Human Rights

Court Refuses To Rule On Legality Of Extra-Judicial Killings By Drones

April 6, 2014 Staff, www.ccrjustice.org Educate! Drones, Human Rights

A federal district court today dismissed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the targeted killing of three American citizens by U.S. drones in Yemen in 2011. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) filed the case on behalf of the families of Anwar Al-Aulaqi, Samir Khan, and Al-Aulaqi’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman. The ACLU National Security Project Director Hina Shamsi said: "The court's view that it cannot provide a remedy for extrajudicial killings when the government claims to be at war, even far from any battlefield, is profoundly at odds with the Constitution. It is precisely when individual liberties are under such grave threat that we need the courts to act to defend them. In holding that violations of U.S. citizens' right to life cannot be heard in a federal courtroom, the court abdicated its constitutional role."

2014 People’s Choice Award: The Cuban Five

April 5, 2014 Global Exchange, www.humanrightsaward.org Educate! Criminal Justice and Prisons, Cuba, Human Rights

n 1998, five Cuban intelligence agents were arrested following their surveillance by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. They were brought up on multiple charges including conspiracy to commit espionage. These five men were sent from Cuba to investigate and report on right-wing groups in Miami planning attacks against the Castro government and the Cuban people. Their presence in the U.S. was in response to several attacks in Cuba for which these U.S.-based groups claimed responsibility, including bomb attacks at many popular tourist hotels and restaurants in Havana. The trial for the Cuban Five was conducted in Miami, despite objections that the city’s legacy as a bastion of anti-Castro extremists was not conducive to an impartial hearing. The men received lengthy prison sentences, and when jailed, were kept in isolation for extended periods of time.

‘Naked American Hero’ Ordered To Pay $500 For TSA Protest, Promises Appeal

April 5, 2014 Lisa Simeone, www.abombazine.blogspot.com Resist! Human Rights, Surveillance, TSA

We have an update on the case of John Brennan, the man who stripped naked at a TSA checkpoint in April of 2012. We first wrote about Brennan here. We then provided updates here, where he said he wanted a trial, and here, where he was found Not Guilty of "public indecency." But not content with that ruling, the TSA pushed on, charging Brennan with "interefering with the screening process." This week, a judge sided with the TSA . . . and ordered a $500 fine, John Brennan plans to appeal.

We Are Radicals at Heart: A New History Gets America Wrong

March 31, 2014 Harvey J. Kaye, www.thedailybeast.com Educate! History, Human Rights, Thomas Paine

Coming to America in late 1774, already approaching 40, Paine not only had all the makings of a radical. He also carried within him the idea of the “rights of the freeborn Briton”—an idea cultivated by a tradition of “radicalism” that reached from the Peasant Rising of 1381, to the English Revolution of the 1640s (in which the English taught the French how to take off the head of a king), to the popular crowd actions of eighteenth-century London. And yet, he did not become a radical until his arrival in Philadelphia in 1774. Indeed, it was Americans themselves who turned him into a revolutionary and he returned the favor. Impressed by their diversity and rebelliousness, the liberty-loving and democratic spirit that animated their actions, and how they had organized themselves to govern everyday public life and commerce, he wrote Common Sense to enable Americans to see who they were, what they were about, and what they might achieve (“We have it in our power to begin the world over again”), and thereby turned their colonial rebellion into a world-historic revolution for independence and the making of a democratic republic.

Managing Disorder: Towards A Global State Of Control?

March 31, 2014 Jerome Roos, www.roarmag.org Resist! Brazil, Egypt, Freedom of Speech and Assembly, Human Rights, NSA, Police abuse, Spain, Türkiye

It’s not just right-wing or military regimes that are leading the assault on hard-fought popular freedoms. In Brazil, the ruling Workers’ Party announced this week that it would send the army into Rio’s favelas to pacify the slums ahead of the World Cup. Ostensibly targeted at violent drug gangs, this pacification scheme has led to a situation in which hundreds of slum dwellers are killed by state troops every year. Under President Rousseff — a former Marxist guerrilla who was tortured and imprisoned by the military dictatorship — state brutality against the “unruly” poor and excluded remains the order of the day. Just last week, Brazilian military police were caught on camera after shooting and killing a 38-year-old mother of four and dragging her lifeless body 200 meters down the street in their police van. It is no coincidence that the intensification of long-standing patterns of state repression appears to be particularly acute in the countries that experienced large-scale street protest in the past three years.

