REDEYE 5/20/15

The masses collectively turn the desert green
BBC, 4/20 — A generation ago Ethiopia’s Tigray province was stricken by a famine….[which] the BBC’s Michael Buerk….described as “the closest thing to hell on earth.” Today…local people are using ancient techniques to turn part of the desert green….
…The Tigrayan people were depicted as just [able] to get through the day without dying.
But here, outside the village of Abr’ha Weatsbaha….from all directions, streams of people are trickling into that human river….summoned before dawn…calling every able-bodied man and woman over 18…for…20 days of…community labor. Their job, quite simply, is to tame the desert….
…Some 3,000 people have turned up. Using picks, shovels, iron bars and their bare hands, they will turn these treacherous slopes into neat staircases of rock-walled terraces that will trap the annual rains, forcing the water to percolate into the soil rather than running off in devastating, ground-ripping flash floods.
Sisters are doing it themselves…brothers, too; from strapping, sweat-shiny youths to Ephraim, a legless old man who clearly ignored the bit about being able-bodied and sits on stumps, rolling rocks downhill to the terrace builders.
Overseeing this extraordinary effort is 58-year-old Aba Hawi,…community leader….He darts from one side of the valley to the other,…slapping backs and showing youngsters the proper way to split half-ton boulders….
…His tireless leadership has brought a miraculous transformation to this sun-blasted land. In just a decade, entire mountains have been terraced. Once you had to dig 50ft down to find water. Now it’s just 10ft, and 94 acres of former desert have been transformed into fertile fields. Families are now reaping three harvests a year from fields of corn, chillis, onions and potatoes….
We…hike to a vast pool of cool green water held back by a huge hand-built dam. “We’ve built 85 of these check-dams…” says Aba Hawi, “and you can see how they work. These mini-reservoirs fill up during the rains and are fed by groundwater in times of drought. Now every farmer has a well….Now look: we’ve got malachite kingfishers living in the desert.”
Deputy sheriff kills black man, then takes off for the Bahamas
NYT, 4/22 — A volunteer sheriff’s deputy plans to vacation in the Bahamas while facing a second-degree manslaughter charge in Tulsa….The deputy pleaded not guilty….Bates, a former insurance executive, has said he confused his handgun for a stun gun when he shot Eric Harris after [he]…ran from a sting investigation….
…The Harris family criticized the trip, saying… “At a time when we are still mourning the death of a loved one that he shot down in the street. Mr. Bates will be relaxing and enjoying his wealth and privilege.”
U.S. ‘justice’ system: killing machine for the innocents
NYT, 4/13 — …Far too often, people end up on death row after being convicted of horrific crimes they did not commit. The lucky ones are exonerated while they are still alive — a macabre club that has grown to…152 members since 1973.
The rest remain locked up for life in closet-size cells. Some die there of natural causes; in at lest two documented cases, inmates who wee almost certainly innocent were put to death….
…At least 4 percent of all death-row inmates in the U.S. have been wrongfully convicted….for many reasons, including bad lawyering, mistaken identification and false confessions made under duress. But…prosecutorial misconduct is at the heart of an alarming number of these cases.
In the past year alone, nine people who had been sentenced to death were released — and in all but one case, prosecutors’ wrongdoing played a key role….
Anthony Ray Hinton…on April 3 walked out of the Alabama prison where he had spent almost 30 years, half his life, on death row. Mr. Hinton was convicted of two murders, largely on faulty evidence that the bullets had come from his gun. His prosecutor at the time said he knew Mr. Hinton was guilty and “evil” just by looking at him. And later prosecutors continued to insist on his guilt even when expert testimony clearly refuted the case against him….
…A. M. Shroud, a former prosecutor in Louisiana’s Caldo Parich….convinced a jury to convict a man named Glenn Ford and sentence him to death for murder. But Shroud now admits…he failed to identify and turn over evidence that would have cleared Mr. Ford….
Shroud…apologized to Mr. Ford — who spent 30 years in prison….[but] this is little consolation to Mr. Ford who was released in 2014 but is now dying from lung cancer that developed, and went untreated while he wasted away in prison…A judge denied Mr. Ford compensation beyond [a] $20 debit card….
…The parish’s current first assistant district attorney…[said] “I’m a believer that the death penalty serves society’s interest in revenge….I think we need to kill more people.”
