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America's Disappeared
Dr. Silvia Quintela was “disappeared” by the death squads in Argentina in 1977 when she was four months pregnant with her first child. She reportedly was kept alive at a military base until she gave birth to her son and then, like other victims of the military junta, most probably was drugged, stripped naked, chained to other unconscious victims and piled onto a cargo plane that was part of the “death flights” that disposed of the estimated 20,000 disappeared. The military planes with their inert human cargo would fly over the Atlantic at night and the chained bodies would be pushed out the door into the ocean. Quintela, who had worked as a doctor in the city’s slums, was 28 when she was murdered.
(Illustration by Mr. Fish)
A military doctor, Maj. Norberto Atilio Bianco, who was extradited Friday from Paraguay to Argentina for baby trafficking, is alleged to have seized Quintela’s infant son along with dozens, perhaps hundreds, of other babies. The children were handed to military families for adoption. Bianco, who was the head of the clandestine maternity unit that functioned during the Dirty War in the military hospital of Campo de Mayo, was reported by eyewitnesses to have personally carried the babies out of the military hospital. He also kept one of the infants. Argentina on Thursday convicted retired Gen. Hector Gamen and former Col. Hugo Pascarelli of committing crimes against humanity at the “El Vesubio” prison, where 2,500 people were tortured in 1976-1978. They were sentenced to life in prison. Since revoking an amnesty law in 2005 designed to protect the military, Argentina has prosecuted 807 for crimes against humanity, although only 212 people have been sentenced. It has been, for those of us who lived in Argentina during the military dictatorship, a painfully slow march toward justice.
Most of the disappeared in Argentina were not armed radicals but labor leaders, community organizers, leftist intellectuals, student activists and those who happened to be in the wrong spot at the wrong time. Few had any connection with armed campaigns of resistance. Indeed, by the time of the 1976 Argentine coup, the armed guerrilla groups, such as the Montoneros, had largely been wiped out. These radical groups, like al-Qaida in its campaign against the United States, never posed an existential threat to the regime, but the national drive against terror in both Argentina and the United States became an excuse to subvert the legal system, instill fear and passivity in the populace, and form a vast underground prison system populated with torturers and interrogators, as well as government officials and lawyers who operated beyond the rule of law. Torture, prolonged detention without trial, sexual humiliation, rape, disappearance, extortion, looting, random murder and abuse have become, as in Argentina during the Dirty War, part of our own subterranean world of detention sites and torture centers.
We Americans have rewritten our laws, as the Argentines did, to make criminal behavior legal. John Rizzo, the former acting general counsel for the CIA, approved drone attacks that have killed hundreds of people, many of them civilians in Pakistan, although we are not at war with Pakistan. Rizzo has admitted that he signed off on so-called enhanced interrogation techniques. He told Newsweek that the CIA operated “a hit list.” He asked in the interview: “How many law professors have signed off on a death warrant?” Rizzo, in moral terms, is no different from the deported Argentine doctor Bianco, and this is why lawyers in Britain and Pakistan are calling for his extradition to Pakistan to face charges of murder. Let us hope they succeed.
We know of at least 100 detainees who died during interrogations at our “black sites,” many of them succumbing to the blows and mistreatment of our interrogators. There are probably many, many more whose fate has never been made public. Tens of thousands of Muslim men have passed through our clandestine detention centers without due process. “We tortured people unmercifully,” admitted retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey. “We probably murdered dozens of them …, both the armed forces and the C.I.A."
Tens of thousands of Americans are being held in super-maximum-security prisons where they are deprived of contact and psychologically destroyed. Undocumented workers are rounded up and vanish from their families for weeks or months. Militarized police units break down the doors of some 40,000 Americans a year and haul them away in the dead of night as if they were enemy combatants. Habeas corpus no longer exists. American citizens can “legally” be assassinated. Illegal abductions, known euphemistically as “extraordinary rendition,” are a staple of the war on terror. Secret evidence makes it impossible for the accused and their lawyers to see the charges against them. All this was experienced by the Argentines. Domestic violence, whether in the form of social unrest, riots or another catastrophic terrorist attack on American soil, would, I fear, see the brutal tools of empire cemented into place in the homeland. At that point we would embark on our own version of the Dirty War.
Marguerite Feitlowitz writes in “The Lexicon of Terror” of the experiences of one Argentine prisoner, a physicist named Mario Villani. The collapse of the moral universe of the torturers is displayed when, between torture sessions, the guards take Villani and a few pregnant women prisoners to an amusement park. They make them ride the kiddie train and then take them to a cafe for a beer. A guard, whose nom de guerre is Blood, brings his 6- or 7-year-old daughter into the detention facility to meet Villani and other prisoners. A few years later, Villani runs into one of his principal torturers, a sadist known in the camps as Julian the Turk. Julian recommends that Villani go see another of his former prisoners to ask for a job. The way torture became routine, part of daily work, numbed the torturers to their own crimes. They saw it as a job. Years later they expected their victims to view it with the same twisted logic.
