LinkBlog: abuse

Sara Kruzan was 11 years old, a middle school student from Riverside, Calif., when she met a man -- he called himself GG -- who was almost three times her age. GG took her under his wing; he would buy her gifts, take her and her friends rollerskating. "He was like a father figure," she recalls. Despite suffering severe bouts of depression as a child, until then, Kruzan was a good student, an "overachiever" in her words. But her mother was abusive and addicted to drugs; as for her father, she had only met him a couple of times. So, more and more, GG filled in. "GG was there -- sometimes," she said. "He would talk to me and take me out and give me all these lavish gifts and do all these things for me …" Before long, he started talking to her about sex, giving her his expert advice on what men were really like and telling her that she didn't "need to give it up for free." Unbeknownst to her, GG was grooming Kruzan to be a prostitute. When she was 13, he raped her. "He uses his manhood to hurt," Kruzan recalls, "Like, break you in. I guess." Kruzan worked for GG as a prostitute for three years. The hours were 6 p.m. until 5:30 or 6 in the morning. She and "the other girls" would come back and hand over their earnings to him. "He was, like, married to all of us I guess," she says. " … Everything was his." After years of prostitution and sexual abuse, when she was 16, Kruzan snapped: She killed GG, was arrested and convicted of first-degree murder. Despite attempts by her lawyer to have her sentenced as a juvenile, the judge described her crime as "well thought-out" and sentenced her to life without parole. "My judge told me that I lacked moral scruples," she recalls, a term she did not know the meaning of.

On December 4, 2008, Specialist Brandon Neely approached CSHRA with testimony he wished to contribute to the Guantánamo Testimonials Project. He believed that insufficient attention had been paid to "the hell that went on at Camp X-Ray." He would be in a position to know, as he arrived in Guantánamo while the cages of Camp X-Ray were still being welded, and escorted the second detainee to hit the prison grounds. In this interview, Specialist Neely provides testimony of the arrival of the detainees in full sensory-deprivation garb, sexual abuse by medical personnel, torture by other medical personnel, brutal beatings out of frustration, fear, and retribution, the first hunger strike and its causes, torturous shackling, positional torture, interference with religious practices and beliefs, verbal abuse, restriction of recreation, the behavior of mentally ill detainees, possible isolation regime of the first six children in GTMO, utter lack of preparation for guarding individuals detained during the War on Terror, and his conversations with prisoners David Hicks and Rhuhel Ahmed.

Because my commercial flight was canceled, I got a ride back to the United States on a military transport. I happened to be seated next to a military physician who had been flown in to do the autopsy on al-Hanashi. When would there be an investigation of the death, I asked him? “That was the investigation,” he replied. The military had investigated the military. This “apparent suicide” seemed immediately suspicious to me. I had just toured those cells: it is literally impossible to kill yourself in them. Their interiors resemble the inside of a smooth plastic jar; there are no hard edges; hooks fold down; there is no bedding that one can use to strangle oneself. Can you bang your head against the wall until you die, theoretically, I asked the doctor? “They check on prisoners every three minutes,” he said. You’d have to be fast. The story smelled even worse after a bit of digging. Al-Hanashi, it turned out, had been elected by the detainees to serve as their representative. (The Geneva Conventions call for this process but the US did not give it any formal recognition). As their designated representative, al-Hanashi knew which prisoners had claimed to have been tortured or abused, and by whom. On January 17, al-Hanashi, according to his fellow prisoner Binyam Mohamed (who has since been released), was summoned to a meeting with the Admiral of Guantánamo and the head of the Guard Force there. He never returned to his cell. He was taken to the psychiatric ward, where, according to another prisoner who had been there, he was kept until he died.

If Bush were in his third term, some of his first and second term secrets might, by now, have been forced out into the open by lawsuits, but what Americans actually read wouldn't be significantly worse than what we'd already known. What documents saw the light of day would surely have had large portions of their pages redacted, and the vast bulk of documentation that might prove threatening would remain hidden from the public eye. Bush's lawyers would be fighting in court, with ever grander claims of executive power, to keep his wrongdoing out of sight. Now, here's the funny part. This dark fantasy of a third Bush term is also an accurate portrait of Obama's first term to date. In following Bush, Obama was given the opportunity either to restore the rule of law and the balance of powers or to firmly establish in place what were otherwise aberrant abuses of power. Thus far, President Obama has, in all the areas mentioned above, chosen the latter course. Everything described, from the continuation of crimes to the efforts to hide them away, from the corruption of corporate power to the assertion of the executive power to legislate, is Obama's presidency in its first seven months.

Today’s slavery focuses on big profits and cheap lives. It is not about owning people like before, but about using them as completely disposable tools for making money.

According to two sources—one who has read a draft of the paper and one who was briefed on it—the report describes how one detainee, suspected USS Cole bomber Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, was threatened with a gun and a power drill during the course of CIA interrogation. According to the sources, who like others quoted in this article asked not to be named while discussing sensitive information, Nashiri's interrogators brandished the gun in an effort to convince him that he was going to be shot. Interrogators also turned on a power drill and held it near him. "The purpose was to scare him into giving [information] up," said one of the sources. A federal law banning the use of torture expressly forbids threatening a detainee with "imminent death."

Technology is a double-edged sword, the cliche goes. It can save and even extend your life, but it can also kill you in new and unpredictable ways. In the several years since the Arizona-based Taser International has deployed its terminologically challenging Electronic Control Devices (ECDs), colloquially known as stun guns or simply tasers, what started out as a midrange law enforcement weapon has turned into a surreal nightmare that has gone viral from streets to screens. It's now to the point that only a hyperreal comedian like Stephen Colbert can make sense of it.

A Boise, Idaho, police officer who pushed a Taser inside a man’s buttocks and threatened to “Taser his balls” violated use-of-force policy, but didn’t break the law, an ombudsman has found.

Why is Padilla’s lawsuit important? Because the ultimate ruling in the case will apply not just to him but also to all Americans. The suit alleges that the U.S. government took Padilla into custody and held him for several years without charge, until finally indicting him and convicting him in federal district court of the federal crime of terrorism. For years prior to the indictment, Padilla was held in the custody of the U.S. military, where he was denied right to counsel, the right to due process of law, the right to bail, the right to a speedy trial, the right to a jury trial, and other procedural protections guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. He was also subjected to torture, sensory deprivation, isolation, sleep deprivation, and many other cruel and unusual pre-trial measures. The government takes the position that it had the legitimate authority to do these things to Padilla and that it, in fact, has the legitimate authority to do them to every other American, as part of its ”war on terrorism.“ Yoo is saying that as a government lawyer who was just delivering legal opinions, he is immune from Padilla’s suit. The district judge disagreed. He held that the U.S. government lacks constitutional authority to subject the American people to such treatment and that any lawyer who knowingly participates in a scheme to subject Americans to such mistreatment is not immune from suit. Given the predilection of the courts against interlocutory appeals, in my opinion the Court of Appeals will quickly rule against Yoo’s appeal, enabling Padilla to continue with his case and begin taking sworn depositions. That will be when things start to get interesting.

Her daughter, referred to only as K, was born three months prematurely with severe medical complications. Officials felt the first-time mother lacked the intelligence to cope with the child and care for her in safety. K was eventually discharged from hospital and given to a foster family. But although her health has now improved to the point where she needs little or no day-to-day care, the child is due to be handed to adoptive parents within three months. Rachel will then be barred from further contact. The adoption is going ahead despite a recent psychiatrist's report which declared that the 24-year-old has 'good literacy and numeracy and that her general intellectual abilities appear to be within the normal range'. It said the unemployed former cleaner had no previous history of learning disability or mental illness.

An observation by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who investigated the Abu Ghraib abuses, seems to underscore my point. "I am not sure what purpose [releasing the 2,000 additional photos of prisoner abuse] would serve other than a legal one and the consequence would be to imperil our troops, the only protectors of our foreign policy – " Hold it right there: Taguba said "protectors of our foreign policy," not "defenders of our independence" or "guardians of our liberties." The foreign policy referred to entails open-ended entanglements in the affairs of nearly every nation on earth, as well as plundering huge sums from taxpayers to sustain a grotesquely huge military establishment and bribe political elites abroad. That foreign policy cultivates misery and harvests war and terrorism. Why in God's Name would any decent human being defend that foreign policy in the abstract, much less spill blood to implement it?

What gives, I think, is that Gitmo is but a prototype, with a view of every police station and every county jail in the US of A being eventually gitmoized. And while they ain't there yet, not by a long shot, I can't help but say that some progress is apparantly being made in that direction.

But Alfa is not talking about Mexico's notorious drug lords. In his testimony to the Chihuahua Human Rights Commission, Alfa is describing being abducted by the military -- the forces that are supposed to protect the civilians in President Felipe Calderón's war against drug cartels. The body count has dropped since Calderón deployed troops to patrol Ciudad Juárez. But the fear of being arrested for practically no reason, "disappeared" for days, and tortured by the very force that is supposed to protect the population, is on the rise.

In a stunning development, powerful Democratic congresswoman Jane Harman has been busted via wiretap for promising the AIPAC lobbying group that she would get a couple of spies off the hook. As Congressional Quarterly's Jeff Stein, Glenn Greenwald, Raw Story and others point out, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales blackmailed Harman into support warrantless spying on Americans by threatening to prosecute her for her little AIPAC episode if she didn't play ball.

I DID NOT RESIST OR FIGHT BACK. YET I WAS TAZERED REPEATEDLY AND SHOVED IN BROKEN GLASS REPEATEDLY! I was IN the United States!!! I had crossed no international border!!! This occured on the night of April 14/15, 2009.

The court filings in a lawsuit filed by Fong Lee's family against Minneapolis police and the officer who fired the fatal shots, along with a review of police reports, witness statements and other documents, raise the possibility that Fong Lee was unarmed when an officer shot him eight times — and that the pistol that officers said they found near his body was placed there after the shooting. The gun in question had been recovered earlier after a burglary and turned over to police, who kept it as evidence and had never returned it to its owner. Moreover, Minneapolis police "may have tried to deliberately alter history by writing new reports indicating the gun recovered near Fong Lee's body was not the same gun" that had been recovered after the burglary, according to Richard Hechter, a lawyer representing Fong Lee's family, wrote in an affidavit filed in U.S. District Court on Monday.

Today, three decades after the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime, marks the beginning of the first substantial hearing in the trial of a senior Khmer Rouge official before the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia. Kaing Guek Eav, or Duch, a former mathematics teacher, is accused of crimes against humanity and war crimes for his role as commander of the Tuol Sleng prison, where 14,000 men, women, and children were tortured and killed. During the three years, eight months and twenty days that the ultra-communist Khmer Rouge were in power, as many as two million people died from execution, starvation, and illness. The international criminal tribunal -- a hybrid of international judges and prosecutors who work alongside their Cambodian counterparts -- has been plagued by seemingly endless delays. There were only seven survivors of the Tuol Sleng torture prison. Vann Nath, a painter by trade and a former monk, was one. He escaped death by painting portraits of Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge leader, that were commissioned by Duch.

Developed by Jinguan Auto, which also makes bullet-proof limousines for the new rich in this vast country of 1.3 billion people, the vans appear unremarkable. They cost £60,000, can reach top speeds of 80mph and look like a police vehicle on patrol. Inside, however, the 'death vans' look more like operating theatres. Executions are monitored by video to ensure they comply with strict rules, making it possible to describe precisely how Jiang Yong will die. After being sedated at the local prison, he will be loaded into the van and strapped to an electric-powered stretcher. This then glides automatically towards the centre of the van, where doctors will administer three drugs: sodium thiopental to cause unconsciousness; pancuronium bromide to stop breathing and, finally, potassium chloride to stop the heart.

And yet it is a distinct possibility that Al Qaeda suspects who were the exclusive source of information for long passages of the commission's report may have been subjected to "enhanced" interrogation techniques, or at least threatened with them, because of the 9/11 Commission. While the CIA says it ended the use of waterboarding by early 2003, the agency continued to use other "enhanced" methods involving pain, sleep deprivation and extended isolation—all of which have been branded as torture. The CIA insists that its interrogation methods were legal and approved by the White House.

Binyam Mohamed, a former UK asylum seeker, admitted to having read the 'instructions' after allegedly being beaten, hung up by his wrists for a week and having a gun held to his head in a Pakistani jail. While I am not, and have never been, a "food writer," other details about the "joke" rang true, such as the names of my co-authors, Peter Biskind and physicist Michio Kaku. Rewind to 1979, when Peter and I were working for a now-defunct left-wing magazine named Seven Days. The government had just suppressed the publication of another magazine, The Progressive, for attempting to print an article called "The H-Bomb Secret." I don't remember that article, and the current editor of The Progressive recalls only that it contained a lot of physics and was "Greek to me." Both in solidarity with The Progressive and in defense of free speech, we at Seven Days decided to do a satirical article entitled "How to Make Your Own H-Bomb," offering step-by-step instructions for assembling a bomb using equipment available in one's own home. The satire was not subtle. After discussing the toxicity of plutonium, we advised that to avoid ingesting it orally, "Never make an A-bomb on an empty stomach." My favorite section dealt with the challenge of enriching uranium hexafluoride:

House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, Jr. (D-Mich.), and Immigration Subcommittee Chairwoman Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), Constitution Subcommittee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), and Crime Subcommittee Chairman Bobby Scott (D-Va.) called on Attorney General Eric Holder and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano to investigate allegations of misconduct by Maricopa County (Arizona) Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

The disturbing stories that have come out of the Congo defy imagination: women and young girls being raped by militia men in front of their families; rape victims ranging from as young as six months to as old as 83 years; women and girls faced with unwanted pregnancies and raped intentionally by men known to have AIDS. There is also a devastating epidemic of women and girls whose vaginas and reproductive organs have been completely destroyed from being violated with guns, bottles and sticks, often resulting in a condition called fistula, a rupture that results in the uncontrollable leakage of urine and feces. The traumatized rape victims are then further stigmatized and ostracized by their families and communities. Says Mukwege, awarded the UN Human Rights Prize in December 2008 for his humanitarian work, “attacking women, the bearer of life, with this level of terror, I believe it has nothing to do with sexual desire. I think it’s about destabilizing society, trying to destroy society and bring about its complete destruction.”

A video released as part of a lawsuit against police in Millville, Philadelphia, shows an officer forcefully punching a woman in the face four times after he bungled an attempt to arrest her for riding a bike on the sidewalk.

