Above photo: Pam Bondi arrives at Fort Baker after visiting Alcatraz in Sausalito, California, on Thursday. Godofredo A Vásquez/AP.
As if we needed more examples of the incompetence and insanity of the current federal regime, along comes their obsession with Alcatraz, in both the nominal and the actual sense. They have been looking at the historic San Francisco Bay island prison, now a museum, with the idea in mind of renovating it and reopening it as an active prison. This foolishness is on the heels of opening a new prison facility in the swamps of Florida that they have christened, with great pleasure, “Alligator Alcatraz.” Both ideas come from the diseased tyrannical minds exercising destructive control over the whole country and assaulting what little remains of morality.
Recently, Attorney General—in title only—Pam Bondi and Secretary of the Interior—in title only—Doug Burgum, as emissaries, toadies, and puppets of the resident of the White House, toured the prison island of Alcatraz, very close to the northern end of downtown San Francisco on one side and the looming presence of the Golden Gate Bridge on another. After the tour, Bondi could barely contain her joy when she said, “It could hold illegal aliens. It could hold anything. This is a terrific facility.” That would make it fit right in with a deportation program run amok that is vacuuming up everyone it can, mostly the innocent and even US citizens, mostly for its own sadistic, power-drunk satisfaction. Bondi could barely conceal her sociopathic glee. She and Burgum sounded like a couple of seven-year-old boys who had wandered onto a movie set: “Wow! Look at all the cool stuff! We can really scare and hurt people with this!”
What Bondi said made her sound like a child who couldn’t wait to turn loose something punitive and dangerous on unsuspecting and helpless victims. First of all, it has already been established that the regime, especially via its deportation program, is only claiming to target terrorists, which is a lie. Mostly it can’t find them, certainly not nearly enough of them to meet an absurd 3,000-per-day quota of detainees. The 3,000 figure has no basis in reality. Moreover, Alcatraz has significant concrete—no pun intended, but enjoy the pun if you wish—technical limitations preventing it from even making any sense as part of the regime’s psychopathic deportation agenda, but we’ll address those limitations later in this article.
It’s worth noting that the Attorney General’s last name is just one letter, “i,” different from “Bond” (maybe the added “i” is for “irredeemable—it appears likely so far) because she and her colleague on the tour, as well as their Washington mob boss, sound like deranged James Bond villains from one of the Bond movies. This is especially true when we hear that same mob boss sound so elated describing a potentially rejuvenated Alcatraz as “so foreboding” and “surrounded by sharks.” Another detention center (really a prison or concentration camp) in the growing American Gulag bringing him excessive delight, a brand new facility, is the so-called “Alligator Alcatraz” in the Florida Everglades. When he talks about the alligators, pythons, and swamps surrounding the prison, he practically drools and rubs his hands together like one of those power- and brutality-obsessed Bond antagonists or cartoon mad scientists. We can imagine the head coward and his like-minded sycophantic cowards sitting around the White House enjoying one guffaw after another about the victims of their wicked, sinister creations. We the people can at least find some consolation in knowing that those Bond villains and cartoon villains always end up failing.
The Florida facility, as a model for others to come elsewhere in the country, is part of a growing land-based archipelago of prisons that is now reaching beyond the land into the water in San Francisco Bay with Alcatraz (at least it’s trying to; more on that below) and even into the middle of the Pacific Ocean in Hawai`i, which has one of the nation’s major Federal Detention Centers being used in the deportation madness. It is rapidly, becoming a great deal like Stalin’s gulag system and Hitler’s web of concentration and death camps. At least eleven people have already died in law-enforcement—more like law-violation—custody, and there are reports of torture, beatings, subhuman conditions of sanitation (almost no bathrooms—the few they have are fully exposed—and primitive sewage systems), and disgusting food in minimal, insect-infested amounts. Prisoners are denied necessary medication and they are subjected to sleep deprivation. All of these are explicit human rights violations. Not only that, but according to journalist Kathleen Parker of the Washington Post:
More than a third of those at Alligator Alcatraz (I can’t believe we’re forced to use this phrase) have immigration violations but no criminal convictions or charges in the United States, according to the Miami Herald and the Tampa Bay Times, which obtained a list of more than 700 people either imprisoned in or scheduled to be sent to the Florida facility. Some are asylum seekers. Others arrived under humanitarian parole, or thought they were here with permission awaiting the result of ongoing legal cases,” the Miami Herald’s editorial board wrote.
