Human Rights Glance
Across the street from U.S. military headquarters in Kabul, shrouded from view by concrete walls, the Afghan intelligence agency runs a detention facility for up to 40 terrorism suspects that is known as Department 124. So much torture took place inside, one detainee told the United Nations, that it has earned another name: “People call it Hell.”
But long before the world body publicly revealed “systematic torture” in Afghan intelligence agency detention centers, top officials from the State Department, CIA and U.S. military received multiple warnings about abuses at Department 124 and other Afghan facilities, according to Afghan and Western officials with knowledge of the situation.
U.S. had advance warning of abuse at Afghan prisons, officials say
In light of Shalit swap, 29 Palestinian women demand Israel return bodies of family members
Following the release of Israel Defense Forces soldier Gilad Shalit, 29 Palestinian women have demanded Israel return bodies of their family members currently in Israel's possession.
Since 1967, Israel has held about 180 bodies of Palestinians killed in various clashes, and those of suicide bombers. Most of the bodies are held in a cemetery for enemy combatants, near Adam Bridge in the Jordan Valley.
ACLU: FBI Guilty of Massive Racial Profiling Operations
The FBI has engaged in vast surveillance operations that involves unconstitutional racial profiling and "mapping" of American communities across the country, the American Civil Liberties Union said Thursday.
"The FBI has targeted communities for investigation not based on suspicion of a crime, but on crude stereotypes," said Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU's National Security Project. Shamsi said documents released by the FBI in response to a Freedom of Information Act request "confirm our worst fears" about the FBI targeting communities on the basis of identity and association rather than evidence of criminal wrongdoing.
Bush confronted with Guantanamo torture complaint at Canadian economics summit
International human rights lawyers in western Canada greeted George W. Bush's arrival at an economics summit Thursday by asking a Canadian court to consider a torture complaint by four Guantanamo captives, three of them free and one still held at the U.S. Navy base in southeast Cuba.
The move is part of a global Guantanamo protest effort to ground the man who set up the prison camps in 2002. In February, the former president canceled a plan to speak at a United Israel Appeal gala fundraiser in Geneva ahead of a similar torture complaint.
Emergency Committee For Israel Board Member Calls Palestinians ‘Savages,’ ‘Unmanned Animals,’ ‘Food For Sharks’
The Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI) — a right-wing “pro-Israel” pressure group — attempted to paint the Occupy Wall Street protests as anti-Semitic. But while plenty of evidence runs counter to the ECI’s far-reaching assertions that politicians are “turning a blind eye to anti-semitic, anti-Israel attacks,” the ECI is much slower to condemn its own ties to ethnic and religious intolerance.
ECI board member Rachel Abrams — wife of George W. Bush administration Middle East adviser Elliott Abrams — litters her blog, “Bad Rachel,” with homophobic, anti-Palestinian, innuendo-filled screeds about political opponents.
Centuries of open justice in UK threatened by secret courts after lobbying by CIA
Secret justice looks set to be a regular feature of British courts and tribunals when the intelligence services want to protect their sources of information. Civil courts, immigration panels and even coroner's inquests would go into secret session if the Government rules that hearing evidence in public could be a threat to national security.
The proposals, which run counter to a centuries-old British tradition of open justice, were introduced to a sparsely attended House of Commons yesterday by the Justice Secretary, Ken Clarke – and met almost no opposition. The planned changes to the British justice system follow lobbying of the Government by the CIA.
The politics behind the Shalit prisoner swap
Like so many other diplomatic and political initiatives in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the recent announcement of a new prisoner release is based on the same solution that has been proposed dozens of times before - only to collapse because the time, and often Israeli political will, wasn't right.
In this case, the separate announcements made by Hamas leader Khaled Meshal and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, asserted that Hamas would release Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, captured by Hamas in 2006, while Israel would release 1,027 Palestinian prisoners, some of whom have been in jail for decades.
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