American Indian Prison Probe Reports 16 Deaths Since 2001

[Judi Lynn]

Wednesday, June 23


Civil Liberties and Security News Briefs

American Indian Prison Probe Reports 16 Deaths Since 2001

Jun 23 - A senior federal official told USA Today on condition of anonymity that 16 prisoners died in Native American detention centers since 2001. For several weeks the Interior Department's Bureau of Indian Affairs has been collecting information to review allegations of neglect and abuse within the 74-prison system.

According to the unnamed official, while the causes of the deaths are not all known, some have been attributed to alcohol or other substances consumed prior to the arrests of the prisoners. The official also blamed the detention centers' poor management and lack of automated records for the lack of information on the cause of prisoner deaths. In 2002, according to the Great Falls Tribune, the facilities held 2,080 inmates and covered 55 million acres of American Indian lands.

The federal investigation initially began when Ed Naranjo, a former special agent in charge of law enforcement for the BIA, videotaped poor conditions at several facilities. At different detention centers, Naranjo documented raw sewage flowing into the men's cellblock when a toilet was flushed in the women's section; juveniles sharing space with adult inmates; inmates showering by pouring buckets of water over their heads; and rifles and other weapons piled near prisoners’ cells. The videotape was provided to USA Today.

On June 1, USA Today reported that, in the midst of the investigation, Robert Ecoffey, the director of enforcement operations for the Bureau of Indian Affairs was reassigned.
(snip/)

http://newstandardnews.net/content/?action=show_briefs§ionID=6#597

[seemslikeadream]

1. Old Indian Wars Dominate Bush Doctrines

Old Indian Wars Dominate Bush Doctrines
by Jack D. Forbes

Back in the 1970s I suggested that the way the USA had treated the First American Nations would eventually become a precedent for the treatment of all people. I suspected that the behavior of the bureaucrats of the Interior Department, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the old War Department, with their authoritarian beliefs, would eventually infiltrate the rest of the government and the courts.

With President George W. Bush we are seeing the U.S. policy towards Native Americans being extended to citizens, resident aliens, visitors, enemies, and other countries. Let us examine a few of the Bush doctrines or strategies to discover their precedents within historic U.S. Native policy.

PREVENTIVE WAR and sneak attacks: Bush has declared that the U.S. will attack first before an "enemy" has the ability to act. This could, of course, be called "The Pearl Harbor strategy" since that is precisely what the Japanese Empire did, but it also has U.S. precedents against First American Nations. For example, William Henry Harrison, under pressure from Thomas Jefferson to get the American Nations out of the Illinois-Indiana region, marched an invading army to the vicinity of a Native village at Tippecanoe precisely when he knew that Tecumseh was on a tour of the south and west. Prophetstown was a center for the revival of First American culture and political organizing designed to resist the sale of Native lands through crooked treaties.

Harrison marched close to Prophetstown with 1,000 troops in November 1811, invading land which had not been ceded to the United States. His intention was to begin a war before Tecumseh could complete the unification of all of the tribes. The U.S. troops outnumbered the Native Americans and Prophetstown was burned to the ground. It should be stressed that this "preventive" attack led to full-scale warfare all along the border. It did not bring peace!

TERRORISM AND ATTACKS ON CIVILIANS, including their food supply, health, and infrastructure: Here I refer not only to massacres such as those of the Washita, Sand Creek, and Wounded Knee but also to other forms of terror: (1) allowing white persons and irregular militia groups to hunt down, rape, murder, enslave and drive away Native People in areas such as northern and central California (1849-1850s), southwest Oregon (1850s-60s), Nevada (1850s-60s), Utah (1850s) and elsewhere; (2) allowing Spanish-speaking New Mexicans and whites to continue slave raids against Navajos and others, and allowing the enslavement of Native People in California and Arizona into the late 1860s; (3) constantly removing Native People from their homes as in the Cherokee's and other "trails of tears" wherein large numbers died; and (4) threatening retaliation against an entire community or nation for the death of any white person (as in the persecution of the Pawnee in Nebraska drier to their involuntary removal to Oklahoma). Among the many examples of biological warfare is the manner in which the U.S. allowed and encouraged the destruction of the bison herds in order to starve the Plains nations into submission. Finally, jumping into recent years, one can speak of the killing and torturing of up to 200,000 or more Native Americans in Central America by U.S. terrorist forces (the Contras) or by U.S.-funded paramilitaries and armies under presidents Reagan and Bush I.

