More money to fight child abuse image trade
ScoopNZ: May 28, 2009
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PA0905/S00511.htm
The campaign against the child pornography trade has received a $2.4 million boost in Budget 2009, Internal Affairs Minister Richard Worth says.
The extra funding will help the department manage a significant increase in the demand-driven volume of censorship investigations, prosecutions and defended hearings involving distribution or possession of child sexual abuse images, Dr Worth said.
“This additional funding, over four years, will ensure that the Department of Internal Affairs’ censorship inspectors continue to play a major role in the global and domestic detection of offenders who collect, distribute and make pictures of children being sexually abused.”
The Censorship Compliance Unit is recognised internationally for the intelligence it supplied and its forensic work in combating child sex abuse through the Internet. In the 13 years since the team was set up, it has developed its own computer software and capability in detecting offending by New Zealanders.
“The additional funding will also ensure the team can respond quickly and effectively to international operations, particularly in trying to identify and save the young victims being used by pornographers,” Dr Worth says.
“We must play our part in the international fight against this trade. This injection will ensure that those who traffic in these images will be caught.”
The additional funding will boost the unit’s budget for 2009/10 by more than 25 per cent from its current budget of $2.1 million a year.
Shifty study proclaims Brits a nation of freetards
Seven million downloading illegal content shocker
The Register: May 29, 2009
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/29/illegal_download_study/
An estimated seven million Brits are involved in illegal downloads of music, movies, software or games. This digital piracy is resulting in “huge economic losses” and confusion about copyright law, according to a study by UK government advisers published on Friday.
The 85-page study, commissioned by the Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property (SABIP), and entitled Copycats? Digital Consumers in the on-line Age (pdf), warns that shifting attitudes may be an uphill struggle. Researchers from the UCL’s Centre for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research (CIBER) found that on one peer-to-peer network at midday on a particular weekday, there were 1.3 million users sharing content.
From this observation the researchers make some dizzying statistical assumptions to draw up a guesstimate of overall piracy losses, which they claim run into the billions:
If each “peer” from this network (not the largest) downloaded one file per day the resulting number of downloads (music, film, television, e-books, software and games were all available) would be 4.73 billion items per year. This amounts to around £120 billion in content being consumed annually – for free.
Students of BSA piracy loss figures will note that a similar technique of equating every item downloaded as a lost sale features in UCL’s statistical methodology. The UCL team also reviewed the available literature and spoke to entertainment industry representatives and regulators in researching its report, which it stresses is only preliminary.
The study makes little mention of the need to establish wider availability of commercial movie downloads, for example, instead preferring to concentrate on the sociology of file-sharing and the possibility that further studies might look into ideas for public awareness campaigns. Hollywood studios, meanwhile, have recently focused on keeping cinema attendances up via the promotion of 3D films.
Findings from the SABIP study are likely to be used in the formation of government policy, in areas such as putting pressure on ISPs to withdraw service to persistent illegal file-sharers. ISPs are reluctant to police the web.
David Lammy, Minister of State for Intellectual Property, said, “The report helps put the scale of the problem into context and highlights the gaps in the evidence which need to be filled. It is important that we understand how online consumer behaviour impacts on the UK economy and the future sustainability of our copyright industries.
“Illegal downloading is not an issue confined by national boundaries. I am sure other EU States and their copyright industries will find this report of use in the development of policy.”
US porn conviction for manga-Wired
31-05-09
[FACT comments: This US judgement should alarm you! Obviously, the accused was tricked into pleading guilty by promises of a lighter sentence or perhaps he simply didn’t have enough money for lawyers or wanted to avoid further notoriety. But his conviction legitimises an unjust law. Manga and hentai are about fantasy not real people. While there are honest reasons for banning kiddie porn, not one child was harmed by manga.]
U.S. Manga Obscenity Conviction Roils Comics World
- David Kravets
- Wired: May 28, 2009
- http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/05/manga-porn/
In an obscenity first, a U.S. comic book collector has pleaded guilty to importing and possessing Japanese manga books depicting illustrations of child sex abuse and bestiality.
Christopher Handley, described by his lawyer as a “prolific collector” of manga, pleaded guilty last week to mailing obscene matter, and to “possession of obscene visual representations of the sexual abuse of children.” Three other counts were dropped in a plea deal with prosecutors.
The 39-year-old office worker was charged under the 2003 Protect Act, which outlaws cartoons, drawings, sculptures or paintings depicting minors engaging in sexually explicit conduct, and which lack “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.” Handley’s guilty plea makes him the first to be convicted under that law for possessing cartoon art, without any evidence that he also collected or viewed genuine child pornography. He faces a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison.
Comics fans are alarmed by the case, (.pdf), saying that jailing someone over manga does nothing to protect children from sexual abuse.
“This art that this man possessed as part of a larger collection of manga … is now the basis for [a sentence] designed to protect children from abuse,” says Charles Brownstein, executive director of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. “The drawings are not obscene and are not tantamount to pornography. They are lines on paper.”
Congress passed the Protect Act after the Supreme Court struck down a broader law prohibiting any visual depictions of minors engaged in sexual activity, including computer-generated imagery and other fakes. The high court ruled that the ban was overbroad, and could cover legitimate speech, including Hollywood productions.
