Prisoners forced to take turns sleeping (Haiti)

[struggle4progress]

By Joseph Guyler Delva in Port-Au-Prince
January 06, 2007 08:13am

HAITI'S prisons have grown so crowded prisoners must take turns sleeping as police step up arrests of alleged gangsters blamed for a wave of violence and kidnappings, government and human rights officials said today.

"We're facing a critical situation with our prisons which have no more room to hold prisoners," Haiti's Secretary of State for Public Safety Eucher Luc Joseph said.

The national penitentiary in the capital, Port-au-Prince, was built to hold 800 prisoners and now houses over 2000.

"We're experiencing the same situation in all the other prisons and police custodies around the country," Mr Joseph said ... http://www.news.com.au/perthnow/story/0,21598,21018846-5005361,00.html

You, too, can enjoy a glorious new society after the US deposes your elected president ...

[Judi Lynn]

1. Who on earth would have EVER expect to read something like this?

From the article (had to hear it from Perth,Aus., or we never WOULD have known!):

The US has also increased the number of Haitian criminals deported to their homeland to about 100 a month, from 25. Haitian officials said many of those deportees have long criminal records and will be held even though they have not been charged with crimes in Haiti and have already served their sentences in the US.

"We have to detain those deportees because they pose a threat to the country's national security," said Mr Joseph.

In many prisons, detainees sleep in turn on the floor, live in inhumane conditions and are deprived of adequate medical care, said Renan Hedouville, head of the Haitian Lawyers Committee for Human Rights.

"Some prisoners have to stand up, while others sleep for one or two hours before giving up their place to other inmates," Mr Hedouville said.

"The living conditions in those prisons are in total violation of the principles of human rights."
(snip)

Yeah, _Bush wants Haitians who've been in jail for any reason, and served their sentences to be deported. I wonder how many of his Cuban "exiles" he is sending back? We all know he is refusing to deport a mass murderer to Venezuela, Luis Posada Carriles.

Since Haiti is so little, and so poor, it's doubtful any nation will take pity and try to help. It has been their fate to be punished since the day the slaves overthrew their French "owners"
(or vicious lunatics who believed you can own people). Instead of finding freedom, and independence, they found they had gained new enemies. tje U.S. being their largest, most threatening one.

All they have to do is work for pennies a day, refuse to try to help themselves above squalor and suffering, and bow and scrape for the sweatshop owners, if they don't want things to steadily get worse.

[struggle4progress]

2. Grand jury calls Posada's associates as witnesses

Two supporters of detained Cuban exile militant Luis Posada Carriles now face a dilemma: whether to testify against their friend in a criminal grand jury proceeding.
BY ALFONSO CHARDY AND JAY WEAVER
[e-mail]

... Santiago Alvarez and Osvaldo Mitat, both in their 60s, were transferred in December from the Miami Federal Detention Center to a jail in El Paso to testify Thursday before the grand jury, a lawyer for Alvarez confirmed Thursday.

The subpoenas were issued as Justice Department prosecutors pursue two investigations into Posada's past -- one in El Paso dealing with the perjury question and the other in Newark, N.J., probing the former CIA-trained explosives expert's alleged role in the bombing of Cuban tourist sites in 1997 ...

Posada, 78, has told U.S. immigration authorities that he entered the United States at the Texas-Mexico border in March 2005. But a key FBI informant in the weapons case, Gilberto Abascal, contradicted Posada's account. Abascal, 41, told authorities that a shrimping vessel crewed by Alvarez, Mitat and three others -- including Abascal -- transported Posada from a Mexican island, Isla Mujeres, to the United States.

But in December 2005 Abascal told The Miami Herald that Posada was not on the boat -- only to assert in a subsequent interview in April 2006 that he was ...

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/16387102.htm

Justice looks like it's deliberately botching this one ...

[Say_What]

3. How Authentic Journalists Caught an International Terrorist in Mexico

<clips>

The Daily Por Esto! Found Posada Carriles on Isla Mujeres but George W. Bush Is Trying to Set Him Free in Miami

By Al Giordano
Special to The Narco News Bulletin

June 21, 2005

“He who protects a terrorist is a terrorist”

-George W. Bush

Mérida, Yucatán, June 2005: On Mexico’s Caribbean island of Isla Mujeres, on March 14, Authentic Journalist Yolanda Gutiérrez Sagrero and photojournalist Mario Alonzo pulled the first threads on a curtain that now disintegrates in tatters. Sunlight now shines upon the darkest recesses and hypocrisies of George W. Bush’s so-called “War on Terrorism,” and thus, Bush’s terror war is in doubt as never before.

Gutiérrez, Alonzo, and their colleagues at Mexico’s daily Por Esto! tugged on the threads and found América’s most-wanted fugitive behind that curtain: Luis Posada Carriles, the Cuban-born, Miami-fed, CIA-paid, confessed architect of the 1976 terrorist passenger jet bombing that killed 73 civilians, including the teenage members of Cuba’s Olympic fencing team.

Known as “the Latin American Osama bin Laden,” Posada Carriles, 77, has publicly confessed, as well, to bombings of civilian targets in tourist hotels, and additional terrorist acts. His trail of violence under a cloak of official protection goes back decades. A recent book even places him at Dealey Plaza, in Dallas, in 1963, at the hour when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated there. Whether or not he also helped kill JFK, Posada Carriles, with 40 years of collaboration with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), is not somebody that the U.S. government wants talking too much, or too honestly, or too loudly about what he’s seen and done, and with whom, and on whose authority (dad’s, Mr. President?) to the press. Read it and weep, citizens of the United States: A terrorist named Luis Posada Carriles is blackmailing your president, George W. Bush, today in order to win “political asylum.” And, so far, the cowardly Bush doesn’t have the courage to stop him.

Ever since his pardon and release from Panamanian prison in the final hours of the presidency of Mireya Moscoso in August of last year, this terrorist successfully eluded an international manhunt. He is wanted by the government of Venezuela (the country where he is a naturalized Cuban-born citizen) to face trial for the 1976 passenger jet bombing. He was free as an ocean pirate until the boat that took him to the United States washed up against the sandbars of Isla Mujeres, which, unfortunately for Posada Carriles (but fortunately for everyone else) is an isle where the flag of the Authentic Journalism renaissance waves higher than his own Jolly Roger.

http://www.narconews.com/Issue38/article1354.html


Five Men Arrived, and Six Launched Out: According to local fishermen and witnesses, the S.S. Santrina left for Miami with an extra passenger on board.
Photo: D.R. 2005 Mario Alonzo, Por Esto!