APA Referendum & the Prisons Issue: Vignettes from Hell

There was a bit of a scare for American Psychological Association supporters of the anti-torture referendum when some APA members who were withholding their dues in protest of APA interrogation policy felt they weren't getting their ballots in the mail. The mailing includes the APA ballot for president of the organization, as well as the ballot for the referendum. It turns out that the mailings may have been only somewhat delayed, and APA is cooperating to help members get their ballots.

In good news for referendum supporters, APA divisions 9 and 27, the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI) and the Society for Community Research and Action: Division of Community Psychology, respectively, have voted to endorse the referendum. Meanwhile, the debate over the pros and cons of the referendum, which seeks to ban psychologist participation "in settings where persons are held outside of, or in violation of, either International Law (e.g., the UN Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Conventions) or the US Constitution (where appropriate), unless they are working directly for the persons being detained or for an independent third party working to protect human rights," continues apace.

The initiators of the referendum are trying to address their opponents criticism, and have posted an updated FAQ page towards that end.

Abuse in American Prisons

Some of the opponents of the APA referendum say, disingenuously in my opinion, that passage of the referendum could jeopardize psychologist jobs in U.S. supermax prisons or other forensic settings. The leftwing version of this criticism is to oppose the resolution because it does not go far enough, i.e., that it fails to address both torture and abusive, inhumane conditions that occur in U.S. prisons.

It is indisputable that terrible abuse takes place in prisons in the United States, and that conditions and treatment in some amount to torture. This scandal has gone on for years, and the APA has totally failed to address it. However, to take anti-torture activists to task because their referendum (or earlier resolutions backed by the same group of supporters) addresses Pentagon/CIA torture and not abuse in American prisons, misses the point entirely, giving "progressive" cover to a political bloc with the supporters of military interrogator jobs in sites that disallow basic human rights.

The backers of the referendum address this issue in an August 6 letter to APA members:

We are well aware of the harms and legal struggles facing certain prisons and jails inside the domestic U.S. criminal justice system. However, the referendum takes no position on such settings where prisoners have full access to independent counsel and constitutional protections; nor does the referendum take a position on settings that now exist within the domestic mental health system where clients and patients also possess these basic rights.

I would have liked to see a stronger statement about the need to address the "harms and legal struggles" faced by domestic U.S. prisoners, but I also understand that the target the referendum is aiming at is the illegal military/CIA sites where prisoners have no constitutional or rights protection, and where torture is conducted as a matter of policy.

Still, both the medical and psychological establishments will have to face sooner or later the obscene mess that is U.S. penal practice. I can't understand, for my own part, why psychologists or any health professional would want to work in any place that propagates human suffering. For those who enter such institutions believing they can "make a difference" in treatment, or ameliorate suffering, they are usually cruelly disillusioned within a short period of time. (I have spoken to some of these psychologists, and they are have made it clear to me that the system is unsympathetic and unmoveable.) The others, like thousands of other prison employees, find ways to rationalize their collaboration with an unjust and barbaric system.

The conditions in U.S. prisons are bad and getting worse. A Human Rights Watch article noted:

A federal judge in 1999 concluded that Texas prisons were pervaded by a “culture of sadistic and malicious violence.” In 1995, a federal judge found a stunning pattern of staff assaults, abusive use of electronic stun devices guns, beatings, and brutality at Pelican Bay Prison in California, and concluded the violence “appears to be open, acknowledged, tolerated and sometimes expressly approved” by high ranking corrections officials....

In January 2004, the U.S. Department of Justice reported on terrible conditions at Arizona’s juvenile detentions centers, including sexual abuse of the children by staff members (and fellow inmates) that occurs “with disturbing frequency” and a level of physical abuse that is ”equally disturbing.”

Murder by Medical Neglect: the case of Hiu Lui Ng

The New York Times has an article by Nina Bernstein yesterday on the death in immigration custody of Hiu Lui Ng, a computer engineer in the U.S. since 1992, placed in detention a year ago even as he was applying for his green card. Denied treatment for months, it took a federal judge's order to get an MRI for Mr. Ng. The results came too late for any effective treatment.

In April [2008], Mr. Ng began complaining of excruciating back pain. By mid-July, he could no longer walk or stand. And last Wednesday, two days after his 34th birthday, he died in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in a Rhode Island hospital, his spine fractured and his body riddled with cancer that had gone undiagnosed and untreated for months....

Mr. Ng’s death follows a succession of cases that have drawn Congressional scrutiny to complaints of inadequate medical care, human rights violations and a lack of oversight in immigration detention, a rapidly growing network of publicly and privately run jails where the government held more than 300,000 people in the last year while deciding whether to deport them.

