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PHP<P>The U.S. has 2.1 million people behind bars today--accounting for one-fourth of the world's prison population. More than half of those incarcerated are serving time for nonviolent offenses. And most of them are in jail for low-level drug offenses--some of which are legal in other industrialized countries. </P>
<P>During the decades-long hysterics about drugs, politicians introduced "mandatory minimum" sentences to look as though they had a solution to the "crisis." Instead, countless lives have been wasted, families torn apart and jails filled to the bursting point because judges aren't allowed to use discretion in sentencing.</P>
<P>The outcomes would be laughable if they weren't so tragic. James Geddes got a 75-year sentence for growing marijuana--and another 75 years for possession. When he won an appeal, the combined sentences were reduced...to 90 years. By way of comparison, the standard sentence for manslaughter in some states is eight years. </P>
<P>Minorities have borne the brunt of mandatory minimums. For example, mandatory minimums helped produce the infamous 100-to-1 rule--where it takes possession of 100 times more powder cocaine than crack cocaine to get a mandatory minimum sentence.</P>
<P>Why the disparity? Crack cocaine is cheaper than powder cocaine and is sold more often to poor Blacks. Statistics show that more whites use crack cocaine than Blacks, yet 88 percent of prison sentences for crack offenses go to African Americans. </P>
<P>One primary motivation of Kennedy and Co. is financial--they believe that prison overcrowding is draining government revenue. But the real cost of mandatory minimums is the human toll. Abolishing these draconian laws is long overdue.</P>
<P>"I now know that justice is a sham, like so many other things in life," wrote Jacquie Fogel, who served 10 years in prison on a first-time drug offense, in a book called <I>Shattered Lives.</I> "I know that accused people have very little hope in the courtroom..."</P><P><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif" size="2"><b>by ELIZABETH SCHULTE</b></font><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2"> | June 8, 2001 | Page 2</font>
<font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif" size="3"><P>HORRY COUNTY, S.C.--"I didn't kill my baby," Regina McKnight repeated throughout her trial. But jurors took just 15 minutes to convict McKnight for "murdering" her stillborn child--because she smoked crack cocaine during her pregnancy.</P>
<P>Prosecutors argued that McKnight--who will serve 12 years in jail without the chance of parole--was a "reckless" addict, indifferent to what drugs might do to her fetus. It was a sick claim.</P><P>McKnight has an IQ of 72. The 24-year-old African American mother of three has been homeless for much of the last few years. She never smoked crack until her mother, who cared for her, was killed in a car accident in 1998.</P>
<P>When McKnight delivered a stillborn baby 35 weeks into her pregnancy, doctors found traces of cocaine in the systems of both mother and child.</P>
<P>At McKnight's trial, a Charleston pathologist testified that it's nearly impossible to determine the cause of stillbirths. But that didn't mean much in this South Carolina court.</P><P>But the news doesn't seem to have reached the Neanderthals on the Supreme Court. In a unanimous decision, the justices ruled against "cannabis buyers' clubs," which allowed AIDS and cancer patients to buy marijuana for medicinal use.</P>
<P>The court upheld a 30-year-old federal drug law reflecting "a determination that marijuana has no medical benefits worthy of an exception." Never mind that nine states have "medical marijuana" laws on the books--most of them through voter referendums. And opinion polls show widespread support for making marijuana available to patients who use it to alleviate pain.</P>
<P>If the Supreme Court ignored established evidence of the medical uses of marijuana, President Bush ignored common sense in nominating John Walters as his new drug czar. Walters is a right-winger whose views on drug policy verge on the fanatical.</P>
<P>As deputy director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) under Papa Bush, he pushed for incarceration over treatment and education. In 1996, Walters testified before Congress to defend racist sentencing guidelines that require harsher punishment for people found guilty of crack cocaine possession than powder cocaine possession. He even dismissed the problem of racial bias in drug enforcement as an "urban myth."</P>
<P>Even former drug czar Gen. Barry McCaffrey--no appeaser in the war on drugs himself--criticized Walters' nomination.</P>
<P>The war on drugs has been exposed as a war on poor people and minorities. But Bush and Walters are looking for more victims.</P>NEW YORK'S drug laws ensure that the privileged and connected receive leniency for the same offenses that send thousands of Blacks and Latinos to prison. <p>
Julia Diaco, the rich and connected so-called "Pot Princess" was sentenced on March 22 in Manhattan Supreme Court to five years' probation for drug dealing. <p>
Diaco was 18 years old when she was arrested for multiple sales of drugs to undercover narcotics officers from her dorm room at New York University. Despite having a "strong" case against her and facing up to 25 years in prison if convicted, she received probation upon completion of a drug rehab and education program.<p>
This follows the high-profile case of Caroline Quartararo, a former spokeswoman on Rockefeller drug law reform for Gov. George Pataki, who received a similar minor sentence after being arrested with crack cocaine. Quartararo was given treatment and a $250 fine. She was arrested on December 20 for possessing three rocks of crack cocaine. She pleaded guilty to seventh-degree criminal possession of a controlled substance.<p>
Cheri O'Donoghue, whose son Ashley is currently serving a sentence of seven to 21 years for a first-time nonviolent drug offense, said the cases of Julia Diaco and Caroline Quartararo prove that "if you are rich and privileged, you will likely receive compassion from the courts."<p>
