The Philadelphia Inquirer asks "Should We Torture?"

by Mahdi Ibn-Ziyad and Bob Allen - 04.12.2002

Twice in the past week the Philadelphia Inquirer has featured editorials calling for the torture of Abu Zubaydah. Friday's April 5, 02 Matthew Miller "With Zubaydah capture, the question is- How opposed to torture are we?" and Mark Bowden's Sunday April 7, 02, "Torture, if it saves lives, may be a necessary evil." Both writers mock the pathetic weaklings who stand against torture. For these moral philosophers, human rights supporters are analogous to naive children.

Citing circumstances warranting torture Bowden claims, "Real life is made of exceptions. Absolutes are for classrooms." Miller says, "And we can tell the kids torture is wrong, ..There'll be time to explain when they're older that, in an imperfect and tragic world, things happen." (Gee Matt, I can't wait to grow up to be a hypocrite.) For Matt Miller "the morality of torture is now central to American defense." But he asks, "I'd prefer to be spared the details."

They both cite a moral imperative of a greater good being served through torture and quote several esteemed co-thinkers. Arthur Kaplan from the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Bioethics gives his academic OK to torture. "Torture is wrong, but not always." And regarding Zubaydah, "I would torture someone like him to the point where torture becomes ineffective."

The much-respected spiritual voice of the Catholic ministries gives us the enlightened contributions of Father Lanagan, from Georgetown University. For him torture is legitimate "where the danger to innocents is real and imminent, and there is good reason to suspect that the person has information that could prevent it." Bowden assures us that the priest's criteria fit Zubaydah's case. "With him, we are talking about using torture to extract valuable, lifesaving information." With Mr. Bowden's word we can now proceed with clear conscience on to our gruesome task.

These editorials illustrate the willing abandonment of our fundamental democratic rights by liberals eager to ensure their place at the front of the war effort. And it is no accident that efforts to legitimize torture in the US are being promoted while the US openly supports Israel's war in Palestine. The Israeli Defense Force's widespread use of torture against Palestinians was extensively documented last year in Israel's Supreme Court. We could learn volumes from them on how to retain our image as a democracy while conducting torture and ethnic war.

Bob Allen

Bob from Dr. Mahdi Ibn-Ziyad:

That the Ashcroft department of justice and the liberal pundits hired by the Philadelphia Inquirer and other big time media are not above toying with or forthrightly promoting torture as a means to render prostrate perceived enemies should not come as a real surprise. Like other social facts of the disagreeable sort, torture itself is not something that has been outlawed or about to be outlawed. It has its proven usefulness, as do other equally disdained features of the American system. Nuclear weapons use is disagreeable to many in the peace movement, yet the US is the first and still the only nation to actually use them on anybody. Such was done with the full backing of the constitutionally elected gentlemen who had used taxpayers’ money to prepare that weapon system for use after long years of research and testing.

Great university trained minds toiled and labored long to make manifest this ugliest of weapons and once done, were heralded as knighted saviors of the so-called free world. I am opposed to torture of any kind because I can feel the pain of another human soul. I hurt at another's pain. My religious and experiential sense of moral sense of justice is guidance enough. Though it's edifying, I do not have to turn to French philosopher Michel Foucault's rarified musings about an architectonically constructed, Western idea and history of the institutionalization of discipline and punishment to know what black people have faced in America since the slave ships left Africa with kidnapped human cargo. Slavery by its very nature was torture; the American enslavement of generations of black people is a guidebook profile in the meaning of torture and its horrific consequences in a nation with a schizoid understanding of itself and its role in the world.

As far as I know, torture in a generic sense is not cruel nor unusual punishment, in as far as the Supreme Court interprets the constitution. Torture goes against our liberal or revolutionary sensibilities and most assuredly should be proscribed, but it just ain't so and never has been. In a state of war torture should come under the Geneva Accords for prisoners of war, if a legal war has been defined through declaration. In the US case, that declaration must be promulgated by Congress as the representative body of the people in mass.

Historically, prior to the Geneva Convention of the late 1940's, torture was viewed as necessary, but obnoxious and retributable method of extracting information or doling out punishment in the case of military action. That's supposedly in war. In "peacetime" the annuals of US race and class war history are replete with examples of various forms of torture legally used on hated white folk and people of color. Indian massacres normally involved some form of pre-death torture or after-death mutilation of body parts, re: scalping and dismemberment.