And FBI ‘junk science’ kills even more…
NYT, 4/27 — The odds were 10-million-to-one, the prosecutor said, against hair strands found at a…1978 murder of a Washington, D.C. taxi driver belong[ing] to anyone but Santae Tribble. Based largely on…the testimony of an analyst with the FBI, Mr. Tribble, 17 at the time, was convicted of the crime and sentenced to 20 years to life.
But the hair did not belong to Mr. Tribble. Some of it wasn’t even human….DNA testing showed there was no match between the hair samples, and…one strand had come from a dog….
The Washington Post reported [that] out of 268 criminal cases nationwide between 1985 and 1999, the bureau’s “elite” forensic hair sample analysts testified wrongly in favor of the prosecution in 257, or 96 percent of the time. Thirty-two defendants in those cases were sentenced to death; 14 have since been executed or died in prison….
…Thousands of additional cases [with]…potentially flawed testimony came from one of the 500 to 1,000 state or local analysts trained by the FBI….

REDEYE 5/6/15

Obama ‘anti-war president’? Who’s kidding who?
GW, 4/15 — Obama is no anti-war president….
…In the last six years, the Obama administration has bombed seven countries in the Middle East alone and armed countless more with tens of billions of dollars in weapons….
…The U.S. is already escalating…its involvement across the Middle East. In Afghanistan, the president has…delayed pulling U.S. troops out…so they can continue special forces raids and drone strikes, despite loudly celebrating the supposed “end” of combat operations….In Iraq, U.S. forces escalated its air strikes in the so-called battle to re-take Tikrit….
…The U.S. has given Saudi Arabia an astronomical $90 billion in military equipment and weapons over the past four years and, as the Washington Post reported, it will play a “huge” role in any fighting. U.S. drones are…patrolling Yemeni skies and even helping Saudi Arabia “decide where to bomb,” according to the Wall Street Journal….
…[Obama] had already authorized dozens of drone strikes…(which backfired and many…think strengthened al Qaeda). He gave the Yemeni government $500 million in heavy weaponry and military gear, all of which is…likely in the hands of U.S. enemies….
…In Afghanistan, the U.S. gave the government nearly 500,000 weapons that are not accounted for (and that was a couple of years ago)…. The Obama administration…[armed] rebels in Syria where many of the weapons promptly fell into enemy hands….
Photographer Gregg Carlstrom…summed it up…as Saudi Arabia started to drop bombs on Yemen: “US praises US ally for bombing US-equipped militia aligned with US foe who is partnering with US to fight another US-equipped militia.”
Oil and gas profits ride roughshod over Oklahoma earthquakes
NYT, 4/4 — Earthquakes Jolt Oklahoma….Oil and gas wells cited….
PRAGUE, Okla. — Yanked without warning from a deep sleep….[by] a 5.0 magnitude earthquake — the first of three as strong or stronger over several days in November 2011 — …peeled the brick façade from [Jennifer Lee Cooper’s] $117,000 home….Repairs have so far cost $12,000 and forced her to take a second job, at night, to pay the bill….
Many scientists….say those quakes, and thousands of others,…are mainly…caused by wells used to bury vast amounts of wastewater from oil and gas exploration deep in the earth near fault zones….
“As long as you keep injecting wastewater along that fault zone, you’re going to have earthquakes,” said…the chief…at the federal Earthquake Science Center….
More than five years after the quakes began a sharp and steady increase, the strongest action by the…governor…has been to name a council to exchange information….The State Legislature…passed bills…barring local officials from regulating oil and gas wells in their jurisdictions….
The state’s oil and gas wells gush profits to corporate owners….a major contributor to…[Governor] Fallin and all three elected members of the…Commission which oversees oil and gas production and disposal wells….From 2011 to 2013….the amount of wastewater buried annually rose…to nearly 1.1 billon barrels. And Oklahoma went from three earthquakes of magnitude 3.0 or greater…to 750-plus this year….
…Last July, researchers stated in Science magazine that wastewater-induced earthquakes were approaching a fault near Oklahoma City capable of producing a magnitude 7.0 shock….
‘American values’: imprisoned pregnant women shackled during childbirth
NYT/ 4/10 — Tina Tinen….was doing a year for selling drugs and had arrived in prison halfway through her pregnancy. On her due date in November, 2011, the labor came so fast that an ambulance… [had] to take her to the hospital from the women’s prison in Bedford Hills [N.Y.].
“Earth-stopping pain,” she said. “The ambulance arrived. I was handcuffed to the gurney.”
