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Tag: miami herald
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis

Miami Paper Blasts DeSantis Over Ideological Policing Of Colleges

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

On June 22, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law a Republican-sponsored bill that calls for standards of "intellectual diversity" to be enforced on college campuses in the Sunshine State. But the Miami Herald''s editorial board, in a scathing editorial published on June 24, emphasizes that the law isn't about promoting free thought at colleges and universities but rather, is an effort to bully and intimidate political viewpoints that DeSantis and his Republican allies in the Florida Legislature disagree with.

"The state government wants to know what political ideologies and beliefs university professors hold, and it's giving the green light for students to secretly record lessons to later use what instructors say against them," the editorial explains. "All of that is being done in the name of free speech. Such twisted logic and targeting academia have been hallmarks of anti-democratic regimes. Now, they have also become the MO of Florida Republicans who passed a bill that requires public universities and colleges to survey students, faculty and staff, to ensure 'intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity' on campuses."

The Herald's editorialnotes the type of arguments that Florida Republicans have used in favor of the new law. According to the law's supporters, college campuses in Florida have become "socialism factories" designed for "indoctrination" of students.

The Herald's editorial board writes, "Don't worry, bill sponsors say, these surveys won't be used against college professors or to threaten their employment, even though there's nothing in House Bill 233 that guarantees that, or that survey responses will remain anonymous. University budget cuts might be looming if our supreme leaders — er — lawmakers don't like what the survey results show, bill sponsor Sen. Ray Rodrigues and DeSantis suggested Tuesday."

According to the Herald's editorial, HB 233 is designed to do the exact opposite of promoting "intellectual diversity" on college campuses.

"College professors have got to be seeing the writing on the wall," the Herald's editorial warns. "We wouldn't be surprised if they fudged their survey responses out of fear of retaliation or that their institution will lose funding for being deemed too liberal. That's especially true for professors teaching liberal-arts degrees that conservatives consider a waste of time and were trying to make ineligible for full Bright Futures scholarship funding. Luckily, that proposal failed during this year's legislative session after student backlash."

History repeats itself, and the Herald's editorial recalls that during the 1950s, college professors were a favorite target of far-right Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin and his Cold War witch hunt.

"University professors were a target of the post-war Red Scare," the Herald's editorial notes. "In 1949, the National Council for American Education published a booklet called 'Red-Ucators at Harvard,' listing professors deemed subversive. In 1954, Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy...sought to flush out communists among educators and questioned professors accused of having ties to the Communist Party. Intellectual diversity should be something every university strives for, but we know the results of government officials policing educators: paranoia, persecution and the opposite of the free speech Republicans say they want to protect."

Judge: Labor Secretary Acosta Broke Law In Pedophile Plea Deal

Judge: Labor Secretary Acosta Broke Law In Pedophile Plea Deal

On Thursday, a federal judge ruled that Trump’s secretary of labor, Alex Acosta, violated the law when he facilitated a lenient plea deal for a serial child sexual predator. But as of now, Trump isn’t planning to fire Acosta. White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said Trump is “looking into” the matter and that is “not aware of any changes” in Trump’s confidence in Acosta.

The ruling stems from a 2007 plea deal that Acosta, then a U.S. attorney, struck with Jeffrey Epstein, a Florida billionaire accused of molesting — and in at least one case, raping — more than 80 young women and underage girls. The case received renewed attention after a blockbuster investigation by the Miami Herald late last year uncovered the extent to which Acosta bent over backward to go easy on a child molester.

Under the terms of the deal Acosta negotiated, Epstein served only 13 months in county jail on two reduced charges of soliciting prostitution.

Now, as head of the Labor Department, Acosta is in charge of U.S. policy regarding sex trafficking.

District Judge Kenneth A. Marra ruled Acosta violated the Crime Victims’ Rights Act, a law giving victims the right to know about significant events in their cases. While Acosta and his team spent hours and hours working on the plea deal with Epstein, he kept Epstein’s victims in the dark. According to the judge, Acosta and his fellow prosecutors tried “to conceal the existence” of the plea deal “and mislead the victims to believe that federal prosecution was still a possibility.”

While the case and allegations are horrific, Trump has long known Epstein and had nothing but wonderful things to say about him in the past.

In 2002, Trump called Epstein “terrific guy,” and “a lot of fun to be with.”

“It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side,” Trump added.

Trump’s refusal to fire Acosta for being lenient on a child rapist fits a disturbing pattern regarding Trump’s view of women survivors of sexual abuse. Trump enthusiastically embraced Roy Moore in a 2017 Senate race, even after Moore was credibly accused of being a child predator. The following year, Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court, and defended him after credible allegations surfaced that he once attempted to rape someone at a high school party.

Then again, Trump himself bragged about being a serial sexual predator, laughing about “grabbing women by the pussy” and getting away with it.

After the Miami Herald investigation, more than a dozen lawmakers sent a letter to the Department of Justice demanding an investigation into the plea deal. Earlier this month, the department opened an investigation, but it will be limited in scope and led by the Office of Professional Responsibility. The Washington Post notes that the investigation may drag on so long that Alex Acosta may not be in government service by the time it concludes.

But given Trump’s reluctance to stand up for the victims of sexual exploitation, it looks like Acosta could stay in place for quite some time.

Published with permission of The American Independent.