In response, the Protect Act narrows the prohibition to cover only depictions that the defendant’s community would consider “obscene.”
“It’s probably the only law I’m aware of, if a client shows me a book or magazine or movie, and asks me if this image is illegal, I can’t tell them,” says Eric Chase, Handley’s attorney.
Chase says he recommended the plea agreement (.pdf) to his client because he didn’t think he could convince a jury to acquit him once they’d seen the images in question. The lawyer declined to describe the details. “If they can imagine it, they drew it,” he says. “Use your imagination. It was there.”
The case began in 2006, when customs officials intercepted and opened a package from Japan addressed to Handley. Seven books of manga inside contained cartoon drawings of minors engaged in sexually explicit acts. One book included depictions of bestiality, according to stipulations in Handley’s plea deal.
Frenchy Lunning, a manga expert at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, was a consultant in the case. She says the books were from the widely available Lolicon variety — a Japanese word play on “Lolita.”
“This stuff is huge in Japan, in all of Asia,” Lunning says. Handley, she adds, “is not a pedophile. He had no photographs of child pornography.”
Handley remains free pending a yet-to-be scheduled sentencing date. Mike Bladel, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Iowa, declined to state what kind of sentence the government would seek, but claimed there were hundreds of obscene panels in the seized manga.
Chase says he’s hoping the judge will take into account the circumstances.
“He was a prolific collector,” says the lawyer. “He did not focus on this type of manga. He collected everything that was out there that he could get his hands on. I think this makes a huge difference.”
Obama’s Supreme Court Pick Schooled in Cyberlaw
- David Kravets
- Wired: May 26, 2009
- http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/05/sotomayor/
If elevated to the U.S. Supreme Court, Judge Sonia Sotomayor would become the first justice to join the court with a history of precedent-setting rulings on cyberlaw issues, legal experts say.
On Tuesday, President Barack Obama nominated Sotomayor, a judge in the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, to the replace the retiring Justice David Souter. The former private IP lawyer’s cyberlaw decisions ranged from copyrights in a digitized world to warrantless computer searches, so-called click-wrap agreements and the Patriot Act .
In 2002, Sotomayor wrote a decision (.pdf) nullifying Netscape’s online click-wrap agreement, which demanded binding arbitration of disputes between Netscape and its customers. The “free download” button for Netscape’s browser software was high on the web page, with the user-agreement well below.
“We conclude that in circumstances such as these, where consumers are urged to download free software at the immediate click of a button, a reference to the existence of license terms on a submerged screen is not sufficient to place consumers on inquiry or constructive notice of those terms,” Sotomayor wrote.
Consumers sued Netscape claiming browser “cookies” amounted to illegal eavesdropping. Netscape claimed the click-wrap agreement demanded out-of-court arbitration. As we all know, it turned out that “cookies” are lawful and mostly harmless.
In a December case, Sotomayor joined in a unanimous appellate decision on the 2001 Patriot Act. The ruling limited the application of the automatic gag orders that bind ISPs that receive an FBI “national security letter” — a type of self-issued subpoena demanding information on a customer.
“If confirmed, she will be the first justice who has written cyberlaw-related opinions before joining the court,” the TechLaw blog wrote.
As a New York District Court judge in 2007, the nominee ruled that The New York Times could digitize and sell freelancers’ work, despite the writers’ claims of copyright infringement. The Supreme Court reversed her decision. The court is current set to hear that case again, and Sotomayor would likely have to recuse herself from the rehearing.
In 2001, as an appellate judge, she upheld (.pdf) the warrantless search of a New York Department of Transportation computer. The accountant was suspected of neglecting his duties and the government searched his computer without a warrant, leading to his job loss. The authorities found unauthorized accounting software on Gary Leventhal’s computer, which was believed to be used for his private accounting practice.
“The searches,” Sotomayor wrote, “were reasonable in light of the DOT’s need to investigate the allegations of Levanthal’s misconduct as balanced against the modest intrusion caused by the searches.”
Unlimited demand for Buddha statues
Peter de Waard (translated by Pieter)
The Volkskrant, May 25, 2009
The Netherlands counts an estimated 250 thousand Buddhists or people who feel a strong affinity with this religion. The growth is so strong that besides from Islamizing we can now also talk of Buddhizing of the Netherlands, according to researchers Marcel Poorthuis and Theo Salemink of the Tilburg University.
”But strange enough nobody is worried about this. Buddhism has apparently a better image than Islam”, according to Poorthuis, lecturer of interreligious dialogue.
Buddhism is the third largest religion of the Netherlands, after Christianity and Islam. While Islamizing by politicians like Geert Wilders is often seen as a threat and is associated with violence and collectivity, Buddhism is experienced as a solo religion that stands for non violence and pacifism. Symbol of this is the Dalai Lama who will visit the Netherlands on 4 and 5 June.
Poorthuis and Salemink claim in their newly published book Lotus in the low lands that Buddhism has other sides too. ‘Kamikaze pilots in the second world war had Buddhist teachers. Ans also the Dalai Lama cannot avoid conflicts because of the difficult political situation of Tibet, even though the Netherlands wants to see in him a heavenly pacifist’, according to Poorthuis.
In 1988 there were four thousand native Dutchmen who felt affinity with Buddhism, next to 12 thousand Buddhist immigrants from Asia. In 1999 that number was already increased to 169 thousand and six years later already to 250 thousand.