Parker goes on to write:
Even if all of them were felons (they are not), all people in the United States have a constitutional right to be treated humanely, if not for their sake, then for the country’s own self-respect and sense of decency. Americans historically have subscribed to laws created to protect, among other rights, human dignity. The worst murderers and rapists—even serial killers—are afforded due process and other essential privileges in a civilized society. What is happening in Florida and at migrant detention centers elsewhere doesn’t come close.
Moreover, I wonder how many Americans know that overstaying a visa is classified as a misdemeanor, the same category as something like shoplifting a football. Imprisonment in a dungeon-like detention center of medieval standards, followed by deportation to a country where one is in danger of torture or murder, is hardly a suitable consequence for such a minor misdeed. It appears that for now, at least until a new government takes control and/or our political system is transformed, “self-respect and a sense of decency” are things of the past, thanks to the current reprehensible regime.
As promised twice above, though, here’s more on the real Alcatraz and the project to revive it. The ignorance of the current regime as a whole, in very dangerous combination with its sadism, has reared is ugly head once again because the regime and its lackeys like the AG and Secretary of the Interior in particular, don’t seem to understand that to bring Alcatraz up to the standards of modern prisons would cost truly enormous sums of money, and it would take at least several years to complete. Even then, its capacity would be so small that it would make no real difference in numbers in the present demonic mass deportation project. As New York Times reporter Heather Knight recently wrote:
“ . . . The previous version [of the prison], which closed in 1963, held only 336 inmates at a time.” Knight also notes that to the 3,000-arrests-per-day quota, “a rebuilt Alcatraz on a small island might not be of much help,” which is putting it mildly, and that “the facility is crumbling . . . there is no running water or sewage system, and all supplies, including food and fuel, must be brought in by boat.”
Thus, what we have here is yet another example of the regime not doing its homework. In fact, they don’t even recognize that homework exists or is required. They scorn knowledge and expertise and anyone who has them, mostly because they possess none of either. The whole cabinet is living proof. Their level of ignorance and corruption is so high that they are relentlessly at war with intelligence and good judgment. Consequently, their statements and actions are diabolical. It is the diabolicality of the inept, incoherent, idiotic, and ignorant, motivated mainly by sadism, malice, racism, and profit (private prisons are falling all over themselves to get government money for building new locations in the gulag). It blends pathology with incompetence. The regime operates like rank amateurs, like a cartoon version of the Mafia, a clownish, incoherent mob, a completely unprincipled Confederacy of Dunces. It’s crazy, but at least the Mafia had a code, what has often been called “honor among thieves.” This regime doesn’t even have that; instead, we have rule not by organized crime but by disorganized crime. This regime doesn’t even have the competence of a criminal mob, but they surely have the malice and barbarism of one. The result is that we have idiotic and harmful chaos.
The whole project of building more detention centers and putting more victims in already existing prisons is a windfall for the sickening private prison industry, an immoral, cynical, and venal scam of an industry if ever there was one. Even before this deportation insanity began, American incarceration levels were already outrageous, an embarrassment before the world. We already had a gulag of inhuman conditions—designed in particular to oppress and control our non-white population—conditions that dehumanize inmates and cause them to emerge as more violent people than they were when they went inside, a badly failed system compared to systems in other developed countries, such as Norway. Inmates are also farmed out as free or cheap labor—often for some of the best-known brand names that you buy every week—which amounts to modern-day slavery.
The Alcatraz idea is an exemplary case demonstrating several of the flaws of the current pseudo-government. The idea strains the credulity of anyone with common sense and reason. Hearing the regime talk about it is like listening to children invent a video game or elementary school project, except that this project can leave irreversible damage in its wake. One is reminded of this insightful observation by author Frank Herbert, perfect for the times we live in in this country:
“All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted.”
We are seeing this played out vividly before our very eyes every day all over the country in countless ways. We have the apotheosis of the kind of people Herbert is talking about, if not in human history, at the very least in American history. Therefore, resistance and unified opposition are essential. Find a resistance niche that fits for you so that this problem does not go so far as to become irreparable. It could be marching, it could be writing, it could be sharing resources with others, it could be feeding those on the front lines of the resistance, it could be one of many things. As activist musician Gil Scott-Heron often said, “No one has to do everything, but everyone has to do something.”
Peter Greenhill is a philosopher and social justice/human rights activist as well as the retired longtime director of the `Iolani Peace Institute in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a regular contributor to popularresistance.org, and his writing has appeared in a variety of other publications around the country.
