[News] Silvia Baraldini: Torture in US Prisons

[News at freedomarchives.org]

Torture
The United States Underground
by Silvia Baraldini

(Silvia remains under house arrest in Italy under terms of her repatriation 
as a US political prisoner)
http://www.prisonactivist.org/pps+pows/silvia.html

from Il Manifesto, May 11, 2004, p. 10 (translated)



Faced with the catastrophic reality of the tortures inflicted on Iraqi 
citizens by U.S. and British occupation forces, the defense of the two 
governments has been centered on the identification of the "bad apples" 
responsible for what could otherwise be characterized as exceptional 
episodes -- episodes extraneous to the democratic systems of the two 
countries.  Since The New Yorker published the first images, we have been 
inundated by interviews with inhabitants of the rural towns from which the 
soldiers accused of the torture originate.  Full of condmenation and 
dismay, these interviews attempt to reassure us of the deep democratic 
sentiment that animates Americans.

Curiously, not a single interview has appeared with that part of the U.S. 
population that would be able to testify to the torture, abuses of power, 
sexual violence and conditioning that it has personally suffered.  I am 
speaking of the prisoners, both political and social, who have served their 
sentences in the special sections of Marion, Illinois; Florence, Colorado; 
Pelican Bay, California; Lexington, Kentucky; and Alderson, West Virginia; 
to name some of the most miserable known.  If a journalist had tracked down 
Rafael Cancel Miranda, he would be able to testify that in the 
not-so-distant years of the 1970s, in the undergrounds of Marion, prisoners 
were handcuffed to walls and left for hours.  Frank "Big Black" Smith would 
be able to recount how all of the prisoners of Attica, at the end of their 
rebellion, were stripped nude and forced to submit while members of the 
National Guard beat them with clubs and rifles, and how he, himself, an 
ex-football player, was forced to remain on his feet for interminable hours 
with a football held beneath his chin, surrounded by soldiers ready to beat 
him if he dropped it. Samuel Brown would be able to tell us about his 
severe neck injury that was purposely left untreated as a strategy for 
softening him before he was interrogated by the FBI. And Sekou Odinga could 
tell us how, after he was arrested, his chest was used as an ashtray by 
members of the task force that interrogated him.  Alejandrina Torres would 
be able to tell us about himself -- a Puerto Rican political prisoner later 
pardoned by President Clinton, who was violated in federal prison in 
Phoenix, Arizona, not with a broomstick but with the gloved fists of a 
so-called nurse.  Or Susan Rosenberg, who spent two months in the winter of 
1988 without sleep in a cell of the special unit of Lexington Prison where 
the lights were turned on every twenty minutes, where the curtainless 
shower is observed by one of the 21 surveillance cameras of that unit, who 
experienced the humiliation of having to ask a male prison guard for a 
tampon every time she needed one.  The women prisoners in Georgia state 
prison and in Dublin federal prison would be able to testify how in prison 
one can be sexually abused by the same individuals who are supposed to 
protect you.  In Pelican Bay and Florence, journalists would find the 
prisons upon which Guantanamo was modelled.


The reality that is inexorably emerging from Iraqi prisons should not 
surprise us. For years, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the 
American Civil Liberties Union have all denounced the analagous conditions 
that exist in special prisons in the United States.

http://www.ilmanifesto.it/Quotidiano-archivio/11-Maggio-2004/art87.html








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