There is an enormous demand for Buddha statues and meditation courses. Famous Dutchmen like Herman Wijffels and Erica Terpstra are affiliated with Buddhism. Many Dutchmen call themselves Buddhist without knowing exactly what the religion is about.
Buddhism is often abused commercially. There are for example many corporate training offerings inspired by Buddhism. ‘But instead to answer the question whether the credit crisis is caused by desire, is Buddhism used to optimize the production process’.
Thanks to 2Bangkok.com
Church of Scientology members banned from editing Wikipedia
Church of Scientology members have been banned from editing Wikipedia articles about their church, after a long-running dispute about biased articles.
Matthew Moore
The Telegraph: May 30, 2009
Wikipedia have banned Church of Scientology members banned from editing their entry
The online encyclopedia’s arbitration committee has voted to block contributions from computers owned by Scientologists, following complaints that many were using the website to push propaganda.
Feuds between pro- and anti-Scientology users had already forced the site, written entirely by members of the public, to lock entries about the church, which counts Tom Cruise and John Travolta among its celebrity members.
“Newcomers are treated rudely. Bad faith assumptions, personal attacks, edit wars, soapboxing, and other disruptions are common occurrences,” the arbitration committee said.
Now the administrators have acted to rebuild the encyclopedia’s reputation for neutrality by taking the unprecedented step of banning anyone they consider to be connected to the church from altering articles.
“All IP addresses owned or operated by the Church of Scientology and its associates, broadly interpreted, are to be blocked as if they were open proxies,” it said.
Anyone who logs on with these IP addresses will be “prohibited from editing articles related to Scientology or Scientologists, broadly defined.”
The arbitration committee, which is composed of experienced volunteer editors, said church followers had set up Wikipedia accounts with the sole purpose of making articles more favourable to Scientology.
These contributors had an inherent “conflict of interest” which undermined the site’s impartial ethos, it said, justifying the blanket ban by saying that the church had a responsibility to “ensure appropriate use of its servers and equipment”.
It continued: “The purpose of Wikipedia is to create a high-quality, free-content encyclopedia in an atmosphere of camaraderie and mutual respect among contributors.
“Use of the encyclopedia to advance personal agendas – such as advocacy or propaganda and philosophical, ideological or religious dispute – or to publish or promote original research is prohibited.”
Wikipedia is the most read reference website on the internet, and the seventh most popular site overall, but critics claim it has failed to weed out hoaxes, libels and unreliable content.
The Church of Scientology has fallen victim to a concerted offensive from a group of hackers and internet users called “Anonymous” in recent years. The group accuses the church, established by the former science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard in the 1950s, of trying to muffle criticism and stifle free speech.
The Church of Scientology in Britain did not respond to requests for comment.
Press Freedom Under Attack Worldwide
World Association of Newspapers: May 30, 2009
http://www.wan-press.org/article18157.html
Press freedom violations including attacks on journalists continue to mount worldwide, the World Association of Newspapers said in its half-year review of global press freedom that paints a bleak picture in much of the world.
The report, presented Saturday to the Board of the Paris-based WAN, shows press freedom under attack in dozens of countries on every continent. Twenty-eight journalists and other media workers have been killed since December 2008, with six of them killed in the Palestinian Territories, which emerged as the deadliest place for journalists in the last six months.
The report, which can be found here, said:
Americas
Journalists in Latin America who report on corruption work in a climate of fear and intimidation. In Central America, a culture of impunity allows many who commit murder and other crimes against journalists to escape justice.
Mexico remains one of the most dangerous places in the world for journalists to practice their profession. Since 2000, 30 journalists have been killed and a further eight remain missing. The attacks have increased recently and the government has made no progress instituting legal reforms.
In the United States, the House of Representatives introduced a new version of the Global Online Freedom Act on 6 May in an effort to prevent US companies from “cooperating with repressive governments in transforming the Internet into a tool of censorship and surveillance.” If passed, it would be a welcome advancement in internet freedom.
Twenty-three journalists continue to languish in prison in Cuba.
Middle East and North Africa
Press freedom violations continue to mount in the Middle East and North Africa. Autocratic governments use repressive media laws to silence journalists, making self-censorship common in the region. Bloggers have also increasingly faced court cases, arrests, intimidations and killings, for exercising their right to freedom of expression.
In Iraq, which has long been a deadly place for journalists, security measures in the past six months have improved, allowing foreign and local journalists to report more openly and safely. But the violence that has characterized the recent history of Iraq continues to have implications for media – 225 journalists and media workers have been killed in the past six years.
Conditions for the media in the Palestinian Territories worsened over the past six months due to the Israeli-led offensive in Gaza in December and January and a surge of intimidation from Hamas and Fatah against journalists. Between 27 December 2008 and 17 January 2009, six journalists were killed, and three media houses were bombed under the allegation that they were being used as a propaganda tool for Hamas.
In Saudi Arabia, an estimated 400,000 internet sites are blocked, with journalists and bloggers facing severe punishment for discussing political, social or religious issues that are viewed as “indecent” or contrary to the state or its system. In April, the government imposed severe restrictions on internet cafes, requiring their owners to install secret surveillance cameras and to register users names and identity numbers.
