TWO BLACKS, TWO GEORGIANS
A YEAR AGO, OCTOBER 1991 featured two very different stories, from two vastly different black Georgians. One was Clarence Thomas, the conservative jurist who, in striving to attain his coveted seat on the Supreme Court, opined he had no philosophical difference with capital punishment; the other was Warren McCleskey, the well-known death row prisoner who boldly challenged the Georgia capital punishment scheme as inherently biased.
In October 1991, one went to a position of supreme judicial power; the other went to an ignoble death in Georgia's electric chair; one ascended the Seat of Power; the other expired upon the Seat of Penalty.
Both made their own marks upon that mystery called history. Thomas -- the second African American nominated to the United States Supreme Court, on a platform that seemed inimical to black social and economic interests, ascended the bench over an outcry of black opinion, as inflamed as it was unprecedented. McCleskey -- whose challenges to Georgia's death penalty practices proved clearly biased infliction of death sentences based upon race of victim -- lost his court fight, and ultimately his life, in one of the most controversial Supreme Coun opinions of recent history. [xxiii]
Thomas's mark was subservience; McCleskey's mark was resistance. Thomas did the bidding of his powerful white, conservative benefactors and was rewarded with appointments of increasing prominence; McCleskey, against enormous odds, battled the historically biased practices of the government in Fulton County, Georgia, all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, and his reward was a tortured death by the state.
McCleskey's 1987 case, which presented undeniable data of the discriminatory nature of the American death penalty process, has become a historic case as much as Dred Scott. The famous Baldus study, which supported McCleskey's claims, was rejected by the Court as a sociological study that revealed "differences" that weren't necessarily "discriminatory."
Retired Justice Brennan denounced the conservative Court's opinion as a "fear of too much justice." One wonders if Thomas, an unabashedly unorthodox born-again conservative, would've seen the facts arising like the red dust of his native Georgia, and condemned the process as de facto unconstitutionally discriminatory, or a mere "difference" unworthy of correction or condemnation?
It would be "cute," perhaps, to add that old standby of indecision -- "time will tell" -- but for Warren McCleskey, time tells nothing, for time ran out.
There are battles ahead over the most fundamental issues, i.e., life and death, simmering and percolating at the "Court of Last Resort" this term.
How Thomas decides them will determine lives or deaths well into the next century, and whether McCleskey's "high-tech legal lynching" constituted an opportunity or an omen.
From death row, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.
CANCELLATION OF THE CONSTITUTION
"I HAVE A RIGHT TO NOTHING which another has a right to take away." So said Thomas Jefferson, America's third president, who as a slaveowner knew a great deal about "rights taken away," and the nation he helped found knows a great deal about it too. Americans are taught, and the world is told, of the First Amendment to the Constitution, which supposedly "guarantees" fundamental rights to free exercise of religion, freedom of speech, and freedom of association. So state history books numbering into the millions. In truth, such rights are illusory. The recent controversy involving this writer is an excellent case in point.
Hired by the prestigious All Things Considered program aired on the NPR network to produce brief commentaries, this writer, who reported for NPR prior to his imprisonment, remarked to one supporter that he felt like he was returning home. NPR, stung by an FOP (Fraternal Order of Police) campaign -- in which the FOP branded the writer a "monster" and heaped abuse on the network -- mumbled something about "misgivings" and, without informing the writer, canceled the airing of the commentaries.
It is perhaps poetic justice that the FOP campaign began on May 13, 1994, several days before the scheduled air date, for it marked nine years to the day after the Mother's Day MOVE massacre of at least eleven MOVE babies, women and men in West Philadelphia by the aerial bombing of MOVE's home in 1985. Philadelphia police shot and killed fleeing MOVE women and children, forced others back into a burning building, and stood by while several blocks of West Philadelphia homes were consumed by flames.
Who are the real monsters?
The same FOP that incinerated, decapitated, and dismembered people with judicial impunity call me a "monster"! Are they then angels?
What rights of "free speech" exist when it can be denied because the state objects to the speaker?