The bipartisan Senate Armed Services Committee report issued on Thursday -- which documents that "former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other senior U.S. officials share much of the blame for detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba" and "that Rumsfeld's actions were 'a direct cause of detainee abuse' at Guantanamo and 'influenced and contributed to the use of abusive techniques ... in Afghanistan and Iraq'" -- raises an obvious and glaring question: how can it possibly be justified that the low-level Army personnel carrying out these policies at Abu Ghraib have been charged, convicted and imprisoned, while the high-level political officials and lawyers who directed and authorized these same policies remain free of any risk of prosecution?

While we support everyone's right to their individual opinions about these proceedings, including, of course, other family members who have suffered the devastation we have, we also feel obliged to make clear that many of us do not believe these military commissions to be fair, in accordance with American values, or capable of achieving the justice that 9/11 family members and all Americans deserve. We believe that the secretive and unconstitutional nature of these proceedings deprive us of the right to know the full truth about what happened on 9/11. These prosecutions have been politically motivated from the start, are designed to ensure quick convictions at the expense of due process and transparency, and are structured to prevent the revelation of abusive interrogations and torture engaged in by the U.S. government. Unfortunately, any verdict borne of these proceedings will lack legitimacy and leave us wondering if true justice has been served. No comfort or closure can come from military commissions that ignore the rule of law and stain America's reputation at home and abroad.

So what will be left of the Republican Party after next week's US election? The answer lies in the sands of Florida, where the sunshine-state Republicans have nominated an unrepentant torturer as their candidate for Congress. They view his readiness to torture an innocent Iraqi not as a source of shame, but as his prime qualification for office. This is American conservatism in the dying days of Bush – and it points out the direction that Sarah Palin would like to take it in 2012. In August 2003, Colonel Allen West – commanding a US unit in Baghdad – heard a rumour that one of the Iraqi policeman he was working with was a secret insurgent. He ordered his officers to go and seize Yehiya Hamoodi, a thin, bespectacled 31-year-old, from his home. They dragged him into a Humvee, beat him, and then handcuffed, shackled and blindfolded him. In a dank interrogation room, they told him he had better start talking. Perplexed and terrified, Yehiya explained he didn't know what they were talking about: why was he here? So West was called in. He told Yehiya he was going to be killed. While his men beat him again, he explained he had one last chance to save his life – by talking.

Jon Burge might have gotten away with torture altogether if it weren't for the case of Andrew Wilson. Wilson was arrested on Valentines Day, 1982, for the killing of two police officers, William Fahey and Richard O'Brien. That night, after spending hours being interrogated at Area Two, where he ultimately confessed to the crime, he was admitted to Chicago's Mercy Hospital with multiple injuries, including lacerations to his face, bruises to his chest, and second degree burns to one thigh. The next year, Wilson was convicted for the murders and sentenced to death, but the Illinois Supreme Court overturned the conviction, based on the fact that he had been apparently abused by police. The court's opinion cited Wilson's testimony at a pretrial hearing, where he described being "punched, kicked, smothered with a plastic bag, electrically shocked and forced against a hot radiator throughout the day until he confessed." Wilson was convicted a second time for the same crime, in 1988, and given a life sentence. In 1989 he filed a civil suit against Jon Burge and four other police officers.

The TV cameraman, 38, was never charged with any crime, nor was he put on trial; his testimony makes it clear that he was held in three prisons for six-and-a-half years – repeatedly beaten and force-fed – not because he was a suspected "terrorist" but because he refused to become an American spy. From the moment Sami al-Haj arrived at Guantanamo, flown there from the brutal US prison camp at Kandahar, his captors demanded that he work for them. The cruelty visited upon him – constantly interrupted by American admissions of his innocence – seemed designed to turnal-Haj into a US intelligence "asset".

According to a written statement provided to the Senate Armed Services Committee earlier this month and released on Wednesday by committee chairman Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI), officials were told that waterboarding and other "harsh interrogation measures" routinely used in a survival training program for US soldiers would not cause "significant" harm if used on prisoners. Rice's statement is the first acknowledgment of those meetings by any of the officials involved. Rice did not name the other officials who were present, but reports last spring based on anonymous sources mentioned Vice President Dick Cheney, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, and then-Attorney General John Ashcroft.

On Friday, Omar Khadr, the sole Canadian citizen in Guantanamo, marked his 22nd birthday in isolation. Seized in Afghanistan when he was just 15 years old, Omar has now spent nearly a third of his life in U.S. custody, in conditions that ought to be shameful to the U.S. administration responsible for holding him and to the Canadian government that has abdicated its responsibilities toward him.

Behind all the patriotic hyperbole that accompanies the conventions, and the thousands of journalists and media workers who arrive to cover the staged events, there are serious violations of the basic right of freedom of the press. Here on the streets of St. Paul, the press is free to report on the official proceedings of the RNC, but not to report on the police violence and mass arrests directed at those who have come to petition their government, to protest.

Glenn Greenwald tells a harrowing tale of police-state tactics in Minneapolis, with armed security forces conducting Baghdad-like raids on the houses of activists, terrorizing many and arresting some for thought crimes — such as "planning to cause a riot" — and other bogus charges. The sweeps — guided and aided by the federal government — are designed to "ensure domestic tranquility" during the imminent Republican convention in the city. As Greenwald points out, not one of those who were shackled, arrested and hauled out at gunpoint had committed any crime whatsoever. Heinous indeed, and entirely worthy of the anger that Greenwald marshals in his reports from the scene. But we must disagree with him on one crucial point: his repeated declaration that these incidents are "extraordinary." On the contrary, there is nothing at all remarkable about them. They are all of a piece with the similar tactics employed to cleanse the city of Denver of any unseemly expressions of old-fashioned, long-gone American liberties during the Democratic convention, where any protests that escaped the grotesque official "cage" set aside for them were strangled by militarized police and mass arrests.

These new revelations, of course, leave the U.S. administration looking like bald-faced liars and the British government looking like myopic dupes. Whether Michael Hayden was also duped is not known, but his strenuous denial, just five months ago, that a secret prison existed, which was manned by his own employees, will do nothing for the credibility of the U.S. administration, which likes to pretend that it does not torture and has nothing to conceal, but is persistently discovered not only being economical with the truth, but also behaving exactly as though it has guilty secrets to hide.

Yes, this is real: 36lbs of concealed pot get delivered to the home of the Mayor of Berwyn Heights, Md. by officers posing as couriers, and the box is left outside. As soon as it is taken inside, SWAT storms the house, seizes the pot, arrests the Mayor and his family, and kills 2 of their dogs. The Mayor maintains he had nothing to do with the box.

What happened in the 39 minutes in between — during which Pikes was handcuffed by local police and shocked nine times with a Taser, while reportedly pleading for mercy —is now spawning fears of a political coverup in this backwoods Louisiana lumber town infamous for backroom dealings.

Iran has sentenced eight women and one man convicted of adultery to death by stoning, activists said Sunday. A lawyer and women's rights activist, Shadi Sadr, said the nine, who are between 27 and 50 years old, were convicted of adultery in separate cases in different Iranian cities. Trial protocol was not applied properly in the cases, she said. Six of the nine were convicted based solely on judges' decisions with no witnesses or the presence of their lawyers during their confessions, said Sadr, who has been leading a campaign in Iran against stoning deaths.

The sense of pressing urgency conjured up by Bush administration folks to justify torture does not square with Coleen Rowley’s direct personal experience in the FBI. As some will remember, the FBI's joint terrorism task force in Minneapolis had detained Zacarias Moussaoui on Aug. 16, 2001. Flight school pilots acting as whistleblowers had notified the FBI, against the wishes of their airline employer, of detailed information making Moussaoui the most suspicious student they had ever encountered. French intelligence soon supplied further background confirming Moussaoui's fighting for a “foreign power” — Chechnyan rebels, whose leader was connected to al-Qaeda. By Aug. 23, the case was deemed so suspicious, it went all the way to the top of the intelligence community, to Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet, in a PowerPoint presentation entitled: "Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly.” As Rowley revealed in her letter of May 21, 2002, to FBI Director Robert Mueller, there was considerable frustration in her FBI unit in Minneapolis over the inability of FBI headquarters to get its act together and present these facts pursuant to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to obtain the secret FISA Court’s permission to search Moussaoui’s personal effects and laptop computer in the days before 9-11.

At this point in our history, America is like a victim of Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs, held captive in a pit, softened up, and then murdered for our supple skin so that the batshit killer can prance around and imagine he's the belle of the ball. If you're living the end of your days in a chamber of horrors, then, really, nothing awful is surprising anymore. The gruel you're fed has maggots in it? Yeah, okay. You're blasted with cold water every now and then? Sure, sure, whatever. You're in a goddamn dirt pit, a pseudo-grave, fer fuck's sake. Waiting to be skinned. What the fuck else is gonna be worse? So it is with the endless streams of revelations of how nightmarish and cynical the Bush administration actually is. The Pentagon was manipulating the media through the placement of ex-military members as "analysts" on the news networks and programs in order to hype the war? Fine, fine. What else ya got? Homeland Security is doping up immigrants for deportation? Really, what would have been shocking is if the Bush administration hadn't been shooting drugs into detainees.

Tracy Ingle was asleep in his house when armed police using a no-knock warrant burst in. Unsure about what was happening, he reached for a non-functioning pistol, but began to drop it as soon as he realized who they were. The gesture was too late -- officers shot him 5 times. Mercifully, he survived, but despite not finding any drugs in his house, Tracy is being charged with two felony counts of Aggravated Assault, drug paraphernalia and running a drug premises. He is in very poor physical shape and obviously not doing well psychologically, due to the incident. Many people in his town and even family find it easier to believe the police would not make such a big mistake. Of course Tracy's neighbor -- who saw the whole thing -- believes him, but the police have intimidated him to near silence. Everyone who speaks to his neighbor privately hears his story, but after the police "questioned" him for 4 hours and "advised" him not to get involved, he has refused to testify or go on the record.

There was an extraordinary meeting held in September 2002, just before the techniques were to go up the chain of command, so to speak. [Gonzales, Addington, and Haynes] descended on Guantanamo, met with the combatant commander there Mike Dunlavey, watched some interrogations, and as I was told by Dunlavey and by his lawyer Diane Beaver, basically sent out the signal ‘do whatever needs to be done.’

Freed today: Al Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Hajj ,beaten and interrogated 130 times, hit out at US treatment of detainees at Guantanamo military prison. He was held for six and a half years without trial.

An American expert in torture techniques has denounced his government for allowing "waterboarding" to be practised against terror suspects, just as a graphic advertisement showing the brutal reality of the technique is unveiled to British cinema-goers. Malcolm Nance, who trained hundreds of US servicemen and women to resist interrogation by putting them through "waterboarding" exercises, demanded an immediate end to the practice by all US personnel. He said: "They seem to think it is worth throwing the honour of 220 years of American decency in war out of the window. Waterboarding is out-and-out torture, and I'm deeply ashamed President Bush has authorised its use and dragged the US's reputation into the mud."

Among other criteria, it stated that “[p]hysical pain amounting to torture must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.”

Three rather unsettling news pieces from today, the anniversary of Dr. King's assassination . . . wow. 1) "Exactly what domestic military action was covered by the October memo is unclear" . . . (Remember when the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 was still in force?) 2) "The October 2001 memo arguing for unregulated military searches on U.S. soil has not been formally withdrawn and remains a secret but unclassified document." 3) 2003 Justice Department memo justifies torture, presidential dictatorship Thanks to Lori Price of Citizens for Legitimate Government for bringing these items to our attention. Almost seems important enough the corporate media would cover it, too, eh?!

Once detained, the Falun Gong adherents are sent without trial to reeducation-through-labour camps, where reports indicate they face torture and other forms of abuse. The Falun Gong website Minghui.org, which receives and compiled accounts of persecution from inside China, has reported that 129 Falun Gong adherents were tortured to death by authorities between January 1st and March 20th, 2008. The website provided a list and case details for each individual reported to have been killed.

DSS officials had known of neglect in the home as far back as 2002 and were informed of three reports of possible physical abuse since late last year, including reports of a beating with a belt in December and burns with a cigarette on March 4. But DSS did not notify law enforcement officials until Monday, when teachers discovered burn marks on his genitals, pelvis, and buttocks. "This kid was sent home to be tortured for another 13 days, as far as I'm concerned, because somebody dropped the ball," Middleborough Police Chief Gary J. Russell said in an interview yesterday. "It makes you want to cry. This kid was tortured."

People love a good conspiracy theory. The JFK assassination plot, aliens crash landing at Roswell, the 9/11 truth movement and charges of government surveillance are all an indelible part of our pop culture landscape and are by and large, total bullshit. So where does your average conspiracy buff go to learn about shadowy plots that aren't pure tinfoil hattery? Look no further.

Already handcuffed and subsequently shoved face down to the ground, an officer then fires a taser into Dempsey's back at point blank range. "I wasn't resisting arrest, I calmly walked, he grabbed me, and said this will teach you not to [profanity] with us, that's what he said," Dempsey later commented. Watch the video:

President Bush said Saturday he vetoed legislation that would ban the CIA from using harsh interrogation methods such as waterboarding to break suspected terrorists because it would end practices that have prevented attacks. "The bill Congress sent me would take away one of the most valuable tools in the war on terror," Bush said in his weekly radio address taped for broadcast Saturday. "So today I vetoed it," Bush said. The bill provides guidelines for intelligence activities for the year and includes the interrogation requirement. It passed the House in December and the Senate last month. "This is no time for Congress to abandon practices that have a proven track record of keeping America safe," the president said.

Military officials say they haven't confirmed the identity of a U.S. Marine seen throwing a puppy off a rocky cliff in a disturbing video. The Marine's purported name was uttered in the video and has been widely circulated online. The name matches a 22-year-old lance corporal at Kaneohe Bay. He's a member of the First Battalion, Third Marine Regiment, which returned from Iraq in October.

Col. Davis recounted a 2005 meeting with the Bush administration-appointed Pentagon General Counsel William Haynes, who now oversees the prosecutions and the defense for the tribunal process. Haynes said “We can't have acquittals. If we’ve been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? We can’t have acquittals, we’ve got to have convictions.”