Sub-Saharan Africa
Governments throughout the region continue to use repressive laws to charge journalists with defamation, sedition and for “disrupting public order”. Censorship, both self-censorship and government imposed, has downgraded the quality of much of Africa’s media. Conflicts, opposition party election campaigns and taboo subjects are at times absent from media or skewed to fit the interests of government.
Press freedom has declined in Senegal, largely due to an increase in authoritarian policies created by President Abdoulaye Wade. In Nigeria, the government continues to intimidate and sanction journalists who report on alleged cases of government corruption.
In Sudan, the government is intensifying its campaign to intimidate journalists and others who criticise the authorities.
In Eritrea, 14 journalists remain behind bars in secret jails.
Reporting conditions have improved in Kenya since the post-election violence that rocked the country last year, but intimidation and a culture of impunity still exist.
Somali journalists work in one of the world’s most volatile environments – media houses are frequently closed and violence has become a daily fixture. Since the start of the year, two journalists have been killed, three have been seriously injured and several others arrested.
Poor conditions have remained for the media and journalists in Zimbabwe. Newspapers printed abroad are still subject to heavy import taxes and high printing paper prices, nearly bankrupting papers such as The Zimbabwean and the inclusive government has yet to institute democratic media reforms.
Europe and Central Asia
Freedom of the press continues to be challenged in various parts of Europe and Central Asia. Death threats against, or prosecution of, journalists reporting on conflicts, war crimes and organised crime remain disturbingly common in some countries. In several EU countries, authorities are increasingly failing to respect the right of journalists to protect the confidentiality of sources. Anti-terrorism legislation is also affecting freedom of expression and governments seem to be using these laws for their own political purposes.
The United Nations Human Rights Council, sitting in Geneva, adopted a new resolution on “defamation of religion” which has significant press freedom implications and it can be used by authoritarian governments to prevent discussion or publication of legitimate religious and cultural issues. A list of recent cases can be found at here.
In the Czech Republic, new laws jail sentences of up to five years or a fine of up to 5 million Czech crowns (about 185,000 Euros) for journalists using certain sources of information such as records of police telephone tapping. I
Journalists who report on the mafia in Italy continue to receive threats of violence and several are working under police protection.
The media environment in Turkey remains fragile. In addition to banning publication of two Kurdish dailies, authorities handed down a fine for alleged tax fraud to the Dogan Media Group, the country’s largest, for delayed payment of a tax on a sale of shares to German publishers Axel Springer. The Dogan Group denies the charges and the case is widely seen as retribution for critical reporting on the government.
Asia
In Asia, independent media continue to face an array of obstacles, mainly in the form of hostile governments and internal conflicts. China’s mass censorship and repression of independent media, Sri Lanka’s civil war, and Nepal’s resort to violence against the press are only some of the key challenges facing press freedom in the region.
Since December, press freedom has been deteriorating in Afghanistan. As the country nears its presidential election, due in August, pressures and violence against the press have been increasing.
In Burma, press freedom advocates and journalists still face long prison sentences and extensive censorship. In March, the ruling military junta prepared to implement an online censorship committee that would have access to all online articles and be empowered to edit them directly.
Chinese authorities continue to arrest, intimidate, and sentence journalists. In One month alone, media was barred from covering a taxi strike, a Tibetan printer was sentenced to seven years in jail, more than 20 reporters were arrested, foreign websites were blocked, and two journalists were assaulted for their reporting.
The full report is available at www.wan-press.org/
article18140.html.
The Paris-based WAN, the global organisation for the newspaper industry, defends and promotes press freedom and the professional and business interests of newspapers world-wide. Representing 18,000 newspapers, its membership includes 77 national newspaper associations, newspaper companies and individual newspaper executives in 122 countries, 12 news agencies and 11 regional and world-wide press groups.
Inquiries to: Larry Kilman, Director of Communications, WAN, 7 rue Geoffroy St Hilaire, 75005 Paris France. Tel: +33 1 47 42 85 00. Fax: +33 1 47 42 49 48. Mobile: +33 6 10 28 97 36. E-mail: lkilman@wan.asso.fr
Former Black Panther: “There Are Political Prisoners in America as Well”
What an Irish hunger striker and a former Black Panther can teach us about prisoner resistance.
Prisons are, or can be, places to raise political consciousness, says Dennis O’Hearn, the author of Nothing But an Unfinished Song, a biography of Bobby Sands, the 27-year-old who died leading a hunger strike in Long Kesh, a prison in Northern Ireland. A new movie about Sands’ final days, Hunger, recently won an award for first-time filmakers at the Cannes Film Festival.
Sands, who was serving a 14-year sentence for possessing firearms, demanded the right to be treated as a political prisoner, says O’Hearn, who appeared at an event about political prisoners in San Francisco with Andrej Grubacic, a professor of sociology at the University of San Francisco and the co-author of Wobblies & Zapatistas: Conversations On Anarchism, Marxism, and Radical History, and Robert Hillary King, one of the Angola 3. King spent more than 30 years in prison before his conviction was overturned in 2001, and he has written a new autobiography about his experiences, From the Bottom of the Heap: The Autobiography of Black Panther Robert Hillary King.
King says he, like Sands, became an activist in response to the oppression in prison.
“Prison is another way to perpetuate slavery,” King says. “They’re connected. A lot of people think legality and morality are the same thing, but they’re not. Prisons are immoral.”