The same system that denied me the alleged "right" to self-representation, that intentionally denied me my "right" to an impartial jury of my peers, that steered me to "trial" before a judge who was a life member of the FOP and known as a "prosecutor's dream"; that denied me the right to examine and/or cross-examine witnesses; and that went back over a decade to introduce evidence of my Black Panther Party membership and statements (said to be "protected" under the First Amendment's "guarantee" of "free" association and "free" speech) and used these to argue for a death sentence -- these are the selfsame forces that successfully censored me from the genteel listeners of NPR's All Things [that the police will allow] Considered.
They have demonstrated how the media is mastered by police power and how the First Amendment once again is but a dead letter.
They have made my point -- and I hope yours.
From death row, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.
L.A. OUTLAW
THE FEDERAL TRIAL of four Los Angeles cops, forced by the public orgy of rebellion and rage that rocked the city a year before in response to acquittals stemming from the brutal Rodney King beating, ended in a jury compromise -- two guilty, two acquitted. While observers may be dispirited by the fact that two cops who brutalized, traumatized, and pummeled King were acquitted, the trial itself raises some serious and disturbing questions. While no one would call the writer a cop lover, it is my firm opinion that the federal retrial of the four L.A. cops involved in King's legalized brutality constituted a clear violation of the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution, which forbids double jeopardy. The Fifth Amendment provides, in part, "nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb."
Like millions of Africans in America, Chicanos, and a host of Americans, the acquittals of the L.A.-cop four in the Simi Valley state assault trial was an outrage that solidified the conviction that there can be no justice in the courts of this system for black people. Although not a reason for the L.A. rebellion, it certainly was a psychic straw that broke the camel's back.
The Simi Valley "trial," like the King beating itself, was both obscene and commonplace, for neither all-white pro-police juries nor state-sanctioned brutality are rarities to those who live in U.S. tombs as opposed to reading about them. The point is, the federal LAPD/King civil rights trial was a political prosecution, spurred by international embarrassment stemming from the raging flames of L.A., without which no prosecution would have occurred.
It also reveals how the system, under the pressure of an outraged people, will betray the trusts of their own agents, so one need not ask how they would treat, and do treat, one not their own, especially under public pressure.
The same system that denied the four L.A. cops their alleged constitutional rights denies the rights of the poor and politically powerless daily with impunity, and will further utilize the Stacey Koon case to continue to do so. To be silent while the state violates its own alleged constitutional law to prosecute someone we hate is but to invite silence when the state violates its own laws to prosecute the state's enemies and opponents.
This we cannot do.
We must deny the state that power. The national ACLU is also of the opinion that the second, federal prosecution violated the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. I believe it is upon that basis that the convictions will later be reversed by an appellate court.
It is ironic that many of those who did not oppose the federal civil prosecutions feel it inappropriate for the federal system to review state convictions under habeas corpus statutes. The only thing this second, federal civil rights violation case has done is provide the system with camouflage, to give the appearance of justice.
The illusion is never the real.
From death row, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.
MEDIA IS THE MIRAGE
AMERICAN MASS MEDIA is a marvel of technology. It is whiz-bang, sparkle, glitter, and satellite wizardry. It is a master plan of methods to communicate, and a pauper's worth of substance. With such technology, how are people so woefully misinformed? The average American neither knows nor cares about the vast world beyond the nation's border. The average American student knows little math, no history, and very little geography, and nor does he or she want to know. Americans have computers in school, dozens of TV stations, and the most aggressive news media on earth. Does that mean they're better informed?
Hardly.
On November 2, 1995, the United Nations General Assembly voted overwhelmingly -- 117 to -- -to condemn the United States for its continuing blockade of Cuba. [xxiv] The international community called the United States blockade "a flagrant act of aggression" and "a blatant violation of international law." That the UN vote was reported at all in American media is amazing, for such news is more often than not passed over entirely by the American press; but where was information about the blockade itself, the effects suffered by the Cuban people, in-depth comments from United Nations delegates and leaders around the world? For a more substantive report, one had to listen to the BBC World News Service, for the rest of the world takes note of events the U.S. prefers to ignore.
