the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America's Prisons that he had evaluated of "scores of inmates" who "psychiatrically deteriorated during the course of their confinement in solitary." "Many of these inmates," he said. "have become psychotic, and many have engaged in self-injurious and self-mutilatory behavior."
Annibal Santiago, who has been incarcerated at Tamms since 1998, describes how it feels from the inside: "The mentally ill prisoners drive the normal prisoners crazy by screaming, crying, yelling into the pod at all hours of the day and night for days non-stop, by banging on toilets, doors, walls, and/or by shaking or kicking the doors so hard that it sounds like rumbling thunder, flooding the wing with toilet water, and by throwing feces at other prisoners or inserting feces into the air vents so that the whole wing receives a dose of the smell for months." "The constant bombardment of unrelenting stress takes its toll like a flurry of well-placed punches on a tired boxer's head," he wrote in a survey compiled by Tamms Year Ten Campaign, and activist group working to shut down the facility.
The Innocent Victims
Berry says that when he was first sentenced, he told his wife, Denise, that he would understand if he had to let her go. "I told her, you didn't commit this crime, you had no part of it and I love you enough not to punish you with the hardships that's to come," he recounted. But she didn't. When he was transferred to Tamms, six hours south of Chicago, she moved the family to nearby Springfield so that they could visit as often as possible. Since the Illinois General Assembly approved funding for Tamms with IDOC's claim that it would serve as nothing more than a temporary, one-year-long "shock treatment" for problem inmates, Mrs. Berry thought it would be temporary move. However, two years later, when it became clear that IDOC had no intention of transferring Berry in the foreseeable future, the family moved back to Chicago. Denise says she wasn't prepared for how difficult it would be to see her husband deteriorate so rapidly at Tamms, after having spent ten years in the general prison population. It was particularly hard for his teenage son, who watched as his father grew emaciated from a meager diet and lack of exercise and saw dark circles form under his eyes from lack of sunlight. "What I had a problem with, being an inmate's wife," Denise says, "was how they degraded the inmates." She described her husband being shackled and forced to sit on a small cement stool for the duration of their visits. When officers would deny him a trip to the restroom, encouraging him to instead prematurely end their visit, she says it made her feel like an accomplice to his suffering.
Berry says one thing that kept him going was keeping his family at the forefront of his mind. It bothered him that Tamms prisoners were only allowed to keep 15 pictures in their cells. "Every time my wife sent me pictures, she'd send me sets of 24, and I'd say, 'ok, I got to decide right here which ones I want,' because if you get caught with more than that they can give you a ticket and send you back down to seg [disciplinary segregation, a unit in which inmates have only one shower and one yard visit per week]." Inmates remain in 'seg' for a minimum of 90 days and are not allowed visits for the duration. Once, says Berry, in what would be a devastating error, he tried to mail a picture to his son rather than throw it away. Because in the photo his son's hat was tilted to one side, the officers gave Berry a disciplinary ticket, allegedly for participating in gang-related activity. "My heart dropped to my knees," he says, "I told them, 'ya'll let this picture in here!'"
The violation earned him a ticket to "seg" for six months -- months that were tacked onto his sentence, which had been reduced for "good time." The decision meant that Berry's sentence would effectively be extended, forcing him to miss his youngest son's college graduation. "I was thinking, 'You missed the eighth grade graduation, you missed the high school graduation, you've got to make this college graduation," Berry recalls. According to Denise, prison officials told her that if she could get proof that the people in the picture -- Berry's brother, Michael, his oldest son, Reggie Jr, and Willie Ware Jr., his nephew -- were not affiliated with gangs, they would reconsider his punishment. "I had to obtain their birth certificates," she says. Denise went to 28th Ward Representative Anazette Collins's office, as did the three men, with their IDs. Their efforts proved futile. In the end, she says, "all this was compiled and sent to Tamms and they did nothing."
Berry's son, Joe, graduated in May of 2006. Berry got home four months later. "I missed my son's graduation," he said, "and it crushed me."
Long-Term Effects
A 2007 Federal Bureau of Prisons (BoP) report lists family ties as integral to rehabilitation and successful re-entry into the general community. However, for many Tamms inmates, the lack of phone access, a prohibitive visitation process, and the distance from Chicago, where two-thirds of Tamms inmates are from, makes it nearly impossible to maintain those ties. The scheduling and approval process at Tamms requires weeks of planning and multiple rounds of paperwork. If a visitor arrives late for their appointment, they are forced to begin the process all over again. With no public transportation near the site, the process become more than some people can handle - or realistically afford.
The BoP also cites access to educational and vocational programs - especially for minority populations - as another key element in prisoner rehabilitation. Yet no such opportunities exist in supermax prisons, other than upper-level, self-guided study for the few inmates who have "earned" it.
According to a March 2008 study published in Prisons Journal, "the rapid expansion of the supermax has occurred despite no empirical evidence substantiating its effectiveness or value." Yet Tamms is just one portion of the billions of dollars that have been invested in supermax prisons. IDOC officials confirmed that they do not collect separate recidivism [or return] statistics for Tamms prisoners - an alarming admission for prisoners, their families, and the broader community that many critics say points to a massive cover-up surrounding the human cost of supermax facilities.
As Paul Beachamp, a Tamms prisoner since 2002, puts it, "What happens when you lock up a dog in a cage for years at a time and constantly harass the dog and treat it bad while it's in the cage? Do you actually think that dog will act right once you let it out?" Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), Chair of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Corrections and Rehabilitation, issued a similar warning before a Senate hearing in 2006. "The experiences inmates have in prison - whether violent or redemptive - do not stay within prison walls, but spill over into the rest of society," he said. "Federal, state, and local governments must address the problems faced by their respective institutions and develop tangible and attainable solutions."
Meanwhile, a range of alternative responses have yet to be explored. A 2006 national survey of 601 prison wardens, funded by the U.S. Department of Justice and administered by the Urban League, showed 62.5% of wardens agreeing or strongly agreeing that "staff training" would be an "effective alternative to supermax prisons." It was the number one choice selected in the survey. Other popular alternatives, in order of preference, were to "use segregation cells in each prison facility," "provide targeted rehabilitative services," and "provide opportunities for spiritual development."
Prison activists across the country are working to shed light on this. Enlisting the support of lawmakers and lawyers who share their concern over the treatment of supermax prisoners - and the rationale behind it - they are fighting for legal precedents that would bring more services to supermax prisons, grant prisoners more mobility and opportunity and, ultimately, shut the facilities down. The Tamms Year Ten Campaign is one such coalition; it recently persuaded the Illinois House of Representatives to hold a hearing, scheduled for April 28th, to consider arguments for and against the effectiveness and legality of Tamms.
Reginald Berry is part of that movement in Chicago, organized under the banner of the Tamms Ten Year campaign, which works to draw attention to the 88 prisoners who have been at Tamms since the day it opened its doors. Today, in addition to raising awareness of conditions inside supermax prisons, he's also working to cut off the "school-to-prisons pipeline" in his community by sharing his experiences in Tamms with Chicago teenagers, through an organization he founded, "Saving Our Sons."
Berry's work is one of the reasons he counts himself among the lucky ones. After spending eight years in a facility where he was told he would have to "relinquish everything, even your personality," Berry has done more than survive; he has thrived, and he is fighting back. Within the current debate over state-sanctioned torture abroad, his voice is an important reminder of the cruel, unusual, and too-often ignored contradictions of our own criminal justice system.
For Wounded Veterans and Their Families, a Journey Without Maps
Go to Original
By Lawrence Downes
How much more can this country keep demanding of Justin Bunce, Daniel Verbeke and Michael McMichael?
The men - a marine, a sailor and a National Guardsman - went to Iraq to fight as ordered, served honorably and suffered grave injuries. When they came home another struggle began, to find the care to make them whole again.
At a recent hearing in Washington before the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee, the men's families told anguished tales of trips through bureaucratic hell in the transition between the Defense Department and the Department of Veterans Affairs. That terrain is notorious for its paperwork mountains and tripwires of red tape, but especially treacherous for those with traumatic brain injuries, the signature affliction of this five-year-old war.
Mr. Bunce lost an eye in a roadside bomb blast that also thrust shrapnel into his frontal lobe. His father, Peter, said his care was so "stovepiped," with nobody knowing what anyone else was doing, that doctors working on his head ignored his broken leg. Technicians nearly did an M.R.I. on his brain, not realizing - because scans had not been done - the danger from the metal in his skull. Nobody tried to coordinate his many medications.
Time and again his parents had to cross the country looking for the right therapies and treatment. Whatever expertise they found they stumbled on; there was no one but them to manage his case. The V.A. relied on the brain-damaged young corporal to evaluate his own mental state, and once sent him a letter threatening to cut off benefits because he could not manage his affairs.
