December 23, 2012

You are here: Home / Archives for Crime / Justice / Prison

China Villagers Defy Government In Standoff Over Death

December 15, 2011 By Leave a Comment

By Chris Buckley

BEIJING (Reuters) - Villagers in southern China on Thursday defied authorities and continued protests over a death in custody and land dispute in the latest outburst of simmering rural discontent that is eroding the ruling Communist Party’s grip at the grassroots.

Many hundreds of residents in Wukan Village in Guangdong province held an angry march and rally despite moves by authorities to halt a land project at the centre of the months-long unrest and detain local officials involved.

“The whole village is distraught and enraged. We want the central government to come in and restore justice,” said one resident who described the scene.

He and another resident, both speaking on condition of anonymity, said villagers remain enraged over last weekend’s death in custody of Xue Jinbo, 42, who was detained on suspicion of helping organize protests against land seizures.

“We won’t be satisfied until there is a full investigation and redress for Xue Jinbo’s death,” said the second resident.

“If you say he wasn’t beaten to death, then you can show us the body,” another villager who had his face hidden from the camera by the hood of his jacket told Hong Kong’s Cable TV.

“If there really isn’t any injury on the body, then why would you not return the body to us?”

Rural land in China is mostly owned in name by village collectives, but in fact officials can mandate its seizure for development in return for compensation, which residents often say is inadequate and does not reflect the profits reaped.

The government of Shanwei, a district including Wukan, said on Wednesday a “handful” of Communist Party members and officials accused of misdeeds over the disputed land development were detained and that the main land development project had been suspended, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

In a bid to allay suspicions that other villagers detained over protests in September had been abused, the local government put online footage of four suspects being visited by relatives and reassuring them of their wellbeing.

FURY

But for the two residents interviewed it was not enough to defuse fury over the death of Xue, whom villagers believe was the victim of police brutality — a charge the government denies, citing an autopsy that found he died of heart failure.

Wukan has been surrounded by police and anti-riot units.

China’s leaders, determined to maintain one-party control, worry that such outbursts might turn into broader and more persistent challenges to their power.

But they usually stay local and Beijing’s grip remains strong, said Kenneth Lieberthal, an expert on Chinese politics.

“Is there a risk of disruption? Yes, absolutely. Is this a place just waiting to explode? No,” said Lieberthal, director of the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution, a Washington D.C. think tank.

“The chances of long-term, systemic instability are very, very small. The chances of some major disruption — like 1989, but on a much larger scale — are considerably greater, but still the odds are they can avoid it,” he said.

Wukan, with its clannish unity and big stake in rising land values, is an example of the kind of slow-burning discontent that is corroding party power at the grassroots.

Residents say hundreds of hectares of land was acquired unfairly by corrupt officials in collusion with developers. Anger in the village boiled over this year after repeated appeals to higher officials.

Although China’s Communist Party has ruled over decades of economic growth that have protected it from challenges to its power, the country is confronted by thousands of smaller scale protests and riots every year.

One expert on unrest, Sun Liping of Tsinghua University in Beijing, has estimated that there could have been over 180,000 such “mass incidents” in 2010. But most estimates from Chinese scholars and government experts put numbers at about half that in recent years.

The Chinese government has not given any unrest statistics for years.

The real worry for Beijing is not the sheer number of such protests, but their tendency to become more persistent and organized - both features on display in the unrest in Wukan, where there were torrid riots in September.

 

Source: https://uk.news.yahoo.com/china-villagers-defy-government-standoff-over-death-141649453.html;_ylt=AuxeBhruiTXMTq4kB4qFQ9HOfMl_;_ylu=X3oDMTNxdjlzdmg1BG1pdANUb3BTdG9yeSBXb3JsZFNGBHBrZwMxNmZiZDA5Yy0yODEzLTNlMTYtYTFiOC0xYWY3NWM2ZGVlNDkEcG9zAzYEc2VjA3RvcF9zdG9yeQR2ZXIDOWM4ZGViZTAtMjcyNy0xMWUxLTlmNmUtNWFkNTVkYzhlYWFk;_ylg=X3oDMTFwcGsyZXJqBGludGwDZ2IEbGFuZwNlbi1nYgRwc3RhaWQDBHBzdGNhdAN3b3JsZARwdANzZWN0aW9ucwR0ZXN0Aw-;_ylv=3

Filed Under: China, Prison, Protests

Afghan Woman Jailed After Being Raped Is Freed After Two Years In Kabul Prison

December 15, 2011 By Leave a Comment

By in Kabul

Woman sentenced to 12 years in prison for ‘adultery’ after reporting rape to police is finally released.

An Afghan woman who was jailed after being raped by a cousin has been released from the Kabul prison where she has spent more than two years, although her lawyer has warned her future remains far from certain.

Gulnaz, a 20-year-old who is known by one name, was set free on Tuesday night, nearly two weeks after Hamid Karzai, the Afghanistan president, ordered her release. Her case has highlighted the issue of “moral crimes“, which lawyers say have no basis in Afghan law.

Despite being the victim of a rape at the hands of a cousin, a day labourer called Asadullah Sher Mohammad, she was charged with “adultery” after reporting the attack to police and sentenced to 12 years in prison.

For two years and three months Gulnaz had been living in the Badam Bagh prison in Kabul with her daughter, who was conceived by the rape.

Karzai had come under growing pressure in the weeks leading up to the recent conference on Afghanistan held in Bonn to release Gulnaz, who has become a symbol of the highly conservative Islamic country’s failure to substantially improve the lot of women in the last 10 years.

Although the government said she would be released without any conditions, she has come under heavy pressure, including from a judge, to marry Sher Mohammad, who is in another prison in Kabul serving a rape sentence.

Kimberley Motley, an Kabul-based American lawyer who has worked on Gulnaz’s case, said she had “major concerns” about the extraordinary pressure her client has come under since Karzai announced her clemency – including from Sher Mohammad’s father.

“He was allowed to have continued access to her while she was in prison, and he has been in there in the last five days to try and make her sign a document,” she said. “We have no idea what this document is, and neither does she because she was unable to read it.”

No decision has been made whether Gulnaz, who has been moved to a safe place in Kabul that her supporters do not wish to be identified, will agree to marry her attacker, although she has previously said she might do so for the sake of her daughter.

She has also demanded a dowry before agreeing to marry her attacker, and suggested that one of Sher Mohammad’s sisters should marry her brother in order to protect her from reprisals.

Motley said she should not have to marry her rapist. “There are women in Afghanistan who are single mothers who are able to work and to survive,” she said. “She definitely has an uphill battle to fight, but it is ridiculous to say that if she does not marry this man her life is ruined.”

Efforts to bring her plight to public attention were first made by Clementine Malpas, a British film-maker who was commissioned by the European Union to produce a documentary about women’s rights in Afghanistan.

The EU, however, refused to allow the film, called Injustice, to be distributed or broadcast, saying it would jeopardise the lives of the women involved.

 

Source: https://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/14/afghan-woman-raped-freed-prison

Filed Under: Prison, Women Tagged With: , , ,

Woman Jailed, Ostracized After Resorting to Self-Administered Abortion: What Is This, Puritan America?

December 15, 2011 By Leave a Comment

By Amanda Marcotte

When we deprive women of access to abortion, shun them, and even throw them in jail, we as a society become weaker.

Jennie McCormack, a resident of Idaho and a mother of three, has spent the past few months of her life in a legal and social situation that calls to mind the trials of Hester Pyrnne, the heroine of The Scarlet Letter. As reported by Nancy Hass of Newsweek, McCormack’s ordeal started when she learned she was pregnant by a man who was doing time for robbery.

