The Rag Blog

For more than a decade, the Federal Prison Industries has been forcing inmates to handle toxic “e-waste” containing arsenic, mercury, lead and other cancer-causing chemicals.

A single computer contains hundreds of chemicals that are known to cause cancer and other illnesses.

U.S. prisoners working for a computer-recycling operation run by Federal Prison Industries (FPI) are being exposed to a toxic cocktail of hazardous chemicals through their prison jobs while efforts by some prison officials to protect them have been met with stonewalling and subterfuge.

Since 1994, FPI has used inmates to disassemble electronic waste (e-waste) — the detritus of obsolete computers, televisions and related electronics goods — for recycling. According to a new report, “Toxic Sweatshops” — published jointly by the Texas Campaign for the Environment, California-based Computer TakeBack Campaign and the Prison Activist Resource Center — the waste contains high levels of arsenic, selenium, mercury, lead, dioxins and beryllium — all considered dangerous by the Environmental Protection Agency.

The report follows three years of mounting scrutiny of FPI by the U.S. Office of the Special Counsel, the Operational Safety and Health Organization (OSHA) and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. Critics say that the scrutiny has led to few reforms.

FPI, which operates as a unit of the semi-autonomous, government-run corporation UNICOR, opened its first electronics recycling business at a federal prison in Marianna, Florida, in 1994. Since then, the company’s electronics recycling program has spread to six other federal prisons across the country. Inmates working for UNICOR are paid between 23 cents and $1.15 per hour. In 2005 the company recorded $64.5 million in profits.

Not so many years ago, perhaps five, there was a country known as “Iraq.” That Iraq no longer exists. It has been replaced by two Iraqs. No, I am not referring here to the Kurdish Autonomous Region, nor to the nascent Shia statelet likely about to be created in the south, though either of these could be considered as break-up products of that former country.

I am, rather, referring to the two zones into which Iraq has become divided, the Green Zone and the Red Zone. The Green Zone, a.k.a. the “International Zone,” the “Ultimate Gated Community,” or more appropriately, the “United States of Iraq,” is the place where the various would-be rulers of Iraq have congregated since the March-April 2003 invasion. The colonial administration, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), set up its headquarters here. After the June 2004 handover of “sovereignty” but little power to an Iraqi Interim Government with its Prime Minister forced upon United Nations officials nominally in charge by the United States, this government made its home in the Green Zone. The current “elected,” but largely powerless, Shia-dominated government also “rules” from this zone.

For the Americans there, life in the Green Zone resembles life in the United States, with just enough of an exotic tinge to make it interesting. Night clubs serve liquor, women jog in shorts and sports bras, and pool parties sometimes get wild. McDonalds and Burger King are available, though, just as in many modern American cities, kebabs served by real natives are available for the daring.

For the time of the CPA, the Green Zone was a nice career stop-over point for those hoping to get some attention in the modern Republican Party. A few months there helped get that coveted PR job back in the States. Of course there was the occasional mortar shell to contend with, but the hint of danger helped relieve the boredom that was, perhaps, the greater risk of service in the colonies.

So what of the Red Zone? It is the place where those Iraqis not cleared to get near the occupation forces live. The place where people go about their lives in a situation economically much worse off than that before the invasion. In the Red Zone people die by the tens or hundreds of thousands, from bombs and bullets, yes, both Iraqi and American, but also from crime, from disease, and from lack of basic medical care. In the Red Zone clean water is scarce, electricity available but a few hours a day, if that, and doctors are increasingly rare as the few remaining flee to the safety of exile. And boredom, that plague of the Green Zone, also plagues the Red Zone as millions of women and children, and increasingly men as well, are afraid to step outside the house for months on end as fear of murder and abduction keeps them under long-term house arrest.

The Green Zone sometimes sees conflict between US political officials with their fantastic visions of an occupied Iraq willing and able to submit to every whim of the occupiers, and the Iraqi officials with their visions of an ascendant Shia state. The Red Zone, in contrast, sees daily conflict between numerous militias with varied political and governmental loyalties, some labeled police, army, special Interior Ministry death and torture squads, others known as the militias of various political parties and organizations, while yet others are labeled as “insurgents,” “terrorists,” “jihadists,” or “freedom fighters” depending on who is doing the labeling.

