The Business of Repression

When I was posting about police brutality the other day something nagged at my memory.

Then someone mentioned Bernie Kerik on the radio yesterday and a I remembered: of course! The prelapsarian Bernie Kerik was on the board and made millions in stock options from pushing tasers to his law-enforcement brethren.

I knew there was something shady about tasers, aside from their potential lethality and use as a torture weapon and summary punishment tool. For those who don’t know much about the Taser here’s a brief description of what it is and what it does from Amnesty International:

Tasers, powerful electrical weapons used by law enforcement agencies in, among other countries, the USA are designed to incapacitate by conducting 50,000 volts of electricity into a suspect. The pistol shaped weapons use compressed nitrogen gas to fire sharp darts up to 21 feet [7 m]. The darts can penetrate up to two inches [5 cm] of clothing. Electricity is then conducted down wires connecting the darts and the taser gun. The electrical pulses induce skeletal muscle spasms immobilising and incapacitating a suspect and causing them to fall to the ground. They may also be used, in “drive stun” mode, as a close up stun weapon. The “drive stun” is specifically designed for pain compliance.(4)

Since June 2001, more than 150 people have died in the USA after being shocked by a taser. Of those deaths, 85 have occurred in the USA since Amnesty International released its report (in November 2004) calling for a suspension on the use and transfer of these weapons. Amnesty International raised its concerns in its previous report that the number of taser-related deaths had been rising each year. There were three deaths reported in 2001, 13 in 2002, 17 in 2003 and 48 in 2004. In 2005 there were 61 taser-related deaths, and by the mid February 2006 there have already been 10 deaths.

In These Times has an excellent article up about those taser deaths, about the history of the company’s formation and about its links with conservatives in government and law enforcement:

In 2002, Taser brought on former New York police commissioner Bernard Kerik as the company?s director. Kerik had attained popularity in the wake of 9/11 as a law-and-order-minded hero; the company had seemingly picked one of the best spokespersons imaginable.

With Kerik?s help, company?s profits grew to $68 million in 2004, up from just under $7 million in 2001, and stockholders were able to cash in, including the Smith family, who raked in $91.5 million in just one fiscal quarter in 2004.

Unbeknownst to most stockholders, however, sales have been helped along by police officers who have received payments and/or stock options from Taser to serve as instructors and trainers. (The exact number of officers on the payroll is unknown because the company declines to identify active-duty officers who have received stock options.)

The recruitment of law enforcement has been crucial to fostering market penetration. For instance, Sgt. Jim Halsted of the Chandler, Ariz., Police Department, joined Taser President Rick Smith in making a presentation to the Chandler city council in March 2003. He made the case for arming the entire police patrol squad with M-26 Tasers. According to the Associated Press, Halsted said, ?No deaths are attributed to the M-26 at all.?

The council approved a $193,000 deal later that day.

Everyone was doing very nicely indeed, thank you. A USAF Lt Col even co-authored a report (later discredited) that bolstered the company’s claims for non-lethality and boosted sales. All was sweet for Kerik and the other shareholders. But then came the Amnesty report and a series of product liability cases:

The prospect that its ?stun gun? would provide an effective non-lethal weapon for law enforcement drove the share price of Taser International Corp. up sevenfold in 2004 to a high of $33 in late December. Reports of deaths from use of the product led to the announcement of an informal SEC investigation in disclosures about its safety in January 2005, leading to a plunge in stock price to $15. In September 2005, Taser announced the SEC had made the safety investigation formal, and the stock fell further, to $6. The company announced its legal fees and public relations expenses for the first half of 2005 were more than $12 million, double those expenses in the first half of the prior year.

Amnesty International’s reports on taser use really hurt the company, so much so that Taser actually considered sueing. Taser are prepared to take a very agressive legal posture towards their critics, but as more and more instances of deaths come to light and the more adverse publicity tasers get, the more the share price drops and the less money it makes. The share price is is somewhere where bloggers really can hit a corporation hard just by publicising the truth .

The problem is that even if the left does generate enough negative publicity to make Taser’s stock price drop precipitately – even if they could be pushed out of business – there are plenty of other torture equipment vendors drooling over the potentially massive profits to be made in the repression racket.