Mr. Verbeke's injuries, in a shipboard accident, were catastrophic. He cannot speak or control his limbs, though he can laugh and smile. His father, Robert, told of years of battling with the V.A. over treatment, tests, prescriptions and plans for therapy and assistance at home. "They can't plan or execute," he said. "The only logical conclusion is that they just don't care."
The bomb blasts that crushed Mr. McMichael's vertebrae and damaged his brain did not take his life, at least not all at once. When he came home he seemed intact, but it soon became clear that his psyche was in shreds. His behavior put him in constant danger of losing his independence, his composure and dignity, his home, his family.
His wife, Jackie, has refused to let that happen. As a National Guard spouse not immersed in military life, she had to rely on doggedness and patience and large measures of self-tutoring. It took her a year and a half, on her own, to assemble a support network for her husband.
That forced self-reliance is the most difficult and baffling part of these veterans' struggles. Had they lost arms or legs, the process would have been much easier. But the quest for care for psychic injuries takes place on a landscape without maps. All three families said that doctors and therapists were constantly handing out business cards, friendly advice and vague offers of help, but that it was nearly impossible to find firm guidance and quick, flexible, responsive care.
At the hearing, representatives of the Pentagon and V.A. played to type, laying down a bewildering fog of acronyms and promises. Their central point was that things were moving now, that the two departments were "in the process of implementing more than 400 recommendations of five major studies."
One involved hiring eight "recovery coordinators" to oversee care for 46 people. That's a droplet of care in an ocean of need: about 3,000 veterans have sustained traumatic injuries, by some rough estimates, and untold thousands of others are afflicted by post-traumatic stress disorder.
The U.S. Naval Institute reported last month on the staggering immensity of paperwork that veterans confront. Defense Department records are on paper and often incomplete; the V.A.'s are electronic. Service members have to carry records between departments, never knowing what might be missing.
The three families in this article were unusually, perhaps stunningly, well equipped to overcome those hurdles. Robert Verbeke is a corporate executive. So is Peter Bunce, who worked at the Pentagon as the Air Force's liaison to the House of Representatives. His wife, Patty, is an occupational therapist. Jackie McMichael has a master's degree in counseling, and practically grew up at the V.A. hospital in Durham, N.C., where her mother worked.
As Ms. McMichael testified, Michael sat behind her, his back straight, hands gripping a cane and shaking so hard they looked as if they were plugged into something. Peace has not arrived for him, and may not come anytime soon.
He is lucky in many ways: he has two young children and a wife who loves him and has sacrificed so much to travel the bureaucratic labyrinth for him. It is more than anyone could ask, but far less than any wounded soldier deserves.
"I am educated, tenacious and resourceful," Ms. McMichael said of her work as a self-taught case manager. "And I was completely lost."
By Lawrence Downes
How much more can this country keep demanding of Justin Bunce, Daniel Verbeke and Michael McMichael?
The men - a marine, a sailor and a National Guardsman - went to Iraq to fight as ordered, served honorably and suffered grave injuries. When they came home another struggle began, to find the care to make them whole again.
At a recent hearing in Washington before the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee, the men's families told anguished tales of trips through bureaucratic hell in the transition between the Defense Department and the Department of Veterans Affairs. That terrain is notorious for its paperwork mountains and tripwires of red tape, but especially treacherous for those with traumatic brain injuries, the signature affliction of this five-year-old war.
Mr. Bunce lost an eye in a roadside bomb blast that also thrust shrapnel into his frontal lobe. His father, Peter, said his care was so "stovepiped," with nobody knowing what anyone else was doing, that doctors working on his head ignored his broken leg. Technicians nearly did an M.R.I. on his brain, not realizing - because scans had not been done - the danger from the metal in his skull. Nobody tried to coordinate his many medications.
Time and again his parents had to cross the country looking for the right therapies and treatment. Whatever expertise they found they stumbled on; there was no one but them to manage his case. The V.A. relied on the brain-damaged young corporal to evaluate his own mental state, and once sent him a letter threatening to cut off benefits because he could not manage his affairs.
Mr. Verbeke's injuries, in a shipboard accident, were catastrophic. He cannot speak or control his limbs, though he can laugh and smile. His father, Robert, told of years of battling with the V.A. over treatment, tests, prescriptions and plans for therapy and assistance at home. "They can't plan or execute," he said. "The only logical conclusion is that they just don't care."
The bomb blasts that crushed Mr. McMichael's vertebrae and damaged his brain did not take his life, at least not all at once. When he came home he seemed intact, but it soon became clear that his psyche was in shreds. His behavior put him in constant danger of losing his independence, his composure and dignity, his home, his family.
His wife, Jackie, has refused to let that happen. As a National Guard spouse not immersed in military life, she had to rely on doggedness and patience and large measures of self-tutoring. It took her a year and a half, on her own, to assemble a support network for her husband.
That forced self-reliance is the most difficult and baffling part of these veterans' struggles. Had they lost arms or legs, the process would have been much easier. But the quest for care for psychic injuries takes place on a landscape without maps. All three families said that doctors and therapists were constantly handing out business cards, friendly advice and vague offers of help, but that it was nearly impossible to find firm guidance and quick, flexible, responsive care.
At the hearing, representatives of the Pentagon and V.A. played to type, laying down a bewildering fog of acronyms and promises. Their central point was that things were moving now, that the two departments were "in the process of implementing more than 400 recommendations of five major studies."
One involved hiring eight "recovery coordinators" to oversee care for 46 people. That's a droplet of care in an ocean of need: about 3,000 veterans have sustained traumatic injuries, by some rough estimates, and untold thousands of others are afflicted by post-traumatic stress disorder.
The U.S. Naval Institute reported last month on the staggering immensity of paperwork that veterans confront. Defense Department records are on paper and often incomplete; the V.A.'s are electronic. Service members have to carry records between departments, never knowing what might be missing.
The three families in this article were unusually, perhaps stunningly, well equipped to overcome those hurdles. Robert Verbeke is a corporate executive. So is Peter Bunce, who worked at the Pentagon as the Air Force's liaison to the House of Representatives. His wife, Patty, is an occupational therapist. Jackie McMichael has a master's degree in counseling, and practically grew up at the V.A. hospital in Durham, N.C., where her mother worked.
As Ms. McMichael testified, Michael sat behind her, his back straight, hands gripping a cane and shaking so hard they looked as if they were plugged into something. Peace has not arrived for him, and may not come anytime soon.
He is lucky in many ways: he has two young children and a wife who loves him and has sacrificed so much to travel the bureaucratic labyrinth for him. It is more than anyone could ask, but far less than any wounded soldier deserves.
"I am educated, tenacious and resourceful," Ms. McMichael said of her work as a self-taught case manager. "And I was completely lost."
Vermont Argues Iraq War Is "Mission Expired"
Go to Original
By Terry J. Allen
Vermont legislators are demanding that all of its National Guard troops be sent home from Iraq.
While Congress runs out the clock on President Bush's Iraq War, some Vermont legislators hope to spark a state-by-state movement to quickly withdraw National Guard troops and stanch the flow of blood and treasure.
On Jan. 30, state House members, soon followed by state senators, introduced legislation that called on Vermont's Republican Gov. Jim Douglas to take "all necessary steps" to bring home, as quickly as possible, all members of the Vermont National Guard serving in Iraq.
Rather than arguing whether launching the war was legal or even just, supporters of the bill tacitly concede that Congress' 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force gave Bush the authority to invade Iraq based on two-and only two-criteria: "(1) defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq; and (2) enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq."
But today, Saddam Hussein and the specter of weapons of mass destruction are both dead; there is no national security threat; and the U.N. resolutions are no longer relevant, the bill's supporters say.
"That very specific mission does not exist today," says state Rep. Michael Fisher (D-Lincoln), who introduced the House bill. And when the mission expired, so too did any legal or constitutional basis for the war or the involvement of the Vermont National Guard, the bill states.
"The president no longer has the authorization to command our Vermont National Guard units," says Fisher.
"It's bait and switch," says constitutional legal scholar Peter Teachout, about the shifting mission rationales. "If they want troops there until the last suicide bomber has blown himself to kingdom come, they need to be specific."
If the Democratic-controlled Vermont legislature passes the bill, the governor would have to sign it. The legislation would then have to survive a court challenge. A veto seems likely as Gov. Douglas is a supporter of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). As for a lawsuit, "there is no court in the country that would issue an order requiring withdrawal of troops mid-deployment," says Teachout.
But there are legal precedents, albeit unsuccessful ones, for governors resisting orders to deploy their state's Guard troops. In 1986, then-Gov. Madeleine Kunin joined a five-state effort to stop the Reagan administration from sending Vermont's Army National Guard to Honduras. In 1990, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Perpich v. Department of Defense that governors cannot block a call-up of the National Guard for service overseas. That precedent was limited because, unlike the current challenge, it did not rest on the illegality of the war, some Vermont Democrats argue.
