Censored 2012 (29 page)

Unlike the corporate media, independent news sources did cover the issue of segregation rather than only addressing academic performance. As reported in the Washington, DC–based
US Fed News Service
in February 2011, Erica Frankenberg, the assistant professor of educational leadership in Penn State’s College of Education, found that “in 15 states, nearly 70 percent of the black students in charter schools are attending hyper segregated schools, which are defined as having at least a 90 percent minority population.” Likewise, the Civil Rights Project at UCLA shows that the majority of charter school students are either low-income or minority students. Frankenberg says, “Little state or federal direct action has been taken to change or correct racial isolation in charter schools despite numerous past reports by The Civil Rights Project and others highlighting this persistent and growing problem.”

Although many news sources have suggested this problem with charter schools, some dispute this conclusion despite statistics showing otherwise. An alternate opinion has been presented in
Times Union
in an article titled “Charter Schools Don’t Segregate.” Their main argument is that charter schools have appealed more to minority families who seek a better education for their children. Their subsequent conclusion is that charter schools may wrongly be characterized as “segregated … simply because minority head counts are a bit higher than for the school system as a whole.” People may hold different
opinions regarding why charter schools are segregated, but either way it is an important issue that was hardly covered by the corporate media even though charter schools and public schools have oft been a point of contention for other reasons.

Sources:
Evan Thomas and Pat Wingert, “Understanding Charter Schools,”
Newsweek
, June 13, 2010,
http://www.newsweek.com/2010/06/13/understanding-charter-schools.html
; “Research Shows Segregation in Charter Schools,” US Fed News Service, February 17, 2011; Robert Holland, “Charter Schools Don’t Segregate,”
Times Union
, September 13, 2010,
http://www.timesunion.com/opinion/article/Charter-schools-don-t-segregate-655727.php
.

Update by Kira McDonough

In Guantánamo, the notorious but seldom-discussed thug squad, officially known as the Immediate Reaction Force (IRF), deployed by the US military remains very much active. Inside the walls of Guantánamo, the prisoners know the squad as the Extreme Repression Force.

Original Sources:
Jeremy Scahill, “Little Known Military Thug Squad Still Brutalizing Prisoners at Gitmo Under Obama,” AlterNet, May 15, 2009,
http://www.alternet.org/story/140022
; Andrew Wander, “Guantánamo Conditions ‘Deteriorate,’ ” Al Jazeera English, November 10, 2009,
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/11/10-0
.

Update:
In April 2011, WikiLeaks released numerous documents revealing the continued torture and brutality at Guantánamo Bay Prison. The documents detailed the imprisonment and brutal treatment of over seven hundred prisoners that, even in the eyes of the US military/intelligence, there was no evidence connecting the vast majority to any form of terrorism, let alone terrorist threats against the United States and US citizens. Many prisoners were held for months or years after interrogators cleared them of having any connection to terrorism. At least a hundred prisoners were diagnosed with psychiatric disorders, including psychosis, depression, and bipolarity. Those incarcerated at Guantánamo range in age from fourteen (thought to know some local Taliban leaders—a description that would apply to most
youth in the east and south of Afghanistan), to an eighty-nine-year-old suffering from senile dementia, cancer, and other serious illnesses. Many people have been sold into custody and imprisonment.

The Obama administration issued an executive order on March 7, 2011, allowing detainees who the administration claims are too dangerous to release but is unwilling to prosecute, the ability to challenge their detention before a new Periodic Review Board. Detainees will be able to submit documentary evidence every six months, but will only go before the full panel once every three years and will be assigned a “representative” by the military but are able to be represented by counsel of their choice at no cost to the government. This order still falls short of basic due process under international law.

Source:
“US: Indefinite Detention Authorized but Restricted,” Human Rights Watch, March 7, 2011,
http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2011/03/07/us-indefinite-detention-authorized-restricted
.

Update by Kira McDonough

US secret prisons in Afghanistan continue to exist under the Obama administration according to interviewed Afghans who were detained and abused at several disclosed and undisclosed sites at US and Afghan military bases across the country. They also reveal the existence of another secret prison on Bagram Air Base that even the Red Cross does not have access to. It is dubbed the “Black Jail” and is reportedly run by US Special Forces.

Original Source:
“ ‘America’s Secret Afghan Prisons’: Investigation Unearths New US Torture Site, Abuse Allegations in Afghanistan,”
Democracy Now!
, February 2, 2010,
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/2/2/americas_secret_afghan_prisons_investigation_unearths
.

Update:
The US military has denied that it runs secret prisons in
Afghanistan, and has said it does not mistreat the prisoners it holds in the known prisons, insisting that conditions are compliant with both the Geneva Convention’s and the US military’s own guidelines. But a report released by the US-based Open Society Foundation—an organization placing high priority on protecting and improving the lives of people in marginalized communities—details the testimony of eighteen detainees held at the Tor Prison who say they were mistreated there. The testimony includes repeated claims that their cells were kept uncomfortably cold so they were unable to sleep, that they were given inedible food, and that bright lights were kept on in windowless cells twenty-four hours a day. Such treatment would not only fall short of international standards for the treatment of prisoners, but also would run counter to US military’s own guidelines on the issue, which says prisoners should not be exposed to “excessive or inadequate heat, light, or ventilation.”

Source:
Andrew Wander, “Afghan Detainees Claim US Abuse,” Al Jazeera English, October 15, 2010,
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2010/10/2010101514217930443.html
.

