Torture

Poland Makes $250,000 Payout To Torture Victims

May 16, 2015 Vanessa Gera, www.bigstory.ap.org Educate! CIA, Human Rights, Poland, Torture

Poland is paying a quarter of a million dollars to two terror suspects allegedly tortured by the CIA in a secret facility in this country — prompting outrage among many here who feel they are being punished for American wrongdoing. Europe's top human rights court imposed the penalty against Poland, setting a Saturday deadline. It irks many in Poland that their country is facing legal repercussions for the secret rendition and detention program which the CIA operated under then-President George W. Bush in several countries across the world after the 9/11 attacks. So far no U.S. officials have been held accountable, but the European Court of Human Rights has shown that it doesn't want to let European powers that helped the program off the hook. The court also ordered Macedonia in 2012 to pay 60,000 euros ($68,000) to a Lebanese-German man who was seized in Macedonia on erroneous suspicion of terrorist ties and subjected to abuse by the CIA.

Reparations: A Blueprint To Address Systemic Police Violence

May 14, 2015 Joey Mogul, www.peopleslawoffice.com Strategize! Chicago, Education, Reparations, Social Justice, Torture

The City of Chicago made history on Wednesday May 6 when it passed legislation providing reparations to survivors of racially motivated police torture committed between 1972 and 1991. Once implemented, it will offer a measure of hope to survivors, their family members and African American communities devastated by the legacy of torture committed by infamous former Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge and detectives under his command. It represents a bold break with the status quo, representing the first time that a municipality in the United States – - a nation with a long tradition of unanswered calls for redress for systemic race based violence, including slavery and lynchings – - will provide reparations to those harmed by law enforcement violence.

Obama Administration Faces Mounting Pressure To Answer For Torture

May 12, 2015 Ali Watkins, www.huffingtonpost.com Resist! Human Rights, Obama, Torture

The Obama administration is facing renewed pressure to answer for its track record on torture after the relative calm that followed the release of the Senate torture report’s damning executive summary in December. In a letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch Friday, human rights group Amnesty International pressed the Justice Department to revisit its decision not to prosecute former officials from the CIA and the George W. Bush administration for their involvement in the agency’s post-9/11 torture program. The new evidence from the report prepared by the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence merits another look, says Salil Shetty, secretary general of Amnesty International, in the letter. “As the new Attorney General you have a critical responsibility to ensure the USA complies with its international human rights obligations to effectively investigate evidence of crimes under international law and to bring the suspected perpetrators to justice,” reads the letter, which is expected to arrive on Lynch’s desk Monday.

Chicago To Pay Reparations To People Police Tortured Decades Ago

May 8, 2015 Arijeta Lajka, www.news.vice.com Educate! Chicago, police brutality, Reparations, Torture

Chicago approved an unprecedented deal on Wednesday to compensate victims that were tortured while in police custody between the 1970s and 1980s under a former police commander. Along with a formal apology, the Chicago City Council unanimously agreed to award a total of $5.5 million to living survivors with abuse claims, up to $100,000 per person. Survivors and their family members may also receive counseling and free college tuition in city schools. More than 100 people experienced torture, many were African-Americans from the poverty-stricken South Side. Under former Chicago police commander Jon Burge's regime, suspects in his custody experienced electric shocks, burns, and mock executions, along with other violent treatments. Mayor Rahm Emanuel said that the decision would "bring this dark chapter of Chicago's history to a close," highlighting that Burge's actions are a disgrace.

Police Violence Shows US Hypocrisy On Human Rights Seen Worldwide

May 8, 2015 Kitty Stapp, www.ipsnews.net Educate! Human Rights, police brutality, Racial Justice, Torture, usa

Since being roundly chastised last fall by the U.N. Committee Against Torture for excessive use of force by its law enforcement agencies, the United States hasn’t exactly managed to repair its international reputation. Fatal beatings and shootings of African American and Latino citizens, mainly men, by the police have continued seemingly unabated, with the latest being the widely publicised case of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryland. Gray, 25, died Apr. 19 of spinal cord injuries in what has been ruled a homicide after being arrested for allegedly carrying an illegal pocket knife. Six officers have since been charged in his murder. "As the U.S. claims a human rights mantle and criticises others for racism, it becomes the world’s greatest hypocrite." -- Michael Ratner The wave of cases – many caught on camera and shared via social media – have sparked a nationwide protest campaign grouped under the hashtag #blacklivesmatter.

