{"id":2580,"date":"2018-06-26T19:52:51","date_gmt":"2018-06-26T19:52:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rashidmod.com\/?p=2580"},"modified":"2018-06-26T19:53:04","modified_gmt":"2018-06-26T19:53:04","slug":"chemical-weapons-used-in-u-s-prisons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/?p=2580","title":{"rendered":"Chemical Weapons Used in U.S. Prisons"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"rashid-2013-self-portrait1\"<\/a>Tear gas\u2014a banned\u00a0chemical weapon<\/h3>\n

Poison gases were first developed and widely used as battlefield weapons during World War I. Among those weapons were chlorine gas, mustard gas, and the benignly named \u201ctear gas,\u201d all of which have similar effects, toxicity and lethality.<\/p>\n

Because of universal aversion to these weapons, a Geneva protocol was issued in 1925 banning their use in war. Subsequent international bans followed due to the persistent use of chemical weapons in war by some countries.<\/p>\n

U.S. intervenes against chemical weapons abroad<\/h3>\n

Playing to the international aversion to these weapons, U.S. rulers have denounced Syrian president Bashar al-Assad as a monster based upon repeated accusations of his using chlorine gas against rebels and civilians during Syria\u2019s ongoing civil war.<\/p>\n

In fact, posing as a moral authority, the U.S. led Britain and France in joint missile strikes against the Syrian government on April 13, 2018, in response to accusations that Assad had once again gassed Syrians on April 7th.<\/p>\n

Donald Trump then went further to threaten sanctions against Russian chemical companies for their role in supposedly enabling Assad\u2019s chemical weapons production.<\/p>\n

\u2026While abusing chemical weapons at home<\/h3>\n

As all this U.S. fakery was going on, I sat in my solitary confinement cell in one of Florida\u2019s infamously abusive, corrupt and racist prisons, processing the countless times I\u2019ve witnessed, and experienced U.S. prison officials use military grade chemical weapons\u2014and often with deadly results\u2014on defenseless U.S. prisoners\u2014and this for any reason or no reason at all.\u00a0An\u00a0AlterNet<\/span>\u00a0article put it into perspective:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cOriginally launched as a tool of French combat during World War I, tear gas has been used around the world over the past century to enforce colonial rule, quell popular protests and aid in ethnic cleansing of civilians. This \u2018riot control agent\u2019 was banned as a \u2018method of war\u2019 by the Chemical Weapons Convention, an arms control treaty that went into effect in 1997 and now binds in nearly 200 countries (although numerous states are in violation.) Yet in prisons and jails across the United States, far from any conventional battlefield or public scrutiny, tear gas and other chemical weapons are routinely used against people held captive in enclosed spaces including solitary confinement.\u201d (1)<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Chlorine no worse than tear gas<\/h3>\n

If international military intervention against Syria and sanctions against Russia are justified responses to\u00a0unproven\u00a0government use of chemical weapons in Syria, what\u00a0should\u00a0be done to stop U.S. officials and their own chemical weapons manufacturers from producing and using military grade chemical weapons on their own subjects?<\/p>\n

And not only is the tear gas manufactured and used in Amerika today the same grade of chemical weapon as the World War I-era chlorine gas allegedly being used in Syria, but U.S. manufacturers have been constantly competing to enhance and maximize the potency and injurious effects of their tear gas, free of medical or public oversight and with little regulation. As\u00a0The Nation<\/span>\u00a0confirmed, U.S. tear gas is:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cContinually being modified, tested and retested for improvements. Thanks to thin regulations on so-called \u2018less-lethal\u2019 weapons, that testing takes place in the dark, without public disclosure or mandatory medical oversight. That means that testing doesn\u2019t have to be oriented toward minimizing risk: It can focus on maximizing pain.\u201d (2)<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A lethal prison weapon<\/h3>\n