Realizing that she couldn’t afford another baby, nor the $500 fee and two trips to get an abortion (because Idaho requires women to wait 24 hours after their first visit to the doctor to “think it over”), McCormack resorted to buying RU-486 from a vendor online. The police eventually arrested McCormack and charged her with an illegal abortion, claiming that she was over Idaho’s legal limit of 20 weeks for an abortion. Since the exact gestational age can’t be determined, charges have been dropped for now, but prosecutors are retaining the right to re-charge McCormack. In the meantime, she’s become a pariah in her community, been fired from her job, and even had to face social workers who are basically denying her aid to care for her children.

Even in super-liberal New York City, a woman is being prosecuted (albeit in a less drastic way) for a self-abortion after the legal limit. The desperate woman, accused of aborting after six months, threw the fetus in a trash can, presumably because she was not aware of her other options for disposing of it.

In the United States, abortion is technically a legal right, but as these cases show, it’s not functionally a right. If abortion were actually a right, women wouldn’t have such a difficult time getting a legal abortion that they resort to drastic measures that land them in jail. These cases demonstrate why abortion needs to be more than a right for those who have the means to jump through all the hoops put in place to keep them from obtaining legal abortions. Making sure women who want abortions can get them in a timely and safe fashion helps more than the women in question. We all do better if women can get the abortions that are supposedly their right.

Abortion’s long descent from being a true right to being only a technical right began in 1976, when Congress passed the Hyde Amendment, which bars federal funds from being used to pay for abortion. Once you needed to be able to get the cash together to pay for an abortion, it stopped really being a right and instead became a commodity, out of reach of those who often need it the most. Since then, anti-choice activists have been chipping away at access to abortion, putting up legal restrictions that usually cost time and money to get around, and now even moving to prevent insurance companies from covering abortion, expanding the number of women whose access is limited because they can’t afford it.

In the anti-choice imagination, the only people who pay for this are women who want abortions, whom anti-choicers generally believe deserve to suffer for not “keeping their legs closed,” to quote a favorite colloquialism of the anti-choice set. In reality, women’s lack of access to affordable, safe abortion hurts all of us, and not just those who accidentally find a fetus abandoned in a trash can by a woman who had simply run out of legal, safe options. When women who want abortions can’t afford them, they often go on to have the baby, instead. In the short term, that means higher costs for Medicaid and other social welfare programs. But there’s also long-term costs to all of us. Having children they don’t feel ready to have often limits women’s employment and educational opportunities, depriving society of their talents and labor. If women can’t have children until they’re ready, they’re often limited in their abilities to educate and care for those children as well as they’d like to, which increases the burden for everyone.

Criminalizing women who need abortion care just makes the situation exponentially worse, as Jennie McCormack’s situation demonstrates. So far, her brush with the legal system has been devastating for her entire family. She has three small children to take care of, but because she’s been “outed,” she can’t hold down a job that would help feed and house them. If Idaho successfully prosecutes her and sends her to jail, that would leave her three children without any parents to care for them. This tragedy could have been averted. If there were no Hyde Amendment and Medicaid paid for abortion, and if there weren’t a bunch of useless legal restrictions on abortion, McCormack could have aborted her pregnancy in a timely fashion, leaving her free to get a job and take care of her kids. Instead, there’s a strong possibility that she’ll be forced to abandon her children, and all because she couldn’t access an abortion that was supposed to be her legal right.

Women who need abortions aren’t some foreign creatures whose wellbeing can be sacrificed so politicians can score points in the culture war. They’re mothers, wives, workers, students, volunteers. When we deprive women of access to abortion, shun them from society, and even throw them in jail for taking matters into their own hands, we as a society become weaker. The Jennie McCormacks of the world are trying to live up to their responsibilities. Putting restrictions on abortion only serves to make that impossible for them.

 

Source: https://www.alternet.org/reproductivejustice/153433/woman_jailed%2C_ostracized_after_resorting_to_self-administered_abortion%3A_what_is_this%2C_puritan_america/?page=2

Filed Under: Health, Law, Prison, USA Tagged With:

“If a Tree Falls”: New Documentary on Daniel McGowan, Earth Liberation Front & Green Scare

December 14, 2011 By Leave a Comment

A new documentary, “If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front,” tells the story of environmental activist Daniel McGowan.

Four years ago this month, McGowan was sentenced to a seven-year term for his role in two acts of politically motivated arson in 2001 to protest extensive logging in the Pacific Northwest—starting fires at a lumber company and an experimental tree farm in Oregon.

The judge ruled he had committed an act of terrorism, even though no one was hurt in any of the actions. McGowan participated in the arsons as a member of the Earth Liberation Front but left the group after the second fire led him to become disillusioned. He was arrested years later after a key member of the Earth Liberation Front—himself facing the threat of lengthy jail time—turned government informant.

McGowan ultimately reached a plea deal but refused to cooperate with the government’s case. As a result, the government sought a “terrorism enhancement” to add extra time to his sentence. McGowan is currently jailed in a secretive prison unit known as Communication Management Units, or CMUs, in Marion, Illinois.

We play an excerpt from the film and speak with the film’s director, Marshall Curry. We also speak with Andrew Stepanian, an animal rights activist who was imprisoned at the same CMU as McGowan, and with Will Potter, a freelance reporter who writes about how the so-called “war on terror” affects civil liberties.

Filed Under: Prison, Terrorism, USA Tagged With:

Syria’s Torture Machine

December 14, 2011 By Leave a Comment

By

Channel 4′s foreign affairs correspondent reports from Syria on the mounting body of evidence that the state is engaging in widespread acts of brutality against its own citizens.

Between bursts of machine-gun fire and the crump of explosions – unmuffled in crisp mountain air – the starry sky above the Syrian frontier offers ethereal distraction. It’s 3am and the town of Tal Kalakh, less than two miles to the north – just inside the Syrian Arab Republic – is under sustained attack, its residents reportedly refusing to hand over a small band of defectors who have holed up there, trying to bolt for Lebanon to join the insurgents.

All around are mountains among which ancient armies have battled for millennia. And below, in besieged Tal Kalakh, a western outpost in the restive governorate of Homs, the Syrian army is once again hard at work, killing its own people. Tal Kalakh has felt the full force of violent repression many times since the Syrian revolt erupted back in March. One day, Tal Kalakh will doubtless appear on the revolutionary roll of honour. For now, this town of 80,000 people doesn’t even merit a mention in my guidebook.

“We don’t kill our people,” President Bashar al-Assad said last week in an American television interview. “No government in the world kills its people unless it’s led by a crazy person.” Those who dare oppose al-Assad do not think their leader crazy. Crazed, maybe. But today they see straight through him. They’re tired of the lies. They have seen too much.

Between late November and early December, I was one of just two foreign reporters granted an official journalist visa to this repressive police state. I spent nine days in Damascus, capital of al-Assad’s Republic of Fear, as a guest of the government. There, I encountered an angrily defiant regime, robust and resolute and unapologetic. Earlier in this Arab spring, I spent six weeks in Libya. There are echoes of Gaddafi in the personality cult surrounding al-Assad, but Syria‘s political and security apparatus is bigger and badder than anything Gaddafi could muster. I do not mean to belittle the suffering of Libyans, but Syria has four times the Libyan population and 10 times the menace.

Over the course of those nine days, I interviewed three government ministers, an army general and the mayor of a rebellious city. I heard nothing but denials that the security forces were shooting, shelling and torturing civilians. The government blames “armed gangs” and “terrorists” and invokes the spectre of Islamist insurgents, just as Gaddafi’s henchmen did. And like them, they see western-backed conspiracies. They talk of a media war in which Arab and western satellite TV stations broadcast “lies” and “fabricated videos.”

“Do you really think that we would accept torture?” I was asked by a seemingly incredulous Bouthaina Shaaban – presidential adviser and senior government minister – when I challenged her on the persistent allegations, most recently documented in great detail by the UN Human Rights Council’s Independent Commission of Inquiry. “Syria has no policy of torture whatsoever,” she said. “We do not have Guantánamo or Abu Ghraib. That is absolutely unacceptable by us. Absolutely unacceptable.” Every government minister complained of the outside world’s anti-Syrian agenda, which overlooked the barbarous excesses of “armed gangs” that, they claimed, had tortured, killed and often dismembered 1,400 Syrian soldiers.

