New York Governor Implicated in Torture by State Prison Officials
An investigation published Tuesday in the New York Times revealed that prison guards at the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York systematically beat and tortured dozens of prisoners in June of this year.
The Times report also notes that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo questioned a prisoner only hours before he was tortured. According to letters from prisoners obtained by the Times, guards rammed inmates’ heads against walls, hanged one from a pipe with a plastic bag, and threatened to waterboard and kill another.
Conditions in American prisons increasingly resemble those in the torture chambers of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, where prisoners have been shackled, strung from ceilings, waterboarded, beaten and sexually humiliated. After fifteen years of the “war on terror,” the barbaric torture methods previously inflicted on the populations of Iraq and Afghanistan are becoming increasingly commonplace at home.
The beatings and torture came in the immediate aftermath of the escape by prisoners Richard Matt and David Sweat from the Clinton facility in early June. Matt and Sweat had used hacksaws to cut their way out of the maximum security state prison while the guards on patrol slept.
In the aftermath of the escape, police orchestrated a violent wave of retribution on other prisoners despite the fact that it was the guards—not the prisoners—who aided in their get-away. Police carried out a manhunt and shot both prisoners, killing Matt and wounding Sweat three weeks later.
The Times report indicates that the collective punishment carried out by the guards followed direct threats made by Cuomo, who visited the prison just hours before inmates were tortured.
According to the Times, Governor Cuomo asked prisoner Patrick Alexander if the escape by the two inmates “must have kept you awake with all that cutting, huh?” Alexander explains that this threat was accompanied by Cuomo’s “best tough-guy stare.” Only hours after Cuomo and his media accompaniment left, Alexander was brutally beaten.
Cuomo’s visit, his threats, and the beatings that followed point to his direct involvement in orchestrating the criminal violence. The fact that he would make such threats on video underscores the degree to which the forces of the American state—from police officers and prison guards up to the governor and the president—carry out the violent repression of the population brazenly and with self-assumed impunity.
Alexander told the Times that three guards without name badges took him from his cell, handcuffed him, and placed him in a broom closet.
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/08/12/pris-a12.html