"While I support the notion of compassion and access to treatment for people who use and abuse drugs," said O'Donoghue, "the reality is that people of color who get caught up in the criminal justice system generally receive neither." <p>
While drug use rates are similar between Blacks and whites, approximately 92 percent of the people in prison on drug charges in New York are Black and Latino. O'Donoghue's 23-year-old son, who is Black, sold cocaine to two white students, who in turn sought to resell the drugs on their Hamilton College campus. <p><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif" size="3"><B><P>OTHER LETTERS BELOW:</B><BR>
<A HREF="#Priorities">These priorities are all screwed up</A><BR>
<A HREF="#Cocaine">Cocaine sentencing rules are still racist</A></P>
<P><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif" size="4"><b>Sweatshops on wheels</b></font></P><P>According to Amnesty International, the paramilitaries--who have direct and documented ties to the official military--are responsible for most of the killing in Colombia. Now, human rights groups fear that the death squads will go on an even more savage rampage in the autonomous zone.</P>
<P>But the U.S. government couldn't care less. It has fueled the horrific violence in Colombia--by funneling close to $2 billion in military aid there, all in the name of fighting the so-called "war on drugs." The U.S. justifies this with the claim that the FARC are "narcoterrorists," with ties to Colombia's drug trade.</P>
<P>The rebels do raise money by taxing producers of coca, the plant used to manufacture cocaine, in areas that they control--and by carrying out kidnappings-for-ransom of prominent politicians and the rich.</P>
<P>But the death squads have the real ties to Colombia's cocaine traffickers. As Klaus Nydholm, a representative of the UN Drug Control program, said last year, "We do not consider the FARC drug traffickers. We believe that it is still a matter of a guerrilla organization with political objectives."</P>
<P>The "war on drugs" was always a smokescreen to hide a war on left-wing opponents of the Colombian government. And now the Bush gang may drop the smokescreen--with "a proposal to declare the destruction of leftist guerrillas in the South American country an explicit goal of U.S. policy," wrote the <I>Los Angeles Times</I>.</P>
<P>"This is no longer about stopping drugs, it's about fighting the guerrillas," said Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), chair of the Senate foreign operations subcommittee, in a rare moment of honesty.</P>
<P>Activists who picketed Colombian diplomatic offices last week know the reality--that the U.S. government is backing brutal killers in a dirty war in which ordinary Colombians will pay the price. We have to send Washington a message: No more Vietnams!</P><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Nate Blakeslee, <b><i>Tulia: Race, Cocaine, and Corruption in a Small Texas Town.</b></i> Public Affairs, 2005, 450 pages, $26</font><p>The arrests and subsequent convictions in most of the cases were based solely on the word of Coleman, who had no witnesses, notes or other corroborating evidence of the alleged crimes. Four years later, the cases unraveled under legal and public pressure, culminating in a dramatic 2003 court hearing that reversed all the convictions.<p>
Journalist Nate Blakeslee--who broke the Tulia story in the pages of the <i>Texas Observer</i>--revisits the dusty town in the Texas panhandle in <i>Tulia: Race, Cocaine, and Corruption in a Small Texas Town. </i>In <i>Tulia</i>, Blakeslee explains how this atrocity could take place--and depicts the struggle of the people who fought for justice.<p>
In Blakeslee's depiction of Tulia, you can feel the racism pervading the town. He writes, "...race was a central organizing principle of life in Tulia," affecting everything from jobs to dating to sports.<p><P><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif" size="5"><b>Washington wages chemical warfare in Colombia</b></font></P>
<P><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif" size="2"><b>By Nicole Colson</b></font><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2"> | September 13, 2002 | Page 2</font></P>
<font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif" size="3"><P>THE U.S. government began dumping toxic chemicals on parts of Colombia last week. Carried out under the guise of the "war on drugs," the operation involved spraying the herbicide glyphosphate over a 300,000-acre area where coca, the crop used to make cocaine, is grown.</P>
<P>Conveniently for Colombia's government, the area being defoliated is a stronghold of the left-wing Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a rebel group that has fought a 38-year civil war against the government. No wonder Washington--which has bolstered Colombia's dirty war on the FARC--wants to step up the defoliation operation.</P>
<P>The rhetoric about a "drug war" is a smokescreen. Experts agree that the fumigation program won't stop coca production, but will only force a shift in the regions where it's grown.</P>
<P>Then there's the safety of the chemical being used. The State Department claims that glyphosphate does "not pose unreasonable risks or adverse effects to humans or the environment." But the Environmental Protection Agency thinks different.</P><P><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif" size="2"><b>By Alan Wallis</b></font><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2"> | October 24, 2003 | Page 2</P>
<P><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif" size="3">A NEW York man was left clinging to life after police gunned him down in a hail of 21 bullets. The October 10 shooting, which recalled the NYPD's murder of African immigrant Amadou Diallo in 1999, took place during an attempted drug bust.</P>
<P>According to the police version of the story, an undercover officer had just given the victim $15 to buy crack cocaine, and was told to go around the corner to get it. When the officer refused to go, police say, the man appeared to reach for a gun.</P>
