This is dismal stuff. Here is the US once again proudly proclaiming its exceptionalism, its ability to parley a mythical 'light on a hill' moralism into unimaginable horrors. This is from an article by Jacqueline Stevens in The Nation:
"If you don't have enough evidence to charge someone criminally but you think he's illegal, we can make him disappear." Those chilling words were spoken by James Pendergraph, then executive director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) Office of State and Local Coordination, at a conference of police and sheriffs in August 2008. Also present was Amnesty International's Sarnata Reynolds, who wrote about the incident in the 2009 report "Jailed Without Justice" and said in an interview, "It was almost surreal being there, particularly being someone from an organization that has worked on disappearances for decades in other countries. I couldn't believe he would say it so boldly, as though it weren't anything wrong."Here's a sample case covered by this article:
In late October 2008, Mark Lyttle, then 31, was held in the Cary office for several hours. Lyttle was born in North Carolina, and the FBI file ICE had obtained on him indicated he was a US citizen. Lyttle used his time in the holding tank attempting to persuade the agents who had plucked him out of the medical misdemeanor section of a nearby prison, where he had been held for seventy-three days, not to follow through on the Cary office's earlier decision to ship him to Mexico. Lyttle is cognitively disabled, has bipolar disorder, speaks no Spanish and has no Mexican relatives. In response to his entreaties, a Cary agent "told me to tell it to the judge," Lyttle said. But Lyttle's charging document from the Cary office includes a box checked next to the boilerplate prohibition: "You may not request a review of this determination by an immigration judge."Go read the whole sordid, disgusting thing.
Lyttle made enough of a fuss at the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia, that the agents there arranged for him to appear before a judge. But the checked box in the Cary paperwork meant he never heard from the nonprofit Legal Orientation Program attorneys who might have picked up on his situation. William Cassidy, a former ICE prosecutor working for the Executive Office of Immigration Review, ignored Lyttle's pleas and in his capacity as immigration judge signed Lyttle's removal order. According to Lyttle, Cassidy said he had to go by the sworn statements of the ICE officers.
Meanwhile, Lyttle's mother, Jeanne, and his brothers, including two in the Army, were frantically searching for him, even checking the obituaries. They were trying to find Lyttle in the North Carolina prison system, but the trail went cold after he was transferred to ICE custody. Jeanne said, "David showed me the Manila envelope [he sent to the prison]--'Refused'--and we thought Mark had refused it." Jeanne was crying. "We kept trying to find out where he was." It never crossed their minds that Mark might be spending Christmas in a shelter for los deportados on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande.
So much for Obama's "change you can believe in" and the claim of "transparency" in government. The Czar's Okhrana would be comfortable and happy in modern America.
This didn't start under Obama. It didn't even start under George Bush. This corruption has deep roots in an America that refuses to honestly look at itself in the mirror. These horror stories have deep roots. A few things that come off the top of my head:
- The CIA doing drug experiments on unsuspecting individuals, killing some.
- The US Oak Ridge "experiments" on terminally ill cancer patients who were told they were being given treatment for their disease but in fact were being given various levels of lethal radiation dosages so that government "scientists" who record how long it took to die from the new atomic weapons.
- The infamous "Tuskegee experiments".
- Biological warfare "experiments" carried out secretly over US cities, including New York and San Francisco.
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