Life in the Guantanamo concentration camp: Mohamedou Ould Slahi

The following is an excerpt  from the The Guantánamo Memoirs of Mohamedou Ould Slahi.  The entire series can be read at Slate.com

He was tortured, beaten, and humiliated, and he remains in prison. Here is his story, in his own words.

By Mohamedou Ould Slahi|Posted Tuesday, April 30, 2013, at 5:31 AM

This file photo shows an unnamed detainee in Guantánamo Bay in 2009
Photo by John Moore/Getty Images

PART ONE: ENDLESS INTERROGATIONS

Mohamedou Ould Slahi voluntarily turned himself in for questioning to police in his native Mauritania on Nov. 20, 2001; a week later, at the behest of the U.S. government, he was placed on a rendition flight to Jordan. Slahi, who had lived in Germany and Canada, was interrogated and cleared by Jordanian intelligence of any connection to the Millennium Bomb Plot, the foiled plan of Canadian resident Ahmed Ressam to explode a bomb at Los Angeles International Airport on New Year’s Eve, 1999. Unsatisfied, on July 19, 2002 the CIA retrieved Slahi from Jordan and flew him to Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan.

Detainees were not allowed to talk to each other, but we enjoyed looking at each other. The punishment for talking was hanging the detainee by his hands with the feet barely touching the ground. I saw an Afghani fellow detainee who passed out a couple of times while hanging from his hands. The medics “fixed” him and hung him back up. Other detainees were luckier; they were hung for a certain time and released. Most of the detainees tried to talk while hanging, which makes the guards double their punishment.

The Guantánamo Memoirs of Mohamedou Ould Slahi

INTRODUCTION

PART ONE: ENDLESS INTERROGATIONS

PART TWO: DISAPPEARED

PART THREE: FAMILY

SLAHI'S TIMELINE

AN INTERVIEW WITH COL. MORRIS DAVIS

There was a very old Afghani fellow, who reportedly was arrested to turn over his son. The guy was mentally sick; he could not stop talking because he didn’t know where he was, nor why. But the guards kept dutifully hanging him. It was so pitiful; one day one of the guards threw him on his face, and he was crying like a baby.

We were put in about six or seven big barbed-wire cells, called after the operations performed against the U.S.: “Nairobi,” “U.S.S. Cole,” “Dar es Salaam,” and so on. In each cell there was a detainee called “English,” who benevolently served as an interpreter to translate the orders to his co-detainees. Our “English” was a gentleman from Sudan named [ ? ? ? ? ?]. His English was very basic, thus he asked me secretly whether I spoke English. “No,” I replied. But as it turned out I was a Shakespeare compared to him.

Now I am sitting in front of a bunch of dead-regular U.S. citizens; my first impression, when I saw them chewing without a break: “What’s wrong with these guys, do they have to eat so much?” Most of the guards are tall, and overweight. Some of them were friendly and some very hostile. Whenever I realized that a guard [was hostile], I pretended that I understood no English. I remember one cowboy coming to me with an ugly frown on his face.

“You speak English?” he asked.

“No English,” I replied.

“We don’t like you to speak English, we want you to die slowly,” he said.

“No English,” I kept replying.

I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction that his message arrived. People with hatred have always something to get off their chests, but I wasn’t ready to be that drain.

I had been living the days to follow in horror. Whenever [ ? ? ? ? ?] went past our cell, I looked away, avoiding seeing him so he doesn’t “see” me, exactly like an ostrich. I saw him torturing this other detainee. I don’t want to recount what I heard about him; I just want to tell what I saw with my eyes. It was that Afghani teenager, I would say 16 or 17 years old. [ ? ? ? ? ?] made him stand for about three days, sleepless. I felt so bad for him. Whenever he fell down, the guards came to him shouting, “No sleep for terrorists,” and made him stand again. I remember sleeping and waking up, and he stood like a tree.

On Aug. 4, 2002, Slahi was again hooded, shackled, diapered, and drugged, and put on a flight with 30 other Bagram Air Base detainees for a 36-hour journey to Guantánamo. He arrived depleted from his nine-month ordeal in Jordan and Afghanistan; official Defense Department documents record that Slahi, who stands 5-foot-7, weighed just a little over 109 pounds when he was “inprocessed” on August 5.

The shoutings of my fellow detainees woke me up in the early morning. Life was suddenly blown into [ ? ? ? ? ?]. When I came early this morning around 2 a.m., I never thought that human beings could possibly be stored in a bunch of cold boxes. I thought I was the only one, but I was wrong; my fellow detainees were only knocked out due to the harsh punishment trip they had behind them.

While the guards were serving food, we were introducing ourselves. We couldn’t see each other because of the design of the block, but we could hear the others.

“Salaam Alaikum!”

“Walaikum Salam.”

“Who are you?”

“I am from Mauritania, Palestine, Syria … Saudi Arabia …!”

“How was the trip?”

“I almost froze to death,” shouted one guy.

“I slept the whole trip,” replied [ ? ? ? ? ?].

“Why did they put the patch beneath my ear?” shouted another.

“Who was in front of me in the truck?” I asked. “He kept moving, which made the guards beat me all the way from the airport to the camp!”

“Me, too,” shouted another detainee.

We called each other with the ISN numbers we were assigned in Bagram. My number was 760. In the cell on my left was [ ? ? ? ? ? ?] from [ ? ? ? ? ? ?]. In the right cell, there was a guy from [ ? ? ? ? ? ?].
He spoke poor Arabic, and claimed to have been captured in Karachi, where he attends the university. In front of my cell they put the Sudanese next to each other.

Breakfast was modest, one boiled egg, a hard piece of bread, and something else I don’t know the name. It was my first hot meal since I left Jordan. Oh, the tea was soothing! People shouting all over the place in indistinct conversations: It was just a good feeling when everybody started to recount his story.

I considered the arrival to Cuba a blessing, and so I told my brothers, “Since you guys are not involved in crimes you need to fear nothing. I personally am going to cooperate, since nobody is going to torture me. I don’t want any of you to suffer what I suffered in Jordan.” I wrongly believed that the worst was over, and cared less about the time it would take the Americans to figure out I am not the guy they are looking for. I trusted the American justice system too much, and shared that trust with people from European countries. We all have an idea about how the democratic system works.

