The Silenced Majority: Stories of Uprisings, Occupations, Resistance, and Hope (24 page)

Her lawyer, Alan Levine, told me: “Debbie was the victim of a smear campaign. . . . The bigots in the community had no power to fire; the Department of Education did. They succumbed to the bigots.” The EEOC report concluded, “DOE succumbed to the very bias that the creation of the school was intended to dispel, and a small segment of the public succeeded in imposing its prejudices on DOE as an employer.” Almontaser is seeking reinstatement as principal of the KGIA, along with back pay, damages, and legal fees. The New York City Law Department has vowed to fight her. Levine hopes for a settlement, but is prepared to file a lawsuit, saying: “The EEOC, which has no ax to grind [and] is the country’s premier agency with regard to employment discrimination claims, says that they did discriminate. I’ll go with the EEOC. I’m confident that a judge or jury will.” Days after the EEOC letter was delivered, the non-Arab-American principal of the KGIA stepped down, without explanation, and was replaced by an Arab-American educator.

Three years ago, in the midst of the firestorm, a group of prominent Jewish leaders, including fifteen rabbis, wrote an open letter to the Jewish community in support of Almontaser, saying, “We seek your support and respect for a colleague and friend who has suffered and continues to suffer from a disturbing and growing prejudice in our midst . . . her return to her children [at the KGIA] will only bring greater peace and understanding between people of all faiths in our educational system and in our city as a whole.” This case, as a metaphor, has broader implications, as protests continue in the streets of Jerusalem following the Israeli announcement of thousands of new housing units in occupied East Jerusalem, blindsiding Vice President Joe Biden as he began a peacemaking visit there. Almontaser told me, “It’s my life’s dream . . . to lead a school, to establish an institution that would set precedents in helping building bridges of understanding and certainly creating young people who will be global thinkers, competing in the twenty-first-century work force.” Hers is a vision the New York City Department of Education should embrace, with her prompt reinstatement.

October 6, 2010

From Tuskegee to Guatemala via Nuremberg

News broke last week that the U.S. government purposely exposed hundreds of men in Guatemala to syphilis in ghoulish medical experiments conducted during the late 1940s. As soon as the story got out, President Barack Obama phoned President Álvaro Colom of Guatemala to apologize. Colom called the experiments “an incredible violation of human rights.” Colom also says his government is studying whether it can bring the case to an international court.

The revelations came about through research conducted by Wellesley College medical historian Susan Reverby on the notorious Tuskegee syphilis study. The two former, equally noxious U.S. government research projects, in Tuskegee, Alabama, and Guatemala, are mirror images of each other. Both point to the extremes to which ethics can be disregarded in the pursuit of medical knowledge, and serve as essential reminders that medical research needs constant supervision and regulation.

Reverby is the author of the recently published book
Examining Tuskegee
, a comprehensive history of the Tuskegee syphilis study.

Tuskegee, Alabama, is in the heart of the Deep South. From 1932 until it was exposed by the press in 1972, the U.S. government conducted a long-term study on the effects of syphilis when left untreated. Four hundred men with syphilis were told that they would be given a “special treatment” for their “bad blood.” Unbeknownst to them, the men were given useless placebos, not the promised cure, and their debilitation caused by the untreated syphilis was tracked over decades. In its advanced stages, syphilis can disfigure and can cause dementia, blindness and extreme, chronic pain. It is a horrible way to die. Ten years into the Tuskegee Study, penicillin was found to cure syphilis. Yet the men were not told about the potential cure and were actively denied treatment when some of them sought it.

In Tuskegee, infected men were left untreated. In Guatemala, the opposite happened.

There, U.S. government researchers actively infected men in prison with syphilis, then treated them with penicillin to measure the antibiotic’s effect immediately after exposure. Syphilis is a sexually transmitted disease, and that is how the lead doctor, Dr. John Cutler of the U.S. Public Health Service, attempted to infect the prisoners. First, they hired prostitutes with syphilis to have sex with the prisoners. When transmission rates were not sufficiently high, the researchers lacerated the men’s penises and applied syphilis-infected cotton to the wounds, or directly injected a fresh “syphilitic mixture” into their spines.