ENEMY COMBATANTS, UNPROTECTED BY THE CONSTITUTION: The U.S. Constitution supposedly governs the behavior of the federal government and also guarantees the rights of citizens and "all persons." But the U.S. repeatedly denied tha Native Americans were protected by the Constitution. Now this same idea is being extended to many other classes of persons. The U.S. also repeatedly captured or seized entire communities of First Americans and marched them to detention centers where they were not charged with any crime, were not tried in open court by a jury of their peers, and were not allowed to have any legal representation or habeas corpus rights. Many entire communities were marched hundreds or even thousands of miles under horrible conditions, with huge death rates, while other captives were arbitrarily shipped to military prisons in far-off places (such as has been done with Muslim prisoners at Guantanamo, Cuba).

THE U.S. WILL NOT SEIZE PROPERTY AND WILL EXERCISE TRUSTEESHIP: Over and over again the U.S. government seized Native lands, often without any treaties or with fraudulent agreements. After surrender, supposedly, the U.S. was to protect Native assets, but such has not been the case. Native Americans lost over 50 million acres of land and even today are in judicial action because of mismanagement of trust funds by the government. The Native Hawaiians, New Mexicans, Puerto Ricans and other groups taken over by the U.S. also have lost property and assets. The idea that the U.S. can exercise judicious trusteeship over Iraqi or other oil is ludicrous.

THE U.S. WILL OBEY INTERNATIONAL LAWS AND TREATIES: The U.S. has refused to obey its own Constitution in regards to Native nations and has broken virtually every treaty with them. In fact, the U.S. asserts the right to ignore each and every treaty in spite of the Constitution's unequivocal language making all treaties part of the "supreme law of the land." The U.S. has also ignored International Court decisions against it and even now is proposing to violate the UN Charter by attacking another state without Security Council sanction.

© 2003 Professor Jack D. Forbes, Powhatan-Delaware, is a historian, social critic, and poet, covering issues of international and inter-ethnic relations for 45 years. He is the author of Red Blood, Africans and Native Americans, Apache, Navaho and Spaniard and other books. He is professor emeritus of Native American Studies, University of California, Davis. He can be contacted at his web site.

This article was originally published in News From Indian Country March 24, 2003 issue.

more
http://yeoldeconsciousnessshoppe.com/art130.html

INVESTIGATION LAUNCHED ON HARSH PRISON CONDITIONS: "In any prison environment you are going to have a certain amount of improprieties," said the official. From Abu Ghraib prison? No, that was a statement by the head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). According to the Associated Press, up to a dozen suspicious deaths have occurred recently in American Indian jails, prisons, and detention centers. The BIA argues the deaths include suicides and natural causes, but critics say there may be other factors. Some offenders were warehoused in over-crowded, deteriorating facilities that "lacked running water or heat and had broken plumbing" (5/22/04). Emergency repairs are being made, while the Inspector General's Office in the Interior Department investigates the deaths and the health and safety conditions affecting prisoners and guards in 74 jails in Indian Country. The official who had been overseeing those facilities has been reassigned. USA Today recently ran several articles about "run-down prisons on tribal lands," but the sweeping federal probe was actually triggered by a 15-minute videotape illustrating facility problems which was commissioned by retired BIA law enforcement official Ed Naranjo who was indignant about the conditions.
more
http://www.fcnl.org/act_nalu_curnt/indian_602_04.htm

[Tellurian]

6. Thanks, seemslikeadream, for posting that material..

The Indians...aghhh..

remember the (BW) commercial depicting the Indian on horseback
standing on a hillside outfitted in a bone breastplate, feather
tucked in the knot of his hair. Arms outstretched fingertips pointing downward, eyes looking upward to the sky with a single tear rolling down his cheek. The camera slowly zooming outward. Where you finally see, the Indian is standing on a hillside overlooking a freeway littered with trash?

