Word: attica
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...damage, of course, had already been done by a combination of error and omission. A nation mesmerized by the pictures from Attica of a mass of exotically clad inmates, mainly black, holding hostages, All of whom were white, had generally accepted the initial report that the hostages who died had all had their throats slit. Some of the early reports also stated that several of the white dead had had their genitals severed and had suffered other forms of extreme physical abuse...
...some part of the public mind the visions conjured by these first false reports remain as if surgically implanted, and they will always be the first images summoned by editorials marking the anniversaries of the Attica massacre...
...York officials seemed to have been caught slightly more off-guard by the riot at Attica and were too engrossed in their efforts to restore order in the prison to give much speculation to the emotional motivation of the prisoners. To be sure, Commissioner Oswald and the negotiating committee of outsiders attempted to discover the prisoners' physical grievances, yet the ultimate violent response of the state, and Governor Rockefeller's posture towards the revolt, the appearance of Bobby Seale, and even the entreaties of the negotiating committee revealed not so much a concern for the safety of the hostages...
Faceless revolutionaries, men beyond the call of any sense of moral decency or reason is the image of the prisoners at Attica and of George Jackson which the authorities in California and New York have attempted to persuade the public to accept. To a large degree, the authorities were successful. Abetted by the Establishment media, they mustered all the representations of the prisoner as a dark and irrational man justly separated from the world of civilized men that have appeared in B-grade films and novels and armed these stereotypes with the most explosive rhetoric of insurrection and hate...
...things like coroners' reports and ballistics that are basically peripheral to the human experience. Imprisoned in the heat of the debate--which, at best, can end in an impotent draw--people on both sides have lost sight of the principle issues involved in what happened at San Quentin and Attica. Regardless of whether or not they have accepted the stories the officials in California and New York have given of how the prisoners in the two institutions acted, people involved in the debate have, either openly or by default, accepted the officials' versions of why the prisoners may have acted...