No (photo: Steven DePaulo / flickr)

By Bill Fisher

Republicans on cable news have been hyperventilating about the White House leaking whistleblower information that makes the president look good before the election. Maybe so, maybe no.

But whistleblowers’ information can work two ways. More often than not, news that ought to be disclosed is suppressed by people who worry that it will make the president look bad. And those self-appointed censors — including high-ranking military officers – need to be held accountable for spewing a barf of lies among the American people.

The practice is known as Propaganda. No, not Public Diplomacy. Propaganda – in which despite the Obama Administration’s pledge of openness and accountability – the public is fed a menu of lies and half-truths designed to morph a bad war into a slightly less bad war, or boast about “victories” in what is becoming a “good war.”

Such was the case when the American general who led a NATO training mission in Afghanistan opposed an investigation into corruption and “Auschwitz-like” conditions at a US-funded hospital in Kabul for political reasons, US military officers told the House of Representatives Committee on Government Oversight last week.

According to an active-duty witness, a three-star general, Lieutenant General William Caldwell, who headed the training mission in Afghanistan, forced him to do a 180 on a request for an inspector general’s investigation into the Dawood Khan national military hospital in Kabul.

This signature hospital, funded by the US and dedicated to caring for wounded Afghan soldiers, is entirely run by and supposedly for the Afghan military.

When your members of Congress return from Afghanistan and tell you we’re winning the war, losing it, or doing something in the middle, the chances are they aren’t getting to see much of the war at all. What they’re seeing is what senior officers are describing as a “dog and pony show.”

In the case of the Dawood Khan Hospital, your Congress people – and senior officers assigned to inspect the facility – will get to see the part of the hospital reserved for the favoring eyes of VIPs.

But what was actually seen in an inspection by a retired Air Force surgeon and other officers will curl your toes.

For example, a witness before the House Committee on Oversight,  retired colonel Schuyler Geller, a command surgeon attached to the training mission, charged poor patient treatment and corruption. He also confirmed that Gen. Caldwell rejected an inspector general’s investigation and had partisan motives in postponing any investigation until after the 2010 election.

Geller told the hearing that when military officials came to visit the hospital they got a “dog and pony show” that covered up the abuse.

What was actually seen by those who ducked the dog and pony show was described by another high-ranking officer, Col. Mark F. Fassl.

At the hearing, he and other officers described the extent of human suffering at the hospital, where the lack of care forced families of soldiers to empty “vats of blood draining from their wounds.”

When asked to describe the scene at the hospital, Fassl said i”t lacked basic facilities.” Hygiene was “poor and the hospital had no soap, no heat and no means to boil water”, he said.

“There were open vats of blood draining out of soldiers’ wounds, there were feces on the floor. There were many family members taking care of their loved ones. The family members were emptying these vats of blood to help their patients out.”

Fassl said: “When I think about what we were trying to do in Afghanistan, which is build the army and police corps, how could we allow this type of suffering to go on when we should be showing the Afghan citizens that their soldiers matter?”

The article below originally appeared in the pages of Prism Magazine.

The year is 2003. In Saudi Arabia, the semester at the university American-born Ahmed Abu-Ali is attending in Medina is coming to an end. It’s exam time. Soon, he’ll be on a jet headed for his family’s home in Falls Church, Virginia.

Saudi Security Forces (Al Jazeera English / Flickr)

But 23-year-old Abu-Ali never makes it to the airport. Or anywhere close. Instead he is arrested by Saudi security services “for questioning,” and imprisoned. And that’s where he would stay for the next twenty months. With no lawyer and no charge against him.

And where, Abu-Ali charges, he was routinely tortured, including the occasion when a “confession” was squeezed from him under extreme duress. It was a “confession” of a conspiracy to organize an Al Qaeda cell in the US, and to use guns or a suicide mission to kill the president of the United States.

