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By Sherry Buchanan
$19.80
By Andy Borowitz
$16.95
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AP/Patrick Semansky
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If a federal judge doesn’t sentence him to life in prison, Pfc. Bradley Manning, the former Army intelligence analyst accused of handing hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables to the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks, may want to run for public office.
Posted on Dec 6, 2012
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As Chris Hedges reported Monday, American Muslims are being dragged into jail on dubious and unclear connections to terrorism. Meanwhile, the president retains the authority to kill U.S. citizens without trial. But most Americans aren’t speaking up. Salon blogger and constitutional lawyer Glenn Greenwald discusses why.
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Wikimedia Commons
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Though they couldn’t stop the freedom-crushing National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 from becoming law, Truthdig salutes the efforts of the members of the U.S. Congress who took a stand against the NDAA in the final round of voting this week.
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youtube.com
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This week’s Truthdigger of the Week award goes to the cantabile group that interrupted President Obama in song over the detention of alleged WikiLeaks’ source Pfc. Bradley Manning.
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AP
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Bradley Manning, the Army private accused of leaking sensitive material to WikiLeaks, has been held for seven months in what Glenn Greenwald reports are “inhumane, personality-erasing, soul-destroying, insanity-inducing conditions.” ... (more)
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AP / Marc Israel Sellem
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Amid rhetoric that could be coming straight out of Arizona, the Israeli Cabinet has voted to build a facility in the desert to hold detained illegal migrants, who arrive mostly from Africa.
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news.bbc.co.uk
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Reports are streaming in that suggest Burmese military authorities have authorized the release of pro-democracy superstar Aung San Suu Kyi after a national election in the junta-led country. Suu Kyi has lived the past seven years under house arrest and 15 of the past 21 years in state-sponsored detention.
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AP / Laura Rauch
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By Max Blumenthal —
Business is booming in Arizona, thanks to a disturbing federal immigration program that transfers millions of taxpayer dollars to a private prison company, parasitic attorneys and other opportunists.
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AP photo / Khampha Bouaphanh
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By Andrew Becker and Hugo Cabrera, CIR —
While the nation’s understaffed immigration courts strain under a backlog that has grown to more than 200,000 cases, thousands of new border agents have been hired and the number of government attorneys who argue for deportation has increased by 35 percent, pushing more cases onto an already overburdened system.
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thebeatwithin.org
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This week on the podcast: Sheerly Avni and Omar Turcios from The Beat Within, a magazine written by and for the troubled kids in juvenile prisons. Such facilities could be “recruiting grounds for crime fighting,” argues Avni, and that’s in our self-interest. “If you want to stop crime—very simple. You look at a bunch of 5-year-old kids in the ghetto. Ask yourself: ‘Do I want them to be criminals or not in 10 years? What’s that going to do to the value of my home?’ ”
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thebeatwithin.org
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This week on the podcast: Sheerly Avni and Omar Turcios from The Beat Within, a magazine written by and for the troubled kids in juvenile prisons. Such facilities could be “recruiting grounds for crime fighting,” argues Avni, and that’s in our self-interest.
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White House / Eric Draper
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By Eugene Robinson — The history-be-my-judge interviews that President Bush and Vice President Cheney have been giving recently help me understand their choices—but also reinforce my confident belief, and my fervent hope, that history will throw the book at them.
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telegraph.co.uk
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The Bush administration is reportedly angry at a decision by U.S. District Judge Ricardo Urbina, who ruled the detention of 17 Chinese Muslim prisoners at Guantanamo Bay was unfounded, citing a seemingly archaic document that prohibits indefinite detention without cause—the U.S. Constitution.
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AP photo / Janet Hamlin, Pool
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Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden’s former driver, has been sentenced by a military jury to five and a half years in prison—most of which he’s already served in detention. The prosecution wanted his sentence to be 30 years or longer, but it needn’t be too upset: The military has said it can hold Hamdan indefinitely if it feels like it. Hamdan’s lawyers are expected to appeal.
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blackfive.net
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Osama bin Laden’s alleged driver, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, was convicted Wednesday by a military court on five counts of supporting terrorism. The decision was largely symbolic, since the U.S. had reserved the right, regardless of guilt or innocence, to detain Hamdan indefinitely. The ACLU called the verdict a “monumental debacle.”
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Canadian lawyers released a wrenching 2003 video—the first of its kind ever made public—of a tearful 16-year-old boy suffering what appears to be a mental breakdown during an interrogation by Canadian officials at the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay. Five years later, Omar Khadr has still not been charged with any crime.
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news.bbc.co.uk
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A Yemeni man has told Amnesty International that he was abducted and tortured and spent nearly three years in secret prisons at the hands of the CIA. Khaled al-Maqtari says that without charge, legal representation or even a word to his family he was shuttled from one prison to another and ultimately dumped into Yemeni custody, once the U.S. had finished with him.
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By Eugene Robinson — The campaign for the White House is great fun, but it can also be a distraction. While the leading contenders to replace Bush continue to duke it out, the president and his lieutenants are still trying to justify torture in the name of protecting this once great democracy.