The other fellow detainees, for instance from the Middle East, didn’t believe it for a second and didn’t trust the American system. Their argument rested on the growing hostility of extremist Americans against the Muslims and the Arabs. With every day going by, the optimists lost ground, and the interrogation methods worsened considerably as time went by. As you shall see, those responsible in GTMO broke all the principles upon which the U.S. was built.

*

[ ? ? ? ? ?] escort team showed up at my cell. “[ ? ? ? ? ?],” said one of the MPs while holding the long chains in his hands. [ ? ? ? ? ?] is the code word for being taken to interrogation. Although I didn’t understand where I was going, I prudently followed their orders until they delivered me to the interrogator. His name was [ ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?], wearing a U.S. army uniform. He is an [ ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?], a man with all the paradoxes you may imagine. He spoke Arabic decently with a [ ? ? ? ? ?] accent; you can tell he grew up among [ ? ? ? ? ?] friends. [ ? ? ? ? ?] told me that he is from [ ? ? ? ? ?] and that he used to interpret for the [ ? ? ? ? ?].

U.S. military guards move an unnamed detainee inside the detention center
Photo by John Moore/Getty Images

I was terrified when I stepped into the room in [ ? ? ? ? ?] building, because of the CamelBak on [ ? ? ? ? ?] back, from which he was sipping. I never saw anything like that before; I thought it was a kind of tool to hook on me as a part of my interrogation. I really don’t know why I was scared, but the fact that I never saw [ ? ? ? ? ?] nor his CamelBak, nor did I expect an Army guy; all these factors contributed to my fear.

The older gentlemen who interrogated me the night before entered the room with some candies and introduced [ ? ? ? ? ?] to me. “I chose [ ? ? ? ? ?] because he speaks your language. We’re going to ask you detailed questions about you [ ? ? ? ? ?]. As to me, I am going to leave soon, but my replacement will take care of you. See you later.”

After the introduction he stepped out of the room, leaving me and [ ? ? ? ? ?] to work. [ ? ? ? ? ?] was a friendly guy; he was [ ? ? ? ? ?] in the U.S. Army who believed himself to be lucky in life. [ ? ? ? ? ?] wanted me to repeat to him again my whole story, which I’ve been repeating for the last three years over and over. I got used to interrogators asking me the same things. Before the interrogator even moves his lips I knew his questions, and as soon as he or she started to talk I turned my “tape” on. When I came to the part about Jordan, [ ? ? ? ? ?] felt very sorry!

“Those countries don’t respect human rights. They even torture people.” I was comforted because [ ? ? ? ? ?] criticized cruel methods during interrogation; that means that the Americans wouldn’t do something like that. Yes, they were not exactly following the law in Bagram, but that was in Afghanistan, and now we are in a U.S.-controlled territory.

After [ ? ? ? ? ?] finished his interrogations, he sent me back and promised to come back should new questions arise. During the session with [ ? ? ? ? ?] I asked him to use the bathroom.

“No. 1 or No. 2?” he asked. It was the first time I heard the human private business coded in numbers. In the countries I’ve been in it is not customary to ask people about their intention in the bathroom, nor do they have a code.

The team could see very obviously how sick I was; the prints of Jordan and Bagram were more than obvious. I looked like a ghost. On my second or third day in GTMO I collapsed in my cell. I was just driven to my extremes. The medics took me out of my cell; I tried to walk the way to the hospital but as soon as I left [ ? ? ? ? ?], I collapsed once more, which made the medics carry me to the clinic. I threw up so much that I was completely dehydrated. I received first aid and got an IV. The IV was terrible, they must have put in some medication I have allergy against. My mouth dried completely up, and my tongue became so heavy that I couldn’t ask for help. I gestured with hands to the corpsmen to stop dripping the fluid into my body, which they did.

Later that night the guards brought me back to my cell. I was so sick I couldn’t climb on my bed. I slept on the floor the rest of the month. The doctor prescribed me Ensure and some hypertension medicine. Every time I got my sciatic nerve crisis, the corpsmen gave me Motrin.

Although I was physically very weak, the interrogation didn’t stop. But I nonetheless was in good spirits. In the block we were singing, joking, and recounting each other stories. I also got the opportunity to learn about the star detainees such as his excellence [ ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?]. [ ? ? ? ? ?] fed us with the latest news from the camp and the rumors. [ ? ? ? ? ?] was transferred to our block due to his “behavior.” [ ? ? ? ? ?] told us that he was tortured in Kandahar with other detainees. “They put us under the sun for a long time, we got beaten, but brothers don’t worry, here in Cuba there is no torture, the rooms are air-conditioned, and some brothers even refuse to talk unless offered food,” he said.

He was captured with four other colleagues of his in his domicile in [ ? ? ? ? ?] after midnight under the cries of his children, and was pried off his kids and his wife; exactly as it happened to his friends, who confirmed the story. I heard tons of such stories and every story made me forget the last one. I couldn’t tell whose story was more saddening. It even started to undermine my story, but the detainees were unanimous that my story was the most saddening. I personally don’t know. The German proverb says, “Wenn das Militar sich Bewegt, bliebt die Wahrheit auf der Strecke”—when the military sets itself in motion, the truth is too slow to keep up, thus it stays behind. The law of war is harsh; if there is anything good at all in a war, it is that it brings the best and the worst out of people. Some people try to use the lawlessness to hurt others, and some try to reduce the suffering to the minimum.

For his first several months in Guantánamo, Slahi was interrogated by agents from the FBI and the Navy’s Criminal Investigation Task Force. Both the FBI and CITF favored conventional, “rapport building” interrogation methods; throughout the fall, both agencies clashed repeatedly with Guantánamo’s commanders over the military’s increasingly abusive interrogations, and fought Pentagon plans for the “Special Project” interrogation of Mohammed al-Qahtani, a 50-day torture regime of extreme sleep deprivation, 20-hour-a-day interrogations, and repeated physical and sexual humiliations.

By January 2003, military interrogators were agitating to make Slahi their second “Special Project,” drawing up an interrogation plan that mirrored Qahtani’s. Declassified documents show that Slahi’s “special interrogation” began when he was transferred to an isolation cell near the end of May.

Things went more quickly than I thought. [ ? ? ? ? ?] sent me back to the block, and I told my fellow detainees about being overtaken by the torture squad.