Another challenge to Taser?s dominance in the stun gun market occurred earlier this week when Maricopa County (Arizona) Sheriff, Joe Arpaio, announced that his deputies will begin testing 30 new stun guns as an alternative to Tasers. This could only have been regarded with concern by Taser International, which is based in Scottsdale, Arizona. According to Arpaio: “Stinger tells me their weapons have better target attainment, they cost less and are cheaper to operate. If those claims are true, I may very well move away from Taser weapons.”

More and more US police departments are buying Stingers, so I suggest anyone who’s thinking of protesting anything anytime soon makes themselves familiar with Stinger Systems Inc.’s products.

Stinger has recently done a deal with a Spanish defence-tech supplier that gives it accessibility to supply products to any of the allied NATO Armies worldwide, not to mention to various EU members’ riot police and anti-terrorism squads. Your country is pushing this technology worldwide.

If you are American your hard-earned tax dollars are actually promoting the use if both Tasers and Stingers abroad: the US government is itself marketing the companies’ products overseas. Take a a look at BuyUSA.gov: it’s not shoes or food products or cars that the US government is promoting internationally as the best of US manufacturing, it’s the tools of repression and dictatorship. Hand in hand with the US in this grisly trade is Britain.

For years the focus of anti-capitalist and antiglobalisation protestors in Britain, Europe and elsewhere has been the campaign against the arms trade. The words ‘arms trade’ may conjure up pictures of steely-faced, flint-eyed men flogging aircraft, tanks and missiles, but the market is much bigger than that and includes all sorts of riot and crowd control gear that I bet you never thought your local police department would even have, let alone use on you or yours. Even the smallest police departments, both in the US and Europe, are increasingly looking like paramilitary units. They seem to be arming themselves for mass insurrection.

Take universities for example; UCLA isn’t the only US university campus prepared for a riot:

The Ball State University Police Department has purchased equipment designed to provide individual officers with an additional less-than-lethal force option, as well as new equipment appropriate for crowd control.

The university has purchased 35 Tasers, four chemical propellant guns and three projectile launchers at a cost of nearly $38,400.

“This is a significant investment in our efforts to enhance the safety and security of the campus community,” said Gene Burton, director of public safety. “This kind of equipment helps minimize the risk to our officers and those they are sworn to protect. This is a very positive step in the evolution of our department.”

35 tasers? Why on earth do institutes of learning need this kind of firepower? Just what is being planned for?

The answer is they don’t need it – it’s been sold to them, just like double-glazing or timeshares, by clever marketing men who know exactly which buttons to push.

After all if their own government buys it and approves and promotes the stuff, it must be a good thing. Mustn’t it? Law and order types tend to be conservative, they listen to conservative media and tend to take conservative viewpoints. Already these officers are ripe for the sales pitch.

Since your customers’re already so receptive, all you have to do is to get your friends in the media – who owns both tv stations and defence tech companies? Step forward General Electric – to keep bumping up the conservatives’ scaredy-cat level by promoting an ‘us and them’ mentality and the fear that their way of life is constantly under threat from within and without . Add a few freebies, a conference in Vegas and few techy presentations with shiny graphics, sexy product names and some obfuscated stats and specs, and voila, one multimillion dollar sale.

The Defence tech industry is is massive. It provides jobs: it contributes hugely to the balance of payments and international trade – and it makes huge contributions to politicians who enable it to continue doing so. It’s one big self-sustaining ecology.

The Boston Globe this week:

The United States last year provided nearly half of the weapons sold to militaries in the developing world, as major arms sales to the most unstable regions — many already engaged in conflict — grew to the highest level in eight years, new US government figures show.

According to the annual assessment, the United States supplied $8.1 billion worth of weapons to developing countries in 2005 — 45.8 percent of the total and far more than second-ranked Russia with 15 percent and Britain with a little more than 13 percent.

Arms control specialists said the figures underscore how the largely unchecked arms trade to the developing world has become a major staple of the American weapons industry, even though introducing many of the weapons risks fueling conflicts rather than aiding long-term US interests.

The report was compiled by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.

Yippee for free markets, and fuck the rest of the world!