[RebelOne]

8. Yes, I remember that commercial well.

It choked me up. I have a T-shirt I bought at an Indian Festival which says: Where has my friend the buffalo gone? It's written in the Sioux language. But it is sort of the same principle as that commercial.

[seemslikeadream]

2. U.S. concentration camps

U.S. concentration camps, both historically and in modern use, can't be denied. They've been used in the Civil War and WWII, and they are currently being used in the War on Terror, and they might be in use on U.S. soil under an insane Federal Emergency Management Agency plan called REX-84, which was drafted by none other than Oliver North at the order of Ronald Reagan


America's gulag
Maher was inside a secret system. His flight was on a jet operated for the
CIA by the US's Special Collection Service. It runs a fleet of luxury
planes, as well as regular military transports, that has moved thousands
of prisoners around the world since 11 September 2001 - much as the
CIA-run secret fleet, Air America, did in the 1960s and 1970s. Some of the
prisoners have gone to Guantanamo, the US interrogation centre at its
naval base in Cuba. Hundreds more have been transferred from one Middle
Eastern or Asian country to another - countries where the prisoners can be
more easily interrogated.

For transfers of low-level prisoners from war zones such as Afghanistan
and Pakistan, military cargo planes have been used. But the CIA has tended
to favour the Gulfstream and other executive jets for the higher-value
prisoners and their transfer to sensitive locations. The operations of
this airline - and the prisoners that it transports around the world -
have been protected in a shroud of total secrecy.

The airline's operations are embarrassing because they highlight intense
co-operation with regimes of countries such as Egypt, Syria and Pakistan,
which are criticised for their human rights record. The movements of these
planes expose a vast archipelago of prison camps and centres where America
can carry out torture by proxy. The operations are illegal, in that they
violate the anti-torture convention promoted by George W Bush which
prohibits the transfer of suspects abroad for torture.

When Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote The Gulag Archipelago, he described a
physical chain of island prisons clustered in Soviet Russia's northern
seas and in Siberia. But the description was also metaphorical: the
archipelago was a cluster of prisons around which swirled the sea of
normal society.

Just like Solzhenitsyn's system, the American archipelago operates as a
secret network that remains largely unseen by the world. Although a few of
the prisons have become well-known - Guantanamo, in Cuba; the CIA
interrogation centre at the US airbase in Bagram, just north of Kabul; the
airbase on British Diego Garcia - there are others, hidden from view: the
floating interrogation centre located on board a US naval vessel in the
Indian Ocean; an unknown jail referred to only as Hotel California by the
CIA. Of those operated by America's allies, the worst prisons include the
Scorpion jail and the Lazoghly Square secret police headquarters in Cairo,
and the Far'Falastin interrogation centre in Damascus, Syria

http://www.newstatesman.co.uk
(subscription)

[Mnemosyne]

3. see the now

http://www.abovetopsecret.com/pages/camps.html

[gatlingforme]

5. very interesting article and scary. The Bush admin. has long

disliked the Native American, as attested by the Bushies, H and Jr., worshipping Geronimoe's skull in their "secret" Skull and Bones BS club. The Bushes were noted as wanting to stuff and prop the indians in a museum. They are sick people

[anarchy1999]

4. Anyone sick yet? I know I am.

Thanks all, tis a great morning.......the sun is shining, blue skies, laced with "milky skies", and Scott Ritter for a dinner lecture, what more could one ask for? Oh, yes, prison camps, FEMA, and all the rest. Not acceptable for today. NO, No No, just not acceptable. Where is that tin foil, damn'ed it?

[blindpig]

7. there was a poll Tuesday in GD

asking if one was proud to be an American. This confirms my answer.