Human Rights

Archive Analyst Kate Doyle Featured in Granito: How to Nail a Dictator

New Film Showcases Spanish Genocide Case, Documents 20 Years of Struggle Against Impunity

January 28, 2011 - A new documentary film about human rights in Guatemala featuring National Security Archive senior analyst Kate Doyle will have its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. The film, Granito: How to Nail a Dictator, will be screened tonight at the Sundance Resort where Kate Doyle, Almudena Bernabeu of the Center for Justice and Accountability (CJA), and film makers Pamela Yates and Paco de Onís, will attend the screening and speak to the audience after the film.

 

By Dave Lindorff

Looks can be deceiving.

When you see photos of Army Specialist Bradley Manning, the fresh, slightly pudgy-faced 23-year old private who has spent the last seven months in solitary confinement, first in Kuwait and later at the Marine base at Quantico, VA, enduring the tender mercies of military guards, you don’t get the sense that this is someone who could withstand a lot of pressure and physical and mental abuse.

Pvt. Bradley Manning, the face of a hero

By Edward S. Herman and David Peterson

By an historical coincidence, both Julian Assange and Luis Posada Carriles were brought before Western courts around the same time in late 2010 and early 2011—Assange in Britain and Posada in the United States. The contrast in their treatment by the U.S.-Anglo system of justice and in their handling by the Western establishment media is enlightening.

Posada, now 82, is a self-confessed terrorist, Bay of Pigs veteran, School of the Americas graduate, and CIA operative who has been credibly placed at two meetings where the plan was hatched for the October 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner that killed all 73 civilians aboard. He also has been implicated in numerous other terrorist acts in which people were killed or injured and property destroyed, and he played a role in the United States' arms-smuggling network in Central America that eventually came to light in the Iran-Contra investigations.

There's a large element within this Country that seems bound and determined to tear apart what this Country is suppose to stand for on the World stage as well as within. They also seem to want to stoke their fears by creating as much hatred towards us, thus enemies of, for a perpetual state of conflict outside of and within our borders. This is our legacy to the coming generations!

In January 2009, President Obama promised a clean break with Bush era detentions. Two years on, only continuity is visible

January 22, 2011 - A leading QC tells Channel 4 there is enough evidence for the International Criminal Court to mount a case against Tony Blair.

For those seeking accountabiity for the senior Bush administration officials and lawyers who established a global torture program in the "War on Terror," involving extraordinary rendition and torture in a variety of secret prisons, the news that the Polish Prosecutor has today accepted the claims of Abu Zubaydah, a former CIA "ghost prisoner," that he was a victim of extraordinary rendition and secret detention in P

By Dave Lindorff

 
"The wranglers over creeds and dogmas are perhaps the most persistent of all agitators; the bedrock idea being that a wrong exists which must be found and exterminated."

-- Eugene Debs

"Get it straight, I'm not a humanitarian, I'm a hell-raiser."

--Mother Jones

For several years now, one organization in the US government has persistently undermined attempts to have a grown-up debate about the perceived dangerousness of prisoners at Guantánamo, and the need to bear security concerns in mind whilst also trying to empty the prison and to bring to an end this particularly malign icon of the Bush administration's ill-conceived response to the 9/11 attacks.

Islamic scholar's experience sheds light on counterterrorism efforts in wake of 9/11 attacks

 

18 January 2011 - Saad Iqbal Madni looks decades older than his 33 years when he shuffles into the room, head down and eyes averted.

My blog entry for 26 November 2006 was entitled Hate Mail, Vandalism and Other Matches and advised readers to complain loudly and officially if they became the victims of hate mail, vandalism and threats. I’m not sure how convincing I was. The recent shootings in Tucson, the Pentagon, the Holocaust Museum, in Wichita, Knoxville, Pittsburgh, Brockton, and Okaloosa County, Florida show an escalation in the seriousness and magnitude of the problems.

One remedy might be recourse to the Law. In Minnesota making a Terroristic Threat is a misdemeanor and is punishable by ”imprisonment for not more than five years or to payment of a fine of not more than $10,000, or both.” Similar laws may exist in other states. Offenses to civil discourse may have to be taken up in the criminal courts as well as in civil courts. The Southern Poverty Law Center seems to have success using lawsuits against hate groups of all sorts.

Just a suggestion. Here are some links that cover the statute and how it is used.

By Jess Guh

It's all too appropriate that on the day that we celebrate the birthday of one of history’s most notable civil rights leaders, Arizona is in the national news spotlight.  Arizona,one of the last states to recognize Martin Luther King Jr's birthday as a federal holiday only began doing in 1992.  Ironically, Arizona’s Attorney General Tom Horne, a supporter of the states tough new immigration laws, and author of a new ban on ethnic studies in the state’s public schools, continually cites his participation in MLK's marches as proof that he's not a racist.