At the hospital…she remained handcuffed…as the contractions accelerated. “It was about one minute apart, just blinding pain,” she said.…Her…only child was born 19 minutes after she arrived. Later…when she was permitted to go from a locked ward to the nursery, the corrections officer shackled her legs and her wrists….
In 2009, the State Legislature passed a bill banning the shackling of pregnant women just before, during or after childbirth….Yet, in a survey done since the ban became law, 23 of…27 pregnant women…reported that they were restrained in violations of its provisions….
…A second woman, Maria Caraballo, said that she had been handcuffed on Feb. 15, as she delivered her daughter and the placenta. “It was hard for me to give birth because I couldn’t hardly lift myself up,” she said. “The doctors told the officers to uncuff my hands, I was in labor. I wasn’t going anywhere — they said no….”
…The forms…listed the gear the guards had signed out, including: two sets each of handcuffs, leg irons and waist chains.
Billion$ in profits extorted from prisoners’ phone calls home
NYT, 3/31 — Since the police in Pennsylvania arrested Anthony Kofalt last March…his wife Heather has spent $3,000 — about $60 a week — on phone calls to the prisons and jails where he had been held.
The cost of a 15-minute call is $12.95….The cost for a similar non-prison call…would be about 60 cents.
And every time Ms. Kofalt deposits $25 into the prison phone account, the private company that runs the system applies a service charge of $6.95….Ms. Lofalt…works as a home health care aide….
…The prison phone system is now a $1.2 billion-a-year industry…setting rates and fees far in excess of those established by regular commercial providers. The business is…considerable — some 500 million…calls totaling more than six billion minutes in 2014….
…Hundreds of millions of dollars in concession fees…[are] paid by the phone companies to state and local prison systems in exchange for exclusive contracts. The fees…drive phone charges as high as $1.22 per minute…compared with typical commercial rates of about 4 cents a minute.…Global Tel-Link Corp., which controls 50 percent of the market…was sold for $1 billion…to American Securities, a New York-based firm….
“They are profiting off of people in vulnerable situations,” said Kasie Campbell, who said she lives paycheck to paycheck and spends $150 a month on phone calls to her husband, Allen, in a Texas prison….

REDEYE 4/22/15

U.S., Israeli rulers share technology that kills immigrants and Palestinians
Mondoweiss, 3/20 — Technologies that Israeli firms developed to enforce Zionism in Palestine are being imported to the U.S.-Mexico border to sustain the disenfranchisement of Mexican and Central American immigrants whose livelihoods have been wiped out by U.S. neoliberal economic policies….
…Towers…are being erected by the Israelis weapons giant Elbit Systems, whose Texas-based subsidiary won a $145 million contract with the United States Department of Homeland Security Customs and Border Protection to install a system of “Integrated Fixed Tower systems” in Southern Arizona. This is the latest piece of Israeli technology to be imported — the Hermes 450 drone already patrols southern Arizona skies. The drone is a major component of Israel’s unmanned arsenal whose destructive capabilities…in the Gaza Strip…which killed 2,319 and injured 11,000 Palestinians [last year].
Over the last two decades…the United States government has transformed the southern borderlands into migrant killing fields....
“The death and suffering that we continue to see today is a direct result of the policy of deterrence by death,” [Maryada] Vallet [coordinator for No More Deaths] said. “While Congress can’t agree on legalization for immigrants, killing them at the border has long been a bi-partisan effort….”
Deterrence is foundational in Israeli policy vis-a-vis Palestinians. The Dahiya Doctrine — named for a Beirut suburb that Israel flattened in 2006 — explicitly demands disproportionate force to be wielded against civilian populations and infrastructure as collective punishment.
Chicago cops top NYPD stop-and-frisks
Chicago Tribune/WGN-TV, 3/24 — Chicago police made street stops at a far higher rate last summer than New York City cops did at the height of their…stop-and-frisk policy….
Chicago police stopped African-Americans at a disproportionately higher rate than…whites, especially in predominately white neighborhoods….
…More than a quarter of a million stops took place from last May through August….
…New York City police made about 192,000 stops…during the same four-month period in 2011, the year it recorded its highest number of stop-and-frisks….The rate of stops in Chicago averaged 93.6 per 1,000 people, more than  four times New York’s highest rate of 22.9 per 1,000 people the [ACLU] report said….
African-Americans were most often singled out for stops — typically individuals walking or standing on street corners….Over the same four months last year…police stopped 182,048 African-Americans, 72 percent of all street stops. Yet African-Americans made up about 32 percent of the city’s population….
