Around 8pmest every night
Democracy Now! Dr. Atul Gawande: Solitary Confinement is Torture
Transcript in the body
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: I want to switch gears for a moment. You wrote a remarkable piece about the effects of solitary confinement on prisoners, on people who have been held in isolation for a long time. On this issue, I just want to turn to the case of the four prisoners in a supermax prison, the Ohio State Penitentiary. This week they launched a hunger strike to protest what they call their harsh mistreatment under solitary confinement. The prisoners—Bomani Shakur, Siddique Abdullah Hasan, Jason Robb and Namir Abdul Mateen—were sentenced to death for their involvement in the 1993 prison uprising in Lucasville, Ohio. For over 17 years, they’ve been held in 23-hours-a-day solitary lockdown. On Monday, the four began refusing to eat meals until they are moved out of solitary confinement and onto death row, where they say they’ll get better treatment. Yesterday I spoke—Amy spoke with the longtime peace activist, historian and lawyer, Staughton Lynd. He wrote the definitive history of the 1993 Ohio prison uprising at Lucasville. He described the prisoners’ conditions. Let’s take a listen.
STAUGHTON LYND: They are held in more restrictive confinement than the more than 100 other death sentence prisoners in the same prison. Now, why is this? It’s precisely because the system thinks of them as leaders. So, it will let them watch television. They even let Bomani Shakur use a typewriter. But what they don’t let any of the four men do is to be in the same space as another human being other than a guard at the same time. And this means that while other death sentence prisoners can wander about the pod, can have collective meals outside their cells, and especially can have semi-contact visits with their friends and families, the four are always obliged to encounter the world either through a solid cell door or, when they go out on a visit, through a solid pane of glass. So that, again, Bomani has a niece and nephew aged eight and three that he loves and would wish to touch. If he were on death row, he could do that. But he’s been told by the prison authorities he will never be on death row, because they’re going to keep him in social isolation until they kill him.
AMY GOODMAN: So, that is Staughton Lynd, the longtime peace activist, lawyer, talking about these four men who have now gone on a hunger strike at the Ohio State Penitentiary, demanding to be put on death row, where they say that they will be treated better.
And then we’ve got the case of the alleged WikiLeaks Army whistleblower Bradley Manning, who’s being held in solitary confinement. Twenty-two years old, U.S. Army private, arrested in May, has been in detention ever since. For the past five months, he’s been held at the U.S. Marine brig at Quantico, Virginia, before that, held for two months in a military jail in Kuwait. Last month, we spoke to Glenn Greenwald, the political and legal blogger at Salon.com. Glenn reported that Manning is being held under conditions that constitute cruel and inhumane treatment, and even torture. This is what Glenn Greenwald said.
GLENN GREENWALD: He’s been held for seven months without being convicted of any crime. And the conditions that I recently discovered he’s being held in are really quite disturbing. And this has been true for the entire seven-month duration of his detention. He is in solitary confinement, and he’s not only in solitary confinement, which means that he’s in a cell alone, but he’s there for 23 out of 24 hours every day. He is released for one hour a day only. So, 23 out of the 24 hours a day he sits alone. He is barred from even doing things like exercising inside of his cell. He’s constantly supervised and monitored, and if he does that, he’s told immediately to stop. There are very strict rules about what he’s even allowed to do inside the cell. Beyond that, he’s being denied just the most basic attributes of civilized imprisonment, such as a pillow and sheets, and has been denied that without explanation for the entire duration of his visit, as well. And there is a lot of literature and a lot of psychological studies, and even studies done by the U.S. military, that show that prolonged solitary confinement, which is something that the United States does almost more than any other country in the Western world, of the type to which Manning is subjected, can have a very long-term psychological damage, including driving people to insanity and the like. It clearly is cruel and unusual; it’s arguably a form of torture. And given that Manning has never been convicted of anything, unlike the convicts at supermaxes to whom this treatment is normally applied, it’s particularly egregious.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: That’s Glenn Greenwald, the political and legal blogger at Salon.com. In his piece that he wrote about Manning, he actually cited your article "Hellhole," which you document what happens to people held in isolation. Explain why this is thought of as a form of torture in many places.