Suffragettes No More – The Long Struggle For Women’s Equality

March 31, 2014 Ellen Dannin, www.truth-out.org Educate! Democracy, Human Rights, Women's Rights

In many ways, life for American women in the 19th century was similar to the lives of women today under the Taliban. Women were deprived of basic rights, including access to education. Women who owned property lost control of that property when they married. Husbands had the legal right to "correct" their wives with beatings. Women had no right to money they had earned and no rights to make decisions concerning their own children. A proper woman had to be "strait-laced," literally. Women's clothing restricted their movement. Corsets made breathing and digestion difficult, and skirts had to be so long as to fully cover their legs. As a result, women's skirts literally swept the streets. To understand the context in which the women's suffrage movement existed, think about the American 1960s. Both were times of ferment and experimentation, in which authority was challenged; norms were violated and people struggled for equality, justice, true citizenship and shared democratic governance. In both eras, race and civil rights were major struggles. Women's status, rights and autonomy were part of that turbulent period, but so were other liberation and civil rights movements.

Edward Snowden And The Right To Travel

March 30, 2014 Carmen Russell-Sluchansky, www.mintpressnews.com Resist! Human Rights, NSA, Snowden

On March 26, Snowden supporters delivered petitions to the U.S. Department of Justice and State Department. The petition to the Justice Department called on Attorney General Eric Holder and President Barack Obama to “make an unequivocal public commitment not to interfere with the travels or political asylum process of Edward Snowden. The U.S. government must not engage in abduction or any other form of foul play against Mr. Snowden.” The petition to the State Department called on Kerry to restore Snowden’s passport so he can seek asylum, which supporters say is his right under international law. The petition to Kerry reads, “Your revocation of Mr. Snowden’s passport contradicts the words of many U.S. leaders who have often criticized other government for violating the principle of freedom to travel.”

The American Holocaust Remains Unparalleled In Its Ferocity

March 30, 2014 Stephen Lendman, www.fah451bks.wordpress.com Educate! Human Rights, Indigenous Rights, Native Indians

“The American holocaust was and remains unparalleled, in terms of its scope, ferocity, and continuance over time.” Historian Ward Churchill explained four centuries of systematic slaughter. It went on from 1492 – 1892. It continues today against Native culture. Churchill estimated around 100 million Native People throughout the Americas “hacked apart with axes and swords, burned alive and trampled under horses, hunted as game and fed to dogs, shot, beaten, stabbed, scalped for bounty, hanged on meathooks and thrown over the sides of ships at sea, worked to death as slave laborers, intentionally starved and frozen to death during a multitude of forced marches and internments, and, in an unknown number of instances, deliberately infected with epidemic diseases.”

US Human Rights Record Criticized In UN Report

March 29, 2014 Matthew Weaver, www.theguardian.com Educate! Drones, Guantanamo Bay, Human Rights, NSA, Torture

The UN has delivered a withering verdict on the US's human rights record, raising concerns on a series of issues including torture, drone strikes, the failure to close Guantánamo Bay and the NSA's bulk collection of personal data. The report was delivered by the UN's human rights committee in an assessment of how the US is complying with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights [ICCPR], which has been in force since the mid 1970s. The UN committee urged the US to overhaul its surveillance activities to ensure they complied with US law and conformed to US obligations under the ICCPR. In its 11-page report, the committee also criticised the US for failing to prosecute senior members of its armed forces and private contractors involved in torture and targeted killings.

Documentary “American Holocaust” Profiles Indigenous Genocide

March 28, 2014 John Ahni Schertow, www.filmsforaction.org Educate! Human Rights, Indigenous Rights, Native Indians

The powerful and hard-hitting documentary, American Holocaust, is quite possibly the only film that reveals the link between the Nazi holocaust, which claimed at least 6 million Jews, and the American Holocaust which claimed, according to conservative estimates, 19 million Indigenous People. It is seldom noted anywhere in fact, be it in textbooks or on the internet, that Hitler studied America’s “Indian policy”, and used it as a model for what he termed “the final solution.” He wasn’t the only one either. It’s not explicitly mentioned in the film, but it’s well known that members of the National Party government in South Africa studied “the American approach” before they introduced the system of racial apartheid, which lasted from 1948 to 1994. Other fascist regimes, for instance, in South and Central America, studied the same policy.