<P>The cop opened fire, emptying his gun with 11 shots, and his partner got off another. Two nearby uniformed cops heard the noise, and fired nine shots of their own. After the smoke cleared, however, police failed to find either drugs or weapons on the victim, or anywhere in the vicinity.</P>
<P>All or part of the shooting was recorded by security cameras at a nearby café, but the videotape was confiscated by the NYPD, a café employee told <I>Socialist Worker--</I>and never heard of again. The shooting victim was eventually taken to St. Luke's Roosevelt Hospital, according to the <I>New York Times</I>, where he was said to be in danger of losing a leg. </P>
<P>But the <I>Amsterdam News</I> reported recently that the man remains unidentified--and rumors of his death are now circulating. He is one in a long list of victims of the trigger-happy New York police force.</P><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif" size="3"><P>BOGOTÁ, Colombia--Authorities here can resume a U.S.-funded program to spray toxic herbicides on the Colombian countryside following a judge's ruling in early August.</P>
<P>In July, Judge Gilberto Reyes halted antidrug flights to spray coca and poppy fields, agreeing that the chemicals used were a threat to humans and the environment.</P>
<P>Then the Bush administration got to work. The U.S. mounted intense pressure on the Colombian government-even threatening to cut off all aid--until Reyes caved.</P>
<P> U.S. officials claim that the spraying program is a necessary tool in their "war on drugs." Under the program, planes are supposed to target fields of coca and poppies--which are used to manufacture cocaine and heroin--with the toxic herbicide glyphosate. More than 125,000 acres of Colombian land have been sprayed this year.</P>
<P>But this chemical weapons program is having a devastating effect. There are numerous reports of local populations that were blanketed with the chemicals. Residents in affected areas report rashes, nausea, vomiting and blurred vision.</P>
<P>Meanwhile, fields of corn, beans, potatoes and other crops near targeted areas have been affected; reports of dead fish and farm animals are on the rise; and water sources may have been contaminated.</P>
<P>Reyes' reversal is the latest example of the U.S. flexing its muscle to impose its will on poor countries. But opposition to the U.S. plan is growing. According to one report, 35,000 indigenous people are threatening a campaign of protest over the spraying.</P>According to the Department of Corrections, about 66 prisoners were re-sentenced, but only 21 were set free as of April 30, 2005. These are handpicked cases that are the least detrimental to the careers of judges and district attorneys. <p>
I have sat in on a half a dozen of these re-sentencing cases. The first three applicants were given time served. In these cases, the courtrooms were full of reporters and concerned activists, along with family members. <p>
The next three cases were not that lucky. All seemed similar to the first three. However, the press wasn't there, and only a handful of people were present, which put the decision-making process in a different light. <p>
One case in particular hit home: a middle-aged mother who was arrested in 1999 with a few ounces of cocaine was sentenced to 17-to-life for a first offense. She was a drug mule, according to the facts of the record. But the Queens district attorney's office twisted and manipulated the facts to make her look like she was a kingpin who had abused her young daughter because the child was present in the room with a package of cocaine. <p>
Sitting in the courtroom was this traumatized teen, who has been placed in a foster home. She had lost her mother and her childhood. She was praying for her mother along with two nuns who she now lives with. The judge and Queens District Attorney Dick Brown agreed to reduce her mother's sentence to nine years-to-life--leaving her to serve an additional five years. The daughter left the courtroom in tears. <p>
In New York City, District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, who is running for re-election against former Judge Leslie Crocker Snyder, has decided to stick it to a prisoner who has already served 14 years of a 33-to-life sentence for a Rockefeller conviction. <p>
The district attorney's office has said they would oppose Junior Gumbs' re-sentencing application on the grounds that he was a major drug dealer. The facts say something different--in light of recent developments with the lead police officer on the case, discredited former Commissioner Bernie Kerik, who is now mired and sullied in professional and private scandals. <p><P><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif" size="2"><b>by MIKE CORWIN</b></font><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2"> | July 20, 2001 | Page 14</font></P>
<P><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif" size="3">TULIA, Texas--Activists from across the country will go on "Freedom Rides" this month to this small Texas town to protest the racist war on drugs. </P>
<P>Tulia, located in the Texas Panhandle, was the site of one of the most notorious drug stings in recent memory. In the early morning on July 23, 1999, police arrested 43 residents on charges of distributing cocaine and paraded them in front of TV cameras as they took them to the county jail.</P>
<P>Of the 43 people arrested, 40 were Black--amounting to 12 percent of Tulia's Black population. Almost every Black person in town had a relative or friend on the indictment list.</P>
<P>The arrests were based solely on the testimony of a white undercover deputy who worked unsupervised on the streets and had no photos, sound recordings or witnesses to back up his allegations. The deputy, Tom Coleman, allegedly has connections to the Ku Klux Klan and has been called "a compulsive liar" by former coworkers at the Pecos Country Sheriff's Department.</P>
<P>At their trials, eight men were convicted by all-white or nearly all-white juries--and given sentences ranging from 12 years to 99 years. Other defendants, fearing such long sentences, sought plea bargains, with 14 more getting jail time as a result.</P>Uribe is also showing that he would prefer to have the U.S. government do the work, rather than trying FARC rebels in Colombia. In other words, Colombia is sending its citizens to be tried by the same country that produced Abu Ghraib and Camp X-Ray in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.<p>