NLG Files Urgent Appeal To UN For Mumia Abu-Jamal

May 6, 2015 Tasha Moro, www.popularresistance.org Resist! Criminal Justice and Prisons, health, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Torture

NEW YORK, NY - Members of the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) Heidi Boghosian and Natsu Saito, with Kathleen Cleaver of the Human Rights Research Fund, today delivered an Urgent Appeal Request on behalf of Mumia Abu-Jamal to Juan Méndez, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture. The Request addresses the life-threatening denial of medical care to the 61-year-old journalist, political activist, and human rights defender who has been described as “perhaps America’s most famous prisoner.” According to the Request, Mr. Abu-Jamal, currently in the custody of the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, has life-threatening medical conditions that have been caused and/or exacerbated by his conditions of confinement. It reports that prison officials have consistently denied him appropriate medical treatment and adequate nutrition, and blocked access to his doctors, his lawyers and his family members.

Whistleblower Urges Journalists Tell ‘Full Story’ Of US Torture

May 4, 2015 John Casey, www.thebureauinvestigates.com Educate! CIA, Journalism, Media, Torture, usa

CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou, who exposed the treatment of al Qaeda suspects held in secret prisons, told the Bureau today it was now down to journalists to “tell the full story” about the intelligence agency’s torture programme because politicians did not have the will. In a video interview on the last day of his house arrest recorded for the Bureau by film-maker Tarquin Ramsay, the former CIA counter-terrorism analyst called on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence to release more details from its 6,000-page report on CIA torture completed last December. The committee published a heavily redacted 525-page executive summary, which contained shocking details about “enhanced interrogation” techniques. Kiriakou said the release of more details was vital, not only for accountability, but also to avoid a repeat of the programme in the future.

Cop Accused Of Torturing Black Suspects Costs Chicago $5.5 million

April 16, 2015 Michael E. Miller, www.washingtonpost.com Educate! Chicago, police brutality, Torture

Whenever Chicago Police commander Jon Burge needed a confession, he would walk into the interrogation room and set down a little black box, his alleged victims would later tell prosecutors. The box had two wires and a crank. Burge, they alleged, would attach one wire to the suspect’s handcuffed ankles and the other to his manacled hands. Then, they said, Burge would place a plastic bag over the suspect’s head. Finally, he would crank his little black box and listen to the screams of pain as electricity coursed through the suspect’s body. “When he hit me with the voltage, that’s when I started gritting, crying, hollering. … It [felt] like a thousand needles going through my body,” Anthony Holmes told prosecutors during a 2006 investigation into Burge. “And then after that, it just [felt] like, you know—it [felt] like something just burning me from the inside, and, um, I shook, I gritted, I hollered, then I passed out.”

DEA Sued Over Mass Surveillance Programs

April 10, 2015 Human Rights Watch, www.hrw.org Resist! Human Rights, Surveillance, Torture

Human Rights Watch filed suit on April 7, 2015, against the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) for illegally collecting records of the organization’s telephone calls to foreign countries. The DEA disclosed the existence of its mass surveillance program in January 2015, after a federal judge ordered the government to disclose more information about the program. The agency made the disclosure in a criminal case against a man accused of violating export restrictions on goods to Iran. “At Human Rights Watch we work with people who are sometimes in life or death situations, where speaking out can make them a target,” said Dinah PoKempner, general counsel at Human Rights Watch.

Release Gitmo Force-Feeding Videos, Media Outlets Tell Obama

April 3, 2015 Reprieve, www.reprieve.org.uk Resist! Human Rights, Media, Torture

Sixteen major media organizations and human rights organization Reprieve have today asked a US federal court to dismiss a White House attempt to suppress classified videos of force-feeding at Guantanamo Bay. In a series of filings today at the DC Court of Appeals, lawyers for Reprieve and the media outlets – which include the New York Times, Washington Post, Associated Press and Reuters – asked the court to dismiss an appeal by the Obama Administration against a landmark ruling last year ordering the videotapes to be made public. The October 2014 ruling in Dhiab v Obama was the first of its kind, and came after the media organizations asked for the tapes to be made public under the First Amendment of the US Constitution.