As Iraq is divided into these two separate but unequal worlds, there are those who go between them, who cross the barriers separating the two worlds. Among these are the US soldiers, the “grunts,” upon whom the day-to-day tasks of occupation fall. Unlike the politicians, bureaucrats and corporate scam artists of occupation, who can often do their jobs without stepping foot in the Red Zone, these soldiers cross the border between the two Iraqs on a regular basis. Can these ambassadors of freedom, and of occupation, bridge the two Iraqs? How do they construe the situation thrust upon them? Perhaps the experiences of these soldiers can shed light upon the evolving relations of the two Iraqs, relations so complex as to challenge the pundits who attempt to make sense of the Iraqi mess for the folks back home.

AMMAN, Jordan: A truce between insurgents and the U.S. forces in Iraq is possible if the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad is dismissed and new elections are held, a prominent Sunni tribal leader said Tuesday.

Until a truce is agreed, insurgent attacks on U.S. troops will continue and even escalate in line with instructions from Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, Saddam Hussein’s deputy and perceived successor, said Sheik Majeed al-Gaood, a tribal leader in Anbar province, the heartland of the insurgency.

“Mr. al-Douri’s instructions came in a handwritten letter weeks before President Saddam was martyred,” al-Gaood told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from his house in Amman, Jordan’s capital. “He demanded escalated attacks against certain targets, not civilians,” he said.

I Left My Heart In (a 2500 miles radius of) San Francisco

Continue to contaminate your bed, and you will one night suffocate in your own waste. Your destiny is a mystery to us. – Chief Seattle leader of the Duwanish tribe in Washington Territory in an 1854 letter to U.S. President Franklin Pierce to mark transfer of ancestral Indian lands to the United States

There are efforts underway to oppose explosions of radioactive materials by the US government into the air in which we breathe. This article will outline various reasons why and how radioactive explosive “tests” are harming America – and describe the efforts of citizens in one area of the country who are now working to try to put a stop to them.

Like most people over 21, you may already know that the United States used to “test” nuclear bombs in the NV and NM deserts, right out in the open air. If asked, most people would probably be able to tell us that yes indeed, both above ground and below ground “nuclear testing” in the United States ended years ago. Yet, even though 1992 saw its last nuke bomb “test” inside the United States, how many know that our government is still firing radioactive explosives into our atmosphere? This fact appears to be one of Uncle Sam’s “dirtiest” not-so-little, well-kept secrets.

Yes, they fire radiation out into the very same air that our families breathe. Tons of radioactive munitions, in fact. Depleted Uranium is the name of one of the materials they use. And if that material sounds familiar? It because it’s the same stuff that they’re using on the “enemy” – that is, on civilians – in Afghanistan and Iraq.

No, we do not know what in the world the civilians of Iraq and Afghanistan ever did to deserve the “honor” of being blasted to kingdom come with Uranium-238 – rendering their nations permanently uninhabitable. By the same token, nor do we know what American citizens have done to deserve Depleted Uranium being exploded into our air so that we are gassed with it, either.

But now the country is starting to buzz with the word of radioactive open air “testing” near San Francisco. And with such a progressive part of the nation that has historically fought hard for peace, equal rights, racial equality, gay rights, and ecological sustainability? As one could say, the Greater San Francisco Bay area is now again boldly “coming out of the closet” with regard to letting the proverbial cat out of the bag about this “dirty” business of Uncle Sam’s.

But this is not a story entirely about San Francisco’s troubles. Nor is it even all about California. As you will see, this story affects you and me, no matter where we live in the country. California’s tale is only the proverbial tip of the iceberg. The story about your community and mine? Now that’s the heart of this story.

The fiery “hot” issue of Depleted Uranium explosives “testing” has emerged into the spotlight in the San Francisco Bay area recently all because of some people who live in a city called Tracy. That’s how anything important usually starts – when just a few people who are fed up enough get together and become vocal enough and publicly put up a fuss.

No wonder why they’re upset. Only a few miles away from them on a federally owned 7,000 acre parcel of land in the Altamont Hills at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in San Joaquin and Alameda Counties, California, radioactive explosives containing Depleted Uranium are being shot out into the open air at a location called Site 300. Yes, Depleted Uranium is being exploded across the street from a motorbike recreational area. Site 300 is only a few miles away from where people live.

