democracynow--2020-12-25--John le Carré (1931-2020) on the Iraq War, Corporate Power, the Exploitation of Africa & More

This is a rush transcript .
Copy may not be in its final form .
AMY GOODMAN : John le Carré was the pen name for David Cornwell .
He died on December 12th at the age of 89 .
Let ’ s go back to that conversation with John le Carré in 2010 .
I interviewed him with Democracy Now !
’ s Denis Moynihan .
AMY GOODMAN : The late British novelist John le Carré in a 2010 interview with Democracy Now !
He died on December 12th at the age of 89 .
We ’ ll be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a minute .
AMY GOODMAN : This is Democracy Now !
, democracynow.org , The War and Peace Report .
I ’ m Amy Goodman , as we remember the legendary British novelist John le Carré , the pen name for David Cornwell .
Democracy Now !
’ s Denis Moynihan and I spoke to him in London in 2010 .
JOHN LE CARRÉ : I suffer from the same frustration that every decent American suffers from .
That is , that you begin to wonder whether decent liberal instincts , decent humanitarian @ @ @ @ @ @ @ voice , get through the steering of American opinion by the mass media .
I don ’ t know what the percentage now is , but I believe it ’ s still something like 65 or 70 % of Americans believe that Saddam was involved in the Twin Towers .
Am I right in that ?
Something like that .
Well , we haven ’ t gone as far down that road yet , but we do have pretty horrendous manipulation of the media by our various press barons , and we have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Rupert Murdoch empire .
I find that very scary — you know , former Australian , now an American , dictating to Brits what they should be thinking .
I find that very , very , very unsettling , and I oppose it wherever I can .
Therefore , as I say , I share the frustration , I think , of very many Americans , that when something is clear common sense , when there ’ s a great humanitarian need , somehow or another , it ’ s the conservative @ @ @ @ @ @ @ chauvinistic or the patriotic voice , that outshouts other people ’ s decent thinking processes .
I thinks it ’ s crudely put , but it ’ s a very crude situation , that it ’ s — the feeling , I think , that many of us have of Obama is that the good things he would really like to do are being frustrated , and now his own Democratic Party is not helping or supporting him and that the corporate and other lobbies are tying his hands .
I think that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ one can make .
AMY GOODMAN : John le Carré , the British spy novelist , speaking in 2010 in London .
He died on December 12th at the age of 89 .
We ’ ll be back with more of our interview in a minute .
AMY GOODMAN : This is Democracy Now !
, democracynow.org , The War and Peace Report .
I ’ m Amy Goodman , with Denis Moynihan , as we go back to our 2010 interview in London with the master spy novelist John le Carré , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 89 .
AMY GOODMAN : Master spy novelist John le Carré , the pen name for David Cornwell .
He recently died at the age of 89 .
We did that interview in 2010 in London .
Special thanks to Democracy Now !
’ s Denis Moynihan .
And that does it for our show .
Democracy Now !
is produced with Renée Feltz , Mike Burke , Deena Guzder , Libby Rainey , Nermeen Shaikh , María Taracena , Carla Wills , Tami Woronoff , Charina Nadura , Sam Alcoff , Tey-Marie @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Hany Massoud and Adriano Contreras .
Our general manager is Julie Crosby .
Special thanks to Becca Staley , Miriam Barnard , Paul Powell , Mike Di Filippo , Miguel Nogueira , Hugh Gran , David Prude and Dennis McCormick .
I ’ m Amy Goodman .
Thanks for joining us .

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: John le Carré was the pen name for David Cornwell. He died on December 12th at the age of 89. Let’s go back to that conversation with John le Carré in 2010. I interviewed him with Democracy Now!’s Denis Moynihan.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. We are on the road in London, just along the Thames, not far from Parliament, not far from MI5 and MI6, the international and domestic spy agencies here, so it is most relevant to bring you John le Carré, this hour we spend with the foremost spy writer of our time.
Welcome to Democracy Now! Now, it might confuse our audience when I say, “Welcome to Democracy Now!, David Cornwell.” Explain where John le Carré came from.
JOHN LE CARRÉ: Well, I’ve told a lot of lies about that in my time, I have to confess. I began writing when I was still in the British Foreign Service, and it was then understood that even if you wrote about butterfly collecting, you used another name. So the fact that I was in a secret department does not play a part.
Then, I think I decided that I needed three pieces to a name, that they would arrest the “I” and put an accent on the last part. Then the word carré in French has a bunch of ambiguous meanings. A balle carrée, for example, is a dance where the ladies ask the men to dance. Carré at roulette, if you put a numéro carré, you put a counter on each corner of a number. And so it goes on. And I think an homme carré is a little bit a dubious guy. That seemed to me to suit me perfectly at that time.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, in the interests of transparency, we’ll just call you David Cornwell, if that’s OK.
JOHN LE CARRÉ: Just David will do fine.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, we were interested because Channel 4 just said “the last interview” with John le Carré, and yet here we are. Why did you change your mind?
JOHN LE CARRÉ: I didn’t change my mind. The full text with Channel 4 was that that was my last interview in the U.K. And this is the last book about which I intend to give interviews. That isn’t because I’m in any sense retiring. I’ve found that, actually, I’ve said everything I really want to say, outside my books. I would just like — I’m in wonderful shape. I’m entering my 80th year. I just want to devote myself entirely to writing and not to this particular art form of conversation.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’re very thankful to be with you today. I want to bring Denis Moynihan into this conversation, my colleague, who invariably has a spy novel in his hand, and it is usually a novel by John le Carré. If he hasn’t read it once, he’s read it three times, and then he’s on to the fourth.
DENIS MOYNIHAN: David, the latest book, your 22nd novel, Our Kind of Traitor, is about — well, I guess, to frame it for our audience, who may not be familiar with your half-century of writing, about half of that time you wrote during the Cold War, and since then you’ve been focusing less on that story and more on the multinational corporate malfeasance and the confluence of kind of corporate interests and government skulduggery. This story, you want to lay it out kind of in broad strokes, the money laundering, the importance of drug money and laundered money in propping up —
JOHN LE CARRÉ: This is really a — it’s a story, and it’s supposed to entertain, and if it doesn’t entertain, there’s no point in the message. The message has — message has got to be carried on the back of the beetle; otherwise, there is none.
So what we have is a young couple. They’re thinking of getting married. They go off and take a holiday in Antigua. They both love tennis. And they’re middle-class. One’s a lawyer. The other is a tutor at Oxford. And they’re playing tennis. Somebody watches them. And all of a sudden, the fellow, Perry, is invited to play tennis with a Russian guy. And from then on — there is purpose behind the invitation. From then on, they are drawn into a world they didn’t know existed. They’re both intelligent, decent, moral people, and they’re faced with the anarchy, in fact, the kind of exported anarchy of post-Cold War Russia. So the Wild East has come to visit them in Antigua. And from then on, they are drawn into an intrigue.
Dima, my Russian character — I don’t spoil the story by telling you this — says he wishes to defect. He has a quarrel with his gang boss, who is the boss of bosses in Russia, and he’s going to get even with him. He’s going to betray him. He’s going to pour out all the secrets about how he launders money on a vast scale on behalf of a collection of Russian brotherhoods, or Vory. Russian crime has been integrated into the — first of all, into the Soviet Union, on a grand scale. It was developed — the crime families were developed in the camps of Siberia. And Dima emerges from that world. He was a bareknuckle gangster, spent a bit of time on Brighton Beach, learned the arts of money laundering, learned to wear suits, learned to speak half-decent English, and settled in Switzerland, and from there operated a vast money laundering scheme.
Now, this isn’t fiction. That part of it isn’t fiction. Money laundering is simply everywhere. On the grand scale, it’s endemic to banking. You have to bear in mind that when Lehman Brothers wasn’t going to function anymore and the big banks weren’t lending to one another, back at that terrible time, $352 billion of illegal money were then tacitly released upon the market, and that was about the only money people were lending to one another. So, money laundering is not some distant fantasy. It’s actually how you handle the profits of extortion, tax evasion, criminal conspiracy and huge quantities of drug money, how you get that into the white sector. And what we are gradually learning from these little exposés that come to light is that there is almost no way of denying people, in the end, the profits of their crime, which is a tragedy. And it’s also a frightful annoyance, because we pay vast sums of money across the way here to agencies that are supposed to stop money laundering. Doesn’t happen.
AMY GOODMAN: I mean, you’ve got a column right there, bringing this right up —
JOHN LE CARRÉ: I have a column right here. I wish I had the figures in my head. This is from the International Herald Tribune, and I guess that means it also comes from The New York Times, of Monday, September the 13th, not so long ago. Barclays, a British bank, paid $298 million “for conducting transactions with Cuba, Iran, Libya, Myanmar and Sudan in violation of United [States] trade sanctions. Barclays was discovered to have systematically disguised the movement of hundreds of millions of dollars through wire transfers that were stripped of the critical information required by law. …
“Last May, when ABN Amro Bank (now largely part of the Royal Bank of Scotland) was caught funneling money for the benefit of Iran, Libya and Sudan, it was fined $500 million, and no one went to jail. Last December, Credit Suisse Group agreed to pay a $536 million fine for doing the same. In recent years, Union Bank of California, American Express Bank International, BankAtlantic and Wachovia have all been caught moving huge sums of drug money, but no one went to jail. The banks just admitted to criminal conduct and paid the government a cut of their profits.”
