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Political Prisoner

Mumia Abu-Jamal Has Hepatitis C: Demand Treatment Now!

August 6, 2015 Noelle Hanrahan, www.prisonradio.org , , ,
By Noelle Hanrahan for Prison Radio - Mumia Abu-Jamal remains weak, ill, and in the prison infirmary. Five months after being admitted to the hospital with lethal blood sugar levels and in renal failure, he continues to have a debilitating skin rashes, open wounds and swelling across his lower extremities. Because of our relentless demands for medical testing and treatment, we finally know the likely cause of his severe ailments: Hepatitis C. But what is news to us is not news to his jailers. Prison officials have known that Mumia was Hep. C positive since 2012-- and have done nothing. Even now that prison doctors know that Mumia's Hep. C is active -from testing they performed solely because we demanded it-they are refusing to provide treatment. Today, we are going back to court to demand justice for our brother.

Activist Faces Charges Over Hong Kong ‘White Paper’ Protest

July 8, 2015 Tony Cheung and Joyce Ng, www.scmp.com , , , ,
By Tony Cheung and Joyce Ng in SCMP - Student leader Joshua Wong Chi-fung and three other activists are set to be charged with obstructing police officers during a protest outside the central government's liaison office last summer. They say the move by police, more than a year after the protest took place, appears like a political prosecution. In a WhatsApp message to the media yesterday, Wong, convenor of student group Scholarism, said he was at the airport checking in for a morning flight to Japan to go on holiday when he received a telephone call from Western District crime squad. He was told to report to police by Thursday, when he would be charged. He was accused of obstructing officers in carrying out their duty at a protest outside the liaison office in Western on June 11 last year.

Guantánamo Prisoner On Nine-Year Hunger Strike Will Be Released

June 27, 2015 AP, www.AP.org , , ,
By AP - A prisoner who has been on a nine-year hunger strike to protest against his confinement at the US base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, can now return to his native Saudi Arabia, a government review board said on Friday. The Periodic Review Board, which has been re-evaluating dozens of Guantánamo prisoners previously deemed too dangerous to release, said in a statement published on its website that Abdul Rahman Shalabi can be released to take part in a Saudi government rehabilitation program for militants and would be subject to monitoring afterward. Shalabi, 39, was among the first prisoners taken to Guantánamo in January 2002. He was never charged with a crime but the government said he had been a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden and had links to the external operations chief for al-Qaida, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is facing trial by military commission at Guantánamo.

Did Prison Officials Single Out Barrett Brown For Solitary Confinement?

June 24, 2015 Kit O'Connell, www.mintpressnews.com , ,
By Kit O'Connell in Mint Press News - According to reports from supporters on social media, Texas Department of Criminal Justice officials moved imprisoned journalist Barrett Brown into solitary confinement last week. Brown is an outspoken and controversial journalist who worked closely with Anonymous during the peak of that movement in the early years of this decade. The government noticed this collaboration and targeted Brown for prosecution during their campaign against the hacktivist group Lulzsec, a high-profile subgroup of Anonymous, which also resulted in the imprisonment of political prisoner Jeremy Hammond.

The Plight Of Guantánamo’s Best-Selling Author Worsens

June 11, 2015 Hina Shamsi, www.aclu.org , , , ,
By Hina Shamsi in ACLU - Mohamedou Ould Slahi's 13th year of captivity in Guantánamo has been remarkable in many ways. "Guantánamo Diary," his story of torture and unlawful detention by the United States, was finally published and has become a best-seller, earning rave reviews around the world and a Hollywood movie deal. Readers continue to marvel at a book that's been called a "masterpiece" and "literary magic," written by a man whose "unfailing humanity is the constant thread throughout." Celebrities like Jude Law and Benedict Cumberbatch are reading Mohamedou's work for a global audience. Almost 50,000 people have signed the ACLU's petition calling for his freedom. But Mohamedou's despair only grows, because the Obama administration is still denying this innocent man what he most urgently needs: freedom.