Despite its slim prospects, Fisher insists the bill is more than symbolic: "It may cause a ripple that develops into a larger wave that helps clarify that states do have a role in controlling their National Guard troops, especially when a war effort is illegal."
"If other states join in, it might light a fire under Congress," says Teachout.
Already, legislators in Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Wisconsin are exploring ways to stoke the flame.
While both sides talk mainly about lives and national security, money circles the Vermont debate. State Rep. Patricia O'Donnell (R-Vernon) points out that if Vermont withdrew the Guards, Washington might withdraw the $3 million it contributes to maintaining Vermont's units.
Democrats counter that states are already bearing much of the burden of budgets cuts necessitated by the pricey occupation. At a January press conference, House Speaker Gaye Symington (D-Jericho) said the war in Iraq has had a heavy impact on Vermont and has led to financial cuts in Medicaid and other areas.
The cost also comes in blood. Vermont has one of the highest per capita death rates in Iraq.
The state has tried various strategies to oppose the Iraq War. In February 2007, the legislature approved a non-binding resolution to bring home all the troops. And on March 4, citizens at a Brattleboro, Vt., town meeting passed a resolution calling for its local police to arrest and indict Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney for war crimes. The town of Marlboro, Vt., passed a similar measure.
With Vermont still the only state Bush has never visited, it is unlikely either town will see a presidential perp walk.
By Terry J. Allen
Vermont legislators are demanding that all of its National Guard troops be sent home from Iraq.
While Congress runs out the clock on President Bush's Iraq War, some Vermont legislators hope to spark a state-by-state movement to quickly withdraw National Guard troops and stanch the flow of blood and treasure.
On Jan. 30, state House members, soon followed by state senators, introduced legislation that called on Vermont's Republican Gov. Jim Douglas to take "all necessary steps" to bring home, as quickly as possible, all members of the Vermont National Guard serving in Iraq.
Rather than arguing whether launching the war was legal or even just, supporters of the bill tacitly concede that Congress' 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force gave Bush the authority to invade Iraq based on two-and only two-criteria: "(1) defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq; and (2) enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq."
But today, Saddam Hussein and the specter of weapons of mass destruction are both dead; there is no national security threat; and the U.N. resolutions are no longer relevant, the bill's supporters say.
"That very specific mission does not exist today," says state Rep. Michael Fisher (D-Lincoln), who introduced the House bill. And when the mission expired, so too did any legal or constitutional basis for the war or the involvement of the Vermont National Guard, the bill states.
"The president no longer has the authorization to command our Vermont National Guard units," says Fisher.
"It's bait and switch," says constitutional legal scholar Peter Teachout, about the shifting mission rationales. "If they want troops there until the last suicide bomber has blown himself to kingdom come, they need to be specific."
If the Democratic-controlled Vermont legislature passes the bill, the governor would have to sign it. The legislation would then have to survive a court challenge. A veto seems likely as Gov. Douglas is a supporter of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). As for a lawsuit, "there is no court in the country that would issue an order requiring withdrawal of troops mid-deployment," says Teachout.
But there are legal precedents, albeit unsuccessful ones, for governors resisting orders to deploy their state's Guard troops. In 1986, then-Gov. Madeleine Kunin joined a five-state effort to stop the Reagan administration from sending Vermont's Army National Guard to Honduras. In 1990, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Perpich v. Department of Defense that governors cannot block a call-up of the National Guard for service overseas. That precedent was limited because, unlike the current challenge, it did not rest on the illegality of the war, some Vermont Democrats argue.
Despite its slim prospects, Fisher insists the bill is more than symbolic: "It may cause a ripple that develops into a larger wave that helps clarify that states do have a role in controlling their National Guard troops, especially when a war effort is illegal."
"If other states join in, it might light a fire under Congress," says Teachout.
Already, legislators in Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Wisconsin are exploring ways to stoke the flame.
While both sides talk mainly about lives and national security, money circles the Vermont debate. State Rep. Patricia O'Donnell (R-Vernon) points out that if Vermont withdrew the Guards, Washington might withdraw the $3 million it contributes to maintaining Vermont's units.
Democrats counter that states are already bearing much of the burden of budgets cuts necessitated by the pricey occupation. At a January press conference, House Speaker Gaye Symington (D-Jericho) said the war in Iraq has had a heavy impact on Vermont and has led to financial cuts in Medicaid and other areas.
The cost also comes in blood. Vermont has one of the highest per capita death rates in Iraq.
The state has tried various strategies to oppose the Iraq War. In February 2007, the legislature approved a non-binding resolution to bring home all the troops. And on March 4, citizens at a Brattleboro, Vt., town meeting passed a resolution calling for its local police to arrest and indict Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney for war crimes. The town of Marlboro, Vt., passed a similar measure.
With Vermont still the only state Bush has never visited, it is unlikely either town will see a presidential perp walk.
US steps in to prevent collapse of gas pipeline project
Nabucco pipeline bypasses Russia
Go to Original
By Keith Lee
The United States has stepped in to prevent the collapse of the first project to construct a natural gas pipeline that will bypass Russia. It is pressuring the European Union (EU) and Central Asian countries to complete plans for the construction of the Nabucco pipeline, which is intended to link up with the Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum and planned TransCaspian networks. It will bring gas 3,300 kilometres from Central Asia under the Caspian Sea to Turkey, through Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary to Austria.
Since the beginning of the year, several European countries have abandoned the Nabucco project and defected to the rival South Stream project run by the Russian oil giant, Gazprom. The $10 billion South Stream pipeline is designed to run from Russia under the Black Sea to Bulgaria, where it divides into a southern branch via Greece to Italy and a northern branch via Serbia and Hungary to Austria.
The collapse of the project started on January 18, when Bulgaria announced it was joining Gazprom during Russian President Vladimir Putin´s visit to Sofia. This prompted a complaint from EU High Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy Javier Solana about the lack of a “credible” European external energy policy, whereas “Big deals are being made every day in the Middle East, the Caucasus, the Balkans and Asia, from decisions on pipelines, to exploration deals to strategic partnerships among producers.”
“Our future options seem to be narrowing while others move in a determined manner,” Solana added.
The Bush administration has reacting with growing impatience to these developments, warning the EU that it must go ahead with building the $6 billion pipeline and reduce its growing dependence on Gazprom. US diplomats and officials have been touring European and Central Asian countries putting pressure on a number of states to complete plans on a project that was first proposed a decade ago, in 1998.
Nabucco has been dogged by long-running disputes between the states bordering the Caspian Sea—Russia, Iran, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan—over ownership of the seabed, the route of the pipeline, and how much will be paid to allow transit of the gas through their territory.
Russia has sought to delay the project, since it owns the only major gas pipeline out of Central Asia and is the main customer of gas and oil from Turkmenistan, the main intended source of supply of gas to the Nabucco pipeline. The two other potential suppliers are Azerbaijan, which has large gas reserves but not sufficient to meet demand and Iran, whose involvement the US vehemently opposes.
US Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Steven Mann flew into the Turkmen capital, Ashgabat, for the second time at the end of February to put pressure on President Gurbanguly Berdymuhammedov, a few days after he stopped off in the Azerbaijani capital, Baku. According to regional expert Mars Sariev, Mann was taking advantage of the “power paralysis” during the Russian presidential elections to “exert pressure on Ashgabat to resolve its disputes with Azerbaijan.”
“Berdymuhammedov and [Azerbaijani President Ilham] Aliyev may be able to reach a consensus under the aegis of the Americans and with [the promise of] massive western investment,” Sariev added. Inter-governmental talks between the two countries began in Baku on March 5 and observers say the settlement of an old gas debt dispute paves the way for better relations between the two countries and possible cooperation over the Nabucco pipeline.
There have also been calls for Romania and Ukraine, which have rights over the Black Sea seabed through which the South Stream pipeline will cross, to take out legal action to block or at least delay its construction in the way Baltic countries used their rights last year to delay and modify Gazprom’s North Stream project. There have also been criticisms of Italy’s ENI corporation for providing technology that Russia does not possess to work in deep water environments.
Virtually overnight, in the first week of March, Austria’s OMV, Hungary’s MOL, Turkey’s Botas, Bulgaria’s Bulgargaz and Germany’s RWE pulled out, leaving Rumania’s Transgaz to pick up the pieces. Lack of investment and gas resources and absence of a unified European energy policy were given as the reasons. In a complete about turn, OMV said it will now transfer the terminus and storage centre in Vienna designated for Nabucco to a Gazprom-OMV joint venture. OMV shares rose sharply at the news followed by rumours that Gazprom was backing a takeover by OMV of MOL, the privately-owned Hungarian partner in the consortium. The speed with which these countries changed their allegiances is a graphic reminder of the British statesman Lord Palmerston’s axiom: nations have no permanent allies, only permanent interests.
