Posts Tagged ‘Torture’
Tuesday, September 15th, 2009
Stephen Fitzpatrick; 15/9/09
Parliamentarians in the Indonesian province of Aceh yesterday passed a law that would allow stoning to death for adultery and whipping for premarital sex. Critics plan to mount a legal challenge to the sharia law provisions, passed at the last possible moment before the current parliament in Banda Aceh is dissolved. The draft law came from the office of Governor Irwandi Yusuf, a US-educated veterinarian with secular views who spent his early adult years fighting in the Acehnese armed resistance. It was drafted in response to popular pressure to fully implement sharia law in the province, under the terms of an autonomy deal struck in 2000. Mr Yusuf is not thought to support the law’s more extreme elements, cobbled together by a parliamentary committee.
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Tags: Asia, Capital Punishment, Torture, Womens Rights
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Friday, September 4th, 2009
Ed Pilkington; 4/9/09
Doctors and psychologists the CIA employed to monitor its ”enhanced interrogation” of terror suspects came close to, and may even have committed, unlawful human experiments, a medical ethics watchdog has alleged. Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), a not-for-profit group that has investigated the role of medical personnel in alleged incidents of torture at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Bagram and other US detention sites, accuses doctors of being far more involved than hitherto believed. PHR says health professionals participated at every stage in the development, implementation and legal justification of what it calls the CIA’s secret ”torture program”. The American Medical Association, the largest body of physicians in the US, said it was talking with the Obama Administration and other government agencies over the role of doctors. ”The participation of physicians in torture and interrogation is a violation of core ethical values,” it said.
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Tags: Terrorism, Torture, USA
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Thursday, July 23rd, 2009
23/7/09
Photographs showing the abuse of inmates at Iraq’s infamous Abu Ghraib prison by US prison guards have shocked the world. The latest one to be outraged is Admiral Michael Mullen, the chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff. Mullen has voiced his disgust after seeing some of the withheld photographs of the abuse that the administration of Barack Obama, the US president, is seeking to keep classified. In a leaked memo obtained by the Fox News network, Mullen expressed his anger at the incidents of abuse and said he was “appalled” that someone in an American uniform would behave in such a way. “We haven’t all absorbed or applied all the lessons of Abu Ghraib,” Mullen said. But for Mahmood Khalil, an Iraqi television cameraman and former Abu Ghraib inmate, the pictures are more than just disturbing images – they are personal nightmares.
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Tags: Iraq, Terrorism, Torture, USA
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Friday, July 10th, 2009
10/8/09
Katrina Abarcar; Katrina Abarcar coordinates the work of Katarungan, which seeks to promote peace, justice, and human rights in the Philippines through research, education, and grassroots advocacy. Here is a moving expression of faith-based solidarity from Mrs. Edita Burgos to Melissa Roxas, and I was very touched and moved by it. Edita is the mother of missing Filipino activist Jonas Burgos, about whom Anna Almendrala wrote a post last year.
My dear Melissa, Praise be to God for He is good! I am the mother of the missing/abducted activist Jonas Burgos. We, my children and I, said prayers of thanks when we learned that you were returned and now are safe with your family. Every time we hear of an abduction, we die all over again, thinking of Jonas. But every time we hear about a victim of abduction being surfaced or found alive, even if it is in jail or elsewhere in captivity, we rejoice with the family and consider it a triumph of good over evil.
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Tags: Human Rights, The Phillipines, Torture
Posted in Human Rights, Terrorism, The Philippines, USA | No Comments »
Thursday, July 9th, 2009
Chris Wallace-Crabbe; 9/7/09
Chris Wallace-Crabbe is a Melbourne poet, and the editor of Vincent Buckley: Collected Poems. See: http://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=14271
The dirty word
Walking under winking wattle that burns the winter away
resist the paradoxical way
in which the viridian tide of pleasure
makes one taste of death.
But if we fail to murmur death
we cannot hear the sound of blood,
nor touch those random victims who
cry out from the very moment
when the electrodes are applied;
for torture is the dirty word
and some are trying to clean its face.
There can be nothing quite like
hypothetical fear to rouse
the deepest human nastiness.
If the cut worm has any sense
it will not forgive the plough,
but let’s not hear the word, revenge:
a dragon that must feed on
all the pornography of shame.