At the same time, Abu-Ali’s parents, naturalized US citizens living in Northern Virginia, find themselves crazed by the frustration of effectively having their son “disappeared” – a victim of extraordinary rendition in plain sight — and being unable to get a coherent story from either the Saudis, who are holding him, or the US, which they strongly suspect is apparently managing his incarceration.

Finally, in August 2004, after the FBI executed a search warrant on their home, Abu-Ali’s parents’ frustration reached a boiling point. They filed a habeas corpus lawsuit in the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia, seeking a legal justification of Abu-Ali’s detention, and his ultimate release.

The legal team for the habeas action included high-profile constitutional rights scholar, Georgetown University law professor David Cole and other prominent civil rights lawyers, including Morton Sklar.

To the pitifully few who have followed him over the years, Khaled El-Masri is the man who arguably holds the world’s record of unsuccessful attempts to get his “day in court.”  He has knocked on courtroom doors all over the US and some overseas venues as well, and has each time been rebuffed.

El-Masri with his children. Photo by Joy Garnett.

This Wednesday he will try one more time. He will pursue Justice in the Grand Chamber of the European Court, which will hold a hearing on May 16, 2012. At the last hearing of this case, Macedonia entered an unbroken series of denials – no, it did not collude with the CIA to kidnap El-Masri from Germany. No, it did not seize his passport and force him to spend a month in a Macedonian hotel, interrogated without a lawyer, without contact with his family, and without the foggiest idea of why he was being held.

What El-Masri is seeking from the Macedonians is a fullblown investigation into his kidnapping and abuse. And while he is waiting, there are grim signs that El-Masri, the human being, is continuing his descent into chaos and confusion.

But even Macedonia’s denials – whether true or not – don’t begin to paint even a remotely accurate picture of what has happened to this Lebanese-born German citizen. To understand how he has come to where he has come to, it’s necessary to go back in history to a time when the never-ending black clouds began to gather over El-Masri’s head.

Rewind to 2004:

The Open Society Justice Initiative, (OSJI), which is El-Masri’s counsel for the Macedonia case, charges that the Macedonians stopped him at the border, confiscated his passport and other papers, and held him without charge for 23 days, accusing him of being a member of Al-Qaida.

They then drove him to the capitol’s Skopje airport and handed him to a  CIA rendition team who flew El-Masri to Kabul as part of the U.S.  “Extraordinary Rendition” program, where he was detained for four  months. The government of Macedonia denies any involvement in his  abduction.

Every attempt at justice has failed. El-Masri seeks an investigation to discover the truth.

The following is based on notes prepared by The Open Society Justice Initiative:

The time is late Autumn 2006. A middle-aged African American inmate sits in the jail cell in Arizona he has occupied for 24 years.

He has little reason to hope he’ll ever see the outside of this prison again – except for one possibly monumental new development – the perfection of a new approach to DNA testing that was not available at the time of his conviction.

He has requested the DNA tests and has heard rumors that such advanced testing is being done in his case – but he’s heard all the jailhouse rumors before and tends to minimize their value.

According to the Innocence Project, On June 22, 1981, Catherine Schilling, a 21-year-old Georgetown University student, was found raped and murdered in Rock Creek Park in Washington, D.C. She was nude and had been shot five times in the head.

The Project reports that on July 20, 1981, Gates, 30, “was arrested for failing to appear in court on an unrelated case. Gates, who had been arrested six times for robbery and assault between 1980 and 1981, gave up a hair sample as part of a processing procedure.”

It’s what was done and said about hair samples and other forensics in the years ahead that would reveal enough lying and corruption to blow the lid off the so-called state of the art FBI Laboratory and force it to forfeit its reputation as the gold standard among forensic crime labs.

The Innocence Project reports that Gates was charged with the rape and murder after a police informant, Gerald Mack Smith, claimed that he and Gates were drinking in the park when Gates said he wanted to rob the victim, but when she resisted, he killed her.”

