The Asshole Song

Gulag Nation USA: 2.3 Million Inmates, Forced Labor, Rancid Food



http://www.alternet.org/print/civil-liberties/gulag-nation-usa-23-million-inmates-forced-labor-rancid-food-and-its-making





Gulag Nation USA: 2.3 Million Inmates, Forced Labor, Rancid Food -- and It's Making the Corporate Overlords Wealthy

March 18, 2013 |



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The letters that pour into her office are disturbing. Female prisoners routinely complain of being sexually abused by guards. One prisoner wrote to her office: “That was not part of my sentence to perform oral sex with officers.” Other prisoners write on behalf of the mentally ill who have been left to deteriorate in the prison system. One California prisoner told of a mentally ill man spreading feces over himself and the guards then dumping him into a scalding bath that took skin off 30 percent of his body.
Kerness said the letters she receives from prisoners collectively present a litany of “inhumane conditions including cold, filth, callous medical care, extended isolation often lasting years, use of devices of torture, harassment, brutality and racism.” Prisoners send her drawings of “four- and five-point restraints, restraint hoods, restraint belts, restraint beds, stun grenades, stun guns, stun belts, spit hoods, tethers, and waist and leg chains.” But the worst torment, prisoners tell her, is the psychological pain caused by “no touch torture” that included “humiliation, sleep deprivation, sensory disorientation, extreme light or dark, extreme cold or heat” and “extended solitary confinement.” These techniques, she said, are consciously designed to carry out “a systematic attack on all human stimuli.”
The use of sensory deprivation was applied by the government to imprisoned radicals in the 1960s including members of the Black Panthers, the Black Liberation Army, the Puerto Rican independence movement and the American Indian Movement, along with environmentalists, anti-imperialists and civil rights activists. It is now used extensively against Islamic militants, jailhouse lawyers and political prisoners. Many of those political prisoners were part of radical black underground movements in the 1960s that advocated violence. A few, such as Leonard Peltier [11] and Mumia Abu Jamal [12], are well known, but most have little public visibility—among them Sundiata Acoli [13], Mutulu Shakur [14], Imam Jamil Al-Amin [15](known as H. Rap Brown when in the 1960s he was the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), Jalil Bottom [16], Sekou Odinga [17], Abdul Majid [18], Tom Manning [19] and Bill Dunne [20]. 

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Kerness says the for-profit prison companies have created an entrepreneurial class like that of the Southern slaveholders, one “dependent on the poor, and on bodies of color as a source for income,” and she describes federal and state departments of corrections as “a state of mind.” This state of mind, she said in the interview, “led to Abu Ghraib, Bagram and Guantanamo and what is going on in U.S. prisons right this moment.”
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Federal judge rules surveillance provisions unconstitutional

Source: Yahoo




By Bernard Vaughan | Reuters – 1 hr 31 mins ago



By Bernard Vaughan
NEW YORK (Reuters) - A federal judge has ruled unconstitutional national security provisions that permit federal investigators to access customer information from some companies without court approval.
The provisions "suffer from significant constitutional infirmities," and violate the First Amendment and separation of powers, Judge Susan Illston of the District Court for the Northern District of California wrote in an order on Thursday.
The judge's decision stems from a "National Security Letter" that the Federal Bureau of Investigation issued to an unnamed telecommunications company, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
The National Security Letter provision of the Patriot Act expanded the FBI's authority to demand personal customer records from Internet service providers, financial institutions and credit companies without prior court approval, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.
The letter to the telecommunications company sought "subscriber information" from the company, and warned that the letter's disclosure could result "in a danger to the United States," among other ramifications, according to the decision.

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Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/federal-judge-rules-surveillance-provisions-unconstitutional-001457869--finance.html