The thing is, it is very undemocratic, because if you or I go to one of these banks along here somewhere with a few thousand dollars in a briefcase, if I’m a Brit and do it, I have to give a really thorough explanation. Bank manager may call in the police. I have to produce my passport. If I want to open an account, I have to produce a utilities bill and all of that. But, if Mr. Orloff comes to a bank here and says, “I am from Russia. I have millions and millions of dollars, please. And here is a letter from a reputable lawyer in Moscow. And here is evidence that I run hotels, casinos, whatnot,” bank manager says, “What are you doing for lunch?” And we’re away. So, the bigger the sum, the easier the crime. Now, that is of course something that afflicts us through life. But it’s the case here.
AMY GOODMAN: And the critics — I know you don’t read reviews, but the critics who say, “Oh, come on. This is so exaggerated. The legitimate economy does not rest on the illegitimate one, the illegal one.”
JOHN LE CARRÉ: Well, alas, those critics don’t read their own newspapers, and nor perhaps have they noticed that a former head of MI5, our security service, who was translated to the House of Lords, was recently denied the senior post on a security committee on account of her connections with oligarchs in the Ukraine. These oligarchs were supposedly connected with criminal conspiracy.
We also have a charming case, which we look back on with embarrassment, where a leading member of the Rothschild family and our present chancellor of the Exchequer — that’s finance minister — and the éminence grise of the Labour Party at that time, Lord Mandelson, were all found holidaying together off the coast of Corfu, sitting on the boat of a man called Deripaska, who at that time, I believe, was wanted in the United States on money laundering charges. So we have a certain amount of evidence before us which you would think would silence critics who say we’re all in perfect shape.
AMY GOODMAN: Could you read the beginning of Our Kind of Traitor?
JOHN LE CARRÉ: “At seven o’clock of a Caribbean morning, on the island of Antigua, one Peregrine Makepiece, otherwise known as Perry, an all-around amateur athlete of distinction and until recently tutor in English literature at a distinguished Oxford college, played three sets of tennis against a muscular, stiff-backed, bald, brown-eyed Russian man of dignified bearing in his middle fifties called Dima. How this match came about was quickly the subject of intense examination by British agents professionally disposed against the workings of chance. Yet the events leading up to it were on Perry’s side blameless.
“The dawning of his thirtieth birthday three months previously had triggered a life-change in him that had been building up for a year or more without his being aware of it. Seated head in hands at eight o’clock in the morning in his modest Oxford rooms, after a seven-mile run that had done nothing to ease his sense of calamity, he had searched his soul to know just what the first third of his natural life had achieved, apart from providing him with an excuse for not engaging in the world beyond the city’s dreaming spires. …
“Last term he had delivered a series of lectures on George Orwell under the title ‘A Stifled Britain?’ and his rhetoric had alarmed him. Would Orwell have believed it possible that the same overfed voices which had haunted him in the 1930s, the same crippling incompetence, addiction to foreign wars and assumptions of entitlement, were happily in place in 2009?
“Receiving no response from the blank student faces staring up at him, he had supplied it for himself: no, Orwell would emphatically not have believed it. Or if he had, he would have taken to the streets. He would have smashed some serious glass.”
AMY GOODMAN: The late British novelist John le Carré in a 2010 interview with Democracy Now! He died on December 12th at the age of 89. We’ll be back with more of the interview in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we remember the legendary British novelist John le Carré, the pen name for David Cornwell. Democracy Now!’s Denis Moynihan and I spoke to him in London in 2010.
AMY GOODMAN: We are not far from MI5 and MI6 right now, which takes us way back in time. For our audience who may not be so familiar with your history, in fact, you did work for the MI5 and MI6.
JOHN LE CARRÉ: I worked for one and then for the other, yes. And I suppose that that was nearly half a century ago. So, to regard me as an expert on espionage is absurd, but — on modern espionage. But —
AMY GOODMAN: These are the spy agencies of Britain.
JOHN LE CARRÉ: These are the spy agencies of Britain, yes. MI5 is responsible for domestic security, but it has no executive powers, unlike your FBI. SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6, also has no executive powers and operates abroad on CIA lines, but with a tiny percentage of the budget and a tiny percentage of the personnel. Unlike the CIA, it is not also in competition with 21 other intelligence agencies within your own country, or whatever the number is, something like that.
And I suppose that if I could generalize about my work in intelligence in those days, for better or worse, we counted ourselves an elite with a very considerable responsibility: to speak truth to power, like good journalists, that whatever we came upon, however offensive it was to those in power, we told it straight. And what I fear I have seen in the run-up to the Iraq War in this country is the politicization of intelligence to fit the political intentions of our masters. And to my mind, that was a terrible moment in the history, the visible history, of intelligence work in this country, where the intelligence service itself became effectively co-author and signatory to the so-called dodgy dossier, which — on the strength of which Colin Powell was able to present a dire picture of the threat from Iraq, which turned out to be untrue.
DENIS MOYNIHAN: January of 2003, one of the largest antiwar marches in world history happened just behind us here.
JOHN LE CARRÉ: I took part in it, yeah.
DENIS MOYNIHAN: And what are your reflections now?
JOHN LE CARRÉ: Well, I think that my anger still stands. I can’t understand that Blair has an afterlife at all. It seems to me that any politician who takes his country to war under false pretenses has committed the ultimate sin. I think that a war in which we refuse to accept the body count of those that we kill is also a war of which we should be ashamed. We’ve always got to be careful of that. I think that — I wasn’t speaking as a prophet, I was just speaking as an angry citizen, I suppose. I think it’s true that we’ve caused irreparable damage in the Middle East. I think we shall pay for it for a long time.
One of the problems, surely, is that victims never forget, and the winners do. And they forget very quickly. If people knew basically, for example, what we had done in Iran when we ousted Mosaddegh through the CIA and the Secret Service here across the way and installed the Shah and trained his ghastly secret police force in all the black arts, the SAVAC, if people understood the extent to which we had humiliated Iran, then they would understand the later developments in Iran and Iran’s posture now. If people would look at the map and see the extent to which Iran is encircled by nuclear powers, they wouldn’t take it perhaps quite so seriously that Iran is seeking to arm itself with — if it is — with nuclear weapons.
I remain terrified of the capacity of the media, the capacity of spin doctors, here and abroad, particularly the United States media, to perpetuate false lies, perpetuate lies. Mussolini, I think, defined fascism as the moment when you couldn’t put a cigarette paper between political and corporate power. He assumed, when he offered that definition, that media power was already his. But I worry terribly that the absence of serious critical argument is going to produce a new kind of fanaticism, the new simplicities that are as dangerous as the ones which caused us to march against Iraq and as misunderstood.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk, David Cornwell, aka John le Carré, about what’s happening with Tony Blair with his new book out, with event after event being canceled, eggs being thrown at him, the anger on the streets?
JOHN LE CARRÉ: Well, I don’t know what the level of protest was in the United States by the time you went to war in Iraq, but here I think an aggregate of about 3 million people marched in Britain. The first march, in which I took part, must have numbered something like a million. And so, the — and I remember we stopped, this huge crowd, which was being really very crudely manhandled by the police at the edges. We stopped. We were all wedged together and looking into Downing Street, where the prime minister’s residency is. And nobody seemed to speak, but a kind of feral roar of popular will rose. And I tried to imagine what it must have been like for Blair sitting inside that building and hearing that sound. It was like a huge cry that goes up at a football game or something like that, where you actually — it is no longer verbalized. It’s just this animal seething noise. And I think it will always be remembered of him that he took us to war, as most people perceive, on the strength of lies.
Now you have to bear in mind also that we are creating what American media are referring to as a deep state in this country. That is, I think I read, indeed, in The Washington Post that 890,000-odd Americans who are not in government service are cleared for top secret and above. I don’t know to what extent that situation is replicated here, but more and more I have the feeling that the power of the counterterror market is expanding and creating a wider — an ever-widening circle of those who are initiated, indoctrinated, part of the security structure, whether directly or indirectly, and those who are not. So then it makes it possible, as at the time, for example, of the parliamentary vote on whether we should go to war in Iraq — it makes it possible for a senior MP to take a neophyte aside and say, “If you’d seen the papers that I’ve seen, you would know which lobby to go into when the vote comes up.” And this suggestion that there are those in the know and those not in the know, and that those not in the know are second-class citizens, is extremely dangerous to society. And I think we have to address it all the time.
We have no idea. We don’t have a spokesman for these intelligence services, either one of them, either one of the three main intelligence services. We have inspired leaks. We have people who seem to speak with authority. But when somebody tells us suddenly that we’ve gone on to red alert, and there are tanks outside London airport, or whatever it is, we don’t know by what process this definition reaches us. It’s very easy inside an intelligence service to develop a capsule mentality. You live inside the bubble. The one thing you begin to lose is common sense, a sense of balance. And particularly when it’s men, all together, men in a room. I always think that was the awful secret of the Bay of Pigs catastrophe. It was actually the guys telling each other who they were, and they were frightfully clever men, and they’d done amazing things, some of them horrible things, in Vietnam, and they were together, and they were conspiring, and there was nobody there to say, “Boys, just take it down a bit. Just step back. Is this sensible? Do we really believe the Cubans are going to rush down and embrace our troops when they land on the beach?”