Chicago police stopped African-Americans at even higher rates in the Jefferson Park police district…15 percent of the time even thought they made up only 1 percent of the population.
Oil bosses gas strikers ‘just like in Ferguson’
Antimedia, 3/23 — More than a month has passed since employees across the nation walked out of refineries, citing concerns about industry-wide disregard for employee safety….
The Emergency Notification System, or ENS, at Houston’s 700-acre LyondellBasell refinery is a warning system installed to notify workers of medical emergencies, fires and vapor releases….to protect…from potentially hazardous chemical vapors.
The ENS is also how strikers were able to keep track of the significantly increased rate of medical incidents when LyondellBasell brought in untrained [scab] workers to replace strikers….
In order to reduce the likelihood of striking employees continuing to report incidents LyondellBasell…implemented a new policy. ENS [warning] speakers near the front gate where picketers stand were disabled…..
This can seriously endanger strikers and nearby communities, as vapor clouds can travel for miles before dissipating and often contain hazardous carcinogens. LyondellBissel has…threaten[ed] the health and safety of employees even after they’ve left the plant, because…when the plant feels the need to flare dangerous chemicals, picketers can expect to be gasses without warning just like protestors in Ferguson.
Sadistic cops to prisoners: fight each other or suffer torture
NYT, 3/27 — San Francisco…sheriff’s…deputies forced prisoners in[to]… “gladiator-style fights” for their own amusement….
…The deputies forced the smallest prisoner…who weighs 150 pounds to fight the largest prisoner…who weighs 350….
“It was a sadistic pleasure,” Mr. Adachi [the public defender] said….this was like something out of ‘Game of Thrones.’”
The prisoners were told they would be rewarded with a hamburger if they won, but would be sprayed with Mace, severely beaten and transferred to dangerous housing quarters if they refused to fight at all….Both men were injured in the fights but were told they would be beaten if they sought medical attention….
…The smaller inmate suffered fractured ribs.
Bail bond industry sucks profits out of poor defendants
Our Time.org., 3/13 —  When someone is arrested…it can be…months until their trial date is set….If the defendant cannot afford to post bail, they must either use a bail bond service or stay in jail to wait their trial. America and the Philippines are the only countries in the world that use the bail bond system….
For example, let’s say two people (one rich, one poor) are accused of the same crime. Bail is set for $100,000 for each….The rich person pays the $100,000, gets out of jail, eventually goes to trial, is found innocent and gets all of his $100,000 back. The poor person doesn’t have $100,000. So he can either stay in jail (and probably lose his job and become even poorer), or use a bail bond service. The bond service charges him a non-refundable ten percent fee. So the poorer person pays the bail bond service $10,000 (or gets all his friends and family help him do so), gets out of jail, eventually goes to trial, is found innocent and has lost $10,000 that he will not get back.

REDEYE 4/8/15

Israel: Leading example of capitalism’s ills
NYT, 3/16 — [Israeli] Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu [‘s]….real purpose of that speech [to the U.S. Congress] was to distract the Israeli electorate with saber-rattling bombast…from…economic discontent….
…Israel has experienced a dramatic widening of income disparities. Key measures of inequality have soared; Israel is right up there with America as one of the most unequal societies in the…world….
…The share of Israel’s population living on less than half the country’s median income — a widely accepted definition of relative poverty — more than doubled to 20.5 percent…between 1992 and 2010. The share of children in poverty almost quadrupled to 27.4 percent….Both numbers are the worst in the advanced world by a large margin…..Children growing up in such families  will surely be placed at a permanent disadvantage….
…There is an extreme concentration of wealth and power among a tiny group of people at the top….According to the Bank of Israel, roughly 20 families control companies that account for half the total of Israel’s stock market….
…Israel does less to lift people out of poverty than any other advanced country….
Meanwhile, Israel’s oligarchs owe their position…to…gaining control of businesses that the government privatized in the 1980s — and they…retain that position…by having undue influence over government policy, combined with control of major banks….
…Netanyahu…[is]….an advocate of free-market policies; he has a…penchant for living large at taxpayers’ expense, while clumsily pretending otherwise.
U.S. racist mass imprisonment generates a public health catastrophe
NYT, 11/27/14 — When public health authorities talk about an epidemic, they are referring to a disease that can spread rapidly…like the flu or tuberculosis.
But…the term [is] useful in understanding another destructive, and distinctly American, phenomenon — mass incarceration. This four-decade binge poses one of the greatest public health challenges of modern times, concludes a new report…by the Vera Institute of Justice.