That we’re now seeing this kind of defence tech used against our own Western civilian populations when we question these corrupt relationships between the free market and repression should come as no surprise. That it should be extended to even the least threatening critics of of the free market of any kind does not surprise, not at all – it’s all done pour encourager les autres.

Those of us who were against the Iraq invasion and occupation from the start, who pointed out the corruption and futility of that particular exercise in imperial adventure by the military-oil-industrial combine; we were denounced as a bunch of shrill anarchists. But we were right. Those of us who’ve been warning for years about the potential for state repression by that same combine are right too, as is now becoming clear.

But it gives no pleasure at all to be able to say ‘we told you so’.

Read more: Tasers, Stingers, Crowd control, Torture equipment, Police, State repression.

Bwahahaha! Hoist. By. Own. Petard

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Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings:

John Hinderaker: Placing Children At Risk?

by hilzoy

John Hinderaker suggests that Democrats covered up Congressman Mark Foley’s boy problem, a charge for which there is no evidence. One wonders, though, whether that is exactly what John Hinderaker did.

How did the email and instant messages that triggered the scandal come to light? It has been reported that at least one set of emails became public after they were sent to “a registered Republican” — a phrase that surely describes John Hinderaker. But when did that happen? The messages themselves are three years old. When did John Hinderaker find out about them? Did he sit on them for a while, in order to prevent them from coming out in time to influence the Presidential election, or to preserve a Republican Congressional majority?

I don’t know the answers to these questions, but they are important and need to be answered. If John Hinderaker has known for some time about Foley’s transgressions but failed to act until now, he endangered more boys–and why? Solely to advance his partisan political interests.

One would hope that the Ethics Committee will subpoena the reporters who broke the Foley story to find out where they got their information, and when. The question to be answered is, What did John Hinderaker know, and when did he know it?

Is it possible that John Hinderaker deliberately delayed disclosure of Foley’s transgressions, thereby endangering the security of current Congressional pages and other teenage boys, solely to advance the political interests of his allies? One would certainly hope not. But it is obviously a question that needs to be investigated and answered.

I also wonder: could John Hinderaker be the anthrax killer? Has he ever denied it, or agreed to take a polygraph? I don’t know the answers to these questions, but they are important. Inquiring minds would like to know the answers.

Some might also say that John Hinderaker is a torture-loving disgrace to our common humanity and flays kittens for sport. I couldn’t possibly comment.

Read more: Wingnuttia, Foleygate, Blogs, Snark

Torture A-OK – Official


“My husband doesn’t wish he was Jack Bauer.
He wishes I was Jack Bauer.”

Washington Post:

“…the administration no longer conceals what it wants. It wants authorization for the CIA to hide detainees in overseas prisons where even the International Committee of the Red Cross won’t have access. It wants permission to interrogate those detainees with abusive practices that in the past have included induced hypothermia and “waterboarding,” or simulated drowning. And it wants the right to try such detainees, and perhaps sentence them to death, on the basis of evidence that the defendants cannot see and that may have been extracted during those abusive interrogation sessions.

Something I’ve been wondering: has this administration started issuing its smaller fry, the apparatchiks, spies and torturers, with cyanide pills yet? It might be wise to do so.

US torture protege Augusto Pinochet, now in his dotage, had his immunity from prosecution removed this week. Old as he is, he’ll face the music in some way for what he did in Chile. I’ve no doubt Bush & Cheney didn’t miss that report.

CIA interrogators are having their indemnity insurance paid by the government because they’ll need their own private lawyers when they’re put on trial; the US Justice department (prop. A. Gonzales) won’t be able to defend them. Why? Because its senior lawyers’ll be in the dock too.

It’s plain that Bushco and everyone associated with them know damned well that a reckoning is coming, so they’re making preparations. This frantic strong-arming of torture legislation through Congress is one of them. the WH desperately trying to stave off the evil day when nemesis calls by changing the law so that what they’ve done and what they continue to do is legal.

They know they won’t get away with that sort of thing for much longer, but desperation is the spur for everything they do now and so the steps they have to take get more and more outrageous and unconstitutional. It has to come to a crisis.

They must be feeling this desperation inside the beltway. I expect, too, that Ken Lay’s recent sudden death gave many in DC Republican circles pause to reconsider their position should the whole Republican edifice, as it must eventually from its own corrupt momentum, come tumbling down.

