Dance of the Reptiles (24 page)

This is an instance where the moral thing to do is also the smart thing, if our goal truly is to lead by example. The bad guys at Camp Delta should be swiftly charged and prosecuted. The others should be freed. Then the prison ought to be shut down, before anything else occurs that will further inspire the fanatic bombers who are picking off our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The longer that Camp Delta stays open, the more claims of injustice and wrongful imprisonment will come out of the tribunals. For the United States, there’s no upside to that scenario.

Democracies aren’t supposed to lock up people for years on a hunch, no matter how well you feed them. The Gitmo Diet is heavy on carbs but lean on basic human rights.

February 5, 2006

Policy Is “White Foot, Black Foot”

When the U.S. Coast Guard recently repatriated a group of Cuban migrants who’d landed at an old bridge in the Keys, lawmakers from South Florida implored the White House to reconsider its bizarre “wet foot, dry foot” policy.

Under current rules, Cubans who make landfall in the United States usually are allowed to stay, while those intercepted before they reach shore are typically sent home. Haitian migrants must have been discouraged by the public outcry that followed the Seven Mile Bridge incident, knowing
that a Haitian landing would have drawn no such attention in Washington, D.C.

Like those before it, the Bush administration doesn’t care whether the feet of arriving Haitians are wet or dry. They’re going back, one way or another.

It’s no secret that U.S. immigration policy is a farce—irrational, inconsistent, ineffective, and discriminatory. And no nationality has been more consistently singled out for exclusion than the Haitians. A prime example is the Department of Homeland Security’s continuing refusal to grant temporary protected status (TPS) to Haitian migrants awaiting deportation hearings.

The TPS program was designed to provide an interim safe haven for undocumented immigrants who would otherwise be sent home to dangerous conditions caused by armed conflict, natural disasters, or other extraordinary circumstances. Haiti is a textbook case for TPS. Lashed by hurricanes, the desperately impoverished nation is again being ravaged by political violence, daily kidnappings, and marauding street gangs.

The situation is so perilous that U.S. travelers have been warned to stay away. American Embassy workers are forbidden from going out at night, and their children under age 21 are supposed to return to the United States. A bloody snapshot of life in Haiti: Last summer, a U.S.-sponsored soccer match in Port-au-Prince ended with approximately 10 deaths when gang members and riot police attacked the Haitian crowd. Incredibly, Bush officials insist that migrants from Haiti don’t need protected status. The place is too deadly for tourists and diplomats—but not for the Haitians we’re sending home.

The TPS program was meant to be humanitarian but also
impartial. In the past, undocumented aliens from war-torn Liberia, Sudan, and Somalia have been given temporary protected status. After Hurricane Mitch devastated Central America in 1998, TPS was granted to thousands of undocumented Hondurans and Nicaraguans here. It was offered again to Salvadorans fighting deportation after a series of killer earthquakes racked their homeland in 2001.

TPS isn’t an amnesty; it’s an 18-month window of safe haven, which is then reviewed periodically. Those immigrants allowed to remain here must register with Homeland Security and pay income taxes during their stay. More than 300,000 Central American TPS designates are still working in the United States and sending money home. Some immigration reformists want the TPS program scuttled or absorbed into guest-worker legislation backed by President Bush.

Whatever form the new rules might take, it’s unrealistic to hope that Haitians will be treated as equals with other migrants. The disparity is painfully glaring here in South Florida, where immigration policy plays out as “white foot, black foot.” Boatloads of Cuban migrants are joyously welcomed if they reach shore, but Haitians are quietly processed and shipped back.

Officially, the U.S. government has explained the double standard by saying that the Cubans are political refugees while the Haitians are fleeing here purely for economic reasons. The two issues are patently inseparable, so the distinction is a sham. Almost everyone who sneaks into this country is seeking the opportunity to make a decent living. Often that requires escaping from inept, crooked, or oppressive governments. Every year an estimated 700,000 immigrants from all over the world illegally cross the U.S. borders, and few are true political refugees. By far the largest single group is from an ally nation and established democracy—Mexico.