....People in prison are among the unhealthiest members of society. Most come from impoverished communities where chronic and infectious diseases…are present at much higher rates than in the general population. Health care in those communities also tends to be poor or non-existent.
….Being locked up — …often involves dangerous overcrowding and inconsistent or inadequate health care — exacerbates these problems or creates new ones….[In] the criminal justice system…. the collapse of institutional psychiatric care and the surge of punitive drug laws have sent millions of people to prison, where they rarely, if ever, get the care they need….More than two-thirds of inmates have a substance abuse problem, compared with about 9 percent of the general public.
Common prison-management tactics…turn even relatively healthy inmates against themselves….People held in solitary confinement are up to seven times more likely than other inmates to harm themselves or attempt suicide.
The report also highlights the “contagious” health effects of incarceration on the…communities more of the 700,000 inmates reach year will return to. When swaths of young, mostly minority men are put behind bars, families are ripped apart, children grow up fatherless and poverty and homelessness increase. Today 2.7 million children have a parent in prison….
…Laws…keep punishing people after they have been released from prison, like denying public housing and food stamps to those with drug felony convictions.
U.S. capitalism became powerful and rich on the backs of slaves
NYT, 104/14 — Edward Baptist[s] “Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism” [is] an examination of both the economic innovations that grew out of the ever-shifting institution of slavery and the suffering of generations of people who were bought and sold….
Mr. Baptist shows the ways that new financial products, bonds that used enslaved people as collateral and were sold to bondholders in [U.S.] and abroad and enriched investors worldwide. He also emphasizes viciously enforced slave labor and migration. The cotton boom led planters to sell slaves — one million moved from old to new slave states from the 1790s to the 1860s. Productivity…came through punishment…..
…His book casts unreimbursed labor as torture and Southern plantations as labor camps….He quotes exchanges between planters about the sexual exploitation of enslaved women….[In] a Maryland county…about 10 percent of enslaved people 16 to 25 were sold in an 18-month period….
…”The expansion of American capitalism [occurred] on the backs of enslaved human beings….In forced migration, survival was a kind of resistance in finding ways to stand in solidarity with each other and to write stories about themselves to say: This is a crime….”
“…Slave owners put mortgages on slaves as they bought them. Britain had abolished slavery, but you can essentially buy slaves by buying…those bonds….”
…The commodification and suffering and forced labor of African-Americans is what made the United States powerful and rich….
…The drive for profit exacerbated physical punishment and forced migration….
… [They] connected the dots among plantation labor, London bankers and Northern factories, and the creation of Ivy League universities….
…The Bank of the United States (in which federal funds were deposited) was lending money to slave traders. Planters would mortgage their slaves to raise money, and those mortgages were sold to investors….Huge increases in cotton-picking…see due almost entirely to violence against slaves….
…Baptist had advanced the story by connecting “the day-to-day violence of plantation labor to the largest macroeconomic questions of the West’s economic takeoff in the 19th century.”

REDEYE 3/25/15

Bosses’ ‘booming’ India leads in hungry mothers, new-born deaths
NYT, 3/3 — Her first child survived eight months before succumbing to pneumonia; her second was stillborn; her third delivered in a rickshaw, gasped for an hour before dying….in a country with about one-sixth of the world’s population but one-third of all newborn deaths….
A child raised in India is far more likely to be malnourished than one from the…Congo, Zimbabwe or Somalia, the world’s poorest countries….The poor health of young Indian women [reflect that] more than 90 percent of adolescent Indian girls are anemic, a crucial measure of poor nutrition….42 percent of Indian mothers are underweight….
Research has shown that genetics play no role in the size differences, leaving environmental factors as the only explanation. The reasons for Indian mothers’…poor health…include a culture that discriminates against them….
“In India, young newly married women are at the bottom of household hierarchies,” [Princeton researcher Diane] Coffey said. “At the…time Indian women become pregnant, they are often expected to keep quiet, work hard and eat little.”
Mothers also suffer from the same sewage-borne infections that so often kill their babies, made endemic by the primitive sanitation in much of the country, Ms. Coffey said. “It is likely that infectious disease is responsible for a significant portion of India’s pre-pregnancy underweight problem....”
Parasites spread by poor sanitation and dirty water are a crucial reason [for anemia]. “These mothers are the last persons in their families to have food.”