‘Civilized’ Nation Can’t Justify Torture

‘Civilized’ Nation Can’t Justify Torture

Meantime, back at Guantanamo …

Chances are you haven’t thought of that American gulag — or, for that matter, of “extraordinary renditions,” CIA black sites and torture — for a long time.

Not everyone has the luxury of forgetting. In the past few days, some compelling reportage has reminded us of that.

In the Miami Herald, we met 48-year-old Mustafa al Hawsawi, a Gitmo detainee who was scheduled for rectal surgery to repair damage done when, his lawyer says, he was sodomized by his captors 10 years ago. As reporter Carol Rosenberg explains, this “sodomy” was, in fact, a “quasi medical” process of “rectal rehydration” and “rectal re-feeding,” i.e., providing nourishment through a tube in the rectum.

The lawyer says this was a means of punishment. It left Hawsawi with what’s called a rectal prolapse. He has to manually push tissue back up into his anus every time he defecates. He has bled from the injury for 10 years.

Hawsawi, you should know, faces the death penalty for his alleged part in the Sept. 11 attacks that took nearly 3,000 lives. And maybe you will find that sufficient to insulate you from feeling, well, anything at his plight.

One wonders what you would make, then, of two New York Times reports documenting how torture, both at Gitmo and at CIA black sites around the world, destroyed the mental health of numerous detainees, many of whom turned out to be innocent of terrorism. Reporters James Risen, Matt Apuzzo and Sheri Fink introduce us to men who were slammed into walls and had foreign objects shoved into their rectums, who were beaten, kept awake, housed in never-ending darkness or light, forced into stress positions, subjected to nonstop music at ear-splitting levels, injected with drugs, menaced by dogs, locked in boxes the size of coffins and laid out shackled and nude on tarps as gallons of ice cold water were poured down on them to simulate drowning. One prisoner described being used as a human mop, dragged through his own urine.

Now, former prisoner Suleiman Abdullah Salim struggles with depression and PTSD. He was released five years after he fell into U.S. custody when it was determined he posed no threat.

Majid Mokhtar Sasy al-Maghrebi will fly into a rage at the sound of music from a passing car. It takes him back to the prison where music was used to torture him.

Hussein al-Marfadi has a permanent headache. Lutfi bin Ali has a recurrent nightmare of suffocating at the bottom of a well. Younous Chekkouri hates to go outside because people in the crowd turn into guards from Gitmo.

For at least one prisoner, what made all this worse is that it was America doing it to him. America, the world champion of human rights. America, the nation of laws.

“It is very, very scary when you are tortured by someone who doesn’t believe in torture,” said Ahmed Errachidi. “You lose faith in everything.” He was released without charges after five years.

Civilization is a word we use for the rules we impose upon ourselves to protect against our most brutish instincts. And America is fond of thinking itself the most civilized of nations, especially as compared with those countries that breathe terror like air.

When the history of this epoch is written, it will tell how our civilization, our righteousness, came under assault by an army of ragtag barbarians one sparkling September morning. It will tell how we swore to defend all that made us what we were.

But these reports remind us how readily we gave it all away.

Leonard Pitts is a columnist for The Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, Fla., 33132. Readers may contact him via e-mail atlpitts@miamiherald.com.

Photo The front gate of Camp Delta is shown at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Station in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba in this September 4, 2007 file photo. REUTERS/Joe Skipper/Files

Judge Says United States Doesn’t Have To Reveal Cost Of Guantanamo’s Secret Camp 7

Judge Says United States Doesn’t Have To Reveal Cost Of Guantanamo’s Secret Camp 7

By Mark Seibel, McClatchy Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — A federal judge agreed Thursday that the Pentagon does not have to reveal how much was paid to build the crumbling, secret Camp 7 at the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center, rejecting a Miami Herald bid to make the number public.

U.S. District Judge Berryl Howell in Washington, D.C., said that the document that contained the figure had been properly classified and denied a request from The Herald‘s Carol Rosenberg that it be made public.

In a making her decision, Howell relied on a secret filing from the Defense Department that neither Rosenberg nor her attorneys were allowed to see.

Camp 7 is the secret prison facility at Guantanamo where alleged Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and 14 other former CIA captives called “high value detainees” are held.

Rosenberg sued the Department of Defense in October, alleging that the Pentagon had acted improperly when it withheld the document, saying it contained information “regarding intelligence activities, sources, or methods.”

In her suit, Rosenberg said the cost of building Camp 7 was of compelling public interest because the U.S. Southern Command had sought $69 million for a replacement because the current facility is in danger of collapsing. The House Armed Services Committee approved the expenditure, but the Senate has yet to approve the proposal and it is thought unlikely that it will.

Rosenberg had first sought the cost of Camp 7 in an April 2009 Freedom of Information Act filing as part of her reporting on the amount of money the U.S. spends to operate the detention center for terrorist suspects, which currently holds 149 men, most of whom have been cleared for transfer to other countries.

Since Rosenberg began her reporting, members of Congress have offered varying estimates on the cost of the prison facility, with Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, saying last year that the U.S. currently is spending $2.7 million per inmate to operate the prison. In a story in 2011, Rosenberg estimated the cost at $800,000 per inmate a year.

Rosenberg said she was disappointed in the judge’s decision. “It seems odd to me that after the U.S. Army furnished Congress with the cost of a new Camp 7, we the people can’t know what we paid for the old one,” she said.

AFP Photo/Mladen Antonov

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