Syria is party to the 1984 UN Convention Against Torture. This convention defines “torture” as any act which intentionally inflicts severe pain or suffering, physical or mental, with the intention of obtaining information, a confession or punishing an individual for something he or someone else has committed or is suspected of committing.

“It’s rampant,” says Nadim Houry, the Beirut-based deputy director of Human Rights Watch for the Middle East and North Africa, who has taken testimony on hundreds of cases of torture from Syria, “and, the odds are, if you’re detained, you will be ill treated and most likely tortured. We know of at least 105 cases of people who were returned from the custody of security services in body bags to their loved ones … and those are only the ones that we know of.” Mr Houry says he has evidence that tens of thousands of Syrians have been arbitrarily detained over the months.

“But we have also documented what I would call “meaningless torture” – if there is ever such a thing. They’ve got all the information but they want to teach you a lesson. I think that lesson is “you need to fear us”. And the striking thing that I’ve seen is that despite that torture, people are no longer afraid. The wall of fear has been broken.”

A short drive from the frontier, along hair-pinned mountain roads, past Lebanese checkpoints where friendly soldiers shiver, is a Syrian safe-house. There is no electricity. The place is crammed with refugees; there are children sleeping everywhere. In an upstairs room, next to a small wood-burner, a weathered former tractor driver from Tal Kalakh – who is in his 50s – winces as pains shoot through his battered body, lying on a mattress on the concrete floor. He manoeuvres himself on to a pile of pillows and lights a cigarette. He’s relieved to have escaped to Lebanon but he’s already yearning to go home. He can’t though. His right leg is now gangrenous below the knee; he can barely move. So far he’s had only basic medical treatment.

Before sunrise one morning, he told me, as troops laid siege to his town, he’d been shot twice by “shabiha“, pro-al-Assad militia. Unable to run, he had been rounded up, thrashed and driven down the road to nearby Homs with many other detainees, being beaten all the way. For the next few weeks, his bullet wounds were left to fester, he says, while he was subjected to torture so extreme that his accounts of what had happened to him left those of us who listened stunned and feeling sick. During his time in detention, he had been passed, he claimed, to five different branches of al-Assad’s sadistic secret police, the Mukhabarat.

In flickering candle-light, he told me in gruesome detail of beatings he’d received with batons and electric cables on the soles of his feet (a technique called “falaka“). He had been hung by his knees, immobilised inside a twisting rubber tyre, itself suspended from the ceiling. He had been shackled hand and foot and hung upside down for hours – the Mukhabarat’s notorious “flying carpet”. Then hung up by his wrists (“the ghost”), and whipped and tormented with electric cattle prods.

When he wasn’t being tortured, he had been crammed into cells with up to 80 people, without room to sit or sleep, he claimed. They stood hungry, naked and frightened in darkness, in their filth, unfed, unwashed. He recalled the stench and listening to the screams of others echoing through their sordid dungeon. He told of being thrown rotting food. And of the sobbing of the children.

“I saw at least 200 children – some as young as 10,” he said. “And there were old men in their 80s. I watched one having his teeth pulled out by pliers.” In Syria’s torture chambers, age is of no consequence, it seems. But for civilians who have risen up against al-Assad, it has been the torture – and death in custody – of children that has caused particular revulsion.

The tractor driver told of regular interrogations, of forced confessions (for crimes he never knew he had committed); he spoke of knives and other people’s severed fingers, of pliers and ropes and wires, of boiling water, cigarette burns and finger nails extracted – and worse: electric drills. There had been sexual abuse, he said, but that was all he said of that.

Having finished in one place, he’d been transferred to yet another branch of the Mukhabarat and his nightmare would start all over again. And as the beatings went on day in, day out, his legs and the soles of his feet became raw and infected. That was when they forced him to “walk on rocks of salt”. He told me, speaking clearly, slowly: “When you are bleeding and the salt comes into your flesh, it hurts a lot more than the beating. I was forced to walk round and round to feel more pain.”

He lit another cigarette, then said: “Although we are suffering from torture, we are not afraid any more. There is no fear. We used to fear the regime, but there is no place for fear now.” If the intention of torture is to terrorise, it has in recent months had the opposite effect. Each act of brutality has served, it seems, to reinforce the growing sense of outrage and injustice and has triggered ever more widespread insurrection.

I met other survivors in other safe houses and each account corroborated the other. A pharmacist, abducted by militia from a hospital to which he’d been taken after being shot. His experience of torture was every bit as bad as that of the tractor driver. The 16-year-old boy, beaten, electrocuted to the point he thought he would die, then threatened with execution. He was now having trouble sleeping.

Another man, placed in what he called “the electric coffin” – in which a detainee is forced to lie inside a wooden box, across two metal plates through which they pass a current. The 73-year-old man was mercilessly whipped, electrocuted and beaten because of his son’s known opposition activities abroad. He talked of hundreds of detainees pushed into cells, humiliated and naked. Another torture refugee told of a device they called “the German chair”, so named, apparently, because it was devised by the Stasi. In it, a detainee is bent backwards until he feels his spine will snap.

What emerged was a pattern of systematic brutality, a revolving door of terror through which thousands of people have passed in recent months. This is Syria’s torture machine. It is torture on an industrial scale.

While in Syria, we lived in a bubble, seeing nothing of the extreme brutality and killing for which the Syrian regime is so notorious. We were taken to mass rallies, where thousands of frenzied supporters kissed portraits of al-Assad for our cameras and chanted slogans in defiance of Arab League sanctions.

For two days we were not granted filming permits – and it’s probably no coincidence that one of those days was a Friday, the day on which hundreds of anti-government demonstrations are guaranteed to break out right across the country after midday prayers. One day, while we were legally filming on a street, our government minder – despite wielding official documents embossed with Ministry of Information double-headed eagles – was arrested by angry Mukhabarat agents. We never found out why this particular location was so sensitive. Our minder returned, visibly shaken, 15 minutes later. “We cannot film here,” he said. “Let’s go.”

Despite daily requests, we were refused access to cities such as Homs and Hama whose residents were posting videos on YouTube showing tanks firing at random into civilian areas. When we were finally taken to Dara’a, the southern city that had been the cradle of this insurrection, we travelled in the presence of four government minders and, when we attempted to talk to anyone, we found ourselves surrounded by Mukhabarat who instructed our interviewees to tell us everything was normal. It was very claustrophobic.

Despite this, an astonishing number of Syrian people did approach us, subtly – and often quaking – to tell us that all was not as it appeared, that they detested the regime and that there were thousands out there like them. One man touched my arm as I stood in the midst of a mass rally in downtown Damascus, completely surrounded by the ranting and raging regime-faithful. As I looked round, he caught my eye and simply uttered the word “Bashar” as he drew his index finger across his throat, before melting into the loyalist crowd. If he’d been spotted he might as well have signed his own death warrant.

A road snakes up the barren rock of Mount Qasioun which overlooks Damascus and on a clear day, from 1,000m up, there’s a magnificent panoramic view across the capital. From this vantage point, if you know what you’re looking for, it is possible to pick out at least seven locations where you can say with a good degree of certainty that people are being tortured at any single moment. The thought spoils the view.

Each of the four main pillars of the Mukhabarat – military intelligence, air force intelligence, the political security directorate and the general security directorate – has its headquarters in the city. And each has sub-branches: general security has three – including the feared Palestine branch – and military intelligence has several, among them the notorious Branch 235. No one seems to know what the number means. Each of these agencies is an empire inside an empire, with bureaux the length and breadth of Syria. Since the revolt started, detention facilities have not been confined to known intelligence buildings; the Mukhabarat have used stadiums and football fields in several cities to detain and torture suspects. In smaller towns and villages, market squares suffice. The four main intelligence agencies are thought to be directly under the control of the president.