Meanwhile, U.S. officials are delighted to be getting their hands on a FARC commander. He will likely be paraded around as another victory in the so-called "war on terror."<p>
Human rights organizations see the extradition as undermining future prisoner exchanges. Even the country's Catholic Church had asked that Uribe not move forward with the extradition while Trinidad faced charges of "rebellion" in his own country.<p>
Trinidad will apparently be charged with drug trafficking in the U.S.--due to the FARC's admitted policy of not stopping impoverished peasants from growing coca, and their taxation of the coca trade. But although more Colombians die from U.S. cigarettes than U.S. citizens die from Colombian cocaine, don't expect the tobacco company CEOs to be extradited to Colombia any time soon.<p>
<?php include "../../legacy-includes/BottomNavLinks.htmlf" ?><b>WHY DO you think the courts are so biased?</b><p>
WITH THE laws, it's all about how they're enforced. In certain communities, the laws are enforced one way. In a predominantly white community, police are not going to put through sweeps in the same kind of way they do in the Black community. Laws are enforced more harshly in the Black community.<p>
And they're designed in a biased way. Look at the crack-cocaine sentencing, where you need 500 times the amount of cocaine for the same sentence you get for crack. With these kinds of laws, the powers-that-be know they've discriminated against the Black community.<p>
So reforms are difficult. We need to deal with the politicians--hold them accountable for promises they make.<p>
Any time you're dealing with a system that incarcerates people wrongly for 22 years, reform is definitely needed. You're not talking about one or two years--you're talking about 20 years.<p>
That's where you get into the political side. I guess anything is possible, but are people willing to make change? You can pass all kinds of laws, but will those laws be followed? Even though they're on the books, the laws don't always get followed.<p><P>That money is flowing into Colombia now--and fueling the government's four-decades-old war against left-wing rebels.</P>
<P>Colombians are dying from war-related violence at a rate of about 30,000 a year. At the heart of the war is Plan Colombia--the U.S. government's program for winning the "war on drugs" by wiping out production and trafficking in the country that produces 90 percent of the world's cocaine. U.S. officials claim that the rebels work with traffickers to run the drug trade--and are therefore the main targets of Plan Colombia.</P>
<P>But as Klaus Nydholm, a representative of the United Nations Drug Control Program stationed in Colombia, said last month, Colombia's right-wing paramilitary thugs are "even more" involved in trafficking than the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the country's main rebel group. "We do not consider the FARC drug traffickers," Nydholm said. "We believe that it is still a matter of a guerrilla organization with political objectives." </P><P>Meanwhile, the government has increased flights to spray chemicals in rural areas where coca plants are raised. The weapon of choice in Plan Colombia's "air war" is Roundup--a chemical manufactured by Monsanto that destroys everything it touches, wiping out legal crops alongside illegal ones. As George Monbiot, columnist for Britain's <I>Guardian</I> newspaper, put it, Roundup "is the Agent Orange of America's new Vietnam."</P>
<P>All this is justified as part of the "war on drugs." As the late Sen. Paul Coverdell (R-Ga.) declared--in terms taken from the "domino theory" that justified the Cold War with the ex-USSR, only with cocaine taking the place of communism: "Colombia is the heart of the drug war, and we'd better get on with it. If we lose Colombia, then we lose everywhere." </P>
<P>But there's a more important--and more familiar--economic interest in Colombia: oil.</P><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif" size="3"><P>THE U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously last week that public housing officials can evict tenants for drug use by family members.</P>
<P>The decision came in a case regarding the 1998 Anti-Drug Abuse Act, passed under Bill Clinton. The law requires public housing agencies to issue leases that allow tenants to be evicted if they, their family members or a guest engage in drug-related crimes--whether or not the tenants know about them, and even if they occur off public housing property.</P>
<P>And who are the "dangerous criminals" that the Supreme Court justices decided had to be turned out into the street? Sixty-four-year-old Pearlie Rucker, her mentally disabled teenage daughter, two grandchildren and a great-grandchild.</P>
<P>The decision gave the Oakland Housing Authority the green light to evict the Rucker family--because the daughter was convicted of possessing cocaine, not on public housing property, but three blocks away.</P>
<P>Among the other possible victims are 72-year-old Willie Lee and 64-year-old Barbara Hill--because their grandsons, who lived with them in a public housing unit, were caught smoking marijuana in the parking lot.</P>
<P>As Sheila Crowley, head of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, said of the decision, "The only way they can get away with it is because it affects poor people."</P>
<P>Of course, not everyone in public housing has to worry. George W. Bush and Florida Gov. Jeb Bush both have family members with drug problems. But you won't see them evicted from their new homes.</P>First, Davis--so aghast by grandstanding--paraphrased [and forever ruined] the classic baseball poem "Casey at the Bat," fuming, "Today, there is no joy in Mudville until the truth comes out." He then said that the "sunshine" being offered by the dour committee was "the best disinfectant" for baseball's steroid woes. <p>
This was just the beginning. The crush of cameras seemed to be like a brew of catnip and crack-cocaine to the congressional leaders, as they sat elevated, facing five current and former major leaguers, including three of the 10 top home run hitters of all time. <p>