On February 28, Putin took part in a signing ceremony at the Kremlin with Hungarian Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany, securing the final stage of the pipeline route. Putin mocked the Nabucco project saying, “You can build a pipeline or even two, three, or five. The question is what fuel you put through it and where do you get that fuel. If someone wants to dig into the ground and bury metal there in the form of a pipeline, please do so, we don’t object.”
To rub salt in US and EU’s wounds the Hungarian president declared, “It is with satisfaction and gratitude that I see Russia doing everything it has promised to us. Hungary has realized that it had no alternative to cooperation with Russia.”
In the days before the signing ceremony the US government warned Hungary about the South Stream project. Matthew Bryza, US deputy assistant secretary of state, gave several interviews that were broadcast in Hungary and Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Fried published an article in the country’s leading newspaper. In a visit to Hungary, Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Dan Browne said, “The US view is that we don’t want a gas pipeline war (in Europe). Only Nabucco will promote conditions needed for competition, protect Hungary and other EU states against supply disruptions and increase transparency in the energy sector.”
Gyurcsany’s junior coalition partners, the Alliance of Free Democrats, and the main opposition party Fidesz have also demanded the government push ahead with the Nabucco project.
Within days of the ceremony, Gazprom agreed with Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan to buy their gas at European prices starting in 2009, more than doubling current prices. It was another stab in the back for the Nabucco project and another step in Russia’s aim to form an association of former Soviet gas producers modeled on the OPEC oil cartel.
To this end Russia has exerted enormous pressure on countries from the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe over the last few years. On March 5, at the last minute, Gazprom resumed gas exports to Ukraine after it cut supplies the previous week by 50 percent in a dispute over an alleged $600 million debt and a price hike. The Ukraine constitutes a vital energy transit route for the EU. For countries like Hungary, which receives around 80 percent of its gas from the Ukrainian pipeline, its only source of foreign gas, the latest dispute was a nightmare.
It also had a knock-on effect on the already tenuous coalition between Ukraine’s Prime Minister, Yulia Tymoshenko, and President Viktor Yushchenko, who both rose to power in the Western-backed 2005 Orange Revolution. The former allies have fallen out over the gas crisis, with claims that Tymoshenko sabotaged a deal on Ukraine’s debts that Yushchenko had reached with Putin. According to Federico Bordonaro, a Rome-based analyst, “Gazprom’s moves are not entirely due to business problems. I think Gazprom is striking back at Europe, firstly because Europe recognized Kosovo’s independence without listening to Russia’s concerns, and secondly because Ukraine is heading toward NATO integration.”
Bordonaro also believes the recent Russia-Ukraine stand-off, following the similar incident two years ago, will make Europe “try to push for new key agreements with Libya, Algeria, and it may also try to revive the Nabucco pipeline.” The Ukraine is also promoting its own pipeline, White Stream, as an alternative to South Stream and Nabucco.
Gazprom’s successes have wiped out Russia’s debt and accounts for 25 percent of its foreign earnings. The company has a market value of $245 billion and is growing rapidly through an aggressive campaign of buying up state energy companies across Europe. It currently provides all the gas needs of neighbouring countries like Latvia and almost half the needs of the rest of Europe, which will rise from 200 billion cubic metres today to around 600 billion cubic metres by 2020.
The economic basis for Russia’s new geopolitical ambitions rests on its huge external trade surplus, which has risen in the past few years to about $100 billion annually. Accumulation of the “oil money” has permitted the state to build up its gold reserves to about $300 billion and top up the so-called Stabilization Fund, which now holds over $100 billion.
There is also an important political reason for the relative strengthening of Russia’s economic and political role, which is related to the growth of inter-imperialist tensions. The occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan by US imperialism have led to a growing anxiety among the European ruling elites that a US stranglehold over the extraction and transport of the oil and natural gas resources of the Middle East and Central Asia will conflict with their own interests.
These fears and the growing role of China and India have been utilised by the Kremlin to further its interests in Europe. The European powers and Russia find themselves in the contradictory position of growing interdependence and rivalry. Lacking sufficient energy resources of its own and home to some of the world’s largest energy companies, Europe sees Russian oil and gas as a vital geopolitical asset and source of profits. For the Russian elite, expansion in Europe is necessary to secure and advance its political and economic interests in a situation where it is being encircled by a militaristic US.
While Secretary Browne has said that the US and Europe do not want a “pipeline war”, this is exactly what threatens. It could be sooner rather than later before the great powers send in their armies to protect their strategic interests in the region. Sections of the European ruling elite also recognise this. In a recent speech European Commissioner for Energy Andris Piebalgs made it clear that “The overall aim is to break down the divisions on the external borders of the European Union. Just because the external border of the Union has been reached, an electron just does not turn around and go back to its generator. Nor does a gas molecule have a passport. What I am saying is that the borders of the European Union are not the borders of the energy market. In an enlarged European Union of 25 [states], this is more obviously the case, as several Member States were integrated into other systems before they joined the EU. We cannot ignore this historical fact. So the Commission and the Council of the European Union have made it clear that we need to extend the borders of the internal energy market and extend the reach of the single regulatory framework of the European Union.”
Go to Original
By Keith Lee
The United States has stepped in to prevent the collapse of the first project to construct a natural gas pipeline that will bypass Russia. It is pressuring the European Union (EU) and Central Asian countries to complete plans for the construction of the Nabucco pipeline, which is intended to link up with the Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum and planned TransCaspian networks. It will bring gas 3,300 kilometres from Central Asia under the Caspian Sea to Turkey, through Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary to Austria.
Since the beginning of the year, several European countries have abandoned the Nabucco project and defected to the rival South Stream project run by the Russian oil giant, Gazprom. The $10 billion South Stream pipeline is designed to run from Russia under the Black Sea to Bulgaria, where it divides into a southern branch via Greece to Italy and a northern branch via Serbia and Hungary to Austria.
The collapse of the project started on January 18, when Bulgaria announced it was joining Gazprom during Russian President Vladimir Putin´s visit to Sofia. This prompted a complaint from EU High Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy Javier Solana about the lack of a “credible” European external energy policy, whereas “Big deals are being made every day in the Middle East, the Caucasus, the Balkans and Asia, from decisions on pipelines, to exploration deals to strategic partnerships among producers.”
“Our future options seem to be narrowing while others move in a determined manner,” Solana added.
The Bush administration has reacting with growing impatience to these developments, warning the EU that it must go ahead with building the $6 billion pipeline and reduce its growing dependence on Gazprom. US diplomats and officials have been touring European and Central Asian countries putting pressure on a number of states to complete plans on a project that was first proposed a decade ago, in 1998.
Nabucco has been dogged by long-running disputes between the states bordering the Caspian Sea—Russia, Iran, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan—over ownership of the seabed, the route of the pipeline, and how much will be paid to allow transit of the gas through their territory.
Russia has sought to delay the project, since it owns the only major gas pipeline out of Central Asia and is the main customer of gas and oil from Turkmenistan, the main intended source of supply of gas to the Nabucco pipeline. The two other potential suppliers are Azerbaijan, which has large gas reserves but not sufficient to meet demand and Iran, whose involvement the US vehemently opposes.
US Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Steven Mann flew into the Turkmen capital, Ashgabat, for the second time at the end of February to put pressure on President Gurbanguly Berdymuhammedov, a few days after he stopped off in the Azerbaijani capital, Baku. According to regional expert Mars Sariev, Mann was taking advantage of the “power paralysis” during the Russian presidential elections to “exert pressure on Ashgabat to resolve its disputes with Azerbaijan.”
“Berdymuhammedov and [Azerbaijani President Ilham] Aliyev may be able to reach a consensus under the aegis of the Americans and with [the promise of] massive western investment,” Sariev added. Inter-governmental talks between the two countries began in Baku on March 5 and observers say the settlement of an old gas debt dispute paves the way for better relations between the two countries and possible cooperation over the Nabucco pipeline.
There have also been calls for Romania and Ukraine, which have rights over the Black Sea seabed through which the South Stream pipeline will cross, to take out legal action to block or at least delay its construction in the way Baltic countries used their rights last year to delay and modify Gazprom’s North Stream project. There have also been criticisms of Italy’s ENI corporation for providing technology that Russia does not possess to work in deep water environments.
