Callous and Cruel: Use of Force Against Inmates with Mental Disabilities in US Jails and Prisons
"This 127-page report details incidents in which correctional staff have deluged prisoners with painful chemical sprays, shocked them with powerful electric stun weapons, and strapped them for days in restraining chairs or beds. Staff have broken prisoners’ jaws, noses, ribs; left them with lacerations requiring stitches, second-degree burns, deep bruises, and damaged internal organs. In some cases, the force used has led to their death."

Panel Faults C.I.A. Over Brutality and Deceit in Terrorism Interrogations
"The Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday issued a sweeping indictment of the Central Intelligence Agency’s program to detain and interrogate terrorism suspects in the years after the Sept. 11 attacks, drawing on millions of internal C.I.A. documents to illuminate practices that it said were more brutal — and far less effective — than the agency acknowledged either to Bush administration officials or to the public.

The long-delayed report delivers a withering judgment on one of the most controversial tactics of a twilight war waged over a dozen years. The Senate committee’s investigation, born of what its chairwoman, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, said was a need to reckon with the excesses of this war, found that C.I.A. officials routinely misled the White House and Congress about the information it obtained, and failed to provide basic oversight of the secret prisons it established around the world."

View the Report and the Republican Party's Rebuttal 

U.N.  Panel Criticizes U.S. Policy on Police Shootings, Torture
"A United Nations panel on Friday sharply criticized how the United States handles a variety of criminal justice-related issues, such as the police shooting of unarmed African Americans, the imprisonment of terror detainees at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and the application of the death penalty.

In a 16-page report, its first such review since 2006, the U.N. Committee Against Torture condemned U.S. policies in handling how police dealt with issues of brutality against blacks and Latinos. It did not specifically mention events in Ferguson, Mo., but the parents of Michael Brown, fatally shot by a white police officer, spoke to the commission before the findings were released.

'There are numerous areas in which certain things should be changed for the United States to comply fully with the convention,' Alessio Bruni of Italy, one of the panel's chief investigators, said at a news conference in Geneva. He was referring to the U.N. Convention Against Torture, which took effect in 1987 and the United States ratified in 1994."

View the Report

And...

Report: States With Stand Your Ground Laws Have More Homicides
If you’re interested in reducing violent crime, homicides, or racial bias, you should repeal Stand Your Ground laws, according to new recommendations from an American Bar Association Task Force. In a diplomatic fashion, the 62-page preliminary report hedges from calling for the outright repeal of the controversial “shoot first” provisions, but instead suggests that the laws are a “solution searching for a problem,” that they are associated with increased homicide rates and reinforce racial bias, and that any state concerned with these problems should probably do something about it.

Disaster Sociologists Study How Hurricane Sandy Changed Life In New York
Hurricane Sandy has ushered in big changes all over the New York metropolitan region, from seawalls to city ordinances. It may have also changed things in the Ivory Tower.

Supported by New York University and its Institute for Public Knowledge, a young cadre of social scientists calling themselves the Superstorm Research Lab is quietly rethinking business as usual in academia. Though their work fits squarely in the established field of disaster sociology, the Research Lab is deeply invested in pushing the boundaries between scholarly research and efforts to make real change.

Read the white paper:  A Tale of Two Sandys

Sex Offender Laws Have Gone Too Far
"Our draconian policies about sex offenses reflect our ignorance of them."

"Is the American approach to sex registration working? Who goes on the registries, for how long, and for what kinds of crimes? Do the answers suggest that they are helping to keep kids safe—or sweeping in too many people and stoking irrational fears?"

Author of "Broken Windows" Policing Defends His Theory
In 1982, after another year of record lawlessness in New York City, two college professors advanced — or, more accurately, rekindled — a plausibly uncomplicated theory that would revolutionize law enforcement in the city: Maintaining public order also helps prevent crime.

European Court Finds CIA Interrogation Techniques "Amounted To Torture"
The European Court of Human Rights concludes that so-called enhanced interrogation techniques - specifically approved by John Yoo and Jay Bybee for use by the CIA on Abu Zubaydah at a Polish black site - amounted to torture.