The baby girl - now aged five - has never been returned to this wholly innocent mother who, because she was wrongly accused of harming her baby, also subsequently had two other children taken away from her. This week, though, a High Court revealed there had been a terrible miscarriage of justice, and ordered that Louise must be reunited with all her children. Furthermore, the judge, Mr Justice Gillon - in an age where children are removed from their parents by family courts sitting in secret - took the extremely unusual step of allowing Louise to be named, and for the tragic details of her case to become public. In a statement he said: "The workings of the family justice system in this case are matters of public interest, and do merit public discussion. Public confidence in the process is necessary, and the emergence of the changing circumstances of this case merits an open discussion."

JC911Truth founder, director and organizer, Glenn Zarmanov was recently harassed on the American-Canadian border for his possession of fliers that prompt the reader to demand a new investigation and DVDs with similar content. While traveling on a visit to Montreal, Quebec, Zarmanov encountered hostility when a border-patrol agent remarked that the fliers and discs could be considered "objectionable material" and might be confiscated. Zarmanov was allowed into the country with his property, but was warned not to bring such material on subsequent visits. Zarmanov was questioned rigorously on his intentions for smuggling paper and plastic into Canada. As if a thorough search of the vehicle in which the activist was traveling were not enough, the border-guard in question added insult to injury by stating: "That sh*t [9/11 Truth] don't fly in Canada" and "You are not welcome here. Americans are second-rate travelers."

The 9/11 Commission suspected that critical information it used in its landmark report was the product of harsh interrogations of al-Qaida operatives - interrogations that many critics have labeled torture. Yet, commission staffers never questioned the agency about the interrogation techniques and in fact ordered a second round of interrogations specifically to ask additional questions of the same operatives, NBC News has learned. Those conclusions are the result of an extensive NBC News analysis of the 9/11 Commission’s Final Report and interviews with Commission staffers and current and former U.S. intelligence officials.

The telling admission came when Col. Lance Davenport, Commander of the Utah Highway Patrol, explained his decision to exonerate Gardener. According to Col. Davenport, Trooper Gardener "felt threatened and acted reasonably." Here, Dear Reader, is the "guilty" plea of the highest-ranking police officer in Utah to the charge that he and his troopers are irrational. In fact, he is so proud of it that he calls a news conference to announce it. Unfortunately, this condition is common among armed agents of the state everywhere.

Regarding interrogation methods, Kean and Hamilton wrote: "The commission did not have a mandate to investigate how detainees were treated; our role was to investigate the history and evolution of Al Qaeda and the 9/11 plot." As they rightfully point out, these are two entirely separate issues. The bottom line is that first the Commission was limited to investigating the above presupposition, and then it was denied access to the very sources that it had been charged to investigate. The whole inquiry now appears to have been a circular, self-defeating, window-dressing exercise.

Readers of my book The Shock Doctrine know that one of the most shameless examples of disaster capitalism has been the attempt to exploit the disastrous flooding of New Orleans to close down that city's public housing projects, some of the only affordable units in the city. Most of the buildings sustained minimal flood damage, but they happen to occupy valuable land that make for perfect condo developments and hotels. The final showdown over New Orleans public housing is playing out in dramatic fashion right now. The conflict is a classic example of the "triple shock" formula at the core of the doctrine.

Just a good story to read. Think of it in the context of this "war on terror" we are supposedly fighting.

We learned this week that CIA videotapes of at least some of these supposed interrogations -- the tapes which were previously said not to have existed -- are now said to have been destroyed in 2005. The CIA has copped to destroying the Abu Zubaydah tapes, but has yet to name the prisoner(s) in the other destroyed tapes. (That one of them was Mohamed is a good bet.) The CIA claims -- bizarrely -- that this was done to protect the identities of the interrogators (as though blurring them out would be beyond the agency's 19th-century video technology). The corporate media have promptly floated the idea that the motive was to cover up the use of torture, possibly waterboarding. But as the "evidence" from which the official 9/11 fable lives disappears further into a black box, naturally any breathing skeptic must wonder to what extent the tapes, or even the prisoners, existed in the first place. And if the tapes existed, was the motive behind their destruction to hide torture, or to hide evidence? Even a defender of the official story like former CIA agent Robert Baer knows this latest story only adds to the stink.

The Central Intelligence Agency in 2005 destroyed at least two videotapes documenting the interrogation of two Al Qaeda operatives in the agency’s custody, a step it took in the midst of Congressional and legal scrutiny about the C.I.A’s secret detention program, according to current and former government officials. The videotapes showed agency operatives in 2002 subjecting terror suspects — including Abu Zubaydah, the first detainee in C.I.A. custody — to severe interrogation techniques. They were destroyed in part because officers were concerned that tapes documenting controversial interrogation methods could expose agency officials to greater risk of legal jeopardy, several officials said. The C.I.A. said today that the decision to destroy the tapes had been made “within the C.I.A. itself,” and they were destroyed to protect the safety of undercover officers and because they no longer had intelligence value. The agency was headed at the time by Porter J. Goss. Through a spokeswoman, Mr. Goss declined this afternoon to comment on the destruction of the tapes.

Amnesty International's "Unsubscribe Me" campaign invites us to unsubscribe from the use of torture in fighting the "war on terror;" to tell the world's governments that torture cannot be done in our name. As part of the campaign, they've released an incredibly moving and disturbing video reenacting a CIA-approved "stress position" torture taken straight out of a CIA interrogation manual. In order to make the film, the directors put the actor into a stress position for six hours -- the whimpers and trembling we see are real, the anguish you feel even when you choose to do this, let alone when you are kidnapped and subjected it for weeks, months or years. Amnesty is making two more videos and then doing a theatrical release for all three. We will never be made free by adopting the tactics of dictatorships.

So Leo got the dog while the deputy pulled out a rifle from his car. They walked a few feet from the Barboza's home where Leo's wife and his three year old son were inside. Leo and the officer tied the dog to a pole when the deputy fired three shots. The dog then collapsed. Leo's son heard the gunshots and opened the front door. Meanwhile... Barboza: "A bunch of kids just got off the bus and they were all on the street. All the kids were watching the officer shooting the dog. My heart was broken seeing an officer killing my dog."

A man was tased and arrested on a Utah highway after being stopped by an officer and refusing to sign a speeding ticket because he did not understand what offence he had committed or why he had been pulled over. The encounter, captured on the police car camera on September 14th and released this week, is the latest in a long string of incidents involving the unacceptable use of Tasers by officers on citizens whom the evidence reveals are in no way threatening, acting unlawfully or resisting co-operation.

In June, St. George, MO resident Brett Darrow incurred online cop hostility when he posted a video of a disputed traffic stop. According to TheNewspaper.com, one poster at St. Louis CopTalk wrote, "I'm going to his house to check for parking violations." Another, using the pseudonym "STL_finest," went further: "I hope this little POS punk bastard tries his little video stunt with me when I pull him over alone-and I WILL pull him over-because I will see 'his gun' and place a hunk of hot lead right where it belongs."

An American military lawyer and veteran of dozens of secret Guantanamo tribunals has made a devastating attack on the legal process for determining whether Guantanamo prisoners are "enemy combatants". The whistleblower, an army major inside the military court system which the United States has established at Guantanamo Bay, has described the detention of one prisoner, a hospital administrator from Sudan, as "unconscionable".

The long and the short of it was that an Egpytian national, Abdallah Higazy, was staying in a hotel in New York City on September 11 and the hotel emptied out when the planes hit the towers. The hotel later found in the closet of his room a device that allows you to communicate with airline pilots. Investigators thought this guy had something to do with 9/11 so they questioned him. According to Higazi, the investigators coerced him into confessing to a role in 9/11. Higazi first adamantly denied any involvement with 9/11 and could not believe what was happening to him. Then, he says, the investigator said his family would go through hell in Egypt, where they torture people like Saddam Hussein. Higazy then realized he had a choice: he could continue denying the radio was his and his family suffers ungodly torture in Egypt or he confesses and his family is spared. Of course, by confessing, Higazy's life is worth garbage at that point, but ... well, that's why coerced confessions are outlawed in the United States. So Higazy "confesses" and he's processed by the criminal justice system. His future is quite bleak. Meanwhile, an airline pilot later shows up at the hotel and asks for his radio back. This is like something out of the movies. The radio belonged to the pilot, not Higazy, and Higazy was free to go, the victim of horrible timing. Higazi was innocent! He next sued the hotel and the FBI agent for coercing his confession. The bottom line in the Court of Appeals: Higazy has a case and may recover damages for this injustice. As I read the opinion I realized it was a 44 page epic, too long for me to print out. I blogged about the opinion while I read it online and then posted the blog as I ate lunch. Then something strange happened: a few minutes after I posted the blog, the opinion vanished from the Court of Appeals website! I had never seen this before, and what made all the more strange was that it involved a coerced confession over 9/11. What the hell was going on? I let some other legal bloggers know about this, particulary the How Appealing blog and Appellate Law and Practice. They both ran a commentary on the missing opinion. Then someone sent How Appealing a PDF of the decision (probably very few of them were floating around since the opinion was posted for a brief period of time) and How Appealing posted the decison. Then things got even stranger. The Court of Appeals actually phoned How Appealing to request that he remove the opinion from his website since it contained classified information. The Court said that a revised opinion would come out the next day without the classified information. How Appealing actually refused to remove the opinion. Through it all, hundreds of people came to my legal blog to see my summary of the opinion. It was either my blog or printing out and reading a 44 page epic. The next day, the Court of Appeals reissued the Higazy opinion. With a redaction. The court simply omitted from the revised decision facts about how the FBI agent extracted the false confession from Higazy. For some reason, this information is classified. Just as the opinion gets interesting, when we are about to learn how an FBI agent named Templeton squeezed the "truth" out of Higazy, the opinion reads at page 7: "This opinion has been redacted because portions of the record are under seal. For the purposes of the summary judgment motion, Templeton did not contest that Higazy's statements were coerced."

Republicans joined with Democrats yesterday to offer Maher Arar something he has never received from the Bush administration – an apology for the U.S. role in wrongly detaining him, then sending him to Syria where he was tortured. More than five years after his nightmare began, Arar received the apologies from congressmen as far apart on the ideological spectrum as possible in Washington, even if they differed widely on the value and legality of the Bush administration's practice of "extraordinary rendition" of terror suspects.

For the first time, Brown reveals what happened when he was tricked and arrested by U.S. Marshals, including how he was tasered multiple times. Brown said that he had a chance to fight back during the arrest but that he did not want to hurt anyone. Brown said his captors were treating him with "professional cruelty" and mentioned that they had also done harrowing things to his wife following her arrest, but refused to go into detail. "I guess Ed and Elaine Brown, the elderly couple, really rattled their cages, we must be a real terror to the federal government, the corporate structure," said Brown.

Some sources said Rashid Rauf (or a friend to whom he sent some sort of a signal, or who had seen him being arrested) sent a text message to the UK Liquid Bombers, saying to go ahead with the plot. This message might have made sense if they all had airline tickets; or if they all had passports; or if they had all applied for passports -- which they hadn't. But all such details are conveniently left out of this version of the tale, in which the heroic British authorities promptly arrested all those who had received the text messages. Other sources say Rashid Rauf was arrested several days before the others and was tortured into revealing their names, after which they were summarily arrested. British newspapers reported on a search of the woods near where the suspects lived, which cost about 30M pounds or roughly $60M before it was called off after four months. Ironically, at the same time as the search was stopped, all terror-related charges against Rashid Rauf were dropped!

Action 10 News were investigating reports of guards and police beating children at a school in Robstown, Corpus Christi. The film crew were not even on school property as they recorded shots of the building before a security guard walked up and forcefully shoved the camera in video journalist Brandy Dunfee's face. Watch the video.

Five members of Code Pink were arrested, one for reading the Constitution, as police refused to say what the charges were and refused to answer any questions while demonstrators were hauled into paddy wagons.

There are many disturbing aspects to police brutality cases. One disturbing aspect is that the police always arrest the people that they have gratuitously brutalized. There was no justification whatsoever to arrest councilman Snyder, or the UCLA student, or the University of Florida student. The cops committed assault against innocent citizens. The cops should have been arrested for their criminal acts. Instead, the cops cover up their own crimes by arresting their victims on false charges that are invented to justify the unprovoked police violence against citizens.

Cynthia McKinney on the police assault-with-taser of University of Florida student Andrew Meyer:

An epidemic of violence is sweeping the country. Police are being trained that the general public are the enemy and that they can engage in outright brutality without recourse. Taser deaths are skyrocketing because the police have been ordered to use "pain compliance", otherwise known as torture, to subdue and oppress the citizenry. It is time for police to remember that their duty is to protect the general public from criminals and not act as enforcers for a tyrannical police state.

Convicted Al Qaeda operative Jose Padilla is seeking to hold former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and 59 other US officials responsible for what his lawyers say were abusive and unconstitutional tactics used against Mr. Padilla while he was held in military custody as an enemy combatant from 2002 to 2006. Lawyers working on Padilla's behalf filed the civil lawsuit earlier this year in federal court in South Carolina. It was publicly disclosed by the lawyers this week.

The American Psychological Association (APA) has voted to overwhelmingly reject a measure that would have banned its members from participating in interrogations at Guantanamo Bay and other US detention centers. While not banning psychologists from participating in interrogations, the council approved a resolution prohibiting involvement in interrogations that use at least 14 specified methods, including sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation and mock executions.

Obviously, that result was the desired outcome all along, and Taco Bell employee Padilla was just a poor sap they used as a tool. (Remember all the “dirty bomb” fear-mongering that went away because they couldn’t gin up the vaguest of evidence? Of course you do.)

As Iraqi families continue to fall on hard times, some have been forced to make the most painful of decisions – selling their daughters. Abu Ahmed, a handicapped father of five who is himself a widower, sold his daughter Lina to an Iraqi man who came to Iraq to "shop" for sex workers. Abu Ahmed said he could not afford to buy food for his other children. He told Al Jazeera: "I'm sure that whatever she is, at least she is having food to eat. I have three other girls and a son and what they paid me for Lina is enough to raise the remaining ones."

But hey, if torturing someone till they love the person who threw them in jail; if taking years to bring someone to trial; if making someone so paranoid that they won't cooperate in their own defense counts as "the system working", then the American justice system is sure a model system. I'm sure next time some American is tortured overseas; is denied a timely trial; is so delusional after years in prison that he can't cooperate properly with his defense attorneys, that those who are declaring victory now will nod and smile and talk about how wonderful the justice system is operating overseas - about how American ideas of justice, civil and human rights are spreading. Sorry, I'm stepping off the spin machine. It's making me so nauseous that if I stay on one more second I'm going to puke.