Virtually overnight, in the first week of March, Austria’s OMV, Hungary’s MOL, Turkey’s Botas, Bulgaria’s Bulgargaz and Germany’s RWE pulled out, leaving Rumania’s Transgaz to pick up the pieces. Lack of investment and gas resources and absence of a unified European energy policy were given as the reasons. In a complete about turn, OMV said it will now transfer the terminus and storage centre in Vienna designated for Nabucco to a Gazprom-OMV joint venture. OMV shares rose sharply at the news followed by rumours that Gazprom was backing a takeover by OMV of MOL, the privately-owned Hungarian partner in the consortium. The speed with which these countries changed their allegiances is a graphic reminder of the British statesman Lord Palmerston’s axiom: nations have no permanent allies, only permanent interests.
On February 28, Putin took part in a signing ceremony at the Kremlin with Hungarian Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany, securing the final stage of the pipeline route. Putin mocked the Nabucco project saying, “You can build a pipeline or even two, three, or five. The question is what fuel you put through it and where do you get that fuel. If someone wants to dig into the ground and bury metal there in the form of a pipeline, please do so, we don’t object.”
To rub salt in US and EU’s wounds the Hungarian president declared, “It is with satisfaction and gratitude that I see Russia doing everything it has promised to us. Hungary has realized that it had no alternative to cooperation with Russia.”
In the days before the signing ceremony the US government warned Hungary about the South Stream project. Matthew Bryza, US deputy assistant secretary of state, gave several interviews that were broadcast in Hungary and Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Fried published an article in the country’s leading newspaper. In a visit to Hungary, Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Dan Browne said, “The US view is that we don’t want a gas pipeline war (in Europe). Only Nabucco will promote conditions needed for competition, protect Hungary and other EU states against supply disruptions and increase transparency in the energy sector.”
Gyurcsany’s junior coalition partners, the Alliance of Free Democrats, and the main opposition party Fidesz have also demanded the government push ahead with the Nabucco project.
Within days of the ceremony, Gazprom agreed with Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan to buy their gas at European prices starting in 2009, more than doubling current prices. It was another stab in the back for the Nabucco project and another step in Russia’s aim to form an association of former Soviet gas producers modeled on the OPEC oil cartel.
To this end Russia has exerted enormous pressure on countries from the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe over the last few years. On March 5, at the last minute, Gazprom resumed gas exports to Ukraine after it cut supplies the previous week by 50 percent in a dispute over an alleged $600 million debt and a price hike. The Ukraine constitutes a vital energy transit route for the EU. For countries like Hungary, which receives around 80 percent of its gas from the Ukrainian pipeline, its only source of foreign gas, the latest dispute was a nightmare.
It also had a knock-on effect on the already tenuous coalition between Ukraine’s Prime Minister, Yulia Tymoshenko, and President Viktor Yushchenko, who both rose to power in the Western-backed 2005 Orange Revolution. The former allies have fallen out over the gas crisis, with claims that Tymoshenko sabotaged a deal on Ukraine’s debts that Yushchenko had reached with Putin. According to Federico Bordonaro, a Rome-based analyst, “Gazprom’s moves are not entirely due to business problems. I think Gazprom is striking back at Europe, firstly because Europe recognized Kosovo’s independence without listening to Russia’s concerns, and secondly because Ukraine is heading toward NATO integration.”
Bordonaro also believes the recent Russia-Ukraine stand-off, following the similar incident two years ago, will make Europe “try to push for new key agreements with Libya, Algeria, and it may also try to revive the Nabucco pipeline.” The Ukraine is also promoting its own pipeline, White Stream, as an alternative to South Stream and Nabucco.
Gazprom’s successes have wiped out Russia’s debt and accounts for 25 percent of its foreign earnings. The company has a market value of $245 billion and is growing rapidly through an aggressive campaign of buying up state energy companies across Europe. It currently provides all the gas needs of neighbouring countries like Latvia and almost half the needs of the rest of Europe, which will rise from 200 billion cubic metres today to around 600 billion cubic metres by 2020.
The economic basis for Russia’s new geopolitical ambitions rests on its huge external trade surplus, which has risen in the past few years to about $100 billion annually. Accumulation of the “oil money” has permitted the state to build up its gold reserves to about $300 billion and top up the so-called Stabilization Fund, which now holds over $100 billion.
There is also an important political reason for the relative strengthening of Russia’s economic and political role, which is related to the growth of inter-imperialist tensions. The occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan by US imperialism have led to a growing anxiety among the European ruling elites that a US stranglehold over the extraction and transport of the oil and natural gas resources of the Middle East and Central Asia will conflict with their own interests.
These fears and the growing role of China and India have been utilised by the Kremlin to further its interests in Europe. The European powers and Russia find themselves in the contradictory position of growing interdependence and rivalry. Lacking sufficient energy resources of its own and home to some of the world’s largest energy companies, Europe sees Russian oil and gas as a vital geopolitical asset and source of profits. For the Russian elite, expansion in Europe is necessary to secure and advance its political and economic interests in a situation where it is being encircled by a militaristic US.
While Secretary Browne has said that the US and Europe do not want a “pipeline war”, this is exactly what threatens. It could be sooner rather than later before the great powers send in their armies to protect their strategic interests in the region. Sections of the European ruling elite also recognise this. In a recent speech European Commissioner for Energy Andris Piebalgs made it clear that “The overall aim is to break down the divisions on the external borders of the European Union. Just because the external border of the Union has been reached, an electron just does not turn around and go back to its generator. Nor does a gas molecule have a passport. What I am saying is that the borders of the European Union are not the borders of the energy market. In an enlarged European Union of 25 [states], this is more obviously the case, as several Member States were integrated into other systems before they joined the EU. We cannot ignore this historical fact. So the Commission and the Council of the European Union have made it clear that we need to extend the borders of the internal energy market and extend the reach of the single regulatory framework of the European Union.”
New Zealand economy sliding into recession
Go to Original
By John Braddock
Bank of New Zealand (BNZ) economists warned last week that New Zealand was heading for a recession—and that it may already be there. One spokesman said the housing slump and global credit crunch had combined to form an almost “perfect storm”.
The drying up of available credit is continuing to put upward pressure on interest rates at a time when householders are already struggling with rising mortgage rates. At the same time, businesses are facing the prospect of rising debt servicing bills and the BNZ declared the impact of the credit crunch was only just beginning to be felt. The statement came the same day the share market dropped $850 million, or 2 percent, in value.
In a front-page article on March 7 headlined “Prepare for pain in the pocket”, the Dominion Post said that householders should “brace for prolonged pain as power and petrol prices rise, and with little relief in sight from punishingly high mortgage rates”.
Amid the catalogue of grim economic news, the Reserve Bank announced it would not consider a drop in interest rates until the second half of next year at the earliest, despite a housing slump and deteriorating economy. It warned that, due to world events, higher interest rates were “the new reality”. New Zealand already has the highest interest rates in the OECD; the current lending rate for house mortgages is running at 10.7 percent, up from 10.5 percent in February. In the past year alone, interest costs on a two-year mortgage have risen by more than 14 percent.
Last July, a visiting US economist predicted that the New Zealand economy was on a “death spiral”. The comments by Steve Hanke, fellow of the Cato Institute and professor at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University, came as the New Zealand dollar hit US80c, a record since it was first floated in 1985 and a rise of 27 percent in six months. It remains at the same level eight months later, crippling many exporters.
According to Hanke, to fight inflation the Reserve Bank hiked interest rates, but because New Zealand had higher interest rates than other developed countries and a small economy, it attracted a flood of capital from offshore where rates were lower, pushing up the exchange rate. He said this aggravated the inflation problem and the central bank then had to increase rates and start the whole cycle again. He concluded; “It’s obvious to everyone that this isn’t the paradise that everyone thought it was.” The Reserve Bank has hiked interest rates no less than six times since early last year.
The bank has now warned there is the potential for a severe downturn in house prices. According to figures released last week by the Real Estate Institute, prices, which are down as much as 10 percent this year, fell for the third month in a row in February. The institute claims prices are now at a “tipping point”—poised to go into reverse for the remainder of the year. The housing market has entered a slump, with sales volumes slipping to their lowest in seven years, while the time it takes to sell a house has risen rapidly to an average of 50 days. Deutsche Bank chief economist Darren Gibbs predicted that falling house prices were set to become a “significant drag” on the economy, and that the market was already sliding faster than the Reserve Bank expected.
Escalating financial pressures on working people
As the US-led international recession gathers pace, the economic shocks are impacting sharply on the daily lives of working people in New Zealand, like those of their counterparts around the world. No-one remains unaffected, with most households facing deepening concerns over their budgets, household expenses, mortgages and financial security. For ordinary people, the daily and weekly struggle to make ends meet has taken an ominous turn, with recent indicators revealing rising prices hitting basic household items.