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Despite his Southern accent and the conclusions of a court to the contrary, officials at Immigration and Customs Enforcement managed to convince themselves that Thomas Warziniack was born in Russia. So they detained and planned to deport him. He is just one of hundreds of victims caught up in an unforgiving bureaucracy who beg, often without recourse, to be taken seriously.
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AP photo / Dennis Cook
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Activists around the world took to the streets Friday wearing orange jumpsuits in protest of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, which Amnesty International calls an “unlawful black hole.” Eighty demonstrators were arrested in or near the Supreme Court building, where justices are reviewing the legality of the government’s detention program.
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By Amy Goodman — The Democrats have gotten in bed with torturers, those who support cruel treatment of military prisoners and some who may have authorized such abuse.
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Bilal Hussein, an AP photographer whom the U.S. military has accused of collaborating with insurgents, has been detained in Iraq for 19 months and may soon be tried by an Iraqi court. The Associated Press, apparently fed up with trying to reason with the military, has released the results of its own exhaustive investigation, which found the charges against Hussein to be “false” and “meaningless.”
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In 2005, the Justice Department issued two secret opinions on torture that endorsed and protected the administration’s desire to use physically and psychologically traumatizing interrogation techniques. Then-Deputy Attorney General James Comey reportedly warned his colleagues that they would be “ashamed” when their work became public.
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By Andy Borowitz — Fresh on the heels of its reality show “Kid Nation,” in which children are sent to perform hard labor on a ranch with no adult supervision, CBS announced today that it is readying a reality show in which children will be sent to the federal detention camp at Guantanamo.
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Were the CIA to potentially, maybe, have a detention and interrogation program it would now have to adhere to President Bush’s new executive order prohibiting cruel and inhuman treatment of detainees. It’s still unclear whether water-boarding remains on the menu.
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By Amy Goodman — Sometimes it takes a brave, idealistic young person (or nearly 50 of them) to break all the rules of pomp and circumstance, pass the president a note, and school him about human rights.
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usip.org
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Robert Gates urged Congress on Thursday to close the Guantanamo Bay prison, acknowledging that the international community was likely to doubt the credibility of tribunals held there: “My own view is that because of things that happened earlier at Guantanamo there is a taint about it.”
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theyoungturks.com
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British and Iraqi forces raided a National Iraqi Intelligence Agency detention center on Sunday and discovered 30 prisoners, including two children, “many of whom showed signs of torture and abuse.” Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki condemned the raid as an “illegal and irresponsible act” and has ordered an investigation.
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Jose Padilla has been ruled competent to stand trial, a rebuke to his lawyers. The defense had sought to have him treated for PTSD before the trial began. Padilla has been held in isolation for three and a half years, during which time he was subjected to varying kinds of interrogation and, very likely, torture.
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dw-world.de
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The Washington Post has an inside look at “black sites,” the secret detention centers operated by the CIA that hold abducted terror suspects, one of whom describes a world of interrogation, torture and misery.
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The Department of Defense plans to build an $18-million facility at Guantanamo Bay in anticipation of mass migration following the eventual death of Fidel Castro. Administration officials say the housing center will be needed for interdicted Cuban migrants now that space normally used in such an event is taken up by the detention and interrogation facility that holds suspected terrorists.
(h/t: Boing Boing)
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spyflight.co.uk
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The European Parliament has condemned 14 member states for either ignoring or assisting the U.S. policy of “extraordinary rendition.” The report, which won approval by a wide margin, says the CIA carried out 1,245 flights of abducted suspects, sometimes to nations where the detainees could expect torture.
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politikforum.de
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Germans are outraged over the emergence of documents that suggest a government official allowed an innocent German citizen to remain in Guantanamo for years after the United States offered to repatriate him.
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A report by the Department of Homeland Security inspector general has found that immigration and customs officials mistreated illegal immigrants held in facilities around the country. But the ACLU and others have criticized the report, charging that it ignored the most serious allegations.
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By Marie Cocco — When the first captives were flown from Afghanistan to Guantanamo five years ago, no one knew the military base would eventually be transformed into a symbol of American tyranny and shame.
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cbsnews.com
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Martin Lee Anderson, 14, died a day after he was beaten and dragged by nine guards while in the custody of a juvenile boot camp in Florida. The medical examiner initially ruled that Martin died of natural causes, but… (h/t: Largest Minority)
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The Washington Post reports that Bush’s new bill on military commissions could be a “precedent-setting Congressional endorsement for the indefinite detention” of anyone the president deems an enemy combatant—including American citizens far from foreign battlefields.
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Courtesy Roadside Attractions
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By Sheerly Avni — Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross have made a necessary and important critique of grave injustices at Guantanamo Bay. But are their storytelling techniques entirely on the level?
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From ThinkProgress
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Last week, the Pentagon kicked all reporters out of the Guantanamo Bay prison after the suicides of three detainees. But on Wednesday the Defense Dept. invited a Fox News analyst down to Cuba to tour the facility.
And what do you know? The Fox analyst described Gitmo as ?now gentle, almost child-like the way they treat the detainees.?
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Christian Lutz / AP
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The charge comes from the head of a European probe into alleged secret CIA prisons in Eastern Europe. | story
Posted on Jan 24, 2006
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Guantanamo Prisoner’s Case Demonstrates Unfairness of Military Commissions
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