Well, during my time with him, some of his reasoning seemed somewhat impaired, some of his thinking seemed impaired, his memory certainly, his ability to pay attention seemed very impaired. I developed a differential diagnosis from this: severe anxiety. Post-traumatic stress disorder can do that. But also, we know from really basic neuroscience studies that extreme isolation for prolonged periods of time -- and I’m talking, you know, the studies are on maybe days or weeks, and he had extreme isolation for years -- really do, in fact, impair higher brain function. And I recommended that we get some neuropsychological testing. And, unfortunately, he wasn't able to fully cooperate with that. However, the testing we did do was consistent with brain damage, yes.

I wish more people in this country would really revere the First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment, the Fifth Amendment, the Sixth Amendment and the Eighth Amendment. But Cheney and Bush themselves are intolerant of the freedoms that are enshrined in our Bill of Rights. In my book, “You Have No Rights,” I tell the story of a guy named Steve Howards who was walking through Beaver Creek, Colo., an open-air mall there. Of all people, Dick Cheney is there, shaking hands. And Steve Howards goes up to the vice president, about three feet away, and says, “Mr. Vice President, I think your policy in Iraq is reprehensible.” ... And then he walked away. But the Secret Service approached him 10 minutes later and said, “Did you assault the vice president of the United States?” Steve Howards said, “No, I was just expressing my First Amendment rights.” And they responded, “No, you assaulted the vice president of the United States. You’re under arrest.”

No proof. No proof. No proof. Same old story for 5 years while an innocent man is locked away in a 5’ by 7’ windowless cell and driven mad with torture.

The Boston Globe's Charles Savage, who almost alone in the corporate media has doggedly pursued this sinister practice, reports numerous specific instances of Bush's deliberate subversion of legislation. Questioned about the story, a Bush spokesman answered, in essence: "Yeah? So what? The Boss does what he wants to do, and that's the way it is. You savvy?" The disgusting thugs who seized control of our government have been repeatedly unmasked. Their authoritarian pretensions and rampant lawbreaking have been repeatedly exposed in the media and by government insiders, and roundly condemned by numerous courts, including, as in this case, conservative courts packed with appointees of the Bush dynasty itself. Yet still, this gang squats in the White House, still they wield their earth-shaking powers, still they break laws and commit atrocities every day.

"What the hell just happened?" Secretary of State Colin L. Powell demanded, a witness said, when CNN announced the order that evening, Nov. 13, 2001. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice, incensed, sent an aide to find out. Even witnesses to the Oval Office signing said they did not know the vice president had played any part. The episode was a defining moment in Cheney's tenure as the 46th vice president of the United States, a post the Constitution left all but devoid of formal authority. "Angler," as the Secret Service code-named him, has approached the levers of power obliquely, skirting orderly lines of debate he once enforced as chief of staff to President Gerald R. Ford. He has battled a bureaucracy he saw as hostile, using intimate knowledge of its terrain. He has empowered aides to fight above their rank, taking on roles reserved in other times for a White House counsel or national security adviser. And he has found a ready patron in George W. Bush for edge-of-the-envelope views on executive supremacy that previous presidents did not assert.

The Military Commissions Act, which denies basic due process protections, including the right to habeas corpus, is a disgrace. But an even bigger disgrace is the concentration camp the United States maintains at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The Act should be repealed and the Guantánamo prison should be shut down immediately.

First, do no harm. This tenet of medicine applies equally to psychologists, yet they are increasingly implicated in abusive interrogations, dare we say torture, at U.S. military detention facilities like Guantanamo. While the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association both have passed resolutions prohibiting members from participating in interrogations, the American Psychological Association refuses to, despite the outrage of many of its members. Now, with the declassification of a report by the Pentagon’s inspector general detailing psychologists’ role in military interrogations, the U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services announced it will investigate.

"Pang arrived in Yodok on a stretcher. The day she died, we buried her together. Heo cried a lot. He blamed himself for her death," said Kim Gwang Soo. "After his woman died, he got strange and tried to escape," Mr Kim went on. "I had to report him to the guards for my own safety, since I was in charge of looking over him and his escape would mean trouble for me. "For a month, they locked him in a cell so small he had to stand or sit upright 24 hours a day, eating little food. Usually that meant death, but he came out alive."

But breaking international and domestic law has not been a concern of an administration led by a “president” who has claimed “authority” to disobey over 750 laws passed by Congress. In fact, when this same individual does things like signing a secret order in 2002 which authorized the National Security Agency to violate the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act by wiretapping the phones of U.S. citizens, and then goes on to allow the secret collection of the telephone records of tens of millions of Americans, torture is but one portion of this corrupted picture. This is a critical ongoing story, not just because it violates international and domestic law, but this state-sanctioned brutality, bankrupt of any morality and decency, is already coming back home to haunt Americans. When U.S. soldiers are captured in Iraq or another foreign country, what basis does the U.S. have now to ask for their fair and humane treatment? And with police brutality and draconian “security” measures becoming more real within the U.S. with each passing day, why wouldn’t these policies be visited upon U.S. citizens?

One week after live organ harvesting was exposed in a hospital in Sujiatun, Shenyang City, the reporter met three people from China in front of the Immigration Bureau in Seoul. After they read materials on the CCP's live organ harvesting, they whispered to the reporter, "We knew this way before you did!" and left in a hurry. A taxi driver in Shenyang City also said the locals all knew about the live organ harvesting and it wasn't anything new.

Prosecutors issued arrest warrants on Tuesday for eight former prison employees accused of abusing inmates, including forcing some to clean toilets with their tongues. The eight were among 13 prison employees who had already been fired from the 605-inmate medium and minimum security at the Hendry Correctional Institution in the Everglades. The previous warden and an assistant warden resigned, and three others were reassigned after an inmates was beaten and choked by guards in March.

On the afternoon of May 4, 2007, Yin Dengzhen of Shiyan City in Hubei Province contacted China Tianwang Center for Human Right Affairs and described how she was taken to a mental hospital for petitioning the authorities for the redress of grievances. She managed to escape incarceration with the help of local citizens.

Under the Justice Department plan, lawyers could meet just three times with their Guantanamo clients after an initial meeting in which the prisoner decides whether or not to use the lawyer's services. Prisoners who have been through several interrogations at the hands of the military are often so distrustful of Americans, including lawyers, that it takes extended visits just to establish a normal attorney-client relationship. The new rules would also allow US intelligence officers to read lawyers' letters to their clients, and they would permit US officials to deny a lawyer access to secret evidence used by the military to determine that a client is an enemy combatant -- all flagrant departures from American justice. As it stands now, the lawyers -- all of whom have security clearances -- can see the material but are forbidden to share it with their clients.

When Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld boasted, as he did frequently, of his unrelenting focus on the war on terror, his audience would have been startled, maybe even shocked, to discover the activities that Rumsfeld found it necessary to supervise in minute detail. Close command and control of far away events from the Pentagon were not limited to the targeting of bombs and missiles. Thanks to breakthroughs in communications, the interrogation and torture of prisoners could be monitored on a real time basis also.

The deadly drug raid had been set up after narcotics officers said an informant had claimed there was cocaine in the home. When the plainclothes officers burst in without notice, police said, Johnston fired at them, and they fired back. Assistant U.S. Attorney Yonette Sam-Buchanan said Thursday that although the officers found no drugs in Johnston's home, Smith planted three bags of marijuana in the home as part of a cover story.

Abby Newman was arrested for not showing ID in August 2000 and fell victim to an illegal vehicle search in which police found items of subversive literature, including a "pocket Constitution." One officer asked the other "Is this legal?" (Case in point, where the very society of freedom is violated by the system that regulates that society.) But that has become all too common in the new American police state. A Christian group in Philadelphia was arrested in 2004 and charged with counts of criminal conspiracy, ethnic intimidation and riot for "praying, singing and reading scripture during an annual 'gay pride' event. Of course, the question here is not one of Christianity vs. homosexuality, but the criminal prosecution of free speech. The eroding inherent right threatens the freedom of Christians, homosexuals, pink-and-polka dotted people, and other groups who were previously guaranteed protection of their voices - whether right or wrong, embarrassing, hateful or supportive, blasphemous, sinful or true. An attorney in Portland, Oregon was falsely arrested under anti-terrorism laws shortly after the 2004 Madrid bombings.

The prisoners at Guantanamo Bay — or Azkaban, as one of my clients, a Harry Potter fan, calls it — have had no access to a hearing in a court of law. Instead, Guantanamo’s inmates are subjected to two kangaroo procedures: Combatant Status Review Tribunals and Administrative Review Boards. The tribunals determine whether an individual is an enemy combatant. Needless to say, the cards are stacked against the prisoner from the get-go. The tribunals are allowed to rely on hearsay evidence and information acquired though coercion. Any evidence deemed “secret” is withheld from the prisoner. Can you imagine trying to defend yourself against evidence kept secret from you? Amazingly, my client Abdul Al-Ghizzawi (a Libyan who ran a bakery in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, before being handed to Americans for a bounty in late 2001), was found to have no ties to terrorism and not to be an enemy combatant. Unfortunately, the higher-ups intervened and the tribunal’s judgment was overturned six weeks later upon the miraculous discovery of “new evidence.” I saw the classified proceedings of my client’s tribunals, and I can assure you that no new material was considered. Mark and Joshua Denbeaux, authors of the study “No-Hearing Hearings,” have discovered that some prisoners went through as many as three hearings before the tribunals made the “correct” determination that a prisoner had ties to terrorism.

Gun free zones may be well intentioned, but good intentions that is not enough. It is an understandable desire to ban guns. After all, if you ban guns from an area, people can’t get shot, right? But time after time when these public shootings occur, they disproportionately take place in gun free zones. It is the law-abiding good citizens who would only use a gun for protection who obey these bans. Violating a gun free zone at a place such as a public university may mean expulsion or firing and arrest, real penalties for law-abiding citizens. But for someone intent on killing others, adding on these penalties for violating a gun free zone means little to someone who, if still alive, faces life in prison.

About 15% of Texas's 4,700 inmates aged 10–21 are imprisoned for misdemeanor offenses, most commonly assault and marijuana possession. Charges for graffiti, curfew violation and failure to attend school also have landed many kids in the youth prison system recently rocked by reports the agency and prosecutors took no action on allegations of sexual abuse by 2 top administrators. Inmates at other facilities are now stepping forward with similar claims.

But darker allegations are included in the complaint over false imprisonment. Because he worked with the FBI, Vance contends, U.S. government officials in Iraq decided to retaliate against him and Ertel. He believes these officials conspired to jail the two not because they worked for a security company suspected of selling weapons to insurgents, but because they were sharing information with law enforcement agents outside the control of U.S. officials in Baghdad. "In other words," claims the lawsuit, "United States officials in Iraq were concerned and wanted to find out about what intelligence agents in the United States knew about their territory and their operations. The unconstitutional policies that Rumsfeld and other unidentified agents had implemented for 'enemies' provided ample cover to detain plaintiffs and interrogate them toward that end."

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court turned down the habeas corpus plea of a Canadian national, captured in Afghanistan when he was 15 years old, because the possible deprivation of his human rights was not conducted on “U.S. soil.” The court, with three judges dissenting, cited a law passed by the Republican-controlled Congress last year that the fate of Guantanamo prisoners will be determined by secret military tribunals outside the purview of U.S. courts.

The worst of the worst? The first "detainee" to be tried? Held for sixty-four months before he could even get a sham hearing, and then sentenced to nine months more? Doesn't he get credit for time served? He's done the nine months already, plus fifty-five more. For what? For being tortured?

Hale, a retired Marine Sergeant who served two tours in Iraq and was decorated before his combat-related medical discharge in January 2006, was murdered by a heavily armed 8–12-member undercover police team in Wilmington, Delaware last November 6. He had come to Wilmington from his home in Manassas, Virginia to participate in a Toys for Tots event.

In the first results of a widespread investigation of misconduct, prosecutors have charged the acting chief of an “out of control” police department in a Fire Island, NY tourist town with stomping a vacationer unconscious for slamming a door after getting a littering fine. The victim was hospitalized with a ruptured bladder and other internal injuries. A trio of officers are charged with failing to get him medical attention and then manufacturing charges to justify the beating.

A district court has detailed the torture of 9 US prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan but ruled former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and 3 high-ranking officers immune from prosecution. The 5 Iraqis and 4 Afghans – none ever charged with a crime – were found to lack US constitutional rights. The abuse authorized by Rumsfeld and sometimes taking place in the presence of the 3 officers included being hung upside-down and slapped unconscious, stabbed, electrically shocked, deprived of sleep, grabbed by dogs and sexually humiliated.

This reminded me of my experience in Iraq, where I would hear soldiers discussing their abuse of detainees. It was always cast as a humorous thing, and each recounting won the expected—sometimes forced—laugh. But now I am in Washington, I thought. Has everyone been bitten by the torture bug? I was sickened to watch a senior senator and lawyer flippantly dismiss what happened at Abu Ghraib, and act as though he knew more about the abuses than the people, like me, who were there.

Authorities are investigating claims that 6 off-duty Chicago police officers were captured on video assaulting 4 men in a bar, the second report of police involved in an assault to surface in a week.

The allegations became public when the Dallas Morning News cited a never-released 2005 Texas Rangers report that said 13 boys were molested at the West Texas State school, a red-brick institution ringed by razor wire in a desolate part of the state. Since then, others have come forward with allegations of sexual abuse at other juvenile prisons across Texas.

Bartender Karolina Obrycka--the woman whose barroom beating by a Chicago policeman was caught on tape--spoke this morning with Tamron Hal. It's her first live interview about the matter.

The firing of the “Gonzales 8” is a perfect opportunity to zero-in on the Justice Department and start tossing bodies on the burn pile. But it’ll take someone with enough brains to figure out what’s really going on and big enough cahones to go for the jugular. That’s how a predator brings down the live-game and that’s what it’ll take to rout the mob bosses at the D.O.J. Anyone who gets squeamish over a little political blood-letting should probably get a job in retail--not government.

After observing last week's closed military tribunal of alleged 9/11 planner Khalid Sheik Mohammed, Sens. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) called for an investigation into allegations that he was physically abused in CIA custody. Mohammed testified he was mistreated in the 3 years before his transfer to Guantánamo Bay, including 4 months when his children were also held and abused. The military panel immediately classified the testimony and redacted from transcripts details of his treatment in the CIA's secret prison program.