“You are not a kid. Those torturers are not worth thinking about. Have faith in Allah,” said my next [ ? ? ? ? ?]. I really must have acted like a child all day long before the guards pried me from the population block later that day. You don’t know how terrorizing it is for a human being to be threatened with torture. One becomes literally a child. An Arabic proverb says, “Waiting on torture is worse than torture itself.” I can only confirm this proverb.

The escort team showed up at my cell: “You got to move.”

“Where?”

“Not your problem,” said the hateful [ ? ? ? ? ?] guard. But he was not very smart, for he had my destination written on his glove.

“Brother, pray for me, I am being transferred [ ? ? ? ? ?]. [ ? ? ? ? ?] was reserved by then for the worst detainees in the camp. If one got transferred [ ? ? ? ? ?] many signatures must have been provided, maybe the president of the U.S. The only people I know to have spent some time [ ? ? ? ? ?] since it was designed for torture were [ ? ? ? ? ?] al Kuwaiti and another detainee from [ ? ? ? ? ?], I don’t know the name.

In the block the recipe started. I was deprived of my comfort items, except for a thin iso-mat and a very thin, small, and worn-out blanket. I was deprived of my books, which I owned. I was deprived of my Quran. I was deprived of my soap. I was deprived of my toothpaste. I was deprived of the roll of toilet paper I had. The cell—better, the box—was cooled down so that I was shaking most of the time. I was forbidden from seeing the light of the day. Every once in a while they gave me a rec time in the night to keep me from seeing or interacting with any detainees. I was living literally in terror. I don’t remember having slept one night quietly; for the next 70 days to come I wouldn’t know the sweetness of sleeping. Interrogation for 24 hours, three and sometimes four shifts a day. I rarely got a day off.

“We know that you are a criminal.”

“What have I done?”

Read More

Solidarity With Striking Mexican Teachers

 by Jack Gerson

Facts for Working People salutes and sends solidarity greetings to the courageous Mexican teachers who are locked in bitter struggle against the Mexican national government’s attempt to impose a U.S.-style corporate reform agenda on Mexican public schools and teacher unions. Last week, tens of thousands of teachers in the southern state of Guerrero dramatically escalated their strike against Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto’s “national education reform” package by marching on the state capital of Chilpancingo, blocking the highway connecting Mexico City with Acapulco for hours. Within days, teachers in neighboring Michoacan state announced that they were striking until Pena Nieto withdraws his proposals, state victimization of teachers stops, and corrupt former National Union of Education Workers (SNTE) president Elba Ester Gordillo returns the 2 billion pesos ($160 million) that she embezzled from the teachers’ union. The powerful teachers union of Oaxaca state (which has battled state and national governments throughout the past decade) are also striking, as are teachers in parts of Chiapas state.

Pena Nieto’s proposals are modeled after planks of the corporate assault on U.S. public education. They push test-based accountability, linking teacher pay and even their jobs to student scores on high stakes standardized tests. As David Bacon documented in The Nation magazine (“U.S.-Style School Reform Goes South”), the corporate assault on public education in Mexico has heavy backing from major corporate and financial forces – the World Bank prominent among them – and has long-term aims of union-busting, privatization, and downsizing (all of which are already well under way in the U.S.) The Mexican education "reformers" cite the same for-rent academic hacks that are trotted out in the U.S. -- one of their favorites is Hoover Institute economist Eric Hanushek, a notorious teacher-basher whose data distortion has been pretty thoroughly exposed in the U.S.

We should all express solidarity and support for the embattled Mexican teachers. Of course, we should raise solidarity motions in our unions and organizations. We should send letters of support. But the best way to show our solidarity is to ourselves take action against the corporate assault that we face here -- against the downsizing, the outsourcing, the school shutdowns, the high stakes testing, the union-busting. And, finally, that's starting to take shape:

First, of course, was the massive turnout by teachers and community for last September's Chicago Teachers Union strike, an action that has energized public education advocates around the country; 

A few days ago, we blogged about the inspirational and ongoing Seattle teacher-led boycott of their school district's high stakes standardized Measures of Academic Performance (MAP) tests.

Last week, Chicago high school students walked out on their school district's standardized tests to protest the planned closure of 54 schools as well as to protest the tests themselves. These brilliant young people directly linked the school shutdowns with the high stakes tests whose outcomes are being used around the country as the excuse to close schools in low-income communities -- hitting especially hard at black and brown communities. (Philadelphia is closing 23 schools; New York City closed 140 schools and plans to close 23 more; Washington DC closed 24 schools and plans to close another 15; Kansas City closed more than half its public schools; etc.) 

The ongoing and monumental struggle of Mexican teachers to defend the right of all citizens to a public education and basic teacher union rights -- rights guaranteed by the Mexican Constitution -- is a fight against "reforms" that would impose the same formula being fought by the Seattle teachers and the Chicago students: tie teachers' jobs to student scores on standardized tests, adopt new curricula dictated by powerful corporations, discourage critical thinking and demand obedience.

Nevertheless, it's clear that the struggle to defend public education in Mexico is far more advanced than that in the U.S. At least part of the reason for that has been the abject passive, class collaborationist role of the national and state teacher union leadership (and, alas, many local leaders as well. For years, some of us have campaigned to get  U.S. teacher unions to mount mass campaigns against the corporate assault / privatization of U.S. public education: high stakes testing , school shutdowns / downsizing, charter schools, outsourcing. We've been opposed every step of the way by the national and state union leadership (and most local leaders). So while solidarity motions are good, we  need to underscore that the fight being waged in Mexico needs to be waged here as well -- not let the union bureaucrats mouth support while blocking action.

Seattle to Chicago to Guerrero; Philadelphia to Oaxaca; New York to Michoacan. Same struggle, same fight.

Read More

US, Britain, Derry and chemical weapons.

It was 1969. The people of the Bogside in Derry, Ireland, rose up against the London backed Unionist state. With nothing but sticks and stones we took on the cops. London is the main ally of the USA.  The USA supported London in its efforts to put down the uprising. One of the ways they did this was by saturating the area with CS Gas, that is chemical weapons. Many people, especially children suffered permanent lung damage. This blog gives no support to the vicious dictatorship in Syria. But neither are we fooled into believing the lies and propaganda and hypocrisy of the US and its allies as they go on about chemical weapons and try and use the possible use of these to justify military action against Syria. When it suited them they used them themselves in Ireland.

