Elsewhere Today 427
Aljazeera:
Israel kills three Gaza fighters
TUESDAY, AUGUST 21, 2007
17:15 MECCA TIME, 14:15 GMT
An Israeli air strike has killed three fighters from Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip near the border with Israel.
In a text message to journalists, the group said that the men were killed east of the town of Khan Yunis on Tuesday, as the result of a direct hit.
An Israeli army spokesman said that the military "attacked and identified hitting three armed gunmen that were identified close to the security fence in the central Gaza Strip."
Israel has carried out a number of operations inside Gaza since Hamas took full control of the territory in June.
Residents initially reported that a missile hit a car in the Khan Yunis attack, but later said that the fighters were on foot.
The three men were taken to the Nasir hospital morgue in Khan Yunis.
An Islamic Jihad spokesman said the group would continue firing rockets into Israel.
West Bank raid
Earlier on Tuesday, a Palestinian fighter was shot dead in clashes with Israeli soldiers in the al-Ein refugee camp in the West Bank city of Nablus.
Nasir Mabrouk belonged to the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades, the armed wing of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
The Israeli operation in the camp, which started two days ago, has included the arrest of a number of people living there and the searching of many buildings.
On Monday, six Hamas militants were killed in an Israeli air strike on a jeep in the el-Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza.
The latest deaths took to 5,831 the number of people killed in Israeli-Palestinian violence since the start of the second Palestinian uprising in 2000, the vast majority of them Palestinian.
Source: Agencies
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/76F54AC2-D26D-46A9-B96E-275EB5F3EC31.htm
AllAfrica:
PH - Troops May Remain Beyond 6 Months
By Deji Elumoye and Juliana Taiwo in Abuja
This Day (Lagos) NEWS
21 August 2007
Lagos
The deployment of troops in Port Harcourt, the troubled capital city of Rivers State, may go beyond the initial six-month projection, the Chief of Army Staff, Lt General Luka Yusuf, disclosed yesterday.
The Army chief said the decision to withdraw the troops would be taken in conjunction with the governor of the state, Sir Celestine Omehia.
This is coming on the heels of the state government's condemnation of the call by some Ijaw leaders for a state of emergency to be imposed on the state.
Soldiers, who were deployed in the city following weeks of shootings and gun battles between suspected cult groups, are not guaranteed to leave after the initial period of six months, although Omehia said at the weekend that the soldiers would be in the city for that period.
Yusuf made the announcement while briefing the Minister of Defence, Alhaji Ahmed Yayale who was on a working visit of the Army, Navy and Airforce.
He said if the governor, as the chief security officer, "feels that the security situation has improved he will ask for the pulling out of the solders to the barracks".
He said the Army would not flood troops to Port Harcourt so as not to create the impression of a state of emergency there.
Yusuf lamented that even though the police were saddled with the responsibility of internal security, "the Army is now taking a very big chunk of it even without being supported with additional logistics".
The army chief informed that the Army was now fully involved in internal security as part of their assistance to civil authority.
He disclosed that most of the soldiers in Operation Restore Hope were being moved to support the ongoing operation in Port Harcourt "until peace returns".
Most of the serviceable boats are being moved from Calabar to Port Harcourt to support the operation to block the creeks to prevent the militants from infiltrating the state capital, he disclosed, revealing that more operational vehicles and Armoured Personnel Carrier (APCS) were being moved to Port Harcourt because "it will take time to restore hope and return things to normalcy in the region".
Yusuf, however, charged the political class to do their own beat insisting some of the crisis had political undertone.
Reacting to the call by some Ijaw Leaders especially Chief Edwin Clark, Chief Albert Horsfall, and Alabo Tonye Graham-Douglas for the declaration of state of emergency and cancellation of the April 2007 elections in the state, the Rivers State Government said the people of the state "are surprised and embarrassed that persons who call themselves elders would make such calls to cause disharmony and promote ethnic friction at this time without any justification".
Clark, Chairman of Ijaw National Congress (INC), had yesterday called for the imposition of a state of emergency.
Clark, who spoke to newsmen in Lagos, said it was high time President Umaru Yar'Adua declared a state of emergency owing to the escalating war between the rival cult gangs.
He promised to lead a delegation of Ijaw leaders to Abuja to meet with the President on the issue.
According to him, "the state of emergency should at the first instance last for six months because as things are now, the state government has lost full control of the situation.
"So rather than the situation degenerating, the federal government should just wield the big stick by immediately declaring a state of emergency in Rivers."
Clark, who was in company with other Ijaw leaders, said the state of emergency, when declared should be headed by a General or an Admiral equivalent so that he could be in full control of the security situation in Rivers.
He said that at the end of the emergency rule, a fresh election should be conducted in the state "because the current Governor, Celestine Omehia and his arch rival Rotimi Amechi, are all boys of the former governor, who would not be able to assert their authority in the state".
But responding through Barrister Emma Okah, the Commissioner for Information, the Rivers State Government said it was interesting to note that "the recent disturbances in Port Harcourt which is part of the broad Niger Delta problems is certainly not up to what has happened in some other Niger Delta States and yet nobody including these 'wise men' called for a state of emergency. It is for this reason that we view this call as senseless, irresponsible, self serving and politically motivated".
"It would have made sense if the call from these elders was directed at our derailed children to enable them live responsibly and appreciate the virtue that life does not begin and end with violence. We expect a legacy of peace and honour and not shame from our elders. This is because, in all situations, constructive engagement and dialogue remains the best option in resolving problems. Genuine elders over the world seek unity and reconciliation and not anarchy.
"The Government of Rivers State hereby restates its irreducible commitment to continue to pursue her policies to rehabilitate and reform the derailed youths, deliver good governance, enthrone economic prosperity, reduce poverty incidence, develop the state and put smiles on the faces of the people of Rivers State to the glory of God.
"For the avoidance of doubts, we call on these elders to leave Rivers State and Dr Peter Odili alone as we believe that they can live normal lives without the disrespect they have been inflicting on him.
"Finally, let us use this opportunity to say that no amount of intimidation by persons who are no longer of this age and whose stock in trade is the pursuit of "pull him down" syndrome will reduce the focus of His Excellency, Sir Celestine Omehia, to lift Rivers State to the next level of development," he said.
Meanwhile, the Minister of State for Defence, Mrs. Fidelia Akuabata Njeze has condemned in strong terms the militancy in the Niger Delta regretting that it has turned the genuine course to milking cow.
In a chat with newsmen yesterday, she assured that the Federal Government was sincere about finding lasting solution to the crisis especially in the development of the area hence the called on the youths in the region to lay down their arms and embrace dialogue.
Njeze said no meaningful achievement would go on without peace in the area stressing that the present crisis was already affecting the economy.
"The Niger Delta issue has become a national issue and nobody is happy including those living in the area. We all agree that the area is underdeveloped, yes they live below human level but you cannot have development in trouble waters. No ship can sail smoothly on trouble waters. Even though there is clear evidence of neglect but it is clear from Mr. President's position that this administration is sincere in tackling the problems. One way to solve the problem is through dialogue and the government is already demonstrating its willingness to embrace that.
"I am appealing not only as one serving in government but also as a mother and as has been disclosed during the retreat at the weekend, that the Niger Delta indigenes have respect for mothers, they should lay down their arms and embrace dialogue. The President said he took an oath that he should be judged based on his performance and even made this one of his seven-point agenda. We all swore to uphold the peace of this country and promised equal development I think this government should be given a chance to live to its expectation", she said.
The Minister also commended the efforts made by all stakeholders especially the military and the police in bringing peace to the area and assured that Mr. President and the Vice President, Dr. Goodluck Jonathan, were ready to serve alongside all committed Nigerians.
Aside the issue of troops in Port Harcourt, however, the army chief also disclosed that a new Armed Force structure would take off in December, as the Nigerian army would now have only four divisions.
He lamented that the Nigerian Army equipment holding was very low due to lack o f maintenance and appealed that efforts should be intensified to procure more military vehicles for the army, as a situation where civilian vehicles are used to move troops to operating areas did not augur well for the image of the army.
In his remark, the Minister of Defence, Yayale, noted that the army had challenges in three main areas, training, equipment and welfare and assured that adequate attention would be paid in those areas.
Copyright © 2007 This Day. All rights reserved.
http://allafrica.com/stories/200708210003.html
AlterNet: 50 Years on, Kerouac's 'On The Road'
Reveals the Beatnik as a Tender, Geeky Romantic
By Alicia Rebensdorf, AlterNet
Posted on August 21
This September marks the 50th anniversary of Jack Kerouac's seminal On the Road. It also is the half centennial of Norman Mailer's ode to the white negro and the obscenity trial of Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl." 1957 was a big year for the newly named Beat Generation. Over the previous five years, movies like Rebel Without a Cause and alarmist news stories about youth culture had made the "juvenile delinquent" an increasingly sensational figure in pop culture. The press was eager to analyze (and dramatize) what this post-war ethos was all about, so when Kerouac's book came out, many looked to it as the proclamation its original title, The Beat Generation, claimed it to be.
"Whatever else it is, and whether good or bad, this is pretty sure to be the most "remarkable" novel of 1957," wrote poet and critic Kenneth Rexroth in the San Francisco Chronicle. The New York Times rave reinforced Kerouac's spokesman role: "On the Road is the most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as "beat," and whose principal avatar he is."
Overnight and with unparalleled media intensity, Kerouac was propelled to fame. And not just as a writer but as an icon: "King of the Beats." It was a role that plagued him to his death and has only strengthened in the nearly 40 years since. Read his name today and it is mostly used as shorthand for hard drinking and fast driving, for New York nights and screw-it-all cool. Kerouac is now the image of him that adorns many of his books, leaning steely-eyed against a brick wall, cigarette in hand. I'd even written a book about a road trip in which I dismissively used him as a stand-in for all that is outdated, nostalgic and glorified about the image of road. To me, Kerouac represented the original hipster with all the wrecked, indulgent imagery such a title connotes.
In light of the book's anniversary, however, I recently revisited On the Road. I found I had him all wrong. The Kerouac as presented through his doppelganger, Sal Paradise, wasn't a petulant bad boy: He was an embattled romantic. This story of how he was miscast as an avatar of cool is a study of both media and his own success at self-promotion. Considering the way his name is so commonly invoked, the repercussions of this distortion are relevant today.
"I said to myself, Wow! What'll Denver be like! I got on that hot road, and off I went in a brand-new car driven by Denver businessmen. He went 70. I tinged all over; I counted minutes and subtracted miles. Just ahead, over the rolling wheatfields all golden beneath the distant snows of Estes, I'd be seeing old Denver at last. I pictured myself in a Denver bar that night, with all the gang, and in their eyes I would be strange and ragged like the Prophet who has walked across the land to bring the dark Word, and the only Word I had was "Wow!"
I'm hardly the first to call Kerouac a romantic. Many have connected the 1950s Beat artists with the 18th century post-Enlightenment Romantic Movement. They shared a disregard for tradition and reason, valued individual expressions over institutional ones and stressed emotion as an aesthetic experience. Kerouac's descriptions of jazz certainly mirror the Romantic's adulation of folk art and heightened emotional experience is the primal focus of On the Road's narrative.
But that's not the romantic I'm referring to. There is another commonly conjured image of the romantic in today's culture that looks less like Byron and Hawthorne than it does the character Charlotte in Sex and the City. These modern romantics are often distinguished for their optimism, for their belief in the possibility of a happily ever after. They are the male lead in a romantic comedy. The Bachelorettes vying for a rose. They do not seek refuge in irony or cynicism; their enthusiasms are unashamed. They are, in short, the antithesis of cool.
