Solidarity Statement for Recognition & Amnesty for U.S. Political Prisoners
author: http://www.thejerichomovement.com/
solidarity statement of jericho movement for recognition
& amnesty for u.s. political prisoners
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EFIA NWANGAZA, NATIONAL CO-CHAIR
4th International Symposium Against Isolation,
Paris, France, December 16-19, 2005
My name is Efia Nwangaza. I, along with Herman Ferguson, a former political prisoner and exile, chair the Jericho amnesty movement for recognition and freedom of U.S. political prisoners, prisoners of war, and exiles. I have been a revolutionary and human rights advocate for more than 45 years; first as a young Christian missionary, then as a student organizer with the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the southern U.S. civil rights movement, later with Amnesty International (AI-USA) and the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement for Self-Determination, and now as a practicing attorney. The Jericho Movement, founded in 1998, is the official national political prisoner organized voice and representative of U.S. political prisoners, prisoners of war, and exiles, (www.thejerichomovement.com).
We thank the organizers of The Fourth International Symposium Against Isolation for their invitation and this opportunity to tell the world about the more than one hundred political prisoners held in U.S. prisons since the 1970's. The United States has held these prisoners longer than the 27 years that apartheid South Africa held Nelson Mandela, for the very same reasons South Africa held Mandela. The U.S. government has held some of our political prisoners up to 35 and 40 years, Marshall Eddie Conway and Ruchell Magee, respectively.
Most U.S. political prisoners, prisoners of war, and exiles are the survivors of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) unlawful counter-intelligence program (COINTELPRO); today's "war on terrorism," excused and codified in the repressive so-called "USA Patriot Act." COINTELPRO, like its predecessors, was designed to contain, control, criminalize and crush activists in the U.S. civil and human rights/liberation struggles of Africans born in the United States (Blacks, African Americans), Latinos/Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, anti-imperialists and Native Americans.
However, these stalwarts of the 60's and 70's not only fought for freedom at home and provided support for the masses of people; but, in solidarity with the peoples of the world; they said "Hell No!" to the U.S. war on Vietnam ... the Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, and Haiti, wars and occupations of their day. We bring their greetings and the greetings of the U.S. celebrants of the December 3rd , 2005 International Day of Solidarity with Political Prisoners and Prisoners of War; called for by former Philippine political prisoner, Donato Continente, to promote a united worldwide amnesty approach. We hope a single world day of solidarity can soon be broadly agreed upon and universally celebrated.
In 2003, the American Friends Service Committee's Criminal Justice Programs' Prison Watch Project's briefing paper entitled, "The Prison Inside the Prison: Control Units, Supermax Prisons, and Devices of Torture," noted that the first U.S. uses of isolation and sensory deprivation were in the 1960s. It was a behavior modification technique against prisoners involved in the prisoner's rights movement, a byproduct of the 1960s U.S. civil and human rights movement. The prisoners were "Islamic militants, jailhouse lawyers, ethnic 'gangs,' and political activists."
In the 1970s the struggle for human rights intensified, both on the streets and inside the prisons. COINTELPRO, the FBI's unlawful attack on U.S. civil/human rights and independence movements, sent Black Panthers, Black Liberation Army, American Indian Movement, Puerto Rican Independentistas, and North American anti-imperialists into open hostilities with the U.S. government and into the underground. The rise and arrest of Black Party members and other such formations increased the politicization and agitation by prisoners. The brilliant and charismatic revolutionary prison educator and organizer, George Jackson, was murdered in a California Control Unit (Adjustment Center) following an unsuccessful heroic attempt to liberate him by his younger brother, Jonathan Jackson. Men of all races rebelled against inhumane treatment at New York's Attica State Prison and were slaughtered with helicopter gunfire and swat teams. In 1978, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Andrew Young acknowledged the existence of U.S. political prisoners at the UN.
The United States is the world's first country to operate entire prisons on a permanent isolation and lock down scheme. It has been cited by the UN Human Rights Commission for violations of the Convention Against Torture and the UN Standard Minimums for the Treatment of Prisoners; long before Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo.
In 1972, at Marion (Illinois) Federal Penitentiary, the U.S. government established one of its first control units. It was followed by others in the states of New Jersey and Massachusetts. By 1985, there were about six, forty-five in 1997, and now there are 2 or more sensory deprivation and isolation prisons or sections of prisons in every state of the United States of America.