Colonel Chivington, in commenting upon his atrocities against Natives followed a line laid down earlier by US Army general, then president, Wm. H. Harrison, the old Indian hater killer: He boldly bragged about his manly accomplishments which included the live mutilation of unarmed, innocent women and children. Southern blacks, before and after the Geneva Accords, were tortured and mutilated as a high form of art and entertainment, a sport if you will, while law enforcement personnel participated or took a leadership position in these rituals of pleasure. Black disembowelment was not considered a crime against humanity of the dirtiest sort. Pregnant black women had their babies carved out of their bellies so little white kids could see what really becomes of bad niggers.

The southern white mommy exhorts her son to "Eat your popcorn little Johnny daddy's carving up another back-talking nigger. No we're not going to eat him (it) for dinner". The courts were silent on this pattern of racist hate, and although well meaning, civilized whites cringed at the pain and sufferings of our people little was actually done to alleviate the pain. Some 2,000 of my people were spirited off the earth via lynching and post-death body burnings from the 1890's to early 20's. Lynching was not allowed, as one would expect in "highly civilized society". I can still see the old dusty reports on the apparent norms of democratic lynching from the untiring pen of the great Ida B. Wells advocating, organizing, agitating not being listened to by white established power but moving in opposition to that power in any case.

The clear case of modern legal torture is demonstrated daily in the penal system. Tiger cages and 23 and a 1/2 hour lock downs in holes is normaltorture for unmanageable prisoners and prisoners who lack the warden's favor. Of course, some among us would even argue that maximum security prisons andthe system of pre-death lockdown in small isolated cubby holes for death row folk is nothing but torture of a modern psychological kind.

The courts allow this while civil libertarians and the prisoners themselves complain. Remember Attica? Nelson Rockefeller became Vice President on the strength of Eastern Republican establishment money (much of it his own), the sickness of the nation's Democratic and Republican primal urges to maim and kill non-white communist folk in SE Asia and his vicious cruelties at Attica. Torture was a major part of Rocky's American strategy; a continuing game of deathing with no end on the horizon. All hail the V.P. H. Rap Brown, now the incarcerated Imam al-Amin, once noted that violence is as American as apple pie.

He could have also said that torture is a main ingredient of violence as pre-approve by benevolent courts of appellant inquiry. What we behold now from established liberal talking heads today is no less than what some of us beheld in the past. The circumstances of 9.11.01 merely brings the sometimes latent, sometimes visible schizoid features of the American system of hate back out for all discerning folk to behold its raw ugliness.

Our Middle Eastern "looking" brothers and sisters are now being hurriedly niggerized, a notch or two down from their former ethnic position as sand-headed, turban wearing, lustful sheiks of by-gone Arabee movies. Objectively, nothing but more of the same old (dangerous) expedience and dispatch posing as democratically arrived at justice in war (unending war according to Bush) and the class and racially tinged politics of xenophobia as usual at home.

Peace then, Dr. A.S. Mahdi Ibn-Ziyad

___________________________________________________________________________________________________

Torture in Our Own Backyards: The Fight Against Supermax Prisons

By Jessica Pupovac, AlterNet Posted on March 24, 2008

Imagine living in an 8-by-12 prison cell, in solitary confinement, for eight years straight. Your entire world consists of a dank, cinder block room with a narrow window only three inches high, opening up to an outdoor cement cage, cynically dubbed, "the yard." If you're lucky, you spend one hour, five days a week in that outdoor cage, where you gaze up through a wire mesh roof and hope for a glimpse of the sun. If you talk back to the guards or act out in any way, you might only venture outside one precious hour per week.

You go eight years without shaking a hand or experiencing any physical human contact. The prison guards bark orders and touch you only while wearing leather gloves, and then it's only to put you in full cuffs and shackles before escorting you to the cold showers, where they watch your every move.

You cannot make phone calls to your friends or family and must "earn" two visits per month, which inevitably take place through a Plexiglass wall. You are kept in full shackles the entire time you visit with your wife and children, and have to strain to hear their voices through speakers that record your every word. With no religious or educational programs to break up the time or elevate your thoughts, it's a daily struggle to keep your mind from unraveling.