Sean.

Read More

US capitalism's war crimes at the root of anti-Americanism: Thank you Wikileaks and Bradley Manning

" Note, the above video was aired by Channel 4 and is based on investigations into Iraq War deaths using material analysed by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in partnership with Wikileaks and which, in turn, is gleaned from information provided by whistleblower Bradley Manning (currently facing a possible life sentence for revealing war crimes). This must-watch video not only examines the actual numbers of those killed, but the proportion of civilians, how deaths occurred, as well as the use of unorthodox methods by US military, including torture."  Read more here: http://darkernet.in/the-iraq-killing-fields-the-untold-genocide-us-war-crimes-tribunal-investigation-8/

****************  

Arab and Muslim anger toward the US government throughout the world has a source. It is not a hatred of American people because we are who we are or because most of us are Christians. It is not the ridiculous idea put forward by the US mass media that we are hated because we are "free" as the imbecile Bush used to say and the much slicker bourgeois Obama repeats. It is US foreign policy, the war crimes committed in our name that are at the root of this anger.  We become partners in crime if we don't openly condemn it and act in some way to halt it.

Read More

Thatcher and the coup in Britain.

Dance on Thatcher's grave, but remember there has been a coup in Britain

By John Pilger. 

25 April 2013

In the wake of Thatcher's departure, I remember her victims. Patrick Warby's daughter, Marie, was one of them. Marie, aged five, suffered from a bowel deformity and needed a special diet. Without it, the pain was excruciating. Her father was a Durham miner and had used all his savings. It was winter 1985, the Great Strike was almost a year old and the family was destitute. Although her eligibility was not disputed, Marie was denied help by the Department of Social Security. Later, I obtained records of the case that showed Marie had been turned down because her father was "affected by a Trade dispute".

The corruption and inhumanity under Thatcher knew no borders. When she came to power in 1979, Thatcher demanded a total ban on exports of milk to Vietnam. The American invasion had left a third of Vietnamese children malnourished. I witnessed many distressing sights, including infants going blind from a lack of vitamins. "I cannot tolerate this," said an anguished doctor in a Saigon paediatric hospital, as we looked at a dying boy. Oxfam and Save the Children had made clear to the British government the gravity of the emergency. An embargo led by the US had forced up the local price of a kilo of milk up to ten times that of a kilo of meat. Many children could have been restored with milk. Thatcher's ban held.

In neighbouring Cambodia, Thatcher left a trail of blood, secretly. In 1980, she demanded that the defunct Pol Pot regime - the killers of 1.7 million people - retain its "right" to represent their victims at the UN. Her policy was vengeance on Cambodia's liberator, Vietnam. The British representative was instructed to vote with Pol Pot at the World Health Organisation, thereby preventing it from providing help to where it was needed more than anywhere on earth.

To conceal this outrage, the US, Britain and China, Pol Pot's main backer, invented a "resistance coalition" dominated by Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge forces and supplied by the CIA at bases along the Thai border. There was a hitch. In the wake of the Irangate arms-for-hostages debacle, the US Congress had banned clandestine foreign adventures. "In one of those deals the two of them liked to make," a senior Whitehall official told the Sunday Telegraph, "President Reagan put it to Thatcher that the SAS should take over the Cambodia show. She readily agreed."

In 1983, Thatcher sent the SAS to train the "coalition" in its own distinctive brand of terrorism. Seven-man SAS teams arrived from Hong Kong, and British soldiers set about training "resistance fighters" in laying minefields in a country devastated by genocide and the world's highest rate of death and injury as a result of landmines.

I reported this at the time, and more than 16,000 people wrote to Thatcher in protest. "I confirm," she replied to opposition leader Neil Kinnock, "that there is no British government involvement of any kind in training, equipping or co-operating with the Khmer Rouge or those allied to them." The lie was breathtaking. In 1991, the government of John Major admitted to parliament that the SAS had indeed trained the "coalition".  "We liked the British," a Khmer Rouge fighter later told me. "They were very good at teaching us to set booby traps. Unsuspecting people, like children in paddy fields, were the main victims."

When the journalists and producers of ITV's landmark documentary, Death on the Rock, exposed how the SAS had run Thatcher's other death squads in Ireland and Gibraltar, they were hounded by Rupert Murdoch's "journalists", then cowering behind the razor wire at Wapping. Although exonerated, Thames TV lost its ITV franchise.

In 1982, the Argentine cruiser, General Belgrano, was steaming outside the Falklands exclusion zone. The ship offered no threat, yet Thatcher gave orders for it to be sunk. Her victims were 323 sailors, including conscripted teenagers. The crime had a certain logic. Among Thatcher's closest allies were mass murderers - Pinochet in Chile, Suharto in Indonesia, responsible for "many more than one million deaths" (Amnesty International). Although the British state had long armed the world's leading tyrannies, it was Thatcher who brought a crusading zeal to the deals, talking up the finer points of fighter aircraft engines, hard-bargaining with bribe-demanding Saudi princes. I filmed her at an arms fair, stroking a gleaming missile. "I'll have one of those!" she said.

In his arms-to-Iraq enquiry, Lord Richard Scott heard evidence that an entire tier of the Thatcher government, from senior civil servants to ministers, had lied and broken the law in selling weapons to Saddam Hussein. These were her "boys". Thumb through old copies of the Baghdad Observer, and there are pictures of her boys, mostly cabinet ministers, on the front page sitting with Saddam on his famous white couch. There is Douglas Hurd and there is a grinning David Mellor, also of the Foreign Office, around the time his host was ordering the gassing of 5,000 Kurds. Following this atrocity, the Thatcher government doubled trade credits to Saddam.

Perhaps it is too easy to dance on her grave. Her funeral was a propaganda stunt, fit for a dictator: an absurd show of militarism, as if a coup had taken place. And it has. "Her real triumph", said another of her boys, Geoffrey Howe, a Thatcher minister, "was to have transformed not just one party but two, so that when Labour did eventually return, the great bulk of Thatcherism was accepted as irreversible."