The Draw Of the Undertow:  Extremity, Otherness And Emergent Harm In Gaming And Pornography
"My own interest in the cultural and social impact of video games probably began with morally conflicted feelings while playing Grand Theft Auto III for the first time. I remember experiencing a real sense of surprise at the possibility of running over pedestrians and perhaps more so, a sense of worry at what other, younger, players might take from the game. The game felt like an incredibly violent space, a bleak vision of a city without moral codes or goodness, a space most of all where we were being goaded to bring out our more callous side, running over the homeless in tunnels, sniping at the unsuspecting or beating and stabbing to advance, or just for the sheer hell of it."

 

Privacy/Surveillance/Transparency

Ottawa’s spin doctor payroll rivals that of the Commons http://t.co/Ie6Dmvehmr via @torontostar
— Crim Library UTL (@CrimLib) August 8, 2014

CSEC Won't Say How Long It Keeps Canadians' Private Data
Agency says there are 'firm' time limits on how long it can retain intercepted private communications, but will not disclose detail.

B.C. Government Raises Alarm By Going After Address Of Medicinal Marijuana Growers
Provincial law enforcement agencies appear to be pushing Health Canada to hand over the personal information of more than 16,500 British Columbians licensed to produce medicinal marijuana, a top pot advocate has warned.

The Fourth Branch: The Rise To Power Of The National Security State
...for the Fourth Branch, this remains the age of impunity. Hidden in a veil of secrecy, bolstered by secret law and secret courts, surrounded by its chosen corporations and politicians, its power to define policy and act as it sees fit in the name of American safety is visibly on the rise.

No Matter What They Tell Us, USA Freedom Act Does Not Rein In The Spies 
Some of its supporters are overselling this bill and with it, anyone’s ability to rein in the intelligence community....[T]his bill...tacitly endorses the notion that FBI can conduct warrantless searches on US person communications without even having real basis for an investigation.

See report:  With Liberty to Monitor All

Obama Officials, Senate Intelligence Panel Spar Over Deletions From Torture Report
The Obama administration and the Senate Intelligence Committee are sparring over the administration’s deletions of fake names from the public version of a long-awaited report on the CIA’s use of harsh interrogation methods on suspected terrorists, McClatchy has learned.

Visit The Wrong Website, And The FBI Could End Up In Your Computer
Security experts call it a “drive-by download”: a hacker infiltrates a high-traffic website and then subverts it to deliver malware to every single visitor....Now the technique is being adopted by a different kind of a hacker—the kind with a badge. For the last two years, the FBI has been quietly experimenting with drive-by hacks as a solution to one of law enforcement’s knottiest Internet problems: how to identify and prosecute users of criminal websites hiding behind the powerful Tor anonymity system.


Wikipedia Link To Be Hidden In Google Under "Right To Be Forgotten" Law
Google is set to restrict search terms to a link to a Wikipedia article, in the first request under Europe's controversial new "right to be forgotten" legislation to affect the 110m-page encyclopaedia.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/08/04/235402/obama-officials-senate-intelligence.html#storylink=cpy

New Execution Methods Can’t Disguise Same Old Death Penalty Problems

Ohio made history today by becoming the first state to use the two-drug combination of midazolam and hydromorphone in the execution of Dennis McGuire. State officials decided to use this experimental combination of powerful sedatives and painkillers after supplies of approved execution drugs ran dry. These shortages have caused other states to begin using experimental and downright dangerous methods to carry out executions.

One of the most popular alternatives has been for states to seek out drugs from compounding pharmacies. These drugs are made to order and have no accountability measures or oversight from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to ensure the drugs work as they are intended. The result—some, if not all, batches of drugs from compounding pharmacies may be ineffective and would not have passed traditional FDA approval. This greatly increases the risk that the condemned will experience torturous pain while they are executed. Even those who may strongly agree with the death penalty must admit that conducting state business in secret without accountability is no way for government to run. Even if execution itself has not (yet) been found a violation of the U.S. Constitution’s ban on “cruel” and unusual punishment, certainly a torturous death using experimental drug combinations is.

Read on...

Kids in Solitary Confinement: America's Official Child Abuse

Thousands of teenagers, some as young as 14 or 15, are routinely subjected by US prisons to psychological torture.

[I felt] doomed, like I was being banished … Like you have the plague or that you are the worst thing on earth. Like you are set apart [from] everything else. I guess [I wanted to] feel like I was part of the human race – not like some animal."
Molly was just 16 years old when she was placed in isolation in an adult jail in Michigan. She described her cell as being "a box":

"There was a bed – the slab. It was concrete … There was a stainless steel toilet/sink combo … The door was solid, without a food slot or window … There was no window at all."