This, contrary to his popular image, is the Kerouac one finds in reading On the Road: a tender, screamingly enthusiastic, geeked-out romantic. His version of happily ever after might have been focused on a more temporal goal - he was obsessed with the notion of living wholly in the present - but he still gushed on the glories ahead of him: "The road would get more interesting, especially ahead, always ahead." That the idyllic road mutated into work and boredom the moment he stopped moving only meant he should go farther. "Somewhere along the line I knew there'd be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me." And while the character Dean Mortiary usually gets credit for the book's frantic energy, Kerouac's passion was equally unambiguous. His most common refrain: "Whooee! Let's go!" Later he espoused: "If moderation is a fault, indifference is a felony." On the Road's Sal Paradise reveals this in spades.
Back in 1957, reviewers marveled at this. Herbert Gold wrote in the Nation: "They care too much, and they care aloud. 'I'm hungry, I'm starving, let's eat right now!' That they care mostly for themselves is a sign of adolescence, but at least they care for something, and it's a beginning." "(N)ot once in On the Road, no matter how sordid the situation nor how miserable the people, is there no hope," reviewed Ralph Gleason in Saturday Review. "That is the great thing about Kerouac's book and, incidentally, this generation. They swing. And this means to affirm. And, unlike a member of a generation that is really beat, Kerouac leaves you with no feeling of despair, but rather of exaltation." Kenneth Rexroth of the San Francisco Chronicle concluded "This novel should demonstrate once and for all that the hipster is the furious square."
What happened between now and then, that this part of Kerouac has been forgotten, is multifold. Five years before On the Road, a writer and friend of Kerouac John Holmes penned an article for the New York Times Magazine called "The Beat Generation." Holmes was reportedly the first person to whom Kerouac shared his "Beat" coinage and in his article, though he argued that the generation was "bright, level, realistic, challenging," his examples - the "eager-faced girl, picked up on a dope charge" and "the hot-rod driver (who) invites death only to outwit it," - actually did less to reform the image of the delinquent than it did brand them with a new name. A year after On the Road was published, The Beat Generation was released, a movie that pushed the old delinquent image one further by casting him as a violent murderer. The black-clad, bongo-beating "beatnik" also gained cultural currency. These associations with Beat-ness quickly fixed to Kerouac, father of the phrase.
And while Kerouac actively worked to refute these caricatures - he appeared on collegiate panels and wrote an article for Playboy arguing for a more "mystic" understanding of the generation - his defensive efforts sometimes stepped into their own form of sensationalism. For proof, one need look no further than his story of writing of On the Road. Legend has it he taped paper into a 120-foot scroll and typed out the novel in three Benzedrine fueled weeks. Kerouac told this story repeatedly in interviews and on TV talk shows. He wrote essays about his method of writing "spontaneous prose" without pause, punctuation or revision: "Never afterthink to 'improve' or defray impressions, as, the best writing is always the most painful personal wrung-out tossed from cradle warm protective mind-tap from yourself the song of yourself, blow! - now!" It quickly became part of the book's mythos.
This version might've helped sell the book but it also sold Kerouac short. His writing process was actually far more belabored. Kerouac had been working on the novel that would become On the Road for years. He wrote and shelved several abbreviated drafts before his three-week "breakthrough" of 1951. At the point, there was a teletype scroll but coffee, not "benny," was his preferred stimulant. Even then, this is not the version we know of it. Kerouac retyped and revised the manuscript many times before it was accepted for publication. Then it was edited again. A full third of the text was cut out.
My argument here is not that Kerouac is a liar or a sham. Although he was by many accounts more business savvy than his reputation lets on, a more likely culprit is that quality so missing in his current incarnation: his romanticism. Ken Kinsley once said, "(Kerouac) wrote not so much to tell the truth as to make the truth." In other words, whether it applied to the road or his writing process, Kerouac didn't obfuscate reality as much as it was that reality didn't always conform to his image of it. He downplayed - and allowed others to downplay - his writing discipline, his patriotism and his ambitions of writer respectability, making him out as far more countercultural than he actually was. This sort of romanticism helped shape the way he continues to be romanticized today.
Of course, Kerouac is hardly to blame for all the ways he's been misremembered. Much of his legacy is nostalgia's work. When Kerouac died at 47 of an alcoholism-related hemorrhage, untarnished by the realities of old age, his life became a canvas for our own projections. His mythology has also proved a profitable marketing tool. After averaging 25,000 in sales for years, in 1991, Viking changed its hand-drawn cover art to a photograph of Kerouac and Neal Cassady. They stand side by side in front of a brick wall, Jack looking straight at the camera, Neal cocking his head. Sales soon quadrupled and continue to average 110,000 to 130,000 copies a year. Re-issues of his other books have followed suit. Scan his section at your local bookstore and you'll find a shelfful of stoic portraits. Kerouac's autobiographical books naturally lend themselves to such covers, but the images most selected - pictures of him unsmiling or smoking - have helped secure his disaffected image.
But while such simplification may be routine, it is not without repercussions. Especially if you accept the suggestion that his signature cool is so polar to the person he presents in his most iconic work. Recently, Kerouac has been increasingly appearing in critiques of today's alt-culture. A recent Time Out New York article entitled "The Hipster Must Die!" cited On the Road as the standard of "real menace" to which today's "zombie hipsters" can't compare. The Hipster Handbook, a satirical guide to identifying the breed, calls Kerouac "iconic" and says he "epitomized what it was to be cool."
Never mind for a moment, the contradictions inherent in some of these critiques: the same author who hailed the Beats as a "real menace" railed the fact that modern "hipsterism fetishizes the authentic." Or even that the Beats suffered from the same caricatures lobbed at hipsters today: dirty, self-indulgent "goofballs" who refuse to grow up. The accusation most often heard of contemporary hipsters - well, maybe right after their affinity for bad haircuts and skinny jeans - is that they are too cool too care; that their excessivelyironic efforts to appear original are the only channels for their otherwise overwhelming apathy.
Recasting Kerouac from the model of cool to the role of a romantic gives us a new model to compare today's hipster cliches. By emphasizing his unapologetic enthusiasm for his friends, his passion for his writing and his hopefulness for the most immediate future, we're encouraged to see the same fervor in his modern counterparts. An indie band wouldn't work months on a demo if they were disaffected. "Zombies" lack the will to pursue the DIY projects they are known for. And if modern hipsters do suffer from too much concern over their public image, as Kerouac's own history shows, they are not the first.
If these hipsters could be accused of anything, perhaps it would be in their unwillingness to defend themselves. When Kerouac went big, he derailed the Beat's caricature as "nutty nihilism in the guise of new hipness" and fought for the philosophical ideals he and his friends believed in. Perhaps he was less than successful. Perhaps he was a romantic fool to try. But what's more cool than that?
Alicia Rebensdorf is a freelance writer and author of Chick Flick Road Kill: A Behind the Scenes Odyssey into Movie-Made America.
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/60284/
Guardian: EU must act on Kosovo
or risk fresh bloodshed, thinktank warns
Fred Attewill and agencies
Tuesday August 21, 2007
The EU must accept responsibility for guiding Kosovo towards independence or risk fresh bloodshed in the Balkans, a report warned today.
A thinktank has said Brussels must step in before Kosovan leaders, frustrated with failed talks, declare unilateral independence from Serbia.
Last month the government of the province declared it would issue a unilateral declaration of independence on November 28 after it appeared the US and EU had abandoned the latest attempt to push through a UN security council resolution paving the way for Kosovo's formal secession from Serbia.
Today, however, the International Crisis Group said such a move would tear apart the territory and destroy progress made by Nato since the end of the conflict.
"The implosion would destabilise neighbouring countries, increasing pressure for further fractures along ethnic lines," the ICG's latest report said.
"The EU would quickly experience refugee flows and feel the impact of the boost that disorder would give to organised crime networks in the Balkans that already distribute most of Europe's heroin, facilitate illegal migration and are responsible for nearly 30% of women victims of the sex trade worldwide."
Talks on the future of Kosovo, which has been under United Nations protection since 1999, are schedule to run until December, but many observers feel they are destined to fail due to the parties' entrenched positions.
The Contact Group - a six-nation bloc made up of France, Germany, Italy, Russia, the UK and the US - authorised the talks, but Russia has signalled it will support Serbia and veto any proposal to grant Kosovo independence.
In its report, entitled Breaking the Kosovo Stalemate: Europe's Responsibility, the ICG called for the EU to recognise "there is no practical alternative to Kosovo conditional independence".
It urged both the EU and the US to use the time until December to pave the way for Kosovan independence.
"The EU members (of the Contact Group) and the US should ensure that they do not unravel the blueprint for Kosovo's supervised independence crafted by the UN secretary general's special envoy, former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari, during a year of painstaking diplomacy.
"They should also use the four months to secure an alliance that will coordinate Kosovo's transition to independence," it stated.
Russia has threatened to veto the plan at the UN security council.
The ICG warned that if the EU "mishandled" the issue, the "genie of ethnic conflict would be let loose again".
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Kosovo/Story/0,,2153347,00.html
Jeune Afrique: Les soldats pourraient manifester
de nouveau s'ils n'obtiennent pas satisfaction
GUINÉE - 20 août 2007 – IRIN
Le soldats guinéens pourraient organiser de nouvelles manifestations dans les prochaines semaines, si le gouvernement ne donne pas satisfaction aux revendications déjà à l’origine des violentes protestations conduites en mai par l’armée, et qui avaient fait deux morts et plusieurs blessés.
A en croire les soldats, le gouvernement a jusqu’au 8 septembre pour régler leurs arriérés de soldes. « Passé ce délai, nous nous ferons entendre comme nous l’avons fait en mai », a affirmé un adjudant qui a requis l’anonymat pour éviter tout problème avec sa hiérarchie.
Cette position est largement partagée par la plupart des soldats interrogés par le correspondant d’IRIN.
Pour exiger le règlement de leurs arriérés de soldes et la démission de certains officiers supérieurs de l’armée, des soldats avaient violemment manifesté dans Conakry, la capitale, et dans d’autres villes du pays, tirant des coups de feu en l’air, mitraillant les habitations d’un quartier résidentiel et tuant au moins deux personnes. Selon certaines sources militaires, les principaux points de revendication des soldats n’ont pas encore été satisfaits. « Ce qui nous intéresse, nous ne cesserons jamais de le dire, c’est de rentrer en possession, dès la fin de ce mois, de nos avoirs promis par le gouvernement sur l’intervention du [président] Lansana Conté ». D’après ces mêmes sources, les soldats refuseront de toucher leurs soldes de ce mois. « Nous sommes décidés à ne pas toucher nos soldes à la fin de ce mois d’août pour protester contre le non-respect de tous les engagements pris par nos supérieurs hiérarchiques ».
En effet, les soldats revendiquent depuis longtemps le paiement de leurs arriérés de soldes, la réintégration des militaires renvoyés de l’armée après les mutineries de 1996 et une promotion. Ils exigent également du gouvernement le versement des 300 milliards de francs CFA (77 millions de dollars américains) que le président Conté leur aurait promis pour mettre fin à la mutinerie de 1996.
A la suite des émeutes du mois de mai, M. Conté avait limogé son ministre de la Défense et quelques hauts fonctionnaires de l’Etat, mais le gouvernement actuel aura d’énormes difficultés pour satisfaire les revendications salariales de la troupe. « L’Etat guinéen n’a pas suffisamment les moyens pour faire face actuellement aux neuf années d’arriérés de soldes, principale revendication des hommes en uniforme », reconnaît Himourana Soumah du ministère de l’Economie, des Finances et du Plan. Quant aux autres fonctionnaires et porte-paroles du gouvernement contactés par le correspondant d’IRIN, aucun n’a daigné faire un commentaire sur la situation.
Selon plusieurs observateurs, le gouvernement ne peut indéfiniment différer la résolution du problème des militaires. « Les promesses artificielles du gouvernement ne tiendront que quelque temps », a affirmé Kissy Agyeman, spécialiste de l’Afrique subsaharienne à l’organisation britannique Global Insight. « Sans la mise en œuvre d’une solution financière concrète, l’appareil politique déjà chancelant pourrait être renversé car la loyauté de l’armée semble avoir atteint ses limites ».
