This story was originally published on Truthout. The UK action charity Reprieve, whose attorneys represent over a dozen prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, reports that former Guantánamo prisoner, Algerian citizen Abdul Aziz Naji, has been sentenced to three years in prison in Algeria. Reprieve says the charges were “of past membership in an extremist group overseas [...]
February 1, 2012 | Filed under
Torture |
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It could have been big news, if U.S. torture weren’t so anathema to the press corps, such that reporting upon it is considered either a fruitless and unprofitable enterprise, or among most of those who do venture into such waters, the sine qua non for such reportage must be ignorance and/or cover-up for much of [...]
December 8, 2011 | Filed under
Torture |
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Former president of the National Lawyers Guild, Marjorie Cohn, commented on recent statements by two GOP presidential candidates who created a stir by defending waterboarding: [Herman] Cain said, “I don’t see it as torture. I see it as an enhanced interrogation technique,” which is what the Bush administration used to call its policy of torture [...]
November 20, 2011 | Filed under
Torture |
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The UN Assistance Mission to Afghanistan (UNAMA) has released its October 2011 report on “Treatment of Conflict-Related Detainees in Afghanistan” (PDF). Ten years after the US invaded Afghanistan to oust the Taliban regime, and ostensibly dismantle the Al Qaeda forces linked to the 9/11 attacks, the regime in place is not only hopelessly corrupt and [...]
October 12, 2011 | Filed under
World |
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It could just be coincidence, of course. But just as a huge scandal unfolds in Washington over a seemingly botched guns-drug operation, and a possibly cover-up by Attorney General Eric Holder, the Department of Justice has announced a big crackdown on medical marijuana dispensaries in California, long the leader in the medical marijuana movement. Something [...]
October 8, 2011 | Filed under
Nation |
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According to a report published Saturday by Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity (PHSS), the Federal receiver’s office has indicated that “nearly 12,000 prisoners were on hunger strike, including California prisoners who are housed in out of state prisons in Arizona, Mississippi and Oklahoma.” This is the second hunger strike in less than four months, with prisoners [...]
October 3, 2011 | Filed under
Nation |
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It made headlines when historian Susan M. Reverby of Wellesley College discovered a decades-old program run from by the U.S. Public Health Service’s studies in Guatemala from 1946 to 1948. That’s because the researchers deliberately inoculated subjects with syphilis in order to study sexually transmitted disease, and they did so without informed consent for the [...]
August 30, 2011 | Filed under
World |
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A new proposed “casebook” on psychologist ethics in national security settings, written by the Ethics Committee of the American Psychological Association (APA), tells psychologists that when assessing whether an interrogation technique is abusive or not, they should consider, among other factors, whether there are “data to support that the technique is effective in gathering accurate [...]
August 25, 2011 | Filed under
Torture |
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When considering the effects of unemployment, and the desultory, really uncaring response of the current Democratic administration, as well as Republicans in Congress, to the human devastation of joblessness, it is important to consider the terrible emotional and psychological effects of such unemployment. Such effects are well-documented, but rarely mentioned in articles or blog postings. [...]
August 18, 2011 | Filed under
Nation |
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As Thomas Jefferson School of Law professor Marjorie Cohn notes at CommonDreams, “Today marks the 50th anniversary of the start of the chemical warfare program in Vietnam without sufficient remedial action by the U.S. government.” More than 3 million people, including Vietnamese, Vietnamese-Americans, US veterans, and their children have either died, sickened or been disabled, [...]
August 12, 2011 | Filed under
World |
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