AMY GOODMAN: It’s seven years after the invasion of Iraq. You’ve moved from Blair in this country, and in the United States it’s gone from Bush to Obama, who then expanded the War in Afghanistan. What is your assessment of the United States?
JOHN LE CARRÉ: I suffer from the same frustration that every decent American suffers from. That is, that you begin to wonder whether decent liberal instincts, decent humanitarian instincts, can actually penetrate the right-wing voice, get through the steering of American opinion by the mass media. I don’t know what the percentage now is, but I believe it’s still something like 65 or 70% of Americans believe that Saddam was involved in the Twin Towers. Am I right in that? Something like that. Well, we haven’t gone as far down that road yet, but we do have pretty horrendous manipulation of the media by our various press barons, and we have enormous intrusions into our domestic affairs by the Rupert Murdoch empire. I find that very scary — you know, former Australian, now an American, dictating to Brits what they should be thinking. I find that very, very, very unsettling, and I oppose it wherever I can. Therefore, as I say, I share the frustration, I think, of very many Americans, that when something is clear common sense, when there’s a great humanitarian need, somehow or another, it’s the conservative voice, the orthodox voice, the chauvinistic or the patriotic voice, that outshouts other people’s decent thinking processes. I thinks it’s crudely put, but it’s a very crude situation, that it’s — the feeling, I think, that many of us have of Obama is that the good things he would really like to do are being frustrated, and now his own Democratic Party is not helping or supporting him and that the corporate and other lobbies are tying his hands. I think that’s the most charitable perception that one can make.
AMY GOODMAN: David, would you go to one of Tony Blair’s events?
JOHN LE CARRÉ: No, I wouldn’t, nor would I buy the book. At the last election in which he stood, I was invited by The Guardian newspaper to interview him. And after much thought, I declined, because I did not see how I could lay a glove on him. And I’ve asked some pretty heavy-hitting journalists what questions they would have asked, in retrospect, that might have unseated him a little, that might have thrown him. And they said, almost with one voice, there’s nothing you can get passed him, there’s no way of doing it.
I think I would have asked him one question, perhaps, and I’d have asked it repeatedly. I’d have asked him about his faith, because we were told, when journalists asked about Blair’s faith, the reply was, “We don’t do God here.” Well, of course, he does do God, and he reports that his actions have been put before God and confirmed, as if somehow God has signed a chit for him. I think that the question of somebody’s religious faith is absolutely central to what we think of them, if we are members of the electorate. We have to know. If it is, for example, somebody’s conviction, widely held among Christians in the United States, that the second coming of Christ is not possible 'til the Greater Israel is established, we need to know that. That's an important political perception. In Blair’s case, I would have asked him that question, and I’d have pressed him on it. I’d have asked him whether God had ever restrained him. I find it very strange that we elect a politician who then claims to serve a higher deity who guides him: “I did what I believe is right.” Well, will you tell us, please, how that relates to the Christian ethic? Do you believe in war first and negotiation afterwards? Exactly how does this work?
And the second question I would ask him is the really painful one, which I could not have asked if I hadn’t gone on my own journey. Have you ever seen what happens when a grenade goes off in a school? Do you really know what you’re doing when you order shock and awe? Are you prepared to kneel beside a dying soldier and tell him why he went to Iraq, or why he went to any war? I think that if anything has happened to Europe since 1945 that defines it, it is collectively Europeans do not believe in war anymore, until it comes as an absolute last resort, and then they’re going to do it rather badly. The United States, I think, still sees war as a necessary part of its existence. It’s impossible to maintain the military on that scale, a Pentagon on that scale, without turning it over. You’ve got to have officers who are experienced in command and control. You’ve got to have troops who have been bloodied. So, we were, in that sense, at odds. I was, as a European. I was at odds with the whole notion of a preemptive strike. And I think many Europeans have that in common, of course with very many Americans, too, feel the same. So I would have tried to challenge him in that area.
And as I think I said earlier in the interview, for me, there are very few absolutes about human behavior. But I think a leader who does take his country to war under false pretenses is simply not an acceptable person. I don’t think that we should be weighing the rights and wrongs of that. It seems to me to be quite simply wrong.
AMY GOODMAN: John le Carré, the British spy novelist, speaking in 2010 in London. He died on December 12th at the age of 89. We’ll be back with more of our interview in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Denis Moynihan, as we go back to our 2010 interview in London with the master spy novelist John le Carré, who recently died at the age of 89.
AMY GOODMAN: Can we talk about corporations, because it’s an issue you have taken on in your later books in a huge way? And interestingly, particularly corporate power in Africa —
JOHN LE CARRÉ: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: — whether we’re talking The Constant Gardener, which took place in Kenya, or we’re talking The Mission Song, which took place in Congo, in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
JOHN LE CARRÉ: Absolutely, yeah, yeah. Well, it’s where I have seen globalization at work on the ground. It’s a pretty ugly sight. It’s a boardroom fantasy. What it actually means is the exploitation of very cheap labor, very often the ecological disaster that comes with it, the creation of mega-cities, the depletion of agrarian cultures and tribal cultures. It’s about — the effect of globalization, again, where I have seen it, has been negative, as far as the local population is concerned. It’s enriched the very few in the country where it takes place. And it has totally dismayed the inhabitants otherwise. So, ask me what corporate power means to me, it means the ability of the individual to sacrifice his own instincts, his own decent instincts, in the name of the corporation, that people will do things to — on behalf of the corporation, to a group of people, which they would never do to their next-door neighbor, so that all the decent humanity seems to be set aside the moment they walk through the corporate doors.
In The Constant Gardener, in particular, it was quite extraordinary to go to Basel, to get among the young pharmaceutical executives in a private way, promise them that I would never tell — divulge their names, and listen to them pouring out their rage against the work they were doing, at the people who were making them do it. But they were still taking the penny, and they were still doing what they were doing. They were still contributing to the invention of diseases. They were fiddling with compounds, turn them into new patents, when they actually had no greater effect than the previous patent. They were joining the lie that every new compound put on the market cost six or eight hundred million dollars, which is pretty good nonsense when you think that many of the main health life-saving drugs that go on the market have been developed, for instance, in your own federal laboratories and then sold off by some strange method to the pharmaceutical companies, so they didn’t do the hard work themselves very often.
So, when we think, supposedly with pride, that many corporations have the budgets, which are larger — have budgets which are larger than many small nations, I find that most alarming. And, of course, in our country, we’re up against the fact that huge corporations are effective here, control the super markets, whatever they do, and they pay virtually no tax. We’re back to how they launder their money, or, if it’s a more polite way of saying it, how they apply sophisticated taxation arrangements so that they don’t pay tax.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you give us a thumbnail sketch of The Constant Gardener?
JOHN LE CARRÉ: It’s a young fellow in the Foreign Office, born into the clover, Eton-educated, a sense of political responsibility, a little bit of a frozen child, stiff parents, no love in his early life, falls in love with a beautiful, idealistic young woman, and she marries him. It’s almost she who does it. And they go off to Kenya, and she engages in charitable work and comes upon evidence that a big pharmaceutical company is using a bunch of people in a village in Africa, in Kenya, as human guinea pigs. They sign the consent forms. They don’t know what they’re signing. They’re bullied into it by the local representatives of the pharmaceutical company. Everything is outsourced. Everything is given away to other people, so that the company itself is never directly responsible. And she becomes very involved in this. She takes a stand, and she is murdered. He, who adores her, comes to the conclusion that he must take up her message and take up her fight, and carries it on. And in the end, romantically — I’m nothing, if not a romantic, in some respects — in the end he dies, as part of the mission, and you may say that he joins her, makes a similar sacrifice. And so, they, both of them, did the decent thing against the most anonymous and horrific kind of threat, which is one of sort of untouchable corporate power.
The things that are done in the name of the shareholder are, to me, as terrifying as the things that are done — dare I say it — in the name of God. Montesquieu said, “There have never been so many civil wars as in the Kingdom of God.” And I begin to feel that’s true. The shareholder is the excuse for everything. And, to me — I’m not suggesting we make some sudden lurch into socialism, that isn’t the case at all. I think it’s more to do with the exercise of individual conscience.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s play a clip of Constant Gardener. LORBEER: [played by Pete Postlethwaite] Big pharmaceuticals, they’re right up there with the arms dealers. JUSTIN QUAYLE: [played by Ralph Fiennes] Payoffs, cover-ups, unmarked graves. UNIDENTIFIED: Are you crazy? LORBEER: These people, they kill anybody. SANDY WOODROW: [played by Danny Huston] Poor man seems to have convinced himself there was a conspiracy in which we are all complicit. TIM DONOHUE: [played by Donald Sumpter] There’s a contract out on you. You’ll never know who ordered the hit. That’s the way it works. It’s a corporate matter.
AMY GOODMAN: That was a clip of Constant Gardener. We mentioned Congo and The Mission Song earlier, and you just mentioned it again, but I do want to ask if you’d simply describe the nut of that story, because the story of Congo and Eastern Congo is one that is rarely told, yet millions of people have died.
JOHN LE CARRÉ: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: And the devastation of the environment has been just horrifying. You did choose to go there and write a novel about it.
JOHN LE CARRÉ: I did choose to go there, and I was escorted by a wonderful American man, Jason Stearns, who is a dedicated student of Africa and a lover of Africa, and also Michela Wrong, who had written nonfiction books about Africa. And we agreed we would make a three, and we would go — we went, first of all, to Rwanda, and from Rwanda we went by jeep then into Eastern Congo, and we stayed in Bukavu. I think we were in Bukavu for about, I don’t know, eight or nine days, and I think there were two or three riots there while we were there.
