Wages of Rebellion

by Chris Hedges

  One example of self-inflicted pain is to force a prisoner to stand without moving or to hold some other stressful bodily position for a long period. The combination, government psychologists argued, would cause victims to feel responsible for their own suffering and accelerate psychological disintegration. Sensory disorientation combines extreme sensory overload with extreme sensory deprivation. Prolonged isolation is followed by intense interrogation. Extreme heat is followed by extreme cold. Glaring light is followed by total darkness. Loud and sustained noise is followed by silence. “The fusion of these two techniques, sensory disorientation and self-inflicted pain, creates a synergy of physical and psychological trauma whose sum is a hammer-blow to the existential platforms of personal identity,” McCoy writes.27

  After hearing from Lutalo, Kerness became a fierce advocate for him and other prisoners held in isolation units. She published through her office a survivor’s manual for those held in isolation as well as a booklet titled “Torture in United States Prisons.”28 And she began to collect the stories of prisoners held in isolation.

  “My food trays have been sprayed with mace or cleaning agents, … human feces and urine put into them by guards who deliver trays to my breakfast, lunch, and dinner,” a prisoner in isolation in the Wabash Valley Correctional Facility in Carlisle, Indiana, was quoted as saying in “Torture in United States Prisons.”

  I have witnessed sane men of character become self-mutilators, suffer paranoia, panic attacks, hostile fantasies about revenge. One prisoner would swallow packs of AA batteries, and stick a pencil in his penis. They would cut on themselves to gain contact with staff nurses or just to draw attention to themselves. These men made slinging human feces “body waste” daily like it was a recognized sport. Some would eat it or rub it all over themselves as if it was body lotion.… Prisoncrats use a form of restraint, a bed crafted to strap men in four point Velcro straps. Both hands to the wrist and both feet to the ankles and secured. Prisoners have been kept like this for 3–6 hours at a time. Most times they would remove all their clothes. The Special Confinement Unit used [water hoses] on these men also.… When prisons become overcrowded, prisoncrats will do forced double bunking. Over-crowding issues present an assortment of problems many of which results in violence.… Prisoncrats will purposely house a “sex offender” in a cell with prisoners with sole intentions of having him beaten up or even killed.29

  Prisons are at once hugely expensive and, as Kerness pointed out, hugely profitable. Prisons function in the same way the military-industrial complex functions: the money is public and the profits are private. “Privatization in the prison-industrial complex includes companies which run prisons for profit while at the same time gleaning profits from forced labor,” she said. “In the state of New Jersey, food and medical services are provided by corporations, which have a profit motive. One recent explosion of private industry is the partnering of Corrections Corporation of America with the federal government to detain close to 1 million undocumented people. Using public monies to enrich private citizens is the history of capitalism at its most exploitive.”

  Those released from prison are woefully unprepared for reentry. They bear the years of trauma they endured and often suffer from the endemic health problems that come with long incarceration, including hepatitis C, tuberculosis, and HIV.30 Many of them lack access to medications upon release to treat their physical and mental illnesses.31 Finding work is difficult, and they feel alienated and are often estranged from friends and family. More than 60 percent end up back in prison.32

  “How do you teach someone to rid themselves of degradation?” Kerness asked. “How long does it take to teach people to feel safe, a sense of empowerment in a world where they often come home emotionally and physically damaged and unemployable? There are many reasons that ex-prisoners do not make it—paramount among them is that they are not supposed to succeed.”

  Kerness grew up asking different questions. In 1961, at the age of nineteen, she left New York to work for a decade in Tennessee in the civil rights struggle, including a year at Tennessee’s Highlander Research and Education Center, where Rosa Parks and other civil rights leaders were trained. By the 1970s, she was involved in housing campaigns for the poor in New Jersey. She kept running into families with incarcerated loved ones. This led her to found Prison Watch.

