Torture of US Citizens on US Soil Not a Crime?

Source: OpEdNews

For OpEdNews: MedicalWhistleblower – Writer

Would it surprise you to know that torture of US Citizens on US soil is not a crime under the US Federal Criminal Code? This does not mean that torture of US citizens does not occur; instead it is an indication that there are inadequate legal means to report and address torture cases in the USA. There are several reasons for this deficiency, despite the United States’ obligation under the United Nations Convention Against Torture (CAT) to take necessary action to assure domestic implementation and to provide effective remedies to victims of violations. When the U.S.A. ratified CAT, a reservation was added by the U.S. Senate suggesting that its provisions were not “self-executing,” and therefore could not be enforced domestically by victims of violations. The Human Rights Committee of the United Nations has suggested that a “non-self executing” reservation in regards to CAT runs directly counter to the underlying necessity for international human rights treaties to be enforceable domestically. Thus the U.S. government’s non-self executing claim makes the need for specific implementing national legislation on domestic torture even greater.

Let’s make torture of US citizens a crime under US law. Sign our petition.

http://www.change.org/medicalwhistleblower/petitions/view/make_torture_of_us_citizens_on_us_soil_a_crime_under_title_18

All human rights violations deserve to remedied and prevented and although problems in the USA do not reach the same level as abuses in other countries, the US should fulfill its responsibilities to be in compliance with CAT. Take for example, the subject of recent Congressional hearings held by Congressman George Miller on abuse of children in residential treatment centers. The Congressional investigation showed that abuse of minor children while held captive in teen rehabilitation centers in the USA still occurs. This is in spite of decades of reports and even previous Congressional reports on SEED and Straight Inc., where thousands of children came forward to report cruel, degrading and abusive treatment which often reached the level of torture and even led to over 40 suicides. Deaths and child abuse in these “residential treatment” programs was recently documented by Greg Kutz, Managing Director, Forensic Audits and Special Investigations, Govt. Accountability Office who testifies to the Committee on Education and Labor. See Video A and Video B

Congressman George Miller (D-California, 7th Congressional District), Chairman, House Education and Labor Committee stated that: “This nightmare has remained an open secret for years. Sporadic news accounts of specific incidents have built a record that should never have been ignored, but shamefully was. The federal government has completely failed to grasp the urgency of this situation.”

In addition adequate compensation and treatment of torture victims is needed in order for the USA to be consistent with the requirement of Article 14 of CAT, but again additional implementing national legislative action is still required. Although victims should be able to be compensated by their abusers by seeking damages in tort claims, this avenue is limited to torture happening abroad and does not apply to domestic torture victims. Thus there is inadequate legal means to address the equally important needs of assuring compensation for victims of torture experienced in the U.S. Thus decades later the SEED and Straight Inc. abuses were reported, the victims of this horrendous abuse are still not compensated.

Gender based physical and sexual abuse is all too common an occurrence in prisons, state institutions, rehabilitation centers, and other places of confinement. Thus rape, sexual assault, sexual taunting, and unwarranted visual surveillance of female prisoners in showers and bathrooms commonly occur. There have been inadequate criminal sanctions as well as inadequate polices to prevent abuse. The victims are more likely to be punished than the abusers. Victims of persecution, especially torture and rape, often need time and medical or psychological treatment before they can tell their stories. Lack of understanding of the psychological consequences of sexual torture leads to inadequate or inappropriate services by social service and mental health professionals which often aggravates problems associated with traumatic stress syndrome.

Extended and indefinite use of restraints, long-term isolation, and the involuntary administration of dangerous chemical treatments in institutional settings can occur to those who are mentally disabled and they can also be exposed prohibited forms of punishment, intimidation, coercion and discrimination that cannot be justified by medical or safety considerations. In addition considerable evidence recently has surfaced that the U.S. government has conducted or permitted “scientific” experiments on human subjects without their knowledge or consent and without full disclosure.

It is true that in spite of the US signing and ratifying the UN Convention against Torture (CAT), torture as a distinct crime done by governmental officials in the USA is not punishable under US law. Although torture would clearly be a violation of someone’s constitutional rights, there are no laws either state or federal which address police torture. The U.S. government has failed to bring charges against its own officials when implicated in torture and other major human rights abuses. This reality came into sharp focus when a former Chicago police commander, Jon Burge, did not face torture charges for alleged acts of brutality including a mock execution of a detainee, beatings to coerce confessions, using a cattle prod on one suspect’s genitals, and burning other prisoners on a hot radiator. Mayor Daley, who was the prosecutor at that time, did not prosecute despite mounting evidence regarding Mr. Burge’s systemic abuse of prisoners. From the 1980′s till he was fired in 1993, Mr. Burge and other police officers allegedly tortured 110 men. Mistreatment or abuse of prisoners is considered battery by the current laws because in the state of Illinois there is no statute that criminalizes acts of torture by police officers.