And the tragedy of Congo is almost — it is appalling. It isn’t really — it isn’t the Congo’s fault even. Congo has become the battleground for other people’s wars, repeatedly. Congo is cursed with amazing mineral resources — diamonds, coltan, now, I believe, up in the northeast of Congo, oil even. God help them, because without any civil society to function, they have been exploited, not simply in terms of boy soldiers, awful gang wars that sweep through the jungle, mass rape as a military weapon, they’ve been subjected to every hell on Earth, these poor people.
And meanwhile, don’t think that Africans are disposed to corruption where we are not, so to speak. Actually, most of the corruption that has taken place in Congo on a vast scale is Western-driven. So there are something like 80 or 90 “airlines” — in quotes — registered in Congo, and these simply belong to tiny exploitative companies that harness boy soldiers and kids to dig out the diamonds or the coltan, whatever it may be, and ship it out of Congo without paying duty or anything of that sort. Without paying royalties to anyone is theft. And Congo is being exploited by everybody on account of these reasons, in addition to providing the battleground for other people’s wars.
AMY GOODMAN: As we wrap up, I wanted to ask you about the writing process and why writing is so important to you.
JOHN LE CARRÉ: Well, it’s — I think the first process, for me, of writing is making — making order out of chaos, out of such a convergence of experiences and so many insoluble things that I’ve seen in my life, to be able to draw a line, to tell a fable which illustrates them, which entertains, and which delivers, even if it’s a sad one, some kind of resolution, is, for me, if you will, a catharsis, a therapy. I think also, in the making of character, I feel completely happy. It always seems to me that the excitement of people is the possibilities of their character — who are you? We don’t know each other, but I could imagine you could be this person, you could be that person. And in my book, you’re that person. I don’t plot. I don’t make what you’re supposed to do in writing schools, the flow charts on how I will proceed. I try to get — as in this case, I get two innocent people into a Hitchcockian muddle and make them fight their way out. But from scene to scene, they have to lead me. And that’s — it’s like asking somebody whether they’re musical or why they’re musical. To me, that is the whole of life. I can’t put it differently.
I just want to — I want to leave the public stage, insofar as I’ve ever been on it, and I would now — I’m fit and resolved, and I’ve got a wonderful family, and I just want to spend the rest of my time doing what I do best, which is writing. I love being an entertainer. I love being a storyteller. I don’t think there is a story unless it provokes a little, unless it engages. I don’t think there’s such a thing as entertaining escapism. Not for me. I think there is entertaining involvement, and that’s what I try to do.
DENIS MOYNIHAN: And do you write with a pen?
JOHN LE CARRÉ: I do write with a pen. I’m not advertising this one, because the cap flies off all the time, and actually I’m reduced to pasting them together. I write only with a pen. I’ve learned to operate a computer to communicate with my children, because they won’t communicate with me in any other medium, but otherwise I write entirely with a pen. And I have an immensely attentive, gifted, tactful wife, who loves to type the stuff out, gives it back to me, and watches bemused as I rip it up again and give it back to her. And that goes on. That’s our relationship.
DENIS MOYNIHAN: I think we approached you first for an interview, perhaps about eight or nine months ago, when you were in the midst of writing Our Kind of Traitor.
JOHN LE CARRÉ: Yes.
DENIS MOYNIHAN: And your agent said he absolutely doesn’t communicate with people like us while you’re writing.
JOHN LE CARRÉ: Well, I’m sure it was a mistake.
DENIS MOYNIHAN: So the cloistering yourself on the cliffs of Cornwall, or wherever you happen to be writing, is that an important part of your process?
JOHN LE CARRÉ: Yes. I mean, for some books, I’ve traveled a lot, and I was very much driven by Graham Greene’s dictum that if you’re reporting on human misery — Amy, you know this far better than I. If you’re reporting on human misery, you do well to share it. And that was a principle that came to me late. I started writing books that were set abroad, like The Honourable Schoolboy and so on. I really thought that although the thought horrified me and I have no natural courage whatever, I should see war, so I went off to Cambodia, and I went off and actually I became the protected child of the war correspondents, and I was very fortunate about that. So, by travel, by talking, by listening, above all, in the places where I go to — or as it was, East Congo, or wherever the books take me — then I fill up my rucksack, my backpack. And then I like to take everything, all my scraps of paper and my memories, down to Cornwall and sort them out there. So, it’s engagement, escape, engagement, escape. I think, again, it’s very similar to a journalist’s life, except nobody checks my story out. I don’t have to tell — I don’t have to tell a small truth. I just have to — I have to be looking for the big truth.
AMY GOODMAN: Master spy novelist John le Carré, the pen name for David Cornwell. He recently died at the age of 89. We did that interview in 2010 in London. Special thanks to Democracy Now!’s Denis Moynihan.
And that does it for our show. Democracy Now! is produced with Renée Feltz, Mike Burke, Deena Guzder, Libby Rainey, Nermeen Shaikh, María Taracena, Carla Wills, Tami Woronoff, Charina Nadura, Sam Alcoff, Tey-Marie Astudillo, John Hamilton, Robby Karran, Hany Massoud and Adriano Contreras. Our general manager is Julie Crosby. Special thanks to Becca Staley, Miriam Barnard, Paul Powell, Mike Di Filippo, Miguel Nogueira, Hugh Gran, David Prude and Dennis McCormick. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for joining us.


democracynow--2020-12-25--"The United States of America Has Gone Mad": John le Carré on Iraq War, Israel & U.S. Militarism

This is a rush transcript .
Copy may not be in its final form .
AMY GOODMAN : In this special broadcast , we spend the hour remembering the world-renowned British novelist John le Carré .
He died on December 12th at the age of 89 .
Le Carré was a master writer of spy novels , in a career that spanned more than half a century .
He worked in the British Secret Service from the late 1950s until the early '60s , at the height of the Cold War , which was the topic of his early novels @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Who Came in from the Cold , became an international best-seller .
Le Carré 's gritty depiction of the realities of the spy world contrasted sharply with the characters in Ian Fleming ’ s James Bond series .
This is a clip from the film adaptation of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold , starring Richard Burton as Alec Leamas , an alcoholic cynical British spy .
AMY GOODMAN : John le Carré continued writing , expanding with a series featuring his British spymaster George Smiley , including the hit novel @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
As the Cold War ended , John le Carré continued to write prolifically , shifting focus to the inequities of globalization , unchecked multinational corporate power , and the role national spy services play in protecting corporate interests .
Perhaps best known among his many post-Cold War novels is The Constant Gardener , depicting a pharmaceutical company ’ s exploitation of unwitting Kenyans for dangerous , sometimes fatal , drug tests .
In this clip from the film adaptation of The Constant Gardener , an activist , who is later killed by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Weisz , confronts a government official , played by Ralph Fiennes , about war .
AMY GOODMAN : That was Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz in The Constant Gardener .
In 2010 , Democracy Now !
interviewed John le Carré in London following the publication of his novel Our Kind of Traitor .
I began by asking as him to read an essay he wrote in 2003 titled “ The United States of America Has Gone Mad.
” Le Carré wrote it in the lead-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq , which @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Tony Blair .
The imminent war was planned years before bin Laden struck , but it was he who made it possible .
Without bin Laden , the Bush junta would still be trying to explain such tricky matters as how it came to be elected in the first place ; Enron ; its shameless favouring of the already-too-rich ; its reckless disregard for the world ’ s poor , the ecology and a raft of unilaterally abrogated international treaties .
They might also have to be telling us why they support Israel @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
But bin Laden conveniently swept all that under the carpet .
The Bushies are riding high .
Now 88 per cent of Americans want the war , we are told .
The US defence budget has been raised by another $ 60 billion to around $ 360 billion .
A splendid new generation of nuclear weapons is in the pipeline , so we can all breathe easy .
Quite what war 88 per cent of Americans think they are supporting is a lot less clear .
A war for how long , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lives ?
At what cost to the American taxpayer ’ s pocket ?
At what cost — because most of those 88 per cent are thoroughly decent and humane people — in Iraqi lives ?
How Bush and his junta succeeded in deflecting America ’ s anger from bin Laden to Saddam Hussein is one of the great public relations conjuring tricks of history .
But they swung it .
A recent poll tells us that one in two Americans now believe Saddam was responsible for the attack on the World Trade Centre @ @ @ @ @ @ @ merely being misled .
It is being browbeaten and kept in a state of ignorance and fear .
The carefully orchestrated neurosis should carry Bush and his fellow conspirators nicely into the next election .
To be a member of the team you must also believe in Absolute Good and Absolute Evil , and Bush , with a lot of help from his friends , family and God , is there to tell you which is which .
What Bush won ’ t tell us is the truth about why we ’ re @ @ @ @ @ @ @ stake is not an Axis of Evil — but oil , money and people ’ s lives .
Saddam ’ s misfortune is to sit on the second biggest oilfield in the world .
Bush wants it , and who helps him get it will receive a piece of the cake .
And who doesn ’ t , won ’ t .
Baghdad represents no clear and present danger to its neighbours , and none to the US or Britain .
Saddam ’ s weapons of mass destruction , if he ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by comparison with the stuff Israel or America can hurl at him at five minutes ’ notice .
