Of all the stomach-turning ironies masquerading as photo ops on Bill Clinton's Africa pilgrimage, few were more sanctimonious than Pres. Lecher's visit with South African President Nelson Mandela to the prison, the very cell (click! snap! whirrr!) where Nelson was held as part of his quarter-century imprisonment by a succession of U.S.-supported apartheid regimes.

Mandela was tactful enough not to remind Clinton that the U.S. was on the wrong side of that one--but not so tactful, happily, that he didn't sharply scold Clinton for ongoing U.S. persecution of faithful ANC allies like Cuba and Libya. (The scolding was even covered by U.S. media, unlike Mandela's criticism of the African free trade legislation Clinton--and new free trade apologist Jesse Jackson--spent spent much of the trip shilling. Mandela called it, rightly, "a new form of economic colonialism.")

But the real hypocrisy of the scene wasn't in South Africa. It wasn't even in Nigeria, Gabon, or Angola, the top three U.S. trading partners in sub- Saharan Africa, all skipped on Clinton's trade promotion tour because they each feature oil-rich, repressive U.S.-supported dictatorships. No, the most striking hypocrisy was back in Washington, D.C., where on the very same day, "Jericho '98," the largest protest rally on the topic in a generation, gathered--to deafening media silence--to protest this country's own holding of political prisoners.

The U.S. keeps political prisoners. It's no news anywhere but (thanks to patriotic blinders and media complicity) in the U.S. itself. Our allies freely recognize it; so do (otherwise) respected international human rights groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Just last week one of the most prominent prisoners, African-American activist and journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, began another hunger strike, protesting oppressive and arbitrary new administrative rules on Pennsylvania's death row, where he lives. Another well-known detainee, Native American activist Leonard Peltier, has struggled for the last several years to get adequate health care; early next decade, barring clemency or death, he will pass Mandela's record for length of unjust imprisonment.

And there are dozens, hundreds more, less well-known, Puerto Rican independence advocates and New Afrikan activists, folks without white liberal celebrities championing them. Most are people of color.

They are put in or kept in prison, and often segregated into the harshest prisons and control units, specifically because of the political content of their actions or failure to renounce their beliefs. As with every other country that jails and brutalizes political activists, the U.S. writes the laws, then claims the person(s) in question violates them, then rams the case through a hopelessly biased court system, usually well out of public view. It's how Ken Saro-wiwa died in Nigeria. Only inside the U.S. is this country's practice of targetting activists not taken at face value for what it is: persecution; in the case of control units, torture; in the case of the death penalty, sheer barbarism.

A case can also be made that the whole class of people jailed in the last decade--as the prison population of the U.S. has tripled, largely with nonviolent offenders--is a form of political imprisonment. The conscious decisions to wage a pointless War On Drugs, the dramatically tougher sentencing and appeal laws, the building of new, often draconian prison complexes, the development of prison labor, and the loss of social services have all served to push a well-defined (poor, non-white) segment of our country into the "justice" system for strictly political purposes.

The prison where Mandela lived, and Clinton posed, is closed now. We can only hope to do as well in this country, and shut down the ominous new gulag that betrays the myth of "land of the free." Perhaps, under the administration of President Peltier, it will happen.