And make no mistake about it, while tear gas is portrayed by officials as \u201cnon-lethal,\u201d and \u201cless-lethal,\u201d it is not only lethal, but prison officials use it in quantities and manner that far exceed its known lethal limits. In fact, its very use in prison settings makes it especially lethal, because it is deployed most often inside closed-in cells.<\/p>\n

According to federal courts, the \u201cestimated lethal dose\u201d of tear gas when sprayed into closed-in cells is 5-6 grams. (3)<\/span><\/p>\n

However, the quantities used by the U.S. prison officials inside prisoners\u2019 cells as a matter of course is typically in the\u00a0hundreds\u00a0of grams. Six-hundred grams is the quantity generally authorized by prison policy\u2014which is\u00a0over 100 times the legal estimated lethal dose.<\/p>\n

And because characterized as a \u201cnon-lethal\u201d weapon, these agents are deployed against prisoners as a first resort to force for the slightest claimed disruption, defiance or infraction committed by them while locked inside a cell.<\/p>\n

In Florida\u2019s solitary confinement units, for example, \u201cdisruptive behavior\u201d allowing the \u201cuse of chemical agents\u201d includes such benign acts as prisoners talking to each other between cells, arguing with staff,\u00a0etc.<\/span>, which says nothing of the routine practice of guards, outright lying on prisoners to create pretexts to falsely justify maliciously gassing them. Florida prisons are notorious for such abuses. (4)<\/span><\/p>\n

Actually as a former Florida guard revealed to the\u00a0Miami Herald<\/span><\/em>, guards are trained as part of a \u201ccode\u201d to fabricate reports against prisoners, to speciously justify beating and gassing them.<\/p>\n

\u201cSometimes,\u201d he reflected, ranking officials \u201cwill even write [the false reports] for you\u2014all filled with lies\u201d so they can say they beat or gassed someone because they deserved it. (5)<\/span><\/p>\n

While I was confined in the disciplinary wings\u2014especially B-wing\u2014at Florida State Prison, I witnessed a Lieutenant Stephen Thompson and various guards use such false pretexts to set prisoners up to be gassed, and often beaten too, on an almost daily basis. Many times they just randomly targeted prisoners, or carried out \u201chits\u201d for other staff who had vendettas or clashed with the prisoner at another prison. Often the prisoners were waylaid and gassed while asleep in their beds or after being left with only boxer shorts in an empty cell, a common practice exposed a few years back at the Northwest Florida Reception Center. (6)<\/span><\/p>\n

If not for many prisoners having learned improvised methods of protecting themselves from the lethal effects of tear gas in some situations, there would be a great many more prison gas fatalities.<\/p>\n

I should add, however, that many fatalities do occur but are effectively covered up by being falsely reported as death by \u201cnatural causes,\u201d instead of as murders by asphyxiation. And aren\u2019t these the same sorts of cover-ups U.S. officials accuse Assad of using when he\u2019s been accused of killing Syrians with chlorine gas?<\/p>\n

Murders by \u201cnatural causes\u201d<\/h3>\n

I\u2019ve witnessed such murders by \u201cnatural causes\u201d up close. One case being the October 2013 killing of Christopher Woolverton, a mentally ill asthmatic man who was confined in solitary with me at the Clements Unit prison in Amarillo, Texas.<\/p>\n

After he was left lying unresponsive and in medical distress on his cell\u2019s cold concrete floor for three days by guards and medical and mental health officials, they had Woolverton sprayed with some 600 grams of tear gas\u2014although he was under medical \u201cdo not gas\u201d orders because of his asthma. Several hours later he was dead.<\/p>\n

Like in the pictures of the Syrians who allegedly died of chlorine gas attacks that went viral on social media on April 7, Woolverton died foaming at the mouth. But while U.S. officials charged those Syrians\u2019 deaths as brutal and barbaric murders, Woolverton\u2019s was dismissed as a routine custodial death by \u201cnatural causes.\u201d<\/p>\n