The Pentagon sank to a new low this week in their attempt to sell the Afghanistan War to the American people. At their Martin Luther King, Jr., Day observance, a Pentagon official actually claimed that if King were alive today, he might support the war.

This is simply not true. As shown in our new video, Dr. King could not have been more clear in his 1967 speech denouncing the Vietnam War:

 

Lawyer for Assange’s Sex Accusers Helped In CIA Torture Rendition

Jan 13, 2011 - Best-selling spy thriller author Thomas Bodström ─ an attorney who represents the two Swedish women making the notorious sex charges against WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange ─ knows better than most people that truth is stranger than fiction.

By Linn Washington

Maybe it’s not a violation of criminal statutes.

But the misappropriation of the U.S. Constitution by conservatives for their partisan posturing – as illustrated in last week’s reading of the nation’s founding document in the House – does fit the definition of theft: taking property without consent…in this instance the ‘consent’ of the governed.

However, this is a heist conservatives’ have successfully pulled off before as evidenced by their politicized appropriation of the American Flag, the Pledge of Alliance, national security, God, mom, apple pie, etc. etc…

This brazen theft by deception of the Constitution – the foundational document of the U.S. government – happens on three levels: dismissive; disturbing and downright dangerous.

January 11, 2011 - ELIZABETH JACKSON: It was called America's Secret War.

From 1964 and 1973, the US dropped 260 million cluster submunitions on Laos in a covert mission to destroy North Vietnamese supply lines.

Not only did the mission fail ... it left a deadly legacy; 80 million unexploded bombs scattered across the Laos countryside.

The bombs have killed or maimed more than 20,000 people since the war ended and they're a major obstacle to economic development in one of Asia's poorest nations.

This year, Australia signed a new international treaty banning the use of cluster bombs.

A Senate committee is currently considering a bill to ratify the treaty but critics say the bill doesn't go far enough to help end the scourge of cluster munitions.

AFGHANISTAN: Call for help for IDPs, deportees in Helmand

10 January 2011 (IRIN) - Thousands of internally displaced persons (IDPs) from insurgency-hit Helmand Province, southern Afghanistan, need food assistance urgently, officials told IRIN.

About 900 displaced families in the provincial capital Lashkargah have little or no means to feed themselves and their children this winter, according to Ghulam Farouq Noorzai, director of Helmand’s refugees and returnee affairs department.

The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) confirmed that of the 3,800 families displaced from Nad Ali and Marjah districts during a major counterinsurgency operation in February 2010, about 900 (300 from Nad Ali and 600 from Marjah) still remain in Lashkargah.

Jan 9, 2011 - Author and journalist Nir Rosen has written a book titled "Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America's Wars in the Muslim World" which provides an in depth look at the consequences of the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Press TV interviewed Nir Rosen regarding his views on the US-led Iraq and Afghan invasions and his travel experiences in both countries.

 

By John Grant

The War On Drugs, fought mostly in poor and person-of-color communities (despite the fact that whites are more than 70 percent of all drug users) has contributed dramatically to the growth of a prison-industrial-complex that is quickly sapping resources from education, job training and other vital programs.          
-- Tim Wise

I’ve taught creative writing in Philadelphia’s maximum-security prison for ten years. I joke with the inmates that most of them are POWs in the Drug War. Of course, most of the men in the class are African American.

Last week only two men showed up for the class, which gave me and my co-teacher the opportunity to talk with them about their lives.

Photo: Contributor/IRIN: A displaced family in a camp erected in an orchard in Diyala province, about 90 km east of Baghdad (file photo)

5 January 2011 - Iraq’s new government plans to tackle internal displacement and closely monitor and assist Iraqi refugees abroad, the country’s newly appointed migration and displacement minister said on 3 January.

Don't deny detainees their day in court

Indefinite detention of post-Sept. 11 detainees without charge or trial is not the American way.

January 4, 2011 - The idea that every person deserves his or her "day in court" is a fundamental principle in the United States and many countries worldwide. Yet more than nine years after 9/11, the United States remains paralyzed not just about how to give the thousands of detainees in U.S. custody around the world their day in court but about whether to give them that day in court.

Reflections of war on display

January 4, 2011 - A mural that commemorates civilian casualties that happened during the Afghanistan war is currently on display at Queens College’s Godwin-Ternbach Museum.

“Windows and Mirrors: Reflections on the War in Afghanistan” opened at the Godwin-Ternbach Museum on December 9 and will remain on display through January 30. Before making it to New York, it had made its debut at Philadelphia’s Arch Street Meeting House.

