guantanamo gulag, nyc militia

by jackie sheeler on April 26, 2008

years ago i read the first two volumes of solzhenitsyn’s gulag archipelago, horrified by how the evil USSR treated human beings, grateful and relieved that my country would never dream of setting up a concentration camp. chalk it up to youthful idealism.

today, detainees at guantanamo bay are held for years without charges, trial, visits, telephone, books (other than the occasional koran), radio, TV or direct human contact with anyone other than the guards. spending 22 hours a day in a cell about the size of my bathroom, some prisoners go months without glimpsing the sun. many have gone insane from years of this climate-controlled isolation and now, finally coming up for trial, cannot participate in their own defense.

it is against US law to hold anyone in solitary confinement for extended periods of time, but guantanamo officials claim that this isn’t solitary confinement, only “single-occupancy cells”.

we know better than to trust our government now, though, don’t we? new yorkers certainly do, and if we needed any more reasons for it we all got a big one this week.

even those of you far from NYC are likely to have heard of the sean bell “incident”, where a young man was killed by police outside a strip club on the night of his bachelor party. police claimed they saw a gun and fired in self-defense. no gun was ever found, nor bullets from any gun othat than the cops’. one of the officers fired THIRTY bullets at the boys.

their crime, it seems, was drinking while black, since sean tried to drive away when the undercover cop approached his car. i’d drive away too, if one of them stepped to me at 4am — do you know what these undercovers look like? the worst of the worst of street thugs. sean pulls out, drunk, hits another undercover’s car, one cop thinks he sees a gun and starts firing, the other officers follow suit and soon nothing in the car is moving. maybe just a little blood dripping off the dashboard.

did you know that starting salary for NYPD officers is $25,000 a year and maxes out at $70,000? did you know that the starting salary for administrative assistants at the dot-com where i work is higher than what a NYC street cop with 10 years on the job earns? no wonder christian torres, a rookie NYC transit cop, was just arrested for robbing three banks (he confessed).

the sean bell cops opted for trial by judge rather than jury, as is everyone’s right. the predictable not guilty was delivered yesterday morning, and al sharpton vowed to “shut this city down” in protest.

here’s how they played it: the prosecution (regular NYC district attorneys, you know, they guys who usually work WITH the cops to convict the bad guys) mounted what is already being called one of the worst prosecutorial cases ever seen, a “defense attorney’s dream” according to one lawyer. when questioned about the most obvious of the mistakes the DA replied “It is what it is.”

right. a way to let the judge off the hook and guarantee the officers would walk, which they did, though luckily for us they may not get their jobs back.

so solitary confinement isn’t solitary confinement because it’s really just a single-occupancy cell, and recklessly mowing down unarmed men in the street isn’t reckless.

where are the fucking emperor’s clothes?

david byrne said, “and you may ask yourself, how did i get here?”

every day, man. every single day.