DR. ATUL GAWANDE: Well, I was interested in whether it really was torture, and I was interested because this has become, I think, a generationally defining question for us. In the 1980s, during the Reagan administration, solitary confinement was very unusual. Today, we have over 50,000 people in long-term solitary confinement in our American prisons now. You know, in states like New York— it’s across every—red and blue states. We have—New York has over eight percent of its prison population in long-term solitary confinement. A large proportion—some think a majority—are not there for violent offenses, either. It’s a method of control that we regard as increasingly routine. And so, what my puzzle was, is it torture, or is it not?
And what I looked back to was the experience and the literature, which is much richer, around what hostages and prisoners of war—our Vietnam veterans, for example—experienced when they went through solitary confinement. And what’s found is that people experience solitary confinement as even more damaging than physical torture. Vietnam veterans who received physical torture—John McCain had two-and-a-half years in solitary confinement, had his legs and arm broken during his imprisonment, but described the two-and-a-half years that he spent in solitary as being the most cruel component and the most terrifying aspect of what he went under. You also look at studies that show that people held in isolation from other human beings—we actually need social, friendly interaction with other people to be sane, to be absolutely—
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: Right. You document how people actually reach a level of psychosis.
DR. ATUL GAWANDE: That’s right. Not everybody.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: They begin to lose their minds, right?
DR. ATUL GAWANDE: Not everybody. The people who become psychotic in solitary confinement are people who often have attention deficit disorder or low IQ or issues of prior mental illness. Well, guess who is in our prisons? And there’s a very high rate of psychosis and people flat-out going crazy under the confinement conditions. And so, then what I puzzle over is, does it actually reduce our violence in our prisons? The evidence from multiple studies now is that not only that it has not reduced violence, it’s increased the costs of being in prison. And my finding was that we have decided that when it is political—when it is a prisoner of war or a hostage, that it is absolutely torture when other countries do this to people, and that there is no discernible difference in the experience of what people go through in our prisons, when they’re in solitary confinement for 14 years, in the case of one person who I documented, that this is torture.
Many of you remember that in Informationthread 15 and Informationthread 13 I linked to this March 30, 2009 article by Atul Gawande. Here is a bit:
After a few months without regular social contact, however, his experience proved no different from that of the P.O.W.s or hostages, or the majority of isolated prisoners whom researchers have studied: he started to lose his mind. He talked to himself. He paced back and forth compulsively, shuffling along the same six-foot path for hours on end. Soon, he was having panic attacks, screaming for help. He hallucinated that the colors on the walls were changing. He became enraged by routine noises—the sound of doors opening as the guards made their hourly checks, the sounds of inmates in nearby cells. After a year or so, he was hearing voices on the television talking directly to him. He put the television under his bed, and rarely took it out again.
One of the paradoxes of solitary confinement is that, as starved as people become for companionship, the experience typically leaves them unfit for social interaction. Once, Dellelo was allowed to have an in-person meeting with his lawyer, and he simply couldn’t handle it. After so many months in which his primary human contact had been an occasional phone call or brief conversations with an inmate down the tier, shouted through steel doors at the top of their lungs, he found himself unable to carry on a face-to-face conversation. He had trouble following both words and hand gestures and couldn’t generate them himself. When he realized this, he succumbed to a full-blown panic attack.
Craig Haney, a psychology professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz, received rare permission to study a hundred randomly selected inmates at California’s Pelican Bay supermax, and noted a number of phenomena. First, after months or years of complete isolation, many prisoners "begin to lose the ability to initiate behavior of any kind—to organize their own lives around activity and purpose," he writes. "Chronic apathy, lethargy, depression, and despair often result. . . . In extreme cases, prisoners may literally stop behaving," becoming essentially catatonic.