The article chronicles the nightmarish treatment of Mr. Ng, as officials seems to have lied about his treatment, and shifted him from prison to prison to avoid his habeas petition, filed so he could seek medical treatment. The Times article documents other recent cases of negligence leading to fatalities for immmigrant prisoners in its system.

Release Torture Victim Pol Brennan!

A case that does link U.S. prisons with the larger torture issue concerns the continued incarceration of former Irish Republican Army member Pol Brennan. He was arrested over 30 years ago for carrying explosives, and imprisoned in the notorious "H-blocks" of Long Kesh Prison in Britain (razed in 2006), where prisoners were subjected to torture via the "five techniques". These techniques would seem familiar to us today, who have seen the revelations from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. They include hooding, wall-standing (stress positions), sensory overload via noise, sleep deprivation, and deprivation of food and drink.

Pol Brennan escaped from Long Kesh as part of a big prison break of 38 prisoners in 1983.

Sandy Boyer and Shaun Harkin described Mr. Brennan's situation in an article at Counterpunch last May.

Pol made his way to the [San Francisco] Bay Area, where he met and married Joanna Volz, a U.S. citizen. They lived quietly until January 1993, when federal agents arrested Brennan on a British extradition warrant. He was forced to spend more than seven years fighting extradition, and was imprisoned for three of those years, half the time in a building with no windows.

The situation in Northern Ireland changed dramatically in ensuing years, with a political agreement between the Provisional IRA and the British government. Britain withdrew its request for Brennan's extradition in 2000. The U.S. also suspended deportation proceedings against some former IRA prisoners. But Brennan still faced deportation, though it was put on hold as his application for political asylum was being considered.

Brennan settled into domestic life, working as a carpenter. As adjudication for political asylum often does (to the stress of those applying, and the scandal of social justice in the U.S.), his asylum case went on for years, while his work permits were routinely approved.

But the new gung-ho security forces born in the fires of 9/11 have generated a new atmosphere. On January 26, 2008, Brennan and his wife were stopped at an immigration checkpoint in Texas. Because his work authorization was expired, and despite the fact that he could produce evidence of his asylum case and pending work permit application, the Border Patrol locked him up:

Brennan says, "They acted as if they had caught the terrorist al-Zarqawi, as they as they huddled around their computer screens. Their little eyes were jiggling in their heads with excitement"....

Brennan was soon moved to solitary confinement, because, apparently, he was considered an escape risk since he broke out of Long Kesh 25 years earlier. It was as if they expected the IRA to invade South Texas to free him.

Today, Pol is locked in a cell 23 hours a day....

An immigration judge denied Brennan bail, saying he is a "flight risk" and "a danger to the community."

According to an ACLU attorney, Mr. Brennan is currently being held at "Willacy County Detention Center, also known as 'Tent City' or 'Ritmo,' and the South Texas Detention Complex. Willacy is run by Management and Training Corporation (MTC), a Utah-based private prison company that gained some notoriety when its former director was tapped to set up the now-infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq." (Emphasis added) Willacy is so bad that its own guards went to the media to complain of rotten maggot-infested food being fed to its 2000 or so immigrant prisoners.

Pol Brennan is another in a by now long stream of victims of abitrary detention and inhumane treatment by the U.S. government and its seamy security contractors. Those who wish to support Mr. Brennan in his campaign for release should visit his support website.

Another Perspective: Torture by Other Countries

Sometimes I wonder, as this is a blog dedicated to exposing and reforming the use of torture by the U.S. government, whether readers of this blog realize to what a great extent torture is practiced by countries other than the United States. The fact is that torture is practiced by many other countries. A websearch turns up the following from InformationPlease.com:

According to Human Rights Watch (www.hrw.org), the use of torture was documented in the following countries in 2004 and 2005: China, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Malaysia, Morocco, Nepal, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Syria, Turkey, Uganda, and Uzbekistan.

Amnesty International's Annual Report for 2008 lists many other countries where torture and other human rights violations occur on a not irregular basis. These include, among others, Myanmar (Burma), Sudan, Belarus, and Afghanistan (where "violations of international humanitarian and human rights law were committed with impunity by all parties, including Afghan and international security forces and insurgent groups," and where U.S. coalition forces continue to turn over prisoners to the Afghan National Directorate of Security, "despite allegations of torture and other ill-treatment by the NDS".)