I wonder which eventuality has the members of this administration lying awake fretting at night – the prospect of a very public trial, or dying painlessly and thus helping Bush escape justice?

Bush, Cheney, Addington, Yoo and Gonzales – who as we know are pure sociopaths – never worry at all, but there are many others in the administration, government and armed forces, Good Germans all, who went along with them through sheer expedience and self-interest. Now they’re scared.

It’s their fear and desperation that’s pushing Bush & Cheney to these extremes.

Well, that and Bush and Cheney’s sick fixation with homoerotic sexual violence and their untrammelled lust for power.

Read more: Torture, Geneva Coventions, International law, Bush, Cheney, US Congress, CIA

You Think It Can’t Get Worse…

…then it does.

BEIJI, Iraq – The U.S. Army will investigate charges that American soldiers were involved in the killings of four Iraqi relatives, including a woman who had been raped, military officials said Friday.

Note the passive construction ‘ a woman who had been raped’ – how they delicately dance around the idea of who actually did it, as though the rape just sort of did itself. It’s the US soldiers who allegedly raped her – one has admitted it – but you’d never know that the way the AP writes about it.

The accused belong to the same batallion as the those two who were kidnapped, tortured and beheaded so recently and this rape and murder seems to have taken place before that, which sheds a different light entirely on the latter. Were the kidnappings revenge for the rape and murder? Mistaken identity, or would any soldier do?

It might be so but no doubt more info will come to light soon enough, since one of the military is outraged enough to leak details like this to the AP:

[…]

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said he had no additional details on the incident but added that the military routinely investigates all allegations of misconduct.

However, a U.S. official close to the investigation said at least one of the soldiers, all assigned to the 502nd Infantry Regiment, has admitted his role and been arrested. Two soldiers from the same regiment were slain this month when they were kidnapped at a checkpoint near Youssifiyah.

The official told the AP the accused soldiers were from the same platoon as the two slain soldiers. The military has said one and possibly both of the slain soldiers were tortured and beheaded.

The official said the mutilation of the slain soldiers stirred feelings of guilt and led at least one of them to reveal the rape-slaying on June 22.

Read whole story

[My emphasis] Weren’t the murdered soldiers also castrated? I seem to remember hearing that at some point on the BBC. That would seem to support the theory these two events might be connected.

Defence lawyer at Guantanamo

The Talking Dog has an interview with Joshua Dratel, defence lawyer for David Hicks, an Australian citizen held at Guantanamo Bay. The interview had some interesting nuggets in it:

Talking Dog: Any reason why Mr. Lindh was charged with a crime, whereas, for example, Yasir Hamdi, also a citizen, or Hicks, were denoted “enemy combatants” and not charged, while Zaccarias Moussaoui WAS charged? Has any of this ever been explained?

Joshua Dratel: It seems that the only “overt distinction” is that by original design, citizens are not eligible for the military commissions. Of course, they never made a distinction there in the case of Moussaoui– his case seemed to be the product of a debate betweeh the Departments of Justice and Defense as to which should prosecute him, and at that time, the criminal justice people prevailed. They have not, apparently, prevailed since.

In addition to Jose Padilla, as citizen unlawful combatants, a man named Al-Mari is still being detained in a brig in South Carolina; he’s represented by Larry Lusberg of the Gibbons firm in New Jersey. That case is completely off the radar.

[…]

Talking Dog: Can you briefly summarize what you in particular find unfair about the military commission process at Guantanimo?

Joshua Dratel: Basically, there are no rules. The Uniform Code of Military Justice, which governs court-martials — that’s been thrown out. No standards at all. Total arbitrariness. No efforts at anything resembling fairness. Let’s start with evidence and proof. People don’t know this, of course. The government’s “proof” consists entirely of interrogators reading from reports of their interrogations– without any basis to challenge the underlying accounts of witnesses, such as the witnesses themselves (who have frequently been shipped out of Guantanamo) or their interpreters, or the conditions under which the statements were taken, which were frequently, to put it politely, “coercive.” Just statements from the detainees themselves– regardless of whether obtained from abuse, or coercion, even rising to torture. In the commissions, you simply can’t challenge them– you don’t have access to the witnesses.