This is how Reginald Akeem Berry describes his time in Tamms Correctional Facility, a "Supermax" state prison in southern Illinois, where he was held from March 1998 until July 2006. He now works to draw attention to conditions inside Tamms, where 261 inmates continue to be held in extreme isolation. Once exclusively employed as a short-term punishment for particularly violent jailhouse infractions, today, 44 states hold "supermax" facilities, or "control units," designed specifically to hold large numbers of inmates in long-term solitary confinement. A concept that spread like wildfire in the 1990s, today an estimated 20,000 prisoners live in these modern-day dungeons, judged to be "unmanageable" by prison officials and moved from other penitentiaries to the nearest supermax.

Life in supermax institutions is grueling. Inmates stay in thei cells for at least 23 hours per day, and never so much as lay eyes on another prisoner. While many live under these conditions for five years, others continue, uncertain of how to earn their way out, for ten, 15, or even 20 years.

The effects of such extended periods of isolation on prisoners' physical and mental health, their chances of meaningful rehabilitation, and, ultimately, on the communities to which they will eventually return are coming under increasing fire, from lawyers, human rights advocates and the medical professionals who have treated them. Bolstered by growing concern over the U.S.' sanctioning of torture, and the effect that has on the country's international standing, their calls to action are gaining ground. In 2000, and again in 2006, the United Nations Committee Against Torture condemned the kind of isolation imposed by the U.S. government in federal, state and county-run supermax prisons, calling it "extremely harsh." "The Committee is concerned about the prolonged isolation periods detainees are subjected to," they stated, "the effect such treatment has on their mental health, and that its purpose may be retribution, in which case it would constitute cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment."

"Sending someone to a supermax is punishment" Defense attorney Jean Maclean Snyder, who has represented several Tamms prisoners, says the U.N. declaration is dead-on. "It is suspected that many [Tamms] prisoners have been sent there in retaliation for filing lawsuits about prison policies; because serious mental illnesses cause them to be disruptive; or simply because wardens at other prisons do not like them," she wrote in 2000, shortly after the original declaration was issued. Allan Mills of the Uptown People's Law Office in Chicago, IL thinks that the ambiguity surrounding how and why inmates are sent to supermax facilities constitutes a violation of due process. "Sending someone to a supermax is punishment," Mills told AlterNet, "and before someone gets punished, they have a right to a fair hearing." "Just like if you were to get a traffic ticket, you have a right to say 'I didn't do it' and bring witnesses, and the police would have to come and testify against you," he said. "The same should go for prisoners who are being subjected to this horrendous long-term confinement." Mills claims he has "tracked a pattern of prisoners being sent to Tamms because of them filing grievances or lawsuits and being jailhouse lawyers."

Assistant Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) Director Sergio Molina told AlterNet that, "Their behavior is their input," and although he claims the decision to transfer an inmate to Tamms is made on a "case-by-case basis," he wasn't able to expand further on the process. Reginald Berry says he believes he was sent there for being "influential," among the general prison population. A former five-star leader of Chicago's infamous Vice Lords gang, he says he had the opportunity to turn in the "pistol" in a murder case, in return for a five-year sentence. However, he says, cooperating with the police against a fellow Vice Lord would have been "against the code," -- so instead he fought a first-degree murder charge in court and wound up with a 33-year jail sentence.

At first, life in Illinois state penitentiaries -- he was transferred to several over the years -- was manageable, since, in his words, "the animals were running the zoo." Through what he describes as a vast web of corruption and incompetence, "the guys who was the beast of the place were being rewarded by the warden," and were granted preferential job placements and access to coveted programs. "Might made right." Following a series of prison riots and attacks on staff in the early 1990s (neither of which Berry had ever witnessed or been involved in) the Illinois General Assembly decided to construct the Tamms Closed Maximum Security Facility, or "CMAX." With a price tag of $72 million, Tamms CMAX opened its doors on March 10, 1998. The prison is capable of housing up to 500 of the department's "most disruptive, violent and problematic inmates," according to an IDOC brochure. IDOC also claims it costs approximately $60,000 per inmate per year to keep the facility running, a figure over three times higher than the per-inmate annual cost at other IDOC facilities.