Update by Ryan Shehee

The international community has come out in force to condemn and declare war on the Somali fishermen pirates, while discreetly protecting the illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fleets from around the world that have been poaching and dumping toxic waste in Somali waters since the fall of the Somali government eighteen years ago.

According to the High Seas Task Force (HSTF), there were over eight hundred IUU fishing vessels in Somali waters at one time in 2005, taking advantage of Somalia’s inability to police and control its own waters and fishing grounds. The IUUs poach an estimated $450 million in seafood from Somali waters annually. In so doing, they steal an invaluable protein source from some of the world’s poorest people and ruin the livelihoods of legitimate fishermen.

Original Sources:
Najad Abdullahi, “Toxic Waste’ Behind Somali Piracy,” Al Jazeera English, October 11, 2008,
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/africa/2008/10/2008109174223218644.html
; Johann Hari, “You are Being Lied to about Pirates,”
Huffington Post
, January 4, 2009,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/you-are-being-lied-to-abo_b_155147.html
; Nicholas Kralev, “Multinational Policing Curbs Piracy off Somalia,”
Washington Times
, February 19, 2010,
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/feb/19/multinational-policing-curbs-piracy-off-somalia/
; Firoz Osman, “For Many Somalis, These ‘Pirates’ are Marine Police,”
Star
(South Africa), June 30, 2009; Mohamed Abshir Waldo, “The Two Piracies in Somalia: Why the World Ignores the Other,”
Wardheer News
, January 8, 2009,
http://wardheernews.com/Articles_09/Jan/Waldo/08_The_two_piracies_in_Somalia.html
.

Update:
This story originally appeared as story #3 in
Censored 2010
and was revisited in the Déjà Vu chapter of last year’s
Censored 2011
. Although this year has seen a change in the corporate media’s degree of attention to this story, they have continued to ignore the issues behind it, promoting only an erroneous, one-sided classification of the Somali people.

In September 2010, the
New York Times
investigated the role of piracy in the conflict between Somalia’s dysfunctional government and Islamist insurgents. However, the article frames the Somalis as “famous opportunists,” and claims any necessary interactions with them as the lesser of two evils. This article came shortly after the June 2010 premiere of
US Navy: Pirate Hunters
on the American cable television channel Spike—a channel whose demographic is men ages eighteen to thirty-four, providing an opportunity to use the show as a recruiting tool according to Navy spokesman Commander Robert K. Anderson. In the first episode, suspects are referred to as pirates who are “terrorizing the open seas” before they have ever reached trial. When, in the course of the constructed narrative, they are found with weapons on their boats, the purpose behind such arms while navigating dangerous waters is not questioned. Ultimately, the suspected pirates are left without a voice in the broadcast, unable to explain their side of the conflict.

Meanwhile, in neighboring Kenya, the views on piracy are not so black-and-white. While some Kenyans agree, claiming the pirates block aid and justify military protection of an integral waterway in the world’s oil supply and economy, others view their neighbors as protectors of Somalia’s natural resources and sovereignty, and defenders against illegal actions by foreign nations. Furthermore, the line may not be so clear here in the United States. On November 24, 2010, three months after receiving a conflicting ruling by a previous judge, five Somalis were sentenced to the mandatory life sentence plus eighty years for piracy against the USS Nicholas. The first conviction of piracy by an American jury in two centuries, this precedence was set after only sixteen days of trial and deliberation.

Somalia has not had a functional government for two decades, and is facing a humanitarian crisis according to Jerry Rawlings, the former president of the Republic of Ghana and the African Union High Representative for Somalia. Rawlings is calling on donor nations for aid in Somalia. Although significant international funding is currently finding its way to Somalia, it is not in the form of an immediate emergency trust as Rawlings has urged. Instead, alarmingly, millions of dollars in capital comes from unidentified donors for an ultimate purpose which is unknown. What is known is that these funds involve Erik Prince, founder of Xe Services LLC (formerly Blackwater Worldwide), who is ostensibly charged with forming an anti-pirate task force—a project that may violate the arms embargo imposed by the United Nations nearly twenty years ago.

Corporate Sources:
Jeffrey Gentleman, “In Somali Civil War, Both Sides Embrace Pirates,”
New York Times
, September 2, 2010, A1; David Bauder, “Show to Tail Pirate
Hunters,” Associated Press, April 14, 2009; “Kenya’s Somali Service Radio Audience Divided Over Piracy,”
BBC Monitoring Africa
, May 8, 2010; “Callers to Kenyan State Radio’s Somali Talk Show Give Mixed Views on Piracy,”
BBC Monitoring Africa
, May 30, 2010; “Somali Foreign Minister Views Situation in Country, Notes Need for Arab Support,”
BBC Monitoring Africa
, July 17, 2010; Tim McGlone, “Federal Judges in Norfolk Wrestle Over Definition of Piracy,”
Virginian-Pilot
, November 8, 2010; “Five Somalis Sentenced to Life Plus 80 Years in Prison for Piracy Against USS Nicholas Press Release,” United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia, March 14, 2011; “Ex-Ghanaian president calls for renewed commitment to peace in Somalia,”
BBC Monitoring Africa
, April 21, 2011.

Source:
Jason Ditz, “Blackwater Founder Trains Somali ‘anti-Pirate’ Militia,” Antiwar, January 20, 2011,
http://news.antiwar.com/2011/01/20/blackwater-founder-trains-somali-anti-pirate-militia