Torture is prohibited by US Federal Law under Section 2340A of Title 18, United States Code. This statute prohibits torture committed by public officials under color of law against persons within the public official’s custody or control. Torture is defined to include acts specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering. But this statute applies only to acts of torture committed outside the United States. Thus on US soil, torture by public officials on captive detainees is not prosecuted even though it is against the Convention Against Torture and is in violation of international law.

So within the state of Illinois the torture of detained human beings is not punishable, but there is legislation that criminalizes the torture of animals. Under 510 ILCS 70/3.03 Sec. 3.03, Animal Torture is a Class 3 Felony; punishment for a violation includes probation or conditional discharge not to exceed 30 months, and a fine of up to $25,000.00 and incarceration from 2 to 5 years. Thus animals in the state of Illinois have more protection under law against torture than do human beings especially persons of color such as those prisoners tortured and mistreated by Mr. Burge. Human rights and civil rights advocates are calling for new trials for 23 men wrongfully convicted based on coerced confessions in Chicago. Chicago’s leading civil rights agencies, like PUSH, NAACP and the Chicago Urban League joined with the Illinois Coalition Against Torture, and a broad coalition of community groups, to try to enact laws that criminalize police torture. The Illinois Coalition Against Torture also wants to remove statutes of limitation that are currently preventing police torture victims from filing criminal charges.

US Congressman Danny K. Davis from Illinois had drafted H.R.5688: The Law Enforcement Torture Prevention Act of 2010 to amend title 18, United States Code, to provide a criminal penalty for torture committed by law enforcement officers and others acting under color of law. This legislation which was intended to give torture victims the redress needed to bring their abusers to justice has not passed out of committee nor garnered adequate support to make it to the floor of the US House of Representatives. There are only a few weeks left in the legislative session and thus this important legislation may need to be reintroduced again in the next session of Congress for any further action to be taken on this important human rights issue.

Please support this important legislation by signing our petition and communicating with your US Congressman/woman.

Let’s make torture of US citizens a crime under US law. Sign our petition.

http://www.change.org/medicalwhistleblower/petitions/view/make_torture_of_us_citizens_on_us_soil_a_crime_under_title_18