Berry says that although he heard supermax rumors swirling throughout the jailhouse, he never imagined that he would end up in one. As he tells it, he hadn't been involved in a violent altercation for years. Nonetheless, "they came back and punished all the guys they had given fringe benefits to, and I had been one of those brothers." Days after the Tamms facility opened, ten police officers in full riot gear came to his cell and escorted him out. One of those guards offered him what would be his last cigarette for the next eight years, before putting him on an IDOC van and sending him off to Tamms.

"Many of these inmates have become psychotic" The moment he arrived at Tamms, Berry says, he knew "it was a different world." All his belongings were immediately confiscated, right down to his underwear. He was then cavity searched before being escorted, in full shackles and leg irons, to his cell. "Imagine if you've been smoking 20 years," he says. "Overnight you can't smoke no more, overnight you can't talk to your kids no more." The coffee was gone. Work and educational programs were gone. Human interaction was out of reach. Guards barked orders and harassed him. After about a month of sitting in his cell, he began to hear other inmates' mental health slipping. "You get these guys and they don't know how to acclimate so they start cutting themselves up," he recalled, adding that some would go so far as "taking a pen and sticking it all the way up into their penis," or even worse, attempting suicide.

One expert on the effects of solitary confinement, Dr. Terry Kupers, who consults prison agencies on mental health services, says it is not uncommon for "psychiatric symptoms [to] emerge in previously healthy prisoners … in this context of near-total isolation and idleness." Psychiatrist and Harvard Medical School professor Dr. Stuart Grassian concurs. In 2005 he told the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America's Prisons that he had evaluated of "scores of inmates" who "psychiatrically deteriorated during the course of their confinement in solitary." "Many of these inmates," he said. "have become psychotic, and many have engaged in self-injurious and self-mutilatory behavior." Annibal Santiago, who has been incarcerated at Tamms since 1998, describes how it feels from the inside: "The mentally ill prisoners drive the normal prisoners crazy by screaming, crying, yelling into the pod at all hours of the day and night for days non-stop, by banging on toilets, doors, walls, and/or by shaking or kicking the doors so hard that it sounds like rumbling thunder, flooding the wing with toilet water, and by throwing feces at other prisoners or inserting feces into the air vents so that the whole wing receives a dose of the smell for months." "The constant bombardment of unrelenting stress takes its toll like a flurry of well-placed punches on a tired boxer's head," he wrote in a survey compiled by Tamms Year Ten Campaign, and activist group working to shut down the facility.

The Innocent Victims

Berry says that when he was first sentenced, he told his wife, Denise, that he would understand if he had to let her go. "I told her, you didn't commit this crime, you had no part of it and I love you enough not to punish you with the hardships that's to come," he recounted. But she didn't. When he was transferred to Tamms, six hours south of Chicago, she moved the family to nearby Springfield so that they could visit as often as possible. Since the Illinois General Assembly approved funding for Tamms with IDOC's claim that it would serve as nothing more than a temporary, one-year-long "shock treatment" for problem inmates, Mrs. Berry thought it would be temporary move.

However, two years later, when it became clear that IDOC had no intention of transferring Berry in the foreseeable future, the family moved back to Chicago. Denise says she wasn't prepared for how difficult it would be to see her husband deteriorate so rapidly at Tamms, after having spent ten years in the general prison population. It was particularly hard for his teenage son, who watched as his father grew emaciated from a meager diet and lack of exercise and saw dark circles form under his eyes from lack of sunlight. "What I had a problem with, being an inmate's wife," Denise says, "was how they degraded the inmates." She described her husband being shackled and forced to sit on a small cement stool for the duration of their visits. When officers would deny him a trip to the restroom, encouraging him to instead prematurely end their visit, she says it made her feel like an accomplice to his suffering.

Berry says one thing that kept him going was keeping his family at the forefront of his mind. It bothered him that Tamms prisoners were only allowed to keep 15 pictures in their cells. "Every time my wife sent me pictures, she'd send me sets of 24, and I'd say, 'ok, I got to decide right here which ones I want,' because if you get caught with more than that they can give you a ticket and send you back down to seg [disciplinary segregation, a unit in which inmates have only one shower and one yard visit per week]." Inmates remain in 'seg' for a minimum of 90 days and are not allowed visits for the duration.

