Click the flash player below to listen to or the mic to download an mp3 copy of this BA Radio commentary.
Constitutionality aside, Barack Obama's preventive detention proposal is "damn near criminally irresponsible" and "like lighting a match in a room full of gasoline." The United States was founded on the principle that "lesser" or "dangerous" peoples should be "detained" for the good of the nation - on reservations or in slavery. Were it not for "rampant race hatred directed against Arabs and spilling over to all Muslims...there would be no serious discussion of preventive detention in the United States, today." The nation's first Black president is provoking a racial whirlwind.
Obama Out-Bushes Bush on Preventive Detention
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
“Calling for preventive detention in the United States is like lighting a match in a room full of gasoline.”
If George Bush had had the gall to propose changing the laws of the United States to allow people to be detained for long periods without even the intention of putting them on trial, progressives across the nation would be howling that the fascist hordes were at the gates. And they would be right. Even the do-nothing, scared-of-nearly-everything Congressional Black Caucus would be up in arms. George Bush and Dick Cheney empowered to imprison people without trial? Progressives everywhere would be justified in crying out against the threat to civilization as we know it. But when Barack Obama last week proposed the very same thing , preventive detention without trial, there was relative silence. People pretended it was just another Wednesday. The best thing that can be said about President Obama’s preventive detention remarks is that they are damn near criminally irresponsible. Calling for preventive detention in the United States is like lighting a match in a room full of gasoline. No nation in the industrial world has a history more entwined with detention of whole classes of people, than the U.S. More Americans are incarcerated than any other inhabitants of the planet – in raw numbers, and as a percentage of population. African Americans alone make up one out of every eight prisoners on Earth, as a direct result of decades of deliberate public policy. Japanese Americans were detained for no crime but their ethnicity. Native Americans – those that were not killed outright – were forcibly “detained” on reservations that were in fact open-air prisons. Slavery was the greatest detention of all – a lifetime of house or field arrest, at hard labor, with no prospect of escape for oneself or one’s children – detention without trial for centuries.
“Slavery was the greatest detention of all.”
It was the deeply ingrained belief among whites in the necessity of lifetime Black detention under slavery that conditioned Americans to tolerating – or demanding – the harshest criminal justice system in the developed world. Race saturates the American criminal justice conversation – so much so, that one’s race has more impact than one’s crime on whether or not one is ultimately detained in a U.S. prison. Were it not for rampant race hatred directed against Arabs and spilling over to all Muslims, and to those who are mistaken for Muslims, there would be no serious discussion of preventive detention in the United States, today. We would not have witnessed the spectacle of almost the entire U.S. Senate figuratively jumping on top of tables, screaming in terror at the prospect of a few Guantanamo Bay inmates being transferred to maximum security prisons in their states. These senators were exhibiting a kind of primal fear that is both irrational and racist in nature – and a lot scarier than any combination of detainees pacing in a cell. This is America, land of everlasting detention, and preventive execution – where evidence has never been necessary. Is President Obama aware of the racial whirlwind that he is unleashing with his talk of preventive detention? Or does he care? On thing is certain: on this issue, Obama has proven himself to be worse than George Bush.
Mutulu Shakur passed away just seven months after being paroled. Like other political prisoners he was released only when he was terminally ill. The US has more political prisoners and incarcerates…
The Caribbean Community (CARICOM) has succumbed to US pressure and endorsed a new invasion of Haiti.
Kamala Harris can be the object of derision for her word salads and oddly nervous laughter. But she plays an important role in promoting US imperialism and the cynical politics of representation.
Joseph McCarthy carried out his red scare with the help of establishment media like the New York Times. Its recent Sinophobic screeds follow the Biden administration narrative and are consistent with…
Glen Ford explained the end of affirmative action in 2013, CIA experiments on indigenous children and Black prisoners, and the Peoples' Senate builds its formation.
