#WORLD #WORLDWIDE #ITALY #SICILIA #ANARCHISM #LIBRARY #News #Journal #Update - (en) #Sicilia Libertaria - 41 bis: #Italian torture (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 As we close this issue, anarchist comrade Alfredo Cospito has reached his 78th

day of hunger strike; he has lost over 35 kilos, and nothing suggests that he
intends to stop protesting to the bitter end against the decision to bury him
under the 41 bis regime, an all-Italian torture that thanks to his fight and the
great support he is receiving internationally , has surfaced like shit in the
democratic quagmire. ---- It was the minister Marta Cartabia who signed the death
sentence of Alfredo Cospito on 4 May; but it was the Cassation on 6 July that
performed the judicial "miracle" of transforming the crime of "massacre against
public safety" into "massacre against the security of the State" against Alfredo
and Anna Beniamino; and it was the surveillance court of Rome on 19 December that
confirmed the harsh regime of the 41 bis.
The word massacre evokes blood, death and destruction; attacks such as those in
Piazza Fontana, the Italicus train, the Bologna station, Piazza della Loggia in
Brescia, or those in which Falcone and Borsellino were killed. In our case we are
dealing with a demonstrative attack outside a carabinieri school which, apart
from some material damage, caused neither deaths nor injuries simply because this
was not the intention of its perpetrators.
So why the accusation of massacre? why 41 bis? and why does the State want life
imprisonment for Alfredo Cospito (submitting the decision to the Constitutional
Court)? Not even the judiciary has been able to adequately justify its decision
to compare the direct action of a group of anarchists to the massacres (complete
with internal state covers) carried out by mafiosi or fascists.
We must try to interpretthese events with the many signals sent by the
institutions: the sentence to 28 years in prison for the anarchist comrade Juan
Sorroche guilty of having planted an explosive device in the door of the
headquarters of the League of the municipality of Villorba, also in this case
transforming a gesture with infamy clearly demonstrative in "attempted massacre
against the security of the state"; the arrests of grassroots trade unionists in
Piacenza; the sentences of NO MUOS activists, the arrests of NO TAV activists in
Val di Susa, the beatings of students, the arrests, the expulsion papers, the
request for restrictive measures against anti-racist militants or comrades like
Claudio di Messina to attack their conduct general and not a specific crime.
The 41 bis regime is a legalized form of torture, a complete restriction of the
prisoner's vital spaces: 22 hours of isolation, sociality reduced to a maximum of
4 people, walking in places without air or natural light, censorship of
correspondence and newspapers, talks for 1 hour a month with dividing glass. A
provision that has not caused a scandal because up to now it has been applied to
members of the mafia in an attempt to cut them off from any contact with the
association. It was also applied to some militants of the PCC Red Brigades,
always with the same reason.
Likewise life imprisonmentit is a way of burying individuals excluding the
possibility of obtaining benefits, as they have never dissociated themselves from
their past or have never bartered the improvement of their conditions of
detention, with betrayal and repentance. Prison regimes equated to torture even
by the European Court of Justice.
The turning point now is in wanting to annihilate an anarchist by putting him on
the same level as the bosses of the mafia, camorra and ndrangheta. A choice made
under Draghi's government of national unity, without critical voices being raised
among those who claim to be on the left and on the side of the least. The new
coalition, also made up by birth of the heirs of the fascist regime and of the
authors and accomplices of the strategy of tension of 1969 and throughout the
1970s, although it has found everything already plated, will have to manage the
hot potato of a decision that it knows could turn into into a boomerang.
If on the one hand the governmentsand the capital that keeps them alive must
equip themselves to face, even preventively, an explosive social situation due to
the impoverishment of growing fringes of the population, widespread discontent
over the high cost of living, fatigue from a war that we are all paying dearly
for, on the other, history shows us how every time the bosses and their puppets
in power have tried to raise the bar against anarchists, accusing them of
massacres, the latter's response has been so lively that the movement, instead of
being annihilated, has strengthened (see Piazza Fontana, Pino Pinelli, Pietro
Valpreda and companions). We try to hit the anarchists because they represent the
most coherent and irrecoverable component of the opposition to the system,
Today a national and international mobilization around the battle of Alfredo
Cospito seeks to prevent his assassination, directly with the 41 bis or with a
hunger strike to the bitter end with tragic consequences.
The lawyers Rossi Albertini and Pintus write:"(...) Since last April and in the
absence of events that may justify the difference in prison treatment, ... he has
been deprived of all rights and in particular of reading, studying, obtaining
information on what corresponds to his inclinations and interests (...). He does
not receive any correspondence, the incoming ones are all withheld and the
outgoing ones suffer from the prisoner's own self-censorship. The hours of fresh
air were reduced to two, spent in a cement cubicle of a few square meters, the
perimeter of which is surrounded by high walls which impede any view or simply
from extending one's gaze to the horizon, while the view of the sky is obscured
by a wire mesh. A place characterized in summer by scorching temperatures and in
winter by a humid and unhealthy microclimate.Sociality is accomplished just one
hour a day in a small room together with three inmates, subjected to the regime
for many years, which in reality are reduced to one in consideration of the fact
that an inmate is subjected to daytime isolation for two years and a second now
tends not to leave the cell anymore. An unbearable condition that now pushes
Cospito to reject a life devoid of any future perspective, which would appear
such to any human being but which is especially so for a man who lives and lived
off the relationships he entertained with the world of the free . A condition so
afflictive as to push the same to regret the death penalty by firing squad
considered more worthy of an infinite agony in a hopeless limbo (...)"
Alfredo's determination to put his life on the line to react to the infamous
death sentence is a stimulus that produces actions of all kinds and other hunger
strikes in his support, starting with those of Anna, Juan and Ivan in prison.
Even the mobilization against life imprisonment regains momentum, and from
prisons it is the prisoners themselves condemned to this slow death penalty who
react with petitions and protests.
Only following this extensive movement did intellectuals and personalities such
as Manconi, Cacciari, Di Cesare, Wu Ming, Cimini, Zerocalcare, Mentana, Moni
Ovadia, Zanotelli, Ciotti and others raise their voice against the assignment to
41 bis for Cospito.
By now it is evident that it is not only the life of Alfredo Cospito that is the
object of the dispute, but the 41 bis and the life imprisonment impediment. And
it is clear how bitter the clash within the institutions must be over a story
that has gone out of control and which, regardless of the epilogue (the collapse
of the state or a hard line until Alfredo's death), will give rise to further
rifts and divisions, while the social rebellion against prison, in support of
anarchists, revolutionaries, social rebels kidnapped by the state, will continue,
ever more determined.

Pippo Gurrieri

https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/2023/01/10/41-bis-tortura-allitaliana/
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