While in Angola, a Louisiana prison built on a former slave plantation, King joined the Black Panther Party, with the other two members that make up the Angola 3, Herbert Wallace and Albert Woodfox. King says they felt morally obligated to do something about the conditions in Angola, considered in the 70s the worst prison in the country.
“There were 72 of us in a space made for 40,” King says. “There were rats, roaches and horrible food. There was a system of sexual slavery that was accepted. Just because you’re in prison doesn’t mean you’re not a human being.”
King says because he, Wallace and Woodfox tried to organize other prisoners, they were seen as threats to the administration and framed – he for the murder of a fellow inmate, and Wallace and Woodfox for the murder of prison guard Brent Miller. They were kept in their 6 by 9 cells for 23 hours a day.
In spite being separated, King says they talked to one another from cell to cell and kept trying to educate themselves and others. He says their efforts led to changes in how prisoners were fed. Officials had been sliding the food under the door or leaving it outside in the hallway. King said this was dehumanizing and through hunger strikes got the prison officials to cut a hole in the bars to slide plates through. Also, King says, once they became politically conscious, they resisted the guards’ standard anal searches. They filed a writ and the court ruled in their favor that these searches were unjustified.
“There are many parallels between Bobby Sands and Robert,” O’Hearn said. “The strip searches and the inhumane conditions.”
Like King, Sands and his fellow prisoners communicated with one another even though they were locked in separate cells. O’Hearn says they told stories, sang songs and learned the Irish language orally.
“It’s so important the joy of the struggle, not just the hardship of struggle,” O’Hearn said.
Grubacic, an anarchist from the Balkans, says he is interested in how people organize themselves in prison. From his co-author on Wobblies and Zapatistas, Staughton Lynd, Grubacic learned about the Lucasville 5, a group that took over a prison in Youngstown, Ohio, for 11 days. The group was made up of black militants and members of the Aryan Brotherhood, who spray painted slogans such as “Convict race” on the walls of the prison.
“Some of the most beautiful examples of American democracy are not found in and around the White House, but in Lucasville,” Grubacic says. “Convicts developed a system of democracy to fight for a different world.”
The discussion focused on political prisoners was part of a week of events discussing various revolutions throughout the world in 1968 and the legacy of those movements. O’Hearn, who along with the biography of Sands, wrote the introduction to Grubacic’s book, said prison activists were part of the shift in perspective in the 60s.
“The old idea was wait till you overthrow the state and take power,” he said. “But in the 60′s social activists felt the important thing was to create kind of state they wanted.”
Ramsey Kanaan founded PM Press, the publisher of King’s book, From the Bottom of the Heap. He says King’s experiences as a Black Panther are an important part of the struggles of the 60s.
“Talking about ’68 is kind of a metaphor,” he says. “Sixty-eight was part of a river that didn’t appear out of nowhere and didn’t disappear into nowhere. Prisoner struggles are part of that stream.”
Kanaan points out that the prison population in the U.S. has more than tripled since the 60s.
Rose Braz, director of Critical Resistance, which advocates for prison reform, says prison is a way for the state to crack down on dissent.
“I think the reality is the U.S. has used prisons as a catchall response to social and economic problems,” she says.
The way to change that is not just to talk to people with different points of view, but to listen as well, says Grubacic. Grubacic says he and others from the university in Belgrade, who opposed the former president of Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic, went to talk with factory workers in the south who supported Milosevic.
“We exchanged ideas, we exchanged skills and experience,” he says. “Listening is a political tool. This is the way to build a movement.”
Robert Hillary King: ”There are political prisoners in America as well.”
Robert Hillary King went into Louisiana’s Angola Prison in 1970, accused of armed robbery. He was sentenced to 35 years, and after escaping, eight more years were added on to his sentence. For most of his time at Angola, considered one of the worst prisons in the nation, he was in a 9 by 6 cell for 23 hours a day. While he was there, he, along with Herbert Wallace and Albert Woodfox, created a prison chapter of the Black Panther Party. Known as the Angola 3, the men were all given life sentences: King for allegedly killing another inmate, while Woodfox and Wallace were accused of killing a prison guard. Woodfox had a hearing at the beginning of March to decide whether to uphold a federal judge’s ruling overturning his conviction. The court may take between four weeks and six months to release a ruling.
King was exonerated in 2001. After being displaced by Hurricane Katrina, he now lives in Austin, TX, where he continues to work for Wallace and Woodfox’s release and travels widely to speak about prison conditions. He recently came out with a book about his experiences, From the Bottom of the Heap. Alternet’s Emily Wilson caught up with him when he was in San Francisco speaking on a panel about political prisoners.
Emily Wilson: How did you get a life sentence at Angola?
Robert Hillary King: They were locking up all the so-called black militants and in 1974, on the tier I lived on which was called B Tier, an inmate was killed in self-defense by another inmate and they indicted 11 people. It was a blanket indictment. A couple of weeks later it was down to two people and I was one of them. Without any corroborating evidence I was found guilty. They accepted the inconsistent testimony of an individual who made up his testimony, was given a gun, and issued a transfer to minimum status within the prison. They got him to say I participated. They also got another individual to say I participated, but his testimony was impeached within the first trial.