Once, says Berry, in what would be a devastating error, he tried to mail a picture to his son rather than throw it away. Because in the photo his son's hat was tilted to one side, the officers gave Berry a disciplinary ticket, allegedly for participating in gang-related activity. "My heart dropped to my knees," he says, "I told them, 'ya'll let this picture in here!'" The violation earned him a ticket to "seg" for six months -- months that were tacked onto his sentence, which had been reduced for "good time." The decision meant that Berry's sentence would effectively be extended, forcing him to miss his youngest son's college graduation. "I was thinking, 'You missed the eighth grade graduation, you missed the high school graduation, you've got to make this college graduation," Berry recalls. According to Denise, prison officials told her that if she could get proof that the people in the picture -- Berry's brother, Michael, his oldest son, Reggie Jr, and Willie Ware Jr., his nephew -- were not affiliated with gangs, they would reconsider his punishment. "I had to obtain their birth certificates," she says. Denise went to 28th Ward Representative Anazette Collins's office, as did the three men, with their IDs. Their efforts proved futile. In the end, she says, "all this was compiled and sent to Tamms and they did nothing."

Berry's son, Joe, graduated in May of 2006. Berry got home four months later. "I missed my son's graduation," he said, "and it crushed me." Long-Term Effects A 2007 Federal Bureau of Prisons (BoP) report lists family ties as integral to rehabilitation and successful re-entry into the general community. However, for many Tamms inmates, the lack of phone access, a prohibitive visitation process, and the distance from Chicago, where two-thirds of Tamms inmates are from, makes it nearly impossible to maintain those ties. The scheduling and approval process at Tamms requires weeks of planning and multiple rounds of paperwork. If a visitor arrives late for their appointment, they are forced to begin the process all over again. With no public transportation near the site, the process become more than some people can handle -- or realistically afford.

The BoP also cites access to educational and vocational programs -- especially for minority populations -- as another key element in prisoner rehabilitation. Yet no such opportunities exist in supermax prisons, other than upper-level, self-guided study for the few inmates who have "earned" it. According to a March 2008 study published in Prisons Journal, "the rapid expansion of the supermax has occurred despite no empirical evidence substantiating its effectiveness or value." Yet Tamms is just one portion of the billions of dollars that have been invested in supermax prisons. IDOC officials confirmed that they do not collect separate recidivism [or return] statistics for Tamms prisoners -- an alarming admission for prisoners, their families, and the broader community that many critics say points to a massive cover-up surrounding the human cost of supermax facilities.

As Paul Beachamp, a Tamms prisoner since 2002, puts it, "What happens when you lock up a dog in a cage for years at a time and constantly harass the dog and treat it bad while it's in the cage? Do you actually think that dog will act right once you let it out?" Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), Chair of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Corrections and Rehabilitation, issued a similar warning before a Senate hearing in 2006. "The experiences inmates have in prison -- whether violent or redemptive -- do not stay within prison walls, but spill over into the rest of society," he said. "Federal, state, and local governments must address the problems faced by their respective institutions and develop tangible and attainable solutions."

Meanwhile, a range of alternative responses have yet to be explored. A 2006 national survey of 601 prison wardens, funded by the U.S. Department of Justice and administered by the Urban League, showed 62.5% of wardens agreeing or strongly agreeing that "staff training" would be an "effective alternative to supermax prisons." It was the number one choice selected in the survey. Other popular alternatives, in order of preference, were to "use segregation cells in each prison facility," "provide targeted rehabilitative services," and "provide opportunities for spiritual development."

Prison activists across the country are working to shed light on this. Enlisting the support of lawmakers and lawyers who share their concern over the treatment of supermax prisoners -- and the rationale behind it -- they are fighting for legal precedents that would bring more services to supermax prisons, grant prisoners more mobility and opportunity and, ultimately, shut the facilities down. The Tamms Year Ten Campaign is one such coalition; it recently persuaded the Illinois House of Representatives to hold a hearing, scheduled for April 28th, to consider arguments for and against the effectiveness and legality of Tamms.

Reginald Berry is part of that movement in Chicago, organized under the banner of the Tamms Ten Year campaign, which works to draw attention to the 88 prisoners who have been at Tamms since the day it opened its doors. Today, in addition to raising awareness of conditions inside supermax prisons, he's also working to cut off the "school-to-prisons pipeline" in his community by sharing his experiences in Tamms with Chicago teenagers, through an organization he founded, "Saving Our Sons."