In 1988, the U.S. Bureau of Prisons was court ordered to remove Silvia Biraldini, Susan Rosenberg, and Alejandrina Torres from a subterrainean sensory deprivation isolation unit in the basement of the Lexington (Kentucky) Federal Prison; see the documentary, "Through the Wire." The court acknowledged that their internment was political. Their case highlighted routine sexual abuse and medical neglect in U.S. prisons as well as the onset of isolation and sensory deprivation on women.
According to Human Rights Watch, by 2002 more than 20,000 prisoners, over 2% of the United States' 2.2 million prison population, are held in long term isolation; political and non-political, adults and children alike. Twenty-three hours a day, with one shower per week, they are held in sound proof or white noise cells about the size of a parking space for a car. With privatization, for-profit-prisons, a person may NEVER leave her/his cell, everything, including delivery of meals, is controlled by a single guard in a central booth flipping switches. The only human contact the internee may have is removal or return to the cage if s/he fails to comply with orders.
Today, despite the known psychological and physical destruction caused by extended isolation and sensory deprivation, political exile Assata Shakur's co-defendant, Sundiata Acoli, a mathematician, painter, and former Black Panther has been held by the State of New Jersey, and jailhouse lawyer and prisoner of conscience, Ruchell Magee, by the State of California, in isolation and sensory deprivation for 30 years. Former Black Panther Russell Shoatz, repeatedly denied proper and timely medical care, is 20 years in the State of Pennsylvania's supermax prison, along with famed journalist Mumia Abu Jamal on its death row.
While these men have survived due to strong personal commitment and outside support, the mentally ill, retarded, learning disabled and illiterate who largely populate U.S. prisons, and often put in isolation for punishment, have not fared so well. They succumb to complete mental and physical breakdowns.
Others, also suffering from lack of adequate community, educational or lawful employment opportunities, may be labeled a "gang" member, harassed on the streets and isolated in "security threat units" once incarcerated. While in isolation they are subject to humiliating body cavity searches by guards of the opposite sex, forced to wear demeaning garments, physically assaulted by guards with fire hoses, bound in restraint belts, chairs or beds for long periods of time in painful positions, shocked with cattle prods now called taser guns and stun belts of 50,000 electrical volts, sprayed in the face, eyes, mouth with pepper spray or tear gas, smothered in urine-soaked pillowcases on their heads, forced baths causing 3rd degree burns over the body. People of color are more likely to receive this kind of treatment than white prisoners.
Now, like the 1960's and '70s, George Bush's Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, local and national law enforcement, and the Fraternal Order of Police have joined forces to set upon us and to hunt down old soldiers missed in the earlier battle; framing and sentencing to Life without possibility of parole of Imam Jamil Al-Amin (fka H. Rap Brown) and jailing Kamau Sadiki, the grand jury witch hunts and fishing expeditions that hounded Sister Janet Cyril to her grave and recently jailed former Black Panthers Harold Taylor, Hank Jones, Richard Brown and Ray Boudreaux. Others now in the system are shuttled to far-off super max sensory deprivation prisons in the middle of the night, Tom Manning and Oscar Lopez Rivera. Medical neglect is used as a weapon; Russell Maroon Shoatz prostate cancer tests, Robert Seth Hayes' diabetic black outs, Leonard Peltier. Mandatory parole is denied to exemplary prisoners, Veronza Bowers, Jr. Lawyers who serve the people are criminalized, Lynn Stewart, Chokwe Lumumba. The $1 million bounty on the head of Assata Shakur (fka Joanne Chesimard) is designed to reduce us all to snitches.
Still others are being held on excessive sentences and parole denial: Jalil Muntaqim, architect of the '98 march on Washington, African AIDS Orphans School Supply Project, and felony re-enfranchisement litigation. Dr. Mutulu Shakur, Black Liberation Army healthcare activist pioneered the use of acupuncture in drug rehabilitation, environmentalists Debbie Sims Africa and other MOVE members who survived Philadelphia's relentless onslaughts and its 1985 neighborhood bombing massacre. Mathematician Sundiata Acoli, women's rights activist Marilyn Buck. We mourn the martyred Richard Williams, Filiberto Ojeda Ríos, Albert "Nuh" Washington, and Merle Austin Africa. We pine for the companionship of exiled Assata Shakur, Nehunda Abiodun and others. It is our shame that we have people who invested their youth, continued service to us and are now growing old, dying in prison and far away from friends and families.