While al-Assad increasingly faces armed insurrection from those weary of life in his Big Brother world, the most potent weapon in opposition hands is the mobile phone. Grainy footage of violent acts of repression – and of those tortured and killed by the regime – has been uploaded and rebroadcast to a global audience of millions.

These videos make distressing viewing. In one, a mother is seen weeping over the body of her 27-year-old son who has been delivered home, dead, after a week in detention. He has marks and bruises all over his body and there is a bullet wound. “May Allah take revenge against all tyrants,” the woman wails. “On each and every unjust person, Bashar and his aides, my God, may You take revenge on him.”

Such footage has caused irreparable damage to al-Assad’s regime. But the government ministers I spoke to about these videos roundly dismiss them as faked or filmed somewhere else at another time. If verified, however, such footage would present important evidence of the crimes the regime now stands accused of by the UN Human Rights Council Inquiry. The sheer volume of such material – upwards of 30,000 videos have now been posted on the internet by Syrian opposition activists – spurred Channel 4 to commission a documentary investigation.

We employed a team of experts to forensically examine video footage, subjecting it to a strict verification protocol. We have independently checked, when possible, the sources of the material, looked for time-specific clues, then examined location details with Syrians from those places. Specific incidents have been cross-checked and corroborated by independent sources. Exiled former members of the Syrian security forces have checked vehicles, uniforms and military insignia. A growing number of these videos show soldiers actually committing acts of torture, openly filming each other. It’s chilling: not one of them appears to be worried about being identified.

Accents have been carefully listened to. And the records of those uploading video have been examined for consistency and reliability. We sought the advice of a specialist doctor from the charity Freedom from Torture. We employed a forensic pathologist, Professor Derrick Pounder, to examine grim video evidence of those whose relatives allege were killed under torture.

The result is a grotesque compendium of verified video material which we believe to present irrefutable prima facie evidence of crimes against humanity.

Talking me through this material, Pounder said the videos show “compelling evidence of crude physical violence, strangulation, homicide, shootings and general assaults. There is a very distinctive pattern of … physical violence in an extreme form,” he said. “It would suggest that what was happening was happening on a wide scale and it would suggest that what was happening was carried out with impunity … There is no consequence for them even if there is clear evidence of an assault.” So much for the UN Convention Against Torture.

One evening, when I was interviewing torture victims in a Syrian safe house in Lebanon, there was a great commotion. A Syrian army defector, who had commanded resistance in the district of Baba Amr in Homs – the city Syrians have dubbed “Capital of the Revolution” – was being carried into the safe-house by four men. He had been shot nine times and had somehow survived, but he was in terrible pain. He had recently been smuggled into Lebanon from Tal Kalakh.

The next morning, he was well enough to talk briefly. It was my first encounter with a former member of the Syrian security forces. He told me that mass detention and severe torture were commonplace. “When the army carries out a detention campaign,” he said, “they start to torture the detainee until the security services arrive. They then take him to the military security branch, which is like a human slaughter house. Most of the people taken there alive are discharged dead.”

While a platoon commander in the army he had accompanied officers in house-to-house searches for wanted men in Homs, he said. “When they don’t find their target, they either rape the women, or kill the children.” He named the officers in charge and his commanding officer. They were all Allawites, he said – members of the prominent Syrian Shia sect to which the president belongs. When they had failed to find one man on their wanted list, he claimed, they had taken his son, beheaded him and hung his head above the door of the family home. He related this account in a faltering manner as though struggling to find the words, and as he did so, tears rolled down his face. But he was so badly wounded, he couldn’t wipe the tears away. This, he told me, was what had prompted his defection.

I told him that the UN had just raised its estimated death count to 4,000 civilians killed since March. (This week they raised that to 5,000.) He looked at me in disbelief. He said the number was much higher. After four decades of al-Assad rule, one man is held accountable for this bloody-thirsty repression: the army’s commander-in-chief and the head of Syrian Intelligence – the president of the republic himself. And if al-Assad was to attempt to stop all this, could he, I asked Nadim Houry. “I don’t know the answer to that,” he said. “But I do know that he never tried to stop it.”

 

Source: https://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/13/syria-torture-evidence

Filed Under: Prison, Protests, Syria, Torture

The Detainee: A Tale Of Collapse

December 14, 2011 By Leave a Comment

By Brandon Smith

In a new experiment we are trying something a little different; a short fiction series based on fact. Make no mistake; while the characters and events in this story are products of imagination, the issues presented and their probable consequences are anything but fantasy.

It was almost overwhelming. Richard Evans had retired from Military Intelligence nearly five years ago, but the need and the desire to serve was so ingrained within his psyche that he now felt in his newfound leisure the days grinding away; wasted, meaningless. He was gray, and unenthusiastic, and beginning to feel like a walking corpse. He never said it out loud, especially around his wife, but when the financial collapse took hold of the U.S. and the insurgency exploded, he was excited. He knew it was only a matter of time before he would be reactivated, and his unique skill set would be required.

The call came Friday morning, and a car picked him up that afternoon at the airfield driven by a man wearing the familiar sword and blue flower insignia of Military Intelligence. He was in his late 50’s now, and the Department of Defense had changed protocols on MI so many times since he joined it was hard to keep track of who was in charge of what anymore. Lately, however, it seemed that the crisis had given the military and the government quite a bit of room to maneuver legally and politically. Under new provisions attached to the National Defense Authorization Act of 2011, the traditionally domestic jurisdictions within the borders of the U.S. could now be categorized as “combat zones” in accordance with the international laws of war. This meant, essentially, that U.S. citizens who opposed government authority could no longer hide behind the Constitutional protections of Habeas Corpus and trial by jury. The reign of military law was at hand.

Richard’s wife constantly complained that the policy was “too harsh” and that it weakened the moral high ground of the government. She was a bleeding heart, of course. Richard was a realist. The greater good required that certain principles be set aside in order to combat men who played by no rules. The extremists involved in the growing American insurgency had to be dealt with outside conventional methods. They didn’t deserve the benefits of a Constitutional framework. They were traitors who now attacked their own country from within.

The car arrived at the outer gate of the detainment facility nestled in an isolated corner of Eglin Airforce Base. Florida was an unbearable hellhole this time of year. The humidity in the late summer made it difficult to breath for those not acclimated. Not to mention, the base could hardly be considered a NATO “Safe Zone” with the amount of terrorist activity all over the state. The prisoner he had been sent to interview was found scouting within the perimeter, somehow evading multiple guard stations and the regular thermal surveys of predator drones. The “revolutionaries”, as they called themselves, were finding extraordinary low tech methods for defeating extremely expensive military technology. They were leveling the playing field, which was unacceptable. If the fight came down to a numbers game, a war of attrition, the Federal Government and its coalition partners in Europe would undoubtedly lose.

The facility was plain looking, nondescript, like a small hospital. This was done intentionally to provide cover for MI to work undisturbed. Only a few of the thousands of soldiers stationed at Eglin had any idea that the area was actually a black-site housing masses of enemy belligerents. Some of the prisoners would be found less valuable, and sent off to a FEMA secured work camp for processing. Others would be shipped out of the country to more controlled locations. It was Richard’s job to discern which was which.

Sergeant Major John Halstrom, commander of the operation, met him at the door and ushered him towards his office. Richard had met Halstrom when he was young and barely noticeable, but even then, the upstart had obvious Machiavellian qualities. He would literally stop at nothing to get what he wanted; the perfect character profile for a man in charge of an interrogation unit.

They both sat down and focused on the assignment at hand. The creed of Military Intelligence was etched in a bronze plaque just above Halstrom’s desk:

I am a Soldier first, but an intelligence professional second to none.
With pride in my heritage, but focused on the future,
Performing the first task of an Army:
To find, know, and never lose the enemy.
With a sense of urgency and of tenacity, professional and physical fitness,
and above all, INTEGRITY, for in truth lies victory.
Always at silent war, while ready for a shooting war,
The silent warrior of the ARMY team.