What is at stake is not an imminent military or terrorist threat , but the economic imperative of US growth .
What is at stake is America ’ s need to demonstrate its military power to all of us — to Europe and Russia and China , and poor mad little North Korea , as well as the Middle East ; to show who rules America at home , and who is to be ruled @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The late John le Carré reading from his 2003 essay , “ The United States of America Has Gone Mad .
”

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: In this special broadcast, we spend the hour remembering the world-renowned British novelist John le Carré. He died on December 12th at the age of 89. Le Carré was a master writer of spy novels, in a career that spanned more than half a century. He worked in the British Secret Service from the late 1950s until the early '60s, at the height of the Cold War, which was the topic of his early novels. His third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, became an international best-seller. Le Carré's gritty depiction of the realities of the spy world contrasted sharply with the characters in Ian Fleming’s James Bond series.
This is a clip from the film adaptation of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, starring Richard Burton as Alec Leamas, an alcoholic cynical British spy.
ALEC LEAMAS: [played by Richard Burton] What the hell do you think spies are? Model philosophers measuring everything they do against the word of God or Karl Marx? They’re not. They’re just a bunch of seedy, squalid bastards like me, little men, drunkards, queers, henpecked husbands, civil servants, playing cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten little lives. Do you think they sit like monks in a cell, balancing right against wrong?
Yesterday I would have killed Mundt, because I thought him evil and an enemy. But not today. Today he’s evil and my friend. London needs him. They need him so that the great, moronic masses you admire so much can sleep soundly in their flea-bitten beds again. They need him for the safety of ordinary, crummy people like you and me.
AMY GOODMAN: John le Carré continued writing, expanding with a series featuring his British spymaster George Smiley, including the hit novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. As the Cold War ended, John le Carré continued to write prolifically, shifting focus to the inequities of globalization, unchecked multinational corporate power, and the role national spy services play in protecting corporate interests.
Perhaps best known among his many post-Cold War novels is The Constant Gardener, depicting a pharmaceutical company’s exploitation of unwitting Kenyans for dangerous, sometimes fatal, drug tests. In this clip from the film adaptation of The Constant Gardener, an activist, who is later killed by the pharmaceutical corporation, played by Rachel Weisz, confronts a government official, played by Ralph Fiennes, about war.
TESSA QUAYLE: [played by Rachel Weisz] Excuse me? Excuse me?
JUSTIN QUAYLE: [played by Ralph Fiennes] Yeah?
TESSA QUAYLE: Excuse me.
JUSTIN QUAYLE: Yeah, sorry.
TESSA QUAYLE: Sir, I’ve just got one question. I just wondered: Whose map is Britain using when it completely ignores the United Nations and decides to invade Iraq? Or do you think it’s more diplomatic to bend the will of a superpower and politely take part in Vietnam the sequel?
JUSTIN QUAYLE: Well, I can’t speak for Sir Bernard.
TESSA QUAYLE: Oh, I thought that’s why you were here.
JUSTIN QUAYLE: I mean, diplomats have to go where they’re sent.
TESSA QUAYLE: So do Labradors.
JUSTIN QUAYLE: Ouch. Well, I think that, no, Sir Bernard would no doubt argue that when peaceful means are exhausted, then —
TESSA QUAYLE: Exhausted? Mr. Quayle, they’re not exactly exhausted, are they? I mean, they’re just — they’re just — no, they are just lying in the way of the tanks. No, let’s face it: We’ve taken 60 years to build up this international organization called the United Nations, which is meant to avoid wars, and now we just blow it up because our car is running out of petrol.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz in The Constant Gardener.
In 2010, Democracy Now! interviewed John le Carré in London following the publication of his novel Our Kind of Traitor. I began by asking as him to read an essay he wrote in 2003 titled “The United States of America Has Gone Mad.” Le Carré wrote it in the lead-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which had the backing of then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
JOHN LE CARRÉ: America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War.
The reaction to 9/11 is beyond anything Osama bin Laden could have hoped for in his nastiest dreams. As in McCarthy times, the freedoms that have made America the envy of the world are being systematically eroded. The combination of compliant US media and vested corporate interests is once more ensuring that a debate that should be ringing out in every town square is confined to the loftier columns of the East Coast press.
The imminent war was planned years before bin Laden struck, but it was he who made it possible. Without bin Laden, the Bush junta would still be trying to explain such tricky matters as how it came to be elected in the first place; Enron; its shameless favouring of the already-too-rich; its reckless disregard for the world’s poor, the ecology and a raft of unilaterally abrogated international treaties. They might also have to be telling us why they support Israel in its continuing disregard for UN resolutions.
But bin Laden conveniently swept all that under the carpet. The Bushies are riding high. Now 88 per cent of Americans want the war, we are told. The US defence budget has been raised by another $60 billion to around $360 billion. A splendid new generation of nuclear weapons is in the pipeline, so we can all breathe easy. Quite what war 88 per cent of Americans think they are supporting is a lot less clear. A war for how long, please? At what cost in American lives? At what cost to the American taxpayer’s pocket? At what cost — because most of those 88 per cent are thoroughly decent and humane people — in Iraqi lives?
How Bush and his junta succeeded in deflecting America’s anger from bin Laden to Saddam Hussein is one of the great public relations conjuring tricks of history. But they swung it. A recent poll tells us that one in two Americans now believe Saddam was responsible for the attack on the World Trade Centre. But the American public is not merely being misled. It is being browbeaten and kept in a state of ignorance and fear. The carefully orchestrated neurosis should carry Bush and his fellow conspirators nicely into the next election.
Those who are not with Mr Bush are against him. Worse, they are the enemy. Which is odd, because I’m dead against Bush, but I would love to see Saddam’s downfall — just not on Bush’s terms and not by his methods. And not under the banner of such outrageous hypocrisy.
The religious cant that will send American troops into battle is perhaps the most sickening aspect of this surreal war-to-be. Bush has an arm-lock on God. And God has very particular political opinions. God appointed America to save the world in any way that suits America. God appointed Israel to be the nexus of America’s Middle Eastern policy, and anyone who wants to mess with that idea is a) anti-Semitic, b) anti-American, c) with the enemy, and d) a terrorist.
To be a member of the team you must also believe in Absolute Good and Absolute Evil, and Bush, with a lot of help from his friends, family and God, is there to tell you which is which. What Bush won’t tell us is the truth about why we’re going to war. What is at stake is not an Axis of Evil — but oil, money and people’s lives. Saddam’s misfortune is to sit on the second biggest oilfield in the world. Bush wants it, and who helps him get it will receive a piece of the cake. And who doesn’t, won’t.
If Saddam didn’t have the oil, he could torture his citizens to his heart’s content. Other leaders do it every day — think Saudi Arabia, think Pakistan, think Turkey, think Syria, think Egypt.
Baghdad represents no clear and present danger to its neighbours, and none to the US or Britain. Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, if he’s still got them, will be peanuts by comparison with the stuff Israel or America can hurl at him at five minutes’ notice. What is at stake is not an imminent military or terrorist threat, but the economic imperative of US growth. What is at stake is America’s need to demonstrate its military power to all of us — to Europe and Russia and China, and poor mad little North Korea, as well as the Middle East; to show who rules America at home, and who is to be ruled by America abroad.
The most charitable interpretation of Tony Blair’s part in all of this is that he believed that, by riding the tiger, he could steer it. He can’t. Instead, he gave it a phoney legitimacy, and a smooth voice. Now I fear, the same tiger has him penned into a corner, and he can’t get out.
It is utterly laughable that, at a time when Blair has talked himself against the ropes, neither of Britain’s opposition leaders can lay a glove on him. But that’s Britain’s tragedy, as it is America’s: as our Governments spin, lie and lose their credibility, the electorate simply shrugs and looks the other way. …
I cringe when I hear my Prime Minister lend his head prefect’s sophistries to this colonialist adventure. His very real anxieties about terror are shared by all sane men. What he can’t explain is how he reconciles a global assault on al-Qaeda with a territorial assault on Iraq. We are in this war, if it takes place, to secure the fig leaf of our special relationship, to grab our share of the oil pot, and because, after all the public hand-holding in Washington and Camp David, Blair has to show up at the altar.
“But will we win, Daddy?”
“Of course, child. It will all be over while you’re still in bed.”
“Why?”
“Because otherwise Mr Bush’s voters will get terribly impatient and may decide not to vote for him.”
“But will people be killed, Daddy?”
“Nobody you know, darling. Just foreign people.”
“Can I watch it on television?”
“Only if Mr Bush says you can.”
“And afterwards, will everything be normal again? Nobody will do anything horrid any more?”
“Hush child, and go to sleep.”
Last Friday a friend of mine in California drove to his local supermarket with a sticker on his car saying: “Peace is also Patriotic”. It was gone by the time he’d finished shopping.
AMY GOODMAN: The late John le Carré reading from his 2003 essay, “The United States of America Has Gone Mad.”


democracynow--2020-12-28--"I Just Felt Like I Had No Control Over My Body": Survivors of Alleged ICE Medical Abuse Speak Out

This is a rush transcript .
Copy may not be in its final form .
AMY GOODMAN : This is Democracy Now !
The Quarantine Report .
I ’ m Amy Goodman .
A warning to our listeners and viewers : This next segment includes graphic descriptions of alleged assaults .