Human Rights Watch, in a new report, “Getting Away With Torture: The Bush Administration and Mistreatment of Detainees,” declared there is “overwhelming evidence of torture by the Bush administration.” President Barack Obama, the report went on, is obliged “to order a criminal investigation into allegations of detainee abuse authorized by former President George W. Bush and other senior officials.”
But Obama has no intention of restoring the rule of law. He not only refuses to prosecute flagrant war crimes, but has immunized those who orchestrated, led and carried out the torture. At the same time he has dramatically increased war crimes, including drone strikes in Pakistan. He continues to preside over hundreds of the offshore penal colonies, where abuse and torture remain common. He is complicit with the killers and the torturers.
The only way the rule of law will be restored, if it is restored, is piece by piece, extradition by extradition, trial by trial. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, former CIA Director George Tenet, Condoleezza Rice and John Ashcroft will, if we return to the rule of law, face trial. The lawyers who made legal what under international and domestic law is illegal, including not only Rizzo but Alberto Gonzales, Jay Bybee, David Addington, William J. Haynes and John Yoo, will, if we are to dig our way out of this morass, be disbarred and prosecuted. Our senior military leaders, including Gen. David Petraeus, who oversaw death squads in Iraq and widespread torture in clandestine prisons, will be lined up in a courtroom, as were the generals in Argentina, and made to answer for these crimes. This is the only route back. If it happens it will happen because a few courageous souls such as the attorney and president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, Michael Ratner, are trying to make it happen. It will take time—a lot of time; the crimes committed by Bianco and the two former officers sent to prison this month are nearly four decades old. If it does not happen, then we will continue to descend into a terrifying, dystopian police state where our guards will, on a whim, haul us out of our cells to an amusement park and make us ride, numb and bewildered, on the kiddie train, before the next round of torture.
118 Comments so far
Show AllChris Hedges, as always one of the best piece I've read especially on Obama. I will rejoice when they drag Obama in chains, together with his cronies to stand trials for crimes against humanity.
Hauling his sorry ass to prison with his anglo twin, GWB, would do much to heal the gaping sore that now represents this nation. But you are correct, Gdpxhk, the money trail leads to the real culprits. Find the gold & find the root of the evil. The Complicits in the press, on the other hand, are easy enough to spot – left and right. Btw, that old devil himself, McCaffrey, is one of Ly'n Brian's right hand men. When he's giving his little five-second sound bite, I expect at any moment he'll turn solid red & sprout horns & disappear in a puff of black smoke.
Thank god for Chris Hedges. But I'm afraid we're too far gone for even his words to make much of a difference at least as saving our nation is concerned. I hope the hell I'm wrong.
It is the puppets who carry out the dirty work of their clandestine masters. It is the puppets (the "little Eichmanns") who need to be found out and prosecuted to the full extent of the law. "The men in the shadows" are impotent unless there are willing stooges in military uniforms, TSA uniforms, or silk suits (like Obama).
After reading this disturbing article, another masterpiece of sober truth-telling by Chris Hedges, I'm not entirely surprised there no comments yet posted herein. Hedges' article makes one wonder if blogging makes people a target for nefarious action by Amerika's $ociopathic ruling class. And like Mr. Hedges, I blog under my legal name. Perhaps I'm more brave (or foolish) than I believe I am. Albeit... I'm not as brave as Mr. Hedges.
It is my opinion that Amerika's foreign policy is delusional, violent and criminallly insane. It is the fruit of $ociopaths and psychopaths. It is why 9-11 happened.
And Amerika's domestic policy isn't much different. It is cruel and stupid and mean-espirited. I rest my case on the latter policy with the damn War on Drrrugs, a vicious minded policy that is the antithesis of personal freedom. Rome is burning! It burns because Amerika's rapacious ruling class has the insight of rabid dogs.
Amerika is NOT a beacon of light for the world. It is a violent, war mongering beast that pushes humanity down the road toward an extinction event. It is evil.
What to do? Well... you don't pet rabid dogs. You fukin' shoot 'em!