“Richard, I’ll be honest, I’m not sure why they brought you down here. I think this guy is a dead end. We’ve already started prepping him and he doesn’t seem to know much of anything…”

Richard grimaced “You were supposed to wait for me, John. You know you can’t just start in on a subject without gauging his psychological state. This is not a game of force, after all, it’s a game of the mind…”

“I’m all for the mind reading and the parlor tricks, if you can bring me results. We cannot win this war without getting some of these guys to turn. Remember Afghanistan?”

“This is not going to be like Afghanistan. These insurgents are misguided, John. Ultimately, they want to return this country back to its former glory. All we have to do is convince them that our way, the new way, is the right way.”

Halstrom was, of course, unconvinced. He wanted to wrench the information out of the prisoners. That’s not how it worked. At most, he would get a false confession, some inaccurate information. The subject would say anything to stop the torture, but rarely was that information useful.

“The higher-ups think this subject has the potential to be converted. To go informant. His background suggests a certain pliability. See what you can do….”

Richard was led to the interrogation rooms at the end of a long hallway. The walls were white, perfectly clean and sterile. Each cell was small, with a thick metal door and a small plexiglass window for observation. He had always heard of the “dungeons” the CIA used in Eastern Europe; dark places covered in the unwashed filth of multiple torture sessions. That was unprofessional, as far as he was concerned, and a bit cartoonish. He found the laboratory clean of these units to be much more unnerving to detainees than any dungeon anyway.

He glanced through the window of the third cell to find a half naked wiry man with a pale complexion and a look of exhaustion. Bruising around his larynx indicated he had been struck in the throat.

“Stupid…” Richard mumbled. “Why not chop his head off. That way we’ll be sure he never talks…”

He strolled into the room with a thin file and a chair. He sat down calmly and confidently as he had been trained to do to assure the prisoner that he was in complete control of the environment. The air in the room was freezing, just as he had requested. The detainee shivered, wrapping his legs close to his chest to maintain body warmth, his arms tied securely behind his back. Richard wore a suit rather than a uniform when conducting interrogations. It was better to deny the subject ANY information about the interrogator, or the facility in which he was being held. The less knowledge he had to hold onto, the more powerless he felt.

Richard opened the man’s file and began with a standard approach.

“Mr. Andrew Long, originally of Denver, Colorado. A public school teacher. Physics….interesting. Husband to Janette Long, and father of two children, Robin and Jessop. Arrested in 2011 during an anti-Federal Reserve protest march in Los Angeles. Released 24 hours later. Votes consistently Libertarian…”

He eyed the prisoner for a moment. The man stared at the ground without response.

“I have to say that your biometric file is a bit incomplete. I’m wondering what the hell happened between 2011 and now that caused a family man like yourself to become a terrorist? …….Do you think your children miss you, Andrew?”

No response. He moved forward…

“It’s rather cold in here, isn’t it? Would you like a coat, Andrew? Perhaps a nice blanket?”

If you can influence the subject to ask you for help, he begins to accept his dependence. This relationship is more conducive to a sharing of information.

“No…” The man uttered. His voice was labored, probably from the sessions with Halstrom the day before.

“Hey, no problem, Andrew. I like the cold myself. Canada’s weather is fantastic during the summer…”

The detainee smirked slightly in disbelief. Giving the subject a false sense of his surroundings was useful for later interrogation. Subjects were often disoriented. Even put on flights to nowhere to make them believe they were outside the U.S.

“I wish I could say I’m here to discuss the weather with you, Mr. Long, but my superiors out there in the hall need a few questions answered first. Let’s start with an easy one; what were you doing inside the perimeter of the Eglin military base?”

Andrew spoke in a matter-of-fact manner that Richard had not seen before.

“I was scouting the area for a prison just like this, of course.”

“And, why were you doing that? How did you know there was even a detention facility at Eglin?”

No response.

“Okay. Let’s try a hard question; why fight us, Andrew? Are you really that fond of this national crisis that you would prolong it by interfering with reconstruction?”

“You people…..” The detainee shook his head and chuckled. “You pretend to believe in what you are doing, but deep down, you know it’s a crime…”

“A crime, Andrew? A crime against who?”

“Against everyone. Against yourselves. Against history. You hide behind laws you rewrite and twist to give the impression of moral superiority, but in the end, you are a bunch of psychopaths. The things you do here now will never wash away…”

“That’s an interesting viewpoint, but it doesn’t change the fact that you’ve been caught. Caught with your trousers down in a highly restricted area in preparation for an attack!” Richard began to push harder.

“I never said I was scouting for an attack…”

“Oh come on, Andrew! That’s what you terrorists do! You blow things up! You kill people! And you want to talk to me about morality?!”

“I only kill people like you. Like your friend out there with the water bucket and the taser. I’ll come out of this war with a clear conscience. Can you people say the same…?”

“I wouldn’t worry about the Sergeant Major. He’ll have no regrets. Will probably dance on your grave after he’s finished with you. I, on the other hand, am not your enemy. I’m here to get you out of this cell. But, I can’t do that if you don’t give me anything in trade. You understand ‘trade’, right Andrew? You insurgents are always talking about barter and free markets. Well, in this particular market, I have a supply of freedom, and I think you want some of that supply very much. What can you exchange for that freedom, Andrew? You have to tempt me with a bargain, otherwise, our little economy won’t work…”

“I have nothing that can help you…” Andrew sunk back into the corner of the room. Richard saw this as a clear sign that the session was over for the day.

“I wish I didn’t have to leave this room under these conditions, Mr. Long. I wish I could walk out there and tell the Sergeant that we can start filling out the release papers. I guess that’s not going to happen today, is it?”

No response.

“I’ll be back tomorrow. But think about this; the longer I’m in here talking to you, the less time they have to do what they do when I’m gone.” He closed the door and walked away.

The next day Richard returned to find the detainee worse for wear. The left side of his face was cut open with a razor. The blood had been mopped up haphazardly and the floor still held a pinkish hue. Two small toes had been removed, from the looks of it probably with a pair of needle nose pliers. The air was still chilled, and Andrew lay in a ball on the floor twitching. Richard walked in with the same chair and calmly sat down.

“Hello, Andrew. It’s rather dry and hot out there today. Saudi Arabia is so uncomfortable this time of year. I’m glad to be inside where it’s nice and cool.”

Andrew pulled himself up from his heap and smiled. The gashes in his face glistening in the fluorescent lights.

“I thought you said we were in Canada?”

“Oh no, I never said that. I said the weather in Canada is nice this time of year, that’s all.” The detainee didn’t seem to flinch at the smug comment.

“You look hungry, Andrew. I hear you haven’t eaten for three days. Would you like a sandwich, or some soup maybe?”

“No…”

“Let me ask you something, Mr. Long, why go through all of this? I mean, what is it you think you are accomplishing?”

“Don’t you know? You interrogators all seem to think you can read people like tea leaves. You think this is a game of the mind, right? If my eyes shift right, I’m pulling from memory. If my eyes shift left I am constructing a lie. If I fidget with my hands it means I’m nervous about your line of questioning. Right?”

Richard was impressed a little by the man’s knowledge of interrogation but didn’t show it.

“You still didn’t answer my question, Andrew…”

“I’ve come here to waste your time. To make you bastards think I have something valuable. I can keep this up forever…”

Richard breathed a sigh of disappointment. Then stood up and grabbed his chair.

“I’ll see you later, Andrew.” He left, closing the door firmly behind him.

The door swung open to a folding cot. The detainee was on a vitamin drip, his arms strapped to the frame. Richard had seen this before. The man was dying. Halstrom wouldn’t be able to see it, but the end result of this strategy was already painted clearly in the sunken hollow eyes of Andrew Long.

