Press, be it Africa, Syria, Ukraine, Iran, Lebanon, Israel, or Gaza, were it not for Aljazeera, people living in confinement like us would lack the means to apprehend, let alone directly observe the distant on-the-ground events of global turmoil so often packaged or glossed over by the nightly news in America. As brutal as it can be to witness death on the screen, the ability to observe distant but real-time resistance, insurgency, war, and genocide reminds us just how starved we are in the carceral state of sensory input.
Without Aljazeera, we’d be blind to truths that envelope so much of the world’s suffering—an envelope often licked by the lathered tongue of western so-called democratic nations seemingly bent on shaping distant lands with exported military hardware that becomes used to prevent journalism from reporting accurately about that suffering. Being an incarcerated journalist requires the full-time pursuit of the universe of knowable information that most of the free-world takes for granted, and is unavailable to us, as we are in a constant state of playing catch-up. Resigned to the last-in-line role of being among the most uninformed group of people in every room we stand in, our observations, data collection, synthesis of information, and thesis formulations must be powerful. We can’t be basic. Aljazeera’s Counting The Cost, Inside Story, Witness, The Stream, and The Listening Post have become our international counterweight to the mainstream media counter-programming we devour via conservative platforms like Real America’s Voice that ‘feed’ prisons like ours, Steve Bannon’s War Room, Turning Point Action’s The Charlie Kirk Show, and whatever rant vitamin hustler Alex Jones can manage to finesse while spewing populist hate. Without the internet, digital television is the lifeline for folks like us who are thirsty for data, starved of context, and allergic to media-manufactured fiction. It’s not easy.
Our work swims like a trapped Orca circling within an aquarium of limitations—shackles that journalist Kristine Guillaume has described as “mechanisms of social control” —that we believe are intended to keep us as illiterate as we are unfree. Prohibiting reading on plantations doesn’t seem so far removed from the contemporary prison book ban tactics, the artificial property limits on books in prison, and the tens of thousands of EBSCO articles firewalled from the reach of our laptops without a sound penological basis. The two-way censorship we contend with is a velcro double-helix of “your voice and your self-knowledge matters not” echoing through the tier. Be it restricting access to higher education to only those with determinate sentences—something made ridiculous on its face now that Pell grants cover the expenses of delivering a college degree program in every state to all comers, or denying arts and music programs to folks living in confinement, the myopic perspectives—that refuse to acknowledge the humanity of the people we cage—wear the same foggy-lensed bifocals that distort the things that appear much further away than they really are, and never sense the collision until its too late. Ignoring us doesn’t render us nonexistent. Muzzling our voices doesn’t silence us either. We can push the pen. If nothing else, Aljazeera has inspired the hell out of us. Being awakened from ignorance makes learning addictive. Pursuing information about a world one has been removed from is like climbing a family tree somebody else carved your name into. We are detached from the archive being formed about the world we have been removed from, while actively residing in conditions of confinement that the public knows no more about than they might know who actually killed JFK. We know what they allow us to learn, and you only know what they want you to see. Ours is a two-front resistance.
Using social media as an organ of the regime’s policing power to track dissidents is no different than monitering prison mail—neither require a warrant, both scoff at probable cause and the human rights it seeks to protect. Who needs a FISA warrant when you already have the NSA? Confidential sources loom large in both terrorism cases and prison parole hearings alike—each are paid, motivated to escape their own inculpation, and unable to be cross-examined. The basement cells in Syria remind us of the SHU—confined spaces are the go-to punishment of warlords and strongmen. Would a suburban soccer mom feel any less safe walking the “four yard” at Killapatria than she might taking the stairs in a Brooklyn project building? If you are confounded by this question, you likely haven’t thought hard enough about how prisons are reflections of the social planning failures that drove mass incarceration in the first place.
If there is, as civil rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson urges, “power in proximity,” then we need alliances that huddle in the cold in order to warm disparate bodies, blister in solidarity while marching for change, and go hoarse from chants that spray misted particles of screamed spittle across aligned face shields. Who will be our boomerang? Who will be, as Randall Horton asked in a poem, this generation’s Baraka? If, and when, he or she should emerge, will anybody listen?
Our plight will never compare to the missiles that land in civilian population centers and turn refugee camps into meat grinders, but I do hope that one day Aljazeera allows some of us doing this work from confinement to talk to the world, and each other, about life in the margin and the role of prisons writ large. Every civil war uses prison to topple resistance movements; thus, the world’s human cages have always represented the most unexamined and under-investigated war zones on the planet. If they can drone strike an unarmed journalist standing in the street with impunity, what chance do we really have when the lights go out? Thank you Aljazeera.