Both of them went home and subsequently returned to prison and they contacted me to say they wanted to set the record straight, and they had lied. The one who had impeached, the warden had prepared his testimony for him and, the other person just took advantage by implicating me because the warden wanted him to implicate me, and I was found guilty and given a life sentence.
EW: Why did you first join the Black Panther Party?
RHK: The Black Panther Party articulated things for me I really couldn’t at the time. I began to feel alienated from the system. I had taken it for granted like everybody else that there were civil rights in this country and I was protected by these rights and I was naively believing that despite the fact that I had witnessed racism and discrimination all of my life. I still had hope and belief and belief in the ideas of the system.
After coming into contact with the Black Panther Party and some of their ideology and not having been able to articulate some of what they were saying but feeling it, I felt kinship and it was easy to adopt some of their ideology, which I felt was pretty humanistic.
I was in prison when I first heard about it. I was in the New Orleans Parish, and I had just been given a 35-year sentence. I heard about them, but it wasn’t until I escaped and was recaptured that I came into contact with the Black Panther Party. I had heard about them, but I did not know they were in New Orleans. Some of them were arrested in a so called shootout and they came in and they placed a couple of them in the tier I was being kept on, so I began to find out more and more about the Black Panther Party. Of course there were people saying the same thing long before the Black Panthers, but I really didn’t hear it. You know, the protests, the Freedom Riders, people trying to acquire the right to vote, civil rights, all of these things eventually connected, but I was not able to connect the dots until I heard the Black Panther Party, so I was attracted.
EW: How could you organize and create a community in prison?
RHK: Herman and Albert were responsible for that; I give them all the credit along with some others in the Black Panther Party. They started political education classes and started passively protesting the work conditions, which were 17 hours a day. They tried to hold political discussion and political education classes that would instill hope in the prisoners. It was a passive protest. You know, work stoppage and food stoppage. Not eating any food or not serving food in the kitchen so that they could get the attention of the administration.
Herman and Albert were the ones who initiated going on the yard and holding political discussion with other inmates. When I came on, Herman and Albert were in the cells and we continued to teach political education classes from the cells and to educate ourselves and people on the tier.
We would talk from cell to cell or write thing up and make fliers. We had access to people who were in minimum custody so we would get on the good side of them and get them to bring fliers down the walk. We were not only able to communicate between ourselves on the tiers, but we were able to reach out to people in surrounding areas as well.
EW: What are some of the things you accomplished?
RHK: We were able to do some things like change the practice of how they fed us. We engaged in not eating; we staged a hunger strike. We had tried to negotiate with prison officials stating that the way they fed us was dehumanizing and unsanitary and we felt it should be upgraded, but we were told this was the way they did it and this was prison. We understood that but being political conscious and aware, we began to see things and recognize that just because we were in prison did not mean we were not human beings, so we took a different approach to how we were treated. We decided to go on a hunger strike and it took 18 months, but eventually they stopped feeding us in that manner.
What they were doing was throwing it under the door or sliding it under the door, and sometimes they would leave it outside the door. Flies and rats and roaches and everything else ran through it. They began to cut food slots in the bars for us, and actually now all over prison they cut food slots.
Another thing they were doing was engaging in dehumanizing body cavity searches that served no criminological purpose. We decided to change this practice, so we decided not to submit. In other words, we wouldn’t refuse a shake down. I would raise my hand, raise my feet, open my mouth and so forth, that is OK. But I was in the cell 23, 24 hours a day sometimes, and we did not come into contact with anybody, and we had to go through an anal search just out after being handcuffed. It was illogical. So we decided if they wanted a body cavity search, they had to force us.
But a writ was filed and the 19th District Court ruled in our favor that a routine anal search was unjustified and that was stopped. And as a result of people struggling and the Black Panther Party coming into the prison, there was a federal oversight of the prison for like 25 years. It was relinquished only about 1998 or 2000 by a federal jury. The prison was considered in 1972 one of the worst prisons in the nation.
We made some changes, but the idea was not to beautify or make prisons more livable. The ultimate goal was to get Herman and Albert and myself out of prison. The bar has always been raised to that degree.
EW: You say in your book prison is a continuation of slavery. Why do you say that?
RHK: I don’t think the 13th Amendment abolished slavery. It just made a transition from one form to another. It was considered legal to own slaves but even thought it was legal to own slaves it wasn’t till people began to see the moral repugnance of owning slaves, that things changed, till there was a moral outrage. I see the difference between legality and morality. Some people think if something is legal, it’s moral, but that’s not so. A lot of people can be legally guilty but morally innocent. People can be legally innocent of a crime and legally innocent and can go to their death.
With this mindset, legality seems to take precedence over morality. I began to make an assessment of the 13th amendment and the wording of it and it just seems to be poppycock. You know, “Slavery and involuntarily servitude shall not exist on these shores” and people say “Well, the 13th amendment abolished slavery.” Well, no, not so. You have to read the rest. It says unless of course, if you have been duly convicted of a crime.
EW: How did you keep going locked up for 23 hours a day? Were you confident you would get out some day?