In 1997, Thatcher was the first former prime minister to visit Tony Blair after he entered Downing Street. There is a photo of them, joined in rictus: the budding war criminal with his mentor. When Ed Milliband, in his unctuous "tribute", caricatured Thatcher as a "brave" feminist hero whose achievements he personally "honoured", you knew the old killer had not died at all.

Read More

Seattle Teachers Appeal for May Day Solidarity With Their Test Boycott

by Jack Gerson

Seattle teachers are calling for an international show of support and solidarity on May Day for their inspirational fight against high stakes standardized testing.

Readers of this blog may recall that three months ago, teachers at Seattle’s Garfield High unanimously to refuse to administer the districtwide Measures of Academic Performance (MAP) standardized test and launched a boycott that has received national acclaim.  Their boycott has since spread to several other schools.

From the outset, this blog has supported the Garfield teachers, discussed the issues involved in some depth, and urged readers to send messages of solidarity. (See

http://weknowwhatsup.blogspot.com/2013/01/support-garfield-high-seattle-boycott.html).

But as the dates for administering the spring semester MAP tests approaches, Garfield teachers fear that the Seattle school administration may be preparing to victimize them. They are asking us to support them again. Here’s the letter they are circulating to appeal for support:

*_Educational Justice Has No Borders:_*
*_Join the May Day International Day of Solidarity _*
*_with the Seattle MAP Test Boycott_*
*_Seattle’s test boycotting teachers need your support for an “educators’ spring” uprising against the MAP test _*
*www.scrapthemap.wordpress.com*<http://www.scrapthemap.wordpress.com/>*__*
scrapthemap@yahoo.com
https://m.facebook.com/SolidarityWithGarfieldHighSchoolTestingBoycott?id=191135177694153&_rdr<https://m.facebook.com/SolidarityWithGarfieldHighSchoolTestingBoycott?id=191135177694153&_rdr>

Dear educators, parents, and students around the world,

On January 9, 2013, teachers at Garfield High School in Seattle announced their unanimous vote to boycott the district mandated Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) test, which they said was not aligned to their curriculum, was a waste of their students' time and resources, and unfairly targeted the most vulnerable populations. Specifically, Garfield’s teachers expressed their opposition to the fact that English Language Learner students are required to take the MAP test most often, causing them to miss out on vital instructional time in the classroom. In this way, the boycott of the MAP test should be viewed as part of the movement for the rights of immigrants and people from all cultures, nationalities, and linguistic backgrounds to have access to a high quality public education. Garfield High School’s Parent Teacher Student Association and the Associated Student Body Government both voted unanimously to support the teachers' boycott of the MAP test.

Soon after, several other Seattle schools joined the boycott—Orca, Chief Sealth, Ballard, and Center School.Teachers at those schools were originally threatened with a 10 day suspension without pay, but because of the overwhelming solidarity from parents, teachers, and students from across the country, the Seattle School District backed down and declined to discipline any of the boycotting educators. Since then, several other schools have joined the boycott, a survey of Seattle teachers was conducted that shows overwhelming opposition to the MAP test at every grade level, and the movement for quality assessment has spread throughout the nation.

Now the Seattle teachers need your support again.

The spring offering of the MAP test produces the scores that are supposed to be used in Seattle’s teacher evaluations.For this reason the Seattle School District could take a harsher stance against boycotting teachers this time around.

May Day is traditionally a day of international workers solidarity. What better time to show your support for the teachers who have risked their livelihoods to advocate for quality assessment and for our resources to be used to support learning rather than endless testing?

We, the Seattle MAP test boycotting teachers, pledge our solidarity to teachers around the world who are struggling for an education system that supports and empowers our students with curriculum and assessments that are relevant to their lives. In turn, we ask for your support as we struggle for these very goals. Possible solidarity actions include: taking a photo with a message of solidarity and emailing it to us (scrapthemap@yahoo.com), calling the Seattle superintendent and asking him to cancel the contract with the NWEA for the MAP test, having a speaker at your May Day rally address the MAP boycott and the abuses of standardized testing, or boycotting a flawed test in your region.

Furthermore, we, the MAP test boycotting teachers, would very much appreciate being informed about struggles teachers are engaged in around the world. Please let us know if there are any ways we can support your efforts for educational justice.

In Solidarity,

Seattle MAP Test Boycott Committee

The Seattle letter touches on some of the most harmful aspects of high stakes testing.  There are many others, because standardized tests are essential to applying the austerity squeeze to education. They are used to keep score – to measure performance: evaluate, rank, punish students, teachers, and schools.

·      To track, label, and victimize students – marginalize and force out disproportionately low income, especially black students – no jobs or, at best, unskilled jobs await them;

·      To stamp out students’ natural curiosity by insisting on blind obedience: don’t think, just spit out the right answer: A, B, or C; True or False; Yes sir, No sir. Curiosity and conceptual thinking might lead to rebelliousness. Instead of emphasizing concepts and understanding, it’s drill ‘n kill rote learning and “gaming the test”.

·      To shut down schools in low-income communities (Chicago is closing 54 schools this year; Philadelphia 23; Washington DC 15; etc. New York City has closed 140 schools over the past decade, and plans to close 23 more soon. Etc. Nearly all of these schools are in low-income areas, and black communities have been especially hard hit. The result has been increased class size, intolerably long and often hazardous commutes for young students; layoffs of teacher and support staff; elimination of electives and other key programs. Schools are ranked and shuttered based on student scores on standardized tests.

·      To harass and victimize teachers and weaken teacher unions and force out veteran teachers. Replace teachers and schools with computer software and “distance learning.

·      To profit from and privatize public education. Close public schools, open charter schools. Hand out lucrative contracts to consultants and channel billions of dollars to giant corporations who sell everything from textbooks and software to standards and “test-taking strategies” (multinationals like Pearson; McGraw Hill; Kaplan; etc.)

They call austertity “shared sacrifice”. But what’s being sacrificed here is the future of tens of millions of young people. And not everyone is sharing – not the banks, bailed out to the tune of several trillion dollars. Not the big corporations, which continue to feast on austerity-induced privatization, not to mention the gigantic tax loopholes which just get wider and wider. This society’s priorities are upside down. It’s well past time to turn them right side up.

For starters, let’s express our solidarity with the Seattle teachers on May Day.

