The military stopped providing daily updates of the six-month hunger strike in September, saying the strike was mostly over. However, the Miami Herald has continued counting. The numbers continue to hover around a dozen. As of this writing, 15 prisoners are on hunger strike, all of whom are being force-fed...
November 2013 Archives
Susan Rice imposed an ultimatum on the Afghan government Monday to sign a "security agreement" (which includes $4 billion in annual funding for the Afghan military) or face the complete and final pullout of American troops by the end of 2014.
U.S. Ambassador James Cunningham quickly expressed reluctance to carry out that threat.
Angered by unrelenting U.S. drone strikes on civilians, President Karzai has added the release of Guantanamo inmates to his list of conditions.
In practice, [closing Guantanamo] means transferring the inmates to another prison...
in anything resembling a free and just society, when a state tortures someone and messes up the chance at due process, the only possibly moral thing to do is let them go...
releases have slowed to a halt under Obama. We need to examine a few of the rationales being used to keep these people imprisoned, and consider the deeper principles involved.
until we exhaust all available avenues to stop crimes committed with electoral sanction. And I'm not plugging writing to Congresspeople here.
"Good Germans" found themselves in the unconvincing position of claiming that they didn't know what was going on under their noses (a look at the historical record reveals the opposite.)
The "legal immunity" demanded of the Afghanistan government for American troops occupying that country could just wind up biting the rest of us in the ass. We have the relative luxury to mount political resistance not available to many of the victims of U.S. imperialism. We can still reverse the fascist direction of society, but time is running out.
As Daniel Ellsberg reminded us in a speech in 2006, it's a short jump to the dark side. It can happen almost overnight.
Interrogation of terror suspects before putting them into the federal courts system "has been a goldmine for us" he said. "The [president] and the Congress should look into codifying this into law ... because I think it's going to become an increasingly important practice. There will be a need for this sort of interrogation."
"Can we imagine what it feels like to live in such constant terror? Do we, as Americans, understand the implications of our foreign policy on other people's lives? Are we even aware of the amount of harm, fear and insecurity that we are forcing upon other peoples? Not at all. -- Shawndeez Jadal
Dressed in all black with solemn expressions on their faces, students from UC and nearby schools stood on the steps of Sproul Hall midday Wednesday to silently protest the government use of drones both domestically and overseas...
Last Saturday, for the first time, the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights, founded in 1986, heard a case relating to the program of rendition and torture established under George W. Bush after the 9/11 attacks, with particular reference to US crimes committed on African soil.
The case was brought by the Global Justice Clinic, based at the Center for Human Rights and Justice at New York University School of Law and by the London-based INTERIGHTS (the International Centre for the Legal Protection of Human Rights), and it concerns the role played by Djibouti, in the Horn of Africa, as part of the program of rendition, secret detention and torture run by the CIA on Bush's orders, with specific reference to the case of Mohammed al-Asad, a Yemeni citizen, who, as the Global Justice Clinic explained in a press release, "was secretly detained, tortured and interrogated in Djibouti for several weeks in 2003 and 2004 before being forcibly transferred to a CIA 'black site'...
see African Human
Rights Commission Hears Evidence About CIA Rendition and Torture
Help kick start the ebook production of Redact
This! Artists Against Torture, an artistic response to acts of torture
during the U.S. "War on Terror."
Redact This! images serve to "perpetuate the memory" of these crimes against humanity so that the people of the world never halt their struggle to end torture.
Each of the pieces found in this book stands on its own as a unique protest against the use of torture, anywhere, everywhere, for any reason, always...
Continue reading Artists Against Torture.
Nicolas J.S. Davies talks about the destruction of Iraq in the context of holding the U.S. government and its functionaries accountable:
The invasion was not just some sort of mistake. The invasion and occupation were a serious crime, a crime of aggression under the UN Charter as (then-Secretary General) Kofi Annan acknowledged. And aggression was defined under the Nuremberg principles and by the judges at Nuremberg as the supreme international crime...
The US military says the hunger strike at Guantanamo, which lasted more than six months and aimed to end the injustices within the prison, is officially over. The military has stopped issuing daily updates of the number of strikers. The Miami Herald, however, hasn't stopped...
Amid Lingering Hunger Strike, Guantanamo Abuses Press On
"I have known Shaker for some time. Because he is so eloquent and outspoken about the injustices of Guantanamo, he is very definitely viewed as a threat by the US. Not in the sense of being an extremist, but in the sense of being someone who can rather eloquently criticize the nightmare that happened there." -- Clive Stafford Smith
painting by Kate Mahoney
This system was set up to ensure
that the U.S. government's torture program would never face trial, and so far
it has succeeded. For the past decade, Guantánamo has been a parallel universe
where information tainted by torture may be admitted as evidence, where the
centuries-old attorney-client privilege is subject to arbitrary interference by
military officials, and where people spend a decade or more waiting for a day
in court. -- Vincent Warren, Executive Director Center for Constitutional Rights
With great fanfare, the UC Berkeley campus community will symbolically usher in the tenure of its new chancellor, Nicholas Dirks, at his inauguration Friday...
Chancellor Nicholas Dirks took office in June, replacing Robert Birgeneau.
The retirement of UC torture apologists Robert Birgeneau and Christopher Edley provides an opening for restoration of ethical leadership at the university, and ending school complicity in sheltering a war criminal. There is no reason to despair of revising the legacy of Berkeley Law. Indeed, respecting the student call for a now long overdue investigation of the actions of John Yoo at the Department of Justice could go a long way towards restoring the moral health at other institutions.
Campus spokesperson Dan Mogulof says "We will be prepared for people who want their voices to be heard [here's your chance], but I think the day will be mostly positive." Former U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security, UC President Janet Napolitano, no stranger to student protest, will present Dirks with the Chancellor's Medal. The activist group By Any Means Necessary will be on hand to advocate her replacement.
"Having worked
in the White House under two presidents, I am exceptionally sensitive to the
complex, ineffable boundary between policymaking and law-declaring. I know that
Professor Yoo continues to believe his legal reasoning was sound, but I do not
know whether he believes that the Department of Defense and CIA made political
or moral mistakes in the way they exercised the discretion his memoranda
declared available to them within the law. As critical as I am of his analyses,
no argument about what he did or didn't facilitate, or about his special
obligations as an attorney, makes his conduct morally equivalent to that of his
nominal clients, Secretary Rumsfeld, et al., or comparable to the conduct of interrogators
distant in time, rank and place. The law does not criminalize every immoral
act, however, and there is a strong argument that these more direct actors get a 'pass' because they relied on the DOJ memoranda. -- Dean
Christopher Edley, Jr
UC Berkeley Billboard
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Events & Calendars
Important Reading
Physicians for Human RightsBroken Laws, Broken Lives
NLG White Paper
ON THE LAW OF TORTURE...
The President's Executioner
Detention and torture in Guantanamo