Judge Orders Thousands Of Torture Photos To Be Made Public

March 22, 2015 Kevin Gosztola, www.dissenter.firedoglake.com Resist! Criminal Justice, Torture, Wars and Militarism

A federal district court judge will no longer accept the United States government’s secrecy arguments and has ruled that it must release thousands of photographs of detainee abuse and torture in Afghanistan and Iraq, including inhumane treatment at Abu Ghraib prison. The government is “required to disclose each and all the photographs responsive” to the Freedom of Information Act request submitted by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU),” according to the order by Judge Alvin Hellerstein of the US District Court of the Southern District of New York. Hellerstein found that the government still had failed to justify keeping each individual photograph secret. However, the judge stayed the order for 60 days so the Solicitor General could determine whether to file an appeal.

Chelsea Manning: CIA Torturers Should Be Held Accountable

March 10, 2015 Chelsea E Manning, www.theguardian.com Resist! Chelsea Manning, Criminal Justice, Senate, Torture

Torture is clearly defined as one of these offenses. And, while the treaty precludes extradition for offenses that are deemed as “a political offense”, it also excludes “murder or other wilful crime, punishable under the laws of both [nations] with a penalty of at least one year”. Torture, then, is not deemed a political offense. However, while the treaty does not bind either nation to extradite its own citizens – making automatic extradition impossible – under the law, the US Secretary of State has the power to order the surrender of any US citizen whose extradition has been requested. I believe that if such a request should come before the Secretary of State, then he (or she) is morally and ethically obligated to grant it or risk further degrading the credibility of the US before the rest of the world and implicitly endorsing other countries that still use torture as a political weapon against their own citizens.

The Rise Of A ‘Democratic’ Fascism

March 9, 2015 John Pilger, www.consortiumnews.com Educate! Fascism, History, Middle East, Torture

The recent 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz was a reminder of the great crime of fascism, whose Nazi iconography is embedded in our consciousness. Fascism is preserved as history, as flickering footage of goose-stepping blackshirts, their criminality terrible and clear. Yet in the same liberal societies, whose war-making elites urge us never to forget, the accelerating danger of a modern kind of fascism is suppressed; for it is their fascism. “To initiate a war of aggression…,” said the Nuremberg Tribunal judges in 1946, “is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” Had the Nazis not invaded Europe, Auschwitz and the Holocaust would not have happened.

Anarchists Storm Greek Ruling Party HQ

March 9, 2015 AFP, www.france24.com Educate! Anarchism, Greece, Prison, Syriza, Torture

Anarchists occupied Greece's ruling party headquarters on Sunday in support of hunger strikers protesting against conditions in the country's maximum-security jails. A group of 50 anarchists burst into the offices of the radical left-wing Syriza party in downtown Athens on Sunday, forcing staff to leave the building, party officials said. "I was inside my office giving my first official interview to a radio station," the party's new spokeswoman Rania Svigou told AFP. "I had locked the door so I wouldn't be disturbed. Then I heard banging and shouting." she said. "I finished the interview and went out to see what was happening and they told us to get out," she added. Svigou said party workers did not call the police. Syriza has often criticised heavy-handed policing of anti-austerity protests in the past.

End US Blockade Of Cuba & Military Occupation Of Guantanamo!

March 7, 2015 Marsha Coleman-Adebayo and Manolo De Los Santos, www.blackagendareport.com Educate! Cuba, Guantanamo, Imperialism, Police, Racial Justice, Torture

Cuba has secured these rights for black people, however… there is still much work to do. We have a responsibility, as people of color worldwide to defend all of the advances that Cuba has made. Cuba is a country that has stuck its neck out for Black liberation struggles around the world, not to mention the liberation struggles in Angola and many of countries and the strong role Cuba played in the liberation of South Africa in freeing Nelson Mandela. One must acknowledge what is currently happening, that Cuba was the first country to step up to fight the Ebola virus. When most countries, only committed money (and we don’t know where this money goes), Cuba actually put up the lives of its doctors to stop the virus. It’s amazing how Cuba has offered scholarships to young black people from all over the African continent and all across the America’s to come study here and become professionals.

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