Molly remained in solitary for several months, locked down alone in her cell for at least 22 hours a day.
No other nation in the developed world routinely tortures its children in this manner. And torture is indeed the word brought to mind by a shocking report released today by Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union. Growing Up Locked Down documents, for the first time, the widespread use of solitary confinement on youth under the age of 18 in prisons and jails across the country, and the deep and permanent harm it causes to kids caught up in the adult criminal justice system.

Read on...

Unlock The Box: The Fight Against Solitary Confinement in New York

On the first chilly morning in September, several dozen demonstrators gathered in front of a limestone skyscraper on Chambers Street in Lower Manhattan. Some wore orange jumpsuits, and two of them held a broad banner with the hand-painted words, “Solitary Is Torture.”

The subject of the protest was the abuse of prisoners—not at Guantánamo, Bagram or some distant black site, but on Rikers Island, less than ten miles away. The protesters, members of a new advocacy group called the New York City Jails Action Coalition (JAC), argue that conditions there—particularly solitary confinement—constitute torture in their own backyard. The target of the protest was the New York City Board of Correction, which oversees conditions for the 13,000-odd men, women, and children who inhabit New York City’s jails on a given day, and whose monthly meeting was taking place inside.

According to the City’s own figures, the number of isolation cells at Rikers has risen to nearly 1,000 and is still growing. The JAC also points to the existence of special solitary confinement units on Rikers Island, designed to hold teenagers and people with mental illness.

“This type of treatment is cruel and inhumane to any human being, especially growing adolescents,” said Lisa Ortega, mother of a 18-year-old with psychiatric disabilities who was placed in twenty-three-hour-a-day solitary confinement on Rikers for weeks at a time, amounting to several months, when he was 16. “The damage done is irreversible.”

Read on...

What Is Happening to Muslims Will Happen to the Rest of Us

The decision by the European Court of Human Rights last week to refuse to block the extradition of the radical Muslim cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri and four others to the United States on terrorism charges removes one of the last external checks on our emerging gulag state. 

Masri and the four others, all held in British jails, will soon join hundreds of other Muslims tried in Article III federal courts in the United States over the last decade. Fair trials are unlikely. A disturbing pattern of gross infringements on basic civil liberties, put in place in the name of national security, has poisoned our legal system. These infringements include intrusive surveillance, vague material support charges, the use of prolonged pretrial solitary confinement, classified evidence that the accused cannot review, and the use of political activities, normally protected under the First Amendment, to demonstrate mind-set and intent. Muslims caught up in the Article III courts are denied the opportunity to confront their accusers and to have their religious and political associations protected, and they rarely find a judge courageous enough to protect their rights. These violations of fundamental civil liberties will not, in the end, be reserved exclusively for Muslims once the corporate state feels under siege. What is happening to them will happen to the rest of us.  

“One of the misapprehensions of the last decade is that the government had to go outside the law to places like Guantanamo or Bagram to abridge the rights of suspects in the name of national security,” said Jeanne Theoharis, a professor of political science at Brooklyn College who has been an outspoken critic of the rights abridgement occurring in Article III courts. “But this is not the case. A similar degradation of rights that has characterized the prison at Guantanamo has also affected the judicial system within the United States. The right to dissent, the right to see the evidence against you, the right to due process, the right to fair and speedy trial, the right to have a judge who will be impartial, the right to fair and not disproportionate punishment, and the right not to be punished before you are convicted have been taken from us in the name of national security. It is not just in special secret prisons that this occurs, but also—dismayingly—within the U.S. federal courts.”

Read on....

Justice Department Closes the Book on CIA Torture and Deaths in Custody

The Justice Department has closed a probe on Bush-era torture and killings by CIA agents, and has decided against prosecuting anyone.

Attorney General Eric Holder said in a statement that the Justice Department “declined prosecution because the admissible evidence would not be sufficient to obtain and sustain a ­conviction beyond a reasonable doubt.”

The probe was opened in 2009, and looked at the cases of about 100 prisoners. The last two cases looked at are now officially closed, with no charges coming.

The probe of the CIA was the Obama administration’s only effort to look at prosecuting those who implemented the Bush regime of torture on alleged militants and terrorists captured in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the administration never considered going after those top-level administration officials who crafted the rationale behind the torture of prisoners, which violated US and international law.

Read on...