Second, almost ninety per cent of these prisoners had difficulties with "irrational anger," compared with just three per cent of the general population.* Haney attributed this to the extreme restriction, the totality of control, and the extended absence of any opportunity for happiness or joy. Many prisoners in solitary become consumed with revenge fanasies.
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It wasn’t always like this. The wide-scale use of isolation is, almost exclusively, a phenomenon of the past twenty years. In 1890, the United States Supreme Court came close to declaring the punishment to be unconstitutional. Writing for the majority in the case of a Colorado murderer who had been held in isolation for a month, Justice Samuel Miller noted that experience had revealed "serious objections" to solitary confinement:
A considerable number of the prisoners fell, after even a short confinement, into a semi-fatuous condition, from which it was next to impossible to arouse them, and others became violently insane; others, still, committed suicide; while those who stood the ordeal better were not generally reformed, and in most cases did not recover suffcient mental activity to be of any subsequent service to the community.
Sady Doyle at Tiger Beatdown (Please read the whole thing at the link):
It’s hard to write about Bradley Manning. I’ve composed more than one lengthy, impassioned post about Manning, and deleted it; we’ve heard things about or from Manning that we weren’t supposed to hear, and we’ve heard lots of things about Manning that may or may not be the truth, and addressing those things publicly — in any of the various ways that they are actually being construed — may actually put Manning in danger.
But let’s start with the most important thing, something simple: Bradley Manning is accused of trying really, really hard to do the right thing.
Bradley Manning is nobody special. He was an ordinary, unexceptional person, enlisted in the US Military, as many people are, and he allegedly found out that the military was doing something which — though we all might have suspected or feared or heard about it — betrayed its most basic promise. The promise that this was war, not murder. I mean, this is what you have to believe, if you’re going to hand a bunch of people guns and train them to kill, if you’re going to give people all of these incredibly powerful weapons in the first place: If you are going to have a military, you have to believe that the weapons and killing-people skills of that military are not going to be used to just gratuitously murder people. And it’s been proven wrong before, and we all have every reason to know that it’s often wrong, this belief, but we have to believe it if we are to justify the existence of a military. Because the other option is realizing that we’ve just sent Death out there, that we’ve just unleashed a ton of highly armed people onto a country where they can now do anything they want to anyone they want. We’ve sent murder. And rape: Rape happens a whole, whole, whole lot, in war. I want to believe that my country, at least, would not support that.
But here’s what they think happened: Manning found out that US soldiers had shot and killed civilians who did not return fire. There was a video: Not just words, but a chance for people to see it happen. He decided that people ought to know that it was really happening. And whatever you think of what he did next, in this version of the story, it can’t really be denied: He tried to do the right thing.
There are supposed to be protections in place, when you do the right thing. When you find out that something has gone wrong, and you tell people about it. If there weren’t protections for whistleblowers, there would be no way for corruption or injustice to be exposed. People would be too scared to tell anyone what they saw, whatever it was. It’s kind of a basic principle of society — it’s what they fucking tell us to do in those Bush-era subway ads, the ones everybody makes fun of. "IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING." Don’t be quiet if you have reason to believe people could get hurt. But there are no protections in place for Bradley Manning.
FishOutofWater did a great diary about the decline in bee population. Well, Wikileaks released a cable waaay back in 2010 about that "Wik-Bee Leaks: EPA Document Shows It Knowingly Allowed Pesticide That Kills Honey Bees" :
The world honey bee population has plunged in recent years, worrying beekeepers and farmers who know how critical bee pollination is for many crops. A number of theories have popped up as to why the North American honey bee population has declined--electromagnetic radiation, malnutrition, and climate change have all been pinpointed. Now a leaked EPA document reveals that the agency allowed the widespread use of a bee-toxic pesticide, despite warnings from EPA scientists.