Similar procedures were used on mental patients and soldiers.

Ironically, the Guatemala study began in 1946, the same year as the Nuremberg tribunals, the first of which tried Nazi doctors accused of conducting heinous experiments on concentration-camp prisoners. Half of those accused were put to death. The tribunals produced the Nuremberg Code, which set ethical standards for human medical experimentation and informed consent. Yet Nuremberg didn’t seem to bother the U.S. researchers.

Dr. Cutler, the head of the Guatemala project, later joined the Tuskegee Study. He said in a 1993 PBS
NOVA
documentary, “It was important that they were supposedly untreated, and it would be undesirable to go ahead and use large amounts of penicillin to treat the disease, because you’d interfere with the study.”

The U.S. government has frequently conducted experiments without the informed consent of the subjects. Women in Puerto Rico were given estrogen, at dangerous levels, when testing birth control pills.

Researchers injected unwitting hospital patients with plutonium to study its effects on the human body. Dow Chemical, Johnson & Johnson, and Pennsylvania prison authorities exposed inmates to chemicals, including dioxin, to test their effects. Subjects of a number of these experiments and others have died or had their lives indelibly harmed, all in the name of progress or profit.

Researchers are quick to point out that such practices are a thing of the past and have led to strict guidelines ensuring informed consent of subjects. Yet efforts are being made to loosen restrictions on medical experimentation in prisons. We need to ask what “informed consent” means inside a prison, or in a poor community when money is used as an incentive to “volunteer” for research. Medical research should only happen with humane standards, informed consent, and independent oversight, if the lessons of Nuremberg, Tuskegee and, now, Guatemala are to have meaning.

January 12, 2011

A Tale of Two Sheriffs

The Tucson massacre that left six dead and fourteen injured, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, brought into sharp public focus the local sheriff, Clarence Dupnik. He’s been the sheriff of Pima County, which includes Tucson, Arizona’s second-largest city, for thirty years. For the twenty years before that, he was a police officer. Dupnik has gained attention this week for linking the shooting to the vitriolic political climate in the U.S., and in particular, Arizona.

Speaking at a press conference shortly after the shooting, Sheriff Dupnik said: “The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous. And unfortunately, Arizona, I think, has become the capital. We have become the mecca for prejudice and bigotry.”

Arizona is one of three states in the country that allow people to carry concealed weapons without a permit. When asked about the law, the sheriff was emphatic: “We are the Tombstone of the United States of America. . . . I have never been a proponent of letting everybody in this state carry weapons under any circumstances that they want. And that’s almost where we are.” He also decried a proposed Arizona bill that would allow students and professors to carry guns on campus.

The suspected shooter, twenty-two-year-old Jared Loughner, by most accounts suffers from some form of mental illness. Yet he was able to buy a semiautomatic pistol, along with extended-capacity magazines to hold more bullets. He bought the bullets the same morning as the attack.

When I interviewed Dupnik, he called Arizona’s gun laws “insane,” and reaffirmed the link he made between political rhetoric and the shooting: “I think that there are a lot of people in the radio industry, especially, and some in the TV industry, who make millions of dollars off of inflaming the public, purveying hate against the government, and distrust. In my judgment, people who are mentally unstable are very susceptible to the kind of rhetoric that’s going on in our country.”

One of those whose rhetoric has attracted attention is Sarah Palin. She published a map of the United States on her political action committee’s website that listed twenty congressional seats held by Democrats whom she was “targeting” in the 2010 elections, including Gabrielle Giffords. The map marked each district with the cross hairs of a gun. More controversially, she linked to the cross hairs map through a tweet that read, “Don’t Retreat, Instead—RELOAD!”

Giffords spoke directly to Palin’s use of the cross hairs when they first appeared, noting that “When people do that . . . there are consequences to that action.” Giffords’ opponent in the midterm elections, the Tea Party–backed Iraq veteran Jesse Kelly, held an event advertised with the words: “Get on Target for Victory in November. Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office. Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly.”