He had only been gone for two days, but the amount of violence that had been visited on this prisoner in that time was simply unnatural. His body was barely recognizable. Intense bruising and swelling, collapsing veins in his arms from continuous chemical injections, a long suture across his mid section where a rib had obviously broken and ripped through the skin, and his head had now been shaved, apparently to allow for easy taser work to the cranium. He grew angry. Angry at the detainee.

“Andrew, I told you what would happen. All you had to do was cooperate. The easiest thing in the world for you to do is to cooperate. You have brought this on yourself and you have interfered with my job. It’s a lose-lose!”

Andrew’s voice was but a wisp, a ghost straining through his teeth to carry a barely audible message.

“You brought this. You bring this every time you look the other way. You could stop it at any time if you wanted…”

“I’m not here to rewrite military interrogation policy. I’m here to get one thing; information. Tell me where the local insurgents are organizing, and this all disappears.”

Andrew shook his head, “You and I both know that once this begins, there is only one place it can go…”

“I can’t be concerned with that. I can’t be concerned with you. Thousands of people are dying out there because of this conflict and it needs to end. We are going to end it! You and your kind are living a fantasy. You think your vision of Constitutionalism and a “free republic” isn’t expendable? Of course it is! It’s just another idea whose time has passed. The outcome of this crisis was decided before it began. Governments survive. People fade away. We can nurture the system and thrive with it, or tear each other apart and perish together. The greater good demands a sacrifice of ideals to ensure progress…”

Andrew shook with fury, subdued by the intense physical agony weighing upon him.

“That’s a nice speech, but you’re only trying to reassure yourself. You have no ideals, you have no principles, and that is why you will lose. I am making my sacrifice for what you call the “greater good” right here and now. I’m leaving behind a wife and two children! They will never know what happened to me. My body will be incinerated and my ashes left in a drainage ditch outside this prison that isn’t even supposed to exist. One day soon, you will understand why your side is destined to fail. Very soon…”

Richard’s attempts to reign in this subject were become even more fruitless. He had come in thinking the school teacher and family man was an easy target to turn informant, and now, he was fighting just to convince the prisoner that he could live through the day. This was a disaster. He rushed to talk with Halstrom. He needed more time. Halstrom was not sympathetic…

“I have my schedule, Richard, just like you have yours. I can’t hold back on any of these prisoners while this base is at risk! If we lose Florida, the entire gulf opens up to the insurgency. Free movement up to Atlanta! Can you live with that? No, because if you could, you’d be a damned traitor.”

Halstrom had a knack for rationalizing his methods that bordered on political genius.

“I’m talking about one prisoner, John. I need some breathing room!”

“Richard, do you or do you not believe this detainee has valuable information on the insurgency?”

Richard’s intuition was never wrong when it came to reading a detainee. He gave his answer with a depressed confidence, knowing the cost.

“……yes, I do.”

“The terrorists are using decentralized combat methods. Do you know what that means? It means they have no top down leadership. They devise strategies at random. Infiltration is useless because each group is acting independently of the others and trading members for multiple actions. Our informants never know what is going to happen until it is happening right in front of them. It means each individual insurgent must be treated like a member of leadership and squeezed for as much information as possible as quickly as possible or we lose our edge. The school teacher gets squeezed tomorrow. He talks or we move on. Period!”

Richard Evans had one chance to salvage this interview, maintain his success rate, and keep Andrew alive long enough to become a valuable asset. The attempt to convince him of the futility of his cause had floundered. He now had to appeal to the man’s honor.

“Andrew, I want you to consider something before you foolishly martyr yourself for information that may or may not be worth a damn. There are some in your movement that operate outside the principles you cling to. The refugee hospital in Miami, for instance…”

Andrew coughed with disgust.

“The one that your people leveled and then blamed on us so that you had clear precedence to move troops into the state?”

“So then give me a false flag group if you are so certain they exist! Give me anything!”

Andrew leaned up and spoke with a softness that one would normally reserve for a dear friend. The tone startled Evans, who had never before allowed himself any connection with the people he analyzed and categorized for the military.

“I want to help you…..and I’ll do it, on one condition…”

The suited man leaned in closely.

“I will tell you what I know, if you stay this time, and watch them work…”

Richard had executed hundreds of interrogations in his career. But not once had he ever been present for the torture. It was always deemed more effective for him to conduct interviews afterwards, while the subject felt vulnerable. His disconnection from the more gruesome aspects of the process allowed prisoners to see him as a welcome safety net, a vacation from the fear and anguish, if only for an hour. This request was not something he was used to.

“If that’s how you want to do this, then I will be here. God help you, Andrew, this information you have had better be golden…”

Evans sat at the far corner as Halstrom and another guard walked in with a duffel bag. Halstrom protested Richard’s presence fervently until Richard appealed to his ego, relating his “admiration” for the direct method. Halstrom was willing to make an exception for such a distinguished veteran of MI, especially if it meant showing off.

The session began with a typical revealing of tools and devices, some strutting around and some overt threats. Andrew was propped up against the wall, still strapped to his medical cot. The questioning was rudimentary, and disturbingly juvenile in manner. Halstrom’s expletives were drowning out his interview, and one could hardly understand what he was saying. The attacks came swiftly. Evans found himself looking away. There was no rhyme or reason to it. Andrew screamed at moments, but was for the most part eerily silent. When no discernable information could be drawn from him, dismemberment was utilized. Richard’s vision became hyperfocused, clouded, accept for the edge of the serrated kitchen knife that Halstrom waved about. The smell of the room turned sour, organic, like a compost bin. That’s when he saw it. His eyes met with the corner of Halstrom’s mouth, and there, as he began separating Andrew from his left index finger, was a smile. An unmistakable smile.

Halstrom was not doing this for his country, for his government, or for the people. Halstrom ENJOYED his work. Halstrom was indeed, a psychopath, as Andrew had warned, given full license by the government to act according to his nature, and to be rewarded for it. Richard moved to end the interrogation when Andrew motioned for mercy. Halstrom stopped, almost surprised, and turned to the retiree. Andrew pointed to Richard, who moved in close. He spoke quickly, then leaned his head back. As Halstrom approached with curiosity, Andrew spit blood in his eyes. The salty sting blinded the Sergeant Major and he stumbled about while the other guard stood back unsure how to proceed. Halstrom, infuriated, savagely planted his boot into Andrew’s sternum. There was a dull crack of bone and cartilage. Andrew’s breathing went sick and shallow. Suddenly, he wheezed, and his eyes rolled over. It was done.

Halstrom laughed awkwardly in his fervor and frothed.

“That’s what happens! That’s how we handle things in MI now, Richard…”

24 hours later, Richard crossed an abandoned industrial park near Pensacola under cover of darkness, escorted by two squads of soldiers familiar with the terrain. The area was known to be active with insurgents at certain times of the year. The suspicion was that it was being used as an underground railroad; a place where terrorists freed from FEMA detention camps were funneled and relocated to the Rockies, where the resistance was strongest. Andrew’s information was an address, and nothing more. A rusted warehouse untouched by the fires that swept through the city a year ago. Evans and his team were to survey the grounds and radio back to a larger force a few miles away.

The gulf twilight softened the air and the ocean breeze rolled over the landscape like fresh water. The moment was serene despite the potential firefight that could erupt at any moment. Richard peered up at the star broken sky and breathed deeply. He wondered if Andrew Long had been here, alive and with dreams of an America lost and mostly forgotten. It was a captivating brand of romanticism. A beautiful but tragically uncompromising revelation. The world was changing, and only the flexible, only the mutable, would live to enjoy it.

Richard and the two squads intersected the main building and closed off all exits. Thermals showed no activity. He was almost to the stairs when he lost his hearing. A shockwave sliced through the room and the smell of a flashbang filled his nasal cavity. There were gunshots. He could not hear them, but he could feel the vibrating thump of directed gunpowder. Two soldiers fell right in front of him. He scrambled for cover when the heavy impact of a rifle butt struck him solidly in the back of the head. Everything went black.