American media is a business, and it has a mission; not to inform Americans, but to entertain them. Every media enterprise in America reports the drivel that Marcia Clarke and Chris Darden are "secret" love birds, but the vote of a global assembly condemning U.S. actions received only scant coverage at best.
Why?
The media is a source of titillation more than information. The mission of the media is to please, to comfort, and primarily to sell. When TV was developed, it was promised that every American would learn about the world in his living room. When computers were developed, wasn't it said that they would be invaluable learning tools and that children would learn more, faster? National scholastic tests show otherwise, as kids master computers as toys, and learn splendid hand to eye coordination, but little else.
The media paints false pictures of the nation and the world, pictures designed to serve corporate masters and to make America look good. This feel-good media approach serves the American delusion of white supremacy but it does not inform. When the New .York Times echoes Star magazine, what can the word media mean?
How could millions be surprised at Minister Farrakhan's enormous influence among blacks unless the media wasn't doing its job? How could they look at a million and count less than half that number?
The major media, like its racist projections, is to be rejected, not consumed. For your very patronage gives it life.
From death row, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.
TRUE AFRICAN-AMERICAN HISTORY
A LIFETIME MAY PASS without an individual having been personally addressed by government. For millions, government is a remote venture, conducted by quasi representatives in their name, with their silence ofttimes taken as acquiescence.
Never is an individual as personally involved with government as when faced by the power of a court, when his or her freedom and very life is at stake, at the tender mercies of the state. And rarely has a case been clearer than when a black man actually sued a United States court for his freedom from slavery. The case? Dred Scott v. Sanftrd, 1857. Perhaps you've heard of the case, but have you ever read it? It is an eye opening piece of African and American history, running over a hundred pages. In his opinion, Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney -- a bony, stooped slave owner from Maryland -- wrote:
The question is simply this, can a Negro, whose ancestors were imported to this country and sold as slaves, become a member of the political community formed and brought into existence by the Constitution of the United States, and as such become entitled to all the rights and privileges and immunities guaranteed by that instrument to the citizen. The plea applies to that class of persons only whose ancestors were Negroes of the African race, and imported into this country and sold and held as slaves. We think they are not, and that they are not included and were not intended to be included under the word "citizens" in the Constitution and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for, and secures to, citizens of the United States. On the contrary, they were at that time considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings, who had been subjugated by the dominant race, and whether emancipated or nor, yet remained subject to their authority and had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power in the government might choose to grant them. They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect and that the Negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.
In these words, uttered by one of America's most brilliant jurists, the face of U.S. racist oppression was made plain. The plaintiff, the slave Dred Scott, who sued for his freedom, and that of his wife Harriet and his daughters Eliza and Lizzy, fourteen and seven respectively, in U.S. courts, found a court of law but not of justice, which rejected his claim, saying since he wasn't a citizen, the rights guaranteed in the Constitution, including the right to sue, didn't apply. One hundred and thirty six years after Scott, and still we find courts of law but not of justice.
From death row, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.
WHEN INEFFECTIVE MEANS EFFECTIVE
IN A CASE KNOWN AS Strickland v. Washington, the U.S. Supreme Court drastically narrowed the range of challenges to the effectiveness and competence of counsel at criminal trials. The Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution provides a right in all criminal cases to "assistance of counsel." The Sixth Amendment notwithstanding, are people facing imprisonment and severe punishment actually receiving effective and competent assistance of counsel?
You decide.
If your lawyer actually went to sleep during your trial, would you think he or she was effective? This is what an appeals court ruled in a case called People v. Tippins, 1991. "Although Defense Counsel slept during portions of the trial," the opinion read, "counsel provided defendant meaningful representations."
What about if your lawyer was high on drugs during the trial? When an appellate court was faced with just such an instance, in the case known as People v. Bedilla, 1990, this was their learned analysis: "Proof of a defense counsel's use of narcotics during a trial does not amount to a per se violation of the Constitutional right to effective counsel." Note that in this case, counsel admitted using heroin and cocaine throughout the trial.