Pour l’instant, ce sont les civils qui font les frais du mécontentement des militaires, a expliqué au correspondant d’IRIN un avocat de Conakry. « Ils font payer la population, pas les responsables », a affirmé Boubakar Sow, président du barreau. Même lorsque la situation est relativement calme, il n’est pas rare d’entendre parler de vols commis par des militaires à l’encontre de civils ; c’est ce qui s’est passé il y a deux semaines, lorsque des soldat ont réquisitionné un camion de vivres à Boke – une ville située à environ 300 kilomètres de Conakry – et ont fait main basse sur le chargement. « Les militaires ne peuvent pas régler leurs comptes avec leur hiérarchie. Ils ne peuvent que tuer et piller la population »
http://www.jeuneafrique.com/jeune_afrique/article_
depeche.asp?art_cle=IRI41727lessonoitca0#
Mother Jones:
School Of Shock
School of Shock Photo Essay
Eight states are sending autistic, mentally retarded, and emotionally troubled kids to a facility that punishes them with painful electric shocks. How many times do you have to zap a child before it's torture?
Jennifer Gonnerman
August 20 , 2007
Rob Santana awoke terrified. He'd had that dream again, the one where silver wires ran under his shirt and into his pants, connecting to electrodes attached to his limbs and torso. Adults armed with surveillance cameras and remote-control activators watched his every move. One press of a button, and there was no telling where the shock would hit—his arm or leg or, worse, his stomach. All Rob knew was that the pain would be intense.
Every time he woke from this dream, it took him a few moments to remember that he was in his own bed, that there weren't electrodes locked to his skin, that he wasn't about to be shocked. It was no mystery where this recurring nightmare came from—not A Clockwork Orange or 1984, but the years he spent confined in America's most controversial "behavior modification" facility.
In 1999, when Rob was 13, his parents sent him to the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center, located in Canton, Massachusetts, 20 miles outside Boston. The facility, which calls itself a "special needs school," takes in all kinds of troubled kids—severely autistic, mentally retarded, schizophrenic, bipolar, emotionally disturbed—and attempts to change their behavior with a complex system of rewards and punishments, including painful electric shocks to the torso and limbs. Of the 234 current residents, about half are wired to receive shocks, including some as young as nine or ten. Nearly 60 percent come from New York, a quarter from Massachusetts, the rest from six other states and Washington, D.C. The Rotenberg Center, which has 900 employees and annual revenues exceeding $56 million, charges $220,000 a year for each student. States and school districts pick up the tab.
The Rotenberg Center is the only facility in the country that disciplines students by shocking them, a form of punishment not inflicted on serial killers or child molesters or any of the 2.2 million inmates now incarcerated in U.S. jails and prisons. Over its 36-year history, six children have died in its care, prompting numerous lawsuits and government investigations. Last year, New York state investigators filed a blistering report that made the place sound like a high school version of Abu Ghraib. Yet the program continues to thrive—in large part because no one except desperate parents, and a few state legislators, seems to care about what happens to the hundreds of kids who pass through its gates.
In Rob Santana's case, he freely admits he was an out-of-control kid with "serious behavioral problems." At birth he was abandoned at the hospital, traces of cocaine, heroin, and alcohol in his body. A middle-class couple adopted him out of foster care when he was 11 months old, but his troubles continued. He started fires; he got kicked out of preschool for opening the back door of a moving school bus; when he was six, he cut himself with a razor. His mother took him to specialists, who diagnosed him with a slew of psychiatric problems: attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, bipolar disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Rob was at the Rotenberg Center for about three and a half years. From the start, he cursed, hollered, fought with employees. Eventually the staff obtained permission from his mother and a Massachusetts probate court to use electric shock. Rob was forced to wear a backpack containing five two-pound, battery-operated devices, each connected to an electrode attached to his skin. "I felt humiliated," he says. "You have a bunch of wires coming out of your shirt and pants." Rob remained hooked up to the apparatus 24 hours a day. He wore it while jogging on the treadmill and playing basketball, though it wasn't easy to sink a jump shot with a 10-pound backpack on. When he showered, a staff member would remove his electrodes, all except the one on his arm, which he had to hold outside the shower to keep it dry. At night, Rob slept with the backpack next to him, under the gaze of a surveillance camera.
Employees shocked him for aggressive behavior, he says, but also for minor misdeeds, like yelling or cursing. Each shock lasts two seconds. "It hurts like hell," Rob says. (The school's staff claim it is no more painful than a bee sting; when I tried the shock, it felt like a horde of wasps attacking me all at once. Two seconds never felt so long.) On several occasions, Rob was tied facedown to a four-point restraint board and shocked over and over again by a person he couldn't see. The constant threat of being zapped did persuade him to act less aggressively, but at a high cost. "I thought of killing myself a few times," he says.
Rob's mother Jo-Anne deLeon had sent him to the Rotenberg Center at the suggestion of the special-ed committee at his school district in upstate New York, which, she says, told her that the program had everything Rob needed. She believed he would receive regular psychiatric counseling—though the school does not provide this.
As the months passed, Rob's mother became increasingly unhappy. "My whole dispute with them was, 'When is he going to get psychiatric treatment?'" she says. "I think they had to get to the root of his problems—like why was he so angry? Why was he so destructive? I really think they needed to go in his head somehow and figure this out." She didn't think the shocks were helping, and in 2002 she sent a furious fax demanding that Rob's electrodes be removed before she came up for Parents' Day. She says she got a call the next day from the executive director, Matthew Israel, who told her, "You don't want to stick with our treatment plan? Pick him up." (Israel says he doesn't remember this conversation, but adds, "If a parent doesn't want the use of the skin shock and wants psychiatric treatment, this isn't the right program for them.")
Rob's mother is not the only parent angry at the Rotenberg Center. Last year, Evelyn Nicholson sued the facility after her 17-year-old son Antwone was shocked 79 times in 18 months. Nicholson says she decided to take action after Antwone called home and told her, "Mommy, you don't love me anymore because you let them hurt me so bad." Rob and Antwone don't know each other (Rob left the facility before Antwone arrived), but in some ways their stories are similar. Antwone's birth mother was a drug addict; he was burned on an electric hot plate as an infant. Evelyn took him in as a foster child and later adopted him. The lawsuit she filed against the Rotenberg Center set off a chain of events: investigations by multiple government agencies, emotional public hearings, scrutiny by the media. Legislation to restrict or ban the use of electric shocks in such facilities has been introduced in two state legislatures. Yet not much has changed.
Rob has paid little attention to the public debate over his alma mater, though he visits its website occasionally to see which of the kids he knew are still there. After he left the center he moved back in with his parents. At first glance, he seems like any other 21-year-old: baggy Rocawear jeans, black T-shirt, powder-blue Nikes. But when asked to recount his years at the Rotenberg Center, he speaks for nearly two hours in astonishing detail, recalling names and specific events from seven or eight years earlier. When he describes his recurring nightmares, he raises both arms and rubs his forehead with his palms.
Despite spending more than three years at this behavior-modification facility, Rob still has problems controlling his behavior. In 2005, he was arrested for attempted assault and sent to jail. (This year he was arrested again, for drugs and assault.) Being locked up has given him plenty of time to reflect on his childhood, and he has gained a new perspective on the Rotenberg Center. "It's worse than jail," he told me. "That place is the worst place on earth."
One Punishment Fits All
The story of the Rotenberg Center is in many ways a tale of two schools. Slightly more than half the residents are what the school calls "high functioning": kids like Rob and Antwone, who have diagnoses like attention-deficit disorder, bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, and other emotional problems. The other group is even more troubled. Referred to as "low functioning," it includes kids with severe autism and mental retardation; most cannot speak or have very limited verbal abilities. Some have behaviors so extreme they can be life threatening: chomping on their hands and arms, running into walls, nearly blinding themselves by banging their heads on the floor again and again.
The Rotenberg Center has long been known as the school of last resort—a place that will take any kid, no matter how extreme his or her problems are. It doesn't matter if a child has been booted out of 2, 5, 10, or 20 other programs—he or she is still welcome here. For desperate parents, the Rotenberg Center can seem like a godsend. Just ask Louisa Goldberg, the mother of 25-year-old Andrew, who has severe mental retardation. Andrew's last residential school kicked him out after he kept assaulting staff members; the Rotenberg Center was the only place willing to accept him. According to Louisa, Andrew's quality of life has improved dramatically since 2000, when he was hooked up to the shock device, known as the Graduated Electronic Decelerator, or ged.
The Rotenberg Center has a policy of not giving psychiatric drugs to students—no Depakote, Paxil, Risperdal, Ritalin, or Seroquel. It's a policy that appeals to Louisa and many other parents. At Andrew's last school, she says, "he had so many medicines in him he'd take a two-hour nap in the morning, he'd take a two-hour nap in the afternoon. They'd have him in bed at eight o'clock at night. He was sleeping his life away." These days, Louisa says she is no longer afraid when her son comes home to visit. "[For him] to have an electrode on and to receive a ged is to me a much more favorable way of dealing with this," she says. "He's not sending people to the hospital."
Marguerite Famolare brought her son Michael to the Rotenberg Center six years ago, after he attacked her so aggressively she had to call 911 and, in a separate incident, flipped over a kitchen table onto a tutor. Michael, now 19, suffers from mental retardation and severe autism. These days, when he comes home for a visit, Marguerite carries his shock activator in her purse. All she has to do, she says, is show it to him. "He'll automatically comply to whatever my signal command may be, whether it is 'Put on your seatbelt,' or 'Hand me that apple,' or 'Sit appropriately and eat your food,'" she says. "It's made him a human being, a civilized human being."
Massachusetts officials have twice tried to shut the Rotenberg Center down—once in the 1980s and again in the 1990s. Both times parents rallied to its defense, and both times it prevailed in court. (See "Why Can't Massachusetts Shut Matthew Israel Down?" page 44.) The name of the center ensures nobody forgets these victories; it was Judge Ernest Rotenberg, now deceased, who in the mid-'80s ruled that the facility could continue using aversives—painful punishments designed to change behavior—so long as it obtained authorization from the Bristol County Probate and Family Court in each student's case. But even though the facility wasn't using electric shock when this ruling was handed down, the court rarely, if ever, bars the Rotenberg Center from adding shock to a student's treatment plan, according to lawyers and disability advocates who have tried to prevent it from doing so.
Since Evelyn Nicholson filed her lawsuit in 2006, the Rotenberg Center has faced a new wave of criticism and controversy. (See "Nagging? Zap. Swearing? Zap," page 41.) And again, the facility has relied heavily on the testimonials of parents like Louisa Goldberg and Marguerite Famolare to defend itself. Not surprisingly, the most vocal parent-supporters tend to be those with the sickest children, since they are the ones with the fewest options. But at the Rotenberg Center, the same methods of "behavior modification" are applied to all kids, no matter what is causing their behavior problems. And so, while Rob would seem to have little in common with mentally retarded students like Michael and Andrew, they all shared a similar fate once their parents placed them under the care of the same psychologist, a radical behaviorist known as Dr. Israel.
Dr. Israel's Radical Behavior
In 1950, matt israel was a Harvard freshman looking to fill his science requirement. He knew little about B.F. Skinner when he signed up for his course, Human Behavior. Soon, though, Israel became fascinated with Skinner's scientific approach to the study of behavior, and he picked up Walden Two, Skinner's controversial novel about an experimental community based on the principles of behaviorism. The book changed Israel's life. "I decided my mission was to start a utopian community," he says. Israel got a Ph.D. in psychology in 1960 from Harvard, and started two communal houses outside Boston.
One of the people Israel lived with was a three-year-old named Andrea, the daughter of a roommate. The two did not get along. "She was wild and screaming," Israel recalls. "I would retreat to my own room, and she'd be trying to pull away and get into my room, and I'd have to hold the door on one side to keep her from disturbing me." When company would come over, he says, "She would walk around with a toy broom and whack people over the head."