Richard, you do not have to worry about the pigs swooping in to carry you away for something you said. The rulers don't give a shit about ANYTHING anybody says, this gives the people the illusion of freedom. If you DO anything beyond peaceful nonviolent demonstrations to upset the bastards, you will be ruthlessly crushed. Just ask the Black
Panthers or the students at Kent State. Talk is cheap. There's too much talk and not enough action.
right on eaglebill,totally agree with you!!!did you hear him,socalledprogressives/leftistsENOUGH OF THE F"ING TALKING
9/11 was an act of persons unknown within the mic - remember the neocons were looking for a new pear l harbor
there is no evidence that bin laden had anything to do with it - so says the fbi
why would they do it the incredulous sheeple ask but you have answered that question when you noted "Amerika is NOT a beacon of light for the world. It is a violent, war mongering beast that pushes humanity down the road toward an extinction event. It is evil."
only people who are ignorant of amerikan history have any doubt the government and the mic they represent would do anything to make money and increase their control of the world
when we left 9/11 investigated and unresolved the war machine knew it could do anything it wanted - put out any bullshit it wanted - kill whoever it wanted and no one would say anything or do anything to stop them
in 1963 we stood back and said nothing while the president had his brains and large chunks of his skull blown out onto the back of his limo
like i say - these folks whoever they are - do whatever they want and in doing so they have dragged the country into a cesspool from which it will never emerge
take my word for it - we are done
Richard,
You write much better than I, but just the same. They know who we are. It takes courage to express one view and feelings either with legal name or pseudonym. It takes even more courage for Chris to publicly telling us what he thinks of the evil’s twins and more. I had often feared when I post here and wonder when I will be drag out in the middle of the night.
Obama is the leader of a terrorist theocracy and in case people think things will get better someday it is important to realize that a large majority of young Americans support torture.
Correct. You always hear about "someday, our children will ask us why we did what we did - why did we leave them such a horrible nation." WRONG. Young people today grew up in this Orwellian police state - they don't know how Amerika "used to be." This is the "norm" to them. They are growing up quite acclimated to torture, illegal invasions, the destruction of civil liberties once enshrined in the Constitution, no habeas corpus, the president claiming he has the powers of a dictator, etc.
As Thalidomide says - don't count on our youth to straighten out the mess we are making. They will take the ball we have handed to them and run with it.
"They are growing up quite acclimated to torture, illegal invasions, the destruction of civil liberties once enshrined in the Constitution, no habeas corpus, the president claiming he has the powers oe4rf a dictator, etc." --Actually, Demonstorm, very few of them know anything about it. Characteristically, I find that maybe one or two students know anything at all about any of these items on your list. If you get a few foreigners and veterans in there, a few will know something at least about the illegal invasions, but as for our homegrown college freshman fresh out of being processed by a steady diet of mindless schooling and TeeVee, forget it. It’s not uncommon for a student to believe, for instance, that we’re waging war against countries that actually have armies, and tell me it’s just like Big-time wrestling—if, that is, they have any opinion about what the Pentagon’s up to at all. They are often puzzled and a bit resentful that the US spends so much money helping other countries, though. They missed the story that we torture people. They are, in short, lost in a dream.
For years I ran a “debate” on torture in a community college. My thought was that if the students were assigned the task of researching the torture done by their own people, they would naturally be repulsed and outraged and rethink their opinions. I thought that maybe if they looked at the arguments pro and con and discover that there were a lot more arguments against the practice than for it—and these latter ones can be distilled down to Cheney saying it was right because it worked—see, we haven’t had another 911—exquisite illogic that that is. Some did. Some were reduced to incoherence. Yet all too many were unmoved, enthusiastic against all evidence that torturing “towelheads” is a perfectly acceptable means of gaining information. It really doesn’t matter if you point out that we now know that the vast majority of those tortured in Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, and elsewhere had no information to give (surprise, surprise!), and nobody had any reason to believe that they did, or that we know that torture has produced false intelligence, or any practical reason at all, let alone the gruesome inhumanity of the act. Standing in a classroom full of such people can be chilling, especially given the fact that the same people who are pro-torture (and pro-war) often talk about their devout Christianity.
The lack of even the most basic ethics is increasingly astounding: students see fit to explain to their fellow classmates that killing is fun and war is good because it’s profitable. In their perverted worldview, this in no way contradicts their Christianity, likely in part because they would never be able to read the Bible. They get fed bullshit from their pastors. They are in the heart of fascism and believe that they are free, but don’t really have any idea what that might mean, as they couldn’t read the Constitution either. Most of my students can’t read any prose written before, oh, 1950, which is a stunning achievement of the schools. Even those who do think there’s something wrong with things like torturing people have been instilled with this little value lesson, brought to us by diversity training (I hate to say it): everyone has a right to their own opinion, unless it’s something nasty about black people. Right. So nobody’s going to be offended when somebody says that murder for fun and profit is a good thing. After all, they have a right to their opinion.
