Barack "DroneMan" Obama just announced that it's harmful to lock juvenile prisoners in solitary confinement, and therefore Federal juvenile prisoners will no longer be subjected to such mind-damaging treatment.
It only took Obama, an intelligent, well-informed man, 7 years into his presidency to figure this out, and do something about it. Which should rightly make us suspicious of his motives. Is it really that he's a humanitarian and reformer? His record of violent assaults on human rights and institutionalization of greater repression is ample grounds to reject such a possibility. [1]
This announcement was nothing more than the latest salvo in a propaganda cum "legacy"-building campaign, Obama The Merciful. Previously it was announced with great fanfare that Obama was "pardoning" (actually commuting the sentences of) 6,000 Federal prisoners. (As usual with the "Good" Obama, there was less- much less- there than met the eye, and ear. Only 1,000 prisoners were actually let out of prison, or more accurately, scheduled to be let out of prison a bit sooner then they would have been anyway. The others were in half-way houses or on probation. And many more than 6,000 Federal prisoners are released yearly as a matter of course, replaced of course by the newly-incarcerated. Obama's drop-in-the-bucket gesture barely moved the dial on the total number of Federal prisoners, around 200,000, and was imperceptible against the total U.S. prison population of over 2 million, most of whom are prisoners of the 50 individual states. And that doesn't count "illegal" immigrants imprisoned for deportation.)
This Mercy Offensive by the Kinder and Gentler Oppressor is part of Obama's "legacy-building." In the last of his eight years in power, Obama wants to be judged by "history" (bourgeois opinion-manipulators) on just his last year, so like Bill Clinton he can give a vague impression of liberalism.
Some people, but fewer and fewer as time has gone by and experience has wised up "folks," are falling for this. My impression is fewer are hailing it than hailed his "pardons." (Pardoning means erasing the conviction; commutation is shortening the prison sentence. Obama has been commuting sentences, often by only a few months.) So, pace Lincoln, there are still those being fooled by Obama- because they want to be.
1] In brief, Obama's anti-human rights record includes: signing into the law the power to declare American citizens "terrorists" and imprison them indefinitely in a military prison, without charges or appeal, so they can enjoy the same treatment non-Americans get in places like Guantanamo Bay and, formerly, Bagram and other military torture sites and the CIA's "black sites"; waging an unprecedented war on whistleblowers and journalists; overseeing the world's most massive and total surveillance system, run by the NSA and utilitized by the FBI, CIA, and DEA, which then launder the information to hide its source and bring trumped-up criminal charges against their targets; issuing orders requiring every Federal employee to be a spy and informer on their fellow employees; blowing up hospitals and using drones to wipe out wedding parties and etc.; his obvious indifference to the system of police repression of blacks and Latinos, the murders of whom are merely the most visible aspect of that repression; the FBI coordination of the repression of the Occupy Movement; and various individual acts of violence, such as the assassination of Al-Qaeda polemicist/propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki's teenage son and nephews; the murder of Obama bin Laden (yes, it was murder; even if the victim is a "scumball" who "deserved it," it's still murder); the CIA assassination of journalist Michael Hastings, who was investigating a very very sensitive state secret at the time (who planted the explosives that blew up those three buildings in lower Manhattan on September 11, 2001? Who ordered it?); allowing the FBI to cold-bloodedly execute Ibragim Todashev, and arrange the murder of Sandra Bland; having the Egyptian dictator Sisi doing him the favor of breaking Medea Benjamin's arm, for having the effrontery to interrupt one of his self-righteous speeches; and other victims unknown. [See also TODASHEV.]
Speaking of victims, a note to my non-secret police readers: I was about to embark upon a project that would have taken up my time and focus, namely digitizing video tapes of past performances by a friend of mine, a non pareil songwriter and singer. These one-of-a-kind performances represent art that was only preserved on those tapes. My secret police persecutors, monitoring my computer research on digitizing, and with the advantage of hidden camera in my home, stole the box in which those tapes were stored. This is the most malicious thing they have done to me in over four decades of persecution, which had included false arrests, scores of illegal surreptitious burglaries, a chilling death threat, acts of sabotage and vandalism, the standard warrantless wiretaps and bugs, and the theft of thousands of dollars. So going forward I will be sharing my experiences of persecution which will illustrate the methods typically used by U.S. secret police against people they don't like. I also have specific information collected over these decades of persecution on FBI activities, use of Mossad agents, CIA locations, personnel identities, photos, and etc. If my tapes don't "reappear," I will do my best to make that information publicly available, and spread around to organizations with an interest in such information. Perhaps my tormentors will prefer that to my political analyses. [Just leave them downstairs.]
What persecuted American dissidents need is greater visibility. Why is there no organization and website for the victims to share their experiences and learn from one another? There are various reasons for that, including the heterogeneous nature of the victims, and the suffocating ideological power of U.S. lies that the U.S. is "free" and there are no dissidents here. (Just as there are no homosexuals in Iran, I suppose).
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