The schizoid actions of our own leaders helped cause the current disaster in Haiti. After a coup, we sent troops to reinstall its first elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide; then we sat on our hands while his government unraveled in corruption and rebellion. Much of the violence throttling Haiti is between supporters and enemies of the exiled Aristide and is pegged to the long-delayed elections now set for this Tuesday. More bedlam and bloodshed are certain.

Immigration lawyers around the United States have filed motions to halt all deportation proceedings against Haitians because of chaotic, life-threatening conditions there. It remains to be seen whether any judges will acknowledge the hypocrisy of the present policy.

It makes no sense to offer a haven to Somalians and Sudanese and turn our backs on a human calamity unfolding in our own hemisphere. Tragically, there isn’t much common sense or decency to be found in the history of how Haitian boat people have been treated.

It doesn’t matter whether they land at a bridge or a beach or the steps of the Statue of Liberty. They still can’t get in.

March 5, 2006

Autopsy: At Least Doc Got Gender Right

The good folks of Panama City can rest easy, as long as they don’t die. Dr. Charles Siebert has renewed his license to practice medicine.

He’s the medical examiner who recently ruled that 14-year-old Martin Lee Anderson expired of “natural causes” after being kneed, choked, and punched by guards at the Bay County Boot Camp.

Previously, Siebert had signed an autopsy report on a woman named Donna Reed in which he described her
appendix, gallbladder, ovaries, and uterus—organs that had been surgically removed years earlier, according to her mother. As a bonus, Dr. Siebert also awarded Ms. Reed a prostate gland and two testicles, a mistake he attributed to conducting the autopsy during a storm-related power outage.

Apparently, the lights were working fine when Siebert examined Martin’s body.

On the plus side, he correctly identified the gender of the victim. On the negative side, he flubbed the case.

Instead of focusing on the boot-camp beating, Siebert concluded that Martin died of complications from sickle-cell trait, a genetic blood disorder. He later speculated that the condition was exacerbated by strenuous exercise at the camp.

The ruling has baffled sickle-cell experts, not to mention legislators, Martin’s family, and millions of TV viewers who’ve seen the disturbing videotape of the boy being kneed and shoved to the ground by a group of seven to nine guards on January 5. He was rushed to a hospital and died the next day.

Incredibly, seven weeks afterward, Gov. Jeb Bush was saying he still hadn’t seen the video. Maybe the VCR at the mansion was on the fritz, or maybe he got swept up watching the Olympic curling competition. Regardless, it’s a fairly serious event when a young teen dies under chaotic circumstances in state custody. Bush, a big fan of boot camps, has been slow to criticize anybody.

Of the five such facilities in Florida, Bay County’s is one of the worst performing, according to the Department of Juvenile Justice. In four of the years between 1999 and 2004, more than half the camp’s graduates were rearrested or convicted of another crime within 12 months of their release.

Martin was sent there after taking his grandmother’s car
for a joyride. A spokesman for the boot camp said the guards got physical with the teen because he was being “uncooperative,” although there was no indication that he was unruly or violent. The Bay County Boot Camp’s manual says that force should be a “last resort,” but evidently, the rule was often ignored.

Martin’s death was handled suspiciously from day one. His body wasn’t autopsied at the hospital in Escambia County where he was pronounced dead. Instead, it was flown back to Panama City and sent to Dr. Siebert. A DJJ official said Siebert told her that shifting the autopsy venue was “highly unusual” and was done at the request of Bay County Sheriff Frank McKeithen. His office runs the boot camp where Martin was roughed up. Later, Siebert denied saying there was anything extraordinary about how the youth’s autopsy was assigned.

The outlandish sickle-cell explanation for Martin’s death would have been difficult to challenge were it not for the 20-minute videotape of the guards’ actions, during which the teen appears limp and unresisting.

And the tape itself wouldn’t have been made public if
The Miami Herald
and CNN hadn’t sued the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to get it.

We are assured that the agency’s reluctance to cough up the video had nothing to do with the fact that FDLE Commissioner Guy Tunnell is the former Bay County sheriff and founder of the boot camp. Several of the guards now under investigation were hired on his watch. Sheriff McKeithen says he’s shutting down the facility in May because of the controversy. In the past, other kids have come forward to complain of being choked and struck.