In a recent class, most of the students were outraged that I would even suggest that the Mideast debacle might not have to do with keeping us safe from evil people who “hate us for our freedom,” or that there might be something wrong with pulling people out of their homes, imprisoning them indefinitely, and torturing them on the very off chance that they might “know something.” At the end of the class the one veteran, who had remained largely silent on the issue, came up to me to say that she had no problem with anything I said. “We veterans know that the American public has been fed a simple story,” she explained.
Yes, they do know, and it is ironic that I see the best hope for this nation in the veterans of invasions I despise. Their little bubble fantasy world that got them into the military in the first place has been shattered, and unlike the girl I quoted above, they’re not all keeping their heads down and mouths shut.
Elizabeth, I'm coming to your booksigning-- and I might not leave.
Thanks, Obedient.
The thing I find most disturbing about your account is not the naivete or ignorance of the students, or even their inability to think, but their apparent moral retardation. Most people are educable, and many can even be taught to think, but what recourse is there when a person has no sense of right and wrong? It's hard to find room for hope, and that awful feeling is multiplied a million fold when I consider that those students are typical young Americans.
I had a similar feeling watching a show on Link TV 8-9 years ago, just before I gave up TV for good. The show had half a dozen American teenagers and half a dozen Iraqi teenagers. The two groups got to know each other and kept up some contact afterwards. The show's premise was a great one: combat US propaganda by humanizing the Iraqi people and demonstrating in a concrete way how much we all have in common.
I found the Iraqi kids very well informed about world events, easy to relate to, and surprisingly enough, pretty well adjusted. (They spoke remarkably good English.) The American kids were a different story. Though on a personal level they responded to their Iraqi counterparts in a more or less typically teenage way, they were clueless about anything happening around the world, and showed no heartfelt moral response. It didn't phase them that many of their counterparts' family members had been murdered thanks to George W. Bush. They mouthed talking points from the US corporate state media in a detached way, giving me the impression that they didn't really understand what they were talking about, that it wasn't quite real to them. I found it horrifying and depressing. Just thinking about it gives me a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.
I'm increasingly convinced that sociopathy is instilled, not genetic.
i have felt that a long time. People adapt their behavior to the environment.
As a geneticist I think that psychopaths are born with their lack of morality etc. Note the Milgram experiments in the 1960's showed how powerful the obedience to authority could be, even when it conflicted with the personal conscience of normal subjects.
To Elizabeth H:
I think your post is so good and on such an important topic that you really should write a book about it. I think you should try to contact Barbara Ehrenreich and correspond with her to brainstorm about it. This would be the sort of thing Ehrenreich could ask some excellent questions about to prod you to think about it from angles informed by the socialist critique of capitalist class control hierarchies that you may not be aware of. America has probably doomed itself at this point. But your experience may be more important to people around the world outside America than inside our present zombie culture itself. Maybe it can help them avoid some of our anti-culture's mistakes and betrayals of its own young people's future.
To mlb: Your post reminded me of an old fraternity brother of mine I went to school with several decades ago. He was the son of a highly placed West German diplomat before the Wall fell. I ran into him many years later in the late 1990s when he came back for a brief visit for the first time in a decade during the Clinton/Lewinsky hoohaw. I asked him what he thought of our TV news since he'd last seen it. He replied very straightforwardly, "It used to be okay but now it's like news for little children or something." Most Americans now are intellectual and emotional children. Knowledge flickers and twitters to and from hand-held radiation emitters clutched to hundreds of millions of brains but wisdom is rarer than $1600 an ounce gold.
In the early 1980s journalism schools openly taught that most TV programming was aimed at a mass audience with the aggregate emotional maturity of a 1970s era twelve year old. That was shortly before the news divisions at the old networks were raided by and merged with the entertainment divisions. I think news started to be image consulted and least common denominator'd just like entertainment programming and dumbed down to that same maturity level to appeal to the widest number of viewers. Now I strongly suspect that its aimed at an audience with the aggregate emotional maturity of a six or seven year old.
Our public schools went through their own dumbing down process during that era thanks largely to fundamentalist Christians on the Right vs. gooey far-Left politically correct teachers on the Left who together sanitized all historical and social controversy out of the history and social studies texts. Controversies and their ebbs and flows, conflicts and occasional resolutions are, of course, the vital essence of history without which the subject cannot be understood. If social studies is not presented honestly by including a thorough history-based grounding on the subject of socio-economic class then it is mostly just confusing gibberish for young minds.