RHK: I hoped that I would get out. Also I felt that I could die in prison. It went beyond hope. I did some things to activate my release. I got into the law and I kept my own case alive, and subsequently Herman and Albert’s. They were closing doors within the legal system, and even though I felt the legal system was hypocritical, I also knew there could be some legal loopholes, and so along with Herman and Albert we kept hammering at it. We looked at our cases, I read Albert’s transcript and my own transcript, and we got some people on board who had heard about the case as a result of Albert getting a new trial. Some activists got others involved, and it took a while, but Albert should be getting out of prison at some point because all the evidence against him has been undermined. And whatever happens in Albert’s case should happen in Herman’s as well because they are linked.
EW: What is it you are doing now for prison reform?
RHK: I’ve been to five different continents and over a dozen countries talking about the Angola 3 case and trying to make a connection that prison America is really slavery. There are political prisoners in America as well. I was in prison for 31 years for a crime I didn’t commit, 29 in solitary. I think it’s incumbent on me to try to do my best to try and expose the things I saw and witnessed. I kind of see the connection of not just Herman and Albert and our struggle, but I believe the struggle of people generally and the struggle of African people. I think there’s a connection. and the connection runs deep. In my book and in my lifestyle, I’m trying to show the connection runs much deeper than the eye can see. I hope people will get to see the system and how it really operates.
Who Are the Shadow Warriors?
Countries Are Getting Hit by Major Military Attacks, and No One Is Taking Credit
Foreign Policy in Focus: May 28, 2009.
In Syria, Sudan and elsewhere there have been violent attacks that no country has claimed responsibility for. A dark new trend in warfare.
The two F-16s caught the trucks deep in the northern desert. Within minutes, the column of vehicles was a string of shattered wrecks burning fiercely in the January sun. Surveillance drones spotted a few vehicles that had survived the storm of bombs and cannon shells, and the fighter-bombers returned to finish the job.
Syria: Four Blackhawk helicopters skimmed across the Iraqi border, landing at a small farmhouse near the town of al-Sukkariyeh. Black-clad soldiers poured from the choppers, laying down a withering hail of automatic weapons fire. When the shooting stopped, eight Syrians lay dead on the ground. Four others, cuffed and blindfolded, were dragged to the helicopters, which vanished back into Iraq.
Pakistan: a group of villagers were sipping tea in a courtyard when the world exploded. The Hellfire missiles seemed to come out of nowhere, scattering pieces of their victims across the village and demolishing several houses. Between January 14, 2006 and April 8, 2009, 60 such attacks took place. They killed 14 wanted al-Qaeda members along with 687 civilians.
In each of the above incidents, no country took responsibility or claimed credit. There were no sharp exchanges of diplomatic notes before the attacks, just sudden death and mayhem.
War without Declaration
The F-16s were Israeli, their target an alleged shipment of arms headed for the Gaza Strip. The Blackhawk soldiers were likely from Task Force 88, an ultra-secret U.S. Special Forces group. The Pakistanis were victims of a Predator drone directed from an airbase in southern Nevada.
Each attack was an act of war and drew angry responses from the country whose sovereignty was violated. But since no one admitted carrying them out, the diplomatic protests had no place to go.
The “privatization” of war, with its use of armed mercenaries, has come under heavy scrutiny, especially since a 2007 incident in Baghdad in which guards from Blackwater USA (now Xe) went on a shooting spree, killing 17 Iraqis and wounding scores of others. But the “covertization” of war has remained largely in the shadows. The attackers in the Sudan, Syria, and Pakistan were not private contractors, but U.S. and Israeli soldiers.
Assassination Teams
In his book The War Within, The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward disclosed that the U.S. military has developed “secret operational capabilities” to “locate, target, and kill key individuals in extremist groups.”
In a recent interview during a Great Conversations event at the University of Minnesota, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh revealed a U.S. military “executive assassination ring,” part of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). Hersh says that “Congress has no oversight” over the program.
According to a 2004 classified document, the United States has the right to attack “terrorists” in some 15 to 20 nations, including Pakistan, Syria, and Iran. The Israeli military has long used “targeted assassinations” to eliminate Tel Aviv’s enemies. U.S. and NATO “assassination teams” have emerged in Iraq and Afghanistan, where, according to the UN, they have killed scores of people. Philip Alston of the UN Human Rights Council charges that secret “international intelligence services” allied with local militias are killing Afghan civilians and then hiding behind an “impenetrable” wall of bureaucracy.
When Alston protested the killing of two brothers in Kandahar, “not only was I unable to get any international military commander to provide their version of what took place, but I was unable to get any military commander to even admit that their soldiers were involved,” he told the Financial Times.
In Iraq, such special operations forces have carried out a number of killings, including a raid that killed the son and a nephew of the governor of Salahuddin Province north of Baghdad. The Special Operations Forces (SOF) stormed the house at 3AM and shot the governor’s 17-year-old son dead in his bed. When a cousin tried to enter the room, he was also gunned down.
Such “night raids” by SOFs have drawn widespread protests in Afghanistan. According to the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, night raids involve “abusive behavior and violent breaking and entry,” and only serve to turn Afghans against the occupation.
Iraqi Prime Minster Nuri Kamal al-Maliki charged that a March 26 raid in Kut that killed two men violated the new security agreement between the U.S. and Iraq.
The Predator strikes have deeply angered most Pakistanis. Owais Ahmed Ghani, governor of the Northwest Frontier Province, calls the drone strikes “counterproductive,” a sentiment that David Kilcullen, the top advisor to the U.S. military in Afghanistan, agreed with in recent congressional testimony. The U.S. government doesn’t officially take credit for the attacks.