And in the case Commonwealth v. Africa, specifically involving MOVE political prisoner Mike Africa, the trial lawyer later admitted to daily cocaine and marijuana use, but that issue wasn't raised on appeal. It would seem that a fairly competent lawyer, having researched the evidence, would pay some attention to how his client was dressed at trial. Not so, said a court of appeals in a case known as People v. Murphy, 1983: "Counsel's seeming indifference to defendant's attire, though defendant was wearing the same sweatshirt and footwear in court that he wore on the day of the crime, did not constitute ineffective assistance."
In all of these real cases, the attorneys involved were deemed competent in their representations, and their clients' convictions were upheld. Under these cases counsel means little more than presence by a lawyer at trial, for even if he is asleep, even if he or she is a drug addict, indeed high at the trial itself, it ain't no thing: counsel, under 5tricklands tortured logic, is presumed effective. These are just a few of the many cases from across the United States that show the poverty of the Sixth Amendment. For more information you can read "Effective Assistance Isn't Much," an article by Robert Darlough in the January/February issue of the American Lawyer. Increasingly the amendments to the U.S. Constitution are merely filler for dusty history books, which have no application in real life -- as the courts have shown repeatedly.
From death row, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.
DEATH: THE POOR'S PREROGATIVE?
"THAT'S WHAT CAPITAL punishment really means. Those that ain't got the capital gets the punishment," is the old saying. Once again we see the inherent truths that lie in the proverbs of the poor. That old saying echoed when it was announced that the district attorney of Delaware County, Patrick Meehan, would not seek the death penalty in the case of John E. DuPont, the wealthy corporate heir charged with the shooting death of Olympic champion David Schultz. The Delaware County DA's office said, "No aggravated circumstances justifying the death sentence existed." Could it be that DuPont's personal wealth, estimated at over $400 million, was a factor? In one fell swoop, the state ensured that while millionaires may be murderers, they are not eligible for that preserve of the poor, America's death row.
As the case of O.J. Simpson showed us, the state is very selective in who it chooses to include in its macabre club of death. O.J., a bona fide celebrity, corporate pitchman, sports legend, and millionaire, was deemed, even though a suspect in a double murder, not fit for a death sentence. So whether or not one is of the opinion that Mr. Simpson was either innocent or guilty, the point remains that before the trial actually began, the DA of Los Angeles decided, No death penalty for O.J. -- millionaires need not apply. As it was for Mr. Simpson, so it was for Mr. DuPont. Simpson's wealth compared to DuPont's makes him look like a pauper. As for DuPont, consider if you will the incredible spectacle of the DA, with all the identical facts, announcing he or she would not be seeking the death penalty if DuPont was the victim. I'm sure we can all agree that would be impossible.
Any poor man who slays a wealthy man will have the weight of the system fall on him like a ton of bricks. For a wealthy man, however, who finds himself charged with killing a poor man, the system becomes user-friendly. Why should this be so?
It's because the system serves the interests of the wealthy. It is their system. In essence, when a poor person comes before the court, he or she faces two things: the offense, and being poor. I am not suggesting that Mr. DuPont, or anyone else for that matter, should be sentenced to death, I am just noting how and why the death sentence is reserved for some and off limits to others. The death sentence remains a prerogative of the poor.
From death row, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.
LEGALIZED CRIME
PHILADELPHIA, New York, New Orleans, Los Angeles. In city after city, we find case after case of not only police corruption but vicious police violence. Young people are beaten, women are assaulted, people who are taught to believe police are their friends find out they are often deadly enemies, armed with the power of the state.
In city after city, police corruption scandals blare across the front pages, telling us of cops who moonlight as drug dealers, sowing the seeds of social poison from their squad cars. The media react with manufactured outrage, and the cycles of corruption reoccur, again, again, and again.