Read More

More on the act of terror in West Texas

West Texas: No accident

by Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444 retired

A recent Pew study found that the richest 7% of American households now own 63% of the country’s net worth up from 56% in 2009, while for the remaining 93% our average net worth declined to $134,000 from $140,000.  Poverty and inequality is presently at 1920’s levels. This is what their media calls a recovery, they actually mean, “our” recovery, it’s a matter of language.  When we add to this the attacks on already dismal social services, lack of health care, homelessness, indebtedness etc. and the insecurity that results, it is no surprise that in the absence of a means of organizational expression, the anger beneath the surface of US society often manifests itself in drug and alcohol abuse, domestic violence, psychological despair and acts of mass murder that we see on an almost daily basis.

Despite all the appeals to patriotism and nationalism, Americans don’t trust the government for good reason.  But these appeals get more of an echo as people see a nasty world out there and no alternative to the status Quo; better the devil you know.

A major source of this anger and alienation as well as the confusion, is the media.  And for those of us that do give the mass media more credibility than it deserves when reporting on global affairs and particularly the US government and war machine’s role in them, we should look at a recent domestic act of terror brought about by US capitalism and how its media reports it. I am referring to the West Texas fertilizer plant that exploded, killing 15 people and injuring more than 200.  The blast destroyed homes within a five-block radius. It “…destroyed a nursing home, an apartment complex, and a nearby middle school, according to the New York Times, the blast left a crater 93 feet wide and 10 feet deep, and the fire 'burned with such intensity that railroad tracks were fused.'" (propublica.org)

This act of domestic terrorism was easily preventable; it was not an accident. The New York Times headline in the aftermath of the catastrophe proclaims that the fertilizer plant, ”Fell Through the Cracks of Regulatory Oversight.”. “Fell through the cracks?”.  What “cracks” are these I wonder?  The Times again, “The uncertainty over who was aware of the chemical at the plant and who was not…”  Ok, we have “cracks” and “uncertainty” so far but there’s more; there were “bureaucratic cracks at the federal, state and local levels” says the Times. It’s hard to grasp it all except it seems no one was responsible.

The NY Times knows this is so because an unnamed federal official told the paper that “regulatory cracks” seem to be the culprit so far.  Why the  “uncertainty”though? We’ve seen the precision and efficiency the US government applies to its military operations and assassinations of various characters in its staunch efforts to protect us all.

It appears that there is a legal requirement that requires a company like the fertilizer plant that just blew up to send annual reports to three state and local agencies according to the Times.  These reports are supposed to inform the authorities of the hazardous chemicals on site.  The company sent them this year informing these agencies that in 2012 it had 540,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate stored at its facility, more than 100 times that used in the Oklahoma bombing. What the response to this information was from these agencies is unclear.

What we do know is that after 911, Congress passed a law that required these companies that store high explosives or hazardous chemicals to notify Homeland Security if they had more than 400 pounds stored.  This was not done in the West Texas case despite the company having more than 1350 times that amount.

In a previous blog on this issue I commented that OSHA last inspected the plant 28 years ago and that

A West Texas victim of capitalist terror

even when found at fault for “serious violations” the fines are so paltry, no company would be hurt by them.  OSHA officials claim that this lax approach was due to the results of prior inspections.  A “lack of worker complaints” was also a factor as well as the company not being “classified as high risk by the EPA”says the Times.

Here’s where the frustration and anger is about to erupt.  Why would a worker not complain about safety violations?  Ask any worker and they’ll tell you.  (Assuming you’re not the boss or one of their flunkies).  You’ll be victimized.  You’ll be punished in some way either by denial of advancement, vacation preferences, overtime availability etc.  Or if you persist you’ll be fired. The main thing is it lets the bosses know you’re not on their, “Team”. You’re, a “trouble maker”. Persist, and you’ll be unemployed.  I worked in the more humane public sector and had a Union and even then, workers were wary.  Only a strong, organized and militant Union presence on the job encourages such freedom.  We are talking about Texas here. And at least, we all know that OSHA rarely has the person power to respond until workers die and can’t protect you against retaliation so you keep your mouth shut and carry on working to keep your head above water and your kids in school.

And it’s not certain the EPA would have done much if anything and in this instance the agency wasn’t even informed. Another accident?  Another slip through the “Regulatory cracks”?

One agency, the Texas Feed and Fertilizer Control Service did make visits to the plant, 35 of them, including one 12 days prior to the explosion. This agency is supposed to keep tabs on the sale of this potentially powerful chemical through the state. Officials of this agency are forbidden by law to divulge information about these facilities.

We finally come to the answer to all of this when an expert on chemical safety informs us that the problem, or a major “shortcoming in the system of regulating chemical plants…” , to use his own words, is “…the reliance on self reporting.” 

 “Self reporting” is like asking the fox to protect the chickens and the Times reports that in its 2011 Risk Management Plan that it has to file with the EPA, West Fertilizer, “..did not check the box saying the plant might face a risk of fire or explosion.”

That should raise the eyebrows of any concerned person but here come those damn “cracks” again.  This time the “budgetary constraint” and “overstretched staffs” cracks kicked in and this little gem slipped by. That may be true in this case.  But why the budgetary constraints?

The ruling class, and the NYT is a organ of the US ruling class, uses language carefully.  They don’t call this terrorism but it is; a far more destructive and violent domestic kind than anything foreign. It is the terror of the market, it is capitalist terror just like the deaths of the workers in Bangladesh this week.

This was no accident.  Human beings made conscious decisions about everything leading up to this event including allowing the construction of such a facility so close to human habitation, schools, libraries, homes. These same forces allow a private corporation dealing in such dangerous chemicals a free hand in how it does so.  The same forces decide what is important and what is not in the allocation of society’s resources, both labor and capital. Another aspect of the location is that it is a small rural community. It is not only that workers and youth in the urban centers are victimized, so are our brothers and sisters in rural communities where regulation and Unions are weak and poverty rife.

There is no shortage of labor power nor is there a shortage of capital in society yet there is apparently a shortage of staff which emerged from thin air and contributed to this catastrophe.  Although, the labor power is available in this case the Times makes clear, but is not put to use due to “budgetary restraints.”  But such budgetary restraints are also arrived at consciously and by the same forces that have other more important areas to think about rather than curbing investors’ ability to profit from their investments by government interference. 