At least 150 prisoners, who included men and women of 17 nationalities and children as young as 7 months, were held in Kenya for several weeks before most of them were transferred covertly to Somalia and Ethiopia, where they're being held incommunicado, the groups charge. The transfers, which authorities reportedly carried out in the middle of the night and made public only after a recent court order in Kenya, violated international law, according to the rights groups. They charge that the program is being driven by the United States, which has built a close relationship with Kenya and Ethiopia in the war on terrorism.

But Gonzales is not just a self-serving political hack. He’s also an ideological hack. Like Cheney, he’s done everything within his power, and a lot of things outside it, to further the agenda of the imperial Presidency, whether that included Bush’s right to violate the “quaint” Geneva Conventions, or to engage in “extraordinary renditions,” or to illegally wiretap U.S. citizens.

A favorite (and extremely cruel) tactic of employers is the seizure of guest workers' identity documents, such as passports and Social Security cards. That leaves the workers incredibly vulnerable. 'Numerous employers have refused to return these documents even when the worker simply wanted to return to his home country,' the report said. 'The Southern Poverty Law Center also has encountered numerous incidents where employers destroyed passports or visas in order to convert workers into undocumented status.' Without their papers the workers live in abject fear of encountering the authorities, who will treat them as illegals. They are completely at the mercy of the employers.

In Washington, I asked Ray McGovern, formerly a senior CIA officer, what he made of Norman Mailer's remark that America had entered a pre-fascist state. "I hope he's right," he replied, "because there are others saying we are already in a fascist mode. When you see who is controlling the means of production here, when you see who is controlling the newspapers and periodicals, and the TV stations, from which most Americans take their news, and when you see how the so-called war on terror is being conducted, you begin to understand where we are headed. It's quite something that the nuclear threat today should be seen first and foremost as coming from the United States of America and Great Britain."

He tortured detainees for information he admits they rarely had. Since leaving Iraq he’s taken this story public, doing battle on national television against the war’s architects for giving him the orders he regrets he obeyed.

I don't know whether Padilla is guilty. What I do know is that as a U.S. citizen he was entitled to be charged at the time of his arrest, see the evidence against him, have an attorney, and be tried expeditiously — not by the president and his advisers, but by a jury of his peers. We shouldn't allow government to disregard the Constitution in the name of national security. Padilla isn't some inconsequential loner. As an American, he is one of us.

Senators outraged over the conclusions signaled they would provide tougher oversight of the FBI -- and perhaps limits its power. "I am very concerned that the FBI has so badly misused national security letters," said Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee that oversees the FBI. Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., another member on the judiciary panel, said the report "proves that 'trust us' doesn't cut it."

The State Department report continued: "AI reported that as the practice of enforced disappearance spread, people were arrested and held incommunicado in secret locations with their detention officially denied. They were at risk of torture and unlawful transfer to third countries. The [Amnesty] report noted that the ‘practice of offering rewards running to thousands of dollars for unidentified terror suspects facilitated illegal detention and enforced disappearance.’" But the State Department left out that the United States was behind those rewards and at least some of the detentions. The very next sentence in the cited Amnesty International report reads: "Many individuals were arrested by Pakistani [authorities] or captured by local people and handed over to US law enforcement or intelligence personnel in exchange for a reward."

Detained by U.S. Customs officials after their flight to Toronto made an unscheduled stop on American soil nearly four weeks ago, Kevin and his Iranian parents, Majid and Masomeh, feel they are being held hostage not only by the physical parameters of Hutto, but by the politics of nationality. “We can't go home because I am Canadian but my parents are not,” Kevin said in a telephone interview with The Globe and Mail — no personal interviews have been granted.

The U.S. government does not deny that I was wrongfully kidnapped. Instead, it has argued in court that my case must be dismissed because any litigation of my claims will expose state secrets and jeopardize American security, even though President Bush has told the world about the CIA's detention program, and even though my allegations have been corroborated by eyewitnesses and other evidence. To my amazement and dismay, last May, a federal district court judge agreed with the government and threw out my case. And then Friday, the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that decision. It seems that the only place in the world where my case cannot be discussed is in a U.S. courtroom.

The exterior window in Jose Padilla's 80-square-foot cell in a Navy brig was painted over. At times, he had to sleep on a steel bunk with no mattress. He went months without a clock and was sometimes seen weeping in his cell. But officials at the brig in Charleston, S.C., testified Tuesday that the alleged al-Qaida operative was not physically abused during his 3 years in military custody, nor did he display serious symptoms of mental problems.

Let me emphasize something important here, especially for libertarians, who have long committed their lives to the achievement of a free society: There is no way — none — to reconcile the assumption of this power with a free society. In fact, it is the most powerful government power of all — the ultimate power that can ever be wielded by a tyrannical government. No infringement on economic liberty — hyperinflation, confiscatory taxation, oppressive regulation, or the like — can compare in significance with the omnipotent power of a government official to arbitrarily pick up anyone he wants for any reason he wants and incarcerate him, torture him, and execute him.

They wear uniforms, carry weapons and drive lighted patrol cars on private properties like banks and apartment complexes and in public areas like bus stations and national monuments. Sometimes they operate as ordinary citizens and can only make citizen's arrests, but in more and more states they're being granted official police powers. This trend should greatly concern citizens. Law enforcement should be a government function, and privatizing it puts us all at risk.

Today, the Day of Remembrance, marks the anniversary of the 1942 signing of Executive Order 9066 -- the document that made it possible to intern thousands of Japanese Americans, German Americans, Italian Americans and Japanese Latin Americans during World War II. Though it is important that we remember what took place, it is more critical that we act, for justice delayed is justice denied. And for the dwindling number of surviving internees who became Americans, such as Cpl. Art Shibayama, justice has been delayed far too long. They deserve our attention, our respect and the official recognition of a country that is willing to heal and to make amends.

But the first step, as always, is awakening people to the root cause of the problems we face - the use of corporate personhood by a handful of the world’s largest enterprises to insinuate themselves into governments and seize control of legislative and regulatory agendas. As enough voters learn the history and realize the consequences of this, the solution - ending corporate personhood - will become more and more possible, and Paine’s and Jefferson’s original idea of democracy representing “we, the people” will come back to life.

When 88-year-old Kathryn Johnston was shot and killed by Atlanta narcotics officers last November, it had all the trappings of the typical drug raid gone wrong. Critics (like me) cautioned Atlanta officials to use Johnston's death to spur real reform in the investigation and policing of drug crimes, and to avoid what other cities have done in the wake of such tragedies: express regret and remorse, promise changes, then return to doing things the same way they've always been done. Nearly three months later, Atlanta is showing some encouraging signs. Last week, Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard announced a series of tough charges against the officers who conducted the raid on Johnston's home, including felony murder. And in today's Atlanta Journal-Constitution, city Police Chief Richard Pennington and Christopher Stone, a criminal justice professor at Harvard, call for the city to set up a civil rights commission with subpoena power to look into police excesses.

Today, pro-war libertarians are faced with what is possibly the greatest moral and philosophical dilemma of their lives. No one can deny that we now live in a country in which the president, on his own initiative, has the omnipotent power to send the nation into war against any country on earth, especially given that the war on terror extends all over the globe. The president, the CIA, and the military have the power to take any suspected terrorist — foreigner or American — into custody and torture, abuse, and execute him without due process of law and trial by jury. The president and the NSA have the power to wiretap telephones and monitor emails without a judicially issued warrant. The president, the CIA, and the military have the power to send missiles into cars and drop bombs into buildings anywhere in the world, including right here in the United States, in their attempt to win the war on terror. Indeed, the president wields the power to ignore any constitutional or legislative restraints on his power as a “wartime” commander in chief.

"I can't think of anything colder than that," said LAPD Det. Russ Long, who called the case the most egregious of its kind that he has seen in his career. "There was no mission around, no services. It's the worst area of skid row."

Despite my best efforts, I cannot ignore the mistakes I made at the interrogation facility in Fallujah. I failed to disobey a meritless order, I failed to protect a prisoner in my custody, and I failed to uphold the standards of human decency. Instead, I intimidated, degraded and humiliated a man who could not defend himself. I compromised my values. I will never forgive myself.

A press officer whose name I didn't catch (because she hung up on me when I stood up for TNS) called to complain about our "coverage" of an incident in which LAPD personnel allegedly beat a handcuffed man to death in front of multiple witnesses. Gabriel Voilles put together a bulletin on the matter for our In Other News... section this morning. This officer was very upset by it, immediately accusing TNS of printing lies. I informed her that we were, quite transparently, merely relaying what her hometown newspaper the LA Times had reported, and that we -- as a matter of journalistic policy -- made no claims as to the true narrative of the incident, since no reporter was on the scene. She then claimed that the Times story on which our bulletin was based did not say or suggest the cops had beaten a man to death while he was cuffed, as our bulletin says, and repeated her insistence that we had published "lies."

Capt. James Yee spent 76 days in solitary confinement, much of the time shackled and in leg irons, after accusations of sedition, espionage and aiding the enemy while serving as a Muslim chaplain at Guantanamo Bay. The Army's case against him collapsed at trial, and it eventually wiped his record clean and gave the West Point graduate an honorable discharge.

US immigration officials insisted the sufferer of an anal infection remove a small piece of medical thread which was being used by doctors to treat the condition. The man required treatment under general anaesthetic as a result.

Russian prosecutors are investigating allegations that hospital staff in Yekaterinburg gagged babies because they did not want to hear them crying.

Two weeks after a senior Pentagon official suggested that corporations should pressure their law firms to stop assisting detainees at Guantanamo Bay, major companies have turned the tables on the Pentagon and issued statements supporting the law firms' work on behalf of terrorism suspects. The corporate support for the lawyers comes as law associations and members of Congress have expressed outrage at the remarks of Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs Charles D. "Cully" Stimson on Jan. 11.

The highest-ranking American soldier - and only officer - charged with a crime in the Abu Ghraib scandal will be court-martialed on eight charges, including cruelty and maltreatment of prisoners, his lawyer confirmed yesterday. Lt. Col. Steven Lee Jordan, a 50-year-old reservist from Virginia who ran the interrogation center at the Iraqi prison, was accused of failing to exert his authority as the place descended into chaos, with prisoners stripped naked, photographed in humiliating poses and intimidated by snarling dogs. He was also charged with lying to investigators.

The question is: a conspiracy to do what? Who is the conspiracy theorist here? The government that jails people for the crime of intending to do something there's no evidence they intended to do? Or those who point out that maybe there's another reason for the arrest, solitary confinement, sensory deprivation, and abuse of Jose Padilla as an 'enemy combatant' who happens to not have engaged in any combat?

The congressman, a veteran of the Nixon impeachment hearings who recently published a book on Bush's crimes, today announced plans to have his Judiciary Committee hold hearings on Bush's rampant use of so-called “signing statements.” These are the documents the president has claimed give him the power, as a commander-in-chief, to ignore laws duly passed by the Congress.

Surveying the deplorable situation, the National Law Journal concluded: "Criminals have been turned into instruments of law enforcement, while law enforcement officers have become criminal co-conspirators."

The investigators are actually following up the accusations made by a Turkish citizen from the northern German city of Bremen, Murat Kurnaz, who claims to have been mistreated by two German KSK soldiers when he was a prisoner in Kandahar in 2002. But the statements taken from members of the special forces before Christmas are now raising more questions than just the possible behavior of individual soldiers: They prove just how early German troops knew about the inhumane methods used by the Americans when dealing with suspected terrorists. And what is worse is they show that German soldiers even helped their American colleagues. After all, Kandahar was a base camp from where suspects were flown to CIA secret prisons and to Guantánamo.

The UCLA student who received a righteous tasering at the hands of the university's campus police officers has decided to sue for "unspecified monetary damages", Associated Press reports.

As required by law, the manual prohibits statements obtained by torture and "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" as prohibited by the Constitution. However, the law does allow statements obtained through coercive interrogation techniques if obtained before Dec. 30, 2005, and deemed reliable by a judge.

The Pentagon has drafted a manual for upcoming detainee trials that would allow suspected terrorists to be imprisoned or put to death using hearsay evidence and coerced testimony.

Congress's new Democratic majorities should repeal the law passed last year that denies detainees their habeas corpus right to challenge their continued detention. That, like the right to counsel, is another mainstay of the American legal system that must not be a victim of the war on terror.

``It is my opinion that as the result of his experiences during his detention and interrogation, Mr. Padilla does not appreciate the nature and consequences of the proceedings against him, is unable to render assistance to counsel, and has impairments in reasoning as the result of a mental illness, i.e., post-traumatic stress disorder, complicated by the neuropsychiatric effects of prolonged isolation.'' On Friday, the federal judge postponed Padilla's trial from Jan. 22 to April 16 to allow the prosecution time to arrange its own examination of Padilla's mental state.

The Bush Administration, having trouble winning its detainee cases in court, is now trying to tar and feather the lawyers for the detainees. And it is asking corporate America to boycott law firms that defend the detainees.

Tony Blair calls it an "anomaly", but the evidence is overwhelming. Camp Delta, which still houses 470 men never convicted of any crime, is a torture camp. That should be the starting point of any debate about what is acceptable in the west's fight with Islamist extremists. More than 750 men have passed through the camp, with nearly half being released. Many prisoners, past and present, have given consistent and repeated testimony of serious abuses and ill treatment. There is also significant evidence from US officials and government documents of widespread abuse at the camp.

I know that the soldiers who did bad things to me represent themselves, not the United States. And I have to say that not all American soldiers stationed in Cuba tortured us or mistreated us. There were soldiers who treated us very humanely. Some even cried when they witnessed our dire conditions. Once, in Camp Delta, a soldier apologized to me and offered me hot chocolate and cookies. When I thanked him, he said, "I do not need you to thank me." I include this because I do not want readers to think that I fault all Americans.

Female soldiers, she soon learned, were called “bitches,” “sluts,” and “dykes.” A friend in an all-male unit related a story in which an obligatory equal opportunity class devolved into a rant against servicewomen, who “always” said they’d been raped after regrettable drunken liaisons. A woman in Dougherty’s unit who stayed behind the initial deployment because she was pregnant showed up in Iraq four months later after an abortion—and was congratulated by the platoon commander on getting “the first confirmed kill in the unit.”