The recent Mollen Commission [xxv] hearings held in New York City were but viler, more corrupt echoes of the Knapp Commission hearing into cop corruption a generation before. Cops caught stealing, thieving, and/or robbing excite the public mind, but what of cops who brutalize, beat, or kill?
How many cops, of the hundreds who beat, brutalize, or kill people all across the land, are ever prosecuted for their acts? How many are convicted? The numbers are minuscule.
The widely reported Rodney King beating case showed us how judges bend over backward to assure criminal cops that things will "be taken care of," and they won't be hurt badly if sentenced.
The white majority media treat cop stealings as worse offenses than cop killings and by so doing seek to minimize those acts in the public mind. Thus, it is the contention of many cops charged with such offenses that they "were only doing their job." Put quite another way, their "jobs" are to kill, to beat, to brutalize the poor and the powerless, to defend the interests of the rich.
That's what they are telling you!
When the human rights group Amnesty International recently released a report denouncing New York police brutality, that city's police hierarchy downplayed it, as if the Nobel Prize-winning group was "interfering." [xxvi]
The status quo in America is white supremacy and oppression of peoples of color. And to protect that status quo is necessary to look the other way when cops beat, lie on the stand, brutalize the poor and the powerless, or even kill.
From death row, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.
CAMPAIGN OF REPRESSION: ATTACK ON THE LIFE OF THE MIND
THE MOST REPRESSIVE REGIME in America just got more repressive: The Pennsylvania Department of Corrections introduced administrative directives 801 and 802. These new regulations severely restrict information, communication, and visitation from very little to virtually nil. Generally, visits are pared down to one per month, with planned restrictions barring all but personal and legal mail, and a ban on all books, save a Bible or Qu'ran. It is a broad-based attack on the life of the mind. Newspapers are to be exchanged one for one, ostensibly to discourage hoarding but in reality to stem the flow of shared information between prisoners-a vital source of up-to-date information, especially in light of the fact that few have access to TV and radio. [xxvii]
Provisions of the rules are so extreme that they can be interpreted to deny a man a piece of paper or an ink pen. Smokers are particularly hard hit: two packs a month are allowed. But most insidious are the provisions governing legal material. They suggest the other regulations are mere smokescreens designed to divert attention from the state's principal objective: the stripping of jailhouse lawyers. For the legal material sections of the Pennsylvania regulations govern all prisoners in the hole, whether for disciplinary or administrative reasons.
There is solid support from scholars, and statistical analysis, for the notion that jailhouse lawyers are the targets of the new rules. In 1991 one of the most exhaustive studies to date on the targets of the prison disciplinary system was released. That report, titled The Myth of Humane Imprisonment, found that there is a statistical hierarchy of who receives the harshest disciplinary sanctions from prison officials. Authored by criminologist Mark S. Hamm, Dr. Corey Weinstein, Therese Copez, and Frances Freidman, it presents tables reflecting the most frequently disciplined groups of prisoners. Here's an example:
Jailhouse lawyers constitute 60.8 percent of the sample; blacks, 48.5 percent. Prisoners with mental handicaps constitute 37.9 percent; gang members, 31 percent; political prisoners, 29.8 percent; Hispanics, 27 percent; homosexuals, 26.6 percent; whites, 22.2 percent; AIDS patients, 19.9 percent; prisoners with physical handicaps, 18.7 percent; and Asians, 5.1 percent.
In accounts supporting this statistical data, the authors wrote, "Respondents observed that guards and administrators had a standard practice of singling out jailhouse lawyers for discipline and retaliation for challenging the status quo." While the data supports the widely held notion that blacks are often targets of severe sanctions, that jailhouse lawyers are the most sanctioned is striking. For jailhouse lawyers, men and women self-trained in law and legal procedure, are among the most studious, in law at least, in the prison; and therein lies the rub.