Seems the only people getting prosecuted in the U.S. these days are protestors, and demonstrators.  Tom

How America Came To Torture Its Prisoners

I read nearly 140,000 formerly classified documents about America’s abuse of prisoners since 2001. Here is what I learned.

It began with one document.

On Sept. 17, 2001, six days after the terrorist attacks in Washington, D.C., President George W. Bush sent a 12-page Memorandum of Notification to his National Security Council. That memorandum, we know now, authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to set up and run secret prisons. We still don’t know exactly what it says: CIA attorneys have told a judge the document is so off-limits to the courts and the American people that even the font is classified. But we do know what it did: It literally opened a space for torture.

Thanks to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit—a lawsuit the New York Times has called “among the most successful in the history of public disclosure”—we now know much of what happened in those secret spaces the Bush administration created. Under that litigation, the American Civil Liberties Union gathered nearly 140,000 formerly classified documents from the Department of Defense, the Justice Department, and the CIA that detail the abuse of prisoners in U.S. custody in the “War on Terror.” My job, as the author of the website www.thetorturereport.org and then of the book The Torture Report: What the Documents Say About America’s Post-9/11 Torture Program, was to dig through that incredible trove of documents and figure out for myself what, exactly, my country had done.

Torture probe

Writing about the strip-search decision the other day, I said:

This is punitive, anyone can see that. They are "breaking down" suspects with humiliation to make them docile and afraid. There is no reason to grant the police blanket permission to do this except for a naive belief that anyone who is arrested must be guilty of something.

Scott Horton points out in this article called "The High Court’s Body-Cavity Fixation" that this is a well documented technique,

Just as the Florence decision was being prepared, the Department of Defense released a previously classified training manual used to prepare American pilots for resistance to foreign governments that might use illegal and immoral techniques to render them cooperative. Key in this manual are the precise practices highlighted in Florence. Body-cavity searches are performed, it explains, to make the prisoner “feel uncomfortable and degraded.” Forced nudity and invasion of the body make the prisoner feel helpless, by removing all items that provide the prisoner with psychological support. In other words, the strip search is an essential step in efforts to destroy an individual’s sense of self-confidence, well-being, and even his or her identity. The value of this tool has been recognized by authoritarian governments around the world, and now, thanks to the Roberts Court, it will belong to the standard jailhouse repertoire in the United States. Something to consider the next time you walk Fido without scooping up his droppings—a cop may well be watching, ready to seize the opportunity to invade your rectum.

Read on....

Don't Exert Yourself

‘I Confess!’ Why Do People Admit to Things They Haven’t Done?

SEVERAL months after Antonio Ramirez was shot seven times in Oakland, Calif., the police picked up a frightened 16-year-old named Felix, isolated him in an interrogation room late at night without a lawyer, rejected his pleas to see his mother, and harangued him until he began to tell them what he thought they wanted to hear.

They wanted a diagram of the crime scene, he later told his court-appointed lawyer, Richard Foxall, but whatever he drew was so inaccurate that the police never produced it. When he described escaping in one direction after the killing, they corrected him, because they knew from witnesses that the shooter had gone the opposite way. When he didn’t mention an alley nearby, they told him about it, and he incorporated it into his statement. “Now we’re getting somewhere,” said one officer, as Felix recalled to his lawyer.

So, they demanded, where was the gun? Felix denied having a gun. “That’s when they really got out of control and started yelling at him,” Mr. Foxall said. “He started to feel personally threatened.” Slyly, he made up something demonstrably untrue: that he had left the gun with his grandfather. “I thought this was brilliant,” his lawyer said, because it discredited the tale he was concocting. “He doesn’t have a grandfather. Both grandfathers are dead.”

Read on...

From the NY Times op-ed pages. Tom

Dispatch from torture nation: execution by pepper spray

by digby

No this isn't a story from North Korea or Pinochet's Chile. I swear:

It has been two and half years since 62-year old Nick Christie was tortured and pepper-sprayed to death by police at the Lee County Jail. Although the medical examiner ruled his death a homicide, the law enforcement officers who kept him strapped naked to a chair and then pepper sprayed him until he died have not been charged in his death.

On January 20, 2010, the Injury Board’s National News Desk reported that Nick Christie’s wife, Joyce Christie, and her son, were planning to file a federal lawsuit because the police violated her husband’s constitutional rights. The article describes what allegedly happened when Christie was arrested for trespassing:

Read on...