Budgets and Strategy
If Congress agrees to the Defense Department budget proposed by Pentagon chief Robert Gates, attacks by SOF and armed robots will likely increase. While most the media focused on the parts of the budget that step back from the big ticket weapons systems of the Cold War, the proposal actually resurrects a key Cold War priority of the 1960s.
“The similarities between Gates’ proposals and the strategy adopted by the Kennedy administration are too great to ignore,” notes Nation defense correspondent Michael Klare. These similarities include “a shift in focus toward unconventional conflict in the Third World.”
Gates’ budget would increase the number of SOFs by 2,800, build more drones like the Predator and its bigger, more lethal cousin, the Reaper, and enhance the rapid movement of troops and equipment. All of this is part of General David Petraeus’s counterinsurgency doctrine.
The concept is hardly new. The units are different than they were 50 years ago – Navy SEALS and Delta Force have replaced Green Berets – but the philosophy is the same. And while the public face of counterinsurgency is winning “hearts and minds” by building schools and digging wells, its core is 3AM raids and Hellfire missiles.
The “decapitations” of insurgent leaders in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan is little different – albeit at a lower level – than Operation Phoenix, which killed upwards of 40,000 “insurgent” leaders in South Vietnam during the war in Southeast Asia.
Hidden Wars
In the past, war was an extension of a nation’s politics “too important,” as World War I French Premier Georges Clemenceau commented, “to be left to the generals.”
But increasingly, the control of war is slipping away from the civilians in whose name and interests it is supposedly waged. While the “privatization” of war has frustrated the process of congressional oversight, its “covertization” has hidden war behind a wall of silence or denial.
“Congress has been very passive in relation to its own authority with regard to warmaking,” says Princeton international law scholar Richard Falk. “Congress hasn’t been willing to insist that the government adhere to international law and the U.S. Constitution.”
The SFOs may be hidden, but there are eight dead people in Syria, four of them reportedly children. There are at least 39 dead in northern Sudan, and more dead in Iraq and Afghanistan. The number of civilian dead in Pakistan runs into the hundreds.
The new defense budget goes a long ways toward retooling the U.S. military to become a quick reaction/intervention force with an emphasis on counterinsurgency and covert war. The question is: Where will the shadow warriors strike next?
Marijuana and Cocaine Should Be Legalized, Says Latin American Drugs Commission
The “war on drugs” has been a disaster say some of Latin America’s most powerful politicians and writers.
Marijuana and cocaine for personal use should be decriminalised because the “war on drugs” has been a disaster, according to some of Latin America’s most powerful politicians and writers.
The current international policy on drugs encourages corruption and violence that is threatening democracy throughout the continent, according to the former president of Brazil, Fernando Enrique Cardoso, who is a co-president of the Latin American commission on drugs and democracy. As well as politicians, the commission includes the writers Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru, and Paulo Coelho of Brazil.
The election of Barack Obama has opened up the best opportunity for decades to address the failure of the “so-called drugs war”, Cardoso told the Guardian today on a visit to London. He said he was hopeful that the international community would acknowledge that the time had come for a “paradigm shift” in the debate on drugs. “The war on drugs has failed in spite of enormous efforts in places like Colombia — the area of coca crops is not reducing,” he said.
The current system of prohibition encouraged corruption among police officers, politicians and even judges. “It poisons the whole system, it undermines democracy,” Cardoso said. “The war on drugs is based on repression … How can people believe in democracy if the rule of law doesn’t work?” Users should be offered treatment rather than jail, he said.
“The starting point has to be the United States,” he said. “Now we have a new American administration, which is much more open-minded than before.” He said he had held talks with the US state department in the later years of the Bush administration and found that, privately, many of the officials there shared his views.
Cardoso said that the changes would have to be co-ordinated. “We need an international convention, otherwise you will have different countries doing different things,” he said. “But the climate is changing for the first time for many years. Even in the US, they recognise we are in deadlock now.” Obama had already made it clear that the idea of a “war on drugs” was not workable. The need for change is urgent, said Cardoso, because of what is happening in Latin America. “There is a very grave situation in Mexico,” he said. “More people are being killed there (through the drugs war) than in Iraq.” He said that it was easier for former presidents who were no longer in office or running for election to speak out on such a controversial issue. He added that ending the war on drugs would be not be a signal that drugs were acceptable but a recognition that current policies had failed.
“You have to show that drugs are harmful, even light drugs, like marijuana – it is better not to use drugs – but tobacco is harmful also yet its use is being reduced by education,” said Cardoso. He added that the vast quantities of money being used to enforce “repressive” policies on drugs could be put into treatment and education. Hundreds of thousands of people were being unnecessarily criminalised and sent to prison, “which are schools of crime.”
The previous UN drugs policy that aimed to eliminate all drug use by this year was ill-conceived, he said. “You can never stop drugs use,” he said, likening it to some of the failed policies in the past over HIV/Aids. “You can’t have zero drugs any more than you can have a zero sex policy but you can have a safe sex policy.” He said that Brazil’s success in halting the HIV/Aids epidemic, which meant promoting the use of condoms in a Catholic country, was an example of how people’s behaviour could be changed by education rather than repression.