He awoke in a small room, clean, sterile. A steel door at the far end. No windows. His hands were bound. A single lightbulb hung from the ceiling. The door opened, and a man, battle worn and intelligent looking, walked in with a chair.

“Captain Richard Evans, Military Intelligence, retired 2006, reactivated one week ago. Ellen Evans, wife. Three children, four grandchildren, all living in the Eastern NATO Safe Zone.”

Richard’s faculties were slowly returning.

“What do you want…?”

“My name is Adam, Captain, and I believe you know a friend of mine, Andrew Long…”

Richards heart sunk.

“Yes, I knew him.”

“….So then, he’s dead.”

“Yes…”

Adam shook his head sadly.

“He said someone like you would come here. He said wait a week, and they’ll come. The bastard was smart. Smarter than me…”

Richard became visibly confused.

“Smarter than me too, it would seem…”

“You still don’t get it, do you?” Adam stared the old man down. “He was captured on purpose. When he finally gave this place up, he had to make it look real. He had to be willing to take all the torture you monsters dished out so that you would believe him and come bumbling in here with a high level MI officer in tow.”

“I never tortured your friend. I swear, I never touched him…” Richard’s adrenaline began to take root and he had trouble controlling his mind.

“I believe you, Richard. Don’t worry, we don’t torture our prisoners.” Adam pulled his pistol from his holster and set it across his thigh. “Do you understand? There will be no torture here.”

Richard understood.

“All I want to know is, where are they keeping my friend’s body? And the location of every other black-site detention facility you have been to. Trains like the Redline included…”

Richard scoffed “The Redline is a myth. A fairytale for insurgents…”

“I was on the Redline, Captain!” Adam gripped his pistol tighter.

It was then that Richard Evans understood what the detainee had meant when he said that the Federal coalition was doomed to fail. Despite the overwhelming military might of the government, Andrew Long was ready to endure any hell and even death for what he believed. When faced with the same, most coalition forces would mentally crumble. At that very moment, Richard himself had to admit he was unwilling to suffer, or to leave his wife and children behind, to protect the system he thought he believed in. Without the force of will inspired by underlying principles, unerring and unyielding, without the support of a collective and individual conscience, the establishment system was fragile, and empty. Richard, now faced with his imminent end, had doubts. Andrew was right…

After telling his insurgent captors everything he knew, they locked the Captain in the cell with a canteen of water. He had no idea if they would ever be back, or if they planned to let him waste away in there. All he knew was, it was very cold…

 

Source: https://alt-market.com/articles/393-the-detainee-a-tale-of-collapse

Filed Under: Prison, Rights, USA Tagged With:

Feinstein: Senate Panel’s Probe Of CIA Torture Program Concludes It Was “Far More Widespread & Systematic Than We Thought”

December 14, 2011 By Leave a Comment

By

It could have been big news, if U.S. torture weren’t so anathema to the press corps, such that reporting upon it is considered either a fruitless and unprofitable enterprise, or among most of those who do venture into such waters, the sine qua non for such reportage must be ignorance and/or cover-up for much of what the U.S. military and intelligence agencies do.

Consider that during the recent Senate debate over the Defense Authorization Bill — the one that passed provisions on indefinite detention that drew cries of outrage from a number of law professors, and stoked fear among government opponents — Senator Dianne Feinstein, while speaking against provisions of the bill that would subject U.S. citizens to indefinite detention also made some serious points concerning the torture-interrogation amendment offered by Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-New Hampshire).

Feinstein announced that the much-heralded, and much forgotten review of CIA torture undertaken by the Senate Intelligence Committee, first reported by Jason Leopold back in April 2010, is wrapping up its investigation. But her comments went unregarded and unreported, as patience for such things as fighting torture is not the strong suit of American political discourse, nor is much expected anymore from a Congress that has so clearly lost its bearings.

But, nevertheless, the announcement is not without interest, as Feinstein told her colleagues:

As chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, I can say that we are nearing the completion [of] a comprehensive review of the CIA’s former interrogation and detention program, and I can assure the Senate and the Nation that coercive and abusive treatment of detainees in U.S. custody was far more systematic and widespread than we thought.

Moreover, the abuse stemmed not from the isolated acts of a few bad apples but from fact that the line was blurred between what is permissible and impermissible conduct, putting U.S. personnel in an untenable position with their superiors and the law.

That is why Congress and the executive branch subsequently acted to provide our intelligence and military professionals with the clarity and guidance they need to effectively carry out their missions. And that is where the Army Field Manual comes in.

It is not surprising to hear the torture was worse than already known. After all, the purpose of secrecy and the cult of classification, so assiduously courted by the current Administration, is to hide crimes. So one can only hope the Intelligence Committee will, when the review is truly and finally complete (and let’s hope it’s not another 18 months), that its findings will be released publicly. In fact, in a decent world, it would be demanded.

Lies that facilitate torture – Case-in-point: the Army Field Manual

One reason for the lulled non-murmur over torture is the outrageous lie that Obama, after coming into office, “ended torture.” He enshrined the Army Field Manual as the supposedly humane alternative to the Bush torture regime of “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Feinstein, who certainly knows better, is an exemplary model for such myth-making — “myth” because the Army Field Manual actually uses torture of various sorts, and even though about half-a-dozen human rights and legal organizations, and a number of prominent government interrogators have said so (see this Nov. 2010 letter signed by 14 well-known interrogators to then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates) — as her following comments on the Army Field Manual (AFM) demonstrate.

Here, Sen. Feinstein is polemicizing against the Ayotte amendment, which was ignominiously dismissed via a parliamentary maneuver, along with a few dozen other amendments, after an ostentatious Senate “colloquy” on the matter by Senators Ayotte and Lieberman (with Lindsay Graham chiming in at the very end). The amendment awaits its resurrection, seeking passage attached like an obligate parasite to another bill some months down the line. (The authorization bill is currently “in conference,” as a final version is worked out that reconciles both House and Senate versions. It is not unknown for provisions to be slipped in under such circumstances, and I wouldn’t count out yet Ayotte/Lieberman/Graham’s attempt to insert a new secret annex to the AFM, not until, like the undead, a stake is driven through its heart.)

Feinstein:

However, Senator Ayotte’s amendment would require the executive branch to adopt a classified interrogation annex to the Army Field Manual, a concept that even the Bush administration rejected outright in 2006.

Senator Ayotte argued that the United States needs secret and undisclosed interrogation measures to successfully interrogate terrorists and gain actionable intelligence. However, our intelligence, military, and law enforcement professionals, who actually interrogate terrorists as part of their jobs, universally disagree. They believe that with the Army Field Manual as it currently is written, they have the tools needed to obtain actionable intelligence from U.S. detainees.

As an example, in 2009, after an extensive review, the intelligence community unanimously asserted that it had all the guidance and tools it needed to conduct effective interrogations. The Special Task Force on Interrogations–which included representatives from the CIA, Defense Department, the Office of the Director of Intelligence, and others–concluded that “no additional or different guidance was necessary.”

Since 2009, the interagency High Value Detainee Interrogation Group has briefed the Select Committee on Intelligence numerous times. The group has repeatedly assured the committee that they have all authority they need to effectively gain actionable intelligence. As a consummate consumer of the intelligence products they produce, I agree.

Unfortunately, Sen. Feinstein is oddly correct. Between standard interrogation methods and CIA-derived interrogation techniques meant to break down a prisoner psychologically, they do really have all they “need.”