What started all the ruckus was that on November 13 a new permit, issued by California’s San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District, was put into effect that allows the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to use more than triple the amount of explosive materials in “test” detonations at Site 300 than in the past. This means that the equivalent of 350 pounds of explosives may now be fired instead of the previously permitted 100 pounds.

There are two efforts underway to appeal the new permit for Site 300 that allows for much larger explosions by using greater amounts of radioactive materials. Two appeals have been filed, one by a housing developer and the other by a resident who lives about five miles from the radioactive blast location, Site 300.

Small business owner, Tracy resident, and long-standing member of Tri-Valley Communities Against A Radioactive Environment (CARES), Bob Sarvey is leading the way to protect his community of 72,400 from radioactivity at Livermore’s Site 300 by appealing the permit of the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District. A health risk assessment performed recently shows a higher health risk just from merely inhaling toxic non-radioactive air contaminants than the Livermore Lab shows in its own radiological assessment.

Residents realized something was not quite right about this report. “Previously“, according to Sarvey, “the Lawrence Livermore Lab didn’t need a permit from the Pollution Control District because their chargers were under 100 lbs. equivalent to TNT – and under 1,000 pounds per year. Now, they are going to increase that to 350 pounds per charge, equivalent to TNT …and they are also going to increase the annual limit to 8,000 pounds. That’s eight-fold of what it was annually… and on a per change basis, three and a half times per charge”.

In addition to allowing up to 8,000 pounds of explosives containing radioactive matter annually, as reported in the Tracy Press on December 14 the current county air pollution control permit allows Livermore Laboratory to emit up to 1,440 pounds of particulate matter up to 10 microns in diameter per year into the air. The public does not even have to be notified of such emissions unless the particulate matter exceeds a 20,000 pound limit.

It only takes one invisible micron of Depleted Uranium to cause organ damage and health failure. Can anyone possibly hazard a guess as to how much potential hazard that 1,440 pounds of particulates could cause – never mind the 20,000 pound particulate upper limit? Can you imagine willingly causing up to 1,440 pounds of radioactive particles to be blasted into the open air? If one miniscule particle so tiny as to be invisible can cause a terminal illness, whose mind can even fathom the devastation 1,440 pounds of this stuff could do to countless numbers of people?

ISLAMABAD • Plagued by sectarian violence imported from the Gulf during the 1980s, Pakistan is on guard for any spillover from the conflict between Sunnis and Shi’ites gripping Iraq.

Bombs can go off anytime for many reasons in Pakistan, but the coming days mark an anxious period for the country’s Shi’ite minority as they mourn the death of one their sect’s heroes in the Islamic festival of Moharram.

So far, there has been no reaction to events in Iraq, but Pakistani leaders view what’s happening there with trepidation, as 15 per cent of the Muslim nation are Shi’ites.

As if he didn’t have enough to worry about with Al Qaeda, the Taleban, jihadi groups fighting the Indian army in Kashmir, and Baluch separatist rebels, Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf shudders at the spectre of sectarian strife.

“The Islamic world is heading towards a crisis,” Musharraf told university students earlier this month, at a time when the world was aghast over Shi’ite guards taunting Iraq’s Sunni former ruler, Saddam Hussein, at the gallows.

“If we don’t get our act together, there will be a sectarian catastrophe in the Islamic world,” said Musharraf.

Sunni sectarian extremists have already forged links with Al Qaeda following Musharraf’s alliance with the United States after the September 11, 2001 attacks. Osama bin Laden’s henchmen directed Pakistani Sunni militants to carry out assassination attempts on Musharraf and his Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz in 2003 and 2004.

Syed Sajid Ali Naqvi, a senior Shi’ite leader in an Islamist opposition alliance, made up of one Shi’ite and five Sunni parties, said Pakistan’s political clerics were deliberately avoiding a topic that is consuming Muslims everywhere.

An attorney’s essay

On Dec. 26, 2006, the Appellate Court of the Iraqi Special Tribunal announced that Judge Awad Hamad al-Bandar, along with Saddam Hussein, was to be put to death. With an initial filing made immediately that night and over the next two weeks, the writer and Carl Messineo of the Partnership for Civil Justice, working with former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, sought emergency relief to stop the U.S. government from transferring Judge Bandar to what was an extra-judicial killing.