Bush expressed surprise at the camp’s closing, but it couldn’t come soon enough for Rep. Gus Barreiro, the
Miami Beach Republican who chairs the House criminal-justice appropriations committee.

Unlike the governor, Barreiro demanded a prompt screening of the boot-camp videotape. He was so outraged by what he saw that he wanted all juvenile boot-camp inmates transferred elsewhere until strict use-of-force rules and other safety measures were emplaced.

Another Republican, Rep. J. C. Planas of Miami, has called for the state to close down all juvenile boot-camp facilities.

Bush recently asked sheriffs running the camps to come up with tighter guidelines. Meanwhile, a special prosecutor from Tampa has been appointed to investigate the Martin Lee Anderson case, and a second autopsy will be done by a different medical examiner.

Dr. Siebert’s license to practice expired on January 31, though he kept working until he got it renewed in late February.

The doctor has said he didn’t see the boot-camp video before finishing Martin’s autopsy. After viewing the tape, he now acknowledges the possibility that the clobbering by guards “played a bit of a role” in the teen’s death.

Right. In the same small way that John Wilkes Booth contributed to Abe Lincoln’s headache.

May 7, 2006

Killing Animals for Profit

If your kids asked to bury a small animal alive, you’d be horrified. You’d tell them that’s an awful thing and that they ought to be ashamed. Most children wouldn’t dream of doing it, of course, because they know what’s wrong and what’s right. Unfortunately, they don’t make the rules.

Consider Florida’s poor, pokey gopher tortoise. Since 1991, the state has allowed grown-ups to bury 74,000 of them because their burrows stood in the path of future subdivisions, highways, golf courses, and supermarkets.

Officials prefer the word “entomb” instead of “bury,” but it’s the same dirty deed. Even on his most fleet-footed day, the average tortoise cannot outrace earthmoving machinery. Some are able to tunnel to freedom, but most suffocate slowly over a period of weeks.

Gopher tortoises have been around for 60 million years, but the last few decades have been murder. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission classifies these ancient land turtles as a “species of special concern,” though obviously not special enough to be left in peace. A child can’t legally keep one as a pet, yet a big company or even a school district can obtain permits to snuff them by the hundreds.

Dwindling in numbers, the animals live in dry hammocks, coastal dunes, and pine scrub. There they dig elaborate dens that provide shelter to more than 300 other species, including rabbits, burrowing owls, and the endangered indigo snake.

As luck would have it, prime tortoise habitat is often prime real estate, which means the tortoises get the boot or, more typically, the bulldozer. The state calls this “incidental taking,” which is a bureaucratically sanitized way of saying “smothering to death.”

The permit process is straightforward. Developers seeking to build on land colonized by tortoises typically agree to contribute to a habitat fund or set aside a relatively small parcel. It’s called mitigation, a lame charade intended to make the state appear vigilant and to make developers appear caring. In the past 10 months, Florida has granted 345 permits to bury tortoises. The
Sun-Sentinel
recently published a sampling:

The Tuscano golf course development near Sarasota got permission to kill 260 of the reptiles in exchange for preserving 138 acres.

In Duval County, the Young Land Group was told it could destroy 190 tortoises if it paid $169,442 for 29 acres of habitat.

The Orange County Public Schools received permission to kill 110 tortoises on the future site of a high school in exchange for preserving 12 acres at a cost of $92,037.

Vikings LLC in Marion County was approved to wipe out 470 tortoises for a 542-home golf-course development, in exchange for preserving 136 acres.

In Palm Beach County, Walmart got permission to bury five tortoises in exchange for a whopping 1.49 acres of habitat.

Mitigation is always meager. A pending project in the Tampa Bay area would obliterate 2,573 acres of tortoise habitat, yet under current rules, the developer is required to set aside only 168 acres. That’s a net loss to the tortoises of 93 percent of their home territory.

News accounts about the tortoise-burying permits have angered many Floridians and discomfited wildlife officials, who admit that not enough is being done to save the reptiles. The state now wants to expand tortoise preserves in the Panhandle, which sounds like a plan except that moving the critters hasn’t worked. Studies have shown that most of the relocated newcomers have died from respiratory disease or other ailments.