Constabulism at Home

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Prisoners have told Human Rights Watch Inmates that correctional officers have beaten, kicked and hit them while they were shackled. They also say that officers sprayed the walls with chemicals and forced inmates to hold their faces against the sprayed walls. When some inmates became ill and vomited, officers wiped their faces and hair in the vomit.

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According to the Associated Press, the bodyguards were American employees of the private security firm DynCorp. The company has been contracted by the U.S. State Department to protect Alexandre, the unelected interim president of Haiti. Alexandre took power after the coup that toppled Haitian President Jean Bertrand Aristide. The journalists were beaten as they tried to cover the event.

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The Justice Department confirmed on Monday that it will investigate the FBI killing of Puerto Rican independence leader Filiberto Ojeda Rios. The killing has sparked widespread outrage in Puerto Rico. On Sept. 23, over 100 FBI agents surrounded the house of the 72-year-old Ojeda Rios. After he was shot, the FBI let him lie wounded in his house for nearly a day during which time he bled to death.

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The Senate Intelligence Committee has approved new legislation that would allow Pentagon intelligence operatives to collect information from U.S. citizens without revealing their status as government spies. According to the Los Angeles Times, the bill would end a long-standing requirement that military intelligence officers disclose their government ties when approaching any U.S. citizen in the United States.

Comment: More Boot in the Face. With astonishing rapidity, the thuggery practiced as policy abroad has rebounded at home. The image of Abu Grahib and house batterings in Irak will be the image of Amurka at home. It is that way because for decades the U.S. has been cultivating the pestilential virus of thuggery on the streets of its ghettos, in the corridors of its prisons and in its courts with a wink and a nod from judges whose tongues are black from bootlicking.

©Barfo, 2005

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