Friday, Nov 07th
Last update08:59:16 AM GMT
Human Rights Glance
Mohamed is one of a growing number of American Muslims who claim they were captured overseas and questioned in secret at the behest of the United States, victims of what human rights advocates call "proxy detention"—or "rendition-lite."
The latter is a reference to the Bush- and Clinton-era CIA practice of capturing foreign nationals suspected of terrorism and "rendering" them to countries such as Egypt, Jordan, or Morocco (PDF) for interrogations that often involved torture.
More than nine years ago, federal agents looking for evidence of terrorism financing hustled Unus, the institute’s director of administration, and his colleagues into this very library. They were kept there for hours while computers and boxes of documents were carted out.
At almost the same time, 14 agents and police officers broke through the front door of Unus’s house with a battering ram and handcuffed his wife and daughter — a raid that sparked an unsuccessful civil rights lawsuit that the Unuses pursued all the way to the Supreme Court.
In an unprecedented move, the Interior Ministry announced Tuesday that it intends on deporting a four-year-old girl, the daughter of a foreign worker, who was born and educated in Israel.
Israel's Population and Immigration Authority on Tuesday arrested the girl and her mother, originally from the Philippines, who are currently in a holding facility in Ben-Gurion International Airport, ahead of their deportation from the country.
The American Psychological Association (APA) has endorsed gay marriage ahead of its annual convention in Washington. With a unanimous 157-0 vote, the APA's policymaking body approved the resolution on Wednesday.
“Now as the country has really begun to have experience with gay marriage, our position is much clearer and more straightforward – that marriage equity is the policy that the country should be moving toward,” Clinton Anderson, director of APA's Office on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Concerns, told USA Today.
A top secret document revealing how MI6 and MI5 officers were allowed to extract information from prisoners being illegally tortured overseas has been seen by the Guardian.
The interrogation policy – details of which are believed to be too sensitive to be publicly released at the government inquiry into the UK's role in torture and rendition – instructed senior intelligence officers to weigh the importance of the information being sought against the amount of pain they expected a prisoner to suffer. It was operated by the British government for almost a decade.
A US judge has ruled that a former American military contractor who claims he was tortured in Iraq can sue former Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
The man's lawyers say he was abducted by the US military and abused at a US military detention centre near Baghdad. The government says he was suspected of helping pass information to the enemy, although he was never charged.
In the controversy over whether torture, especially waterboarding, was used to gather information leading to the capture of Osama bin Laden, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told Fox News' Sean Hannity recently that "no one was waterboarded at Guantanamo by the US military. In fact, no one was waterboarded at Guantanamo, period."
In his memoir, "Known and Unknown," Rumsfeld maintained, "To my knowledge, no US military personnel involved in interrogations waterboarded any detainees, not at Guantanamo or anywhere else in the world." But as we shall see, Rumsfeld was either lying outright, or artfully twisting the truth.
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