Tag: human rights

Cross posted from The Dream Antilles

Early this morning the Connecticut Senate voted to abolish Connecticut’s death penalty.  The vote was 19-17.  The bill now goes to Governor Jodi Rell (R).  She sounds like she will veto the bill.  So, if you care about the value of human life and making Connecticut and America more just and ending the barbarism that is the death penalty, this is an important time to spend a few moments to call or email Governor Rell to ask her to sign the bill.  The phone is 860.566.4840.  The email: [email protected].  

cross posted from The Dream Antilles

Aung San Suu Kyi

Evidently, the military junta running Myanmar (Burma) has decided to make life for Aung San Suu Kyi, who has been under house arrest for 13 of the past 19 years, even worse.  Today was the second day of her trial.  The New York Times reports:

Rorschach “Rachel”

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Simone Bitton’s documentary “Rachel,” which premiered this week at the Tribeca Film Festival, is what’s not in it. Bitton, a Moroccan-born Jewish filmmaker who spent many years in Israel and now lives in France, conducts a philosophical and cinematic inquiry into the death of Rachel Corrie, the 23-year-old American activist who was killed under ambiguous circumstances in the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip in March 2003. But the political firestorm that followed Corrie’s death, which saw her beatified as a martyr for peace by some on the left and demonized as a terrorist enabler by some on the right, is virtually absent from the film….>>>>>Much More Here

Rachel’s mother and father, a brother ‘Nam Vet, were living and working for a stop to the impending illegal invasion of Iraq, here in Charlotte, at the time of Rachel’s Murder by the Israeli Army!!

Torture used against criminal suspects in the US is not new, but two cases illustrate that we can appoint a special prosecutor now to investigate the Bush gang and then move on, or we can ignore the rule of law to let it fester over decades before justice in any form is served.

The GOP love to fawn over President Reagan yet ignore that it was his DOJ that prosecuted a Texas sheriff and deputies for waterboarding prisoners to get confessions.  Politicians can push the move-on meme for the Bush gang, but the appointment this week of a special prosecutor to investigate decades-old allegations of police torture against prisoners shows that justice may be slow, but tenacious advocates of human rights will not surrender.

Scott Horton’s article, Licensed to Kill, discusses Panetta’s memo for subordinates and Congress of his move-on plan, which includes generalized “immunity” that may cover executive-level officials, including some now advising Panetta. The plan includes shutting down the CIA black sites, which is good, but as the CIA has already destroyed evidence of torture, will any evidence at these sites be preserved?

Other torture news includes:  Prisoners can not judicially enforce Geneva rights due to MCA; torture lawyer Bybee admits DOJ work shoddy; a court reinstated a Guantánamo defense lawyer fired by the Pentagon; Obama opposes habeas rights for Bagram prisoners because it may interfere with Afghanistan war, and a judge blasted Bush DOJ for hiding evidence that key witness used to build case against prisoners is mentally ill.

Top Story

• Female prisoner at Bagram:  In an interview, Binyam Mohamed revealed that there was a female prisoner  when he was imprisoned at Bagram in June 2004 for around 3-4 months:
  

  1.  He saw a female prisoner wearing a shirt with the number 650 at Bagram prison.

  2.   The guards frightened the male prisoners into not talking with the woman prisoner for fear that the prisoners “would know who she was.”

  3.  In terms of how this woman may have been tortured, Binyam knew that the woman was kept in isolation and he “could tell that she was severely disturbed.”

  4.  Binyam heard that she had children, but did not see the children at Bagram.

  5.  The woman was from Pakistan and she had studied or lived in America.

Today, most people know that the US tortured prisoners at Guantánamo and CIA black sites.  Experts have been clear that torture does not produce reliable information. The response is often yeah, torture is the only way to save Americans from a mushroom cloud tomorrow. Cripes, it works for Jack Bauer!  

Even if you believe torture is permissible for national security reasons, is torture an acceptable method for a Congressionally-established commission to obtain facts? News reports indicate that 25% of the information about the 9/11 attacks came from prisoners who were tortured. The 9/11 Commission was responsible for providing a complete accounting of the attacks, including “recommendations designed to guard against future attacks.” Just how safe is America when it is relying upon recommendations based upon facts obtained by torture?  

On Monday, the Obama administration may answer some lingering questions about the parameters of our torture policies now that Bush is history. Oral argument is scheduled to address whether Boeing subsidiary Jeppesen Dataplan can face trial on civil liability for torture based on its role in extraordinary rendition flights (pdf file).  Five men claiming that they were tortured by the US alleged that Jeppesen transported the rendered prisoners to countries known for torture or to CIA black site prisons. A federal district court dismissed the lawsuit when Bush invoked the state secrets privilege. The issue is now on appeal before the 9th Circuit. This is not an either/or issue: The courts have authority to protect our national security, promote governmental transparency and redress harms to torture victims.  

600 US born children have filed a lawsuit against Obama  to stop the deportation of their undocumented immigrant parents, who mostly immigrated from Latin American countries.  The children do not oppose President Obama, but rather are hopeful that he will exercise his authority to either adopt an Executive Order or  promote immigration reform in Congress to cease this governmental policy of separating families.  A similar lawsuit against Bush did not accomplish diddly-shit.  This is another problem that Obama has inherited from Bush’s immigration policies and also from immigration “reform” enacted in 1996.   One thing the children really need is public pressure.  While children suing Obama should be an attention-getting story, so far the lawsuit has been reported “almost exclusively by Spanish-language media.”  

If you wish to repost this essay you can download a .txt file of the html here  (right click and save). Permission granted. (Thanks Edger for coding!)

Bush thinks he can beat a torture prosecution because the law provides a defense of acting on legal counsel’s advice.  So, Bush can whip out those infamous legal memos, which opined that torture lite is not torture.

However, two little jabs can knock down this defense. One poke should educate the public (and potential jurors) that torture lite is torture under the law. Bush is banking on people limiting torture to gruesome, physical mutilations even though seemingly harmless acts cause similar pain, injuries and death. Jurors believing this false distinction are more likely to find Bush had reasonable grounds to rely on legal advice that supported his view.  The second poke ties in the reality that Bush ignored US findings that torture lite methods constitute torture, particularly when several techniques are combined together. This jab also includes the truth that prisoners killed by those innocuous stress positions renders it unreasonable for a President to claim good faith reliance on legal advice of his hired guns.