Tags: Torture
Posted in Australia, Human Rights, Terrorism | No Comments »
Friday, June 26th, 2009
Ben Farmer; 26/6/09; (2 Items)
Former prisoners in the US military jail at Bagram air base in Afghanistan have claimed they were beaten, deprived of sleep and threatened with dogs. Some allege they were blasted with unbearably loud noise, forced to strip in front of female soldiers and put in stress positions. The 27 former prisoners interviewed in a BBC investigation were detained after being accused of associations with al-Qaeda or the Taliban. None was charged or tried before release and some had subsequently received apologies. Two said they had been treated well.
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Tags: Afghanistan, Drugs, Torture, USA
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Monday, June 15th, 2009
Don Thompson; 15/6/09
A federal judge has ruled that a convicted terrorist can sue a former Bush administration lawyer for drafting the legal theories that led to his alleged torture. The order by US District Judge Jeffrey White of San Francisco is the first time a government lawyer has been held potentially liable for the abuse of prisoners. On Friday Judge White refused to dismiss Jose Padilla’s lawsuit against the former senior Justice Department official John Yoo. Mr Yoo wrote memos on interrogation, detention and presidential powers for the department’s Office of Legal Counsel from 2001 to 2003. Padilla, 38, is serving a 17-year sentence on terrorism charges.
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Tags: Terrorism, Torture, USA
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Thursday, June 4th, 2009
Rumsfeld ‘in strife’ over Guantanamo
4/6/09
Former US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld could soon be in trouble for the role he played in human rights abuses committed in the Guantanamo prison, a United Nations expert said. “In a year or two, his responsibilities will be established. Wherever he goes, he will face difficulties,” Leandro Despouy, who is Special Rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers, said in Geneva today. A US bipartisan Senate report released late last year found Mr Rumsfeld and other top administration officials responsible for abuse of Guantanamo detainees in US custody. It said Mr Rumsfeld authorised harsh interrogation techniques on December 2, 2002 at the Guantanamo prison, although he ruled them out a month later.
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Tags: Human Rights, Torture, USA
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Thursday, May 28th, 2009
28/5/09
Last week President Barack Obama and former Vice President Dick Cheney delivered back-to-back speeches on national security. In these speeches, we witnessed a rare moment of clarity, a moral clash in the interpretation of reality, and one of the starkest contrasts in competing visions I have ever seen for the values, direction, and policies of our nation. In short, there was a choice offered to us for exactly what kind of country and people we want to be – and what America will mean for us and for the world. First, President Obama offered a dramatically new direction for achieving national security, after the “misguided experiment” of the Bush years. In a very powerful symbol, Obama chose the National Archives as the venue for this major address, pointing to the historic documents that are kept here – the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Bill of Rights – noting that these documents are “the foundation of liberty and justice in this country, and a light that shines for all who seek freedom, fairness, equality, and dignity around the world,” and clearly suggesting that they have been violated in the policies of the U.S. over the past several years, policies that included the systematic violation of legal rights and even the use of torture.
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Tags: Human Rights, Torture, USA
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Wednesday, May 27th, 2009
Cynthia Banham; 27/5/09
The Australian Defence Force has raised concerns about the Rudd Government’s plans to make a new federal torture offence apply to acts committed overseas. The Attorney-General, Robert McClelland, announced on Friday the Government would create a Commonwealth offence criminalising torture, and said it was contemplating giving it extraterritorial application to cover acts committed both within and outside Australia. The Herald understands the military has raised concerns that troops on joint exercises or operations with allied forces could become caught up in the new laws and face prosecution, even though they had no knowledge about a particular act of torture or did not condone it. The United States has admitted using brutal interrogation techniques which amount to torturing detainees in the so-called “war on terror” under the Bush administration.