Through experiments with rats and pigeons, Skinner had demonstrated how animals learn from the consequences of their actions. With permission from Andrea's mother, Israel decided to try out Skinner's ideas on the three-year-old. When Andrea was well behaved, Israel took her out for walks. But when she misbehaved, he punished her by snapping his finger against her cheek. His mentor Skinner preached that positive reinforcement was vastly preferable to punishment, but Israel says his methods transformed the girl. "Instead of being an annoyance, she became a charming addition to the house."
Israel's success with Andrea convinced him to start a school. In 1971, he founded the Behavior Research Institute in Rhode Island, a facility that would later move to Massachusetts and become known as the Judge Rotenberg Center. Israel took in children nobody else wanted—severely autistic and mentally retarded kids who did dangerous things to themselves and others. To change their behavior, he developed a large repertoire of punishments: spraying kids in the face with water, shoving ammonia under their noses, pinching the soles of their feet, smacking them with a spatula, forcing them to wear a "white-noise helmet" that assaulted them with static.
In 1977, Israel opened a branch of his program in California's San Fernando Valley, along with Judy Weber, whose son Tobin is severely autistic. Two years later, the Los Angeles Times reported Israel had pinched the feet of Christopher Hirsch, an autistic 12-year-old, at least 24 times in 30 minutes, while the boy screamed and cried. This was a punishment for soiling his pants. ("It might have been true," Israel says. "It's true that pinches were being used as an aversive. The pinch, the spank, the muscle squeeze, water sprays, bad taste—all those procedures were being used.") Israel was in the news again in 1981, when another student, 14-year-old Danny Aswad, died while strapped facedown to his bed. In 1982, the California Department of Social Services compiled a 64-page complaint that read like a catalog of horrors, describing students with bruises, welts, and cuts. It also accused Israel of telling a staff member "to grow his fingernails longer so he could give an effective pinch."
In 1982, the facility settled with state officials and agreed to stop using physical punishments. Now called Tobinworld, and still run by Judy Weber, it is a $10-million-a-year organization operating day schools near Los Angeles and San Francisco. The Rotenberg Center considers itself a "sister school" to Tobinworld, and Israel makes frequent trips to California to visit Weber. The two were married last year.
Despite his setback in California, Israel continued to expand on the East Coast—and to generate controversy. In 1985, Vincent Milletich, an autistic 22-year-old, suffered a seizure and died after he was put in restraints and forced to wear a white-noise helmet. Five years later, 19-year-old Linda Cornelison, who had the mental capacity of a toddler, refused to eat. On the bus to school, she clutched her stomach; someone had to carry her inside, and she spent the day on a couch in a classroom. Linda could not speak, and the staff treated her actions as misbehaviors. Between 3:52 p.m. and 8 p.m., staffers punished her with 13 spatula spankings, 29 finger pinches, 14 muscle squeezes, and 5 forced inhalings of ammonia. It turned out that Linda had a perforated stomach. She died on the operating table at 1:45 a.m.
The local district attorney's office examined the circumstances of Vincent's death but declined to file any charges. In Linda's case, the Massachusetts Department of Mental Retardation investigated and found that while Linda's treatment had "violated the most basic codes and standards of decency and humane treatment," there was insufficient evidence to prove that the use of aversives had caused her death.
By the time Linda died, Israel was moving away from spatulas and toward electric shock, which, from his perspective, offered many advantages. "To give a spank or a muscle squeeze or a pinch, you had to control the student physically, and that could lead to a struggle," he says. "A lot of injuries were occurring." Since shocking only required pressing a button, Israel could eliminate the need for employees to wrestle a kid to the ground. Another benefit, he says, was increased consistency. It was hard to know if one staff member's spatula spanking was harder than another's, but it was easy to measure how many times a staff member had shocked a child.
Israel purchased a shock device then on the market known as sibis—Self-Injurious Behavior Inhibiting System—that had been invented by the parents of an autistic girl and delivered a mild shock that lasted .2 second. Between 1988 and 1990, Israel used sibis on 29 students, including one of his most challenging, Brandon, then 12, who would bite off chunks of his tongue, regurgitate entire meals, and pound himself on the head. At times Brandon was required to keep his hands on a paddle; if he removed them, he would get automatic shocks, one per second. One infamous day, Brandon received more than 5,000 shocks. "You have to realize," Israel says. "I thought his life was in the balance. I couldn't find any medical solution. He was vomiting, losing weight. He was down to 52 pounds. I knew it was risky to use the shock in large numbers, but if I persevered that day, I thought maybe it would eventually work. There was nothing else I could think of to do...but by the time it went into the 3,000 or 4,000 range, it became clear it wasn't working."
This day was a turning point in the history of Israel's operation—that's when he decided to ratchet up the pain. The problem, he decided, was that the shock sibis emitted was not strong enough. He says he asked sibis's manufacturer, Human Technologies, to create a more powerful device, but it refused. "So we had to redesign the device ourselves," he says. He envisioned a device that would start with a low current but that could increase the voltage if needed—hence its name, Graduated Electronic Decelerator or ged—but he abandoned this idea early on. "As it turns out, that's really not a wise approach," he says. "It's sort of like operating a car and wearing out the brakes because you never really apply them strongly enough. Instead, we set it at a certain level that was more or less going to be effective for most of our students."
Thirty years earlier, O. Ivar Lovaas, a psychology professor at ucla, had pioneered the use of slaps and screams and electric jolts to try to normalize the behavior of autistic kids. Life magazine featured his work in a nine-page photo essay in 1965 with the headline, "A surprising, shocking treatment helps far-gone mental cripples." Lovaas eventually abandoned these methods, telling cbs in 1993 that shock was "only a temporary suppression" because patients become inured to the pain. "These people are so used to pain that they can adapt to almost any kind of aversive you give them," he said.
Israel encountered this same sort of adaptation in his students, but his solution was markedly different: He decided to increase the pain once again. Today, there are two shock devices in use at the Rotenberg Center: the ged and the ged-4. The devices look similar and both administer a two-second shock, but the ged-4 is nearly three times more powerful—and the pain it inflicts is that much more severe.
The Mickey Mouse Club
Ten years ago, Israel hung up a Mickey Mouse poster in the main hall, and he noticed that it made people smile—so he bought every Mickey Mouse poster he could find. He hung them in the corridors and even papered the walls of what became known as the Mickey Mouse Conference Room. Entering the Rotenberg Center is a bit like stepping into a carnival fun house, I discovered during a two-day visit last autumn. Two brushed-aluminum dogs, each nearly 5 feet tall and sporting a purple neon collar, stand guard outside. Giant silver stars dangle from the lobby ceiling; the walls and chairs in the front offices are turquoise, lime green, and lavender.
Israel, 74, still holds the title of executive director, for which he pays himself nearly $400,000 in salary and benefits. He appears utterly unimposing: short and slender with soft hands, rounded shoulders, curly white hair, paisley tie. Then he sits down beside me and, unprompted, starts talking about shocking children. "The treatment is so powerful it's hard not to use if you have seen how effective it is," he says quietly. "It's brief. It's painful. But there are no side effects. It's two seconds of discomfort." His tone is neither defensive nor apologetic; rather, it's perfectly calm, almost soothing. It's the sort of demeanor a mother might find comforting if she were about to hand over her child.
Before we set off on our tour of the facility, there's something Israel wants me to see: Before & After, a homemade movie featuring six of his most severe cases. Israel has been using some of the same grainy footage for more than two decades, showing it to parents of prospective students as well as visiting reporters. They've already mailed me a copy, but Israel wants to make sure I watch it. An assistant slips the tape into the vcr, Israel presses the remote, and we all stare at the screen:
1977: An 11-year-old girl named Caroline arrives at the school strapped down onto a stretcher, her head encased in a helmet. In the next shot, free from restraints, she crouches down and tries to smash her helmeted head against the floor.
1981: Janine, also 11 years old, shrieks and slams her head against the ground, a table, the door. Bald spots testify to the severity of her troubles; she's yanked out so much hair it's half gone.
Both girls exhibit autistic behaviors, and compared with these scenes, the "After" footage looks almost unbelievable: Janine splashes in a plastic pool, while Caroline grins as she sits in a chair at a beauty salon. "Most people haven't seen these pictures," Israel says, setting down the remote. "They haven't seen children like this, so they cannot imagine. These are children for whom positive-only procedures did not work, drugs did not work. And if it wasn't for this treatment, some of these people would not be alive." The video is extremely persuasive: The girls' self-abuse is so violent and so frightening that it almost makes me want to grab a ged remote and push the button myself. Of course, this is precisely the point.
Considering how compelling the "After" footage is, I am surprised to learn that five of the six children featured in it are still here. "This is Caroline," one of my escorts says an hour or two later as we walk down a corridor. Without an introduction, I would not have known. Caroline, 39, slumps forward in a wheelchair, her fists balled up, head covered by a red helmet. "Blow me a kiss, Caroline," Israel says. She doesn't respond.
A few minutes later, I meet 36-year-old Janine, who appears in much better shape. She's not wearing a helmet and has a full head of black hair. She's also got a backpack on her shoulders and canvas straps hanging from her legs, the telltale sign that electrodes are attached to both calves. For 16 years—nearly half her life—Janine has been hooked up to Israel's shock device. A couple years ago, when the shocks began to lose their effect, the staff switched the devices inside her backpack to the much more painful ged-4.
Rogue Science
In 1994, matthew israel had just 64 students. Today he has 234. This astonishing rate of growth is largely the result of a dramatic change in the types of students he takes in. Until recently, nearly all were "low functioning," autistic and mentally retarded people. But today slightly more than 50 percent are "high functioning," with diagnoses like add, adhd, and bipolar disorder. New York state supplies the majority of these students, many of whom grew up in the poorest parts of New York City. Yet despite this change in his population, Israel's methods have remained essentially the same.
Israel has long faced criticism that he has not published research about his use of electric shocks in peer-reviewed journals, where experts could scrutinize it. To defend his methods, he points to a bibliography of 110 research articles that he's posted on the Rotenberg Center website. This catalog seems impressive at first. Studied more closely, however, it is not nearly so convincing. Three-quarters of the articles were published more than 20 years ago. Eight were written or cowritten by Lovaas, the ucla-affiliated behaviorist. One of America's leading autism experts, Lovaas long ago stopped endorsing painful aversives. And Lovaas' old studies focus primarily on children with autism who engage in extreme self-injury—not on troubled teens who have been diagnosed with adhd or add.
But then, it would be hard for Israel to find contemporary research supporting his program, because the practice of treating self-abusive kids with pain has been largely abandoned. According to Dr. Saul Axelrod, a professor at Temple University and an expert on behavior modification, "the field has moved away from painful stimuli because of public outcry and because we've devised better techniques," including determining the cause of an individual's self-abuse.
Another expert Israel cites several times is Dr. Brian A. Iwata, a consultant on the development of sibis, the device Israel modified to create his ged. Now a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Florida, he's a nationally recognized authority on treating severe self-abuse among children with developmental disabilities. Iwata has visited the Rotenberg Center and describes its approach as dangerously simplistic: "There appears to be a mission of that program to use shock for problem behaviors. It doesn't matter what that behavior is." Iwata has consulted for 25 states and says there is little relationship between what goes on at Israel's program and what goes on at other facilities. "He may have gotten his Ph.D. at Harvard, but he didn't learn what he's doing at Harvard. Whatever he's doing, he decided to do on his own."
Paul Touchette, who also studied with B.F. Skinner, has known Israel since the 1960s when they were both in Cambridge. Like Israel, Touchette went on to treat children with autism who exhibit extreme self-abuse, but he isn't a fan of Israel's approach either. "Punishment doesn't get at the cause," says Touchette, who is on the faculty of the University of California-Irvine School of Medicine. "It just scares the hell out of patients."
Over the decades, Touchette has followed Israel's career and bumped into him at professional conferences. "He's a very smart man, but he's an embarrassment to his profession," Touchette says. "I've never been able to figure out if Matt is a little off-kilter and actually believes all this stuff, or whether he's just a clever businessman."