Black Panther Ordered Released After 40 Yrs In Solitary Confinement

June 9, 2015 Cain Burdeau, www.huffingtonpost.com , , ,
By Cain Burdeau in Huffington Post - The last of the "Angola Three" inmates, whose decades in solitary confinement on a Louisiana prison farm drew international condemnation and became the subject of two documentaries, was ordered released Monday. The ruling would free 68-year-old Albert Woodfox after more than 40 years in solitary, which human rights experts have said constitutes torture. U.S. District Judge James Brady of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, ordered the release of Woodfox and took the extraordinary step of barring Louisiana prosecutors from trying him for a third time. A spokesman for the Louisiana attorney general said the state would appeal Brady's ruling to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals "to make sure this murderer stays in prison and remains fully accountable for his actions."

Released From Prison, Anti-Nuclear Activist Nun Speaks Out

June 6, 2015 Lisa De Bode, www.america.aljazeera.com , ,
Megan Rice, an 85-year-old nun who broke into the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in 2012, along with fellow anti-nuclear activists Michael Walli and Gregory Boertje-Obed, was charged with sabotage and damaging federal property and spent about two years in federal prison. They were released on May 16 after the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned their sabotage convictions while upholding their convictions for the less serious crime of injury to government property and ordering the original court to resentence them on the lesser crime. They don't regret their actions, and remain devoted to their cause.

Jeremy Hammond Promotes Prison Abolition From Behind Bars

June 1, 2015 Kit O'Connell, www.truth-out.org , ,
By Kit O'Connell in Truthout - Hammond's message of prison abolition is closely aligned to his previous work as an anti-racist activist. A disproportionate number of America's incarcerated 1 percent are black (40 percent of the prison population) and Latino (20 percent), an effect that can only be credited to systemic racism since studies consistently show that people of color do not commit more or worse crimes than whites. It's not unusual for an activist-turned-political prisoner to emerge with a renewed passion for fixing the prison system - two members of Pussy Riot even started a prison reform charity. Hammond, however, is dedicated to total prison abolition and to expressing those views, even though his words are read by censors who can and will punish him for his views. Truthout spoke with Grace North, director of the Jeremy Hammond Defense Committee. North, who prefers gender-neutral pronouns, told us about how prison officials have reacted to Hammond's abolitionist viewpoint.

Freedom For Nestora Salgado

May 31, 2015 Free Nestora, popularresistance.org , , ,
By Free Nestora, The U.S. Campaign to Free Nestora Salgado is sending a delegation, including Salgado's daughter Grisel Rodriguez, to Mexico City on May 31 in an urgent effort to win Salgado’s release. She has spent nearly two years in prison, despite a Mexican federal judge's order to release her. The delegation will speak at a press conference on Monday, June 1, 12:00pm (Central Time) at the Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez Human Rights Center (Center Prodh) in Mexico City. The families of other Mexican political prisoners will also be present. The delegation plans to visit the U.S. embassy to request a copy of Mexico’s notification to the U.S. that Salgado had been arrested. Requests for this information by the family have so far been unsuccessful.

Whistleblower Kiriakou Joins Activists To Write To Political Prisoners

May 27, 2015 Sean Nevins, www.mintpressnews.com , , ,
On Wednesday, CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou joined activists at Code Pink’s brightly painted “Pink House” in northeast Washington, D.C., to write letters to imprisoned activists, dissenters, and people who are sometimes viewed as political prisoners. “The first one I wrote to Chelsea Manning and the second one I’m writing to is James Williams,” said Katie, 19, an intern for the anti-war group Code Pink, who helped organize the gathering. Williams is a federal inmate, who Kiriakou maintains has mental health problems and is having a difficult time in prison. Prisoners’ names and addresses, such as Jeremy Hammond, Mutulu Shakur and Oscar Lopez Rivera, were printed onto a list and spread out on a coffee table. Nalini, another 19-year-old intern for Code Pink, sat on a pink sofa, mulling over whom to write to.