Teenagers Now Look Favorably On Torture Because The Media Taught Them It Was Morally Acceptable

Over at the Daily Beast, Daniel Stone dives into a study on torture conducted by the American Red Cross. "Americans' opinions on torture seem to have fractured," the report said, "largely on generational lines."

So, who are the biggest supporters of torture? "A surprising majority -- almost 60 percent -- of American teenagers thought things like water-boarding or sleep deprivation are sometimes acceptable," the study found. Overall, teens are "significantly more in favor of torture than older adults."

It's a dispiriting result, and Stone does a fine job taking on the reasons why these results came down in this fashion. As he relates, there's been a general uptick in the visibility of torture (er..."enhanced interrogation techniques") in the media. Along with that comes the effort undertaken by the Bush administration to normalize torture, despite its attendant lack of success as an intelligence gathering technique. Stone also notes that there are "societal influences that may be responsible for de-stigmatizing torture, including increasingly graphic media."

But the bottom line, he says, is that young people are just at a significant remove from the world of war and conflict:

Read on...

Update: Obama Administration to Spanish Judge: We Won’t Investigate Bush Lawyers’ Role in Torture

Robert Redford And Ellen Barkin Join Doug Liman At Sundance Event Shining Spotlight On Bush Torture Record

Robert Redford And Ellen Barkin Join Doug Liman At Sundance Event Shining Spotlight On Bush Torture Record

Live Closing Day Performance Features Leading Writers, Actors And Former Interrogators

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: (212) 549-2666; media@aclu.org

PARK CITY, UT – Robert Redford and Ellen Barkin today joined director Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Fair Game) and an all-star cast at Sundance Film Festival to perform “Reckoning With Torture: Memos and Testimonies From the 'War on Terror.'" The event, presented by the American Civil Liberties Union, PEN American Center and Sundance, featured readings of formerly secret government documents. The production was filmed for a documentary Liman is directing to raise awareness of the scope and human cost of the United States’ post-9/11 torture program.

Redford and Barkin joined actor America Ferrera; writers Sandra Cisneros, Annie Proulx, Marilynne Robinson, Esmeralda Santiago, George Saunders and Naomi Wolf; documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney; former interrogation insiders Jack Rice and Matthew Alexander; and other surprise guests to perform the readings. The texts are drawn largely from over 150,000 pages of formerly classified government documents obtained by the ACLU in a lawsuit that the New York Times has called “among the most successful in the history of public disclosure”; they include secret legal memos that sought to justify torture, e-mails written by FBI agents who witnessed torture at Guantánamo, interrogation logs, transcripts of military tribunal proceedings and moving statements and affidavits by U.S servicemen and women who objected to the abusive interrogations.

Read on...

What about Bradley Manning and Obama's torture record. Tom

Infamous Police Commander Who Oversaw Torture of Over 100 Prisoners Awaits His Sentence

The depressing Jon Burge saga in Chicago reinforces the notion that racial bias is part of the institutional gene pool of the nation's police departments.

G. Flint Taylor should be basking in the glow of vindication as he awaits the January 20 sentencing of Jon Burge, the retired Chicago police commander convicted for lying about a ring of torturing cops he led.

A federal jury found Burge guilty on two counts of obstruction of justice and one count of perjury last June. Taylor and the firm he co-founded, the Chicago-based Peoples Law Office, have represented several of the more than 100 black men victimized by Burge’s torture corps and have been trying to bring the rogue cop to justice for more than 20 years.

Read on...

The Interrogation of Omar Khadr Pt. 2

Bush's Waterboarding Admission Prompts Calls For Criminal Probe

WASHINGTON -- The American Civil Liberties Union on Thursday joined a growing chorus in the human rights community calling for a special prosecutor to investigate whether former president George W. Bush violated federal statutes prohibiting torture.

In his new memoir and ensuing book tour, Bush has repeatedly admitted that he directly authorized the waterboarding of three terror suspects. Use of the waterboard, which creates the sensation of drowning, has been an iconic and almost universally condemned form of torture since the time of the Spanish Inquisition.

Except for a brief period during which a handful of Bush administration lawyers insisted that the exigencies of interrogating terror suspects justified its use, waterboarding has always been considered illegal by the Justice Department. It is also a clear violation of international torture conventions.

Read on...

George boasts about being a war criminal and the mainstream media yawns. The U.S. has become inured to crimes by the elites going unpunished. Canada too, where the cover-up of war crimes in Afghanistan seems effortless. Tom