Protests Against Mass Death Sentences At Egyptian Embassy In DC

March 28, 2014 DC Media Group, www.dcmediagroup.us Resist! Egypt, Human Rights, Protest

An Egyptian court sentenced 529 supporters of former Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi to death on March 24 for killing a police officer. Today protestors from CODEPINK took their objections to the Egyptian Embassy in Washington, DC: “The trial was clearly a sham and your government, which has jailed over 16,000 people since coming to power, is clearly targeting people based on political affiliation.” The alleged supporters of ousted Islamist president Mohamed Morsi were convicted on charges of killing a single police officer, the attempted murder of two other officers, and attacking a police station in the Nile Valley city of Minya in August. Sixteen people were acquitted. The mass sentencing underscored the severity of an ongoing campaign by Egypt’s military-backed leaders to silence opposition, eight months after a military coup ousted Morsi, the country’s first democratically elected leader.

Students & Faculty In Maine Continue To Organize Against Cuts

March 27, 2014 Sarah Lazare, www.commondreams.org Resist! Austerity, Democracy, Education, Freedom of Speech and Assembly, Human Rights, Student Activism

Hundreds of students and university workers rally outside of the law building at the University of Southern Maine Portland campus on Monday, March 24. When University of Southern Maine administrators announced mass faculty firings and departmental cuts, students, faculty, and staff protested by taking over part of a university building last Friday. A few days—and sit-ins and walk-outs—later, their continued mobilization against the "national corporate war on public education" appears to be resonating with students and university workers across the country. Earlier this month, USM president Theo Kalikow and Provost Michael Stevenson announced a push to cut four academic programs—American and New England studies, geosciences, arts and humanities at the school’s Lewiston-Auburn College facility, and recreation and leisure studies—and up to 50 faculty and staff. The first round of lay-offs took place Friday when a dozen faculty members—including tenured professors—were handed "retrenchment" or layoff letters.

Scientists Launch Wake-Up Campaign on Climate Change

March 19, 2014 Jim Lobe, www.ipsnews.net Educate! Energy, Environment, Finance and the Economy, Human Rights

“The projected rate of temperature changes for this century is greater than that of any extended global warming period over the past 65 million years.” Among the impacts are a dramatic shrinkage in Arctic sea ice, the melting of the Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets, the acidification of oceans; the migration of plants and animals toward the poles and stepped up extinction rates; the rise in sea levels; and the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events. While all of these are likely to take place in the coming decades, the report also cited worse-case scenarios – or tail risks, as they are called in the financial world — that are possible, if not probable. Extreme heat events that currently occur only once in every 20 years could well become annual events; sea level rise could reach around two metres by 2100 resulting in storm surges that could extend flooding well beyond those of Superstorm Sandy.

Police Attack Student Protesters in San Fransisco

March 19, 2014 Tyler Kingkade, www.huffingtonpost.com Resist! Freedom of Speech and Assembly, Human Rights, Police abuse, Student Activism

The Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges said that unless CCSF shows remarkable improvement, the commission will proceed with revoking its accreditation in July 2014, effectively shutting down the school. Demonstrators claim that Agrella does not have their best interests in mind, in light of a tabled proposal that would've raised administrators' pay by 19 percent. Agrella said there are no plans to hand out raises, while three vice chancellors are getting 10 to 13 percent more than their approved salaries, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Meanwhile, faculty have seen their salaries cut in recent years. Campus and city police on Thursday blocked the entrance to Conlan Hall, where the protesters had planned to stage a sit-in. In the clash that followed, two protesters were arrested, including one who was pepper sprayed.

It’s Payback Time for McDonald’s!

March 18, 2014 Thom Hartmann www.alternet.com Resist! Corporatism, Human Rights, Solidarity, Worker Rights and Jobs

This is crazy. Doing business in America isn't a right, it's a privilege. Companies get lots of benefits for that privilege, from limitations on their liability and risk, to the ability to pay their executives with options that face a maximum 20 percent tax rate. Their executives can even fly fancy corporate jets and eat $500 dinners and have it all tax-deductible, meaning they're subsidized by working-class taxpayers. To get these privileges, companies should at least conduct themselves to certain minimum standards — like paying their workers a living wage. Right now the only thing in the way of a minimum wage increase are Republicans, who consistently rationalize tax breaks for the rich along with low wages for the working poor by saying that raising the minimum wage will hurt the economy. That’s simply not the case...

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