One country worth examining in a bit more depth is Egypt, as it exemplifies the effects of an out of control use of torture upon the civil life of a society. A Human Rights Watch article in February 2005 reported:

Human Rights Watch interviewed several former detainees who provided credible accounts of torture they underwent at the hands of SSI [State Security Investigation service] interrogators. Others spoke of seeing fellow detainees who had been badly tortured, and hearing the screams of those being abused. Given that those most likely to have been tortured are among the hundreds if not thousands of persons still in detention, and that many of those released fear the possible consequences of meeting with independent human rights monitors, Human Rights Watch believes that torture and ill-treatment by the SSI has been widespread in connection with the investigations into the Taba attacks. [The Taba attacks concerned a terrible series of bombings of tourist areas, including the Taba Hilton hotel in near the Egyptian-Israeli border in October 2004.]

A HRW "briefing paper" a year earlier described the terrible cost torture had wrought upon Egyptian society:

Torture in Egypt is a widespread and persistent phenomenon. Security forces and the police routinely torture or ill-treat detainees, particularly during interrogation. In most cases, officials torture detainees to obtain information and coerce confessions, occasionally leading to death in custody. In some cases, officials use torture detainees to punish, intimidate, or humiliate. Police also detain and torture family members to obtain information or confessions from a relative, or to force a wanted relative to surrender.

While torture in Egypt has typically been used against political dissidents, in recent years it has become epidemic, affecting large numbers of ordinary citizens who find themselves in police custody as suspects or in connection with criminal investigations. The Egyptian authorities do not investigate the great majority of allegations of torture despite their obligation to do so under Egyptian and international law. In the few cases where officers have been prosecuted for torture or ill-treatment, charges were often inappropriately lenient and penalties inadequate. This lack of effective public accountability and transparency has led to a culture of impunity.

The other countries that practice torture are not always outside Western Europe. Great Britain scandalously tortured IRA prisoners at Long Kesh internment camp in the 1960s-1970s, utilizing techniques such as hooding, sensory deprivation, and isolation that are remarkably similar to those practiced by the United States, as revealed in recent exposes the past five years or so. In the early 1960s, the French were charged with hideous use of torture against Algerian "insurgents".

The U.S. State Department produces Reports on Human Rights of many countries around the world -- I often utilize these reports when doing research on U.S. asylum applicants for my work -- and despite some shortcomings, the State Department reports often document human rights violations, including torture, in many countries around the world. Furthermore, they document the tremendous legal and reporting difficulties experienced by workers of NGOs [Non-Governmental Organizations] in those countries when they seek to expose or remedy these wrongs, including harassment, jailing, even disappearances of such workers.

It's important to note that despite its faults and its struggles the United States remains a country where, even if it is difficult to penetrate the mass media on this subject, journalists, bloggers, NGO organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, etc. do not experience this kind of heavy-handed governmental oppression, at least not as a normal occurrence. And then, too, despite the paucity of coverage in the U.S. press, as readers of this blog know, some important coverage does occur here, coverage that is essential in providing much of what we know about the fight against torture. Furthermore, it seems that within the military and even the intelligence agencies, there are those individuals who do not go along with the misuse of interrogation practices at Guantanamo and elsewhere. Alberto Mora is one such individual who comes to mind. Retired Major General Antonio Taguba is another.

Hence, it was an international embarrassment when some months back an internal training manual developed by the Canadian foreign affairs department labeled the United States as a country where foreigners risked torture, relying on reports of maltreatment in the U.S. prison at Guatanamo, Abu Ghraib, and "black site" prisons. The U.S. protested, and the Canadian government made moves to remove the U.S. from such a list.

The United States is also a major destination for torture victims seeking asylum from around the world. I know. I've worked personally with a fair number of these victims. While the U.S. has tightened the procedures for gaining asylum in the U.S., making them too restrictive, many thousands still find refuge in this country, sometimes from the very countries that remain U.S. allies, some of which have also been harshly criticized by the same State Department reports noted above. Making matters even stranger, many asylum refugees are torture victims fleeing the same countries to which the U.S. sent foreign prisoners in the "war on terror" via "extraordinary rendition", where they then experienced torture (such as Maher Ahar). The entire situation is so irrational, it almost seems invented by a madman trying to confuse any reasonable person into a state of insensibility.

The fight against torture is a world-wide struggle. One major outcome of that political fight was solidified with the production of the United Nations Convention Against Torture, to which the U.S. is a signatory. (The U.S. ratified the CAT with a number of reservations that unfortunately complicate the enforcement of the CAT when it concerns U.S. possible violations.)

As a statement on Worldwide Torture by Human Rights Watch puts it:

This is a critical time to insist on revelation of the full extent of torture and related abuses by U.S. authorities and to press for prosecution of those responsible. It is also a critical time to press other governments, many of which have been quick to condemn the U.S. for its actions at Abu Ghraib, to investigate and prosecute torture and mistreatment in their own holding cells, detention facilities, and prisons.