Rebecca Riley’s doctor on the defense

By Lane Lambert
The Patriot Ledger
Posted Apr 10, 2010 @ 09:00 AM
BOSTON —
Years before she became a board-certified psychiatrist, Dr. Kayoko Kifuji was diagnosing children as young as 2 as bipolar and hyperactive – and prescribing powerful cocktails of mood-altering drugs to quiet them.
By the time Kifuji finally passed the psychiatric board exam – on her fourth try – one of her youngest patients, Rebecca Riley, had a little more than a year to live. Her parents murdered the 4-year-old by overdosing her with one of the drugs Kifuji prescribed.
Both of Rebecca’s parents are in prison for her murder. Her mother, Carolyn, was convicted in February; her father, Michael, in March.
Now the spotlight is on the controversial doctor who testified in both trials in exchange for immunity. Kifuji and her employer, Tufts Medical Center, face a malpractice lawsuit filed by Norwell attorney Brian Clerkin, the court-appointed administrator for Rebecca’s estate, which was created for the benefit Rebecca’s brother and sister, who are now 14 and 9.
Glimpses into Kifuji’s background and treatment methods are part of a lengthy deposition she gave in December in the civil suit. The final pretrial hearing in the case is scheduled for June 1.
Kifuji diagnosed Rebecca Riley and her sister with mental illness and prescribed drugs for both girls and their brother. Prosecutors in the parents’ murder trials said the Rileys killed Rebecca because they couldn’t get disability payments for her, as they had with their two other kids.
According to the plaintiff’s lawyer in the malpractice suit, Benjamin P. Novotny, of the Boston firm Lubin and Meyer, Kifuji said she “trusted the mother” (Carolyn Riley) to tell her how the children were behaving and reacting to the drugs. She relied almost exclusively on what Carolyn told her about the kids when diagnosing them and ordering increasing amounts of drugs for them.
Kifuji also trusted the mother to keep tabs on Rebecca’s heart rate and blood pressure for signs of problems with the four drugs she was on. Kifuji, a pediatrician who later became a psychiatrist, told Novotny during the deposition that she didn’t realize she had a blood pressure cuff in her office and could check the girl’s vital signs herself until after Rebecca was dead. She said she didn’t take Rebecca’s pulse with her fingers because Carolyn Riley told her the child’s pulse “was within normal range.”
Kifuji also told Novotny during the deposition:
She prescribed clonidine – the drug that killed Rebecca – during the child’s first visit to control the “impulsivity” that Carolyn Riley described. Rebecca was 2 at the time.
She originally came to the United States from her native Japan in 1990 to research dust allergies in children. She switched her training to psychiatry when she went to New England Medical Center in 1994.
In 2000, she took a job at Baystate Medical Services in Springfield because it meant she wouldn’t have to return to Japan for two years and wait for an H-1 work visa.
She diagnosed dozens of children as bipolar or having attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or both, and estimated that she prescribed drugs for 99 percent of her pediatric patients.
She usually saw Rebecca for 20 minutes at each office visit because she was seeing all three Riley children in an hour.
She explained that some researchers believe the area of the brain called the amygdala is different in people with bipolar disease. But she admitted she didn’t know where the amygdala is in the brain.
Kifuji’s medical career has taken her from Tokyo to Detroit and Boston. She was living in Somerville as of December.
She grew up in Kumamoto, Japan, on the southwest tip of the island of Kyushu, and graduated from Tokyo Women’s Medical College in 1981.
She’s been a permanent legal resident of the U.S. since 1990, and has held a medical license here since 1999.
She worked at Baystate in Springfield from 2000-03. Her outpatients there included the Rileys’ two older children, whom she also diagnosed as bipolar with ADHD.
After Rebecca’s death in December 2006, Tufts Medical Center placed Kifuji on paid leave after the psychiatrist agreed not to practice medicine. The state Board of Registration in Medicine reinstated her license this past September after Plymouth County District Attorney Timothy Cruz announced that a grand jury would not bring criminal charges against her.
In January, Tufts reaffirmed its support for Kifuji and her treatment methods, saying she provided “appropriate” care to Rebecca Riley. Kifuji began seeing patients again in the fall. As of December, she was seeing five outpatients – four children and one adult – and working with a state-funded child psychiatric access program.
Lane Lambert is at llambert@ledger.com.
READ MORE about this issue.

http://www.patriotledger.com/news/x905416295/Rebecca-Riley-s-doctor-on-the-defense

West 57th KIDS and Straight Inc., Virgil Miller Newton exposed

Video Exclusive!

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrlFzv5x2Sw

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1KKnFTZVnI

“Crisis in California” – Calvina Fay Debates Rob Kampia

Calvina Fay is clueless. She is the Director of DFAF. DFAF is owned by Mel Sembler. When Straight Inc. shut down in the early 90s Mel Sembler changed the name of the Organization to DFAF. These are the same people that abused countless of children in the name of “rehabilitation”. When Straight was around they used faulty statistics and tactics and they still do today.

They make a ton of money in the “troubled teen industry” legalizing would greatly hurt their industry and ability to make money as an organization. She says 60% of people using drugs (my guess mostly alcohol) abuse children. That statement alone is false and such a hypocritical statement to come from an organization who themselves has abused children for years. When the truth finally comes out on a mass scale about what the DFAF has been involved in, they won’t have much of a leg to stand on.

Drug Warriors and Their Prey by RLMiller (Review)

Richard Lawrence Miller is the same person who wrote that piece on the appalling lack of ethics involved in Dr. Richard H. Schwartz’s use of Straight, Inc. “clients” as experimental research subjects. This was recently mentioned in the following thread:

Who are the doctors at PFC?
viewtopic.php?f=7&t=26022

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Drug Warriors and Their Prey
From Police Power to Police State
by Richard Lawrence Miller
Praeger Publishers 1996, ISBN 0-275-95042-5

A Review by Peter Webster

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There is a certain difficulty in writing a review of Richard Lawrence Miller’s Drug Warriors and Their Prey, but not because it is a difficult book in any usual sense. On the contrary, it is disarmingly easy to understand the author’s every implication. Yet the theme of Mr. Miller’s essay, a point by point comparison of the reality of Drug Prohibition in the United States today with exactly analogous situations leading up to Hitler’s Third Reich and the attempted destruction of the Jewish people, is certain to repulse the very readers who need most to understand that, indeed, it can happen again. Thus the book, and any honest review of it, might achieve little more than preaching to the converted: those who can readily accept its main thesis must already be active in resisting not just the “worst excesses” of the War on Drugs, but the entire and historically-proven futility of the very concept of Prohibition as a means to advantageous ends.