Jeremy Hammond Deserves Our Praise For Hacking Stratfor

May 15, 2015 Kit O'Connell, www.mintpressnews.com , , , , ,
The mainstream media has devoted hundreds of articles to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the subject of the Oscar-winning documentary “Citizenfour,” but it’s not devoted the same level of attention to many other whistleblowers and political prisoners, like Jeremy Hammond, no matter how sensational the facts they revealed. In November 2013, a federal court sentenced Hammond to 10 years in prison for his part in the hack of Strategic Forecasting, an Austin, Texas-based corporate intelligence agency, also known as Stratfor. Working on behalf of Lulzsec, an infamous subgroup of Anonymous, Hammond leaked 5 million private emails taken from Stratfor to the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks, a release that came to be known as the Global Intelligence Files, or GI Files.

Canada May Charge BDS Supporters With Hate Crimes

May 12, 2015 Neil Macdonald, www.cbc.ca , , , ,
The Harper government is signalling its intention to use hate crime laws against Canadian advocacy groups that encourage boycotts of Israel. Such a move could target a range of civil society organizations, from the United Church of Canada and the Canadian Quakers to campus protest groups and labour unions. If carried out, it would be a remarkably aggressive tactic, and another measure of the Conservative government's lockstep support for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. While the federal government certainly has the authority to assign priorities, such as pursuing certain types of hate speech, to the RCMP, any resulting prosecution would require an assent from a provincial attorney general. And it would almost certainly be challenged under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, civil liberties groups say.

CIA Whistleblower Sentenced To 3.5 Years In Prison

May 12, 2015 Peter Maass, www.firstlook.org ,
Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA agent convicted of sharing classified information with a New York Times reporter, was sentenced today to three and a half years in prison, a significantly shorter term than had been expected. Sterling’s lawyers had asked the judge not to abide by sentencing guidelines calling for 19 to 24 years behind bars. They argued Sterling should be treated with the same leniency shown to former Gen. David Petraeus, who was allowed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor and avoid prison after admitting to leaking classified information to his biographer and then-girlfriend, Paula Broadwell. Sterling’s lawyers also pointed to the case of former CIA agent John Kiriakou, who was recently released from jail after a 30-month sentence for disclosing the name of a covert agent to a reporter, and to the 13-month-sentence handed down to Stephen Kim, who pleaded guilty to talking about a classified document with a Fox News reporter.

Black Lives Matter Raising $90,000 Bail For Jailed Activist

April 18, 2015 Tasbeeh Herwess, www.magazine.good.is , , , ,
Black Lives Matter (BLM) is mounting a campaign to crowdfund $90,000 for the bail of 28-year-old Jasmine Richards, a Pasadena-based activist who was arrested on a slew of charges related to a protest against police brutality that she helped organize. Richards was arrested on Monday, just as she was preparing to appear at a City Council meeting to talk about the death of Kendrec McDade, an unarmed black teenager who was shot seven times and killed by Pasadena police officers in 2012. “[Richards] has been working tirelessly to build a BLM Pasadena chapter, so black folks in Pasadena know their lives matter,” said BLM organizers in a statement. “Courageously, Jasmine reached out to Anya Slaughter, Kendrec McDade's mother, making sure that she had a community supporting her in seeking justice for Kendrec.”

Stop Trying To Kill My Husband; Free Mumia Now!!

April 7, 2015 Wadiya Jamal, , , ,
Enough is enough!!! Today is my birthday. April 24 is Mumia’s 61st birthday. But today my husband is in critical condition in a cell in the infirmary at SCI Mahanoy. We need Mumia free and home!!! This rotten ass system has made many attempts on my husband's life when his only crime is that on December 9, 1981 he survived a cop’s gunshot to the chest through his lungs to the liver, a serious ass whipping by cops on the street of 13th and Locust, then cops surrounding his hospital bed stepping on his urine bag making the poison go back up into his body. He is innocent in the murder of police officer Daniel Faulkner and the cops on the scene all knew that. But Mumia was convicted for a murder he did not commit and sentenced to death. For over 30 years my husband was on death row in solitary confinement!!! where he was caged 24 hours a day, in his cell and even when outside. In general population these past three years, he has yet to receive his correct diet,!!!
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