The facts surrounding Wolverton\u2019s murder only came to light because I filed grievances in the prison about it and encouraged other prisoner witnesses to also do so, and I publicized it to the outside. (7)<\/span>\u00a0As a result, Woolverton\u2019s family read and learned about the situation online (prison officials did not notify them that he was dead,) and they brought a federal wrongful death suit.<\/p>\n

U.S. prison deaths like Woolverton\u2019s aren\u2019t uncommon, they\u2019re just rarely publicized.<\/p>\n

Another such rarely publicized incident involved a Florida prisoner, Randall Jordan-Aparo, which only came to light because, as in Woolverton\u2019s case, other prisoners exposed it at great personal risk to themselves. In fact officials who then dared to investigate Jordan-Aparo\u2019s death as an unjust killing were retaliated against by administrators at the highest levels of Florida\u2019s prison system, prompting them to file suit, which was settled by Florida officials. (8)<\/span><\/p>\n

Jordan-Aparo\u2019s case was similar to Woolverton\u2019s. He too was in medical distress and sought medical help when his rare blood condition flared up. As the\u00a0Miami Herald<\/span><\/em>\u00a0reported, he cursed at a nurse when they refused to help him:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cAfter he cursed at [the] nurse, staff forced him into a 13 x 8 cell and gassed him with 600 grams of chemical agents. \u2026 Inmates in the area heard him scream: \u2018I can\u2019t take it. I can\u2019t take the gas. I need a nurse!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHours later, Jordan-Aparo was dead. He was found on the floor of the cell with a weathered paperback Bible by his side, and was positioned as if he had spent his last moments gasping for fresh air through the narrow crack beneath the door.\u201d (9)<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

His death too was initially blown off as by natural causes.<\/p>\n

A similar tear gas death also came out in 2014. In that case, Rommell Johnson, another Florida prisoner who was also an asthmatic, was sprayed with 600 grams of tear gas inside his cell. He too collapsed and died foaming at the mouth. (10)<\/span><\/p>\n

A weapon of torture<\/h3>\n

Tear gas in the prison setting can be described as nothing but a weapon of torture. How else does one characterize a weapon that\u2019s designed to create the sensation that one\u2019s flesh and mucous membranes are on fire, and causes one to suffocate? Imagine the pain of one\u2019s eyes, nasal passages, lungs and flesh being aflame, without relief.<\/p>\n

And the constant \u201cupgrades\u201d that U.S. manufacturers make to tear gas, is in part to enhance the severity of this pain and make the agents harder to flush from one\u2019s flesh.<\/p>\n

The abuse of such weapons (in the pain inflicted) is worse than the lashings and beatings inflicted on slaves in the old South, and the terror just as effective. Only tear gas may be regularly abused without leaving the telltale scars of other forms of physical torture.<\/p>\n

A sadistic weapon, a sadistic culture<\/h3>\n

Not only are these barbaric abuses and murders a daily occurrence in U.S. prisons, but to prison officials they\u2019re part of a game fueled by a deranged and sadistic culture and sense of official entitlement to degrade, torture and murder powerless people.<\/p>\n

A glimpse was given into this closed culture in December 2017 when postings, on a 6000-member private\u00a0Facebook<\/span>\u00a0page for Florida guards, was leaked to the\u00a0Miami Herald<\/span>. In those postings, guards mocked Jordan-Aparo\u2019s tortured death, and cursed and threatened\u00a0Herald<\/span>\u00a0reporters for publicizing how he was abused and killed. No one on that\u00a0Facebook<\/span>\u00a0page objected to those postings. (11)<\/span><\/p>\n

This reflects the uniformity of abusive attitudes and practices, or tacit complicity, of U.S. prison officials towards prisoners and the secretive culture that conceals and enables it.<\/p>\n

To get a sense of how completely this culture is embraced by prison officials, consider that when at full capacity, Florida has 24,000 prison employees. So, 6000 members on a closed\u00a0Facebook<\/span>\u00a0page where guards openly mock prisoners they have murdered, and threaten journalists who publicize such abuses, is fully\u00a0a quarter of the systems entire staff.\u00a0Actually it\u2019s a much larger percentage when you consider that Florida\u2019s prisons are notoriously understaffed.<\/p>\n