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Tags: Australia, Terrorism, Torture, USA
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Tuesday, May 26th, 2009
Gary Younge; 26/5/09; (3 Items)
Every government assumes deeds and misdeeds of the past,” writes Hannah Arendt in Eichmann and the Holocaust. “It means hardly more, generally speaking, than that every generation, by virtue of being born into a historical continuum, is burdened by the sins of the fathers as it is blessed with the deeds of the ancestors.” For Barack Obama this cuts both ways. Talented as he is, he looks much more so when compared with the man who preceded him. To earn acclaim in these early months, he hasn’t had to do anything good. He merely had to announce that he would stop doing things that were bad. On the other hand, he has inherited the scarred landscape of his predecessor’s tenure. Bush’s wars, banks, car companies, secret prisons and untried prisoners are now his. As the candidate he may have promised change, but as the president he must also simulate some sense of continuity.
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Tags: Bush Legacy, Obama, Torture, USA
Posted in Human Rights, Terrorism, USA | No Comments »
Sunday, May 24th, 2009
Anne Davies; 24/5/09 (2 Items)
Amid claims he is compromising America’s national security, the President, Barack Obama, has embarked on a vigorous campaign to lay out the moral, legal and political case for closing Guantanamo Bay detention centre, banning torture and working to reassert the US’s global reputation. The alternative case was put minutes later, just as forcefully and eloquently, by the former vice president Dick Cheney, who used a speech at the American Enterprise Institute to defend the Bush administration’s record and stir emotions against the policy reversals. The back-to-back speeches, and a backlash in Congress over closing Guantanamo Bay, suggest that Mr Obama has a battle on his hands. For the first time since last year’s election, dispirited Republicans feel they have some purchase with the electorate as they begin to shape a comeback for next year’s mid-term elections.
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Tags: Dick Cheney, Terrorism, Torture, USA
Posted in Afghanistan, Human Rights, Iraq, Terrorism, USA | No Comments »
Saturday, May 23rd, 2009
Patrick Walters; 23/5/09; (2 Items)
The Rudd Government will introduce legislation later this year prohibiting the use of torture amid a fierce political debate in the US over the treatment of terror suspects. Attorney-General Robert McClelland confirmed the Government’s intention yesterday, saying it would enact a specific federal offence against torture. “The Government believes torture is totally inconsistent with a humane and civilised society,” Mr McClelland said yesterday.
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Tags: Australia, Torture, USA
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Monday, May 18th, 2009
Leonard Doyle; 18/5/09; (5 Items)
The general chosen by President Barack Obama to run the war in Afghanistan allowed abusive treatment of prisoners in Iraq, human rights investigators claim. Soldiers have described beatings, psychological torture and other physical mistreatment at a camp near Baghdad where General Stanley McChrystal, then commander of US Joint Special Operations forces in Iraq, was frequently seen. General McChrystal was named last week as the next head of Afghan operations. He is now operations director for the US Joint Chiefs of Staff.
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Tags: Afghanistan, Australia, Civilian Deaths, Pakistan, Terrorism, Torture, USA
Posted in Afghanistan, Human Rights, Pakistan, Refugee & Migrant, Terrorism, USA | No Comments »
Saturday, May 16th, 2009
Geoff Elliott; 16/5/09; (3 Items)
Democrat Nancy Pelosi, the most powerful person in the US Congress, and a critic of Bush administration interrogation techniques such as waterboarding, knew about the practice in 2003 and said nothing. The Speaker in the US House of Representatives made the admission yesterday in an extraordinary press conference as she fought to maintain her credibility among the Democratic base. Appearing tense and flustered on the podium as she rifled through her notes, Ms Pelosi is in the firing line after offering several versions of events in the past few weeks about CIA briefings on interrogation policies in 2002 and 2003. Republicans have accused her of hypocrisy and the Democrat from San Francisco has tried to hit back.
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Tags: Australia, Guantanamo Bay reopens, Terrorism, Torture, USA
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Friday, May 15th, 2009
15/5/09; (2 Items)
The United States’ top lawyer has said he is prepared to go to court to prevent the release of scores of photos reportedly documenting prisoner abuse by US troops. Eric Holder’s remarks to US congress on Thursday came a day after Barack Obama, the US president, said he would move to block the court-ordered release of the photos. Holder told the US house judiciary committee that… “The president consulted with the generals on the ground and made the determination that the release of those photos would endanger our troops,” he said.”The concern was the release of those photos could have a negative impact on the situation both in Iraq and in Afghanistan and I think the president as commander in chief … thought that the posture he has now put us in was the better one.”
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Tags: Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Refugees, Terrorism, Torture, USA
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