Berry's work is one of the reasons he counts himself among the lucky ones. After spending eight years in a facility where he was told he would have to "relinquish everything, even your personality," Berry has done more than survive; he has thrived, and he is fighting back. Within the current debate over state-sanctioned torture abroad, his voice is an important reminder of the cruel, unusual, and too-often ignored contradictions of our own criminal justice system. Jessica Pupovac is an adult educator and independent journalist living in Chicago.

© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

View this story online at: _http://www.alternet.org/story/80440/_

(http://www.alternet.org/story/80440/)

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

RESPONSE TO  INQUIRIES ABOUT ROB ANDREWS RUN

This past week  Congressman Rob Andrews announced his desire to run against incumbent NJ Senator  Frank Lautenberg. Several people have contacted Dr. Mahdi Ibn-Ziyad about  whether the Democratic Party of South Jersey, especially the George Norcross led  machine in Camden County will endorse and officially support his candidacy now  that Andrews has to leave his congressional post to run for the Senate. Below is  Ibn-Ziyad’s response to one such inquiry.

Dear  Friend:
In the past few days I  have had several people express sentiments similar to yours. The concerns  are appreciated and give one pause to reflect and consider whether this is  really an opening for official Democratic Party recognition or, on the other  hand, a renewed opportunity to deepen and replenish the means of struggle  in my progressive campaign. To see the events of  the past few days as opening in the Democratic Party is okay but fraught with  problems based on the nature of the party, its philosophical allegiance to the  notion of majoritarian democracy and its human  organization.

All things considered,  I think Democratic Party boss George Norcross and all his cronies  would die a miserable death before they would even hint at a wink or nod my way.  They along with the Courier-Post are playing the invisible man game with me and  my candidacy. They know I am there but to date I remain off the stage of serious  merit or comment. I don't think South Jersey Democratic Party realists, money  men, power brokers, party stalwarts and other subordinate party leaders who  have been in waiting for promotion would countenance anything outside of the  general party line and "the way things are normally done in these  cases". 

Realistically  I am almost certain that the party will not do anything to recognize  or invite my official presence as an acceptable candidate to replace Rob Andrews  in Congress. How could it? Much of what I am  about is anathema to the viability of the party as it is now and how it  perceives its self in the world. The party is not so much swayed by progressive  ideas of principle and merit as it is the accumulation, function and  distribution of political (and economic) rewards and punishments in the form of  favors owed, cronyism,  A public money contracting, loyalty, positioning in  a well-defined pecking order and the old guard, back room type politics.

Moreover, not only am  I an outsider, I am a black progressive in a South Jersey Democratic Party  political environment that is still ill prepared to deal with black political  empowerment on any mass and effective scale. Unlike the run of the mill black  political types that are safely installed in their party roles from mayors, a  freeholder, a state senator to selected committee men and women, I am not a  fawning elitist who hopes to curry favor with the powers that be. I am not  seeking favors, a contract, or a new career as somebody's well dressed,  articulate and affluent flunky. Further, I am not awed or cowed by big  money or big power.

Majoritarian  elitist and exclusionary, rather than inclusionary, minoritarian and  proportionately decided democracy rules the day in first District politics.  The majority of those motivated to exercise the franchise to vote in the  1st District (whether Democrat, Green, independent or Republican), will usually  vote along traditional racial and ethnic lines; especially if the political  parties subtly (or openly) push an exclusionary agenda that barely ever  deals with racial or ethnic issues in any forward looking, out  front manner. To not mention or barely mention local area race and  ethnic divisions and the need to heal those fissures, by means of agreed upon  methods of reconciliation, is the usual way that the politics of avoidance  works. 

A recent case in point  was the 2/5/2008 NJ primary election which Obama lost to Clinton. None of the  South Jersey power brokers favored Obama, thus  all the party faithful who owed their jobs and livelihood as party hacks to  Norcross fell in line. Black politicians who are puppets of Norcross,  without the merest of whimpers, also fell in line across the board.  That this same crowd, minus Rob Andrews as of yet, are now backing Obama is  a sad tale about old guard race, and power politics in the South Jersey  Democratic Party. We'll have to wait and  see, but just possibly Obama's big speech on race will provide some  conversational space for this all but taboo issue to surface and distinguish  itself as separate from economic class and status issues with which there is a  subtle tendency for the casual observer to confuse because many racially  oppressed people are also among the most prominent of the economically  dispossessed.  