Big Reward Store
At the rotenberg center, an elaborate system of rewards and punishments governs all interactions. Well-behaved kids can watch TV, go for pizza, play basketball. Students who've earned points for good behavior visit a store stocked with dvd players, cds, cologne, PlayStation 2, Essence magazine, knockoff Prada purses—anything the staff thinks students might want. But even more prized is a visit to the "Big Reward Store," an arcade full of pinball machines, video games, a pool table, and the most popular feature, a row of 42-inch flat-screen TVs hooked up to Xbox 360s.
Students like the "brs" for another reason—it's the only place many can socialize freely. At the Rotenberg Center, students have to earn the right to talk to each other. "We had to wait until we were in brs to communicate with others," says Isabel Cedeño, a 16-year-old who ran away from Rotenberg in 2006 after her boyfriend, a former student, came and got her. "That was the only time you really laughed, had fun, hung around with your friends. Because usually, you can't talk to them. It was basically like we had to have enemies. They didn't want us to be friendly with nobody."
Students live grouped together in homes and apartments scattered in nearby towns and are bused to the facility's headquarters every morning. They spend their days in classrooms, staring at a computer screen, their backs to the teacher. They are supposed to teach themselves, using self-instruction programs that include lessons in math, reading, and typing. Even with breaks for gym and lunch, the days can be incredibly dull. "On paper, it does look like they're being educated, because we have lesson plans," says former teacher Jessica Croteau, who oversaw a classroom of high-functioning teens for six months before leaving in 2006. But "to self-teach is not exciting. Why would the kids want to sit there and read a chapter on their own without any discussion?"
Croteau says teachers have to spend so much time monitoring misbehaviors there's often little time left for teaching. Whenever a student disobeys a rule, a staff member must point it out, using the student's name and just one or two rote phrases like, "Mark, there's no stopping work. Work on your task, please." Each time a student curses or yells, a staffer marks it on the student's recording sheet. Teachers and aides then use the sheet to calculate what level of punishment is required—when to just say "No!" and when to shock.
Employees carry students' shock activators inside plastic cases, which they hook onto their belt loops. These cases are known as "sleds," and each sled has a photo on it to ensure employees don't zap the wrong kid.
Behaviorism would seem to dictate that staff shock students immediately after they break the rules. But if employees learn about a misbehavior after it has occurred—by, say, reviewing surveillance footage—they may still administer punishment. Rob Santana recalls that Mondays were always the most stressful day of the week. He would sit at his desk all day, trying to remember if he had broken any rules over the weekend, waiting to see if he'd be shocked.
Employees are encouraged to use the element of surprise. "Attempt to be as discreet as possible and hold the transmitter out of view of the student," states the employee manual. This way, students cannot do anything to minimize the pain, like flipping over their electrodes or tensing their muscles. "We hear the sound of [a staffer] picking up a sled," says Isabel, the former student. "Then we turn around and see the person jump out of their seat."
Employees shock students for a wide range of behaviors, from violent actions to less serious offenses, like getting out of their seats without permission. In 2006, the New York State Education Department sent a team of investigators, including three psychologists, to the Rotenberg Center, then issued a scathing report. Among its many criticisms was that the staff shocked kids for "nagging, swearing, and failing to maintain a neat appearance." Israel only disputes the latter. As for nagging and swearing? "Sometimes a behavior looks innocuous," he says, "but if it's an antecedent for aggression, it may have to be treated with an aversive."
New York officials disagreed, and in January 2007 issued regulations that would prohibit shocking New York students for minor infractions. But a group of New York parents filed a federal lawsuit to stop the state from enforcing these regulations. They prevailed, winning a temporary restraining order against the state, one that permits the Rotenberg Center staffers to continue using shock. The parents' case is expected to go to trial in 2008.
When they talk about why they use the shock device, Israel and his employees like to use the word "treatment," but it might be more accurate to use words like "convenience" or "control." "The ged—it's two seconds and it's done," says Patricia Rivera, a psychologist who serves as assistant director of clinical services. "Then it's right back to work." By contrast, it can take 8 or 10 employees half an hour or longer to restrain a strong male student: to pin him to the floor, wait for him to stop struggling, then move his body onto a restraint board and tie down each limb. Restraining five or eight kids in a single day—or the same student again and again—can be incredibly time-consuming and sometimes dangerous.
Even with the ged, the stories both students and employees tell make the place sound at times like a war zone: A teenage boy sliced the gym teacher across the face with a cd. A girl stabbed a staffer in the stomach with a pencil. While staff have been contending with injuries ever since Israel opened his facility, the recent influx of high-functioning students, some with criminal backgrounds, has brought a new fear: that students will join forces and riot. Perhaps tellingly, among high-functioning kids most of the violence is directed at the staff, not each other.
"Our Students Have a Tendency to Lie"
Rotenberg staff place the more troubled (or troublesome) residents on 1:1 status, meaning that an aide monitors them everywhere they go. For extremely violent students, the ratio is 2:1. Soon after I arrived, right before I set off on my tour, a small crowd gathered—it seemed that almost the entire hierarchy of the Rotenberg Center was going to follow me around. That's when I realized I'd been put on 5:1. As I began to roam around the school with my escorts, my every move monitored by surveillance cameras, I realized it would be impossible to have a private conversation with any student. The best I could hope for would be a few unscripted moments.
Ten years ago, a reporter visiting Israel's center would have been unable to talk to most students; back then few of them could speak. These days, there are more than 100 high-functioning kids fully capable of voicing their views, and Israel has enlisted a few in his campaign to promote the ged. "If we had only [severely] autistic students, they couldn't talk to you and say, 'Gee, this is really helping me,'" Israel says. "Now for the first time we have students like Katie who can tell you it helped them."
In the world of the Rotenberg Center, Katie Spartichino is a star. She left the facility in the spring of 2006 and now attends community college in Boston. Around noon, a staff member brings her back to the facility to talk to me. We sit at an outdoor picnic table away from the surveillance cameras but there's no privacy: Israel and Karen LaChance, the assistant to the executive director for admissions, sit with us.
Katie, 19, tells me she overdosed on pills at 9, spent her early adolescence in and out of psych wards, was hooked up to the ged at 16, and stayed on the device for two years. "This is a great place," she says. "It took me off all my medicine. I was close to 200 pounds and I'm 160 now." She admits her outlook was less rosy when she first had to wear the electrodes. "I cried," she says. "I kind of felt like I was walking on eggshells; I had to watch everything I said. Sometimes a curse word would just come out of my mouth automatically. So being on the geds and knowing that swearing was a targeted behavior where I would receive a [GED] application, it really got me to think twice before I said something disrespectful or something just plain-out rude."
As Katie speaks, LaChance runs her fingers through Katie's hair again and again. The gesture is so deliberate it draws my attention. I wonder if it's just an expression of affection—or something more, like a reward.
"Do you swear anymore?" I ask.
"Oh, God, all the time," Katie says. She pauses. "Well, I have learned to control it, but I'm not going to lie. When I'm on the phone, curse words come out."
The hair stroking stops. LaChance turns to Katie. "I hope you're not going to tell me you're aggressive."
"Oh, no, that's gone," Katie says. "No, no, no. The worst thing I do sometimes is me and my mom get into little arguments."
For Israel, of course, one drawback of having so many high-functioning students is that he cannot control everything they say. One afternoon, when I walk into a classroom of teenagers, a 15-year-old girl catches my eye, smiles, and holds up a sheet of paper with a message written in pink marker: HELP US. She puts it back down and shuffles it into her stack of papers before anyone else sees. When I move closer, she tells me her name is Raquel, she is from the Bronx, and she wants to go home.
My escorts allow me to interview Raquel while two of them sit nearby. Raquel is not hooked up to the ged, but she has many complaints, including that she has just witnessed one of her housemates get shocked. "She was screaming," Raquel says. "They told her to step up to be searched; she didn't want to step up to be searched, so they gave her one." After 20 minutes, my escorts cut us off. "Raquel, you did a great job—thank you for taking the time," says Patricia Rivera, the psychologist.
Once Raquel is out of earshot, Rivera adds, "Some of the things she said are not true, some of them are. Our students obviously have a tendency to lie about things." She explains that a staff member searches Raquel's housemate every hour because she's the one who recently stabbed an employee with a pencil.
The Rotenberg Center does not have a rule about how old a child must be before he or she can be hooked up to the ged. One of the program's youngest students is a nine-year-old named Rodrigo. When I see him, he is seated outside at a picnic table with his aide. Rodrigo's backpack looks enormous on his tiny frame; canvas straps dangle from both legs.
"He was horrible when he first came in," Rivera says. "It would take five staff to restrain him because he's so wiry." What was he like? "A lot of aggression. A lot of disruptive behavior. Whenever he was asked to do a task that he didn't feel like doing, he would scream, yell, swear. The stuff that would come out of his mouth you wouldn't believe—very sexually inappropriate."
"Rodrigo, come here," one of my escorts says.
Rodrigo walks over, his straps slapping the ground. He wears a white dress shirt and tie—the standard uniform for male students—but because he is so small, maybe 4 feet tall, his tie nearly reaches his thighs. "What's that?" he asks.
"That's a tape recorder," I say. "Do you want to say something?"
"Yeah."
Unfazed by the presence of Israel, Rivera, and my other escorts, Rodrigo lifts a small hand and pulls the recorder down toward his lips. "I want to move to another school," he says.
The Employee-Modification System
To understand how the Rotenberg Center works, it helps to know that it runs not just one behavior-modification program, but two—one for the residents, and one for the staff. Employees have no autonomy. If a staffer believes it's okay to shock a kid who is smashing his head against a wall, but it's not okay to shock someone for getting out of his chair without permission, that could spell trouble. "There's pressure on you to do it," a former teacher told me. "They punish you if you don't."
I met this former teacher at a restaurant, and our meeting stretched on for six hours. At times it felt less like an interview than a confession. "The first time you give someone a ged is the worst one," the teacher said. "You don't want to hurt somebody; you want to help. You're thinking, 'This has got to be okay. This has got to be legal, or they wouldn't be doing this.'" At the Rotenberg Center, it's virtually impossible to discuss such concerns with coworkers because there are cameras everywhere, even in the staff break room. Staff members who want to talk to each other without being overheard may meet up in the parking lot or scribble notes to each other. But it's hard to know whom to trust, since Israel encourages employees to file anonymous reports about their coworkers' lapses.
In addition, staff members are prohibited from having casual conversations with each other. They cannot, for example, say to a coworker, "Hey, did you see the Red Sox game last night?" "We don't want them discussing their social life or the ball games in front of the students or while they're on duty," Israel says. "So we'll sometimes actually have one staffer deliberately start a social conversation with another and we'll see whether the other—as he or she should—will say, 'I don't want to discuss that now.'" Monitors watch these setups on the surveillance cameras and punish staffers who take the bait.
Former employees describe a workplace permeated with fear—fear of being attacked by students and fear of losing their job. There are so many rules—and so many cameras—it's not easy to stay out of trouble. Employees quit or are fired so often that two-thirds of the direct-care employees remain on the job for less than a year.
New employees must sign a confidentiality agreement promising not to talk about the Rotenberg Center—even after they no longer work there. Of the eight ex-employees I interviewed, most did not want to be identified by name for fear of Israel suing them; all were critical of how the ged is used. Maybe, says one, the use of shocks was justified in a few extreme self-injurious cases, but that's all. "Say you had a hospital that was the only hospital in the nation that had chemotherapy, and they were treating people who had the common cold with it," she says. "I think the extreme to which they abuse their power has outweighed what good they do."
