Unarmed men of fighting age were interrogated on the spot, and more than a thousand were sent to detention centers, from which they were released a few days later. Mickey Freeman was one of dozens allegedly shot to death in custody.
A year and a half later, the Jamaican government has refused to make public what it knows about how the men and women of Tivoli Gardens died. So has the government of the United States, despite clear evidence that the U.S. surveillance plane flying above Kingston on May 24th was taking live video of Tivoli, that intelligence from the video feed was passed through U.S. law-enforcement officers to Jamaican forces on the ground, and that the Department of Homeland Security has a copy of this video. The video could corroborate, or refute, allegations that members of the Jamaican security forces massacred dozens of innocents, and could help identify the alleged killers.
- Mattathias Schwartz in a piece from the current New Yorker that’s, unfortunately, behind the magazine’s paywall.
To summarize, my government is sitting on a copy of a video that “could corroborate, or refute, allegations that members of the Jamaican security forces massacred dozens of innocents.” Morally, if not legally, this amounts to obstruction of justice. Crap like this is why Wikileaks enjoys legitimacy.
Paywall or not, I urge you to read the piece. It’s on newsstands. There’s a Kindle edition, an iPad edition. You can probably find a copy in a library or the waiting room of a nearby dental office.
Do seek it out. This passage especially got to me:
A suitcase on top of a bedroom dresser holds what remains of her old life. When she wants to explain who she once was, she will carry it to the kitchen table, spill out a bundle of loose papers, and begin picking out the vital documents—identification cards, letters of reference, phone numbers of supervisors who will attest that Mickey Freeman was a good man.
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UPDATE (12/15/2011): The story is now free to read on newyorker.com. Here’s a link!