The Project added, “Smith later picked out Gates’ photo. He was paid $50 for the initial tip and $250 for picking out the photograph. In all, Smith would be paid $1,300 for his help on the case.”

Trial records and memoranda to this reporter from trial observers at Gates’ trial in 1982, reveal that key testimony came from FBI forensic analyst Michael Malone who said that Gates’ pubic hairs were “microscopically indistinguishable” from hairs found on the victim’s body.

On September 16, 1982, Gates was convicted. He was sentenced to 20 years to life in prison.

In 1997, a scathing internal review of the FBI laboratory was conducted by the DOJ Inspector General, who found that Malone and other analysts made false reports on cases across the country and performed inaccurate laboratory tests.

In January 2002, the U.S. Justice Department sent a letter to prosecutors in the case, informing them that Malone’s lab report was not supported by his notes and advising them to determine whether the defense should be notified. The defense was not notified.

In 2007, Gates sought DNA testing again. Two years later, the request was granted and the tests, conducted on a sample of biological evidence found at the District of Columbia medical examiner’s office, eliminated him as the killer and rapist.

So a grievous miscarriage of justice was arguably corrected, albeit far too late. Nonetheless, it was a bittersweet moment for Gates, who was released on December 15, 2009 – after 27 years in prison.

On December 18, 2009, the charges were dismissed. Gates was given $75 and a bus ticket to Ohio.

But the joy for the system was short-lived. The reason is that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people had possibly been unlawfully tried and sentenced partly based on the junk science that applies to all forensics, with the exception of DNA. In Gates’s case, the analysis of his single hair was the only physical evidence introduced in court, and thus probably heavily responsible for his conviction.

In the many other trials that took place across the country before, during and after the Gates case, the approach to forensics had not changed. Forensic “scientists” were still intent on stretching a flimsy spandex shield over a mountain of unscientific interpretation.

The use of unscientific evidence to obtain convictions was not limited to Malone, according to Dr. Frederic Whitehurst, considered to be the premiere whistle-blower in this whole sordid episode.

It was Whitehurst and his colleagues, lawyer David Colapinto, and the staff at the National Whistleblowers’ Center, who kept this story alive. Dr. Whitehurst originally exposed forensic flaws that may have led to many wrongful convictions, as reported in last week’s Washington Post front-page story. For years, Dr. Whitehurst has urged the Justice Department to act on systemic flaws that he witnessed while serving as the top explosives expert in the FBI Crime Lab. The NWC and Whitehurst assisted the Washington Post in its investigation into the Justice Department’s failure.

In response to the widespread outrage and condemnation of the FBI lab and Dr. Whitehurst’s original whistleblower disclosures, the Justice Department formed a Task Force to review thousands of cases impacted by Dr. Whitehurst’s allegations and to determine if any individuals were wrongly convicted.

Although the Justice Department and FBI pledged to correct their mistakes, documents obtained by the NWC through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) suggest a government attempt to suppress embarrassing mistakes at the expense of innocent defendants, lawyer Colapinto said.

As reported by the Washington Post, convicted defendants were left uninformed of serious flaws in the forensic evidence presented in their cases long after the Justice Department had confirmed that serious problems existed, according to Colapinto.

When he left the FBI Crime Lab in 1998 after 16 years of service, Dr. Whitehurst vowed to continue his work to find all the defendants harmed by the FBI’s misconduct. It was then he established the NWC’s Forensic Justice Project.

Whitehurst said, “The (Washington ) Post came to us after the Washington DC Public Defender Sandra Levick proved Gates innocent with DNA evidence. It was only after I got out of the FBI that I started researching the Malone cases. I have a tremendous file that the Post also has that will show you the over 1800 files we have identified where Malone was involved.”

Sandra Levick found out about Gates as a result of a DOJ disclosure made to Gates’ prior attorney that DOJ was looking at Gates’ case as a result of the 1997 DOJ Inspector General report on FBI Lab practices and alleged misconduct raised by Whitehurst. DOJ never provided any further notification to the prior attorney about what happened. The judge appointed the Public Defender Service and the case was assigned to Levick.