We learned about the members of Congress who had baseball card collections as children. We learned who played catch with their dad. We learned that the son of Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.)--who we can only hope is younger than 13--sleeps in a Sammy Sosa jersey (although with some of the fawning on display from Congress, it seemed like many of them slept in uniform as well, a well-oiled glove tied with string tucked under their mattresses).<p>The players' seething hostility toward Canseco was so thick that he even had to be placed in a separate, guarded waiting room before the hearing. At the witness table, no one hid their contempt of the player whose name is now synonymous with stool-pigeonry in every clubhouse. As Schilling said, "The allegations made in that book, the attempts to smear the names of players both past and present, having been made by one who for years vehemently denied steroid use, should be seen for what they are: an attempt to make money at the expense of others." <p>
Canseco himself came off as an oafish and discredited figure. One of the most striking aspects of Canseco's book is not only that he names alleged users; it's that he does so to make the case for the greatness of steroids as part of your breakfast of champions. It's as if George W. Bush admitted his youthful cocaine use and then called for the distribution of little spoons as part of No Child Left Behind. Yet before Congress, Canseco meekly denounced performance-enhancing drugs, saying, "I'm completely turned around." <p>
While Canseco sweated under the hot lights, the player being lacerated in the hearing's aftermath is Mark McGwire. McGwire, who has been out of the public eye since retiring in 2002, was the only player who did not deny under oath having used steroids. As sports columnist Larry Biel put it, "McGwire's silence was deafening. In the court of public opinion, McGwire looked very guilty." Another columnist, the <i>Washington Post's </i>Thomas Boswell, wrote that McGwire "left the hearing room with his reputation in tatters."<p><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif" size="3"><b>Dear <i>Socialist Worker,</b></i> <br>
In December, Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Gary Webb committed suicide at the age of 49. <p>
The tragedy of Webb's death is not simply the loss of a great reporter. It's the fact that Webb's career--and life--was ripped apart by the very same people in the mainstream media who rushed to break the news of his death.<p>
Webb is best remembered as the trail-blazing journalist who, in the 1996 <i>San Jose Mercury News</i> series "Dark Alliance," broke the story of the CIA's involvement in trafficking cocaine into inner-city Los Angeles. In his exhaustive report, Webb uncovered evidence that during the 1980s, right-wing drug dealers in Latin America had helped to finance a CIA-run covert war in Nicaragua--reaping the profits of selling tons of cocaine to Los Angeles street gangs, which in turn sold it through Black neighborhoods nationwide in the form of crack cocaine.<p>
The most galling part of the story, as Webb wrote on the CounterPunch Web site in 2001, was that "all the available evidence pointed to the sickening conclusion that elements of the U.S. government had known of it and had either tacitly encouraged it or, at a minimum, done absolutely nothing to stop it."<p>
Yet once the story broke, the mainstream press and government officials savagely attacked Webb. "The national news media, instead of using its brute strength to force the truth from our government, decided that its time would be better spent investigating me and my reporting," Webb wrote. "They kicked me around pretty good, I have to admit." At one point, Webb was even accused of making a movie deal with a drug dealer he'd written about--and the Drug Enforcement Agency raided his agent's office trying (and failing) to back up the claim.<p>
In the face of such a vicious assault, the <i>Mercury News</i> caved, retracting the story, and used Webb as a sacrificial lamb for the media hounds. Webb was demoted--later quitting the paper--and he saw his career trashed in print by such bastions of "journalistic integrity" as the <i>New York Times</i> and the <i>Washington Post</i>.<p><P>In other words, more executions all around. "They want to set a consistent national standard for these cases," said David Ruhnke, who represents a defendant in a new Manhattan death penalty case, "but the standards that they're using are the standards used by Texas district attorneys running for re-election."</P>
<P>Almost half of the cases that Ashcroft intervened in were in New York and Connecticut. "They're attempting to bring the federal death penalty to areas of the country like the Northeast that are less hospitable to the death penalty than the traditional death penalty states," said Kevin McNally, a Kentucky lawyer from the Federal Death Penalty Resource Counsel Project.</P>
<P>The group also found that race played an overwhelming role in the cases where Ashcroft intervened. "In the cases he is seeking the death penalty, overriding the prosecutors, 95 percent are cases involving people of color," said Texas defense lawyer Dick Burr.</P>
<P>Who is Ashcroft going after? In one New York case, three men are accused of being cocaine dealers who killed a marijuana dealer. Defense lawyers say one of the defendants is mentally retarded.</P>
<P>Also on the list is the New York case of Diego Rodriguez and Alan Quinones, who are accused of killing a government informant. Last year, they received publicity after a federal judge ruled in their case that the current federal death penalty law was unconstitutional, citing the growing number of exonerations of death row inmates through DNA and other evidence. </P>
<P>Ashcroft was also responsible for getting the prosecutions of the Washington, D.C., sniper suspects moved to Virginia--a state with a high rate of executions.</P>