Fascism, Ferguson Style
NYT, 3/5 — [Ferguson, Mo is a] city that used its police and courts as money-making ventures, a place where officers stopped and handcuffed people without probable caused, hurled racist slurs, used stun guns without provocation, and treated anyone as suspicious merely for questioning police tactics….
 When people refused to comply with — or even questioned — unconstitutional orders, police…responded with force. Stun guns…were commonly used….
Blacks in Ferguson accounted for 85 percent of traffic stops, 90 percent of tickets and 93 percent of arrests over a two-year period….In cases like jaywalking…blacks accounted for 95 percent of those charged. A black motorist in Ferguson was twice as likely to be searched…even though searches of whites turned up drugs and other contraband more often….
 “For people caught in this system, the consequences… [are] devastating. The man arrested…after sitting in his car…lost a job as a government contractor. An African-American woman who had been periodically homeless was cited once for parking her car illegally. From that ticket she was twice arrested and spent six days in jail...More than seven years and $550 worth of payments later, she still owes $541.
 The…report describes the courts as a bureaucratic morass in which people often receive the wrong court dates, court procedures are made on the fly, and it can be unclear how much people owe or when they owe it. The punishment for missing a payment or an appearance, even for routine traffic violations, is often jail.
Court fines are a major source of revenue, and internal emails show city officials pushing for more tickets and fines, then congratulating one another when revenues exceed expectations. Police supervisors insisted that officers hit ticket quotas and reorganized the shift schedules to help hit them….
…City officials circulated racist jokes on their government email accounts without fear of punishment. One portrayed President Obama as a chimpanzee. Another included a photograph of African women dancing topless along with a caption ‘Michelle Obama’s High School Reunion.’
One black woman, who was cited for a permit violation after she had called police for help on a domestic disturbance, declared that she would not call the Ferguson police ever again, “even if she is being killed.”
U.S. Saudi oil ally financed al Qaeda’s Sept 11 attacks
NYT, 2/5 — A still-classified section of the investigation…into the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks examine crucial support given to the hijackers and…implicate prominent Saudis in financing terrorism….
Zacarias Moussaoui, a convicted former member of al Qaeda, [said] he had high-level contact with officials of the Saudi Arabian government in the prelude to Sept. 11….[The report] shows that Saudi Arabia was complicit in the…attacks…“as being the principal financier….”
Proponents of releasing [the report]…have suggested that the Bush and Obama administrations have held it back for fear of alienating an influential military and economic partner rather than for any national security consideration….The national commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks…did note…the “likelihood that charities with significant Saudi government sponsorship diverted funds to al Qaeda.”
Holocaust victims who survived the Nazis were jailed by the U.S.
NYT, 2/5 — Largely lost to history…is the cruel reality of what “liberation” actually meant for hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors discovered barely alive in the Nazi camps….
…The survivor —…Jews,…gays, Roma, Communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses...— remained for months behind barbed wire and under armed guard in what became known euphemistically as displaced persons, of D.P. camps. Many Jews were left wearing the same notorious striped pajamas that the Nazis gave them….
…Underfed survivors lived for months in decrepit camps in Germany and Austria — a number of them on the same grounds as the concentration camps….Thousands of former prisoners remained inside and in limbo for as long as five years because the United States and most other nations refused to let them in.
In the early months after the war, thousands of survivors died from disease and malnutrition...Allied commanders refused to give extra food rations to Jewish survivors because they did not want to be seen as giving preferential treatment over German P.O.W.s….
…A former immigration official, Earl Harrison, [sent] to Europe to inspect the camps….wrote, “we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them. They are in concentration camps…under our military guard instead of S.S. troops….” Many [Nazis] made it to America so easily while so many Holocaust survivors were left behind.
One answer came in…Gen. George S. Patton’s handwritten journal….Patton, who oversaw the D.P. operations….[wrote] “Harrison and his ilk believe that the Displaced Person is a human being, which he is not, and this applies particularly to the Jews who are lower than animals….” (emphasis added).
Under Patton, Nazi prisoners were not only bunked…with Jewish survivors, but were even allowed to hold positions of authority….
Hundreds of thousands of war refugees from Eastern Europe — including many top Nazi collaborators — gained entry to the United States…but visas were scarce for those left in the camps….
At Bergen-Belson as many as 12,000 Jewish survivors at a time remained there until the camp was closed in 1951. Manachem Rosensaft [who] was born at the camp in 1948….believed that the survivors’ hardships had often been overlooked because “it doesn’t neatly fit the story line that we won the war and liberated the camps.”