Whitehurst adds, “The (then) Inspector General, Michael Bromwich, has publicly spoken in anger that nothing was done beyond the IG report about Malone. There are potentially thousands and thousands of victims of this subjective practice.”

However, the DOJ put together a Task Force, presumably to follow up on the IG investigation into the FBI Lab practices and to investigate and identify the other inmates convicted based on inaccurate forensic evidence. That Task Force convened for eight years (between 1996-2004) and the consensus among knowledgeable observers is that is achieved zero.

The Task Force first said it would fully examine all the cases that might have been infected by false evidence. Then they came up with about 250 cases, and announced they would only do paper reviews of the cases, not going back to examining evidence. They sent these paper assessments to the prosecutors of the respective cases, leaving it at the prosecutors’ discretion as to whether to share the information with defense counsel.

As Gates’s lawyers were never notified, hundreds of other defense lawyers were passed over as well.

The Task Force also consistently ignored instructions from presiding judges to send their reports up the food chain to their superiors.

Now Sandra Levick is writing to the D.C. judges requesting the assignment of a judge to sit for whatever remaining cases there are. She wrote:

“The investigation that the United States has thus far conducted (at least insofar as is known to undersigned counsel) has not been adequate to the task. It has been too narrow in scope, too one-sided in execution, and the results have been too slow in coming. Moreover, as more fully set forth in our letter of April 14, 2010 – to which the government has never responded – the investigation and its initial results lack transparency and an opportunity for meaningful adversarial or judicial oversight.”

“First, the government’s investigation remains incomplete even by its own narrow terms. The United States reported on March 12, 2010, that there were “more than one hundred additional names.”

“Second, the United States has not responded to our request for a broader investigation to include all cases where the prosecution relied on FBI microscopic analysis of hair or fiber without DNA testing to obtain a conviction. As is more fully set forth in our letter of April 14, 2010, hair or
fiber microscopy has been proven too lacking in a scientific basis and too unreliable to support the kind of testimony that was used to convict Mr. Gates and, it is feared, many others. This is so whether or not the individual examiner’s integrity has been called into question as was Mr. Malone’s.”

“Third, the United States has not responded to our request for a more transparent investigation and a greater opportunity for adversarial testing and judicial oversight. As is discussed at length in our April 14, 2010, letter, the United States risks repeating the failures of the DOJ Task Force and the United States Attorney’s Office to apprise Mr. Gates of the results of the OIG Report by yet again resorting to a secret inquiry with respect to others who may have been affected.”

The court ordered DOJ to turn over its review of Gates case to Levick. DOJ never had transmitted the report to the prior attorney even though it had been completed many years before as part of he review of lab cases resulting from Whitehurst’s allegations about the lab.

As it turned out, DOJ had conducted a paper review of Malone’s work in the Gates case, but the review was not conclusive and no trial transcripts existed. Levick then asked the court for an order to locate the original hair evidence in Gates case for DNA testing. When the sample was later found the DNA test ruled out Gates thus contradicting Malone’s testimony that the hair evidence matched Gates. As a result, the court released Gates in late 2009.

David Colapinto, counsel to the National Whistleblowers Center, tells us that that “Malone’s misconduct in cases was known in the FBI dating back to the 1980s and the knowledge that Malone was testifying falsely in many cases became more widespread as a result of Dr. Whitehurst’s whistle blowing and the subsequent IG investigation. DOJ was certainly on notice of the magnitude of the problem by the mid-1990s.”

Of the inmates and former inmates who were convicted with unlawful evidence, it is safe to say that no one knows precisely how many there are or where they are. Nor does the government appear to have any plan to identify them and provide new trials or rehearings. Some doubtless died in prison. Others have been paroled. But whistleblowers believe the bulk of prisoners continue to be prisoners.