<P>A mountain of doubts--and opposition--about the death penalty system is piling up across the country. High-profile cases of innocent people on death row, proof of the systematic racism in the system and activism around the issue led former Illinois Gov. George Ryan to empty death row by commuting the sentences of every prisoner facing execution.</P><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif" size="2"><b>By Lee Sustar</b></font><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2"> | May 13, 2005 | Page 2</font><p>
<font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif" size="3">THE ARREST of two U.S. soldiers in Colombia charged with selling weapons to right-wing paramilitaries has once again highlighted Washington's deep involvement in that country's dirty war.<p>
The two soldiers, Lt. Col. Allan Norman Tanquary and Sgt. Jesus Hernandez of the U.S. Army, were arrested by Colombia authorities just weeks after five other U.S. soldiers were arrested for smuggling cocaine into the U.S. The soldiers are part of the 800 military advisers--increased last year from 600--at the core of Plan Colombia, the U.S. government's multi-billion-dollar effort to militarize the Andes under the guise of the "war on drugs."<p>
Colombian President Álvaro Uribe came under severe criticism for handing over the soldiers to the U.S. for prosecution. Under an agreement with Washington, U.S. soldiers can't be prosecuted in Colombia.<p>
Uribe is the U.S. government's chief right-wing strongman in Latin America amid a growing number of center-left governments. In particular, the U.S. wants Colombia--the third-largest recipient of U.S. military aid after Israel and Egypt--to serve as a counterweight to Venezuela, which has swung to the left under President Hugo Chávez.<p>
Now, the arrest of the U.S. soldiers on gunrunning charges has complicated Uribe's efforts to repackage the government's dirty war against left-wing rebels by offering amnesty to right-wing death squads, which back drug lords and collaborate with Colombian armed forces against two leftist guerrilla armies.<p><P><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Jennifer Gonnerman, <B><I>Life on the Outside: The Prison Odyssey of Elaine Bartlett.</B></I> Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2004, 368 pages $24.</font></P>
<I><P><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif" size="3">LIFE ON the Outside: The Prison Odyssey of Elaine Bartlett </I>is an honest and, at times, infuriating account of how the criminal justice system destroys lives. At the age of 26, Bartlett was convicted of selling four ounces of cocaine for a drug informant who set her up.</P>
<P>Under the Rockefeller mandatory minimum drug laws, she was sentenced to 20 years in prison. The judge who sentenced her was nicknamed "Maximum John."</P>
<P>Bartlett was granted clemency after serving 16 years. The bulk of the book details what happened after her release. Without a job or any assistance to help her rebuild her life, Bartlett moves back to a run-down, crime-infested public housing complex.</P>
<P>While she was incarcerated, her mother and two brothers died, and her four children struggled to survive living with various family members. As a convicted drug felon, she can be denied public housing, student loans, a driver's license, parental rights, welfare benefits, many types of jobs and, in some states, the right to vote.</P>When Congress created its first broad immigration controls in the 1920s, Mexicans were singled out for the first "guest-worker" programs, admitted and then forcibly returned when their labor was no longer needed. <p>
Immigration laws have undergone many changes since, but this employment pattern for Mexican workers has remained. Even when federal law bans Mexican migration, immigration officials reserve punishment for undocumented workers, deported in showcase immigration raids--to reinforce an atmosphere of fear in Mexican communities.<p>
This was the case even during the notorious bracero program, which imported more than 4 million Mexican farm laborers between 1942 and 1964--all deported by their employers when their contracts expired.<p>
But while the bracero program was in full swing, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service also instituted a mass deportation program in 1954, known as "Operation Wetback." The INS deported 1 million Mexicans in the name of "protecting national security and American jobs."<p>
U.S. employers had found an ideal solution--two sides of the same coin: rigorous border enforcement and guest-worker status for Mexican migrants. Both these elements--and only these elements--are present in the congressional debate over immigration now being waged in Washington. <p>
Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein has suggested that upcoming negotiations with the House will "not necessarily" be finished before the November elections. Let's hope so. No legislation is far preferable to what is on offer. <p>
The future for immigrant rights will be determined not by election-year congressional wrangling but by more bodies in the streets.<p><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif" size="2"><b>By Robert McDonald</b></font><p>
<font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif" size="3">AUSTIN, Texas--Supporters of the racist Minuteman Project and the U.S. Border Watch group were evenly matched in Austin by about 80 to 100 immigrant rights activists.<p>
Police separated the lines of activists on the Capitol grounds by about 20 yards. Antiracist protesters chanted in both Spanish and English--"That's bullshit, get off it, the enemy is profit! Unemployment and inflation are not caused by immigration!" The Minutemen supporters responded with such gems as "Wetback, wetback, go away."<p>
Tensions were high, and protesters were agitated when an activist was detained without charges by the police for attempting to enter the Capitol to use the restroom. He was later released but told he must stay away for 24 hours.<p>
The police spent most of their time enforcing an arbitrary distance between the multiethnic protesters and the lily-white anti-immigrant bigots.<p>