Judge Bandar was sentenced to death in a show trial, along with Hussein, in the absence of a competent tribunal or due process of law. The federal courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, refused to prohibit the transfer of Bandar, who was undisputedly in U.S. physical custody, based on the U.S. government’s argument that its operations are beyond the reach of U.S. courts when acting as, or as in this case renaming itself to be, a multi-national force. Judge Bandar was hung to his death early Monday morning, Jan. 15, 2007.

President Bush has announced he is “disappointed” with the hangings of Saddam Hussein, Judge Awad Hamad al-Bandar and Barzan Ibrahim, adding that it “looked like kind of a revenge killing.” This might be seen as strange from the man who hung them. Bush added that the real problem with the hangings was the appearance, that it made it harder for him to “make the case to the American people.” This part was true.

The issue for Bush is not really the hangings, but rather the reality of the hangings that was revealed to the world. The government was concerned that protest and even rebellion could spread in Iraq and throughout the Arab world. But the Bush Administration was also worried about the dynamically evolving domestic political scene. The people of the United States, having seen something other than the edited and packaged presentation of the hangings, may question the U.S.’s fictional story of the situation in Iraq and rightly hold the U.S. government responsible. Condoleezza Rice clarified the government’s displeasure with the situation, calling for punishment of those who made and released unauthorized video images.

First one hanging, and then two more, and the press has filled columns with the U.S. government’s self-serving protestations. The media dutifully reports this fiction of concerns, regret and criticisms. To read these protestations was remarkable to us, as we were simultaneously reading the U.S. government’s briefs filed in federal court opposing our emergency attempts to obtain due process for our client Judge Bandar, who was to be hung.

Judge Bandar, a civilian, was being held in the exclusive physical custody of the U.S. government at Camp Cropper. The U.S. government controlled his fate, whether he lived or died. Had it really any concerns about the hangings, the fact that the federal court system in the United States was being presented with such matters was easily enough to stave off execution. But, the U.S. government actually wanted them dead. Further, it is adamantly opposed to there being any restraint on its lawless conduct in Iraq.

The U.S. government in its military operations has sought to neutralize itself from the authority of the U.S. courts simply by renaming itself as the Multi-National Force-Iraq (MNF-I). It presented this fiction to the court claiming that the U.S. government did not control military operations in Iraq. This may be news to you, news to most of the world; especially news to the Iraqis.

That assertion may be news even to General George W. Casey, Jr., identified as the commander of MNF-I who has said repeatedly that he is subject to the authority, direction, and control of the Commander, U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) and that the MNF-I is “a subordinate command to CENTCOM.” Asked in his Senate confirmation hearing whether there would be any limits on CENTCOM’s authority due to the international nature of the MNF-I, he replied that there were “none at all.” He added, there is “no reporting chain that goes back to the United Nations. … My chain of command is through the secretary of defense and the President.”

The U.S. war machine, which has already sought to exempt itself from restraint or accountability worldwide, has now untethered itself from the one last legal hold on it, the U.S. courts. By so doing, it asserts that the U.S. courts do not have jurisdiction to address claims lodged against it. It can take up arms anywhere against any civilians, capture, hold them, torture them, have them killed, and merely by renaming itself can eliminate any threat of judicial oversight or intervention.

The U.S. government also simultaneously argued that any stay in the rendition to death of Judge Bandar would interfere with the “exclusive authority” of the President as Commander in Chief and “unitary chief executive.” Maintaining its open rejection of any check or balance against imperial authority, the government argued this was a matter of foreign affairs and military operations exclusively for President Bush to determine with no oversight.

U.S. puppets and propaganda

Continuing his fiction spun to the people of the United States, Bush has launched a component campaign of his decision to inflict deeper death and destruction on Iraq and U.S. servicepeople. He has begun to publicly criticize his puppet, Prime Minister Maliki. This is to ensure that any failure of the puppeteer’s actions and plans, and resulting public outcry, can be laid at the feet of the puppet. Thus, his critique of the hangings.