Not that Hitler and the Reich’s atrocities are too distasteful for public examination and discourse, far from it! Americans, and to a lesser degree, Europeans, continue to watch with relish and fascination each new television episode depicting Hitler and his cohorts, continue to make best-sellers of both fiction and non-fiction tomes about the Reich, and we see many educators and intellectuals insisting that the morbid details of Hitlerism be widely taught in the schools so that we may “never again” fall into the trap which ensnared the post World-War-One German nation. Equally atrocious episodes as the Nazi reign (at least with respect to relative population size), which have more recently occurred in Vietnam and Cambodia, or in East Timor, Rwanda, Yugoslavia, to mention but a few, are given short shrift by producers of documentaries and consumers of such “entertainment,” and ignored in classrooms as potential “never again” object lessons. Even more glaringly, America continues to largely ignore the implications of an even more successful genocide which American Policy, assisted by American Congresses and Politicians of the highest stature, committed over a period far longer than the Reich’s brief existence: the eradication of Native American populations. A recent book which rightly dared to call that eradication a holocaust, was indignantly denounced by many “intellectuals.”

Hitler and his image have clearly become a modern scapegoat through which we attempt to psychologically expunge collective guilt for our own atrocities, past and present, as well as for those other atrocities which we do nothing, or very little, to prevent or stop. There is plenty of evil-reeking film footage of Hitler’s life and times which when watched, with their pompous and cymbal-crashing military tunes, and their images of “the bad guys” far surpassing anything that Hollywood can invent, become the perfect medium for our unfortunate proclivity to hate. And to do so collectively in a way which seems correct and proper. The evil image of Hitler and his deeds provides catharsis for the sins we care not to recognize, dare not recognize, and allows a continuation of a status quo which is fertile ground for allowing hate to produce once again the very situation from which inevitably rise the most glaringly evil aspects of our modern world.

If we can see from these observations why many a reader will close his mind to Mr. Miller’s thesis, or perhaps merely look at the dust jacket and replace Drug Warriors on its bookstore shelf, it is nevertheless quite necessary and effective to compare the American-led War on Drugs with events in 1930′s Germany. As Mr. Miller readily shows, it is not with the after-the-fact evil image of “The Great Dictator” that current parallels correspond, but rather with the actions of individual and ordinary Germans, their daily life, the ease with which they fell into that horrible trap, and the actions of police, mayors, governors and administrators, the deeds and “researches” of doctors and scientists, the judgments of the courts, the facile way in which the Jewish people were ensnared in “The Chain of Destruction : Identification, Ostracism, Confiscation, Concentration, and Annihilation.” Before 1939, when it became painfully obvious to every person on earth what the Führer was up to, it was equally as difficult as now to see the inevitable course of events which follows from the first principles of fascism. Many in the United States and England praised Hitler’s National Socialism for having brought Germany out of the Great Depression, Presidents and Prime Ministers believed his Treaties and Promises, even subscribed to his overall political vision, until it was far too late for anything but total conflict.

If the very accurate and chilling comparisons of developments in 1930′s Germany to the modern War on Drugs disgusts some readers to the point where they are blinded to the reality exposed in Drug Warriors, that in itself is a telling parallel to that decade before the beginning of WWII. Euphemisms and pacification would today certainly go no further in helping to reverse ill-conceived Drug Prohibition than they did in reversing the Reich’s rise to power. Books and articles by those who predicted the inevitable course that post WWI fascism would take were, as will be Mr. Miller’s book today, viewed as unnecessarily alarmist, the product of an over-vivid imagination or even fanaticism. But in the telling of such truth, as in the recommendation of possible means of avoidance of great disaster, there really is no alternative but the kind of stark simplicity of theme which Drug Warriors epitomizes. For the few persons on the brink of waking up to the reality of the Drug War, the book will certainly provide better catalysis than other current, and less honest if more complacent tracts. For those masses eternally convinced that “it can’t happen here,” there is, history would teach, little that can convince.