  The letters that pour into her office are disturbing. Female prisoners routinely complain of being sexually abused by guards. One prisoner wrote to her office: “That was not part of my sentence to perform oral sex with officers.” Other prisoners write on behalf of the mentally ill who have been left to deteriorate in the prison system. One California prisoner told of a mentally ill man spreading feces over himself and the guards then dumping him into a scalding bath that took skin off 30 percent of his body.

  Kerness said the letters she receives from prisoners collectively present a litany of “inhumane conditions including cold, filth, callous medical care, extended isolation often lasting years, use of devices of torture, harassment, brutality, and racism.” Prisoners send her drawings of “four- and five-point restraints, restraint hoods, restraint belts, restraint beds, stun grenades, stun guns, stun belts, spit hoods, tethers, and waist and leg chains.” But the worst torment, prisoners tell her, is the psychological pain caused by “no-touch torture,” which includes “humiliation, sleep deprivation, sensory disorientation, extreme light or dark, extreme cold or heat,” and “extended solitary confinement.” These techniques, she said, are consciously designed to carry out “a systematic attack on all human stimuli.”

  Sensory deprivation is used against Islamic militants, jailhouse lawyers, and the some 150 political prisoners, many part of radical black underground movements in the 1960s that advocated violence. A few, such as Leonard Peltier and Abu-Jamal, are well known, but most have little public visibility—among them are Sundiata Acoli, Mutulu Shakur, Imam Jamil Al-Amin (known as H. Rap Brown when he was the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, in the 1960s), Jalil Bottom, Sekou Odinga, Abdul Majid, Tom Manning, and Bill Dunne.

  Those within the system who attempt to resist the abuse and mistreatment are dealt with severely. Prisoners in the overcrowded Southern Ohio Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in Lucasville, Ohio, staged a revolt in 1993 after years of beatings, degrading rituals of public humiliation, and the alleged murders of prisoners by guards. Approximately 450 prisoners were able to unite antagonistic prison factions, including the Aryan Brotherhood and the Black Gangster Disciples, and hold out for eleven days by holding guards hostage. It was one of the longest prison rebellions in US history. Nine prisoners and a guard were killed by the prisoners during the revolt.

  The state responded with characteristic fury. It singled out about forty prisoners and eventually shipped them to Ohio State Penitentiary (OSP), a supermax facility outside Youngstown.33 There prisoners are held in solitary confinement twenty-three hours a day in seven-by-eleven-foot cells. Prisoners at OSP almost never see the sun or have human contact. Some of those charged with participating in the uprising have been held in these punitive conditions at OSP or other facilities since the 1993 revolt. Five prisoners involved in the uprising—Bomani Shakur, Siddique Abdullah Hasan, Jason Robb, George Skatzes, and Namir Abdul Mateen—were charged with murder. They are being held in isolation on death row.34

  Kerness said that the for-profit prison companies have created an entrepreneurial class like that of the Southern slaveholders, one “dependent on the poor and on bodies of color as a source for income,” and she described federal and state departments of corrections as “a state of mind.” This state of mind, she said in the interview, “led to Abu Ghraib, Bagram, and Guantánamo, and what is going on in US prisons right this moment.”

  As long as profit remains an incentive to incarcerate human beings and our corporate state abounds in superfluous labor, there is little chance that the prison system will be reformed. Our prisons serve the engine o
f corporate capitalism, transferring state money to private corporations. These corporations will continue to stymie rational prison reform because the system, however inhumane and unjust, feeds corporate bank accounts. At bottom, the problem is not race, although race plays a huge part in incarceration rates, nor is it ultimately poverty. It is the predatory nature of corporate capitalism itself. And until we slay the beast of corporate capitalism, until we wrest power back from corporations, until we build social institutions and a system of governance designed not to profit the few but to foster the common good, our prison industry and the horror it perpetuates will only expand.

  African American radicals were targeted first. Muslim radicals were targeted next, especially after the attacks of 9/11. Their stories differ little from those of Abu-Jamal or Lutalo.