Scapegoating their own puppet is not an unfamiliar program to the White House and Pentagon. The U.S. government supported its puppet Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines until the people rose up and drove him out. The United States supported its puppet Jean Claude Duvalier in Haiti until the people rose up and drove him out. A little repudiation of the failing regime, at the stage of its dethronement, is a tactic borne of practicality.

Had things gone according to plan in Iraq, minus the all-revealing video of the execution, all three men would have been strung up by the U.S. government, and it would have been reported as a sovereign act of their puppet Iraqi government and asserted to have been carried out with appropriate gravitas and “dignity.” We would have been spoonfed the fiction of the conquerors’ honorable execution of the captured head of state—a romantic notion of barbaric “victor’s justice,” harkening back to the Roman Empire.

BAGHDAD, Jan. 22 — Two blocks from the new American outpost in Ghazaliya, one of Baghdad’s most dangerous neighborhoods, a fight was raging. Shiites were battling Sunnis, the latest skirmish in a sectarian war that has left this area a wasteland.

On Friday morning, it became an American fight, too, after a few rounds whizzed by Sgt. Sergej Michaud’s head, and he and three other soldiers returned fire.

The battle would rage for nearly an hour, with mortar shells and rocket-propelled grenades exploding near the soldiers, who in turn laid down heavy fire, eventually driving the attackers away.

Previously, that would have been the end of it, with the soldiers moving on to their next patrol area and eventually returning to their base. But this time, the Americans were staying, defending their new home in a neighborhood where the rule of law had been driven out by the reign of the gun.

Their outpost here, a cluster of fortified houses officially designated a joint security station and unofficially called the Alamo by some of the soldiers, is a test case for President Bush’s new Baghdad security plan. The strategy envisions at least 20 more facilities like it in other troubled neighborhoods, all jointly staffed by Iraqi and American forces.

Even after the stations are set up, American commanders say, it will be many months, at best, before they can even hope to prevent bombings like the one that killed at least 88 people in a central Baghdad market area on Monday.

In the week since the Americans arrived, however, the troops have seen the truth of what their commanders warned in announcing the plan: it leaves Americans more exposed than ever, stationary targets for warring militias.

The outpost sits on the fault line between Sunni and Shiite enclaves: Ghazaliya to the south, where fighters with Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia have moved in among the Sunni population, and Shula to the north, a base for Shiite militias that have been raiding this neighborhood for months.

Over the course of three days spent with the 105 soldiers here — Company C of the Second Battalion, 12th Cavalry — four American vehicles were hit by roadside bombs near the outpost. No soldiers from Company C were wounded, but they know the fighting will intensify.

“I’m a juicy target they are just trying to figure out,” said Capt. Erik Peterson, 29, the commander at the outpost.

During the week, the soldiers also received their first glimpse of the green Iraqi forces who will share the mission and eventually, they hoped, take it over. The soldiers talked about them with a mixture of bemusement, disdain and mistrust.

“You could talk about partnership, but you would be lying,” said one soldier who asked that his name not be used, for fear of punishment by his superiors.

It was also a week to start getting to know the desperate residents of Ghazaliya, where almost every remaining family has lost someone to kidnappings and executions, and where government services have long been cut off.

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — With a certain satisfaction, Lebanese journalist Michael Young watched a local station broadcast images seen across the world on April 9, 2003: the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Firdaus Square, its reverberations rumbling across a stunned Middle East. Out of curiosity, he switched to a satellite station from Syria. It was showing a documentary on a venerable Damascene mosque. He flipped to another channel, where a former Egyptian general was dismissing the idea that day that the Iraqi capital had even fallen.

“If they were scared of what was happening in Baghdad, there was more power in this moment than might have been expected. The regimes were truly scared of this moment, truly scared,” recalled Young, the opinion editor of the Daily Star in Beirut.

“The problem is,” he added, “the Americans failed.”

The coterie of Arabs who supported the U.S.-led invasion were never the target of expensive American propaganda efforts. Their unpopular stands in the Arab world earned them inboxes full of angry e-mails; a few claimed they got death threats. And nearly four years after the invasion they backed, their sense of frustration, resentment and even betrayal speaks volumes about how withered American standing is in the Middle East today and how far the region itself has deteriorated, riven as it is by escalating conflicts, worsening sectarian tension and a simmering struggle with an ascendant Iran.