The evidence suggests, and the new regulations clearly support, the notion that prison administrators don't want studious, well-read prisoners. Rather, they prefer inmates who are obedient, quiet, and dumb. Why else would a prison expressly forbid a person from expanding their learning through correspondence courses or educational programs? It would seem that any institution daring to use the term "corrections" would require all of its charges to participate in educational programs. For how else is one corrected? Yet disciplinary prisoners are forbidden from the one resource designed to moderate behavior and enhance self-esteem: education. For them, many of whom are illiterate, books are deemed contraband, and educational courses are proscribed.
In that regard, more than any other, lies the solution to the often bewildering conundrum mislabeled as "corrections." The state raises its narrow institutional concern, to control by keeping people stupid, over a concern that is intensely human: the right of all beings to grow in wisdom, insight, and knowledge, for their own sakes as well as their unique contribution to the fund of human knowledge. This intentional degradation of the soul by the state, which allows a being to degenerate, or vegetate, yet forbids one from mental expansion, is the most sure indictment available of a system that creates rather than corrects the most fundamental evil in existence, that of ignorance.
From death row, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.
MUSINGS ON MALCOLM
THANKS TO THE EFFORTS of premier filmmaker Spike Lee, the name Malcolm X is once again on millions of lips. Based largely on the Autobiography of Malcolm X; penned by the late Alex Haley, the film tells the epic tale of a man who was indeed larger than life.
This commentary is not, and cannot be, a film review, for I have never seen the film, for reasons that should be obvious. Rather, it is a musing on the life that gave both Haley and Spike grist for their mills.
There are few black men who lived a life as full of glory and tragedy as did Malcolm X; Martin Luther King Jr. was one; and to a lesser extent so was Marcus Garvey, as well as the late Black Panther cofounder Dr. Huey P. Newton. As were King and Newton, Malcolm X was assassinated, but perhaps there the similarity ends. For as America lionized, lauded, and elevated King (more for his nonviolent philosophy than for his person), it ignored and vilified Malcolm (as it did similarly with Dr. Newton, a Malcolmite, as were most Panthers), whose obituaries dwelt on the dark side, ignoring the brilliance of his life, a force that still smolders in black hearts thirty years after his assassination in New York City.
The system used the main nonviolent themes of Martin Luther King's life to present a strategy designed to protect its own interests -- imagine the most violent nation on earth, the heir of Indian and African genocide, the only nation ever to drop an atomic bomb on a civilian population, the world's biggest arms dealer, the country that napalmed over ten million people in Vietnam to "save" it from communism, the world's biggest jailer, waving the corpse of King, calling for nonviolence!
The Black Panther Party considered itself the Sons of Malcolm (at least many male Panthers did) for the sons he never had (Malcolm and his wife, Dr. Betty Shabazz, had a passel of stunning daughters), and inherited one of their central tenets, black self-defense, from his teachings.
While the eloquent, soaring oratory of Dr. King touched, moved, and motivated the southern black church, middle and upper classes, and white liberal predominantly Jewish intelligentsia, his message did not find root in the black working class and urban north, a fact noted by his brilliant, devoted aide-de-camp, the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, who noted in his autobiography how King, coming to Chicago Illinois, met glacial white hatred, black indifference, and near disaster.
Northern-bred blacks preferred a more defiant, confrontational, and militant message than turn the other cheek, and Malcolm X provided it in clear, uncompromising terms. And his message of black self-defense and African-American self determination struck both Muslim and non-Muslim alike as logical and reasonable, given the decidedly un-Christian behavior displayed by America to the black, brown, red, and yellow world.
The media, as Malcolm predicted, would attempt to homogenize, whiten, and distort his message. How many have read of him, in a recent newspaper, described as a "civil rights" leader -- a term he loathed! Stories tell of his "softening" toward whites after his sojourn to Mecca, conveniently ignoring that Malcolm continued to revile white Americans, still in the grips of a racist system that crushes black life -- still! Post-Mecca Malik found among white-skinned Arabs and European converts to Islam a oneness that he found lacking in Americans. So deeply entrenched was racism in American whites that Malcolm/ Malik sensed the intrinsic difference in how the two peoples saw and described themselves. Arabs, calling themselves white, referred simply to skin tone; Americans meant something altogether different: "You know what he means when he says, 'I'm white,' he means he's boss!' Malcolm thundered.