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The chapters in Drug Warriors are named for the stages of “The Chain of Destruction” mentioned above, which, as Mr. Miller points out, derives from Raul Hilberg’s monumental study of the destruction process as applied to the holocaust. From the very first page of chapter 1, “Identification,” we see in vivid detail how the modern drug-user is fulfilling the same function as did the Jew during National Socialism. He is the perfect scapegoat, the perfect distraction, the ideal “other” and alien, the perfect tool “for maintaining the social turmoil needed by authoritarians” in their rise to power. Miller quotes Karl A. Schleunes, The Twisted Road to Auschwitz:

It was the Jews who helped hold Hitler’s system together-on the practical as well as the ideological level. The Jew allowed Hitler to ignore the long list of economic and social promises he had made to the SA, the lower party apparatus, and the lower middle classes. By steering the attention of these groups away from their more genuine grievances and toward the Jew, Hitler succeeded in blunting the edge of their revolutionary wrath, leaving him freer to pursue his own nonideological goals of power in cooperation with groups whose influence he had once promised to weaken or even destroy. An ideological retreat on the Jewish issue in these circumstances was impossible…. The continued search for a solution to the Jewish problem allowed Hitler to maintain ideological contact with elements of his movement for whom National Socialism had done very little.

Just as it was difficult for people in the US or England of the 1930′s to get worked up about a “few incidents” of the breaking of windows of Jewish shops, or the “excesses” of burning the contents of a library or two, it is today difficult perhaps to get worked up over some of the documented “excesses” of the Drug War, hundreds of which are described and referenced in Drug Warriors. “A few” such incidents can always be blamed on individual human error and frailty, as when an over-zealous cop assassinates a purported marijuana dealer. But what of the evidence so well presented in Drug Warriors of actual drug warrior “death squads” instituted by US government agencies to “assassinate narcotics leaders?” What are we to make of the statement of former Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates (also the founder and designer of the DARE program, “Drug Abuse Resistance Education”): In 1990 he advised the U.S. Senate about the “‘casual user’ and what you do with the whole group. The casual user ought to be taken out and shot, because he or she has no reason for using drugs.” Gates later emphasized that he was not being facetious and declared marijuana users to be guilty of treason. Such sentiment in the US today is not unusual. William Bennett, the former “Drug Czar” and therefore top drug police officer declared that ethically no trial is required before killing citizens suspected of drug dealing. The next day Bennett said of drug dealers, “You deserve to die.” (These passages quoted or paraphrased from Drug Warriors, where they are referenced.) Comparisons to the Gestapo are unavoidable.

Miller goes to great lengths to make it painfully obvious that we are not dealing with a few minor incidents provoked by the occasional renegade, but as in 1930′s Germany, a vast and vicious machine is being oiled and tested, a horribly familiar pattern is again materializing, and normal law-abiding citizens are today just as unaware of what lies just around the corner as they were formerly. More critically, just as leaders and intellectuals of the 1930′s were equally as duped and pacified into non-action, even to supporting the rise of the Nazi machine, a significant movement of leaders and intellectuals resisting the American lead in the War on Drugs, a coalition of nations, for example, which might quickly put an end to the rising power of Drug War Fascism, is nowhere on the horizon, it would seem. Such a project would need to be a widely visible, intentional and public denunciation of American policy accompanied by a radical shift in Prohibition policy itself within those nations.

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As much as it may itself seem a fanaticism to compare Drug Warriorism with Nazism, I have tried to show here why that is far more an artifact of our psychological makeup than a misinterpretation or gross exaggeration of the factual evidence at hand. On every page of Drug Warriors the facts are profuse. We ignore them, and their proper interpretation, at great peril:

I believe authoritarians are manufacturing and manipulating public fears about drug use in order to create a police state where a much broader agenda of social control can be implemented, using government power to determine what movies we may watch, determine who we may love and how we may love them, determine whether we may or must pray to a deity. I believe the war on drug users masks a war on democracy.

After all, what is the vision of a Drug-Free America? Millions in prison or slave labor, and only enthusiastic supporters of government policy allowed to hold jobs, attend school, have children, drive cars, own property. This is the combined vision of utopia held forth by Nancy Reagan, Ronald Reagan, George Bush, William Bennett, Daryl Gates, and thousands of other drug warriors. News media and “public interest” advertising tell us this is the America for which all good citizens yearn.

– Richard Lawrence Miller

I shall end my own intellectually risky yet morally necessary task of agreeing wholeheartedly with Miller’s analysis and prognosis by quoting the same passage with which Drug Warriors begins,

Everywhere in the world I dread that same self-deception which holds that “it can’t happen here.” It can happen anywhere. It becomes unlikely only where the mass of the population is aware of the threat, where there is accordingly no relapse into lethargy, where the character of “totalitarianism” is known and recognized from its very inception and in each of its aspects-as a Proteus which is constantly putting on new masks, which glides out of your grasp like an eel, which does the opposite of what it claims, which perverts the meaning of its words, which speaks, not to impart information, but to hypnotize, divert attention, insinuate, intimidate, dupe, which exploits and produces every type of fear, which promises security while destroying it completely.
– Karl Jaspers