We turn to an update now on how dozens of immigrant women detained by ICE , Immigration and Customs Enforcement , at the Irwin County Detention Center have joined a class-action lawsuit against ICE over allegations they were subjected to nonconsensual and invasive gynecological procedures and surgeries , that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , in some cases , left them unable to have children .
The complaint was filed last week in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Georgia and cites sworn testimony from at least 35 women about their treatment by Mahendra Amin , a physician in Ocilla , Georgia .
The lawsuit also describes how the women suffered retaliation for speaking out and faced threats of deportation .
One of the survivors , who ’ s still detained at Irwin , joined a call with reporters on Tuesday .
This is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ old , originally from Guadalajara , Mexico , but has lived in the United States since she was 8 years old , first detained in June after calling 911 to report being physically abused by her boyfriend .
Her daughter was 4 months old at the time .
She ’ s now 10 months old and living with Elizabeth ’ s mother in Florida , as Elizabeth now marks five months in detention .
In this clip , she describes part of her experience with Dr. Amin .
AMY GOODMAN : In a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ phone from the Irwin jail to talk more about her ordeal and what she ’ s calling for .
And we ’ ll hear from another woman , who says Dr. Amin pressured her to get a hysterectomy .
When she refused , she found he removed her fallopian tubes .
She has since been deported .
Also with us , Azadeh Shahshahani , legal and advocacy director at Project South , co-counsel for women at Irwin who say they were subjected to these nonconsensual and invasive procedures by Dr. Amin .
In @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Accountability Project and others to file a complaint about the alleged abuse , based primarily on nurse Dawn Wooten ’ s testimony .
Wooten is a nurse who worked in the jail operated by the LaSalle Corrections corporation , who spoke out about the high number of undocumented women undergoing hysterectomies , a surgery to remove the uterus , without proper consent .
We welcome you back Democracy Now !
We thank you so much for being with us .
Let ’ s begin with Azadeh Shahshahani .
Can you lay out this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ this very closely .
But explain who ’ s included in this , what the allegations are and what has happened to Irwin , the detention center , as well as Dr. Amin .
AZADEH SHAHSHAHANI : Thank you very much for having me , Amy .
First , I should say that I ’ m glad that the complaint that we filed in September along with the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights , Georgia Detention Watch and the South Georgia Immigrant Support Network , and the testimony of our courageous client @ @ @ @ @ @ @ whistleblowing nurse , has paved the way for more women survivors of medical abuse at Irwin to come forward and tell the world about what they suffered at this facility .
So , this lawsuit , recent lawsuit , that Project South filed along with our partners , the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild , Immigrants ’ Rights Clinic at Columbia Law , David Dreyer and several other law school clinics , is a class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of women detained at Irwin who have been subjected to invasive @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , medical abuse .
So , in total , we have more than 40 women who filed sworn testimony in court , despite consistent attempts by ICE to silence them .
And the filing also includes evidence showing that ICE and the private contractors at the facility knew as far back as 2018 about the medical abuse being inflicted on women , and yet they didn ’ t do anything .
Instead , they kept sending women to this same doctor , who was not even board-certified .
And the lawsuit also focuses @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , since we filed the complaint in September , instead of cooperating with the investigation , ICE has been actively trying to cover their own tracks and erase the evidence through deporting survivors of medical abuse , survivors and witnesses to medical abuse — so they have already deported six , and they were trying to deport several more , before lawyers and Congress have stepped in to try to stop the deportations — and using other tactics of retaliations against those who speak out , such as threats of placing women in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ confinement .
And so , the status is that Irwin is still up and running , despite our demands for several years now to go ahead and shut this place down .
And they ’ re not sending women to Dr. Amin anymore at this moment .
AMY GOODMAN : So , we ’ re going to go right now to Elizabeth , a survivor of alleged medical abuse , speaking to us from inside Irwin .
She has a limited amount of time she can speak because she ’ s calling from @ @ @ @ @ @ @ tell us your story , how you ended up at Irwin , and then how you ended up having a medical procedure done on you .
It sounds like this call has just disconnected , and we ’ re going to try to get this call back on , be able to speak with Elizabeth , a survivor of alleged medical abuse , from inside the Irwin Detention Center .
It is very difficult for these women to get their stories out , but they increasingly are .
We ’ re going to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ who ’ s testified that while she was detained in Irwin , Dr. Amin told her she had large cysts and pushed her to get a hysterectomy , which she refused , but he still performed a surgery that left her unable to have children .
Doctors later told her the procedure was completely unnecessary .
She ’ s originally from Jamaica , lived in the U.S. for more than 20 years , has four U.S.-born children .
She was deported in May .
Wendy , if you can tell us what happened @ @ @ @ @ @ @ you for having me .
Good morning .
AMY GOODMAN : Thank you so much .
WENDY DOWE : September of 2018 , I went to court for a traffic violation .
And after that , they put — I got arrested .
They put a ICE hold on me .
So I ended up in Irwin County .
I was there for a year and six months with stomach pain .
I went in there with hypertension , and I had stomach pain , and I have a hernia .
So I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
And they didn ’ t do anything until one day they came for me .
Didn ’ t know where I was going .
They woke me up 5:00 .
And when I went there , it was Dr. Amin .
He performed an X-ray and a sonogram on me , and told me that I got multiple cysts in me .
So I asked him what that meant .
He didn ’ t answer .
So , after the point , he told me that I got a mass in my @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ What is that ?
” He says , “ It ’ s a mass that grows in your ovary .
We don ’ t know if it ’ s cancerous , but it ’ s a mass.
” I went back to the facility .
I spoke to the nurses about that .
They said they don ’ t know , because Dr. Amin didn ’ t send them any type of paperworks as yet .
So , I think it was a couple weeks after that , they woke me up @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to Dr. Amin again , that told me that I ’ ve got a size of a cantaloupe in my ovary , that it ’ s cancerous .
By then I was like shaky and crying , and I asked him , you know , “ What caused this ?
” And he said he can ’ t tell me , because he was hired through ICE and he ’ s got to send the paperwork back to the facility .
So , when I went back to the facility , I spoke @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to them .
Multiple papers .
They never answer , until — I think this is the cause of the stress , that I couldn ’ t see out of my eyes .
My blood pressure was all the way up , and my vision was lost .
And next morning again , they came in the morning , 5:00 , told me I ’ m going to the doctor .
I thought it was for what I was going through .
When I went to the doctor , they told me I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ what I ’ m going through , I was like out of my mind and wasn ’ t , you know , concentrating on what they were saying , because I had a headache , couldn ’ t see out of my eyes or anything .
When I woke up — AMY GOODMAN : So the doctor cut your fallopian tubes ?
WENDY DOWE : Yeah .
When I woke up , I noticed that I couldn ’ t wake up at all because I was on anesthesia .
When I went back @ @ @ @ @ @ @ t know as yet .
I noticed there were three holes in my stomach .
So I was asking them , “ What is this ?
” They say I got surgery , but they don ’ t know what type of surgery I had .
After I request and request and request the medical paper , they brought it back to me .
That ’ s when I know that my fallopian tubes is out .
AMY GOODMAN : And then , how much later were you deported to Jamaica , where @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in Kingston ?
WENDY DOWE : After that , I think it was a couple months after that .
AMY GOODMAN : And your kids still in the United States ?
They are U.S. citizens .
WENDY DOWE : They were in the United States with a friend .
I had an 11-year-old that — she is disabled .
I had a 14-year-old at the time .
She ’ s turned 14 now , but she was 12 .
And I had a 15-year-old .
So , they were with a friend at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ wanted to go , Wendy , back to the facility , the jail .
You ’ re speaking to us from deportation , and you ’ re demanding you be allowed to come back to this country , where you lived for 20 years .
A number of women have had their deportation stopped .
But we ’ re back with Elizabeth inside the facility , and we don ’ t want to leave her — inside the jail .
Elizabeth , if you can describe what happened to you ?
ELIZABETH : @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Detention Center in July of 2020 .
A little after I arrived , I started feeling abdominal pain , so I asked to see a doctor .
I went , like she said , multiple times , until they finally made an appointment .
When I went to this appointment , I went to see Dr. Amin .
When I was there , I was shackled from my ankles , my wrists and on my stomach .
I had a chain around my stomach .
The nurses took my weight , my temperature @ @ @ @ @ @ @ shackled .
AMY GOODMAN : Your shackles .
You are in for a civil offense .
They ’ re saying you violated your immigration status .
You had called the police yourself , because you said you were being abused by your partner .
And they arrested you .
AMY GOODMAN : So now you ’ re shackled , and you ’ re brought to this gynecologist .
ELIZABETH : Yes , ma ’ am .
They took my weight and all this .
They put me back in a room , where @ @ @ @ @ @ @ my clothes .
So they had to take off my chains in order for me to take off my clothes .
And I ’ m just sitting down on the bed .
Dr. Amin comes in .
He doesn ’ t even acknowledge me .
He doesn ’ t say anything .
His demeanor is very much , you know , manly and rude , so it ’ s like he ’ s unapproachable .
Like , I didn ’ t even say hi to him .
He sits in front of me @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and getting ready for the procedure that is going to be done , which he does not tell me what is going to be done .
Then , the officer that is with me , she ’ s like right in front of me , in the eyesight where she was going to see my body parts .
So I told the nurse if she could please move .
So , the person that was there , she said she couldn ’ t leave the room , but she just moved from there @ @ @ @ @ @ @ words , his exact words , were “ Open up your legs.