Malcolm, and the man who returned from Mecca, Hajji Malik Shabazz, both were scourges of American racism who saw it as an evil against humanity and the God that formed them. He stood for -- and died for -- human rights of self-defense and a people's self-determination, not for "civil rights," which, as the Supreme Court has indeed shown, changes from day to day, case to case, administration to administration.
From death row, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.
IN DEFENSE OF EMPIRE
AS THE NIGHT SKY over Mogadishu explodes into blazing light, UN/U.S. armed forces clash with Somali irregulars in the Horn of Africa.
The East African nation, already ravaged by famine and the disintegration of the fallen Barre regime, is now the setting for war. So-called peacekeeping forces of the United Nations shoot live rounds into crowds of demonstrating Somalis, killing and wounding scores of them and further defaming the dead by calling them "shields" for Somali gunmen. Curiously, only the "shields" -- Somalian women and children for the most part -- are hit by gunfire, not gunmen. Curious too, how troops kill unarmed demonstrators, mostly women, as part of a "peacekeeping" mission.
The United States, although not yet involved in ground activity, has unleashed repeated air attacks on the capital city, making President Clinton's first use of arms as commander in chief (if one excludes the Waco massacre) in East Africa, against a small Somali militiaman commanding a minute squad of what appears to be armed (with small arms) children.
In a world where small wars and silent holocausts approach normalcy, where Serb/Muslim intergroup hatred has spawned concentration camps, mass rape, and "ethnic cleansing" of beleaguered Muslims, the United Nations can only drop leaflets and MRE food packages. But that is Europe -- where we are told centuries of old hatreds make military intervention ill-advised. Where U.S. air forces dropped food relief to Bosnia-Herzegovina, they drop bombs in Mogadishu, East Africa. To "send a message" to a Somali general, his home, offices, and supporters were bombarded by U.S. air fire. Bosnian and Serb "cleansers," we can assume, do not need any "message."
In truth, however, every act, even nonaction, has a message.
The so-called international community, actually a minority of the world's people, have used force in an attempt to humble an African militia leader who has sought to control his own homeland. That same UN/U.S. force has refused to raise a finger where European militias have virtually razed cities and scattered countless numbers of Muslim families to "ethnically cleanse" Bosnia-Herzegovina.
To my mind, that's quite a message.
It is also illustrative of the way the UN has become the henchman for imperialist power. It doesn't matter if the generals are black, white, straight or gay, male or female: they serve the interests of the system.
Nor does it matter if the president is Democratic or Republican -- he fights to preserve the system.
Is it coincidence that Clinton's first military strike -- into the Horn of Africa -- came days after his lowest poll readings? The American people, if they have shown anything in the last two centuries of existence, have shown a passion for war.
From death row, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.
BUILD A BETTER MOUSETRAP
MANY AMERICANS have a skewed perception of Japan, as skewed, perhaps, as foreigners have of America, many of whom seem to expect cowboys and Indians. Of Japan, the image arises of the feudal Samurai, the ritual Hari- Kari, visions of what Westerners like to call "the inscrutable Orient." From such a martial, warlike history, one wonders what kind of justice system has evolved. Rates of homicide, rape, robbery, and theft are far, far lower than in other industrial societies such as the United States, England, and Germany.
Why are these rates so low in Japan?
If America's conventional wisdom holds true, Japan must be building plenty of prisons, levying increasingly harsh sentences, and subjecting prisoners to Draconian conditions -- right? Wrong.
University of Washington law and Eastern Asian studies professor John O. Haley, author of Mediation and Criminal Justice, opines that the Japanese veer away from retribution and revenge and toward restoration and social reconciliation.