The Boston bombing on the other hand gets a different treatment. We must unite, us as workers and the same capitalists responsible for the act of terror in West Texas that has killed 15 of us and brought horror to a community. We must join them in the struggle to defend our way of life from the countless foreigners who want to take away our freedoms, like the freedom to lose one’s home. They claim they are our guardians abroad but they are our killers at home. Once we understand this, their War on Terror should be looked at more closely. If they care so little about the lives of US citizens in West Texas and countless other victims of capitalism like those that died in mine explosions or the BP disaster or the two million in prison or the old people who’ll soon have no post office if they have their way; how little can they care about foreign workers when it comes to their rapacious thirst for profits.

The death and devastation in West Texas will not receive the media attention as Boston because Boston is supposed to take our mind off it, turn our anger in a different direction toward the “foreign”enemy rather than the domestic. Marshall law and the use of some 9000 militia after the bombing was a practice run, an opportunity to test the security and police presence beefed up since 911 and the Occupy Movement entered the stage and in preparation for the coming battles here in the US as workers rise to resist the attempts by capital to drive us back 150 years.

So, I am done now. I’ve got it out of my system for a while.  I just want to urge my class to think about it.  About what happened in Texas not being an accident and that behind the increase in global hatred for the US government there is more than meets the eye; things CNN doesn’t tell us. We should be angry and moved when people in our own community are killed but where our anger should be directed is a bit more complicated and we have to have information to draw the right conclusion. And one of those conclusions must be that society needs new managers and the productive forces need collective ownership.  An economic system should be built on human solidarity not the accumulation of profits. There will be no massive hunt for those responsible for the destruction and death in West Texas.  "Regulatory cracks"  disappear once you've fallen through them.

As for language, we can start by referring to the tip jar at the counter by the name that actually describes its function---the “employer’s subsidy jar”

Read More

A small reminder; who are our friends and who are our enemies.

Just a short contribution to remind us who US politicians, representing the interests of the giant US multinationals, meet with when they visit other countries.  Here's an example from their travels in Central and South Asia:

Those they meet with:

Enemies: Reagan and the Mujahadeen

Who they avoid

Brother and sisters: two of more than 250 Bangladeshi Factory workers crushed this week. 

Read More

Irish TD Clare Daly takes up abortion rights in the Irish parliament.

Followers of this blog are aware of the events that took place in Ireland around the death of Savita Happanavar, the Indian woman, a Dentist, who pleaded for authorities to terminate her pregnancy as she was having a miscarriage. Clare Daly, an Independent TD (Member of the Irish parliament)has been one of the most outspoken critics of Ireland's abortion laws and has campaigned for legalizing abortion when a mother's life is in danger. Ms Daly, along with three other TD's introduced such a bill in to parliament that was voted down.  She is here discussing the issue during a session in the parliament referred to as "leaders questions."

Read More

Capitalism at work: More Bangladeshi workers die as factory collapses

Workers mourn the death of their comrades

by Richard Mellor

As I write, Bangladeshi authorities are trying to figure out how many workers have been killed in the latest factory disaster there.  So far, the death toll as a building housing workers collapsed according to the Wall Street Journal is 145, but it is expected to climb much higher. 700 workers have been killed in factory fires in the last decade in this Dickensian world of manufacture and mass mayhem.

Most of the workers are women according to reports and this catastrophe comes on the heels of the Tazreen factory fire last year where 100 workers died. This is capitalism at work. These killings are not accidents and the guilty are not simply the small fry that run these outfits but the executives in the board rooms of Wall Street and the western retailers that demand cheap labor to keep the profits rolling in. These workers have died so that consumers in the west can purchase items under such colorful brand names as "Joe Fresh" or from the the likes of Spanish apparel giant "Mango."

Like electricity that seeks the line of least resistance so do capitalists in their rapacious quest for profits.  As if Chinese wages and conditions aren't abysmal enough, as Chinese workers have fought to raise wages foreign manufacturers flee in search of human beings more desperate for work and survival and preferably living under more repressive conditions.  Vietnam and Bangladesh have become more lucrative markets for human Labor power, "Foreign companies have flooded in to Bangladesh in recent years..." to escape the higher cost of Chinese workers the WSJ points out.  This is as natural to the capitalist mode of production as the air we breath is to life, no amount of regulation will stop it. 

If we should learn one thing as workers it is the need to build international solidarity with all workers, those that make the decisions at US corporations don't move production to low wage countries to improve living standards, just the opposite.  We must reject the idea that we should compete with foreign workers that the bosses claim are "willing" to work for less and under more inhumane conditions.  Acceding to one's oppressor under coercion is not being a "willing" partner in the arrangement. We must not blame them and be driven in to competition with them for the necessities of life.  Our allegiance must be not to a nation state but to our class across such national boundary's. The existence of low waged areas is a threat to all of us, whether in Mississippi or Bangladesh, the bosses will always be drawn to them.  The way to combat it is to build international working class solidarity against international capitalism.

The investors and other thugs that run the likes of Wal Mart and Nike cry crocodile tears for the dead and throw a million bucks here and a million bucks there to satisfy western non profits and human rights groups who are constantly raising the conditions in these factories.  After the last fire, Wal Mart has been paying for fire inspections at the factories that supply it with cheap goods and has donated $1.6 million for training in fire safety according to the Journal.  We should remind ourselves that the Wal Mart heirs are worth some $100 billion, made off the backs of these women in Bangladesh, many of whom now lay dead.

A huge crack was seen in the building a day before the collapse and workers were evacuated. The bosses had a meeting that evening and the owner of the factory told workers that "The building will stand for another hundred years", according to Selina Aktar, a 24 year old worker who survived.  She told the WSJ that as workers were gathered outside the next day, bosses through megaphones warned them that if they didn't return to work their pay would be docked. Shortly after they did, the place collapsed. "I was trapped in the darkness" she told the Journal, "There was choking dust. There was a big slab of concrete. I couldn't get out."

Bosses coerced workers in to returning after defects were found

according to reports.