The Hard Lessons of Connie Chung
Matthew Israel has been fielding questions from journalists since the 1970s, but few have examined his operation as thoroughly—and critically—as the producers at Eye to Eye with Connie Chung did. In 1993, they spent six months investigating the facility. They even found an employee willing to go inside with a hidden camera. But Israel ended up getting the last laugh. As he recounts the story for me, he can barely contain his glee. "We refused to meet with her unless the parents could be in the same room," he says, grinning. "She talked to the parents, and they really gave it to her." This is no exaggeration: When Chung tried to ask him tough questions, his parent-supporters shouted her down.
Throughout this raucous meeting, Israel had his own camera rolling, too, which turned out to be a brilliant move. Before cbs got its 40-minute story on the air, Israel launched a national campaign to discredit both Chung and her report. He accused her of being "biased" and "hostile," and to prove it, he distributed edited videotapes of her interview to media critics and cbs affiliates. It worked. A New York Times television critic savaged cbs, accusing it of using "shabby tricks of the trade." Suddenly the story was not about whether the school had abused students—but whether cbs had abused the school.
"I don't think it was a positive thing for her career," says Israel, still smiling. It's late in the day, right near the end of my visit, and I'm starting to wonder why he's brought up this topic.
By now I've spent 22 hours with Israel and his staff—wandering around the facility, meeting parents they've brought in for me to interview. But before I depart, there's one more place I want to see, the room where they repair the geds. Israel and Glenda Crookes, an assistant executive director, agree to take me there. It is just past 7 p.m. and drizzling as we climb into Israel's Lexus for a short drive to the maintenance building.
There, Crookes and Israel lead me down a hall, past storerooms filled with red helmets, ged sleds, batteries and their chargers. The room at the end of the hall looks like it could be a repair shop for any sort of electronics equipment: scissors, screwdrivers, industrial-grade glue, a Black & Decker Pivot Driver. On one desk, I spot a form called a ged Trouble Report. The report explains that someone dropped off Duane's shock device because it was "making rattling noises." Crookes explains, "Anytime a screw is loose or anything is wrong with the device, it's automatically sent back here."
A Trouble Report on another desk suggests a more serious problem: "Jamie Z was getting his battery changed, Luigi received a shock." "What does this mean?" I ask. Crookes picks up the paper, reads it, then hands it to Israel and walks away. Her gesture seems to say, I cannot believe we just spent two days with this reporter and now this is the last thing she sees.
Israel stares at the report, then reaches into his pocket and pulls out a pair of reading glasses. Nobody says anything. Outside, one car after another races by, the tail end of the evening commute.
After a minute or two, Israel says, "Well, I don't understand the whole of it." He is still staring at the paper in his hand. "But there was apparently a spontaneous activation." The ged, in other words, delivered a shock without anyone pressing its remote.
This moment reminds me of something Israel told me earlier about the premise of Skinner's Walden Two, that by changing people's behaviors you can help them have a better life. But, Israel was careful to add, "The notion was that you needed to have the whole environment under control. With a school like this, we have an awful lot. Not the whole environment, but an awful lot."
He was right; he controls nearly every aspect of his facility. But all of his surveillance cameras and microphones and paperwork and protocols had failed to protect Luigi, a mentally retarded resident who had done nothing wrong.
This article has been made possible by the Foundation for National Progress, the Investigative Fund of Mother Jones, and gifts from generous readers like you.
© 2007 The Foundation for National Progress
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/09/school_of_shock.html
New Statesman:
Hope for the future in Sierra Leone
Lisa Denney
Published 21 August 2007
Lisa Denney - in Sierra Leone with an NGO - relates how presidential elections have brought hope of desperately needed change in the West African state
I am smothered. Wedged between sweaty, gesticulating passengers in an overcrowded taxi, I am forced to listen to the boisterous argument filling the suspension-less vehicle. It’s not an argument about the taxi fare or personal gripes (of which I am accumulating many – the latest involving an uninvited rat swimming in my toilet). It’s about politics – about which Presidential contender can most successfully wipe out corruption, create jobs and oversee the development of Sierra Leone. The political apathy that sweeps the West is one of the few things that politicians in this West African nation need not worry about. Political opinion here is endemic.
There is nothing dour or staid about politics in the Sierra Leonean elections. The solemnity that attends political debate in many other countries is replaced by a carnival of music, colour and dancing. On their allocated days, all shades of green (the incumbent Sierra Leone People’s Party), red (the main opposition All People’s Congress) and orange (the SLPP breakaway, People’s Movement for Democratic Change) take the streets of Freetown by storm, causing already day-long traffic jams to congest further. Youths high on the exhilaration of the possibility of change hang out of car windows, or perch on trucks carrying speakers that pump with music and the occasional political message.
The expatriate community in such times keep a conversely low profile. Most have been scouring their closets for politically neutral clothing that does not suggest affinity with one party or another. Non-government organisations have taken to printing promotional materials in the non-party suggestive blue, also to avoid bias.
People here are resistant to the idea that the elections could spur a new wave of violence, only five years after the official end of their decade-long civil war, renowned for its brutality of ‘chopping’ limbs and use of child soldiers drugged up on 'brown brown' – a mixture of gunpowder and cocaine. Wrist bands bearing the slogan "voters say no to violence" are popular and travelling musical ensembles promoting peaceful elections have emerged with a keen following.
In a wonderful demonstration of perspective, people are engaging the serious issues of elections and democracy with exuberance and fun. This boisterousness, of course, also has the potential to become a prelude to violence, if the results of the election (and its likely Presidential run-off in approximately two weeks time) are not accepted by the contesting parties, who currently all claim likely victory. It is this moment that will be a test to Sierra Leone’s democratic transition. In the hype of election euphoria, it is easy to forget that it is not just the ballot box that gauges democracy, but an adherence to the rule of law also.
For most Sierra Leoneans, the key political issues are jobs, corruption and development. Across the country, and particularly in the capital, Freetown - where many people converged during and after the war in hope of greater opportunity - unemployed youths congregate on street corners, in chop houses and around markets.
Their idle hands and disgruntlement are not only an economic concern, ensuring that much of the population remains locked in poverty, but also pose a potential security threat. Sierra Leone is currently ranked second lowest on the human development index by the United Nations Development Program, ahead only of Niger. With investment still lagging, the much needed jobs simply don’t exist. This election is a crucial stability landmark that, all things remaining peaceful, may see a return of investors and foreign companies, whose taxes and license fees can help to generate government revenue, and whose operations can create much needed employment.
Development still remains a buzz word five years into the post-conflict era and encapsulates an overwhelmingly extensive list of services and infrastructure. Roads remain poor, particularly upcountry, with only one town connected to Freetown by a paved road. Schools and hospitals are severely underfunded with high illiteracy and infant mortality rates. According to the World Health Organisation, life expectancy is 40 years for women and 37 years for men. The absence of reliable power is also a severely limiting factor for families and businesses in Sierra Leone.
Freetown hums continuously with the drone of generators that are expensive to acquire, maintain and run. Boys selling kerosine and women carrying baskets of coal stacked on their heads fill the electricity void with these alternatives to light lamps and start fires. A long-running plan to build a hydro-electric power station seems no further off the ground than when the idea was first mooted over a decade ago.
Weeding out corruption within government, business and the security sector is also a central concern of many voters. The sentiment is summed up in the hugely popular Freetown-based musician, Daddy Saj’s song, ‘Corruption e do so’ (‘Corruption – enough is enough’), which outraged politicians at the time of its release in 2003.
Yet despite the seriousness, complexity and inter-relatedness of such issues constituting the political agenda, Sierra Leoneans remain optimistic that the future, under the right leader, is promising. The difficulties arise in determining who that ‘right leader’ will be. The international community have so far been quick to congratulate Sierra Leone on a peaceful election – but the test is not over just yet. If people can prioritise their enthusiasm for democracy – which saw millions vote in the torrential rains of the monsoon season, rather than their enthusiasm for a particular party or leader, then Sierra Leone might shed further its war-torn reputation and instate itself as a peaceful country, rather than just a post-conflict one.
As a Sierra Leonean friend told me: true patriots may be red, green or orange on the outside, but all are a tricolour of green, white and blue (the colours of the national flag) on the inside. Traipsing amongst this election rapture, the monsoons have drenched my shoes and caused the dye to run. My feet turn green and I am marked as an SLPP supporter. I must remember to wear red to restore my neutrality.
http://www.newstatesman.com/200708210004#
Página/12:
Vida de segunda
Por Rodrigo Fresán
desde Barcelona
Martes, 21 de Agosto de 2007
UNO Escribo esto en la mitad del terrible mes de agosto y en el centro de una ciudad llamada Barcelona. Y es una ciudad en problemas: apagones colosales, trenes que no funcionan, aeropuertos colapsados y –lo peor de todo– hordas de turistas que llegan atraídos por lo que ellos entienden como “el estilo mediterráneo” y que parecen decodificar como emborracharse barato, mear y cagar en las calles, tomar por asalto las fiestas barriales del verano y enloquecer a los residentes del lugar (bajo la mirada entre comprensiva y resignada de las fuerzas del orden con órdenes de los ayuntamientos de que no estalle la batalla a la hora del desalojo porque eso da mala imagen), lanzar alaridos a diestra y siniestra, unirse por un rato a fashion okupas para jugar al anarquista de luxe (se los reconoce por el mal uso y peor abuso de las palabras Babylon y Utopía) y alquilar bicicletas para (alentados por el mal ejemplo de nativos y residentes, hay que decirlo) montarlas a toda velocidad por las mismas veredas donde se derrumban y duermen la resaca en charcos de vómito. Y, si queda tiempo, un poquito de Gaudí. Consecuencias de los modales permisivos de una ciudad que ya desde hace unos cuantos años viene abriéndose de piernas al visitante y que se la aguanten como puedan los locales.
Escribo esto a las tres de la mañana mientras, bajo el balcón de mi casa, una jauría de italianos de esos que hasta hace poco solían ir a atormentar a Praga, aúllan a coro algo así como ¡Bella! ¡Bella! ¡Bella bambina! y son seguidos por una horda de vikingos milenaristas que, supongo, vienen aquí a descargar las tensiones que harán postergar, al menos por unos años, ese suicidio frígido y boreal consecuencia de vivir en sociedades donde no se puede hacer nada de todo esto. Y yo tengo ganas de irme a otra parte, a cualquier lugar, lejos. O, mejor, que se vayan los otros. No todos. Pero bastantes.
DOS Y semanas atrás alguien me había hablado del fenómeno Second Life. Me lo había descrito con los ojos brillantes y salivando y mostrando los dientes. Parecía un turista italiano. Me hablaba de “avatares” y “lindens”, de “ser otro” y de “ganar dinero”. Y yo no pude evitar el pesadillesco recuerdo de aquel jueguito de la pirámide donde “te forrabas” conociendo “gente copada”. Me habló también de los muchos lugares a conocer en el “metaverso” y yo pensé en que ese era un buen sitio adonde enviar a tanto turista descarrilado. Y lo cierto es que a mí todo lo que tiene que ver con la informática –chats, blogs, sites, etc.– no me interesa en absoluto y mi computadora funciona, nada más y nada menos, que como una máquina de escribir con súper poderes. Sin llegar a ser un tecno-retrógrado, tengo que reconocer que la adicción a la electricidad siempre me produjo una mezcla de rechazo con miedo. Espacialmente –luego de haber conocido, durante mi infancia, a la mujer del “bombero” Montag, enganchada a su televisión interactiva, en Fahrenheit 451– la que ha venido aumentando de intensidad en los últimos años con cada vez más numerosos y complejos gadgets destinados a convertirnos en sentados sedentarios presionando teclas y botones. Así, parece, buena parte de la ciencia ficción estaba equivocada: no hay vida en otros planetas pero cada vez hay más alienados aliens nacidos en la Tierra. Y ninguno necesita eso de phone home porque no hace falta, porque no salen casi nunca.