According to statistics published by the Supreme Court of Japan, the following median prison terms were returned for the following offenses:
1. HOMICIDE-FIVE TO SEVEN YEARS
2. ROBBERY TO THREE TO FIVE YEARS
3. ARSON-THREE TO FIVE YEARS
4. RAPE-TWO TO THREE YEARS
The median term for all criminal offenses combined was one to two years. Persons sentenced to prison rarely serve over one term in Japan. For example, in 1984, 64,990 persons were sentenced to prison. Of that total, 56 percent received suspended sentences, with less than 13 percent being subjected to prison terms exceeding one year. More surprisingly, 25 percent of those with suspended sentences were convicted of homicide or robbery, and of those convicted of arson or rape, 35 percent of the sentences are suspended. Only about 45 percent of all imprisoned persons serve full terms.
American critics view the Japanese penal practice with incredulity, if not outright amazement, and hasten to note the sharp distinctions in culture between the United States and Japan. Curiously, American industrialists and economists raise few "cultural" barriers when attempting to incorporate Japanese business and managerial wisdom to the U.S. workplace.
Seemingly, what works in a factory environment becomes unmanageable in the prison context.
But, truth be told, U.S. prisons are themselves in a state nearing physical, social, and ideological collapse, as over a million persons serve sentences, many set to expire, if at all, far into the next century. U.S. prisons, far from being a place of restoration, are social sinkholes of despair, of degradation, of spiritual death.
We could learn much from the Japanese -- more than how to build a better mousetrap.
From death row, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.
HAITIANS NEED NOT APPLY
SINCE 1886 the mammoth monument has stood, its fabled torch and patinaed visage beckoning to the dregs of Europe, the starving many from Ireland blighted by the potato famine, the bearded and babushkaed Jews fleeing the pogroms of an Eastern European pale, the human excess of empires that now wane.
Upon a massive pedestal on which this statue stands, a tablet bears the chiseled words of the poet Emma Lazarus, saying:
... Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the Golden Door!
Lazarus gave voice to the massive Statue of Liberty, and carved human warmth into her stern copper face, through this Golden Doorway to America. How hollow these words sound, when measured against the slam of a door, shutting out Haitians fleeing repression in the bloody ghost towns of Port-au-Prince and Cite Soleil.
The United States-armed army of Haiti, seemingly but a uniformed division of the Ton-Ton Macoutes, has stained the Haitian dust crimson with the blood of its people, especially those who dared support the candidacy of the rebel priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide -- the nation's first democratically elected president. Pere Aristide, a favorite by an overwhelming majority of Haitians, found his candidacy and his presidency annulled by the army, acting as hit men for the elite class, and was considered by most observers lucky to have escaped alive. Meanwhile, thousands of other Haitians, numbered among Aristide's vast throng of supporters, have attempted to flee the flood of bloody repression, by dinghy, by makeshift craft, by stowaway, and by stealth -- only to run into a United States wall of iron, denying entry.
The Bush administration, playing to his party's right wing, has gone one step further -- Haitians cannot even set foot on United States soil. They are detained at Guantanamo military base, on Cuba's coast. That for some, return means clumsy attempts at torture, or a sudden death, merits little. The U.S. government has spoken, and its word is: "Haitians! Go back to your own country!"
Rarely has an entire people been so publicly maligned. Rarely has Emma Lazarus's poem seemed so misleading. Rarely has the racism underlying the decision been so naked.
Haiti-the legendary land of rebel general Toussaint L'Ouverture -- gained its independence from France in 1804. After a period of United States intervention, the United States occupied the country from 1915 to 1934. Ever since, it has supported a series of satraps who've held state power to keep Haiti a sedate source of cheap labor for foreign capital investment. With multinationals fleeing the United States for a bigger profit margin abroad, with a deepening national depression, the government wants labor abroad compliant, and hopefully nonpolitical.
Haitians, radicalized by the astounding demonstrations of people's power that put Pere Aristide into the office of president, ate being told to go back -- back to choking oppression and dead-end factory jobs, if any, for they were too "political," too "radical," too "lumpen," too black to pierce the veil of immigration.
Blacks here could only shake their heads at this dual moment of shame. Shame that stemmed from being both black and "American"; at an entity said to be "our" government.
From death row, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.