The Minutemen held signs with preposterous claims like "25 Americans are killed by illegal aliens each day," and outright racist pronouncements such as "If you can't read this, you don't belong here!" Pro-immigration activists held out their positive demands, chanting "Don't give into racist fear, immigrants are welcome here!"<p>That was a green light to Gulf Coast employers to take advantage of immigrant workers. And now, many immigrants are finding that promises of easy money and accommodations used to lure them to the Gulf Coast are the cover for a very different reality.<p>
Myron Moran, an undocumented immigrant from Guatemala, came to New Orleans on the promise of good-paying construction and cleanup jobs. Today, he works 14-hour days and pays $30 a night to live in a room in an abandoned hotel on Canal Street, with no electricity or running water.<p>
His roommate, Ruben Lopez, a U.S. citizen who drove from Fresno, Calif., to New Orleans after he heard about jobs at a job fair, says he is still owed $1,200 by a local contractor for house gutting and other clean-up work.<p>
Lopez and others say that the climate in the city is becoming increasingly hostile to Latino immigrants. "I walked up and asked this white guy if he knew where we could get some food," Lopez told <i>Salon</i>, "and he said, 'I don't know a place where you can eat, wetback.'...There's lots of racism here."<p>
Meanwhile, to many employers, workplace safety laws seem to have become little more than a suggestion. An investigator with the Laborers Union, Rafael Duran, recently told the Associated Press that outside the New Orleans Arena he encountered Mexican teenagers as young as 15 and 16 years old removing carpets covered in excrement. The teens said they were sleeping in a field under a tent.<p>
In Gulfport, Miss., the <i>New York Times</i> recently found a group of 32 undocumented Guatemalan immigrants being paid just $8 an hour to tear down Sheetrock for 10 hours a day. All 32 were being housed in just three mobile homes. One of the men, Arnoldo Antonio Lopez, said that he had paid $70 a month to live in the trailer--and that the first contractor who had hired him for $7 an hour failed to pay him. A second contractor to hire the men also failed to pay them.<p>
"They hadn't eaten for three days when we got to them," Vicki Cintra, the Gulf Coast outreach organizer for the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance, told the <i>Times</i>. "They had no blankets, nothing. They were sleeping on the floor. They had no money to buy food." Bill Chandler, president of the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance, added, "These workers are super-exploited by contractors in horrible living conditions. People are working without any kind of inoculation--tetanus or anti-hepatitis. They don't have goggles, they don't have gloves, they don't have any safety protection at all."<p><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif" size="3">THE SUB-plot in the movie, Deerfield's journey to self-discovery, leaves some disturbing political questions. Much of the painful brutality of military culture is laid bare along the path, yet Deerfield clearly sees the Army of the Iraq war era as a different world from the Army he fought with in Vietnam.<p>
He is shocked that soldiers are using drugs. He is disturbed at the naked women performing in the strip club for his son's unit on its return from war, embarrassed by the topless waitress in another saloon on the base's periphery.<p>
The military police unit is not only incompetent but more concerned with the military's image than solving a crime. In his anger, he calls a soldier in his son's unit a "fucking wetback," only one example of racism toward Latinos that comes out of nowhere.<p>
Clearly, Deerfield is meant to be the hero of this movie, but his outburst that "my son has spent the last 18 months bringing democracy to a shit hole" does little for his image.<p>
Ironically, Tommy Lee Jones played a Vietnam vet in <i>Heaven and Earth, </i>a 1993 Oliver Stone film which dealt sensitively with the devastation of that war on the civilian population, the degradation of women, and the danger to soldiers and families when vets return home tormented by the what they did in war.<p>
I found myself wanting to scream at both Deerfield and Jones, "Didn't you learn <i>anything </i>from Vietnam?" The furrows in his face show pain, but fail to show whether Deerfield has gained any awareness of his complicity in his family's tragedy. He looks for comfort by performing meaningless military rituals. In his darkest moment, he seeks comfort by frantically "ironing" his pants along the straight edge of a chair.<p><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif" size="3">The history of the U.S. is riddled with hostility to various immigrant groups--though only during certain waves of immigration.<p>
Until the post-Civil War period, the U.S. had no immigration laws. The racist Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882--passed after an industrial strike wave--was part of an attempt to craft a deliberate immigration policy of keeping out "undesirables."<p>
In the early 1900s, a wave of anti-Japanese violence led to a 1907 agreement barring Japanese laborers--a deal made after newspapers like the <i>San Francisco Chronicle</i> warned of an invasion of "bumptious, disagreeable and unreliable" Japanese.<p>
The U.S. carried out mass deportations of Mexicans during the Great Depression, and in a 1954 program actually called Operation Wetback in 1954. Today, both documented and undocumented immigrants in the U.S. face the uncertainty of random raids and deportations, the threat of separation from their families and increased exploitation on the job.<p>
And forget about all men being "created equal. Under an April 29, 2003 Supreme Court ruling, even <i>legal </i>immigrants don't have the same due process rights as citizens. "Congress may make rules as to aliens that would be unacceptable if applied to citizens," then-Chief Justice William Rehnquist declared in upholding a law permitting the federal government to detain immigrants indefinitely if they have been arrested and convicted of a crime. <p>
<?php include "../../legacy-includes/BottomNavLinks.htmlf" ?><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif" size="3"><i>BASTARDS OF the Party--</i>a documentary by Cle "Bone" Sloan, a former member of the Athens Park Bloods--traces the political history of African American street gangs in Los Angeles.<p>
