Tuesday, November 19, 2013

Gitmo, the 't' word & domestic detention - Part 2


The removal of ATSI people still appears to form the basis for the Australian legal system, well beyond the eras of (openly discussed) racist assimilation policies such as those that prompted declarations of 'terra nullius', the Stolen Generations, Forgotten Australians and the unpalatable likes of the 'White Australia Policy' - shocking white supremacist ideals evident, but not openly discussed in those clear and plain universal terms.

I wonder if it is really possible for our post-colonial society to discuss these racial issues honestly in the same un-spun terms that are used in open dialogue in the US and UK, and other countries? Really, how often does racial vilification get examined in the mainstream news - as often as it occurs in society? Probably not, and this spin-generated, linguistic forcefield can smother such unpalatable racist policy in deceptive terms, and conceal socially unacceptable consequences from the consciences of broader society's media consumers.
 
In view of Indigenous imprisonment rates that are unchecked and rising - consider:
  • the predominantly non-indigenous operations of all justice mechanisms, despite the prevalence of other cultures in prison musters  
  • the discrimination & racism evident in the resulting manner in which most (not all) of those mechanisms function
  • that the government promotes and condones, reactive and ever more punitive mandatory sentencing, regardless of statistical realities i.e. fear of crime sells news and buys votes
  • there are disproportionately heavier sentences for Indigenous youth,
  • that there are insufficient -independent- legal resources and translators available to ATSI people and that results in people 'pleading it out' when they haven't actually committed a crime.
Of course, these listed concerns are just a tiny number of those issues at play behind rocketing Indigenous imprisonment rates. I'm merely a journo, just a witness to what I see my news sources go through - but often they end up unable to explain these underlying problems to society via the media because such topics, like social justice, don't make mainstream news - they don't run. Australia’s pop media generally has no interest in publishing  news stories about human rights. This shortfall is simply another reason that deaths in custody and ‘mistreatment’ are recurrent and increasingly prevalent. 

Such Fourth Estate-based stories that focus on real issues, are the unwanted elephant in the Australian news room, which focuses predominantly on whether popstars, royals, actors, etc etc are wearing revealing clothing, having babies, and getting divorced, i.e. censorship by trivia. Keep the population dumb, dumb them down  some more, and then their opinions don’t pose any political dilemma – no disagreements, no dissent. 

This was the basis for Bernays’ public relations theories, that if the public had a single brain cell they’d be a danger not only to themselves, but to the whole public and to the function and power of the government (Propaganda, 1928, pp.9-12). Ironically, Bernays’ theory formed the basis for all PR to follow, and at least 3 wars, two massive campaigns of genocide (that's even if you exclude his marketing cigarettes to women) – so evidence would suggest that Bernays' theories were  seen as appealing to the corrupt, and to extremists. Woodrow Wilson took him on as an adviser & the tragic irony in that, is that Bernays was also employed by that "small group of dominant men" (see link) to ensure that 'the people' (the democratic, voting, public) didn't have power, or knowledge, or independent thought. In this insidious facet of government spin it is possible to perceive the inherent dangers of overly secretive government cultures. Disclosure and public right to know were democratic values, effectively, taught to disempowered publics through the incidence of increasingly monumental whistleblowing, of the grandest proportions - incomprehensible before Wikileaks & Snowden hit the news.

The Guantanamo Effect” (Stover & Fletcher, 2009) tweets I have made this year have been re-tweeted so many times over, it leads me to believe that I may not be alone in considering the text to be an exemplary and unmatched assessment of detainee human rights, with relevance to the management of most places of custody. I am also encouraged by the fact that Van Boven raised concerns of this nature in his 2004 report (hosted in full in the pages in the side bar).

I'll run some very brief passages of the Preface and Foreword of “The Guantanamo Effect” in the following posts, for the readers to view, and am hoping that they will be considered within permissible copyright limits for the purposes of education…(fingers crossed - email me if not). I plan to also look at issues raised as far back as The McGivern Report into the riot at Fremantle Prison(1988), and I'll touch on the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Theo van Boven's 4th Report (2004), and the DICWC(WA) WA Prison Torture Report submitted to the UN (Cox, 2000) which has been ferretted away by the National Library of Australia, where no man can bury it.