Some of the detainees have already been held at Bagram for as long as six years. And unlike the prisoners at the Guantánamo Bay naval base in Cuba, these detainees have had no access to lawyers, no right to hear the allegations against them and only
A federal appeals court dismissed a lawsuit against two
U.S. defense contractors by Iraqi torture victims, saying the companies
had immunity as government contractors.
The lawsuit was filed in 2004 on behalf of Iraqi nationals who say
they or their relatives had been tortured or mistreated while detained
by the U.S. military at the Abu Ghraib prison.
The plaintiffs sued CACI International Inc, which provided
interrogators at Abu Ghraib, and L-3 Communications Holdings Inc's
Titan unit, which provided interpreters to the U.S. military.
Does bad judgment or rude behavior by any citizen justify the use of force of an electric shock by the police in America?
Here we go again, another officer with poor or nonexistent
communication skills using the Taser in a manner unacceptable in a free
society. This new report comes from not New York City where you expect
rude behavior to be the norm, but from the wild west of Glenrock,
Wyoming.
Wasn’t it the Bush Administration that coined the phrase, “Freedom isn’t free.”?
I’m left to wonder, free of what; free of excessive force from our own
police force? Just going through the airport in America I’m made to
feel like a criminal in ways you won’t feel going through airports in
Europe. In Russia you get robbed over luggage charges but you expect
it. In America we now get not just robbed by Wall Street, but there is
a growing trend of being mugged by our own police forces.
Former Attorney General John Ashcroft
may face personal liability for the decisions that led to the detention
of an American citizen as a material witness after the Sept. 11
attacks, a federal appeals court panel ruled on Friday.
When it came time for a CIA employee to testify during the
court-martial of Army Chief Warrant Officer Lewis Welshofer, however,
officials went to great lengths to protect the employee's identity,
erecting a high, Army-green tarpaulin to shield him from spectators.
Even the unidentified man's employment by the CIA was off-limits, until
Welshofer's civilian attorney mentioned it in a slip of the tongue.
Doctors and psychologists the CIA
employed to monitor its "enhanced interrogation" of terror suspects
came close to, and may even have committed, unlawful human
experimentation, a medical ethics watchdog has alleged.
On Sept. 2, 2008, U.S. and Iraqi troops smashed in the doors of Iraqi
journalist Ibrahim Jassam's home, shouting "freeze" and holding back
snarling dogs before they hauled him off into the night in his
underwear.
A year later, neither Jassam and his family nor
global news agency Reuters, which employed him as a freelance TV
cameraman and photographer, have been told exactly why he has been
detained for all this time by U.S. military forces in Iraq.
CIA operatives used severe sleep deprivation
tactics against a terror detainee in late 2007, keeping him awake for
six straight days with permission from government lawyers. [M.D.'s helping?]
Mohammad Jawad, one of the youngest detainees to be held at the U.S.
detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, said after his
return home to Afghanistan he had been abused and humiliated during 6 years in custody. A teenager when he was held, he was accused of
war crimes for throwing a grenade that wounded two U.S. soldiers in
2002, but was ordered freed in July by a U.S. judge who threw out his
confession because it had been obtained through abuse.
Pastors Anderson's court files video below
Prosecutor's and Court's Actions are in Red. Defense Attorney's Actions are in Blue. 4/16/09 Not Guilty Plea
4/17/09 2 Misdemeanor Complaints against Pastor Anderson
4/20/09 Pre-trial Conference is Scheduled
4/21/09 Rule 15.2 Disclosure
4/28/09 Motion to allow Pastor Anderson interstate travel
4/28/09 Prosecutor's request to DENY interstate travel (this is insane!)
4/29/09 Judge Romine grants interstate travel
5/7/09 Search Warrant
5/8/09 Rule 15 Interviews
5/20/09 Supplemental Disclosure
6/2/09 Officer Jones' version of the incident
6/2/09 Officer Mitchell's version of the incident (aka Mr. Smiley & Mr. Failure to Obey Me Right Now!)
6/16/09 Motion to Dismiss the Case with Prejudice
6/25/09 Judge Cora Romine Recuses herself (i.e. decides not to hear the case because of either personal bias or inability to
Four generations of UC Berkeley law school alumni joined activists,
community members and lawyers to protest former
Bush administration lawyer / torture memo author John Yoo’s return to campus Monday.