And they vow to keep up the pressure until justice is done.

The FBI laboratory has once again assumed a position of credibility, largely based on DNA, the only scientific tool anywhere in the forensics lab. It is now located in a state-of-the art complex at Quantico Virginia.

But for those who pay attention when our government fails, the thousands of unlawfully convicted prisoners remain as a grim legacy caused by lies and corruption and faux science that will haunt the lab forever.

Steven Aftergood, editor of the Government Secrecy Report for the Federation of American Scientists, summed up the situation this way:

“It’s an astonishing, scandalous story. What we have is a systemic failure. It’s not just the FBI lab itself that failed, which it did, egregiously. So did the Justice Department, by withholding its knowledge of the matter from those who could have acted on it. So did congressional oversight, and so did the courts, by failing to demand and deliver accountability. The price was paid by those who were wrongfully convicted.”

He added: “I would like to see some congressional involvement in charting a path forward, which should include providing remedies for past errors and developing new mechanisms for preventing future errors.”

You’re going on a business trip abroad. Or an overseas vacation. Or you’re returning to the country of your parents’ birth to visit family there.

You check in at the airport, go through security, and find your seat in the plane. Now the engines are at full throttle, you’re rolling, and in seconds, you’re airborne.

What you don’t know is that, if your government gets its way, you’ll never be airborne again headed for the US. Even though you are a native-born US citizen or a permanent resident with a green card.

Because the moment your flight was wheels up, your name was added to the dreaded No Fly List.

But you don’t know any of this. You’re just sitting there, enjoying your flight, blissfully unaware that someone’s put a target on your back.

Will you ever know you’ve been put on the no-fly list? Yes. When? When you attempt to board your flight back to the US. You will not be allowed to board. Instead you’ll be taken to a room somewhere in the airport, where you’ll be questioned by officers you’ve never seen before.

And questioned. And questioned. And questioned.

They think you’re a terrorist. And they want to know all about you, your terrorist associates, what your plans are, who you saw overseas, the whole nine yards.

This goes on for days. You’re exhausted. Your family has no idea where you are. They’re frantically phoning anyone they think might have some information, including the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, and so forth. And, of course, their lawyers, if they have lawyers. So far, your gracious “hosts” haven’t asked you if you even want a lawyer, and they are not likely to do so.

Every evening your hosts let you go – where can you go? — to the American Embassy or Consulate, where you talk to anyone who will listen and try to find out why you’re stuck in this nightmare. This can go on for weeks or for a month or more.

Finally, you manage to reach out to an organization like the American Civil Liberties Union. You tell your story. But they’ve heard it all before – from people in precisely the same predicament as you are in. They’ve learned how to navigate these rocky shoals of counter-terrorism.

After what seems an absolutely endless delay, you are unceremoniously put on a plane headed for the US. You have not been found guilty of anything. You have not been exonerated of any crime. You are exactly the same person you were when this awful journey began – except that you are now on the no-fly list and you’re mad as hell.

Why did this happen to you? You’ll have to tell me. Because our Government certainly isn’t going to. They won’t even confirm that you are on a no-fly list, or any list, much less why.

Now the ACLU represents 15 US citizens and permanent residents who have received this kind of inhumane treatment.

Most of these folks didn’t know one another. Today they are bonded by the Keystone Kops antics of our counter-terrorism programs. And bonded even more tightly by the adventure on which they are about to embark.

Ten of them are suing the U.S. government.

With the help of the ACLU, they have filed a first-of-its-kind lawsuit on behalf of 10 U.S. citizens and lawful residents who are prohibited from flying to or from the United States or over U.S. airspace because they are on the government’s “No Fly List.”

None of the individuals in the lawsuit, including a disabled U.S. Marine Corps veteran stranded in Egypt and a U.S. Army veteran stuck in Colombia, have been told why they are on the list or given a chance to clear their names.