  Syed Fahad Hashmi, a US citizen, is serving a fifteen-year sentence in Guantánamo-like conditions in the supermax ADX (Administrative Maximum) facility in Terre Haute, Indiana. He is isolated in a small cell for twenty-two to twenty-three hours a day. He has only extremely limited contact with his mother, father, and brother, often going weeks without any communication. He was charged by the government with two counts of providing and conspiring to provide material support to al-Qaeda and two counts of making and conspiring to make a contribution of goods or services to al-Qaeda. He accepted a plea bargain on one count of conspiracy to provide material support to terrorism. If he had gone to trial, he would have faced the possibility of a seventy-year sentence.35

  The best the US government could offer as evidence of Hashmi’s crimes was that an acquaintance who stayed in his apartment with him in early 2004 while he was a graduate student in London, Junaid Babar, also an American citizen, had raincoats, ponchos, and waterproof socks in his luggage that were to be handed over to a member of al-Qaeda in south Waziristan, Pakistan. Hashmi also allegedly permitted Babar to use his cell phone to contact others who were planning acts of terrorism.36 Babar, who was arrested in 2004 and pled guilty to five counts of material support for al-Qaeda, also faced up to seventy years in prison. But he agreed to serve as a government witness against Hashmi, as well as in other terror trials, in exchange for a reduced sentence.

  I doubt that the government was overly concerned about a suitcase full of waterproof socks that were being taken to Pakistan. The reason Hashmi was targeted was because, like the Palestinian activist Dr. Sami Al-Arian, he was fearless and zealous in his defense of those being bombed, shot, terrorized, and killed throughout the Muslim world.37 The government planned to introduce tapes of Hashmi’s political talks while he was a student at Brooklyn College, during which time Hashmi was a member of the New York political group Al Muhajiroun. He made numerous provocative statements, including calling America “the biggest terrorist in the world,” but Al Muhajiroun is not defined by the government as a terrorist organization. Membership in the group is not illegal. And our complicity in massive acts of state terror is a historical fact.38 Hashmi had a right to express these sentiments. More important, he had a right to expect freedom from persecution and imprisonment because of his opinions.

  I spoke to Hashmi’s father, Syed Anwar Hashmi, in June 2011. The elder Hashmi came to the United States from Pakistan when Fahad was three and his other son, Faisal, was four. He worked for more than two decades as an accountant for the city of New York. Anwar came, as most immigrants do, for his children. He believed in America, in its fairness, its chances for opportunity, its freedoms. And then it all crumbled when the state proved as capricious and cruel as the Pakistani dictatorship he had left behind. On the day of his son’s arrest, he said, “my American dream became an American nightmare.”

  Three law enforcement officials appeared at his home in Flushing, Queens, on June 6, 2006, to inform him that his son, who had been in London completing a master’s degree in international relations, had been arrested at Heathrow Airport on terrorism charges. Hashmi, after fighting the order for eleven months while in Belmarsh Prison in London, was the first American citizen extradited under the post-9/11 laws. He was taken in May 2007 to the Metropolitan Correctional Center in lower Manhattan and placed in solitary confinement. Like so many of those arrested during the Bush years, Hashmi was briefly a poster child in the “war on terror.” His arrest was the top story on the CBS and NBC nightly news programs, which used graphics that read “Terror Trail” and “Web of Terror.”39

  “I came to this country from Pakistan nearly thirty years ago, in 1982, with my wife and two young boys,” his father said. “Coming from a Third World country, we were full of hope and looked towards America for liberty and opportunity. I had an American dream to work hard and give my sons good educations. I worked as an assistant accountant for the city of New York, six days a week, nine hours a day, including overtime, to support my family and to send both my kids through college. We all became US citizens, and my sons fulfilled my dreams by completing their undergraduate and postgraduate education. I was very proud of them.

  “In high school and then as a student at Brooklyn College, Fahad became a political activist, concerned about the plight of Muslims around the world and the civil liberties of Muslims in America,” he went on. “Growing up here in America, Fahad did not fear expressing his views. But I was scared for him and urged him not to speak out. He would remind me that everything he did was under the law. But having grown up in a Third World country, I had seen that it did not always work this way, and so I worried. He was monitored by law enforcement and quoted in Time magazine. But he kept speaking out. And then, with his arrest, my fears came true.”