Raymond Azar, a 45-year-old Lebanese construction manager is employed by a Lebanon-based
contractor working for the U.S. military in Iraq and
Afghanistan. He is the first
target of a rendition carried out on the Obama watch.
About a dozen state officials were joined by 18 representatives from
the Defense, Justice and Homeland Security departments and the Bureau
of Prisons on the tour of the lockup in Standish, said Russ Marlan, a
spokesman for the Michigan Department of Corrections.
The prison in Standish, 145 miles north of Detroit, and a military
penitentiary at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., are being considered to house
the 229 suspected al-Qaida, Taliban and foreign fighters currently at
the Guantanamo Bay prison, if it is closed by 2010 as President Barack
Obama has ordered.
A U.S. military lawyer for a Kuwaiti detainee held at the American
prison at Guantanamo Bay charged the Obama administration
was hampering his efforts to clear his client's name.
Navy Lieutenant Commander Kevin Bogucki said the U.S. State
Department would not issue him clearance to travel on Friday to Kuwait,
where he planned to hold a news conference outlining the case involving
his client, Fouad Al Rabiah.
NEW YORK, Aug 6 (IPS) - Charging that the U.S. government was complicit in the forced disappearance of an influential Muslim scholar four years ago, human rights groups in the U.S., the U.K., and Switzerland have asked the U.N. to investigate.
Nowhere is there a more disturbing, if not horrifying, example of the relationship between a culture of cruelty and the politics of irresponsibility than in the resounding silence that surrounds the torture of children under the presidency of George W. Bush – and the equal moral and political failure of the Obama administration to address and rectify the conditions that made it possible. But if we are to draw out the dark and hidden parameters of such crimes, they must be made visible so men and women can once again refuse to orphan the law, justice, and morality. How we deal with the issue of state terrorism and its complicity with the torture of children will determine not merely the conditions under which we are willing to live, but whether we will live in a society in which moral responsibility disappears altogether and whether we will come to find ourselves living under a democratic or authoritarian social order.
Under even the most dire conditions, there is a gold standard when it
comes to applying the rule of law. It was set 65 years ago by a former
attorney general of the United States. At issue today is whether the
current attorney general will uphold that standard.
A young Guantanamo detainee appears likely to be sent home after a federal judge concluded he'd been held
illegally and ordered him released after almost seven years.
"After this horrible, long, tortured history, I hope the government
will succeed in getting him back home," U.S. District Judge Ellen Segal
Huvelle told Justice Department lawyers during a court hearing. "Enough has been imposed on this young man to date."
In the 13 months since the Supreme Court issued its landmark decision
granting detainees at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba,
the right to challenge their confinements before federal judges, most
prisoners still have not had their day in court.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Wednesday "deplored" the alleged abuse of political prisoners in Iran following the election and urged their immediate release.
Secrecy is endemic in all governments. It goes with the turf,
especially if their leaders hope to hide illegal or immoral behavior,
such as torture of foreign prisoners.
Many Americans heaved a sigh of relief last January when President
Barack Obama banned the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
It made the administration look more humane than the Bush-Cheney team. But that is not the whole story.
Obama
left unaddressed the possibility of torture in secret foreign prisons
under our control as in Abu Ghraib in Iraq or Bagram in Afghanistan,
not to mention the 'black sites" sponsored by our foreign clients in
Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Israel, Thailand and other countries.
"The
United States will not torture," Obama said in his directive. But he
has been silent on the question of whether the U.S. would help others
do the torturing.
Members of Congress knew a lot about U.S.
torture practices. But Republica
The federal judge reacted furiously after government lawyers
conceded much of their evidence to justify teenager Jawad’s detention
consisted of statements he had made that were obtained by torture.
Applause to what Editor Powell Gammill is doing for the enjoyment of millions of readers glued to FP.com everyday. This time he did it again on the subject of “torture” that makes people laugh hysterically their s
Given that the pro-torture crowd has
long argued that confessions that U.S. “interrogation techniques” have
produced are voluntary and valid, I wonder if the pro-torture crowd
would say the same about Bergdahl’s statement.
6 months after President Barack Obama ordered the closing of the
military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, his administration is still
slogging through the cases and policies and will need more time to
complete interim reports due on Tuesday.
Top Obama
administration officials said late Monday that they're still on track
to close the prison in January.
WASHINGTON, AP – The Obama administration is considering creating a special unit of professional interrogators to handle key terror suspects, focusing on intelligence-gathering rather than building criminal cases for prosecution, a government official said Saturday.