Prisoners held at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp in Cuba are being driven insane by a tightening of conditions and the situation of their indefinite detention without trial, according to lawyers and rights activists involved with the US camp. The lawyers and activists also doubt whether the Bush administration intends to carry out its stated desire to close the facility.

A distinguished British historian claims he was knocked to the ground by an American policeman before being arrested and spending eight hours in jail — because he crossed the road in the wrong place.

Bisher al-Rawi, who is locked in solitary confinement in a 6ft by 8ft cell, is gradually "losing his mind" and is in danger of irreparable damage to his mental state after five years of incarceration and torture. On the fifth anniversary of the opening of Guantanamo Bay this week, lawyers acting for two UK residents are to warn the Foreign Secretary that the psychological deterioration of Mr al-Rawi is so serious that he may be unrecognisable as the "same person" unless he is swiftly released. His friend Jamil el Banna, who was seized with him five years ago by the CIA, is diabetic and, because he does not receive an appropriate diet, is beginning to lose his sight.

Suspicions will undoubtedly be cast as to whether the facility in Tyler is part of a wider agenda to set up a network of internment camps that will be used to forcibly detain American citizens under emergency provisions. The pretext for this was set in the summer of 2004, when thousands of protesters in New York for the Republican National Convention were forcibly detained, some for over 24 hours, without charge in an asbestos infested disused bus facility known as Pier 57, or "Guantanamo on the Hudson" as other labeled it.

This is part of a pattern, a Bush-Cheney habit of ignoring the Constitution. And it's grounds yet again for immediate impeachment, arrest, and imprisonment of George W Bush, Dick Cheney, and Alberto Gonzales.

If we do not trust the rule of law, if we do not uphold the process for insuring that all individuals accused of crime have access to the means of defending themselves, we have no claim to the moral high ground. Due Process of Law is the lynchpin of our way of life. If we do not trust that process, if we must bypass it in time of peril, then who is the enemy that will destroy our freedom? In the words of that precocious possum, Pogo, “We have seen the enemy and they are us”.

A case out of Port Chester, N.Y., illustrates the danger. In 1999 the Village of Port Chester and the development firm G&S Port Chester agreed to embark on a $100 million 27-acre redevelopment project in which dilapidated buildings would be torn down in favor of stores, a movie complex, and other amenities. Under the agreement the Village government gave G&S sole authority to obtain properties in the project area both through negotiation and eminent domain. Only G&S can build there, and any profits from the project belong to the developer. (See the Christian Science Monitor story here.) This smells bad enough already, but it gets worse because Bart Didden, who owns property that is partly in the project area, wants to build a CVS drugstore. The local Village planning board said okay, but under the redevelopment agreement G&S has veto power. Rather than vetoing the plan, however, G&S made Didden an offer: You can build your store if you fork over $800,000 or make G&S a 50 percent partner.

These detainees include poets, writers, political activists and even common citizens. Dr Safdar Sarki, a Pakistani-American, who is also the secretary-general of Jeay Sindh Qaumi Mahaz (JSQM), has been missing since February 2006. Family members of Gohram Saleh from Makran, who was allegedly picked up by security forces in August 2006, have threatened to commit suicide if he is not released immediately.

Hundreds of British soldiers laid siege to a police station in the southern city of Basra today, killing seven gunmen, rescuing 127 prisoners from almost certain execution and ultimately reducing the building to rubble. The focus of the attack was an arm of the local police called the Special Crimes Unit, which British officials said had been thoroughly infiltrated by criminals and militia members who had used it to terrorize local residents and violently settle scores with political or tribal rivals.

The 21-year-old community college student, one of hundreds of Muslim men picked up in the frenzied dragnet following the attacks, was whisked to New York to testify as a material witness before a grand jury. That set off a five-year legal ordeal that ended last month with Awadallah's acquittal on perjury charges. He was never accused of involvement in terrorism but was charged with lying about how well he knew one of the hijackers.

In the US the wrongful conviction rate is extremely high. One reason is that hardly any of the convicted have had a jury trial. No peers have heard the evidence against them and found them guilty. In the US criminal justice (sic) system, more than 95% of all felony cases are settled with a plea bargain. Before jumping to the conclusion that an innocent person would not admit guilt, be aware of how the process works. Any defendant who stands trial faces more severe penalties if found guilty than if he agrees to a plea bargain. Prosecutors don't like trials because they are time consuming and a lot of work. To discourage trials, prosecutors offer defendants reduced charges and lighter sentences than would result from a jury conviction. In the event a defendant insists upon his innocence, prosecutors pile on charges until the defendant's lawyer and family convince the defendant that a jury is likely to give the prosecutor a conviction on at least one of the many charges and that the penalty will be greater than a negotiated plea.

As is often the case with policies aimed at curbing the drug supply, civil liberties were one of the first casualties of the meth hysteria. Several cities and states, for example, quickly made it illegal for businesses to sell customers combinations of ingredients that together, are used to make meth, but that are perfectly legal if bought separately. Sell bhutane, cold medicine, and matches to the same customer, and an unknowing store clerk could well be arrested. These laws effectively deputized private business to begin policing the shopping habits of their customers – never a good idea. The idea has led to some horrific outcomes. In Northwest Georgia, for example, a meth sting ended with the arrest of 49 convenience store clerks for violating the odd new law. The problem is that 47 of the clerks were of Indian decent, and spoke only broken English. When undercover police officers tossed out drug lingo like "cooking up a hit," the clerks had no idea what they were talking about.

Whatever the government's motives for this ongoing horror, Americans need to wake up and recognize that Guantanamo and the so-called "War on Terror" have made America--and every one of us Americans--guilty of the most obscene of war crimes. There will inevitably come a day of reckoning--a day when we will all be called to account for our collective crime. Let us at least be able to say then that we spoke out against what is being done in our name.

“Even Saddam Hussein had more legal counsel than I ever had,” said Mr. Vance, who said he planned to sue the former defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld, on grounds that his constitutional rights had been violated. “While we were detained, we wrote a letter to the camp commandant stating that the same democratic ideals we are trying to instill in the fledgling democratic country of Iraq, from simple due process to the Magna Carta, we are absolutely, positively refusing to follow ourselves.”

Flux was not arrested, nor did he receive a receipt for seized property. Without any warning, he was jumped by two police officers, one of whom is an NYPD captain, and knocked down onto the asphalt of 39th Street. A police officer then snatched the camera out of Flux's hands. As Flux attempted to protect himself and his equipment from being trampled and beaten, the cop with the camera conferred with another officer and scurried back into the building to hide the camera.

You want to know what goes on in the much-discussed American detention in Iraq from the inside? Ask an American who was held and treated badly because he was a whistle-blower who didn't like what he saw in the Iraqi security firm he worked for. His reward: 97 days of detention, sleep deprivation, noise, exposure to cold and more.

The Bush administration asserted in federal court yesterday that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and three former military officials cannot be held liable for the alleged torture of nine Afghans and Iraqis in U.S. military detention camps because the detainees have no standing to sue in U.S. courts.

What we are therefore seeing today, then, is not the enactment of law to protect us. On the contrary, at face value, the state is manipulating and abusing the process of law in order to systematically erode, deface and ultimately eliminate the rule of law entirely. And in its place, what is being established is the ability of the state to consolidate policies of social control, to control and intervene in the life of the public at will, with impunity, and without accountability. For now, we can call this process, a process of totalization.

Last but not least, police tasered and gunned to death Derek Hale, a decorated 25-year-old U.S. Marine who had served two tours of duty in Iraq, as he sat talking to a woman and two children in front of a house in a Delaware neighborhood. Police swarmed Hale in front of the suspected home of a member of an outlaw motorcycle gang that is notorious for violence and drug offenses. Upon engaging Hale, who was sitting with his hands in his sweatshirt, the officers insisted he place his hands in view. Immediately after that, according to independent witnesses, the police tasered him three times and fired three .40-caliber rounds into his chest, ultimately leading to his death. Hale had no criminal or arrest record in Delaware, and witnesses to the shooting insist that he was no threat to the police. In fact, after police tasered Hale the second time, one of the independent witnesses yelled at the police that what they were doing was “overkill,” to which one of the officers responded, “Shut…up or we’ll show you overkill.”

This weekend, Australian citizen David Hicks will have spent five years in the torture hellhole that is Guantanamo Bay. Five years, and he still hasn't faced a court to answer the charges levelled against him. Nor is he likely to in the next twelve months.

An interactive map of botched SWAT and paramilitary police raids, released in conjunction with the Cato policy paper "Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids," by Radley Balko.

Together with other documents filed late Friday, the images represent the latest and most aggressive sally by defense lawyers who declared this fall that charges against Mr. Padilla should be dismissed for “outrageous government conduct,” saying that he was mistreated and tortured during his years as an enemy combatant. Now lawyers for Mr. Padilla, 36, suggest that he is unfit to stand trial. They argue that he has been so damaged by his interrogations and prolonged isolation that he suffers post-traumatic stress disorder and is unable to assist in his own defense. His interrogations, they say, included hooding, stress positions, assaults, threats of imminent execution and the administration of “truth serums.”

Spain's largest newspaper, El Pais, last year reported that Jeppesen was named the CIA's flight arranger in investigative documents compiled by Spanish police. More recently, The New Yorker magazine noted the connection, reporting "it is not widely known that the [CIA] has turned to a division of Boeing, the publicly traded blue-chip behemoth, to handle many of the logistical and navigational details for these [rendition] trips."

But defense lawyers are convinced that given the seriousness and the specificity of Padilla’s claims of mistreatment—many of which involve the use of aggressive interrogation techniques virtually identical to those the Pentagon has confirmed using at Guantánamo—the judge in his case, Marcia Cooke, may have little choice but to order a pretrial hearing on his allegations. Padilla’s lawyers say they will soon file “additional material” to back up their torture claims. And if Cook grants them a hearing, it could open the door for the first time to questioning in a U.S. courtroom about controversial interrogation methods that were used against one of the most sensitive detainees in U.S. government custody. Padilla's fate is all the more important because his incarceration by the U.S. military was directly ordered from the White House by President Bush.

El-Masri, in the United States for the first time, said all he wants is an acknowledgement that the US is responsible for his kidnapping, an explanation and an apology. The lawsuit also seeks $75,000 in damages, though El-Masri’s attorneys emphasized that the case is not about a monetary award. The US government has refused to confirm or deny the allegations, saying that by doing so, clandestine CIA activities would be divulged. Last May, US District Judge T.S. Ellis granted the government’s request to use the "state secrets" privilege to dismiss the lawsuit. Ellis concurred with the defendants’ argument that proceeding with the lawsuit "would reveal considerable detail about the CIA’s highly classified overseas programs and operations.”

An initial autopsy by medical examiner Dr. Charles Siebert found Anderson died of complications of sickle cell trait, a usually benign blood disorder. A second autopsy by Dr. Vernard Adams, the medical examiner for Hillsborough County, found Anderson's death was caused by suffocation due to the actions of the guards. He said the suffocation was caused by hands blocking the boy's mouth, as well as the "forced inhalation of ammonia fumes" that caused his vocal cords to spasm, blocking Anderson's upper airway. The guards had said in an incident report that they used ammonia capsules five times on Anderson to gain his cooperation.

For those who are fired or have their security clearances revoked — tantamount to firing in the intelligence agencies — there is little recourse. Most national security whistle-blowers are not protected from retaliation by law. That's because the intelligence-gathering agencies are exempted from the 1989 whistle-blower Protection Act, which guarantees investigations into disclosures made by federal employees and protects whistle-blowers from retaliation.

Newly leaked audiotapes of military tribunals held at Guantánamo Bay concentration camp shared the eerie quality of the Soviet show trials of the 1930s. Once again the men are accused of membership in a shadowy terrorist conspiracy. The evidence against them consists of hearsay--the testimony of other misérables giving them up in order to save themselves. They have been beaten, abused and probably tortured.

Let's examine the arithmetic of this systematic disappearance. In the first years after the attacks of 11 September, thousands of Taliban or suspected terrorist suspects were captured. Just in Afghanistan, the US admitted processing more than 6,000 prisoners. Pakistan has said it handed over around 500 captives to the US; Iran said it sent 1,000 across the border to Afghanistan. Of all these, some were released and just over 700 ended up in Guantanamo, Cuba. But the simple act of subtraction shows that thousands are missing. More than five years after 9/11, where are they all? We know that many were rendered to foreign jails, both by the CIA and directly by the US military. But how many precisely? The answer is still classified. No audit of the fate of all these souls has ever been published.

Padilla, 36, a U.S. citizen held in military custody for three-and-half years without charge as an "enemy combatant,” was originally accused of plotting to detonate a radioactive "dirty bomb" in a U.S. city.

Lately, the company's sights have been set squarely on Robert Greenwald, director of Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers, in which CACI plays a starring role. Greenwald has been in a back-and-forth with CACI's CEO, Jack London, and its lead attorney, William Koegel, during "months of calls, emails and letters" in what Greenwald calls a campaign to "intimidate, threaten and suppress" the story presented in the film. "The threatening letters started early, trying to get us to back off," Greenwald told me. "We refused, and went back at them with a very strong letter saying, 'no, you're war profiteers and we won't be silenced.' Like any bully, they backed down when confronted. No lawsuit was filed- they're a paper tiger."

The Rude Pundit's said it before and he'll say it again: we live in Gitmo America. Sure, there's hope that in the future the cages will be rattled. But for now violence is out of the shadows and in our faces, and those who wish to create violence do so alarmingly without fear of reprisal.

China has acknowledged for the first time the scale of "transplant tourism" — in which the organs of executed prisoners are sold to foreigners — and are to force doctors to pledge to stop the practice. The announcement is the government's most serious response yet to allegations that hospitals are conducting a lucrative and expanding trade in selling organs to foreigners arriving on tourist visas.

This is like something out of a horror movie, you can hear the guy screaming and begging not to be tortured as they repeatedly hit him with the Taser shot. Tortured for not showing ID in America, this is what "serve and protect" has come to mean.

A horror video that wouldn't look out of place in Maoist China or Nazi Germany shows a student being repeatedly shot with a stun gun by UCLA police for the crime of not showing his ID. As similar cases begin to pile up how long will it be before Americans are routinely tortured for noncompliance and refusing to have their 4th amendment violated?

After years of denials, the CIA has formally acknowledged the existence of two classified documents governing aggressive interrogation and detention policies for terrorism suspects, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. But CIA lawyers say the documents -- memos from President Bush and the Justice Department -- are still so sensitive that no portion can be released to the public.