” He just told me , “ Open up your legs.
” So , at that moment , I just felt like I had no control over my body .
He just made me feel , you know , like worthless , because I ’ m like , “ Oh wow.
” So , I did what he told me to .
Then he just said , “ It ’ s going to be cold , ” and he stuck the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hard .
And he was doing a vaginal ultrasound .
As I ’ m about to turn to the monitor , he [ inaudible ] , and he tells me that I have a cyst on my left ovary , that I ’ m going to get a Depo shot for it to dissolve .
If it doesn ’ t dissolve in four weeks , I ’ m going to be scheduled for surgery .
At that time , I didn ’ t know what a Depo shot was .
I didn ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ My family has had birth control before , and I ’ ve been scared of birth control because it made their hormones crazy .
They gain a lot of weight , and they just — you know , they get acne on their face and stuff like that .
So , if I would have known that it was birth control , I wouldn ’ t have gotten it .
But he just said , “ You ’ re getting a Depo shot , ” like he didn ’ t give me no @ @ @ @ @ @ @ re talking about the drug Depo-Provera , injected into your arm .
ELIZABETH : Yes .
Yes , ma ’ am .
He just leaves the room after that .
And I get dressed , and then they shackle me up once again .
Then the nurse comes in , and she gives me the Depo shot in my arm , with my handcuffs on , and then she makes me sign the paper , which I didn ’ t know what the paper was because I couldn ’ t even hold the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ arm .
So , the way I could , I just grabbed a pen , and I signed the paper .
And on my way back to the detention center , I ’ m talking to this girl that was also transported in there with me , and she tells me that she also has a cyst in her left ovary , and she got the shot “ to not have babies.
” Those were her words .
And that ’ s how I knew that the Depo shot was the birth control @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
ELIZABETH : I was like , how was the doctor — mm-hmm ?
AMY GOODMAN : Can you tell me , Elizabeth , what you ’ re calling for now ?
Sadly , you are in this ICE jail through Christmas .
Your daughter is now what ?
Ten months old .
And you haven ’ t seen her since she was 4 months , is that right ?
ELIZABETH : Correct .
Yes , that ’ s right .
I have not seen her in six months .
AMY GOODMAN : @ @ @ @ @ @ @ where you are exposed to COVID .
What are your calls for ?
ELIZABETH : I am in a jail , yes , correct .
AMY GOODMAN : What are you calling for ?
ELIZABETH : I want — what I want out of this is for this jail to be closed .
I want everyone to be freed in here .
It is not fair for us to be in here when we have our kids , our family members out there .
I want immigration , if it ’ s possible @ @ @ @ @ @ @ don ’ t want any more women to go through what I went through .
AMY GOODMAN : I mean , this is just an astounding story , how many women are telling your story .
Wendy , you ’ re deported as Elizabeth is inside the jail .
You were held there until you were sent back , having been sterilized by the same doctor .
Wendy Dowe , what are you calling for ?
WENDY DOWE : I ’ m calling for the shutdown of Irwin County .
I ’ m @ @ @ @ @ @ @ minor offense , people that ’ s been in the country for decades , people that don ’ t know , you know , like your country — even though you ’ re born there , you don ’ t know the country — people don ’ t go through the same thing like we went through , because I ’ ve got four U.S. citizen children , and my children went through hell .
I ’ m in Jamaica now .
They can ’ t get the doctor help they need .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ them , where my daughter got Medicaid in America .
She got Medicaid because she ’ s a disabled child .
They can ’ t get the education they needed here , because they are not from here .
I already got an American citizen that died in Jamaica because of the healthcare , and I don ’ t want the same thing to happen to my children .
AMY GOODMAN : I want to go , finally , back to Azadeh Shahshahani and what — we only have 30 seconds .
But @ @ @ @ @ @ @ since congressmembers have taken up this issue , as well , to shut down this ICE facility , this ICE jail , where women are being sterilized against their will , having medical procedures they don ’ t realize ?
What can be done at this point ?
AZADEH SHAHSHAHANI : At this point we ’ re looking to the Biden administration , and the demand is to go ahead and immediately shut this place down .
And we ’ re asking Congress to put pressure on ICE to shut down Irwin , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ contractors , including the prison corporation LaSalle , accountable for women who suffered abuse , and for the witnesses to be able to come back and testify about what happened .
And we need a broader investigation .
AMY GOODMAN : We want to leave it there , but we ’ ll continue to investigate , Azadeh Shahshahani of Project South , Wendy Dowe in Jamaica , Elizabeth , survivor inside Irwin now .
I ’ m Amy Goodman .
Thanks so much for joining us .

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! The Quarantine Report. I’m Amy Goodman. A warning to our listeners and viewers: This next segment includes graphic descriptions of alleged assaults.
We turn to an update now on how dozens of immigrant women detained by ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, at the Irwin County Detention Center have joined a class-action lawsuit against ICE over allegations they were subjected to nonconsensual and invasive gynecological procedures and surgeries, that were later found to be unnecessary and, in some cases, left them unable to have children.
The complaint was filed last week in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Georgia and cites sworn testimony from at least 35 women about their treatment by Mahendra Amin, a physician in Ocilla, Georgia. The lawsuit also describes how the women suffered retaliation for speaking out and faced threats of deportation.
One of the survivors, who’s still detained at Irwin, joined a call with reporters on Tuesday. This is Elizabeth, who’s 21 years old, originally from Guadalajara, Mexico, but has lived in the United States since she was 8 years old, first detained in June after calling 911 to report being physically abused by her boyfriend. Her daughter was 4 months old at the time. She’s now 10 months old and living with Elizabeth’s mother in Florida, as Elizabeth now marks five months in detention. In this clip, she describes part of her experience with Dr. Amin.
ELIZABETH: This doctor, he comes in. He comes in, and he doesn’t even acknowledge me. He just — he just comes in, and he sits right in front of me. My escort was right behind him. He starts prepping for the procedure he’s going to — that’s going to be done, without telling me anything. He’s not explaining what’s going to be done or anything.
Then he just says, “Open up your legs.” And, you know, his demeanor is very intimidating, very just standoffish. So, like, as soon as he says that, I just feel like I have no control over my body anymore. I just — I didn’t know what was going to be done to me.
AMY GOODMAN: In a minute, Elizabeth will join us by phone from the Irwin jail to talk more about her ordeal and what she’s calling for.
And we’ll hear from another woman, who says Dr. Amin pressured her to get a hysterectomy. When she refused, she found he removed her fallopian tubes. She has since been deported.
Also with us, Azadeh Shahshahani, legal and advocacy director at Project South, co-counsel for women at Irwin who say they were subjected to these nonconsensual and invasive procedures by Dr. Amin. In September, her organization joined the Government Accountability Project and others to file a complaint about the alleged abuse, based primarily on nurse Dawn Wooten’s testimony. Wooten is a nurse who worked in the jail operated by the LaSalle Corrections corporation, who spoke out about the high number of undocumented women undergoing hysterectomies, a surgery to remove the uterus, without proper consent.
We welcome you back Democracy Now! We thank you so much for being with us. Let’s begin with Azadeh Shahshahani. Can you lay out this broadened lawsuit? We have been following this very closely. But explain who’s included in this, what the allegations are and what has happened to Irwin, the detention center, as well as Dr. Amin.
AZADEH SHAHSHAHANI: Thank you very much for having me, Amy.
First, I should say that I’m glad that the complaint that we filed in September along with the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights, Georgia Detention Watch and the South Georgia Immigrant Support Network, and the testimony of our courageous client, Ms. Dawn Wooten, the whistleblowing nurse, has paved the way for more women survivors of medical abuse at Irwin to come forward and tell the world about what they suffered at this facility.
So, this lawsuit, recent lawsuit, that Project South filed along with our partners, the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild, Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Columbia Law, David Dreyer and several other law school clinics, is a class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of women detained at Irwin who have been subjected to invasive and nonconsensual gynecological procedures — that is, medical abuse. So, in total, we have more than 40 women who filed sworn testimony in court, despite consistent attempts by ICE to silence them.
And the filing also includes evidence showing that ICE and the private contractors at the facility knew as far back as 2018 about the medical abuse being inflicted on women, and yet they didn’t do anything. Instead, they kept sending women to this same doctor, who was not even board-certified.
And the lawsuit also focuses on the issue of retaliation. So, since we filed the complaint in September, instead of cooperating with the investigation, ICE has been actively trying to cover their own tracks and erase the evidence through deporting survivors of medical abuse, survivors and witnesses to medical abuse — so they have already deported six, and they were trying to deport several more, before lawyers and Congress have stepped in to try to stop the deportations — and using other tactics of retaliations against those who speak out, such as threats of placing women in solitary or actually placing them in solitary confinement.
And so, the status is that Irwin is still up and running, despite our demands for several years now to go ahead and shut this place down. And they’re not sending women to Dr. Amin anymore at this moment.
AMY GOODMAN: So, we’re going to go right now to Elizabeth, a survivor of alleged medical abuse, speaking to us from inside Irwin. She has a limited amount of time she can speak because she’s calling from inside a jail. Elizabeth, please tell us your story, how you ended up at Irwin, and then how you ended up having a medical procedure done on you.
It sounds like this call has just disconnected, and we’re going to try to get this call back on, be able to speak with Elizabeth, a survivor of alleged medical abuse, from inside the Irwin Detention Center. It is very difficult for these women to get their stories out, but they increasingly are.