The document, which was leaked to a Colorado beekeeper, shows that the EPA has ignored warnings about the use of clothianidin, a pesticide produced by Bayer that mainly is used to pre-treat corn seeds. The pesticide scooped up $262 million in sales in 2009 by farmers, who also use the substance on canola, soy, sugar beets, sunflowers, and wheat, according to Grist.
The leaked document (PDF) was put out in response to Bayer's request to approve use of the pesticide on cotton and mustard. The document invalidates a prior Bayer study that justified the registration of clothianidin on the basis of its safety to honeybees:
Clothianidin’s major risk concern is to nontarget insects (that is, honey bees). Clothianidin is a neonicotinoid insecticide that is both persistent and systemic. Acute toxicity studies to honey bees show that clothianidin is highly toxic on both a contact and an oral basis. Although EFED does not conduct RQ based risk assessments on non-target insects, information from standard tests and field studies, as well as incident reports involving other neonicotinoids insecticides (e.g., imidacloprid) suggest the potential for long-term toxic risk to honey bees and other beneficial insects.
Suspicions about clothianidin aren't new; the EPA's Environmental Fate and Effects Division (EFAD) first expressed concern when the pesticide was introduced, in 2003, about the "possibility of toxic exposure to nontarget pollinators [e.g., honeybees] through the translocation of clothianidin residues that result from seed treatment." Clothianidin was still allowed on the market while Bayer worked on a botched toxicity study [PDF], in which test and control fields were planted as close as 968 feet apart.
Thom Hartmann in hour three today interviewed Dr. Sydney Cameron(who did the study) and George Langworthy & Maryam Henein, Co-Directors/Producers of "Vanishing of the Bees." If someone can find me some video or audio to include, please let me know. Amazing interviews!!!!
In Informationthread 10 and Informationthread 13 I linked to a radio interview by Brad Friedman of the Bradblog where he interviewed Coleen Rowley while she was in a van with 17 other activists heading back home after being arrested for protesting outside the White House. The program also includes, in hour 3, a clip of his interview with Daniel Ellsberg who was also arrested that day. Well Judge Dismisses Cases Against Military Veterans and Anti-war Activists Following December 16th Washington, D.C. Arrests :
Among those arrested were members of the leadership of the national organization Veterans for Peace , Pentagon Papers whistleblower Dr. Daniel Ellsberg; Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges; former senior CIA analyst Ray McGovern; and Dr. Margaret Flowers, advocate for single-payer health care.
Forty-two of those arrested opted to appear in court and go to trial, with the first group appearing in DC Superior Court on January 4, 2011. Prosecutors from the DC Attorney General’s office stated that the Government "declined to file charges due to missing or incomplete police paperwork." Presiding Magistrate Judge Richard Ringell confirmed that the cases were dropped and defendants were free to leave.
Here is(arrested) Ray McGovern schooling a sad sad person on CNN:
DON LEMON: You really think we --- and I'll say we, I'm a journalist --- you really think we have it wrong and that he [Assange] is actually not a pariah and we should be praising him and following his lead rather than calling him a pariah?
RAY MCGOVERN: Yeah, actually, with all due respect, I think you should be following his example. Seek out the secrets. Find out why it is that my tax-payer money is going to fund trafficked young boys performing dances in women's clothing before the Afghan security forces who we are recruiting to take over after we leave. Take a look at the documents and see the abhorrent activities that our government has endorsed or done through its contractors. And then tell me you don't think the Americans can handle that. Well I think they can handle it. But they can't handle it if they don't have it.
Israel Said It Would Keep Gaza Near Collapse: WikiLeaks :
JERUSALEM — Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip was meant to push the area's economy "to the brink of collapse," according to a U.S. diplomatic cable released by Wikileaks on Wednesday, signaling that Israel was well aware that the policy was taking a heavy toll on the area's civilian population.