In sum, I fear  conventional Democratic Party thinking would rather to keep my candidacy in  the ethereal realm where it's not a problem or obstacle to conventionality. Out  of sight, out of mind.   Be that as it may my  progressive push, on the other hand, has a renewed opportunity to  deepen and replenish the means of struggle in order to get my message of  principled change out and acted upon. What I need now is  for people wanting a progressive agenda to rush out and get on board  my campaign jitney. Let the Democratic Party big wigs worry about who to select  for Rob's place. Let the backroom smoke fill them with whatever.   Meanwhile, I need  volunteers to hit the streets today if we are to make the best of this new  opportunity that the last few days have given. 
Forward ever, backward  never then ...
Mahdi

_________________________________________________________________________________________________

WE “SMELL A RAT”

In refusing an invitation  to attend the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Patrick Henry, one of America’s founding statesmen, was  fairly specific and direct about “smelling a rat” in the rough and tumble  politics of his moment on the historical stage. Past political lessons can  always be turned to in understanding current  realities.

Today’s Courier Post  report that Senator Frank Lautenberg’s campaign manager thinks Camille Andrews  pitch-hitting role for her husband Rob, in his quest to challenge Lautenberg  “doesn’t pass the smell test“ is a case in point. Apparently, the Lautenberg  people feel that Rob’s ploy to run his wife as a surrogate is little more than a  cover to protect the Andrews’ supreme patron, South Jersey Democratic machine  boss, George Norcross III.

Clearly the stench of foul  South Jersey “politics as usual” is in the air  with the selection of Camille Andrews as a stand-in for her husband. The  Lautenberg campaign has sniffed out and detected a nauseating odor that  negatively permeates the democratic process and calls into question the serious  lack of ethics on the part of Democratic Party stalwarts who seek to subvert  democracy for their own narrow ends of maintaining the status quo.  

Traditionally, death or  physical incapacitation has been the route in which spouses of elected officials  were chosen to complete the terms of their loved ones. Now somehow, the South  Jersey Democratic machine has consorted with the Andrews’ family to initiate a  new and odious tradition that says you can be alive and in good health and  pass your elected seat onto a spouse for safe keeping. Or to be kept safe until  the Democratic machine, after (sic) “careful deliberation” and a “deliberative  process” finds a suitably qualified candidate to support.  

If the Democratic machine  did not engage in a “deliberative, democratic process” in selecting Andrews’  wife to replace him how can the people of the first congressional district trust  it to do so at some later time?  South  Jersey voters have a right to know how and on  what specific grounds the Andrews and their cronies get to break with tradition  when it seems suitable to their interests. The question is this: do we have a  democracy based on the nomination and election of officials in their own right  or do we have a process based on hereditary rights or family rights wherein  political power is passed along via blood  relations?.

I know of no new and  controlling rule book of ethics that would nudge or force South Jersey  Democratic power brokers to act ethically and in a transparent manner on the  Andrews’ family arrangement. Only the people of South Jersey themselves have the  power to assess and judge this trumped up arrangement and hopefully not allow it  to develop to full term. 

Some are now asking me  whether --- to better assist the people’s assessment --- an independent  investigatory body or an impartial journalistic entity or legal inquiry into the  Andrews’ family arrangement may be in order? As a candidate for  Andrews’ seat I have an interest in and a duty in seeing that our system is fair  and open. As a progressive Democrat I have consistently called for change in the  cynical “politics as usual” game that passes for participatory democracy in  South Jersey.   The current Andrews’  family affair is nothing if not more of the same in this failed politics of the  past.  The people of South Jersey deserve so much  better.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

   I WAS GOING TO THANK ROB

I wear two hat's writing this letter, first as a private citizen and long term supporter of Rob Andrews (until his pro-war vote) and second, as a Campaign Manager for one of his challengers.

I had been in the process of writing an op-ed to thank Rob Andrews for actually allowing a true Democrat to have a fighting chance at representing the people of the 1st congressional seat in NJ.  When I read online about his wife Camille and how she has aligned herself with the "Camden County Machine" aka "Norcross Incorporated.  

Now IF Mrs. Andrews is really serious about representing the people of the 1st CD then I applaud her activism, respect for the constitution and the electoral process. IF her motives are otherwise, well she has become nothing else but a political shill. Too bad, as a mother, Dean of Rutgers and educator, I would have thought she had the ethics and moral integrity not-to lower herself to the station of political "pawn" (to be polite).