As Giffords’ father rushed to her hospital bedside, he was asked if she had any enemies. “Yeah,” he said. “The whole Tea Party.”

As direct and offensive as Palin’s campaign was, it was a small part of the political vitriol that has consumed Arizona in recent years. Republican Gov. Jan Brewer gained national notoriety when she signed into law the controversial immigration bill S.B. 1070, which Dupnik fiercely opposed:

Every Hispanic in this country, especially in Arizona, must have awakened the next day to feel like they’ve been kicked in the teeth, like they are now second-class citizens, they have a target on their back, because when they leave the house, they’re going to have to take papers with them and prepare to be stopped and questioned.

Contrast Dupnik with the sheriff of nearby Maricopa County, Joe Arpaio. He is notorious for the harsh conditions in which he jails people, using canvas tents in the searing summer heat. He has pledged to expand his tent city to accommodate the expected influx of detained immigrants. He is the subject of a U.S. Justice Department federal civil-rights lawsuit focusing on his treatment of prisoners and immigrants, and on abuse of power.

The
Arizona Republic
reports that Jared Loughner, charged in federal court for the murders and attacks, normally would have been remanded to the Maricopa County Jail, but “given the high profile of the case and Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s penchant for publicity, they moved Loughner instead to [a] federal facility.”

As the country unites against the terror in Tucson, let’s take the targets off the backs of all innocent civilians, and hope the humanity of Sheriff Dupnik prevails over the cruel vitriol of Arpaio and his ilk.

January 19, 2011

Tucson, Juarez, and an Assault Weapons Ban

The Glock 19 semiautomatic pistol that Jared Loughner is accused of using in his rampage in Tucson, Arizona, is, according to Glock’s website, “ideal for versatile use through reduced dimensions” and is “suitable for concealed carry.” The site continues, “Compact and subcompact Glock pistol model magazines can be loaded with a convincing number of rounds,” from the standard fifteen up to thirty-three. The shooter was able to kill and wound to the extent that he did, with six dead and thirteen injured, because he had a semiautomatic, concealed weapon, along with the “extended magazine.” He was attempting to reload the weapon with another extended magazine when a brave, unarmed woman knocked his next clip from his hand.

Jared Loughner confirmed Glock’s claim that thirty-three is a “convincing” number of rounds. Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, D-N.Y., doesn’t need convincing, though. Her husband, Dennis McCarthy, was gunned down on the Long Island Rail Road on December 7, 1993, when Colin Ferguson pulled a semiautomatic pistol out of his bag and methodically made his way along the afternoon commuter train, randomly shooting passengers. He, too, killed six people and wounded nineteen, including McCarthy’s son, Kevin. Ferguson was tackled, as was Loughner, while reloading his weapon. In both cases, the act of reloading the gun created a pause in the shooting that allowed unarmed citizens to take action.

Carolyn McCarthy mourned the loss of her husband and nursed her critically injured son back to health. He had been shot in the head. Carolyn McCarthy then decided to go further, to try to heal the nation. She lobbied her Long Island member of Congress, Republican Daniel Frisa, to support the 1994 Federal Assault Weapons Ban. He refused. McCarthy had been a nurse for thirty years, and a lifelong Republican. Turning her anger into action, she switched to the Democratic Party, ran for Congress against Frisa and defeated him in 1996. She has been in Congress ever since, and is one of the staunchest supporters there of common sense gun laws.

The 1994 law prohibited a number of weapons outright, as well as extended-capacity magazines like Loughner used. The law expired in 2004 under President George W. Bush. In response to the Tucson shooting, McCarthy is introducing the Large Capacity Ammunition Feeding Devices Act. In a letter to other members of Congress seeking co-sponsors, she says the bill “will prohibit the transfer, importation, or possession of high-capacity magazines manufactured after the bill is enacted,” and, thus, “the increased difficulty in obtaining these devices will reduce their use and ultimately save lives.”