Israeli leaders have long maintained that the blockade was necessary to weaken the ruling Hamas militant group. The newly released document, published in Norway's Aftenposten newspaper, indicates that Israel hoped to accomplish that goal by targeting Gaza's 1.5 million people.
According to the March 3, 2008, cable written by an American official, Israeli officials told American diplomats "on multiple occasions that they intend to keep Gaza's economy on the brink of collapse without quite pushing it over the edge."
Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev refused to comment.
I'm sure this is all part of the Jewish/Asange conspiracy. Maybe this is all part of the Rove/Kevin Bacon conspiracy. Who knows. Some people say....
The Motley Fool "Wikileaks Could Sink These Stocks" An amazing read by them. I trust them when it comes to stock advice. Have for a few years now:
For all the outrage voiced by folks in positions of power over the releases of classified U.S. diplomatic cables, there's a very good argument that in other respects, Wikileaks is picking up where old-fashioned investigative journalism left off.
Aside from the political content of many of Wikileaks' disclosures, they're increasingly revealing nasty tidbits about well-connected corporations as well. In fact, Wikileaks head honcho Julian Assange has announced that a big business will be his next target for exposure.
The following unpleasant revelations have already hit the wires, courtesy of Wikileaks:
•Bank of America (NYSE: BAC) has embarked on serious Wikileaks damage control after Assange threatened to expose something about a major U.S. bank, which Assange said revealed an "ecosystem of corruption."
•U.S. diplomats have acted as a "sales force" for Boeing (NYSE: BA), offering perks and goodies to foreign leaders who chose Boeing's products over competitor Airbus.
•A U.S. ambassador suggested the Bush administration wage a retaliatory trade war with the European Union in 2007 over genetically modified crops. U.S. pressure applied to Europe, which is notoriously reluctant to accept GM crops, would most certainly have helped companies like Monsanto (NYSE: MON).
In a rare interview in November, conducted by Forbes, Assange claimed that he has damning data on companies in the pharmaceutical, finance, and energy sectors. A lot of investors had best hope that their companies are beyond reproach.
Wikileaks may have rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, but there are definite virtues in its actions. Freedom of speech doesn't simply apply to speech you (or people in power) want to hear. And a true free market has corporations competing with one another on a fair and ethical playing field, vying to make the best products customers will want to buy. Corruption isn't supposed to be part of the equation, and the competitive advantages it can bestow don't strengthen our economy or better serve consumers.
A good brand reputation is a major asset for many corporations; a bad reputation can be a liability. "In the struggle between open and honest companies and dishonest and closed companies, we're creating a tremendous reputational tax on the unethical companies," Assange told Forbes.
Those of us who are searching for good, ethical businesses to invest in would call that a pretty smart "tax." In a world of greater transparency, only the corporate jerks have something to fear.
Fast Company asks: "Is the Federal Government Asking Its Agencies to Treat Employees Like Potential Spies?"
But the sections on preventing unauthorized employee disclosures and personnel security seem designed more for the CIA and NSA than, perhaps, the Department of Housing and Urban Development or the Department of Education. Among the items on the checklist:
•"Do you have a foreign travel/contacts reporting process or system that identifies unusually high occurrences of foreign travel, contacts, or foreign preference in the investigative subject pool?"
•"Do you have mandatory pre-and post-travel briefings for government and contractors?"
•"What if anything have you implemented to detect behavioral changes in cleared employees who do not have access to automated systems?"
•"Do you use psychiatrist and sociologist to measure:
•Relative happiness as a means to gauge trustworthiness?
•Despondence and grumpiness as a means to gauge waning trustworthiness?"
Steven Aftergood, a national security specialist for the Federation of American Scientists, told MSNBC those sections of the checklist looked more like programs used at intelligence agencies for "rooting out spies." "This is paranoia, not security," he said.
Vanity Fair releasing Wikileaks piece at 12amest tonight.
Ok. Much more info but, let's leave it there for now.......