If nothing else, what kind of example does this set for her two daughters? What message has been sent to every student that still believes(ed) that government is open to all, that activism and participation are not only a right but a responsibility in the process of good government? If none of the above was a consideration, then at the very least, have enough consideration to consider the effect this would have on Rob's campaign and career.

As for the excuse Norcross uses for not having a candidate; that's bull! There is a true democrat, one who believes in the power of the electorate to determine the direction of it government, not the immoral and corrupt influence of the money changers, developers, and corporations over elected officials and political organizations. This man had already publicly announced his candidacy in December of 2007. His name is Mahdi IbnZiyad, "Dr Z" as he is affectionately known to his students, and he is exactly what we need right now in Washington, a man with ethics, morals and the conviction to pursue a progressive agenda.

Before Rob's announcement, Dr Ziyad's grass roots organization collected almost 500 signatures, way more than the 200 required to qualify to be on the ballot. He is anti-Bush/pro Bill of Rights, a Vietnam veteran, a teacher, and activist, an American in every sense. So I don't want to hear the excuses from "King George and his court" as they go about insulting the voters with their blatant abuse of our constitution (NJ. and U.S.). In essence, they are on the same level as Florida's Secretary of State in the 2000 presidential election. She also legally(?) and unethically managed to disenfranchise thousands of voters to influence the outcome of the election.

As a last thought, just remember, among all of the candidates, Dr Ziyad was the only one who had the courage and conviction to take on the incumbent when the pundits and the wannabe politicos ignored him. You would never have heard from those "Johnny come latelys" that magically appeared after Rob decided not to run when it was "safe" to run. I wonder, if elected will they use the same criteria when the "tough" votes come up in Congress?

Timothy j O'Neill, Campaign Manager Mahdi Ibn-Ziyad for Congress

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Toxic Poop & Environmental Racism: Where are Our Elected Leaders?

                        Dr. Mahdi Ibn-Ziyad, Candidate for Congress, NJ 1st District

                                                                5.11.2008

Katrina is now receding into the background. The lessons of that  horrific disaster have not been learned in any great measure. Environmental inequality and injustice based on race, class and ethnic differentials remains a profound civil rights issue that is just now surfacing and entering the national debate.

Inner-city areas across the nation are exposed to many times the environmental risks of nearby suburban areas. With such risks one would think that the generation of politicians who came of age during the Civil Rights and the 1960's era of activism would be well attuned to environmental injustice as a major concern. But alas! They usually are not any where to be found on this issue.

Why aren't our local Camden City, NJ state assembly or senate officials or the governor, the county freeholders and/or federal elected officials in Congress --- whether black, Latino or otherwise --- dealing with one of the greatest threats to our health and well being?

Camden's environmental problems are monumental and getting worst. If the National Institute of Environmental Health Science were to do a thorough research study of Camden's environmentally related cancer rates--- or other South Jersey locales where minorities predominate --- what would the almost predictable results be? 

But what are our elected leaders doing with respect to environmental issues? Their silence signals our adult generation's on-going demise related to environmental waste hazards and dangerous chemical based carcinogens in or near our de facto segregated inner-city homes, schools, churches, recreation sites and places where we gather to socialize. The very futures of our children is obviously at stake.

Instead of leading the charge to stop environmental racism and ethnic injustices our elected officials are continually seen patting themselves on the back and awarding themselves all manner of praise at recognition luncheons and dinners that the public can ill afford to attend.  

Moreover, our local leaders have no real plans for alternative energy usage in existing or even planned housing stock; no publicly announced ideas on the utilization of green technologies accessible to poor communities; or the need to develop green job options for the unemployed or underemployed minority poor.

We need to demand strict electoral accountability from those who pat themselves on the back and award themselves kudos for doing absolutely nothing to end the environmental injustice. We can no longer countenance such stupid behavior while literally hundreds of us suffer from toxic poop in our front and back yards; from toxic sub-soil seepage underneath our children's schools and play grounds; from dumping waste and sludge from affluent primarily non-white communities in Camden; from air borne carcinogens caused by contaminated ground soil dust; or ill health and damage from drinking or bathing in contaminated groundwater.

Our demand must be loud and clear and must be heard.