According to figures released last week by Statistics New Zealand, food prices rose 5.2 percent in the year to February. Grocery foods were the worst hit—the cost of dairy products has soared, with butter costing twice as much as it did last year. In the past month alone, milk has risen by 4 percent and bread by 3.4 percent. Overall, meat poultry and fish prices went up 3.9 percent in the past year. Poultry rose by 10.4 percent. Costs for restaurant meals and ready-to-eat food rose 4.2 percent and non-alcoholic beverages by 4.8 percent.
With a three cents per litre hike last week, motorists are now paying record prices for petrol. All the major companies lifted their pump prices after oil hit the $US110 mark. It now costs $NZ1.78 a litre for 91 octane and $1.83 for 95 octane. The Automobile Association is predicting that petrol will cost over $2 per litre by the end of the year.
Signalling that working people are already being forced to reduce their spending, core retailers—excluding those in fuel and vehicles—are reporting their flattest sales period since the Asian economic crisis some 10 years ago. The retailer The Warehouse Group, the dominant discount homegoods supplier in working class areas, last week reported net profit for the year was down 5.1 per cent to $57.1 million, while its operating profit declined 10.8 per cent to $83.3 million.
After nine years of steady increase, core retailing figures have been flattening out since April last year. Statistics NZ figures for January showed that on a seasonally adjusted basis, total retail sales rose just 0.3 per cent. However, the biggest contribution to the rise came from a 2.1 per cent surge in supermarket sales, in large part a reflection of rising food prices. Fifteen of the 24 core retail industries reported drops in sales. The biggest falls came in takeaway food (down 6.1 percent), appliances (3.1 percent) and department stores (1.8 percent).
The Sunday Star Times noted this week that essential items such as petrol, household energy, local authority rates and vehicle running costs have all “spiked dramatically” since Labour came to power, by more than the official rate of inflation. In the past year alone, food price rises represented a quarter of the increase in the total consumer price index (CPI). That and necessities such as local council rates, rubbish disposal, water charges, telecommunications, electricity and gas and petrol were responsible for two-thirds of the total increase. The rise in essential items has hit those with the lowest disposable income hardest, as they are forced to spend the highest proportion of their income on basics.
Financial sector collapses
Accompanying the pressure on household living costs has been a series of business failures and job losses.
On March 7 the country’s principal carpet maker Feltex announced the closure of two of its plants. The decision will devastate the regional towns of Foxton and Feilding where Feltex is a long-term employer. The plant at Foxton made tufted carpet and the plant at Dannevirke produced yarn. Around 160 workers will be affected by the two closures.
A company spokesperson said there had been no investment in the plants for 15 years and they had become uneconomic. Although other jobs have been offered at the Dannevirke, Wiri and Lower Hutt plants, most of the laid off workers will be unable to transfer to the main centres because of the wide difference in housing costs. One worker bitterly joked that if he managed to sell his house in Foxton he could buy a letterbox in Auckland. A spokesman for the National Distribution Union (NDU) noted at least 15 cases where multiple family members will lose their jobs. Many of the workers are responsible for young families, while others who are just a few years away from retirement will find it difficult to get new jobs in the local area.
The Australian company Godfrey Hirst, previously Feltex’s main Australasian competitor, bought the NZ business from receivers in 2006. It almost immediately shut the Riccarton plant in Christchurch, with the loss of 134 jobs. The new round of closures came after the NDU had already delivered “efficiency gains” and reductions in take-home pay through an agreement on shift changes. Workers were earning a miserly $14-$16 an hour.
Union officials were on hand at the meetings where the closures were announced and promptly declared they would meet with the company to “discuss the restructuring plans” and to organise the sacked workers onto unemployment benefits. The union has only a “very modest” redundancy agreement with Godfrey Hirst, with significantly lesser conditions than those that applied under the previous owner.
In the finance sector, thousands of desperate small investors have become embroiled in a series of collapses and have lost millions of dollars of their life savings. The most recent involved Australian-owned Blue Chip Financial Solutions (BCFS). In February nineteen property management companies associated with BCFS were forced into liquidation, and reports indicate that as much as $58 million may be owed. The liquidator told a meeting of 200 investors—mainly retired couples—that it was one of the worst company collapses he has handled. He indicated that, at best, the more than 2000 investors around the country might recover 50 cents in the dollar after the web of Blue Chip companies was unravelled.
In less than two years, some fourteen finance companies have collapsed, with the rate accelerating since the onset of the US sub-prime crisis in the middle of last year. The extent of losses is now as bad as in the period of the 1987 share market crash. Recent collapses include; Five Star Consumer Finance (August 30, owing $50 million), Property Finance (August 29, debenture debts of more than $80 million and loans of more than $630 million), Nathans Finance (August 21, owing $166 million to 6,000 investors), Bridgecorp (July 2, owing nearly $500 million to 18,000 investors). The toll for tens of thousands of small investors has reached more than $NZ 1.2 billion.
Prime Minister Helen Clark, her Labour government—and their accomplices in the trade unions—have done nothing to address this deepening crisis. For most of its nine years in office, Labour has presided over a buoyant economy fuelled by high world prices for export commodities and a booming share market. The principal beneficiaries have not been working people but a thin layer of wealthy investors and the corporate elite.
The downturn in the economy has seen a significant shift among vast layers of the population against Labour. With no progressive alternative within the parliamentary setup, this is expressing itself in a rise in support for the conservative opposition National Party, which has run a populist campaign promising to boost household incomes with substantial tax cuts. Just six months out from the 2008 elections, National has opened up a consistent 20 point lead over Labour in the polls, and on current figures could govern alone without having to enter a coalition with any of the minor parties.
Neither Labor nor National represent a way forward for New Zealand workers. The only way the working class can defend its own independent interests in this new period of spiralling economic crisis, militarism and war is to turn to the building of a new political movement, in unity with workers in Australia, the Asia-Pacific region and throughout the world, grounded on the perspective and program of socialist internationalism. That is the perspective of the WSWS and the Socialist Equality Party.
By John Braddock
Bank of New Zealand (BNZ) economists warned last week that New Zealand was heading for a recession—and that it may already be there. One spokesman said the housing slump and global credit crunch had combined to form an almost “perfect storm”.
The drying up of available credit is continuing to put upward pressure on interest rates at a time when householders are already struggling with rising mortgage rates. At the same time, businesses are facing the prospect of rising debt servicing bills and the BNZ declared the impact of the credit crunch was only just beginning to be felt. The statement came the same day the share market dropped $850 million, or 2 percent, in value.
In a front-page article on March 7 headlined “Prepare for pain in the pocket”, the Dominion Post said that householders should “brace for prolonged pain as power and petrol prices rise, and with little relief in sight from punishingly high mortgage rates”.
Amid the catalogue of grim economic news, the Reserve Bank announced it would not consider a drop in interest rates until the second half of next year at the earliest, despite a housing slump and deteriorating economy. It warned that, due to world events, higher interest rates were “the new reality”. New Zealand already has the highest interest rates in the OECD; the current lending rate for house mortgages is running at 10.7 percent, up from 10.5 percent in February. In the past year alone, interest costs on a two-year mortgage have risen by more than 14 percent.
Last July, a visiting US economist predicted that the New Zealand economy was on a “death spiral”. The comments by Steve Hanke, fellow of the Cato Institute and professor at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University, came as the New Zealand dollar hit US80c, a record since it was first floated in 1985 and a rise of 27 percent in six months. It remains at the same level eight months later, crippling many exporters.
According to Hanke, to fight inflation the Reserve Bank hiked interest rates, but because New Zealand had higher interest rates than other developed countries and a small economy, it attracted a flood of capital from offshore where rates were lower, pushing up the exchange rate. He said this aggravated the inflation problem and the central bank then had to increase rates and start the whole cycle again. He concluded; “It’s obvious to everyone that this isn’t the paradise that everyone thought it was.” The Reserve Bank has hiked interest rates no less than six times since early last year.
The bank has now warned there is the potential for a severe downturn in house prices. According to figures released last week by the Real Estate Institute, prices, which are down as much as 10 percent this year, fell for the third month in a row in February. The institute claims prices are now at a “tipping point”—poised to go into reverse for the remainder of the year. The housing market has entered a slump, with sales volumes slipping to their lowest in seven years, while the time it takes to sell a house has risen rapidly to an average of 50 days. Deutsche Bank chief economist Darren Gibbs predicted that falling house prices were set to become a “significant drag” on the economy, and that the market was already sliding faster than the Reserve Bank expected.
Escalating financial pressures on working people
As the US-led international recession gathers pace, the economic shocks are impacting sharply on the daily lives of working people in New Zealand, like those of their counterparts around the world. No-one remains unaffected, with most households facing deepening concerns over their budgets, household expenses, mortgages and financial security. For ordinary people, the daily and weekly struggle to make ends meet has taken an ominous turn, with recent indicators revealing rising prices hitting basic household items.
