From jaywalking to torture

British historian's violent arrest in US - a "wonderful experience"

Browsing the net I came across a link to this on YouTube:




It's an interview with a British historian about his violent arrest for jaywalking while at an academic conference in Atlanta, Georgia.

I didn't think it would merit 3 episodes, totalling about 25 minutes, but it is fascinating, funny and a bit frightening; it makes one realise how easily one could have been in a similar situation (during one of about a dozen trips I've had to the US).

The other two sections of the interview (well worth watching) are at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENCa43r9jmY

To be fair, my only contact with the US police was entirely different. I had lost a credit card and thought I was supposed to report it to the police and that a phone call would be enough, but they arranged for a policeman to visit to take details at my hotel. He was about 6' 4", looked like film star, and was very polite about what seemed to be a waste of his time.

"Over-zealous" police

The experience of the historian, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, was very different from mine; it was very violent and quite traumatic at the time. Despite his name he is VERY British, and sounds a bit like someone from Noel Coward's era. He says that the policeman was wearing a zipped jacket which didn't seem like a policeman's uniform to him; he describes it as a somewhat "louche" garment, worn by people "affecting a rather raffish image".

The situation deteriorated when: "I may have passed comment on his uniform which was under-appreciative". He was violently thrown to the ground and handcuffed and when he "bridled" at this treatment, he was then held down by five burly policemen. The siuation was calmed by a security man from the hotel, but one of the more professional policemen explained that they had to go ahead with the arrest to avoid being sued if they admitted they'd made a mistake.

I suspect that the video is on YouTube not just as an example of what Fernandez-Armesto describes as "over-zealous" US police behaviour, but also because of the vocabulary and accent of this Brit which must be amusingly bizarre to many Americans (the link I saw warns Americans that it might take time to adjust to his accent).

He was held in custody for 8 hours, having difficulty in raising the required 1,000 dollars bail for this minor traffic infringement, but which now included "resisting arrest". He found the other inmates at the detention centre far more humane and polite than the police, but also praised the staff there, who quickly realised he didn't exactly fit the usual criminal profiles, and went to some lengths to help him. He was advised by lawyers to sue Georgia state authorities, but didn't want to do anything which might endanger his ability to enter the US - he was a visiting professor.

Luckily for him, in court the two young female prosecutors quickly realised this could be a very embarrassing case and it was quickly dismissed. But, while it was traumatic at the time, he found it to be in retrospect a "wonderful experience" because as "aging members of the bourgeoisie, we don't normally get an insight into this world".

US police torture drug dealer

He was lucky, by coincidence, today (Sun.), I came across this example of brutal US police behaviour, possibly not that unusual, except that the wife of the drug-dealer beaten up by the police left a tape-recorder on. Thanks to the internet you can hear it - should you want to, it's extremely "over-zealous":

http://wms.scripps.com/knoxville/siler/siler.mp3 The action starts about 3.40 secs in.

More delicate souls can get an idea of what happened from this report:

...Three years ago this July, Franklin, a senior detective with the Campbell County, Tennessee Sheriff's Department, presided over the prolonged torture of a pathetic small-time drug dealer named Lester Eugene Siler, who primarily trafficked in prescription drugs.

Franklin's five-man crew included three other full-time law enforcement officers and a part-time process server. This squalid little gang was created with the help of a federal Byrne Grant (a Justice Department subsidy for counter-narcotics programs), and – like most criminal cliques of that sort – they were involved in a vulgar shakedown-and-skimming operation conducted under the color of government authority.

Eugene Siler and wife

Franklin's squad descended on Siler's home on July 8, 2004 on the pretext of serving a warrant for probation violations. Their real objective, however, was to rummage through the home in search of either money or contraband that could be used to justify seizing and forfeiting Siler's assets. The police ordered Siler's wife to take their son and leave; before doing so, however, she turned on a tape recorder, which captured roughly half of what turned into a two-hour torture session.
...
Detective Franklin, a 17-year veteran of the Campbell County Sheriff's Department, was also the DARE officer at the local school district. Bear that last fact in mind as we examine his conduct.