“More and more Americans who have done nothing wrong find themselves unable to fly, and in some cases unable to return to the U.S., without any explanation whatsoever from the government,” said Ben Wizner, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project. “A secret list that deprives people of the right to fly and places them into effective exile without any opportunity to object is
both un-American and unconstitutional.”

The ACLU, along with its affiliates in Oregon, Southern California, Northern California and New Mexico, filed the lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Justice, the FBI and the Terrorist Screening Center in U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon.

According to the ACLU’s legal complaint, thousands of people have been added to the “No Fly List” and barred from commercial air travel without any opportunity to learn about or refute the basis for their inclusion on the list. The result is a vast and growing list of individuals who, on the basis of error or
innuendo, have been deemed too dangerous to fly but who are too harmless to arrest.

“Without a reasonable way for people to challenge their inclusion on the list, there’s no way to keep innocent people off it,” said Nusrat Choudhury, a staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project. “The government’s decision to prevent people from flying without giving them a chance to defend themselves has a huge impact on people’s lives – including their ability to perform their jobs, see their families and, in the case of U.S. citizens, to return home to the United States from abroad.”

She added: “The infuriating thing about this whole episode is that when each one of them tried to correct the problem through the existing redress system, the government refused to tell them why they were put on the No Fly List and to provide them a reasonable chance to defend themselves. Denying people such fundamental rights in complete secrecy and without due process is unconstitutional.”

So for all you travelers: Next time you’re planning a trip, pray you’ll be able to return to ‘the land of the free’. And don’t forget to take your Frequent Interrogation card with you.

This article was originally published on the website of Prism Magazine.

By William Fisher

It wasn’t supposed to be a nail biter. It was supposed to be a bill that effortlessly slithered its way through a well-oiled State Legislature.

Here’s how it happened:

The Republican-controlled Florida legislature was set to consider a bill that would have authorized private sector bidding on all of South Florida’s state prisons. That’s twenty-nine prisons in 18 counties. The successful bidder would have to guarantee the state a seven per cent savings on the $232 million Florida now spends on these prisons.

An annual savings of about $20 million-plus was looking better and better to lawmakers faced with a statewide deficit of more than $1 billion for this year alone. That kind of economy looked particularly succulent to Republican lawmakers who have generally had an affinity with private, for-profit prisons. Free enterprise and all that jazz, y’know.

Now, it hadn’t been easy to get this legislation to the floor. On its first try, the bill ran smack into a lawsuit filed by the union representing some 4,000 state prison guards. They asserted that the prison privatization bill was unconstitutional because it was part of the state’s general budget and not a stand-alone measure as the law requires. A judge agreed.

So it was back to square one for the private prisons. A new stand-alone bill was introduced. It was expected to pass without incident.

But a funny thing happened to the bill on its way to the desk of Gov. Rick Scott, a friend of for-profit prisons. Nine Republicans jumped ship.

How come?

Well, it wasn’t for lack of intense lobbying by those in favor – largely fiscal hawks and those who received substantial campaign contributions from private prison interests – or those opposed – the union, trying to protect 4,000 jobs, and lawmakers and public policy organizations who didn’t think it was a good idea for private companies to run prisons, and who doubted that the promised savings would ever appear.

Sen. Mike Fasano, the Republican who led the charge against privatization, told James Rosico of the Associated Press that the bill was “bad public policy.”

His reward? Losing the chairmanship of the Senate budget panel that oversees spending on prisons and the courts.

Some legislators simply felt that public safety, including corrections, shouldn’t be contracted out. Others doubted that the state would ever see the promised savings. A delegation of state prison guards, sitting in the gallery, let loose a shout of joy.

Thus the largest prison privatization in US history crashed and burned, 21-19.

But many familiar with Florida politics think this is only Round One. They expect prison privatization to come back to the legislative calendar in the near future.