Defending Khadr shows Edmonton's mettle

January 2, 2011 - In a coffee shop near the provincial museum, Edmonton lawyer Dennis Edney let his cup of java get cold.

He was too busy describing Guantanamo Bay military prison and his meeting with a very controversial client, Canadian Omar Khadr, silent and in chains.

As we talked, Edney watched the e-mail on his BlackBerry. He paused to read another message attacking him for defending "that terrorist." Edney couldn't resist responding. He has turned around a lot of critics by explaining the need to fight for the right to a fair trial, he said.

By Linn Washington Jr.M

An outrageous assertion by a potential presidential candidate who praised a group which had notoriously and openly supported racial segregation played a role in finally righting one of the most grotesque wrongs anywhere in America’s justice system with the freeing of two sisters serving controversial double-life sentences for an $11 robbery they may not even have committed.

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour recently announced suspending the troubling prison sentences of Gladys and Jamie Scott primarily on the humanitarian grounds that older sister Jamie needs a kidney transplant.

Back in 1994, a Mississippi jury convicted the Scott sisters for a Christmas Eve robbery the preceding year. The Scotts, according to police and prosecutors, had lured two men into an ambush where three teens robbed the victims of what records indicate was $11 in cash.

By Jess Guh

Am I the only queer person in the country that is sad about the repeal of "Don't Ask Don't Tell"? I know the long-delayed bill just signed into law has destroyed my plan to avoid any future military conscription.

Let me explain. Many of my male friends in college photodocumented their participation in pacifist activities. They explained that this was their insurance policy against any eventual military draft: solid proof to support a history of conscientious objection. As a queer person, I had another plan, though: If anyone tried to compel me to serve in the military, before anyone could even "ask," I planned to "tell" by yelling, "I'm gay, and not in the happy way!" loudly and repeatedly, until no branch of the military would want me. Just for extra measure I would threaten to convert any and all women that I ran across.

By Linda Milazzo

When will we change the course of corporate media? When will sane Americans take media to task? Can't we end this media madness before the fabric of our society irreversibly tears?

Across America people suffer end-of-life illness. They agonize in pain. They agonize in fear. They're in drug induced stupors. Modest people soil themselves in front of friends and family. They avert their eyes in shame. They lose and regain consciousness. They welcome the unconscious moments that shield them from feelings of helplessness and burdening those they love.

This is no way to live. This is no way to die.

Throughout the recent debate on the health care bill, the media - in particular cable TV and talk radio - inflamed the rhetoric on the bill; on the bill's size, its number of pages, its fiscal impact, its social impact, excluding abortion, surviving death panels...

DEATH PANELS?!

By Jean Casella and James Ridgeway

As Christmas is celebrated in Incarceration Nation, it’s worth remembering certain things about the two figures who dominate this holiday.

As more than 3,000 American sit on death row, we revere the birth of a godly man who was arrested, “tried,” sentenced, and put to death by the state. The Passion is the story of an execution, and the Stations of the Cross trace the path of a Dead Man Walking.

Less well know is the fact that Saint Nicholas, the early Christian saint who inspired Santa Claus, was once a prisoner, like one in every 100 Americans today. Though he was beloved for his kindness and generosity, Nicholas acquired sainthood not only by giving alms, but in part by performing a miracle that more or less amounted to a prison break.

By John Grant

On December 18, David House, an MIT researcher, visited Bradley Manning at the Quantico, Virginia, military prison where he is being held in solitary confinement. Other than Manning’s attorney, House is the rare person allowed to visit him.

House’s report is quite thorough in pointing out instances where the military authorities are lying -- or to use philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s formulation, “bullshitting” -- about how the 23-year-old Army intelligence worker is being treated.

Here’s some of psychologist Dr. Jeffrey Kaye’s comment on House’s report:

by Linda Milazzo

Registered Nurse Estella Chavez (photo by Linda Milazzo)

Every action has a reaction, every destructive action has destructive reactions!

This report is just a part of the legacy we've left to an entire small Country of innocent people, as well as their neighboring countries, whose doctoral leader was under our thumb, right up till his hanging, as to the policies of that whole region we push in the names of Freedoms and Democracy!

The damage done over the previous decade, the pandora's box destroyed, the tens of thousands killed and maimed, the millions turned into refugee's within and running to escape, the children who've grown up in the destruction and death around them, the now selective cleansing of once neighbors and friends.

It isn't only the war of choice that has reaped the damage but the hate, and fear, rhetoric coming from within our country as well as from others who also use it to control their own, now a decade of it as it continues.