TRES Aun así, lo de Second Life, su concepto, me llamó la atención porque ya lo había leído hace años –en 1992, en una novela muy graciosa de Neal Stephenson titulada Snow Crash– y, como todo lo que se nos ocurre y nos ocurre, ya insinuado en cualquiera de las páginas de Philip K. Dick. Pero la semana pasada volví a cruzarme con el fenómeno Second Life esta vez no presentado como tierra prometida sino como promesa no cumplida. La cosa era un fracaso y el 85 por ciento de los avatares inscriptos ya ni pasaba por ahí. Y, los que todavía se daban una vuelta lo hacían en busca de sexo veloz en Sexy Beach o de dinero fácil en Money Island. No sé el sexo, pero el dinero ya no lo sería tanto porque el banco de Second Life llamado Ginko Financial se había declarado en bancarrota y alguien –cuyo nombre nunca se supo– había desaparecido de allí con 750.000 muy reales dólares que muchos incautos habían cambiado a lindens. La noticia –en televisión– mostraba también las imágenes de un concierto de U2 en el metaverso donde apenas unos diez avatares bailoteaban con una animación que me pareció deficiente. El locutor aludía a un artículo de la revista Wired y lo leí (de parado en una librería, no en cuclillas frente a la pantalla) y ahí me enteré (el pabellón de Coca-Cola sólo había recibido unas 27 visitas) de la fuga en masa de auspiciantes. Días más tarde leía que Time había calificado a Second Life como uno de los cinco peores sites de Internet por lento, aburrido y poblado por demasiados locos. Y, claro, los cuerdos, seguro, ya están a la búsqueda de la nueva novedad, el sabroso sabor, la otra otredad, esas cosas. Mientras tanto y hasta entonces, me cuentan, ya hay parodias en Second Life on line donde se tienta con el placer de “salir afuera” y de “fornicar usando los propios genitales”. Otra que turismo aventura.
CUATRO Y que Second Life haya acabado resultando una vida de segunda –me parece– apenas encierra una transparente moraleja. No hay nada más aburrido que recibir (a escala y de fogueo, después de todo avatar significa “descenso o encarnación de un divinidad”) los poderes de un Dios capaz de controlar no la existencia de todo el universo pero sí la propia. Y tal vez a partir de esta experiencia pueda entenderse la absoluta ausencia en nuestro planeta de cualquiera de las muchas posibles encarnaciones de Dios. Porque si uno se aburre de sí mismo, entonces cómo no aburrirse de toda la humanidad y sus circunstancias. Esta es la explicación, me parece, a que de aquí en más las guerras sean cada vez más religiosas y/o doctrinarias, a que el Papa pueda decir tantas cosas raras y a que las iglesias siempre se vengan abajo cuando hay gente adentro de ellas y a que Osel Hita –el primer niño español reconocido como la reencarnación de un lama a los 14 meses de edad– sea hoy un joven de 22 años que ha decido dejar atrás sus estudios de geshe (Filosofía budista, Metafísica y Dialéctica) para irse a estudiar cine a Canadá. Está claro que Osel se cansó de su Second Life.
Y a mí la decadencia de Second Life no es que me alegre pero me parece un signo positivo. La verdad –para bien o para mal, aunque más de un anonymous no quiera creerlo– sigue estando a este lado de la pantalla.
Lo que me lleva, otra vez, a lo del principio: ahora, ahí abajo, un tal Giovanni (así lo llama a los alaridos un amigo que tal vez se llame Luigi) no deja de girar como un derviche mientras vomita al mismo tiempo y muestra sus puños al cielo.
Parece un avatar.
© 2000-2007 www.pagina12.com.ar|Todos los Derechos Reservados
http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/contratapa/13-90018-2007-08-21.html
Página/12:
“Esa imagen la vio todo el mundo”
EL REALIZADOR ANDRES HABEGGER ANTICIPA SU FILM “IMAGEN FINAL”
El director de H (Historias cotidianas) presenta hoy en la Sala Lugones, en el marco del Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, un adelanto de su documental sobre el camarógrafo argentino Leonardo Henrichsen, quien filmó en Chile el momento de su propia ejecución.
Por Oscar Ranzani
Martes, 21 de Agosto de 2007
El 29 de junio de 1973, en la ciudad de Santiago de Chile, se produjo un sublevamiento militar contra el gobierno democrático de Salvador Allende, que precedió al golpe que finalmente lo derrocaría. Producto de ese alzamiento de las Fuerzas Armadas chilenas, murieron veintidós personas. Entre ellas estaba Leonardo Henrichsen, un joven camarógrafo argentino de 33 años, que estaba realizando la cobertura del “Tanquetazo” –tal como se conoció aquel putsch militar– para la Televisión Sueca. Henrichsen filmó su propia muerte y esa imagen recorrió el mundo: el compromiso por su vocación pudo más que la necesidad de resguardo y lo llevó a enfocar justo al lugar desde donde comenzaron a dispararle impunemente los asesinos. La imagen, impactante cuantas veces se la mire, muestra cómo los militares apuntaban desde una camioneta hacia Henrichsen, quien a pesar de identificarse como periodista siguió siendo baleado, hasta que uno de los impactos le provocó la muerte. Como consecuencia de este episodio, la Justicia militar chilena inició una investigación que quedó en la nada tras el golpe de Augusto Pinochet. El periodista chileno Ernesto Carmona se metió en los vericuetos de la burocracia de su país y –analizando el expediente de entonces y en base a una reconstrucción minuciosa que le deparó años de trabajo– dedujo el nombre del autor intelectual del crimen. A partir de esta investigación, dos años atrás la familia de Henrichsen inició una querella, que ha llegado a provocar una controversia judicial.
Sobre esta historia posó su mirada el cineasta argentino Andrés Habegger –director de H (Historias cotidianas), acerca de seis hijos de desaparecidos–, quien está realizando el documental Imagen final abordando dos líneas: una de ellas vinculada con el presente, donde pone el acento en la investigación personal de Carmona y en el juicio. La otra está más ligada al pasado y focaliza en los recuerdos de las personas que trabajaron con Henrichsen. Entre ellas habla Jan Sandquist, quien fue el corresponsal de la Televisión Sueca (SVT) y jefe de Leonardo al momento del crimen. Hoy a las 19.30, con entrada gratuita, en la Sala Leopoldo Lugones del Teatro San Martín (Corrientes 1530), en el marco del ciclo “Human Rights Watch Internacional Film Festival en Buenos Aires - Segunda Edición”, se proyectará una adelanto de media hora de Imagen final, con la presencia del propio Habegger, quien conversará con el público.
En diálogo con Página/12, Habegger reconoce que la investigación para el documental “fue muy larga” y que tanto la reconstrucción del episodio en que matan a Henrichsen como la de su vida profesional “fue muy fragmentaria, porque cada uno de los personajes vinculados con la historia tiene su versión, por el vínculo afectivo que tenían con él, por cómo cada uno recuerda la historia. Y fue un proceso complejo porque involucra a la Argentina, a Chile y a Suecia”, sostiene Habegger, quien agrega que el hilo conductor del documental “se fue modificando y delineando en la medida de nuestra investigación y de los materiales que íbamos encontrando”. Para el documentalista, “algo muy llamativo es que no estaba identificado el nombre del cabo de esa camioneta. O sea, el que primero dispara y el que después ordena a los soldados que están en la camioneta que también disparen”. Ese dato lo investigó Carmona en forma personal antes de realizar una segunda investigación especialmente para Imagen final.
–¿Cuándo arrancó usted con la investigación?
–En 2003. En ese momento, el cabo no estaba identificado. Había un rostro, pero ese rostro no tenía nombre. Para mí era una paradoja muy grande: había un asesinato de un reportero gráfico que tenía la particularidad de que había registrado a los sujetos que lo mataron. Y esa imagen y ese sujeto habían dado vueltas por todo el mundo, pero no se sabía su nombre.
–Sobre todo con una prueba tan contundente como es la filmación...
–Por supuesto. El tipo está en primer plano disparando y no había un nombre para ese rostro. Por ende, no había nadie juzgado por ese asesinato. Y esa paradoja fue la que me motivó a trabajar. Al día siguiente del “Tanquetazo”, la propia Justicia militar inició una investigación. Producto de esta investigación hay un expediente compuesto por alrededor de diez libros con testimonios, investigaciones y autopsias, porque ese día murieron veintidós personas, entre ellas Leonardo.
–¿Todos civiles?
–Sí. A partir de ese expediente, que es muy rico aunque bastante ecléctico por la manera en que está organizado, una semana después del golpe se declara nula la causa y liberan a todos los detenidos que había. Ese mismo expediente es el que utiliza muchos años después Carmona para empezar a investigar, con los testimonios, que son parciales. Digo parciales porque, por ejemplo, nosotros investigamos en ese expediente a muchos de los conscriptos que estuvieron en esa camioneta y están sus declaraciones. Pero ninguno declara haber disparado a una persona. Muchos declaran no haber disparado y otros declaran haber disparado al aire, por orden de su superior, para espantar a la gente y eso. Son parciales, pero lo que sí es verídico son los nombres que aparecen ahí. Entonces, en base a esa investigación profunda que hizo Carmona, terminó haciendo una deducción del nombre: Héctor Hernán Bustamante, que fue el cabo, que iba en una camioneta con trece conscriptos. El es el primero que dispara hacia Leonardo, es el único que tiene una pistola porque todos los demás tienen carabinas. Ese disparo no le da. Entonces lo que él hace es ordenarles a los soldados que disparen. Héctor Hernán Bustamante es el nombre que está en la querella como acusado de ser el autor intelectual.
–¿Es decir que, en base a la investigación de Carmona, se saca el nombre del autor intelectual y la familia inicia una querella?
–En realidad, coinciden dos cosas. Primero, hay consenso entre la familia porque ellos necesitaron también su tiempo para poder enfrentar la situación de ir a Chile a presentar una querella, ya que se podría haber iniciado antes, aunque no hubiera un nombre. Pero coincidió la investigación de Carmona, la aparición del nombre y la decisión de la familia. En la querella, los dos nombres que figuran como acusados son Héctor Hernán Bustamante y Pablo Rodríguez, que tiene que ver con una acusación más política. Pablo Rodríguez era integrante de una agrupación llamada Patria y Libertad, algo equivalente a la Triple A de acá, de extrema derecha. Fue una agrupación civil que colaboró con la organización del “Tanquetazo”. Pablo Rodríguez fue uno de los abogados de Pinochet, hasta su muerte.
–¿El que disparó todavía no está identificado?
–No se sabe el nombre. Bueno, eso es algo que también aborda en un momento la película. Lo que tenemos identificado es que hubo cuatro disparos. Nosotros hemos tratado de analizar repetidamente esas imágenes y otros también, pero no hay una certeza de cual fue el disparo que lo mata.
–¿Qué pasó con el juicio?
–La primera presentación fue en 2005. La familia hizo dos presentaciones más: una en 2006 y otra en 2007.
–¿Por qué?
–Porque la primera jueza hizo un análisis del caso y su dictamen fue que éste es un caso prescripto. Es lo mismo que los muertos previos al 24 de marzo de 1976.
–Los que asesinó la Triple A.
–Claro. Como Leonardo muere en el “Tanquetazo”, antes del golpe y de la dictadura de Pinochet, su asesinato no se lo consideró un delito de lesa humanidad. Por ende prescribió porque es como un asesinato común, que creo que si en diez años no se inicia una causa, en Chile prescribe. La pelea de ahora de los abogados es que lo que pasó ese 29 de junio de 1973 sea considerado un delito de lesa humanidad y no un delito común, porque participaron las Fuerzas Armadas como institución contra la población civil. Entonces, aunque había un gobierno democrático como el de Allende, en este marco fueron delitos de lesa humanidad. Pero judicialmente no se entendió así. Entonces ni siquiera se abrió una investigación. Hubo una presentación y la jueza dictaminó eso. Volvió a haber una nueva presentación, pidiendo lo que se llama un juez de visita, que revisa el caso, y también pasó lo mismo. Ahora, la última presentación fue ante la Corte Suprema. Cuando eso se deniegue, lo que piensa hacer la familia es ir ante la Corte Interamericana de Derechos Humanos.