We’re going to go right now to Wendy Dowe, who’s testified that while she was detained in Irwin, Dr. Amin told her she had large cysts and pushed her to get a hysterectomy, which she refused, but he still performed a surgery that left her unable to have children. Doctors later told her the procedure was completely unnecessary. She’s originally from Jamaica, lived in the U.S. for more than 20 years, has four U.S.-born children. She was deported in May. Wendy, if you can tell us what happened to you?
WENDY DOWE: Thank you for having me. Good morning.
AMY GOODMAN: Thank you so much.
WENDY DOWE: September of 2018, I went to court for a traffic violation. And after that, they put — I got arrested. They put a ICE hold on me. So I ended up in Irwin County. I was there for a year and six months with stomach pain. I went in there with hypertension, and I had stomach pain, and I have a hernia. So I made a claim to the medical department. And they didn’t do anything until one day they came for me. Didn’t know where I was going. They woke me up 5:00.
And when I went there, it was Dr. Amin. He performed an X-ray and a sonogram on me, and told me that I got multiple cysts in me. So I asked him what that meant. He didn’t answer. So, after the point, he told me that I got a mass in my ovary. I’m like, “What is that?” He says, “It’s a mass that grows in your ovary. We don’t know if it’s cancerous, but it’s a mass.” I went back to the facility. I spoke to the nurses about that. They said they don’t know, because Dr. Amin didn’t send them any type of paperworks as yet.
So, I think it was a couple weeks after that, they woke me up again 5:00 that morning. I went to Dr. Amin again, that told me that I’ve got a size of a cantaloupe in my ovary, that it’s cancerous. By then I was like shaky and crying, and I asked him, you know, “What caused this?” And he said he can’t tell me, because he was hired through ICE and he’s got to send the paperwork back to the facility.
So, when I went back to the facility, I spoke to the nurses, sent multiple papers to them. Multiple papers. They never answer, until — I think this is the cause of the stress, that I couldn’t see out of my eyes. My blood pressure was all the way up, and my vision was lost. And next morning again, they came in the morning, 5:00, told me I’m going to the doctor. I thought it was for what I was going through. When I went to the doctor, they told me I had surgery. But, basically, what I’m going through, I was like out of my mind and wasn’t, you know, concentrating on what they were saying, because I had a headache, couldn’t see out of my eyes or anything. When I woke up —
AMY GOODMAN: So the doctor cut your fallopian tubes?
WENDY DOWE: Yeah. When I woke up, I noticed that I couldn’t wake up at all because I was on anesthesia. When I went back to the facility, I didn’t know as yet. I noticed there were three holes in my stomach. So I was asking them, “What is this?” They say I got surgery, but they don’t know what type of surgery I had. After I request and request and request the medical paper, they brought it back to me. That’s when I know that my fallopian tubes is out.
AMY GOODMAN: And then, how much later were you deported to Jamaica, where we’re speaking to you now in Kingston?
WENDY DOWE: After that, I think it was a couple months after that.
AMY GOODMAN: And your kids still in the United States? They are U.S. citizens.
WENDY DOWE: They were in the United States with a friend. I had an 11-year-old that — she is disabled. I had a 14-year-old at the time. She’s turned 14 now, but she was 12. And I had a 15-year-old. So, they were with a friend at the time.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go, Wendy, back to the facility, the jail. You’re speaking to us from deportation, and you’re demanding you be allowed to come back to this country, where you lived for 20 years. A number of women have had their deportation stopped. But we’re back with Elizabeth inside the facility, and we don’t want to leave her — inside the jail. Elizabeth, if you can describe what happened to you?
ELIZABETH: Yes. I arrived at Irwin County Detention Center in July of 2020. A little after I arrived, I started feeling abdominal pain, so I asked to see a doctor. I went, like she said, multiple times, until they finally made an appointment. When I went to this appointment, I went to see Dr. Amin. When I was there, I was shackled from my ankles, my wrists and on my stomach. I had a chain around my stomach. The nurses took my weight, my temperature and my blood pressure with my ankles shackled.
AMY GOODMAN: Your shackles. You are in for a civil offense. They’re saying you violated your immigration status. You had called the police yourself, because you said you were being abused by your partner. And they arrested you.
ELIZABETH: Yes, mm-hmm.
AMY GOODMAN: So now you’re shackled, and you’re brought to this gynecologist.
ELIZABETH: Yes, ma’am. They took my weight and all this. They put me back in a room, where the nurse told me to take off my clothes. So they had to take off my chains in order for me to take off my clothes. And I’m just sitting down on the bed. Dr. Amin comes in. He doesn’t even acknowledge me. He doesn’t say anything. His demeanor is very much, you know, manly and rude, so it’s like he’s unapproachable. Like, I didn’t even say hi to him.
He sits in front of me. He starts putting his gloves on and getting ready for the procedure that is going to be done, which he does not tell me what is going to be done. Then, the officer that is with me, she’s like right in front of me, in the eyesight where she was going to see my body parts. So I told the nurse if she could please move. So, the person that was there, she said she couldn’t leave the room, but she just moved from there.
Then, Dr. Amin, his words, his exact words, were “Open up your legs.” He just told me, “Open up your legs.” So, at that moment, I just felt like I had no control over my body. He just made me feel, you know, like worthless, because I’m like, “Oh wow.” So, I did what he told me to. Then he just said, “It’s going to be cold,” and he stuck the tube inside of me, like just hard. And he was doing a vaginal ultrasound.
As I’m about to turn to the monitor, he [inaudible], and he tells me that I have a cyst on my left ovary, that I’m going to get a Depo shot for it to dissolve. If it doesn’t dissolve in four weeks, I’m going to be scheduled for surgery. At that time, I didn’t know what a Depo shot was. I didn’t know it was birth control. My family has had birth control before, and I’ve been scared of birth control because it made their hormones crazy. They gain a lot of weight, and they just — you know, they get acne on their face and stuff like that. So, if I would have known that it was birth control, I wouldn’t have gotten it. But he just said, “You’re getting a Depo shot,” like he didn’t give me no choice.
AMY GOODMAN: You’re talking about the drug Depo-Provera, injected into your arm.
ELIZABETH: Yes. Yes, ma’am. He just leaves the room after that. And I get dressed, and then they shackle me up once again. Then the nurse comes in, and she gives me the Depo shot in my arm, with my handcuffs on, and then she makes me sign the paper, which I didn’t know what the paper was because I couldn’t even hold the paper because I had handcuffs on my arm. So, the way I could, I just grabbed a pen, and I signed the paper.
And on my way back to the detention center, I’m talking to this girl that was also transported in there with me, and she tells me that she also has a cyst in her left ovary, and she got the shot “to not have babies.” Those were her words. And that’s how I knew that the Depo shot was the birth control. And I started asking her questions.
AMY GOODMAN: So —
ELIZABETH: I was like, how was the doctor — mm-hmm?
AMY GOODMAN: Can you tell me, Elizabeth, what you’re calling for now? Sadly, you are in this ICE jail through Christmas. Your daughter is now what? Ten months old. And you haven’t seen her since she was 4 months, is that right?
ELIZABETH: Correct. Yes, that’s right. I have not seen her in six months.
AMY GOODMAN: And you’re in a jail where you are exposed to COVID. What are your calls for?
ELIZABETH: I am in a jail, yes, correct.
AMY GOODMAN: What are you calling for?
ELIZABETH: I want — what I want out of this is for this jail to be closed. I want everyone to be freed in here. It is not fair for us to be in here when we have our kids, our family members out there. I want immigration, if it’s possible, to be shut down. I don’t want any more women to go through what I went through.
AMY GOODMAN: I mean, this is just an astounding story, how many women are telling your story. Wendy, you’re deported as Elizabeth is inside the jail. You were held there until you were sent back, having been sterilized by the same doctor. Wendy Dowe, what are you calling for?
WENDY DOWE: I’m calling for the shutdown of Irwin County. I’m calling for changes. People with like minor offense, people that’s been in the country for decades, people that don’t know, you know, like your country — even though you’re born there, you don’t know the country — people don’t go through the same thing like we went through, because I’ve got four U.S. citizen children, and my children went through hell. I’m in Jamaica now. They can’t get the doctor help they need. Financially, I can’t support them, where my daughter got Medicaid in America. She got Medicaid because she’s a disabled child. They can’t get the education they needed here, because they are not from here. I already got an American citizen that died in Jamaica because of the healthcare, and I don’t want the same thing to happen to my children.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to go, finally, back to Azadeh Shahshahani and what — we only have 30 seconds. But do you see it being feasible, since congressmembers have taken up this issue, as well, to shut down this ICE facility, this ICE jail, where women are being sterilized against their will, having medical procedures they don’t realize? What can be done at this point?
AZADEH SHAHSHAHANI: At this point we’re looking to the Biden administration, and the demand is to go ahead and immediately shut this place down. And we’re asking Congress to put pressure on ICE to shut down Irwin, to hold ICE and the private prison contractors, including the prison corporation LaSalle, accountable for women who suffered abuse, and for the witnesses to be able to come back and testify about what happened. And we need a broader investigation.
AMY GOODMAN: We want to leave it there, but we’ll continue to investigate, Azadeh Shahshahani of Project South, Wendy Dowe in Jamaica, Elizabeth, survivor inside Irwin now. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks so much for joining us.