The footage, shot by a local resident and posted on YouTube.com three weeks ago, shows two officers holding down 24-year-old Williams Cardenas as they arrested him in August on a warrant for receiving stolen property. As the struggling suspect yells, "I can't breathe", one of the officers punches him sharply several times in the face before they are able to handcuff him.

IJ lawyers are currently defending property owners in Long Branch, N.J., whose homes are threatened by politicians and developers who want to build expensive condominiums in their place. It's odd that the politicians now call these homes "blighted" because only a few years ago, Mayor Adam Schneider praised the condition of the beachfront homes in the middle-class MTOTSA neighborhood. "If the whole area looked like [MTOTSA], we would not be doing [redevelopment]," said the mayor at the time. Now, all of a sudden, the area needs to be leveled so developers Applied Companies and Matzel & Mumford can provided badly needed condos for the rich.

A delegation of the European Council will arrive in Warsaw on Tuesday to start a three-day probe into alleged secret CIA prisons in Poland, the Polish Press Agency reported.

“Government lawyers also argue in court papers that detainees such as Khan previously held in CIA sites have no automatic right to speak to lawyers because the new Military Commissions Act, signed by President Bush last month, stripped them of access to U.S. courts. That law established separate military trials for terrorism suspects,” the Post continues. It will, soon enough, strip the rest of us from court access, that is after the unitary decider or one of his minions designates those of us in opposition to the neocons and their emerging police state as “unlawful combatants,” thus posing the question: how long until the spanking new Ministry of Homeland Security camps, constructed by Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root, are transformed into “black sites,” containing “black rooms” complete with the latest in torture techniques, including, for the male members of the resistance, lacerating the penis with scalpels and razorblades?

The Bush administration has told a federal judge that terrorism suspects held in secret CIA prisons should not be allowed to reveal details of the "alternative interrogation methods" that their captors used to get them to talk. The government says in new court filings that those interrogation methods are now among the nation's most sensitive national security secrets and that their release -- even to the detainees' own attorneys -- "could reasonably be expected to cause extremely grave damage." Terrorists could use the information to train in counter-interrogation techniques and foil government efforts to elicit information about their methods and plots, according to government documents submitted to U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton on Oct. 26.

From time to time, certain people in the U.S. also find themselves tossed into special kinds of detention facilities. For example, during the 2004 Republican National Convention (RNC) in New York City, protesters (and also bystanders) swept up in indiscriminate mass arrests or illegal acts of preemptive incarceration were temporarily locked up in "Marine and Aviation Pier 57," a filthy facility of razor-wire topped chain-link cages that was soon dubbed "Guantanamo on the Hudson." While being imprisoned in New York City's own Gitmo didn't begin to compare to being tossed in the real McCoy or any other secret offshore site, there was one striking similarity. U.S. intelligence officials estimated that 70-90% of prisoners detained in Iraq "had been arrested by mistake." That was also 2004. The next year, it was revealed that, of the large majority of RNC arrest cases that had run their course, 91% of the arrests were dismissed or ended in acquittals. On the American prison planet, not only has the principle of habeas corpus been formally abolished and torture proudly added to the mix, but that crucial tenet of the legal system, the presumption of innocence, has been cast aside. Whether at home or abroad, the solution for U.S. security forces is a simple one, identify the likely suspects, conduct sweeps, and preemptively lock them up.

Padilla's lawyers say that he was kept from sleeping, kept in shackles for hours and housed in a small cell at a Navy brig in South Carolina. They also allege that interrogators threatened to cut him and pour alcohol on the cuts and gave him drugs, possibly LSD or PCP. U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke told federal prosecutors to respond to the torture claims by Nov. 13.

We will continue to see armed men terrorize our children, aim guns at their head and indoctrinate them to accept living under tyranny unless parents and teacher organizations band together to file huge lawsuits against those responsible and we vehemently denounce the insidious Sovietization of the public school system.

The concept of habeas corpus actually dates back about 700 years, to the 14th Century. Seriously. And now, this concept has been eliminated. The judge is no longer needed, as today's note from the Bush-Cheney administration reminds us. So under this new law, people can be held for years -- for life, forever -- without a trial. Today they use this law to deny any shred of due process to prisoners on Guantanamo. But the law could be used against anyone. I weep for what's left of America. And really, I don't know what is left, except a pretty flag that once stood for something.

And God help us if the Democrats take Congress this year and then get the presidency in 2008. At times, Democratic presidents can actually get away with more senseless killing and militarism, since political pressure from both sides of the spectrum pushes them in that direction. The left will tolerate more bombings from a Democrat. And the right will condemn the Democrats for being international wimps if they don’t send ground troops. For a short period in the 1990s, there was some rightwing resistance to Democratic imperialism, but 9/11 has made that dynamic very unlikely. You had better believe that if Hillary demands a bombing, the Republicans will not be calling for ceasefire. A Democrat would have to prove his or her willingness to kill for America, and he or she will. With a Republican Congress and Democrat in the Oval Office, there might be more restraint with domestic spending than we’ve seen in the last six years. But as for war, Democrats have very rarely been against it. And if they come to have both the presidency and Congress, we can expect welfare and warfare from here to the heavens.

Vice President Dick Cheney has confirmed that U.S. interrogators subjected captured senior al-Qaida suspects to a controversial interrogation technique called "water-boarding," which creates a sensation of drowning. Cheney indicated that the Bush administration doesn't regard water-boarding as torture and allows the CIA to use it. "It's a no-brainer for me," Cheney said at one point in an interview.

Owen's account of his seven months on the job paints a similar picture to Mayberry's. Health and safety measures were essentially non-existent, he says. Not once did he witness a safety meeting. Once an Egyptian worker fell and broke his back and was sent home. No one ever heard from him again. "The accident might not have happened if there was a safety programme and he had known how to use a safety harness," Owen said. State Department officials supervising the project are aware of many such events, but apparently did nothing, he said. Once when 17 workers climbed the wall of the construction site to escape, a State Department official helped round them up and put them in "virtual lockdown", Owen said.

How does an American who is labeled an enemy combatant ultimately get tried? Answer: he doesn’t. Under the Military Commissions Act, trial by military tribunal is limited to foreigners. So, even though Americans still have the use of habeas corpus (so far) to test whether their detention is lawful, if the Supreme Court ultimately upholds the “unlawful enemy combatant” designation for people accused of terrorism, Americans will be returned to indefinite military custody as “unlawful enemy combatants” if the government has provided some evidence of terrorism at the habeas corpus hearing.

I read through the pages in utter disbelief. My first reaction was, ‘This is terrible. The English used here is terrible. Nobody could ever believe that I would write such a document.’ Then I thought, ‘This could actually be good—anybody who knows my style of writing would know that I am not the author, I don’t write like this.’ It sounded uninformed and adventurous, more like the ramblings of a hysterical sixteen-year-old college dropout than what one would expect from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I recalled that during one of the interrogations Marti had said to me, ‘Stop, already! Stop using big words.’ Besides the pathetic English, I read the ‘facts’ with complete amazement. It was full of exaggerations, lies, and presumptions. There were names in there that I hadn’t even heard of, which they knew only too well.

The arrogance of the Neo-Cons has led many to fear that HR 6166 is being maintained in a holding position in anticipation of a major event that will give the Bush administration carte blanche to expand its provisions and sharpen its focus to further target American citizens.

I contend that the government routinely breaches the Constitution and the Bill of Rights that it was sworn to uphold; and that it circumvents domestic law through the frequent use of presidential signing statements that effectively render civil law null and void. The recent passage of the Military Commissions Acts that resulted in the suspension of habeas corpus, passed into law with the aide of fourteen Democrats, is beyond onerous—it is morally vacuous and criminal.

Sixteen Afghans and one Iranian released from years in captivity at Guantanamo Bay prison arrived in Afghanistan on Thursday, an Afghan official said, maintaining that "most" of the detainees had been falsely accused.

It sounds like a case from the old Soviet Union. An activist opposing the government's policies is charged with crimes against the state, declared mentally unbalanced, and forced to take psychotropic drugs in a military prison hospital. However, this case occurred in the United States and involved a Justice Department attempt to silence a one-time CIA asset who was engaged in backchannel negotiations with Saddam Hussein's government to avert a war.

In legalese resurrected verbatim from Saddam Hussein’s penal code, the Iraqi government has criminalized criticism and even ridicule of the government or any of its officials. Ridiculing is defined as exposing corruption or questioning the actions of government officials. Iraq's new government considers itself to be so democratic that dissent is unnecessary - so they've outlawed it!

Padilla's attorneys argued that the alleged torture constitutes "outrageous government conduct" that requires that the criminal case against Padilla be dismissed. Judge Marcia Cooke has already dropped one of the charges against Padilla, but he could still be sentenced to life in prison on the other charges. The trial has been delayed until next January, at the earliest. A top Al Qaeda leader, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, reportedly admitted during interrogations that he tasked Padilla with locating radioactive materials and scouting out locations for a dirty bomb. However, the pending indictment against Padilla makes no mention of such a plot.

The atrocity known as the Military Commissions Act of 2006 is a huge leap forward to elevating the Padilla treatment from the lawless shadows into full-fledged, officially sanctioned and legally authorized policy of the U.S. Government. The case of Jose Padilla is no longer a sick aberration, but is instead a symbol of the kind of Government we have chosen to have.

Americans might feel comforted by the fact that the president and the Congress limited the removal of habeas corpus to foreign citizens and did not apply it to Americans. If so, they know little about the history of government oppression. Once people accede to the cancellation of judicial protections for “other people” — a grave wrong in and of itself — it is just a matter of time before the cancellation is extended to include them. After all, American officials would argue at the height of a new crisis, what is the difference between a foreign terrorist and an American terrorist? Shouldn’t they be treated the same? Aren’t they equally dangerous? Of course the suspension of habeas corpus should be extended to American terrorists, the argument would go. After all, aren’t American terrorists also traitors?

One of the measure's worst aspects is that it hands the president the discretion to interpret the Geneva Conventions relative to prisoner treatment. By preventing the courts from ruling on cases involving breaches of Common Article 3 of the Conventions, Congress is effectively giving the president unilateral authority over interrogations beyond some explicitly prohibited acts.

President Bush continually says that, "they" hate us because of our freedoms. That may explain why, in this legislation and in the Patriot Act, he is, piece by piece, trying to remove our freedoms. If this is his idea of protecting Americans, we really can't stand much more protection.

Bush now claims continuing authority to kidnap, seize, arrest, imprison and torture anyone he wishes anywhere in the world. The MCA gives him the authority to torture anyone he desires under the statutory privilege to interpret the meaning and application of the Geneva Conventions. The MCA makes his action "authoritative," as final and binding on the courts. In addition, the MCA bars the application of foreign or international law "as a rule of decision" in court. As a result, many international human rights are dead for accused defendants. Perhaps the most invidious part of the MCA is broadened definition of "enemy combatant" beyond someone captured on the battlefield. Under the MCA, without limitation Bush can designate as "enemy combatants" U.S. citizens who "purposely and materially" support hostilities against the United States. For example, this can include anyone who actively opposes the president or the government, including attorneys for detainees, lawful resident aliens who oppose Bush administration policies, innocent contributors to Afghan or Iraqi charities that may have some connection, however slight, to al-Qaida or the Taliban, perrhaps even a writer of a letter to the editor critical of the Iraq war and occupation.

To shield FEMA from cronyism, Congress established new job qualifications for the agency's director in last week's homeland security bill. The law says the president must nominate a candidate who has ``a demonstrated ability in and knowledge of emergency management" and ``not less than five years of executive leadership." Bush signed the homeland-security bill on Wednesday morning. Then, hours later, he issued a signing statement saying he could ignore the new restrictions. Bush maintains that under his interpretation of the Constitution, the FEMA provision interfered with his power to make personnel decisions. The law, Bush wrote, ``purports to limit the qualifications of the pool of persons from whom the president may select the appointee in a manner that rules out a large portion of those persons best qualified by experience and knowledge to fill the office."

The Bush administration can continue its warrantless surveillance program while it appeals a judge's ruling that the program is unconstitutional, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday.

The Senate just passed by a vote of 65-34 a bill that, among other things, allows the president to imprison forever, without trial, your neighbor's son -- a lawful permanent resident in the United States -- for emailing his Muslim roommate who went home to visit his family. Your daughter who organizes a protest at the Pentagon that gets a little more attention than the president thinks it should could become a detainee, held indefinitely. The bill says generally what activities qualify one as an "unlawful enemy combatant" subject to detention, but if the government can postpone that review indefinitely, who's going to tell the president that detention is illegal?

Some people think that Amnesty International's description of the camp as the "gulag of our times" is too harsh. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, for instance, recently rejected the "gulag" label, telling conventions of the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American Legion that Guantanamo is more akin to a holiday resort, complete with a volleyball court, basketball court, soccer field and library. During my years of incarceration, I never once encountered the things Rumsfeld mentioned and never met anyone who had. What people don't seem to understand about Guantanamo is that the prisoners there who protest their innocence have no way to prove it. The principle "innocent until proven guilty" is turned on its head. Everyone's guilty without charges, convicted without a trial. That is why it's like a gulag — even if it's one that provides "Harry Potter" books for reading material (as Rumsfeld noted).

A report in the Chicago Tribune summarized the bill as shielding U.S. officials from prosecution under the War Crimes Act retroactively to 1997. That's when the original law was passed criminalizing violations of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions.

To the applause of fellow passengers, the Jewish designer was escorted from a New York flight as a potential bomber. Because, he tells Sophie Goodchild, of his holiday tan

According to the Chicago Tribune, that memo instructed prosecutors to drop cases handled by four Chicago police officers who were later charged with robbery and kidnapping.

lthough it specifically outlaws rape and mutilation, defining them as war crimes, human rights groups fear this leeway could allow George Bush to authorise methods viewed as illegal under international law. Sleep deprivation, light and sound deprivation, 20-hour interrogations, induced hypothermia, the use of hoods, isolation and the removal of clothing are amongst methods already believed to be in use that could be given official approval by Mr Bush.

A Wisconsin man who wrote "Kip Hawley is an Idiot" on a plastic bag containing toiletries said he was detained at an airport security checkpoint for about 25 minutes before authorities concluded the statement was not a threat. Ryan Bird, 31, said he wrote the comment about Hawley -- head of the Transportation Security Administration -- as a political statement. He said he feels the TSA is imposing unreasonable rules on passengers while ignoring bigger threats.