Our church movie night this month featured Dr. Strangelove. The group discussion of the film after its viewing was almost a movie musical in and of itself of stultifyingly predictable and stupid exclamations invariably made by the older Baby Boomers in the room. As ignorant and morally vacuous as the younger generations are, at least they aren't both as materialistic AND materially glutted and spoiled as most Boomers have been their entire mostly pointless lives as blind consumers.
I hope you are wrong but I fear you are right. I think one of the most pernicious fascist cultural evils that psychologically conditions our young people to "normalize" torture, illegal violations of people's bodies with the intent to maim, rape or kill, capriciously ignoring liberties and the laws that should protect those liberties, etc., are gratuitously and hideously violent video games. Some of those games are only one step down in practical effect from the point-and-shoot video programs used by the military and CIA to operate lethal unmanned aerial drones (with a high kill ratio of civilians to terrorists by the Pentagon's own admission) and lethal land roving robot gun and rocket carriers.
It was interesting to see that Clarence Thomas actually defied Scalia's typical blindly corporatist majority opinion (the only time I know of) in a recent Supreme Kangaroo Court case regarding such "games"--not on the grounds that he opposed the games per se, but because he felt the law in question that restricted child access to such games was Constitutional because the Constitution never expressly gave children free speech and free expression rights as it extended to adults, who he felt ought to have the right to limit what children view and read. I hate to agree with Clarence Thomas on anything, but I agree with him on this one.
The USA is far worse than Argentina was. The body count, the period of time, the area over which the US'ns have killed and their glee makes this blatantly clear.
The USA is a grand human mistake (actually fuck-up in modern parlance). Humanity must eradicate its influence. There is no other way forward. Present US citizens are part of humanity and have a duty to perform. They must deny the authority of their government and the validity of the structure called the USA.
Hedges does not write so and as the likes of Steve Biko have discovered it is dangerous to do so, but it is so and those who cannot see so are in Hell already.
We must remember that it is an honour if Hell kicks us out.
The man Jesus said so and he was no Christian.
Definitely far worse...Argentine facists actions killed Argentinians, American fascists kill people from every nation on earth.
Excellent analogy. Americans like to consider themselves as a first world country while they label Argenrina as some backward, third world country with no respect for the rule of law. Unfortunately the American ruling class feels confident that they will never see the inside of a cortroom because of their wealth, sense of moral superiority and a complacent population that basically says... "better them than me".
I for one, don't see any of the culprits being brought to justice in my lifetime because most Americans still buy into the official State line that they're just "doing their job" to help keep us safe. Muslims have been vilified so successfully that the average American feels nervous next to a Middle Eastern man if he dons a long beard and speaks a foreign language. We cloak our racism in the camoflauge of patriotism as we place 'support pur troops' bumper stickers on our cars and wave tiny American flags as military processions roll by in tanks and armoured personnel carriers. We're taught to hold our founding fathers in high esteem while ignoring uncomfortable truths about them such as their slaves, genocide of the aboriginals and their selfish, financial motivations for declaring war on behalf or their fellow countrymen.
Critical thinking in our schools have been replaced by standarized tests that just have the narrow focus of honing our literacy and numeracy skills so that we may all be able to improve our chances of entering that rapidly shrinking employment pool known as corporate America in exchange for minimal wages, routine drug tests and a psychotic corporate mantra that places profits above family, empathy and morality.
One thing Argentina lacked compared to their U.S. contemporaries is the omnipotent influence of their State propaganda apparatus. The Argentine elite couldn't unabashedly expect a private media to cheer lead their crimes and responded with their own State run media lies. But it had neither the sophistication, the reach or the deep pockets that America has and the populace quickly ignored it for the bunk that it was.
The elite in the U.S. have no such worries as the masses goose step with pride in defence of the status quo boasting of a free press, the greatest military in the world and a country personally blessed by God Almighty. Everyone's on board, or at least those who really matter as we assuage our moral conscience that only America can save the world if the world would only embrace Big Macs, Paris Hilton and the Super Bowl as proof of a superior culture. How stubborn the world must seem to be, when so few recognize that unchecked consumerism, limitless entertainment and blind patriotism are the only true paths to happiness.
Extremely well-said. It is scary how much Amereichans today resemble Germans of the 30's and 40's. Only worse. Back then, at least many Germans could use the excuse they didn't know what their government was really doing. Amereichans see it every day and don't give a rat's ass, for the reasons you so well stated. Indoctrinated and acclimated to Amerikka the Great, anything and everything she does is hunky-dory for them. They say most evil people don't really believe they are evil, in their own minds. No better example of this exists than in this country.