–¿Quién retiró el negativo que filmó Leonardo, cómo se salvó y cómo llegó a conocerse la imagen?
–Es una historia bastante larga e interesante, que involucra a Chile Films. En ese momento, Chile Films era el equivalente de Sucesos Argentinos: una empresa estatal que hacía un noticiero cinematográfico que iba antes de las películas. La gente que estaba en Chile Films era proallendista. Cuando a Leonardo le disparan, se sabe que uno de los soldados va hacia él y le arranca la cámara para borrar la evidencia. Estaban más o menos a cuarenta o cincuenta metros de distancia. La camioneta estaba en la esquina y él estaba a mitad de cuadra. Le arranca la cámara y esa persona vuelve a donde estaba la camioneta. Abren una alcantarilla, tiran la cámara y vuelven a ponerle la tapa. Eso lo ve Eduardo Labarca, un periodista de Chile Films, que estaba en el noveno piso del edificio de la esquina, filmando, porque esa esquina justo da a la Plaza de la Moneda. El cuenta en la película que no llega a ver el momento en que lo matan a Leonardo, ni cuando le arrancan la cámara. Pero lo que ve es que abren la alcantarilla y que tiran una cosa negra que él identifica como una cámara. El avisa a la policía secreta de Allende, cuando se sofoca el intento del golpe. Unas horas más tarde rescatan la cámara con la película adentro. La cámara la lleva la policía secreta a la casa de Allende. Y ahí empieza una disputa entre la Televisión Nacional de Chile y Chile Films.
–¿Y quién gana la pulseada?
–Chile Films. Con la particularidad de que esa película era 16 mm color. En ese momento, en Chile no existía laboratorio de 16 mm color. Una persona de Chile Films viaja hasta los laboratorios Alex en Buenos Aires, la revelan y vuelven. Y ahí se dan cuenta de lo que tenía esa imagen. La Televisión Sueca se entera de que la película y la cámara las tenía Chile Films y empieza una especie de disputa. La Televisión Sueca reclama y dice: “Esa película y esa cámara son de la Televisión Sueca”. Y Chile Films dice: “No, nosotros no sabemos nada”.
–¿Y cómo se resuelve?
–En realidad, lo que confrontan ahí son dos lógicas distintas. Para Chile Films, cuando ellos se dan cuenta de lo que contenía esa imagen, lo consideran un material de denuncia muy fuerte contra la derecha golpista que intentaba derrocar a Allende. Y la Televisión Sueca, con otra ideología, dice: “Esa película es nuestra, devuélvannos la película”.
–Pero no se la devuelven...
–No se la devuelven hasta el día 24 de julio, casi un mes después, cuando esa película forma parte de un noticiero cinematográfico de Chile Films que se estrena en las salas. El mismo día que Chile Films estrena en las salas de Santiago el noticiero que contiene las imágenes de Leonardo, le devuelven una copia a la Televisión Sueca.
–En ese momento debe haber resultado difícil la decisión de mostrar públicamente la imagen; si se mostraba, habría quienes podrían acusarlos de lucro con la muerte, pero si no se difundía no se iba a poder saber lo que habían hecho los militares con Leonardo. ¿Esto está reflejado en su película?
–Sí, porque es parte de una paradoja. La gente de Chile Films parte de la base de que esa imagen tiene un valor periodístico, tiene un valor de denuncia sobre una situación política y social, y eso es lo que a ellos los autoriza desde su lógica para utilizarla. Por otro lado, para la familia, en su círculo íntimo, ver esa imagen muy pocos días después de la muerte de Leonardo no tenía nada que ver con un valor periodístico. Aunque no lo ves en imagen al camarógrafo, es estar vivenciando la muerte de ese sujeto. O sea que el valor afectivo de eso es enorme. Entonces son dimensiones opuestas. Y a partir de ese momento, la imagen empezó a circular por todo el mundo.
© 2000-2007 www.pagina12.com.ar|Todos los Derechos Reservados
http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/suplementos/espectaculos/5-7364-2007-08-21.html
The Independent:
We admire those who went before us
I do remember as I look through the old boys' list of deaths how they were good men
Robert Fisk
Published: 18 August 2007
Sutton Valence School was an awful, misogynous place. Its one moment of glory was the annual dance with Benenden School (Princess Anne, breathed heavily) but the rest of the year was one of pea soup fogs, humid lakes over the weald and hopes for higher academic advancement.
I laboured for my A-levels under a lunatic headmaster who insisted that we spent more time on our Latin grammar (especially Livy), as he also insisted on our pernicious study of Gilbert and Sullivan. Initially, I was his prize performer on the percussion in Iolanthe. Later, I learned - viciously - to destroy The Pirates of Penzance on the violin.
But one thing I did learn from Sutton Valence: the dawning of early morning over the Weald of Kent. Even in Beirut, where I now walk out to that beautiful dawn which only the Mediterranean can give us, do I understand this.
I dispute - and hate - much of what my old school used to tell me - but each year flops on to my desk, in my mail bag from London, my annual copy of the Suttonian. It shows Westminster House wherein I was once a prefect - I waited there, one night, for Soviet missiles to arrive after the Cuban Missile Crisis was revealed - and I left that extraordinary, red brick building with untold feelings that "we" had left many minefields in the world which I would have, as a journalist, to walk through. I was right.
But I do remember how wonderful it was those summer evenings to read Chaucer and Shakespeare and Donne and Milton and to feel that there was something about their work that would enliven me for all my life. Little did I realise how strongly I would later come to believe that it was the very breath of the air of the Weald of Kent that would overwhelm me.
I say this when I open my latest issue (Volume 37) of the Suttonian. For example, I find that John Henry Ablitt, a scholar of our school in 1926, has just died aged 94 and I notice in the magazine that "We have been notified of the death in 1992 of Gavin William Carpenter ... aged 79. He was the brother of the late Professor Garth Carpenter and the late Drew Carpenter ... He worked in the timber trade for his career after war service in the RAFC."
And I note also that "We have been notified of the death in December 1993 of Edward William Pain (1929, St Margaret's House, aged 81. Edward was the elder brother of Geoffrey Sholto Pain and Dennison Bishop Pain and uncle of Timothy Bishop Pain." And so my eye slips down the names of those old Suttonians who have passed us by.
"In January 2006, Alfred Brann Catt (1930, St Margaret's) aged 92. Alfred was the father of Anthony Catt [1963, Westminster House - my old house] who sadly died a month after his father and grandfather of Piers Catt (1996, Westminster House). Alfred farmed on the Romney Marshes for his whole life."
I love these memorials to my long dead and unknown school friends. Here, for example, we have, "at the beginning of June 2006" Roy Hart Dunstan, aged 89. "Roy left school 'at the headmaster's request' after a series of boisterous escapades. However, he always had great affection for Sutton Valence. He went on to Dulwich College where he was a school prefect and captain of athletics. He qualified as a dentist at King's College Hospital in London before serving as a surgeon lieutenant in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve during the Second World War. Thereafter, he was in dental practice until his retirement in 1974."
How much I love these "thereafters" and if only the stupid headmaster's request had been rescinded, what a fine man Mr Dunstan would have made to have been an old boy of my school. But let me continue, for the interest of readers, his CV after the Second World War.
"He was mayor of Warminster in 1985-86. He was closely involved with the International Order of Anysetiers (Commanderie of Great Britain). This was originally a guild of producers and traders in aniseed formed in France in the 13th century under the patrony of the kings of France. The Guild died in the 17th century but was revived in the Order of Anysetiers formed in 1955, opening its ranks to lovers of anis, gastronomy and convivial company."
In 1977 the Commanderie of Great Britain was established and Roy Dunstan was elected chamberlain at the first meeting held at Vintner's Hall, the headquarters of the Worshipful Company of Vintners.
Where do we go from here? On 2 December 2005, "suddenly but peacefully" in Guernsey, I'm informed that Geoffrey Austin Nops (St Margaret's, 1932), passed away aged 92. "On leaving school Geoffrey went to Magdalen College, Oxford, to read law, he qualified as a barrister in 1937. He served in the Royal Artillery during the Second World War and was a prisoner of war from 1942 to 1945." And so it goes on.
Guy Goble died aged 83 and Peter Brill died aged 77. "As a major, he served in Sicily and Italy during the Second World War and later served in the Middle East, Germany and spent some time in the Ministry of Defence."
What did all these young men learn at Sutton Valence? Did they really understand that there was some kind of way in which we would all learn to live longer? Did we all appreciate something that, at the time, we didn't understand? And I look now, today, at the names in their old memoriam. Dunstan, Nops, Crowhurst, Lewis, Goble, Coleman, Butler, Molyneux-Berry, Scoble-Hodgins, Cresswell, Catt, Gorman, Hills, and I admire these long-dead men from a past I did not know.
We can admire those who went before us, from fathers whose names we never knew, but what was it that kept them alive? That wonderful view over the Weald of Kent, now so sadly curtailed (I went to have a look the other day and it is cynically cut back) or was there something of their belief in life which we don't have or cannot have. I do not know.
I do remember in the great pea-soupers of the 1950s - and how we have all forgotten the smoke and fumes of old smog - how I would go to check the door locks on the chapel and the rooms wherein these great names were locked. I don't think I cared for them. I don't think we do. But now I do remember as I look through the old boys' list of deaths how there were good men (this was before women came to Sutton Valence school!) who believed in things as I hope I do now.
http://news.independent.co.uk/fisk/article2874095.ece
Utne Reader:
Sao Paulo: The Ad-Free City
August 16, 2007
By Eric Kelsey,
Utne.com
The world's fourth-largest city rids itself of billboards
The bustling metropolis of São Paulo has gone ad free, much to the delight of aesthetes hungry for urban landscapes unpolluted by corporate entreaties. According to the decidedly anti-corporate Adbusters, the city of 11 million has been stripped of roughly 15,000 billboards since a new law went into effect in April. "The Clean City Law came from a necessity to combat pollution," explains Gilberto Kassab, the city's conservative, populist mayor. "We decided that we should start combating pollution with the most conspicuous sector - visual pollution."
Adbusters reports that more than 70 percent of residents approve of the seven-month-old measure. But not everyone is singing the ban's praises. Advertising firms are enraged, and detractors are arguing that the policy is discouraging foreign investment and hurting the local economy.
In a June cover story for the design industry magazine Creative Review (article not available online), Patrick Burgoyne quotes a press release from the Brazilian Association of Advertisers (also known as Border), which describes the law as "unreal, ineffective, and" - yes - "fascist."
A common refrain among these naysayers is that the ban is economically destructive. Burgoyne cites local press reports that the economy stands to lose $133 million in advertising revenue. Sepex, a São Paulo outdoor-media association, claims that the ban would put 20,000 residents out of work. A less predictable complaint is that the ban may actually be making the city uglier. Burgoyne writes that skeptics worry that ridding the city of its colorful, loud ads will result in "a bland concrete jungle replacing the chaos of the present." Clear Channel Communications, the US radio giant that has fought similar initiatives in the United States, has launched a public campaign claiming that the law will erode the city's culture.
Still, some on both sides of the debate agree that the billboard ban could be a catalyst for a new city. One ad-maker tells Burgoyne that it's an opportunity for advertisers to reinvent themselves, while others find a new city emerging from a suffocating commercial quilt. Local photographer and typographer Tony de Marco credits the ban as giving the city a newfound sense of civic pride previously foreign to most residents. The ban, de Marco says, has "revealed an architecture that we must learn to be proud of, instead of hiding."
Go there >> São Paulo: A City Without Ads
Related Links:
* Brazil's Ad Men Face Billboard Ban
* Photographer Tony de Marco's Pictures of the New São Paulo
Related Links from the Utne Reader Archive:
* The Urban Green Revolution
* Big Media Meets Its Match
Copyright 2007, All Rights Reserved
http://www.utne.com/webwatch/2007_312/news/12736-1.html
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