The film's title is from a passage in <i>City of Quartz, </i>radical urban historian Mike Davis' book that Sloan credits with inspiring the film. In the book, Davis refers to the Crips and Bloods gangs as the "bastard children of the Black Panther Party," though Sloan's history stretches back to the Reconstruction era.<p>
Sloan traces the evolution of violence by whites against Blacks and the forms of Black self-defense that evolved by interviewing current and former gang members, Black Panthers and historians, including Davis.<p>In fact, it is the right that's trying to shove judicial activism down our throats. Consider Bush judicial nominees Janice Rogers Brown of California and Priscilla Richman Owen of Texas, two of 10 right-wingers put forward by the White House whose nominations have been held up in the Senate.<p>
Brown, who was tapped for a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, once called the New Deal a "socialist revolution." In 2000, she said in a speech, "Where government moves in, community retreats, civil society disintegrates and our ability to control our own destiny atrophies...The result is a debased, debauched culture which finds moral depravity entertaining, and virtue contemptible."<p>
Owen, who is angling for seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, is an old ally of Karl Rove, Bush's political fixer. Owen is rabidly anti-abortion. In one case in Texas, in which a teenager sought to obtain an abortion without parental consent, Owen argued that the teenager should be refused because she hadn't demonstrated that she knew of religious objections to abortion, or that some women who underwent abortions had experienced severe remorse.<p>
Then there's William Pryor Jr., a former Alabama attorney general who has been approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee for a spot on the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. In one brief that Pryor filed to the Supreme Court on behalf of a Texas anti-sodomy law, he warned that if gay sex were decriminalized, legalized necrophilia, bestiality and child pornography were just around the corner. "I believe that not only is [<i>Roe</i>] unsupported by the text and structure of the Constitution, but it has led to a morally wrong result. It has led to the slaughter of millions of innocent unborn children," Pryor recently told members of a Senate panel.<p>
The Democrats say that they're going to fight these appointments. But even if they do block a few of the worst Bush nominees, this won't make up for the dozens of other conservative judges they've let through without a peep.<p>
Already, Congress has already approved 205 of Bush's judicial nominees--giving the administration a 95 percent success rate. And as the Republicans threatened the "nuclear option," Senate Democrats were working to head it off with a compromise that would allow most of the offending nominees to be confirmed.<p>
We've seen these "compromises" with Bush before--with Democrats backing bankers to push through the bankruptcy "reform" and caving to the anti-abortionists' lies to accept a ban on a late-term abortion procedure misnamed "partial birth" abortion by the right. And that's not to mention the Democrats' all-but-unanimous support for recent legislation to spending another $82 billion on the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.<p><title>
Hitler and Sharon have quite a bit in common
</title><P><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif" size="5"><b>Hitler and Sharon have quite a bit in common</b></font></P>
<p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">June 21, 2002 | Page 4</font></p>Watching scenes of a professor of hygiene peddling myths against masturbation and college students asking the most basic questions about their own bodies, you have to wonder whether these scenes will become tragically familiar again in this era of abstinence-only education in the public schools.<p>
Kinsey's own sexual awakening to his attraction for other men, despite his marriage, and the radical free-love environment he cultivated among his colleagues were used to vilify him during the puritanical 1950s. "Taken together, Kinsey's statistics pointed to a vast hidden world of sexual experience sharply at odds with publicly espoused norms," writes historian John D'Emilio.<p>
Kinsey's published results--which exposed widespread homosexual practices, among other unanticipated outcomes--inspired the McCarthy-era House Un-American Activities Committee to attack him as a communist and hold hearings to intimidate his funding sources.<p>
Some of the movie's best scenes are stories from some of the 18,000 sexual histories that Kinsey and his team gathered through personal interviews. A gay man in a Chicago bar describes being beaten and branded like cattle in a stable by his own brothers when they discovered him having sex with another boy. A woman who had her first orgasm at 40 discovers that her clitoris is the organ responsible for sexual stimulation, not the vagina.<p>
Lynn Redgrave has a bit role as an older woman nearly driven to suicide by her sexual arousal by a female friend, until she reads Kinsey's 1953 study <i>Sexual Behavior in the Human Female</i>. The discovery that there are others like her saved her life and opened up a new world for her as a lesbian.<p>
The biggest drawback of the film is how little of the actual results of the study are revealed. For example, nudity during sex only became commonplace during the 1920s. Kinsey found that most husbands and wives had no idea women were capable of having an orgasm, and most women rarely--and some, never--had one in an era before oral sex and experimentation beyond the "missionary" position.<p>
Class background also had an impact on sexual behavior. Kinsey's study reported that working-class men tended to avoid extended foreplay and few engaged in oral sex. Kinsey's personal preferences and class bias did influence the study, and he dismissed working-class marriages as sexually inadequate due to the lack of varied sexual practices.<p>