The Jericho Movement demands the immediate recognition, amnesty, and release of all political prisoners and prisoners of war locked up in or exiled from the United States of America. It is committed to gaining full political recognition, legal amnesty and social freedom for political prisoners despite the United States government's continued denial of their existence and their proper status by criminalization.
Each political prisoner was incarcerated because of his/her political beliefs and work to eliminate indecent housing, lack of adequate medical care and nutrition, quality education, to stop police brutality and the murder of people organizing for independence and liberation. Each is entitled to our best possible efforts to decriminalize and rehumanize them in the minds of the people and to build the movement to protect and bring them home now!
EFIA NWANGAZA, NATIONAL CO-CHAIR
The Jericho Movement for Recognition and Freedom of U.S. Political Prisoners
FSD 10193 Greenville, SC 29603 USA
864-242-3039  enjericho@aol.com
National Jericho Movement • P.O. Box 340084 • Jamaica, NY 11434
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First I want to congratulate the keynote speaker, the Honorable Congresswoman Sister Cynthia McKinney, on her triumphant return to Congress. But more so I want to personally thank her as being the only Congressional official who had courage or concern enough to make a determined effort toward my release when I was rounded up on Sept. 11, 2001, and held incommunicado from my family, my attorneys and the entire outside world.
Meanwhile, prison officials torturously interrogated me, looking for any connection on my part to the destruction of the World Trade Center or the later spread of anthrax through the postal system. They openly threatened to hold me in total isolation for the rest of my life, and their implied threat was to seek the death penalty.
So torture is nothing new to U.S. Political Prisoners and POWs, nor to everyday people of color and others oppressed in the ghettoes, barrios, reservations, towns and cities throughout Amerika. They don't call the Bronx's 44th Precinct "Fort Apache" for nothing or because they serve "tea and cookies" there. They call it "Fort Apache" because they whip heads there, bust lips, knock out teeth, blacken eyes, break ribs and even rape and kill there ... and it goes on to one degree or another in every police station across the country, big or small.
Abu Ghraib is not an aberration. Most U.S. prisoners instantly recognized Amerika's fingerprints all over Ghraib; they match its prints in U.S. police stations, jails and prisons. The Ghraib perversions trace a straight line back home to White amerika's psychotic obsession with the genitals of Blacks it lynched. The same perverted grins seen at Ghraib can be found in the faces and photos of white lynch mobs in the U.S. swarmed around Black bodies hung from trees.
It's a perversion born in this country's racial-sexual degradation of its Black slaves and others of color since its beginning, and the lies told since then to cover it up. That same "cover-up" mindset also keeps most of the Amerikan press silent about the many Iraqi women and children, young boys and girls, who were also raped, and probably still are being raped, at Abu Ghraib. Photographic proof exists and the San Francisco Bay View newspaper has it. For those adults who have legitimate need for such proof, the photos are available upon email request for them at
Now for some of my personal experiences with torture:
In 1969, New York cops kicked in my door for two other Panthers, Sekou Odinga and Kuwasi Balagoon, and without saying a word beat and stomped me unmercifully. Then they took me to the 32nd Precinct, Harlem, and threw me in the holding tank with Joan Bird, another Harlem Panther, whose lip was so busted and swollen, and eyes so blackened and swollen shut that I barely recognized her. She said that at one point during her beating they hung her out of the third floor window by the ankles, made sexual taunts and threatened to drop her if she didn't tell the whereabouts of Sekou and Kuwasi. They didn't find them, and after holding us in jail for a month they released us.
In 1970 during the New York Panther 21 trial, we defendants were assaulted numerous times while cuffed by Riker's Island jail guards who transported us back and forth to court each day.
In 1973, after my arrest in the New Jersey Turnpike case, I was held in strict isolation at Middlesex County Jail, N.J. Because of my placement there, and even though I was allowed no visitors except my lawyer, the jail implemented harsh visiting rules on all visitors, which caused the prisoners to protest by refusing to lock in their cells.
New Jersey state troopers came in with shotguns, shot prisoners in the face and torso with bean-bags that broke noses, blackened eyes and bruised ribs, shot teargas that choked, blinded and burned, and drove prisoners back into their cells. I was already under 24/7 lockdown, so they simply shot teargas into my cell, turned the water off and heat on, in mid-summer, which left me and similar prisoners to wallow in pain from the sweat-reactivated tear gas, which we had no means to wash off.