Space Cadet—Good post. Thank you for bringing up the connection between the lack of critical thinking and the population’s acceptance of horrors such as torture. Many opposed to the feverish standardized testing we submit our children to seem to see it as simply a misguided but earnest attempt to raise our country’s level of education. Some of us, however, see it as a malevolent means of disabling people’s ability to think. So Dick Cheney can say torture works because we haven’t been attacked since 911 and people eat it up. They really can’t see the illogic of this. Cheney has given them the right answer, and there’s no thinking necessary, just as there is no real thinking necessary to “achieve” in the standardized test. Just memorize the “correct” answer and fill in the right bubble, and even if you don’t know the right answer, your helpful teacher will explain how to game the test to increase your chances of filling in the right bubble. That’s what being smart is all about.
Good insights and well said.
The American populace has been continually threatened, by one enemy or another, according to the government and media, since the 1950s. It starting with the nuclear threat from the Soviets to today's terrorists threat from Muslims.
A frightened citizen accepts militarism and illegality if they believe these acts will protect them. Non-military and legal means are thus ignored as being ineffective or inefficient. This callousness results in the new American 21st century racism.
Hedges writes:
"Tens of thousands of Americans are being held in super-maximum-security prisons where they are deprived of contact and psychologically destroyed. Undocumented workers are rounded up and vanish from their families for weeks or months. Militarized police units break down the doors of some 40,000 Americans a year and haul them away in the dead of night as if they were enemy combatants."
I am having problems believing what Hedges has written. If each disappeared American had at least 10 friends and relatives, then well over 400,000 Americans a year would experience personally knowing someone who was disappeared by militarized police units breaking down doors. Someone, please explain where Hedges gets the numbers he writes.
>>>> Militarized police units break down the doors of some 40,000 Americans a year and haul them away ...
Hint: The "blue" text (haul them away) in the article is a link to more information (assuming you're not just a concern troll and actually want to learn).
I am not sure where Mr. Hedges got his information but there is information out there.
http://www.immigrantjustice.org/isolatedindetention
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/laplaza/2010/09/immigration-detention-report.html
http://www.detentionwatchnetwork.org/aboutdetention
"The recent impact of ICE enforcement includes:
•Approximately 380,000 immigrants were detained in 2009, more than 30,000 people per day. The average length of detention is currently 33.5 days.
•More than 369,211 immigrants were deported in 2009, a record for the agency and a twenty seven percent increase from 2007.
•DHS has spent over $2.8 billion on efforts to deport immigrants since the creation of ICE in 2003.
•In total, 3.7 million immigrants have been deported since 1994.
•A 12 fold increase in worksite arrests between 2002 and 2008. A new trend is to use “identify theft” charges to put immigrants in the category of “criminal alien” to make it easier to deport them.
•Over 100 “Fugitive Operations Teams” and the development of other specialized operations. ICE claims these are focused on specific groups but they are often used as a pretext for wide scale arrests in apartment complexes, workplaces, and public spaces.
•67% of ICE detainees are housed in local and county jail facilities, 17% in contract detention facilities, 13% in ICE-owned facilities, and 3% in other facilities such as those run by the Bureau of Prisons.
•According to the Washington Post, “with roughly 1.6 million immigrants in some stage of immigration proceedings, the government holds more detainees a night than Clarion Hotels have guests, operates nearly as many vehicles as Greyhound has buses and flies more people each day than do many small U.S. airlines.” (Washington Post, February 2, 2007)"
http://www.detentionwatchnetwork.org/node/2382
Missing the attribute "illegal" in most places before "immigrant".
Memento -- as Brian mentioned there is a link to Hedges' assertion & you might want to read it on Truth Dig.
What may have confused you is that you seem to assume that Hedges is claiming that the 40,000 were executed clandestinely and never seen again. He is simply describing the number of arrests performed during which police execute military style raids in the middle of the night -- often without knocking.
There are many, many incidents where it later turns out police have raided the wrong house, innocent people are shot, and the level of police violence in the raid is out of all reasonable proportion to the alleged offense.
Here is one tragic example of a raid gone bad:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/17/aiyana-jones-7-year-old-s_n_578246.html
I don't want to bore you with the details, but I was recently surrounded --while camping legally in my car-- by over a dozen sheriff's officers with semi-automatic weapons and night vision goggles. This occurred in Arizona. It was, needless to say, scary. They screamed at me to keep my hands in clear site while I was "laser sighted" from multiple rifles.
There was no warrant, there was no evidence of me doing anything wrong (I was asleep but my dogs started barking at them), and they admitted that I had committed no crime. I was 100 miles from the border but they had 'suspicions' that I might be a drug trafficker....
I wrote up more details in an earlier post but my main point is that I could have easily been killed if I had slipped trying to get out of the car or seemed like I was reaching for a gun.