Feinstein never mentions the years-long protests about certain provisions of the AFM, many of them gathered in the document’s Appendix M, that have been found tantamount to torture — the use of drugs (so long as they don’t “induce lasting or permanent mental alteration or damage,” the harsh manipulation of fears and phobias, the elimination of wording from the previous version of the AFM that would ban stress positions, the use of isolation, sleep deprivation and sensory deprivation techniques. All of these are mingled in with a number of other basic interrogation techniques, but that doesn’t diminish the cruel irony of Feinstein’s IC-based assurance that that government interrogators “had all the guidance and tools it needed to conduct effective interrogations.” Guidance and tools, indeed.

Perhaps she could have quoted the letter to Gates, signed by Ali Soufan, Steven Kleinman, Jack Cloonan, Robert Baer, Mark Fallon, Malcolm Nance and others, which noted “the use of potentially abusive questioning tactics” in the Army Field Manual. Of course, these government interrogators softened their language (“potentially”?) and couched their opposition in terms of what hurts the national interest, versus what is wrong or illegal.

But when it comes to protecting the massive military-intelligence complex, such awkward facts as the use of cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment of prisoners, as well as outright torture enshrined in the Army Field Manual are not worthy of note. Even the many human rights groups who opposed the Ayotte amendment allburied any past critique of the AFM or its Appendix M in their polemics against Ayotte’s “classified annex” proposal. This is not the way to win a battle!

Honoring “our values”?

Feinstein concluded:

We cannot have it both ways. Either we make clear to the world that the United States will honor our values and treat prisoners humanely or we let the world believe that we have secret interrogation methods to terrorize and torture our prisoners.

But what about interrogation methods that are not secret, Sen. Feinstein?

I don’t seriously expect her to respond. Instead I ask readers, what kind of a country is it that has torture written into its public documents, and no one raises a fuss (or practically no one)?

The failure to take on the AFM and its Appendix M abuses in a serious fashion has led in a straight line to the political pornography of watching torture debated in Congress and among Presidential candidates, as well as a surge of political effort being made in some circles to make sure all such abuse is hidden forever behind a veil of classification. This failure is directly the responsibility of the human rights groups, who have not made it clear to their constituencies and the public at large how serious the problem currently is. While most of them are on the record of opposing the abuses described above, they repeatedly have pulled their punches for political reasons (as during the recent debate on the Ayotte amendment), and as a result, they must take the hard criticism when it comes, until, or unless they turn this around.

 

Source: https://pubrecord.org/torture/9912/feinstein-senate-panels-probe/

Filed Under: Military, Prison, Rights, Torture, USA

A Preview Of Things To Come In America

December 12, 2011 By Leave a Comment

In this video I talk about the situation we are facing with the Department of Homeland Security.

Trust me when I say that I don’t like making this video.

I don’t like admitting when I am cornered by a force that I cannot defend myself against.

I am posting this so that you will realize what is developing in this country.

 

Filed Under: Martial Law, Military, Police, Politicians, Prison, Rights, Surveillance, Terrorism, Torture, Tyranny, USA, Violence Tagged With:

Proof Obama Will Sign NDAA 1031 Citizen Imprisonment Law In A Few Days

December 12, 2011 By Leave a Comment

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLiKvSz_wX8&feature=player_embedded

As soon as December 13, the President will sign NDAA Section 1031 into law, permitting citizen imprisonment without evidence or trial. The bill that passed Congress absolutely DOES NOT exempt citizens. The text of Section 1031 reads, “A covered person under this section” includes “any person who has committed a belligerent act”. We only have to be ACCUSED, because we don’t get a trial.

- Confusingly, Obama threatened a veto for 1032, but NOT 1031. 1032 is UNRELATED to imprisoning citizens without a trial. He has never suggested using a veto to stop Section 1031 citizen imprisonment — in fact, it was requested by the Obama administration. Watch the video for proof.

- The Feinstein Amendment 1031(e) is dangerously misleading. Don’t be fooled: In the text of 1031(e), “Nothing in this section shall be construed…”, the only word that matters is “construed” because the Supreme Court are the only ones with the power to construe the law. The Feinstein Amendment 1031(e) permits citizens to be imprisoned without evidence or a trial forever, if the Supreme Court does not EXPLICITLY repeal 1031.

- Any time you hear the words, “requirement for military custody” this refers to 1032 NOT 1031. We MUST not confuse these two sections. In its statements, the Obama administration has actually contributed to the confusion about 1032′s “requirement for military custody”, which is COMPLETELY UNRELATED to Section 1031 citizen imprisonment without trial. These tricky, misleading words appear even in major news stories. Don’t fall for it!

If we act urgently to tell our friends, family, and colleagues, we may still be able to prevent this. Here is what we can do:

1) Americans must know about this to stop it. Urgently pass this petiton as widely as possible: https://www.change.org/petitions/stop-ndaa-section-1031-citizen-imprisonment-l…

2) To spread this C-SPAN video evidence, Thumbs Up and comment on this video. People deserve to watch this before he signs it.

3) Congress can still block the law before December 13. Write and call your Representative and Senator telling them to stop NDAA Section 1031 and the dangerously misleading Feinstein Amendment 1031(e).
Contact your Representative: https://writerep.house.gov/writerep/
Contact your Senator:https://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm

4) Write and call the White House to tell the President you won’t sit by and watch NDAA Section 1031 and the dangerously misleading Feinstein Amendment 1031(e) become law: https://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/submit-questions-and-comments

 

Filed Under: Martial Law, Military, Police, Politicians, Prison, Rights, Terrorism, Tyranny, USA

Crushing Occupy: Riot Police, Drones And Undercover Agents

December 12, 2011 By Leave a Comment

The US police continue to play cat and mouse with the Occupy movement, having torn down the last remaining Occupy Wall Street camp in San Francisco, arresting 55 people for illegal lodging.

The tents of the almost three-month-old movement have already been cleared several times but sprung up again when the main Occupy encampment in the city was demolished last Wednesday.

These last three months have seen a lot of police activity, with tactics changing several times against an entirely non-violent protest movement. Reports of mass arrests being made while peaceful protesters stand by chanting “Shame on you!” have become routine.

The latest crackdown on protesters on America’s West coast has seen 55 people arrested over the weekend in San-Francisco as they rallied in front of the Federal Reserve building.

In this instance, protesters had built no structures to protect themselves, and campers were easily pulled out of their tents and sleeping bags by a police contingent outnumbering them 2:1.

The local authorities have adopted a law prohibiting sitting or lying down on public sidewalks at certain hours of the day. The protesters attempted to circumvent the new municipal legislation by invoking the First Amendment which guarantees freedom of speech and should have outweighed the local laws, allowing the protesters to continue to exercise their rights.

But as enthusiastic police activity continued unchecked, it became clear that the First Amendment does not outweigh anything in America these days.

The latest police raid in San Francisco has effectively cleared out the last remaining OWS protester camp.

The US authorities have used a variety of pretexts to shut down Occupy camps across the country. All in all, about 5,000 protesters have been arrested over the last three months.

Many in the movement fear their message could vanish together with their tents.

This Monday, in order to re-energize the movement, they plan to block major ports on the West coast, from California to Alaska, by marching into them. The idea is to highlight economic inequalities in the country’s financial system, which they say is unfairly tilted toward the wealthy.

Given the track record of police brutality towards the movement, with pepper spray, tear gas and batons being used repeatedly on non-violent demonstrators, concerns are rising that the port marches might also turn ugly.

Not content with pepper spray and tear gas, the police are now devising fresh methods to deal with the movement. It has been revealed that undercover police officers infiltrated Occupy LA tent camps last month to find out how the protesters plan to resist an eviction and as well as to spy on people suspected of not properly disposing of human waste.

Also, for the first time in American history, some protesters were arrested with the help of a Predator drone, a military reconnaissance and assault flying machine used by the US Army and the CIA in covert operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Now those Predators are being turned on the country’s own peaceful but dissenting citizens.

 

Source: https://rt.com/news/ows-camps-cleared-san-francisco-557/

Filed Under: Occupy, Police, Prison, Protests, Rights, USA
« Older Posts