Campbell County's Finest: Detective Franklin and his little shakedown-and-torture squad.

“Let me tell you what we're gonna do,” explained Franklin, the moral tutor to Campbell County's youth, as Siler – who had already been beaten once – cringed in terror. “We're gonna put them handcuffs in front of ya. Cut you a little slack. But if you don't start operating [sic], we're gonna put the motherf****rs behind your back, and I'm gonna take this slapjack and I'm gonna start working that head over, you understand?”

Officer David Webber elaborated on the plan: “We're gonna know everything about your business today. And you're gonna take us and where you got your money, we're gonna take every dime you have today and if we don't walk out of here with every piece of dope you got and every dime you got, your f*****g a** is not going to make it to the jail.... We're doing this on our own, and you're gonna sign a consent to search form and you're gonna give us permission to be here and you're gonna do it our way, cause we're tired of f*****g with your a**.”
...
A little later, Deputy Monday suggested that they should murder Siler and frame him for armed assault using a pellet pistol found in his home:

“Eugene, you're gonna sign this right here or I'm gonna f*****g put a bullet in your damn head, and we're gonna f*****g plant this BB gun.”

When that didn't work, the gang dragged Siler off for a few rounds of water-boarding.

Surely it wasn't necessary to beat, abuse, molest, and terrorize Siler in order to find a pretext for searching his house. So why did Franklin and his gang do so?

Because they could.

As I read the transcript, and saw how young Deputy Monday emerged as the most violent and sadistic of the officers, I made a small bet with myself that he was the first one to break when the FBI conducted its investigation of Franklin's squad.

I won the bet: Monday broke right away, and began “cooperating” with the inquiry. All five are now in prison.

But the only reason this happened is because Siler's wife had secreted a tape recorder where it could gather evidence, and had the presence of mind to turn it on before leaving her husband in the hands of his torturers.

How often does this sort of thing take place undetected?.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/grigg/grigg-w12.html

But it is not just a matter of some US policemen, the report links it to the use of torture in Afghanistan and Iraq, and to the policy of the Bush government:

Because They Can: The Logic of the Torture State

... As Eliza Griswold recounts
in the current issue of The New Republic, the tribunal “cleared Corsetti of all charges. His lawyer successfully argued ... that the rules for detainee treatment were unclear: `The president of the United States doesn't know what the rules are. The secretary of defense doesn't know what the rules are. But the government expects this Pfc. to know what the rules are?'”

So – at the time of Corsetti's trial a year ago, the assumption was that sexual assault was considered a permissible interrogation tactic in the absence of a specific prohibition. He'd used the tactic before while working at Abu Ghraib: With the help of two comrades he forced an Iraqi woman to strip.

Why did he do this? Because he could.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/grigg/grigg-w12.html

Torture in Nice in WW2

By another coincidence, on Saturday I was also reading Robert Kanigel's: "High Season in Nice: How One French Riveria Town Has Seduced Trvellers for Two Thousand Years". Generally this is a story of people seeking sun and pleasure, at first the wealthy and later workers taking advantage "congés payés" introduced in 1936.

But yesterday I read the section on the period of the Second World War, when Nice was at first a refuge for Jews, even when the Italians took control of the area and, to their credit, left the Jews alone despite German protests. But when the Italians were defeated the Germans took control and they and their French collaborators went after the Jews:

"In menacing black Citroens Germans and their French henchmen hunted down Nice's Jews.
... Brought back to the Exelsior [hotel] ...Many were tortured for information about brothers, parents and children not yet caught in the net.
... In the end, the Germans in Nice wound up shipping off to Drancy about three thousand Jews, most of whom died in Auschwitz." pp. 199-201

Iraq is not a "good war"

In August 1944 many Americans were in involved in liberating this area of France and today many look back proudly to this restoration of freedom. Scott Ritter, a US arms inspector (and ex-marine), recently joined the American Legion. He was one of the few American officals with the knowledge and guts to publicly disagree with Bush administration and argued that Iraq was no threat to the US and had no WMDs.