The AP reports that Florida already has seven privately-run prisons. “Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), based in Nashville, runs the Bay, Graceville and Lake City correctional facilities, and South Florida’s Moore Haven correctional facility, its website says. The GEO Group (formerly Wackenhut), headquartered in Boca Raton, operates South Florida’s South Bay correctional facility and Broward Transition Center, and Blackwater correctional facility in the Panhandle, according to its website.”

Companies like CCA and GEO own and operate adult prisons, juvenile facilities and immigration detention centers across the country. They have been widely criticized by many prison professionals for hiring inexperienced staff willing to work for less, focusing their management initiatives on keeping their beds filled (and thus paid for), and neglecting the health and safety of inmates. A number of their facilities have turned out to be public health nightmares, with substandard food and unsanitary conditions. There have been a number of deaths and sexual assaults in for-profit prisons.

Despite such well-publicized shortcomings, the for-profit prison business has grown consistently, spurred recently by the industry’s sales pitches that play to the necessity for cash-strapped states to balance their budgets. But prison professionals report that the resulting savings, if any, are marginal.

The two largest companies in the field, CCA and GEO, reported revenues of over a billion dollars each in 2011, and forecast healthy growth for 2012.

CCA and GEO are also major players in the organization known as ALEC – the American Legislative Exchange Council – an association of corporate lobbyists and state legislators. ALEC prepares “model bills” that states can adapt to their particular politics. For example, the egregious stack of paper known as B-1070, Arizona’s disastrous anti-immigrant bill, is largely an ALEC product, as are many parts of a similar bill in Alabama.

The link between private prisons and immigration? These companies and others also operate detention centers for tens of thousands of people – whole families, in fact – who are awaiting hearings before immigration judges to decide whether they will stay in the US or be deported. The tougher the laws, the more people will be picked up and detained.

Given the obvious clout of the industry, it was a rare act of genuine courage for these nine Florida Republicans to buck their Senate leadership, their Governor, and their campaign coffers to vote the vote this bill down. I was particularly struck by the reasoning of one of the rebellious Florida lawmakers, Sen. Steve Oelrich, a Republican from Alachua.

He told his Senate colleagues: “No sooner should we privatize our military than we should be privatizing our corrections department and our correctional officers. I think it’s bad policy.”

But Mr. Oelrich must know how naïve it would be for Florida lawmakers to expect private prisons to just go away. With the financial and political firepower this industry has exhibited, they will surely be back next year if not sooner.

Amid the anger that has erupted in Syria following the publication of images of the battered face of 13-year-old Hamza al-Khateeb, Human Rights Watch (HRW) has released a chilling new report detailing the brutality of Syrian security forces in the Syrian city of Daraa.

“For more than two months now, Syrian security forces have been killing and torturing their own people with complete impunity. They need to stop – and if they don’t, it is the (UN) Security Council’s responsibility to make sure that the people responsible face justice.”

These are the words of Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch, introducing a chilling new 54-page report, “We’ve Never Seen Such Horror: Crimes against Humanity in Daraa.”

The “systematic killings and torture” by Syrian security forces in the city of Daraa since protests began there on March 18, 2011, “strongly suggest that these qualify as crimes against humanity,” the Human Rights Watch report said.

Hamza — a pudgy-cheeked 13-year-old — was reportedly arrested, tortured and killed in custody and has become a symbol of the violent suppression of protesters by the Assad regime and a potential tipping point after 12 weeks of bloodshed, HRW said.

HRW‘s report is based on more than 50 interviews with victims and witnesses to abuses. It focuses on violations in Daraa governorate, where some of the worst violence took place after protests seeking greater freedoms began in various parts of the country. The specifics went largely unreported due to the information blockade imposed by the Syrian authorities. Victims and witnesses interviewed by Human Rights Watch described systematic killings, beatings, torture using electroshock devices, and detention of people seeking medical care.

HRW said the Syrian government “should take immediate steps to halt the excessive use of lethal force by security forces. The United Nations Security Council should impose sanctions and press Syria for accountability and, if it doesn’t respond adequately, refer Syria to the International Criminal Court (ICC).”