No amount of regulation or intervention on the part of western non-profits will prevent the continued savagery of capitalist production.  As I pointed out in recent commentaries, US capitalism has driven wages and conditions in the US to such a low level that this country is becoming an attractive place to do business as it already has fairly decent infrastructure compared to many other countries.  Caterpillar shifted production from its London Ontario plant to Indiana where wages are 50% lower and the Union leaders more cooperative.  As Marx once said, workers have no country.

The same forces that we bailed out to the tune of trillions of dollars are at work here.  Capitalism was saved from collapse through the intervention of public funds.  We should have helped it over the cliff.  The austerity agenda that is being imposed on workers here in the US, the savage conditions imposed on workers and peasants throughout the Third (former colonial) World is the natural order of things for the so-called free market.  Workers can only rely on our own strength, our own organizations, both economic and political.  The women and men, and children that die everyday as a result of business decisions are our brothers and sisters.

At the 1994 California State Labor Federation Convention to which I was a delegate, then Executive Director, Jack Henning stated in his opening address: "There should originate, in the leadership of the AFL-CIO, a call to the unions for the only answer that is noble: global unionism is the answer to global capitalism."

-->

Although Henning had no intention of using his office to fight for such a development, it is advice we can all agree with.  Only a united global movement of workers can drive back the global capitalist offensive and would be a step to preventing disasters like yesterday's factory collapse in Bangladesh. We must break the barrier in our own minds of nationalism and patriotism and build such global solidarity among workers, not motivated by some notion of morality in defense of those less fortunate than ourselves, but to defend out own class interests.   "United We Stand" is a good slogan.  Who we unite and stand with is the crux of the matter.  The coupon clippers that have driven Americans from our homes, denied our youth education, our sick health care are as responsible for the deaths of our class brothers and sisters in Bangladesh.  They call themselves Americans too, but we must not be fooled by that, there are Americans and Americans.

There will be no manhunt in the offices or board rooms of Wall Street for these criminals, just like those whose decisions led to the deaths in West Texas. They know too well the conditions that are necessary for them to make their millions and they make their choices accordingly. 

Such a movement is necessary, but what we stand for is crucial.  Taking in to public ownership the finance industry and banks is crucial because workers cannot change this situation if we don't own capital and control its allocation in society, not the individual savings of workers and the middle class, but a collective accounting of how this capital is used in  production.  Taking under workers control and management  the dominant sectors of the economy is what will change this situation, not having illusions in capitalism regulating itself.

The usual crocodile tears will flow for these victims of the market from the apologists of capital.  The US capitalist class will blame it on their junior partners in Bangladesh.  We will hear their usual arguments that it is "crony capitalism" that is at fault as if the US isn't the home of "crony capitalism".

Our future can only be guaranteed if we end this madness, end capitalism as a means of producing human needs and replace it with a world federation of democratic socialist states.

Read More

AC Transit board backs off fare increases---for now.

Richard Mellor in Oakland CA

I went to an AC Transit board meeting tonight as I heard there was going to be a bit of a protest by some of the users of mass transit Oakland.  "Mass" transit is actually a misnomer as public transportation is not a priority in the United States, after all, the car is king. Readers are probably aware of GM's buying up of the electric tram systems and shutting them down in order to profit from the manufacture of gasoline powered vehicles.

The event was organized by the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, (ACCE).  It was a small gathering of about 25 people at the most, people who rely on the bus system to get around.  The board is considering raising fares but there was a resolution on the agenda to "defer" the July 1st fare increase "pending further analysis" by the transit district.

As a former rank and file Union activist in the public sector, I forgot what staged performances these board meetings are. The chair announced to the riders, overwhelmingly working class folks, older people  and people of color, that they could certainly speak but that they were "preaching to the choir" as the resolution was to "defer" the fare increases.

As I have not been attending these events I was not quite sure what to say when I was  called to the podium but I did talk to one of the women who organized the event and she said that the board was considering actually lowering fares in the hope that this would increase ridership, but she was not very taken in by this argument.

You get two minutes to speak at these things and I took the opportunity to inform the board that I did not consider them "the choir", and that the most likely outcome of their "analysis" would be the usual,  "Robbing Peter to pay Paul". I had read an economic report they handed out from one of these firms that present an analysis of the economy from the big capitalists point of view.  It was an attempt to portray a rosy future but repeatedly raised red flags, "uncertainty continues" and while there was  "modest growth" it comes with,  "a potentially serious upside or downside, depending how Congress decides (or doesn't decide) to act in the coming months."  One of the upsides was housing the report said but it also pointed out that in Oakland 42% of foreclosed homes between 2007 and 2011 were bought by investors. I made the point that investors are flocking in to single family foreclosed homes and renting them out, sometimes to the people that were driven from them by the bankers. This is driving up prices to some extent and the processes that brought us to this point are being played out again.  I read that some hedge funds are spending $100 million a month buying foreclosed properties.

The boards analysis then will depend on capitalism producing the goods which isn't likely to happen. I made it clear that in this scenario they will do what they usually do, set riders against the union workers that operate the system, turn one section of the working class against another, the youth against seniors, make sure one way or another we pay.

I pointed out that only by linking our struggles, relying on our own strength rather than these politicians whose job it is to implement the austerity agenda, can we turn the tide. We must build a united mass action movement out of which independent political candidates can arise.  I gave some examples of the money that is in society like the $26  to $32 trillion that the super rich have stashed away in offshore accounts to avoid taxes. 

It was a small but spirited event and I had a good time chatting to folks afterwards.  Being with working people in these situations is always refreshing but one thing always comes to mind after I speak at something like this. The  politicians just stare at you, they want you to play the game.  But so many people came up and thanked me afterwards, shook my hand, gave me a hug. It's  not that I said anything profound, anything workers don't know in our gut. But people love it when they hear someone express the anger they feel inside, say what they feel and think about things that affect us and more importantly, have a go at the establishment as we used to say. There is tremendous anger beneath the surface of US society that cannot find organizational expression. 

We can see why the trade Union leadership is so terrified of their own members and of taking a lead in any way, of confronting the bosses and the politicians of Wall Street in any way; there is nothing they fear more than providing an outlet for this anger. Where might it lead?  They have the same world view as the boss, they accept the market and capitalism, they must bail it out, help it to its feet and if that means cutting bus routes, raising fares, closing schools, cutting wages, so be it.

This blockage will be overcome at some point. Needless to say, I am glad I got out tonight.

Read More