American Torture  
Special testimony from political prisoner Sundiata Acoli
By Sundiata Acoli

The following is a piece from Sundiata Acoli, a political prisoner who's been held by the US Government for 26 years.  He is currently in USP Allenwood.  He wrote this piece to mark the one-year anniversary of the torture that was exposed at Abu Ghrahib prison in Iraq.

Below is an account of prison torture that he has been victim to here in the United States and was a statement to the Human Rights Conference on Torture. He starts by writing about the extra “special attention” he received after 9/11.

I was rounded up on September 11, 2001, and held *incommunicado* from my family, my attorneys and the entire outside world.

Meanwhile prison officials torturously interrogated me, looking for *any* connection on my part to the destruction of the WTC or the later spread of anthrax thru the postal system. They openly threatened to hold me in total isolation for the rest of my life and their implied threat was to seek the death penalty.

So torture is nothing new to u.s. political prisoners or Prisoners of War, nor to everyday people of color and others oppressed in the ghettoes, barrios, reservations, towns and cities thru out amerika.

Abu Ghraib is not an aberration. Most u.s. prisoners instantly recognized amerika's fingerprints all over Ghraib; they match its prints in u.s. police stations, jails and prisons. The Ghraib perversions trace a straight line back home to White amerika's psychotic obsessions with the genitals of Blacks it lynched. The same perverted grins seen at Ghraib can be found in the faces and photos of White lynch mobs in the u.s. swarmed around Black bodies hung from trees.
 

Now for some of my personal experiences with torture:

In 1969 NY cops kicked in my door for two other Panthers, Sekou Odinga and Kuwasi Balagoon, and without saying a word beat and stomped me unmercifully. Then they took me to the 32nd Precinct, Harlem, and threw me in the holding tank with Joan Bird, another Harlem Panther, whose lip was so busted and swollen, and eyes so blackened and swollen shut that I barely recognized her. She said that at one point during her beating they hung her out of the 3rd-floor window by the ankles, made sexual taunts and threatened to drop her if she didn't tell the whereabouts of Sekou and Kuwasi. They didn't find them and after holding us in jail for a month they released us.

In 1970 during the New York Panther-21 trial we defendants were assaulted numerous times while cuffed, by Riker's Island jail guards who transported us back and forth to court each day.

In 1973, after my arrest in the New Jersey Turnpike case, I was held in strict isolation at Middlesex County Jail, NJ. Because of my placement there, and even though I was allowed no visitors except my lawyer, the jail implemented harsh visiting rules on all visitors which caused the prisoners to protest by refusing to lock in their cells.

New Jersey state troopers came in with shotguns, shot prisoners in the face and torso with bean-bags that broke noses, blackened eyes and bruised ribs, shot teargas that choked, blinded and burned, and drove prisoners back into their cells.

I was already under 24/7-lockdown so they simply shot teargas into my cell, turned the water off and heat on, in mid-summer, which left me and similar prisoners to wallow in pain from the sweat-reactivated tear gas which we had no means to wash off.

In 1976 at Trenton State Prison (TSP), NJ, I and other Management Control Unit (MCU) prisoners were subjected to two-hours of gunfire by Jersey state troopers raking the Unit back and forth, trying to shoot into our cells. John Andaliwa Clark was killed by a shotgun blast to the chest and another prisoner, "Gunner," who came out with his hands in the air was shot by an M-14 rifle aimed at his head but tore thru his elbow instead. I and numerous other MCU prisoners were hit by shrapnel from bullets that ricocheted off the bars into our cells.

In 1977, MCU guards suddenly began demands to probe the anus of random MCU prisoners during their normal strip-search of us each time we were taken out or returned to our cells. And of course, we refused to submit willingly to such a degrading and asinine demand. All who resisted were jumped by the guards, beaten, wrestled to the floor and anus probed, then charged with assault on the guards which carried an additional 7-year sentence upon conviction. To avoid further anus probes, for the next seven months we refused all family visits, attorney visits, doctor, dental visits or anything else that required us to leave our cells.

Prison officials then instituted a policy of "random" mandatory cell-changes so that they could continue to subject selected prisoners to "random" beatings, abuse and forced anal probes under the guise of changing our cells. The situation became so volatile and our families, attorneys and friends were so alarmed that a federal judge stepped in, forbade the prison to continue anal-probes, declared that a metal detector was just as
effective as a search tool and that it be used instead of the anal probe and then summarily dismissed all assault charges that had been filed against us MCU prisoners.

In 1983, at USP Marion, Il, a federal penitentiary, guards locked down the prison and went on a six-month rampage, roaming the prison and beating prisoners at will and randomly subjecting some to forced anal probes. During that period I was sent to "the hole" whose floor and walls were covered with feces thrown by prisoners who had been beaten and anal probed. It was mid-summer, the heat was intense, the smell incredible, the windows were closed and I was confined sixty-days there without fresh air or relief.

Later in the summer of '83 I was taken by bus in chains to testify at Sekou Odinga's trial in New York where he and other comrades were charged with robbery of a Brinks armored truck and with liberating Assata Shakur from prison. After I dressed-out for the bus ride, the guard put a black-box over my handcuffs which is supposedly for high security prisoners. Any prisoner who's ever worn it will tell you that after a half-hour the
box gnaws into your wrists and sets them on fire with pain.