But getting the Security Council to act is not going to be easy. Russia and China have made it clear they are not inclined to participate in any overall condemnation of the Assad regime nor any call for referral to the ICC.

The US has already adopted unilateral sanctions against Assad and his top lieutenants, but they are not likely to have a major negative impact on the country.

China and Russia are likely to oppose UN-backed sanctions and are strongly opposed to a Libya-type action, even if such an operation were militarily possible in Syria.

The HRW reports says “the protests first broke out in Daraa in response to the detention and torture of 15 children accused of painting graffiti slogans calling for the government’s downfall. In response and since then, security forces have repeatedly and systematically opened fire on overwhelmingly peaceful demonstrators. The security forces have killed at least 418 people in the Daraa governorate alone, and more than 887 across Syria, according to local activists who have been maintaining a list of those killed. Exact numbers are impossible to verify.”

Witnesses from Daraa interviewed by Human Rights Watch provided consistent accounts of security forces using lethal force against protesters and bystanders, in most cases without advance warning or any effort to disperse the protesters by nonviolent means. Members of various branches of the mukhabarat (security services) and numerous snipers positioned on rooftops deliberately targeted the protesters, and many of the victims had lethal head, neck, and chest wounds. Human Rights Watch documented a number of cases in which security forces participating in the operations against protesters in Daraa and other cities had received “shoot-to-kill” orders from their commanders.

Human Rights Watch called on the Syrian government to halt immediately the use of excessive and lethal force by security forces against demonstrators and activists, release all arbitrarily arrested detainees, and provide human rights groups and journalists with immediate and unhindered access to Daraa.

It also called on the Security Council to adopt targeted financial and travel sanctions on officials responsible for continuing human rights violations, as well as to push for and support efforts to investigate and prosecute the grave, widespread and systemic human rights violations committed in Syria.

“Syrian authorities did everything they could to conceal their bloody repression in Daraa,” Whitson said. “But horrendous crimes like these are impossible to hide, and sooner or later those responsible will have to answer for their actions.”

Michelle Shephard, National Security reporter for the Toronto Star, wrote that young Hamza went missing after a protest in the southern Syrian village of Jiza on April 29, and “until his body was returned to his family Friday, his whereabouts were unknown. Activists said he was tortured and killed by Syria’s security services during a month in custody.”

Syrian state TV reported that Hamza was hit by three bullets outside the military complex where he was protesting. There was a delay in returning the body because his identity was unknown, the government-sponsored station stated.

But a video posted on YouTube showing his beaten corpse has sparked international condemnation and become a rallying cry for Syria’s protesters, who shouted this week: “We are all Hamza al-Khateeb.”

Hamza’s father, obviously under duress, appeared on Syrian State TV and praised Assad for his leadership. It was widely reported that the government has threatened his family.

HRW said. “It is difficult to look at his injuries and not think about what he endured — the boy’s face is purple and swollen; there are bullet and burn marks on his chest. A narrator states that his kneecaps were also shattered and his penis severed.”

“I have a child who is exactly that age and I just cannot comprehend the cruelty. It is so hitting home,” said Abdalla Rifai, of the Syrian Emergency Task Force. The Washington-based non-profit group was established to support the “democratic aspirations of Syrians” and is suing Assad’s regime in U.S. courts for human rights abuses.

Despite the courage of the protesters and the ferocity of their clashes with government forces, Syria experts remain doubtful that there are enough demonstrators to outnumber the security services. As long as they situation remains, Assad may be able to control the uprising.

Assad inherited power in July 2000, a month after his father Hafez al-Assad died. The senior Assad had ruled for three decades and his son inherited a government led by the Arab Socialist Baath party and dominated by Alawites – a minority Shia sect that makes up between five and 10 per cent of the population in a predominantly Sunni country (74 per cent). The Alawites are regarded as extraordinarily clever in holding on to their minority power.