They had not even bothered to run my vehicle license plate before launching their little raid. Since I was eventually let go without being arrested (or shot) there is not even an official statistic on this encounter.
There is no presumption of innocence and the 4th amendment is a joke.
You have to experience or witness something like this to appreciate how totally militarized our police have become. This is not a highway patrol officer cautiously approaching your car after stopping you for speeding.
The total number of arrests in the U.S. -- much of it in the service of the 'drug war'-- is simple mind boggling.
How many arrests per year are made in the U.S.?
14,172,384.
"From 2005 to 2008, there are on average 14,172,384 arrests made per year in the United States. This is based on data from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reporting program. Of all reported arrests, drug abuse violations remains the greatest, with on average 1,819,970 arrests made per year."
http://www.numberof.net/number-of-arrests-per-year/
"Arrests for drug law violations this year are expected to exceed the 1,663,582 arrests of 2009. Law enforcement made more arrests for drug abuse violations (an estimated 1.6 million arrests, or 13.0 percent of the total number of arrests) than for any other offense in 2009."
"Someone is arrested for violating a drug law every 19 seconds."
http://www.drugsense.org/cms/wodclock
http://able2know.org/topic/172440-1
I remember your prior post about that incident and I believe I posted about an incident that occurred to me. If a white, middle aged mom(obvious from passengers), driving an American sedan(most popular police care model), completely lawfully, can literally be pulled over for NOTHING (other than fitting an unacknowledged dubious watch profile) (three abreast front seat at dusk, Friday night)(no ticket or warning issued ie, no violations) in rural WI then the Fascist Police state is definitely here. As Russel Means so aptly phrased it, "Welcome to the Reservation".
"... my main point is that I could have easily been killed if I had slipped trying to get out of the car or seemed like I was reaching for a gun. "
___________________
In many Amerikan urban jurisdictions, you would've been summarily executed with impunity in accordance with a justification that unfailingly satisfies law enforcement agencies, the judiciary, and the overwhelming majority of the public alike: "The suspect APPEARED to be reaching for his waistband".
Case closed.
Not only that, but many police officers carry an unregistered gun just to put in reach of or in the hand of someone they shot by "mistake." The guy reaching for his wallet when shot is now "proved" to have been reaching for a gun.
When I was in high school around 1954, my buddies and I decided to go mountain climbing near Index. We came across several groups, armed and with dogs, as we drove toward the mountains.
We stopped at a resort to ask directions as to where we could camp. The owner told us of an old trapper's cabin we could stay in. We drove on up there and found the cabin so badly collapsed that we decided to just camp in my car ('39 Chevy) and head out in the morning.
In the middle of the night we were awakened by flashlights shining in every window and someone yelling questions at us. They wanted to know where the "fourth guy" was. We tried to tell them that Louie's folks wouldn't let him come so there were just the three of us. Finally, they just left. The lights went off and we could hear cars start up and move off.
We lay there, wondering what that was all about and finally fell asleep.
In the morning as we woke up and started to thaw out, the owner of the resort went by with a group from his place, sight seeing, I guess. He stopped and told us to go down to the resort for breakfast, which we did.
Then we got the story. Apparently four kids had escaped from the Monroe Reformatory. Art matched the description of one of them. The owner, a reverend, had asked us quite a few questions in conversation, then slipped out and got my license plate. The phone was out, so he told us where we could stay and drove down to Index, where he told his story to the Sheriff. He gave them the license number and suggested calling to verify the story, but the Sheriff didn't even listen. He had a posse en-route in minutes. The owner said it was a good thing that we didn't move or try to get out of the car as we had shotguns pointing in every window alongside the five cell flashlights.
We visited up there a couple of times afterward, always being hailed as the "escaped convicts" with much laughter. I think we were very lucky.
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Richard-Ralph-Roehl, Jul 18 2011 - 9:11am, is unfortunately right.
What a painful, albeit necesary, article by Hedges.
Thanks again to Chris Hedges. Unfortunately, he is a voice crying in the wilderness, and NOTHING will be done to bring the American war criminals to justice. We American are too caught up in our own mythology.
Jim Shea
Scripted by Disney.
The concerted effort by thousands of ordinary Argentinians, over decades, made sure the junta responsible were punished. In the States there is no equivalent embodiment of injustice by its citizens, no strong sense of moral outrage, nothing to bring ordinary people together, to insure a prison cell for Bush, Cheney and the rest of them. There is no cacerolada here, our hands and voices have been effectively amputated, by ourselves. Indeed, Bush would probably receive a Nobel peace prize, before anything here, resembles the type of justice that is taking place in Argentina.
"Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, former CIA Director George Tenet, Condoleezza Rice and John Ashcroft will, if we return to the rule of law, face trial. "
I will certainly feel less "soiled" by my country's dirty deeds when some of our laundry has been hung. No doubt that we are no longer a country where the "rule of law" means much any more. Hopefully one day that will change (and it will probably change "in one day").
The condors* have come home to roost.
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Condor
Collapse and disintegration is a much more likely destiny for the dumb ol' USA than any kind of long march to justice. The US hasn't got three decades to spend defending its criminal acts in court. It probably hasn't got three years. The US is perched on the mother of all tipping points, economically, socially and militarily and one wing beat from one black swan will send the US into the ravine. Here, for instance is just one of them:
Al Jazeera: CIA veteran: Israel to attack Iran in fall
http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/07/201171775828434786.html
Thanks for this Al Jazeera link, Chaokoh.
That is the scariest article I've read in a while next to the recent UN report on the pace of global technological change and spending critical for any significant number of humans (let alone other species) to survive climate change and the also human induced sixth extinction event.
There is one admittedly slim hope re that article: Obama may realize before September that his chances of re-election next year are vaporware. He's fouled the well of his own base too many times and pole-danced the third rail of Social Security to boot. He said he was willing to lose his presidency over his offers of deep social spending cuts to Republicans--and won NOTHING from them for that severely retarded offer. Because of that bluff and its failure and subsequent lack of resolution on the budget he knows he's going to pay a heavy political price.
He's towed Israel's line in order to massage other Dems more beholden to AIPAC, but I've never seen any real love from Obama for Israel. If he thinks he's going to lose in 2011 anyway he might just stand off if Israel blitzkriegs Iran without provocation and let those two religiously fanatical regimes sort it out while he orders air cover for Saudi Arabia, certain Iraqi oil fields, U.S. bases & the Green Zone in Iraq, bases in Afghanistan and certain other Gulf oil fields. It would be a hell of a lot more cost effective than going to war with Iran because Israel can't keep it in its pants.
The present governments in Israel and Iran could both fall, but it would probably be a good thing if either one of them fell. It would sure as hell cure the Israelis of their Jewish "chosen race" belligerence for a few years to realize Uncle Sam won't always be there to get their religious extremist/racist back.
If the Shiite sharia regime in Tehran fell, then Iran's younger generation who already bridle at the grand ayatollah's bit would be given a window to peacefully emulate the Arab Spring revolutions that have called for more dignity and freedom elsewhere. Iran's young people don't have anything against the American people and Iran's population is mostly young.
The Israelis seem to regard the American people with increasing distrust and paranoia, but then they seem to regard the rest of the world that way, too. They are so deep in their own anti-democratic mass psychosis and Nazi-like ghetto-ization of Gaza and parts of the West Bank that Obama would be wise to step out of their way and let them sink their regime and their suicidally "ethnic cleansing" based Zionism.
The article's author makes good sense until the very end where he says:
"This is something the president needs to focus on instead of being forced to nickel and dime with the likes of Representative Eric Cantor and Senator Mitch McConnell. How incredible that these two, and their right-wing allies, have our government tied in knots in their incessant effort to elevate themselves by destroying the President of the United States. It is sickening."
Obama is not forced to bicker with Cantor & McConnell. And they aren't just trying to destroy Obama's political career. They're all three neo-liberal class-war officers engaged in rolling back the Great Society and New Deal (at only slightly different speeds) all the way to the first Gilded Age (that led to its own laissez-faire bank panic in 1893).
Christians can do anything they want because they have "God on their side". It has become a mantra among Republican presidential candidates to claim that God told them to run (I'm not absolving Democrats, it's a matter of idiotic versus batshit stupid fucking crazy). The lamestream media is pure corporatist bullshit propaganda. Refuse to salute the flag or pledge allegiance to it. Throw a spaniard in the works.
>>>> Throw a spaniard in the works.
Nice! Triple entendre, at least!
"Jesus El Pifco was a foreigner and he knew it."
As usual, Hedges is one of the very few left who can say things just as they are.
There is one more thing to make clear, though.
We are the mascochistic idiots (charitably put) who regularly and willingly vote for these crimes, nobody else.
I am not saying that not voting for the dictatorship would change anything, because the owners of the country would then certainly unmask their fascism. Perhaps the morons are right, and voting like sheep and living like plants is the only way to avoid a huge slaughter...
readbetweenthe_lines?
i guess that's the third incarnation of rbl. About the only poster i know of who was kicked out twice and had all their posts removed. Must be some kind of record. Extra points for persistence tho....
"I see you have not been on CD very long."
You meant "I see you have been on CD very long". Definitely longer then your first incarnation.
Nice quotes tho. It's hope that keeps me going most of the time too.