According to figures released last week by Statistics New Zealand, food prices rose 5.2 percent in the year to February. Grocery foods were the worst hit—the cost of dairy products has soared, with butter costing twice as much as it did last year. In the past month alone, milk has risen by 4 percent and bread by 3.4 percent. Overall, meat poultry and fish prices went up 3.9 percent in the past year. Poultry rose by 10.4 percent. Costs for restaurant meals and ready-to-eat food rose 4.2 percent and non-alcoholic beverages by 4.8 percent.
With a three cents per litre hike last week, motorists are now paying record prices for petrol. All the major companies lifted their pump prices after oil hit the $US110 mark. It now costs $NZ1.78 a litre for 91 octane and $1.83 for 95 octane. The Automobile Association is predicting that petrol will cost over $2 per litre by the end of the year.
Signalling that working people are already being forced to reduce their spending, core retailers—excluding those in fuel and vehicles—are reporting their flattest sales period since the Asian economic crisis some 10 years ago. The retailer The Warehouse Group, the dominant discount homegoods supplier in working class areas, last week reported net profit for the year was down 5.1 per cent to $57.1 million, while its operating profit declined 10.8 per cent to $83.3 million.
After nine years of steady increase, core retailing figures have been flattening out since April last year. Statistics NZ figures for January showed that on a seasonally adjusted basis, total retail sales rose just 0.3 per cent. However, the biggest contribution to the rise came from a 2.1 per cent surge in supermarket sales, in large part a reflection of rising food prices. Fifteen of the 24 core retail industries reported drops in sales. The biggest falls came in takeaway food (down 6.1 percent), appliances (3.1 percent) and department stores (1.8 percent).
The Sunday Star Times noted this week that essential items such as petrol, household energy, local authority rates and vehicle running costs have all “spiked dramatically” since Labour came to power, by more than the official rate of inflation. In the past year alone, food price rises represented a quarter of the increase in the total consumer price index (CPI). That and necessities such as local council rates, rubbish disposal, water charges, telecommunications, electricity and gas and petrol were responsible for two-thirds of the total increase. The rise in essential items has hit those with the lowest disposable income hardest, as they are forced to spend the highest proportion of their income on basics.
Financial sector collapses
Accompanying the pressure on household living costs has been a series of business failures and job losses.
On March 7 the country’s principal carpet maker Feltex announced the closure of two of its plants. The decision will devastate the regional towns of Foxton and Feilding where Feltex is a long-term employer. The plant at Foxton made tufted carpet and the plant at Dannevirke produced yarn. Around 160 workers will be affected by the two closures.
A company spokesperson said there had been no investment in the plants for 15 years and they had become uneconomic. Although other jobs have been offered at the Dannevirke, Wiri and Lower Hutt plants, most of the laid off workers will be unable to transfer to the main centres because of the wide difference in housing costs. One worker bitterly joked that if he managed to sell his house in Foxton he could buy a letterbox in Auckland. A spokesman for the National Distribution Union (NDU) noted at least 15 cases where multiple family members will lose their jobs. Many of the workers are responsible for young families, while others who are just a few years away from retirement will find it difficult to get new jobs in the local area.
The Australian company Godfrey Hirst, previously Feltex’s main Australasian competitor, bought the NZ business from receivers in 2006. It almost immediately shut the Riccarton plant in Christchurch, with the loss of 134 jobs. The new round of closures came after the NDU had already delivered “efficiency gains” and reductions in take-home pay through an agreement on shift changes. Workers were earning a miserly $14-$16 an hour.
Union officials were on hand at the meetings where the closures were announced and promptly declared they would meet with the company to “discuss the restructuring plans” and to organise the sacked workers onto unemployment benefits. The union has only a “very modest” redundancy agreement with Godfrey Hirst, with significantly lesser conditions than those that applied under the previous owner.
In the finance sector, thousands of desperate small investors have become embroiled in a series of collapses and have lost millions of dollars of their life savings. The most recent involved Australian-owned Blue Chip Financial Solutions (BCFS). In February nineteen property management companies associated with BCFS were forced into liquidation, and reports indicate that as much as $58 million may be owed. The liquidator told a meeting of 200 investors—mainly retired couples—that it was one of the worst company collapses he has handled. He indicated that, at best, the more than 2000 investors around the country might recover 50 cents in the dollar after the web of Blue Chip companies was unravelled.
In less than two years, some fourteen finance companies have collapsed, with the rate accelerating since the onset of the US sub-prime crisis in the middle of last year. The extent of losses is now as bad as in the period of the 1987 share market crash. Recent collapses include; Five Star Consumer Finance (August 30, owing $50 million), Property Finance (August 29, debenture debts of more than $80 million and loans of more than $630 million), Nathans Finance (August 21, owing $166 million to 6,000 investors), Bridgecorp (July 2, owing nearly $500 million to 18,000 investors). The toll for tens of thousands of small investors has reached more than $NZ 1.2 billion.
Prime Minister Helen Clark, her Labour government—and their accomplices in the trade unions—have done nothing to address this deepening crisis. For most of its nine years in office, Labour has presided over a buoyant economy fuelled by high world prices for export commodities and a booming share market. The principal beneficiaries have not been working people but a thin layer of wealthy investors and the corporate elite.
The downturn in the economy has seen a significant shift among vast layers of the population against Labour. With no progressive alternative within the parliamentary setup, this is expressing itself in a rise in support for the conservative opposition National Party, which has run a populist campaign promising to boost household incomes with substantial tax cuts. Just six months out from the 2008 elections, National has opened up a consistent 20 point lead over Labour in the polls, and on current figures could govern alone without having to enter a coalition with any of the minor parties.
Neither Labor nor National represent a way forward for New Zealand workers. The only way the working class can defend its own independent interests in this new period of spiralling economic crisis, militarism and war is to turn to the building of a new political movement, in unity with workers in Australia, the Asia-Pacific region and throughout the world, grounded on the perspective and program of socialist internationalism. That is the perspective of the WSWS and the Socialist Equality Party.
Legacy of Depression at work now
The Federal Reserve's expanded lending, a salve for the financial markets' current crisis, was meant to aid the 'forgotten man.'
Go to Original
By Maura Reynolds
WASHINGTON -- — It was July 1932 when Speaker John Nance Garner rose to address the U.S. House of Representatives, complaining that the government was helping big business but not the little man.
In an emergency, the Texas Democrat declared, even ordinary citizens should be eligible for help.
"I plead with you to let all the people have some drippings," said Garner, recently chosen to be Franklin D. Roosevelt's running mate. "Do not keep it just for a few."
The Great Depression had gripped the country, and under Garner's prodding, the Federal Reserve Act was amended to permit a wide expansion of federal lending under "unusual and exigent circumstances." Last week, after more than 70 years of gathering dust, the measure was pulled out like a rabbit from a hat to rescue one of the biggest financial institutions in the country.
Garner may have rolled in his grave at what the Fed did with his largely forgotten bit of populist lawmaking, but most economists applauded.
"It was almost a miracle that it was there, and it was a miracle that someone in the Fed figured out how to use it," said David M. Jones, a former Fed official who is now chief economist at Investors Security Trust in Fort Myers, Fla.
The credit system may face more rough weather in the months ahead, and the key question seems to be how bad a recession the United States is in for, not whether it faces one at all. Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke's decision to rescue investment house Bear Stearns Cos. by extending central bank lending to major financial institutions other than traditional banks is widely credited with giving anxious markets a breather and possibly averting a 1930s-style crisis.
Normally, the Fed makes direct loans only to depository institutions. March 16, after hasty meetings and a vote by its senior decision-makers, the central bank announced that it would loan $30 billion to JPMorgan Chase & Co., effectively underwriting its fire-sale purchase of Bear Stearns.
Moreover, the Fed promised that for at least the next six months, it would permit about 20 other "primary lenders" to take out direct loans as well, using whatever collateral the central bank decided was appropriate, including troubled mortgage-backed bonds.
Bear Stearns, caught in the sub-prime mortgage debacle and the resulting credit freeze-up, had been thrust suddenly to the brink of collapse. The financial community was rife with rumors that other major firms might go under too.
Wall Street faced the prospect of a 21st century version of an old-fashioned run on the banks as investors lost confidence in the huge companies that had grown up outside traditional banking.
For months, Bernanke had been searching for new tools. The Fed's traditional crank for boosting the economy -- lowering bank interest rates -- was less effective than in the past.
The bold expansion of Fed lending appeared to provide an answer, at least temporarily. The stock market steadied and even gained ground last week, aided also by an aggressive Fed rate cut Tuesday. Commodity prices plunged, a sign of renewed confidence in the financial system. And Wall Street's other major investment houses held on.
As the drama unfolded, economists and other analysts repeatedly compared and contrasted the current crisis with the Depression.
David Moss, an economic historian at Harvard Business School, said a major difference was that during the Depression, the Fed was part of the problem.