In 1976 at Trenton State Prison (TSP), NJ, I and other Management Control Unit (MCU) prisoners were subjected to two hours of gunfire by Jersey state troopers raking the Unit back and forth, trying to shoot into our cells. John Andaliwa Clark was killed by a double-ought shotgun blast to the chest, and another prisoner, "Gunner," who came out with his hands in the air, was shot by an M-14 rifle that was aimed at his head but tore through his elbow instead. I and numerous other MCU prisoners were hit by shrapnel from bullets that ricocheted off the bars into our cells.
In 1977, MCU guards suddenly began demands to probe the anus of random MCU prisoners during their normal strip-search of us each time we were taken out or returned to our cells. And of course, we refused to submit willingly to such a degrading and asinine demand. All who resisted were jumped by the guards, beaten, wrestled to the floor and anus probed, then charged with assault on the guards, which carried an additional seven-year sentence upon conviction.
To avoid further anus probes, for the next seven months we refused all family visits, attorney visits, doctor, dental visits or anything else that required us to leave our cells. Prison officials then instituted a policy of "random" mandatory cell-changes so that they could continue to subject selected prisoners to "random" beatings, abuse and forced anal probes under the guise of changing our cells. The situation became so volatile and our families, attorneys and friends were so alarmed that a federal judge stepped in, forbade the prison to continue anal probes, declared that a metal detector was just as effective as a search tool and that it be used instead of the anal probe, and then summarily dismissed all assault charges that had been filed against us MCU prisoners.
In 1983, at USP Marion, Ill., a federal penitentiary, guards locked down the prison and went on a six-month rampage, roaming the prison and beating prisoners at will and randomly subjecting some to forced anal probes. During that period I was sent to "the hole," whose floor and walls were covered with feces thrown by prisoners who had been beaten and anal probed. It was mid-summer, the heat was intense, the smell incredible, the windows were closed and I was confined 60 days there without fresh air or relief.
Later in the summer of '83 I was taken by bus in chains to testify at Sekou Odinga's trial in New York, where he and other comrades were charged with robbery of a Brinks armored truck and with liberating Assata Shakur from prison. After I dressed out for the bus ride, the guard put a black box over my handcuffs, which is supposedly for high security prisoners.
Any prisoner who's ever worn it will tell you that after a half-hour the box gnaws into your wrists and sets them on fire with pain. I had to endure the three-day bus ride with the black-box gnawing into my wrists all day, plus no smoking was permitted on the bus nor at any of its stopovers along the way, which in itself was also torture to me with a then 30-year cigarette habit.
At MCC-NY, the City's federal jail, they put me in isolation wearing only a T-shirt, pants and shower shoes, then turned the air conditioner to near freezing level so that I had no choice but to do push-ups day and night to keep warm. After three days of freezing and going without cigarettes, I testified in Sekou's defense and was immediately put back on the bus, cuffed in the black-box, for another agonizing three-day trip back to Marion, Ill.
In 1988 at USP Leavenworth, Ks., as happened on several occasions during my sojourn in prison, I was caught up as an innocent bystander during a major prison disturbance. In such situations bystanders and participants alike suffer the same abuse by the intervening guards.
This time it happened in the yard when a gang war broke out between the Texas Syndicate and the EMEs, two Mexican street organizations. In the ensuing melee, Rene, leader of the Syndicate, was stabbed to death, and both groups sustained numerous stab wounds. Tower gunfire stopped the carnage as guards moved in to teargas and handcuff everyone, including me and other bystanders, facedown on the blistering summer asphalt, then lifted us by the cuffs and threw us in the dilapidated and condemned "Building 63" without food or water until the whole thing was sorted out days later.
And last, in 2001, Sept. 11, at USP Allenwood, Pa., I was rounded up, held incommunicado and tortured four months with interrogations about the WTC and the spread of anthrax before being released back into prison population due to the efforts of Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, my attorneys and many other concerned people.
The "Attica to Abu Ghraib Conference: Human Rights, Torture and Resistance," presented by the International Human Rights Initiative (IHRI), was held Saturday, April 23, 2005 at UC Berkeley in Barrows Hall. Learn more about brilliant mathematician and heroic revolutionary Sundiata Acoli at www.afrikan.net/sundiata and www.assatashakur.org and write to him at: Sundiata Acoli, 39794-066, P.O. Box 3000, USP Allenwood, White Deer, PA 17887.
National Jericho Movement • P.O. Box 340084 • Jamaica, NY 11434