He was disappointed to find that some members of the American Legion who were veterans of WW2 had swallowed the propaganda of Bush and co:

"... It quickly became apparent that The American Legion magazine was a sounding board for many holding quite militaristic and jingoistic opinions based on their rather limited personal experiences, many dating back to World War II. The war in Iraq, together with the overarching “global war on terror,” seems to be viewed by many in the American Legion as an extension of their own past service, and much effort is made to connect World War II and the Iraq conflict as part and parcel of the same ongoing American “liberation” of the world’s oppressed.
...
I yearn for a time when “good Americans” will be able to stop and reverse equally evil policies of global hegemony achieved through pre-emptive war of aggression. I know all too well that in this case the “enemy” will only be emboldened by our silence, since at the end of the day the “enemy” is ourselves. I can see the Harvard professor shaking an accusatory finger at me for the above statement, chiding me for creating any moral equivalency between the war in Iraq and the Holocaust. You’re right, Mr. Dershowitz. There is no moral equivalency. In America today, we should have known better, since we ostensibly stand for so much more. That we have collectively failed to halt and repudiate the war in Iraq makes us even worse than the Germans."

Scott Ritter was a Marine Corps intelligence officer from 1984 to 1991 and a United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998. He is the author of numerous books, and his latest is “Waging Peace: The Art of War for the Antiwar Movement” (Nation Books, April 2007).
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17683.htm

Fortunately the French did not support the disastrous attack on Iraq, and, while there were collaborators with the Nazis, there are memorial plaques all over Nice to those who died resisting, e.g., in what is now Rue Francis Gallo in the old town, there is this memorial to him:



http://farm1.static.flickr.com/230/496031342_aa76b49ed8_o.jpg

I find it particularly moving that the memorial records that he was seventeen and a half; when you're seventeen the half makes a great difference; who knows what difference he might have made had the Nazis not killed him. He might even have become a historian and visited an academic conference in Atlanta Georgia, without the "wonderful experience" of more British than the Brits - Felipe Fernandez-Armesto.

I supect that this "wonderful experience" has rather changed his opinion as expressed in an interview:

"For me, history is about what it meant to live in the past. It doesn’t mean experiencing it directly. One of the things about being a historian is that you do live vicariously, learning about things not by the senses but vicariously. I relish that. History is sources, I am much more interested in them than in what actually happened, if you could ever know them."

http://www.tmcq.co.uk/interviews/felipe-fernandez-armesto

He now knows, through "the senses", what many Americans experience on a daily basis and, I think, has been very changed by it.

American Historical Association votes to oppose the war in Iraq

But his particular conversion should not overshadow the far more important fact that the conference of the American Historical Association which he was attending was not just discussing "arcane historical issues" (as he puts in his YouTube video) but passed a resolution condemning the war in Iraq:

"... Whereas during the war in Iraq and the so-called war on terror, the current Administration has violated the above-mentioned standards and principles through the following practices:

excluding well-recognized foreign scholars;
condemning as “revisionism” the search for truth about pre-war intelligence;
re-classifying previously unclassified government documents;
suspending in certain cases the centuries-old writ of habeas corpus and substituting indefinite administrative detention without specified criminal charges or access to a court of law;
using interrogation techniques at Guantanamo, Abu-Ghraib, Bagram, and other locations incompatible with respect for the dignity of all persons required by a civilized society;
Whereas a free society and the unfettered intellectual inquiry essential to the practice of historical research, writing, and teaching are imperiled by the prctices described above; and

Whereas, the foregoing practives are inextricably linked to the war in which the United States is presently engaged in Iraq; now, therefore, be it

Resolved, That the American Historical Association urges its members through publication of this resolution in Perspectives and other appropriate outlets:

1. To take a public stand as citizens on behalf of the values necessary to the practice of our profession; and
2. To do whatever they can to bring the Iraq war to a speedy conclusion."

http://hnn.us/articles/33409.html#Day3

Historians of the World unite - you have nothing to lose but your tenure.