But U.S. officials denounce regimes like Assad\u2019s in Syria as corrupt, murderous and secretive, and they never lose the opportunity to self-righteously critique the human rights records and treatment of prisoners in countries they dislike.<\/p>\n

Whence comes our intervener?<\/h3>\n

So, if chemical weapons abuses in Syria that leave people suffocating, foaming at the mouth and dead are evil and justify international military responses, who will intervene to stop U.S. officials from doing the same to us? And who will sanction the four major U.S. companies that constantly upgrade and sell the deadly military grade chemical weapons used against us to prisons across Amerika: namely Combined Tactical Systems, Sabre, Safariland and Sage?<\/p>\n

Now, what if someone dared to militarily strike Amerika, as the U.S., Britain and France just did to deter uses of chemical weapons in Syria\u2026Well, that\u2019s\u00a0unthinkable, isn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n

Just an example of the utter hypocrisy of U.S. rulers who go around the world masquerading as opponents of injustice and pretending to have the moral (or might I say imperialist and racist) authority to police everyone else, when in reality they are the greatest purveyors of injustice in the world.<\/p>\n

Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win!
\nAll Power to the People!<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

1 Sarah Lazare, \u201cThe Scandal of Chemical Weapons in U.S. Prisons\u2014Banned Worldwide in War, Tear Gas Is Routinely Used In U.S. Prisons And Jails,\u201d\u00a0Alternet<\/span>, January 11, 2017<\/p>\n

2 Daniel Mouttar, \u201cPrisons Are Using Military-Grade Tear Gas to Punish People\u2014A Burgeoning Arms Industry Brings the War Home,\u201d\u00a0The Nation<\/span>, April 28, 2016<\/p>\n

3 Williams v. Benjamin<\/span>, 77 F. 3d 756 (4th Cir. 1996)<\/p>\n

4 Julie K. Brown, \u201cCulture of Brutality Reigned At State Prison in Florida Panhandle,\u201d\u00a0Miami Herald<\/span>,\u00a0March 21, 2014.<\/p>\n

5 Julie K. Brown, \u201cFor Allegedly Brutal Guard, Day of Reckoning Arrives,\u201d\u00a0Miami Herald<\/span>, September 20, 2014<\/p>\n

6 Op cite.\u00a0note 4<\/p>\n

7 Karl Kersplebedeb, \u201cAsthmatic Prisoner Doused With Pepper Spray, Refused Medical Care, Dies: Just Another Day in the Texas Prison System,\u201d\u00a0http:\/\/rashidmod.com\/?p=917<\/a><\/p>\n

8 Julie K. Brown, \u201cAfter Florida Inmate\u2019s Lethal Gassing, Claims of Cover-Up,\u201d\u00a0Miami Herald<\/span>, August 30, 2014<\/p>\n

9 Caitlin Ostroff, \u201cWhen a Sickly Inmate Was Gassed to Death, Florida Found No Fault. A Judge May Disagree,\u201d\u00a0Miami Herald<\/span>, November 29, 2017<\/p>\n

10 Op cite, note 4<\/p>\n

11 Julie K. Brown and Caitlin Ostroff, \u201cPrison Guards Take to Facebook<\/span> To Mock Florida Inmate Who Died While Being Gassed,\u201d\u00a0Miami Herald<\/span>, December 5, 2017<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tear gas\u2014a banned\u00a0chemical weapon Poison gases were first developed and widely used as battlefield weapons during World War I. Among those weapons were chlorine gas, mustard gas, and the benignly named \u201ctear gas,\u201d all of which have similar effects, toxicity and lethality. Because of universal aversion to these weapons, a …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2580","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2580","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2580"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2580\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2581,"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2580\/revisions\/2581"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}