It was largely in denial in the early years, stingy about lending to distressed banks and a virtual slave to the gold standard, which led it to raise interest rates right when they should have been lowered.
This time, the gold standard is long gone and the Fed is alert to the risks and moving aggressively to try to address them.
"As an academic, Ben Bernanke studied the Depression," Moss said. "Now, as Fed chairman, it's clear he's learned from the mistakes of the 1930s and is using those lessons on a daily basis."
Alice M. Rivlin, a former vice chairwoman of the Fed and Clinton administration budget director, praised Bernanke for using all the powers at his disposal.
She called it "very interesting but totally irrelevant" that the statute Bernanke used to authorize his rescue of Bear Stearns was intended for the opposite purpose.
"I think the Federal Reserve needs maximum flexibility at the moment to deal with the situation," she said. "If [the statute] weren't there, we would have to put it there. Luckily, it was there."
As it happens, Garner -- now best remembered for his assertion, in bowdlerized form, that the vice presidency wasn't "worth a bucket of warm spit" -- hadn't been thinking about the Federal Reserve at all. The target of his wrath was the Reconstruction Finance Corp., which then-President Herbert Hoover had set up to rescue big businesses such as banks, insurance companies and railways.
In particular, Garner pointed out that the Reconstruction Finance Corp. spent $90 million to bail out a big Chicago bank with strong ties to the GOP, while refusing the city money to pay its workers, including teachers and firefighters.
There were good economic reasons to save the Chicago bank. Its failure would probably have triggered the collapse of dozens of smaller banks. Because federal deposit insurance did not yet exist, that would probably have wiped out the savings of thousands of ordinary Americans.
Besides, the Reconstruction Finance Corp. was not allowed to lend to local governments, much less individuals.
That, Garner said, was exactly the problem. "How can you say that it is more important in this nation that the New York Central Railroad should meet the interest on its bonds . . . than it is to prevent the forced sale of 500,000 farms and homes?"
His motivations may not have been entirely altruistic. The presidential campaign was heating up as Hoover, seeking reelection, battled challenger Roosevelt. Garner saw a chance to burnish his populist credentials.
"Politically, the loan looked like cronyism of the worst order," said George Nash, the author of a three-volume biography of Hoover.
Garner decided to use a big Depression-relief bill then nearing completion to champion the cause of the "forgotten man."
In early July, Congress sent the bill to Hoover's desk, including the Garner-backed provision to let the Reconstruction Finance Corp. loan federal money to individuals, cities and smaller businesses.
Hoover complained that Garner's language would turn the Reconstruction Finance Corp. into the "most gigantic banking and pawn-broking business in all history."
Eventually, a behind-the-scenes compromise was negotiated, and Garner's idea became law as an amendment to the Federal Reserve Act.
The provision was invoked during the Depression, but sparingly. All together, just $1.5 million in loans were approved, the last one in 1936.
Now, it has found an entirely new purpose in an entirely new era.
"We were on the brink of a total financial collapse," said Fed watcher Jones. "This saved us."
Go to Original
By Maura Reynolds
WASHINGTON -- — It was July 1932 when Speaker John Nance Garner rose to address the U.S. House of Representatives, complaining that the government was helping big business but not the little man.
In an emergency, the Texas Democrat declared, even ordinary citizens should be eligible for help.
"I plead with you to let all the people have some drippings," said Garner, recently chosen to be Franklin D. Roosevelt's running mate. "Do not keep it just for a few."
The Great Depression had gripped the country, and under Garner's prodding, the Federal Reserve Act was amended to permit a wide expansion of federal lending under "unusual and exigent circumstances." Last week, after more than 70 years of gathering dust, the measure was pulled out like a rabbit from a hat to rescue one of the biggest financial institutions in the country.
Garner may have rolled in his grave at what the Fed did with his largely forgotten bit of populist lawmaking, but most economists applauded.
"It was almost a miracle that it was there, and it was a miracle that someone in the Fed figured out how to use it," said David M. Jones, a former Fed official who is now chief economist at Investors Security Trust in Fort Myers, Fla.
The credit system may face more rough weather in the months ahead, and the key question seems to be how bad a recession the United States is in for, not whether it faces one at all. Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke's decision to rescue investment house Bear Stearns Cos. by extending central bank lending to major financial institutions other than traditional banks is widely credited with giving anxious markets a breather and possibly averting a 1930s-style crisis.
Normally, the Fed makes direct loans only to depository institutions. March 16, after hasty meetings and a vote by its senior decision-makers, the central bank announced that it would loan $30 billion to JPMorgan Chase & Co., effectively underwriting its fire-sale purchase of Bear Stearns.
Moreover, the Fed promised that for at least the next six months, it would permit about 20 other "primary lenders" to take out direct loans as well, using whatever collateral the central bank decided was appropriate, including troubled mortgage-backed bonds.
Bear Stearns, caught in the sub-prime mortgage debacle and the resulting credit freeze-up, had been thrust suddenly to the brink of collapse. The financial community was rife with rumors that other major firms might go under too.
Wall Street faced the prospect of a 21st century version of an old-fashioned run on the banks as investors lost confidence in the huge companies that had grown up outside traditional banking.
For months, Bernanke had been searching for new tools. The Fed's traditional crank for boosting the economy -- lowering bank interest rates -- was less effective than in the past.
The bold expansion of Fed lending appeared to provide an answer, at least temporarily. The stock market steadied and even gained ground last week, aided also by an aggressive Fed rate cut Tuesday. Commodity prices plunged, a sign of renewed confidence in the financial system. And Wall Street's other major investment houses held on.
As the drama unfolded, economists and other analysts repeatedly compared and contrasted the current crisis with the Depression.
David Moss, an economic historian at Harvard Business School, said a major difference was that during the Depression, the Fed was part of the problem.
It was largely in denial in the early years, stingy about lending to distressed banks and a virtual slave to the gold standard, which led it to raise interest rates right when they should have been lowered.
This time, the gold standard is long gone and the Fed is alert to the risks and moving aggressively to try to address them.
"As an academic, Ben Bernanke studied the Depression," Moss said. "Now, as Fed chairman, it's clear he's learned from the mistakes of the 1930s and is using those lessons on a daily basis."
Alice M. Rivlin, a former vice chairwoman of the Fed and Clinton administration budget director, praised Bernanke for using all the powers at his disposal.
She called it "very interesting but totally irrelevant" that the statute Bernanke used to authorize his rescue of Bear Stearns was intended for the opposite purpose.
"I think the Federal Reserve needs maximum flexibility at the moment to deal with the situation," she said. "If [the statute] weren't there, we would have to put it there. Luckily, it was there."
As it happens, Garner -- now best remembered for his assertion, in bowdlerized form, that the vice presidency wasn't "worth a bucket of warm spit" -- hadn't been thinking about the Federal Reserve at all. The target of his wrath was the Reconstruction Finance Corp., which then-President Herbert Hoover had set up to rescue big businesses such as banks, insurance companies and railways.
In particular, Garner pointed out that the Reconstruction Finance Corp. spent $90 million to bail out a big Chicago bank with strong ties to the GOP, while refusing the city money to pay its workers, including teachers and firefighters.
There were good economic reasons to save the Chicago bank. Its failure would probably have triggered the collapse of dozens of smaller banks. Because federal deposit insurance did not yet exist, that would probably have wiped out the savings of thousands of ordinary Americans.
Besides, the Reconstruction Finance Corp. was not allowed to lend to local governments, much less individuals.
That, Garner said, was exactly the problem. "How can you say that it is more important in this nation that the New York Central Railroad should meet the interest on its bonds . . . than it is to prevent the forced sale of 500,000 farms and homes?"
His motivations may not have been entirely altruistic. The presidential campaign was heating up as Hoover, seeking reelection, battled challenger Roosevelt. Garner saw a chance to burnish his populist credentials.
"Politically, the loan looked like cronyism of the worst order," said George Nash, the author of a three-volume biography of Hoover.
Garner decided to use a big Depression-relief bill then nearing completion to champion the cause of the "forgotten man."
In early July, Congress sent the bill to Hoover's desk, including the Garner-backed provision to let the Reconstruction Finance Corp. loan federal money to individuals, cities and smaller businesses.
Hoover complained that Garner's language would turn the Reconstruction Finance Corp. into the "most gigantic banking and pawn-broking business in all history."
Eventually, a behind-the-scenes compromise was negotiated, and Garner's idea became law as an amendment to the Federal Reserve Act.
The provision was invoked during the Depression, but sparingly. All together, just $1.5 million in loans were approved, the last one in 1936.
Now, it has found an entirely new purpose in an entirely new era.
"We were on the brink of a total financial collapse," said Fed watcher Jones. "This saved us."
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