  Judge Loretta Preska, who would later oversee the case of the hacker Jeremy Hammond, denied Hashmi bail. His family and friends, who sat crowded together in the courtroom, listened in stunned silence. And then, after five months in jail, Hashmi, already isolated in solitary confinement, was suddenly put under “special administrative measures.” SAMs are the state’s legal weapon of choice when it seeks to isolate and break prisoners. They were bequeathed to us by the Clinton administration, which justified SAMs as a way to prevent Mafia and other gang leaders from ordering hits from inside prison. The use of SAMs expanded widely after the attacks of 2001. They are frequently used to isolate terrorism case detainees before trial. SAMs, which were renewed by Barack Obama, severely restrict a prisoner’s communication with the outside world. They end calls, letters, and visits with anyone except attorneys and sharply limit contact with family members.40

  Hashmi, once in this legal straitjacket, was not permitted to see much of the evidence against him under a law called the Classified Information Procedures Act, or CIPA. CIPA, begun under the Reagan administration, allows evidence in a trial to be classified and withheld from those being prosecuted.41

  The weekly visits that Hashmi’s family had made to the jail in Manhattan were canceled. A single family member was permitted to visit only once every two weeks, and on a number of occasions the family member was inexplicably denied admittance. During the last five months of the trial, Hashmi’s family was barred from visiting him. Anyone who has contact with a prisoner under SAMs is prohibited by law from disclosing any information learned from the detainee. This requirement, in a twist that Kafka would have relished, makes it illegal for those who have contact with an inmate under SAMs—including attorneys—to speak about his or her physical and psychological condition. The measures were imposed because of Hashmi’s “proclivity for violence,” although he had not been charged with or convicted of committing an act of violence.42

  Once the SAMs were imposed, “he wrote us occasionally—one letter on no more than three pages at a time—but he was allowed no correspondence or contact with anyone else,” his father said of his son. “In addition, because of Fahad’s SAMs, we were not allowed to discuss anything we heard from him, including his health or any details of his detention or what he was experiencing, with anyone else. It was like being suffocated.”

  In a pretrial motion, Hashmi’s lawyer presented the extens
ive medical and scholarly research that demonstrates the severe impact of solitary confinement on human beings, which often leaves them incapable of defending themselves during their trial. It did not sway the judge. Before ever being sentenced, Hashmi lived in a universe where he had no fresh air and was subjected to twenty-three-hour lockdown and constant electronic surveillance, including when he showered or relieved himself. He was barred from group prayer. He exercised alone in a solitary cage. He was denied access to television or a radio. His newspapers were cut up by censors. And this was all before trial.

  “These years have brought deep disillusionment for my family in the American justice system,” Syed Anwar Hashmi said. “Fahad was restricted in reviewing much of the evidence against him, and even his attorney could not discuss much of the evidence with him. Secret evidence is something we knew from back home. The judge accepted the prosecutor’s motion to introduce Fahad’s political activities and speeches into the trial to demonstrate his mind-set. Where was the First Amendment to protect Fahad’s speech? Two days before the trial was set to begin, Judge Preska agreed to the prosecutor’s motion to keep the jury anonymous and kept under extra security—even though this could have frightened the jury and affected how they viewed Fahad.”

  “On the day before trial [April 27, 2010], nearly four years since he had been arrested, I had just returned from dropping off clothes for Fahad to wear to court when I received a call from my attorney,” his father said. “The government had offered a deal to drop three of the four charges against Fahad if he accepted one charge which carried a fifteen-year sentence, and Fahad had agreed to this plea bargain. I was shocked by my son’s decision on the eve of his trial, but after I thought more, I wondered how anyone could have decided differently in his situation. Fahad had been in solitary confinement, under SAMs, for nearly three years. The judge had in every instance sided with the government in pretrial motions. If convicted, Fahad faced a possible seventy-year sentence.”