In a 253 to 168 “party-line” vote, the congress repealed habeas corpus and approved the torturing of prisoners in American custody. It is breathtaking assault on human rights and personal liberty and puts the United States well-outside the community of civilized nations. It will ultimately be up to the Supreme Court to decide whether to strike down this "affront to democracy" or let the law stand as is. If the bill passes the Senate, the administration will be able to arrest whomever it chooses and lock them up indefinitely without due process. Suspects in Bush’s war on terror will no longer have the right to challenge the terms of their detention or to even know why they have been incarcerated.

Keep this in mind. If your neighbor's mean-ass pit bull comes into your yard and bites you, you don't get mad at your own dog for not protecting you. First order of business is to get rid of the god-damned pit bull. After all, he's the one that's really responsible for your wounds. Once that's done, then you can worry about giving your own sorry pooch some watch-dog training.

We have established that the bill allows the President to define American citizens as enemy combatants. Now let's take it one step further. Before this article is dismissed as another extremist hyperbolic rant, please take a few minutes out of your day to check for yourself the claim that Bush now has not only the legal authority but the active blessings of his own advisors to torture American children.

We must speak these words clearly: the right to protest the actions of the US government is simply not negotiable. What our leaders so plainly do not understand is that, in a democracy, the exercise of government power is paid for by the right of the people to voice their opinions. There is no other currency. Where the people are silenced and stripped of their liberties, the government exercises power unjustly, and must be removed. We are at a critical moment in time. Even as it strips our liberties and presides over the willful destruction of the US economy, the current administration has sought to further insulate itself from the citizens it is supposed to serve. We cannot afford to allow this trend to continue. We urge all concerned citizens to join WCW in a work stoppage next week, and in helping to create the conditions for the removal of a criminal regime.

Camp Cropper itself turns out to be an interesting story, but one with a problem: while the emptying of Abu Ghraib made the news everywhere, the filling of Camp Cropper made no news at all. And yet it turns out that Camp Cropper, which started out as a bunch of tents, has now become a US$60 million "state-of-the-art" prison. The upgrade, on the drawing boards since 2004, was just completed and hardly a word has been written about it. We really have no idea what it consists of or what it looks like, even though it's in one of the few places in Iraq that an American reporter could safely visit, being on a vast US military base constructed, like the prison, with taxpayer dollars.

``THE INTERROGATOR shut her file and said, `Congratulations! Your interrogation is complete. You're innocent! You'll be leaving soon.' "`When did this happen?" I asked. Abdulnasir searched his memory. His foot moved back and forth the short length of the chain clipped to the floor. Then the young man spoke softly, ``The year after we got here -- 2003. In the spring, I think -- a long time ago." Abdulnasir is in Guantanamo today, more than three years later.

But more important, the Senate-White House torture deal should cause Americans to doubt the moral basis of their entire government.

In 2003 alone, justices disciplined by the state included one in Montgomery County who had closed his court to the public and let prosecutors run the proceedings during 20 years in office. Another, in Westchester County, had warned the police not to arrest his political cronies for drunken driving, and asked a Lebanese-American with a parking ticket if she was a terrorist. A third, in Delaware County, had been convicted of having sex with a mentally retarded woman in his care. New York is one of about 30 states that still rely on these kinds of local judges, descendants of the justices who kept the peace in Colonial days, when lawyers were scarce. Many states, alarmed by mistakes and abuse, have moved in recent decades to rein in their authority or require more training. Some, from Delaware to California, have overhauled the courts, scrapped them entirely or required that local judges be lawyers. But New York has no such requirement. It demands more schooling for licensed manicurists and hair stylists.

A year later on the streets of Baghdad, I saw countless insurgents surrender when faced with the prospect of a hot meal, a pack of cigarettes and air-conditioning. America’s moral integrity was the single most important weapon my platoon had on the streets of Iraq. It saved innumerable lives, encouraged cooperation with our allies and deterred Iraqis from joining the growing insurgency. But those days are over. America’s moral standing has eroded, thanks to its flawed rationale for war and scandals like Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo and Haditha. The last thing we can afford now is to leave Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions open to reinterpretation, as President Bush proposed to do and can still do under the compromise bill that emerged last week. Blurring the lines on the letter of Article 3 — it governs the treatment of prisoners of war, prohibiting “violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture” and “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment” — will only make our troops’ tough fight even tougher. It will undermine the power of all the Geneva Conventions, immediately endanger American troops captured by the enemy and create a powerful recruiting tool for Al Qaeda.

While you can obviously imagine or gerrymander or stipulate a situation in which torture might yield useful information, in practice the systematic authorization of torture creates an army of butchers, not a crack investigative team. Bush, Cheney, and those around them remind me of Nietzsche's line about staring too long into the abyss. They've become transfixed, hypnotized almost, by the evils they believe themselves to be fighting. Obsessed to the point where they've clearly developed an admiration for the brutal methods, ruthless dishonesty, and utter secrecy with which the enemies of liberalism conduct themselves.

What distinguishes these two fatalities from scores of other questionable deaths in U.S. custody is that they were successfully concealed — not just from the American public but from the military's chain of command and legal authorities. The deaths came to light only after an investigation by The Times and a nonprofit educational organization, the Crimes of War Project, led the Army to open criminal inquiries on the incidents. Two years later, the cases remain under investigation and no charges have been filed.

U.S. Justice Department lawyers filed an appeal Friday aimed at blocking a lawsuit by a former Islamic charity that has challenged a Bush administration secret surveillance program. U.S. District Judge Garr M. King ruled earlier this month that a lawsuit by the defunct Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation chapter in Ashland could go forward without damaging national security.

The extent of the torture and abuse that British residents held at Guantanamo Bay claim to have suffered is revealed for the first time in a series of recently declassified interviews between the detainees and their human rights lawyers.

A judge ruled Thursday police Commissioner Ray Kelly cannot be called as a witness to defend the city against lawsuits accusing it of unjustly arresting hundreds of protesters during the Republican National Convention.

A report by the U.N. Assistance Mission in Iraq's Human Rights office cited worrying evidence of torture, unlawful detentions, growth of sectarian militias and death squads, and a rise in "honor killings" of women.

Asked at a news conference on Tuesday about a Canadian commission’s finding that the man, Maher Arar, was wrongly sent to Syria and tortured there, Mr. Gonzales replied, “Well, we were not responsible for his removal to Syria.” He added, “I’m not aware that he was tortured.” The attorney general’s comments caused puzzlement because they followed front-page news articles of the findings of the Canadian commission. It reported that based on inaccurate information from Canada about Mr. Arar’s supposed terrorist ties, American officials ordered him taken to Syria, an action documented in public records.

In the novels and stories of Kafka, the guilt or innocence of the accused is not the issue. When hauled before the unknown accuser, without explanation of charges or evidence, Kafka's characters assume that they must have done something wrong. The surreal dislocation of the one imprisoned in the penal colony or the castle consists in solitude, vulnerability, ignorance. The anonymously oppressing power structure is Kafka's true subject, and it is characterized only by its radical unaccountability. ``Trust us. You're guilty. We're going to execute you, but we can't tell you why." The absolute power of the oppressor depends on the absolute ignorance of the oppressed.

The question isn't just Ben Franklin's safety versus liberty -- it comes down to whether we should prefer a small potential gain in security over the short term to possibly a large security threat in the future.

The elite needs to maintain the facade that terrorist cells are everywhere and that only their smothering 'protection' will keep us safe. And yet time and time again the real terrorists are protected and given safe passage by the military-industrial complex handlers. Though the torture program is being sold to the American people as a necessity in the "war of civilizations," it is in actual fact a trial balloon for the incarceration of political dissidents during a time of manufactured national emergency such as a biological terror attack or race riots.

Dr. Steven Miles is the author of Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity and the War on Terror, a scathing examination of the failings of members of the medical profession serving in the military with respect to treatment of prisoners held by American forces in the war on terror, demonstrating such abuses as medical personnel participating in coervice interrogations if not outright torture (including using prisoners' own medical records against them), preparing misleading, if not outright falsifying, medical records including death certificates, and failing to advocate for prisoners being placed in dangerous situations (e.g., such as under weapons fire, or in dangerously unsanitary conditions). Dr. Miles expanded on an article on this subject he published in the Lancet in 2004, relying on an examination of declassified, publicly available documents from our government and military.

A few cities, such as New Haven, Conn., and San Jose, Calif., restrict the use of SWAT teams to cases where a suspect presents an immediate threat. Denver dramatically cut back the number of "no-knock" raids conducted after a SWAT team shot and killed an innocent man in a botched raid in 1999, and follow-up investigations revealed severe deficiencies in the how police had obtained "no-knock" warrants. But these examples are few and far between. Most of the country is moving toward more militarization, more aggressive drug policing -- and less accountability when things go wrong.

In his defense, Corsetti's lawyer is reported to have said: ``The president of the United States doesn't know what the rules are. The secretary of defense doesn't know what the rules are. But the government expects this Pfc. [private first class] to know what the rules are?" Corsetti cannot escape culpability by this argument. But it does suggest that responsibility stretches higher up the chain of command. Meanwhile, we continue to pay the price because nobody knows what the rules are.

Another reason for the raid may have been McCormack's increasing awareness of aspects of the 9/11 official story that don't add up.

Everyone's heard about the human rights abuses in African gold and diamond mines. But when it comes to their ultra-cool, razor-thin cell phones, American consumers won't get the message.

Murat Kurnaz was detained in the United States detention camp at Guantánamo, Cuba, for almost five years and released three weeks ago. Cem Özdemir, a member of the European Parliament, visited Kurnaz at his home in Bremen and reports back about a German man of Turkish origin who appears to be anything but a fanatic.

Congress's Republican leadership yesterday threw its weight behind two of President Bush's most controversial national security programs, warrantless wiretapping and extrajudicial military tribunals.

A personal request to readers. Many have written to ask what can be done to protect Matt and me from becoming unwilling guests of the State. First, this ain't no foolin' around: Matt and I are facing these nutty charges. So spread the info. We believe that getting the word out is the best defense. Second, call Homeland Security and turn us in. They seem to have trouble finding us. If you get a reward, you may choose to donate it to the Palast Investigative Fund, a 501(c)(3) educational foundation which supports our work and pays our legal fees.

Four veterans of the current war in Iraq and one supporter (a total of five young men) were detained at the Pentagon today after they attended an open house and left behind flyers providing information about the lethal effects of depleted uranium.

The "undercover tactical unit" involved in the assault and TASERing of a 9/11 investigative journalist at his Chicago-area home was most likely an operation ordered by the Department of Homeland Security, according to a former high-ranking police official.

I watch as everything I was educated to believe in crumbles around me. I watch as there are secret detentions, extraordinary renditions, secret trials, disappeared, people held with no charges and no evidence, searched without judicial review and without their knowledge, a homeland security office that last spoke of round ups of "disgruntled" and people from 33 nationalities. At the same time, our unused military bases are being turned into concentration camps. And, this is just the start, the time before the sunset provisions of the Patriot Act or being eliminated either through the Hatch bill or by the Domestic Security Act... I watch and I am afraid...

Baltimore City police have a new crime on the books: Stealing your own car. Just ask Keith Spence, a Baltimore City resident who was arrested when he was driving home from work in a car he bought with a tax refund.

My son is not a terrorist. He was, in fact, a great admirer of American political values and legal principles before he was kidnapped and sent to Guantanamo. Our family is nonetheless willing to undergo the ordeal of trial and judgment, if only the U.S. government would allow it to happen.

Picked up by FBI agents from his home in Peoria, Illinois, al-Marri might be a criminal, but he hardly seems like a combatant. He carried no weapon, was thousands of miles away from any conceivable battlefield, and was charged with credit card fraud, making false statements, and similar offenses, until the government decided to drop his prosecution and transfer him into military custody.

Why should Geneva Convention protections be applied to Guantanamo detainees? One innocent man's journey through the legal black hole of the War on Terror—four prisons, three countries, two years—may be the best argument yet.

Why would FEMA make an already terrible situation worse? Because after every purposefully botched rescue effort that is whitewashed as a lack of resources, FEMA get more funding and more power.

After calling 911 to report a suspicious vehicle with three armed men in my neighborhood, I was harassed, beaten and shocked with a Taser gun in my front yard in Hoffman Estates, Ill., in front of my wife and child. I was subsequently charged with resisting arrest and aggravated assault. I was then subjected to six hours of abuse at the hands of the local police.

Five years ago, a moribund Bush administration seized upon the national fear and revulsion over the Sept. 11 attacks to tighten its grip on power. Quickly diverting the nation into a disastrous foreign military adventure in Iraq, which had nothing to do with fighting terrorism, the Republicans happily shed painstakingly established domestic civil liberties and mocked the ideal of representative democracy by lying to the American public.

After 9/11, new martial law plans began to surface similar to those of FEMA in the 1980s. In January 2002 the Pentagon submitted a proposal for deploying troops on American streets. One month later John Brinkerhoff, the author of the 1982 FEMA memo, published an article arguing for the legality of using U.S. troops for purposes of domestic security.

An excellent expose by The Boston Globe of the predatory tactics used by the debt collection machinery in Massachusetts. Reads like a frontline report from the war on the poor.

Despite the fact that the beating was videotaped, no arrests have been made.

In honor of the Bush administration's seeming reversal of policy on detainees and the Geneva Conventions, as well as a deep appreciation of California Republican Duncan Hunter, chair of the House Armed Service committee, who says that detainees have been treated in too lax a fashion, here's some excerpts from the report by the Center for Constitutional Rights on what the detainees and others say happens to prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility.

Evidence provided in the Burge cases paint a picture not unlike what has emerged from the Abu Ghraib scandal, or allegations relating to abuse by US authorities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and other US detention facilities in the Middle-East.

The U.S. Supreme Court, in a June 2004 judgment, stated, "For if this nation is to remain true to the ideals symbolized by its flag, it must not wield the tools of tyrants even to resist an assault by the forces of tyranny."

We all pray for a time when the world will be a peace — but until that time arrives, Jewish law directs the Jewish state and the American nation to do what it takes (no more, but no less, either) to survive and prosper ethically in the crazy world in which we live.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has been detaining Muslim immigrants, holding their green cards hostage, and threatening deportation unless the detainee agrees to become a government informant, today's WALL STREET JOURNAL is reporting.