“It’s a success story for al-Qaeda, a success story for autocratic Arab regimes that made democracy look ugly in their people’s eyes. They can say to their people: ‘Look at the democracy that the Americans want to bring to you. Democracy is trouble. You may as well forget about what the Americans promise you. They promise you death,’ ” said Salameh Nematt, a Jordanian analyst and the former Washington bureau chief for the Arabic-language daily newspaper al-Hayat.

I tried to leave the hotel at night to buy some cigarettes, when one of the hotel security guys took me a side and asked me where I was going?

I told him that I was going to buy some cigarettes from the corner shop, he smiled and said “No go back.” I found that strange and asked him why?

He said “believe me and go back” I questioned him again?, he then informed me that there was some thing fishy going on out side, and that there were three cars driving back and forth in front of the hotel, the guard told me that they had stopped the car and asked them what they were doing in the neighborhood?”

(Because after dark you don’t find cars driving because of the security situation and only militia forces will move around looking for random Sunni targets)

They told him that they are looking for some one called Omar!!

Iraq will not let United States use its territory to launch strikes against Iraq, according to the leader of the parliamentary bloc of radical anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

“We will not allow the American forces to strike Iran to achieve what it wants because the Islamic Republic of Iran is one of our neighbours.” He said. “Iran is our big neighbour who and deals with us diplomatically without meddling in our internal affairs.”

He added that Iran has the technical capacity to assist in the rebuilding of the his war torn nation.

Member of the House of Representatives Fread Raunduzi of the Kurdistan Alliance called on the Iraqi government and the government of Kurdistan region to “make a substantial effort” secure the release of Iranian diplomats detained by the US forces following the seize of the consulate in Erbil, an act which has “caused problems in the relationship between the Iraqi government and Iran.”

CRAWFORD — The Revs. Alan and Nancy Bean never dreamed of being on the front lines of the “war on drugs” — let alone actually getting involved in it in their small West Texas town.

But in 1999, these two ordained Baptist ministers were called to form “Friends of Justice Tulia” to get the word out to the national media, NAACP, the ACLU, and the Justice Department that there was something fishy about a local drug sting.

The sting itself initially received glowing yet nasty coverage in their hometown newspaper.

“When I first heard about the drug sting, actually I didn’t know that everybody was black. The race of those arrested was not given in the newspaper account, which is what I was going on,” Rev. Alan Bean told the Iconoclast. “What got me was that they were described as scumbags and known drug dealers in an editorial in the Tulia paper.”

Indeed, 39 of the 46 people arrested for allegedly dealing cocaine were African American and so poor that they had no houses or cars of their own. Moreover, the “drug kingpin,” a 57-year-old pig farmer who lived in a run-down shack, was convicted and given a 90-year sentence.

Yet as the first of the trials were happening, Rev. Bean questioned the verdicts more closely: Why should the sentences be so long? How could there be 46 drug dealers in a town of 5,000? How could any jury convict any alleged criminal on the testimony of a single narcotics agent?

To Rev. Bean, this style of due process just didn’t make sense biblically.

“The Bible says that nobody is to be convicted except on the word of at least two witnesses. That’s not just a passing reference in the Bible. Moses said it. Paul confirmed it. Jesus confirmed it. I mean, no matter who your favorite figure is in the Bible, they said it,” said Rev. Bean. “That teaching isn’t just there because it appealed to somebody. It just made sense. It’s not just to take any single person’s word for anything, particularly when a person’s freedom is riding on the line.”

As this lone undercover agent — Tom Coleman — was basking in the spotlight of his work, more information surfaced. Coleman made his living working low-level law enforcement jobs in country towns. His position was funded through a federal anti-drug program that reached rural areas outside of the Drug Enforcement Administration.

However, Coleman made for a lousy undercover agent, never wearing a wire, taking photographs and videotapes, nor hiring a partner to verify his work on the Tulia sting. Still, a number of predominately white juries believed him and sent the defendants to prison with terms ranging from 90 years to 400 years, the latter given for one man with a prior conviction.

With its team of racially-integrated and persistent volunteers, the Friends of Justice eventually obtained media exposure. An article in the Texas Observer and a documentary on the irregularities of the Tulia case convinced several civil rights organizations to take the case seriously.