Algeria calls for direct talks between Saudi and Iran
MEMO | December 21, 2015
An Algerian diplomat has revealed that his government has suggested that Saudi Arabia and Iran should hold direct talks to solve regional conflicts and regain stability in the Arab world, Anadolu reported on Sunday.
“Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika offered an initiative to Eshaq Jahangiri, the first deputy of the Iranian president,” explained the anonymous official. Jahangiri visited Algeria last Wednesday and Thursday. The same suggestion was made to Saud Bin Mohamed Al-Saud, an aide of the Saudi monarch, who was also in Algiers last week.
The initiative apparently includes an invitation to both countries to sit for direct talks in order to solve the armed conflicts in the Arab region. Neither government has responded as yet.
Bouteflika met with Jahangiri on Thursday at the end of his two-day visit to Algeria, during which he attended a meeting of the High Cooperation Committee which discusses matters of direct relevance to Algiers and Tehran. According to Jahangiri, the situation in Syria and Iraq was on the agenda for the talks with the Algerian president.
Israeli Lies About Kuntar Murder Flow in Abundance
Samir Kuntar, before being released in Israeli prisoner exchange
By Richard Silverstein | Tikun Olam | December 20, 2015
Yesterday, Israel murdered Samir Kuntar, a Hezbollah militant involved with a terror attack that killed three Israeli civilians in 1979. Until he was freed in a prisoner exchange in 2008, he’d been the longest-serving security prisoner in Israeli jails.
In the years following the original attack, Kuntar became the embodiment of the bloodthirsty terrorist, supposedly personally bashing in the head of a little girl with a rifle butt. At least this is the story they told. But this narrative, like so many spun by Israeli military-intelligence circles, and lapped up so eagerly by an adoring Israeli media, is largely fiction.
According to Aviv Sela, a noted Israeli psychologist who served in that capacity for years with the police and Shabak, Kuntar did not kill the girl or her father. Instead, he claims he had left the boat to help his comrades who’d been attacked by Israeli security forces. The firing that killed the Israelis came via friendly (Israeli) fire and not the Palestinians. As with so many ugly facts Israel tries to conceal in such circumstances, it creates comfortable narratives that obscure the truth.
Something similar happened with the 300 Line bus hijacking in which the Israeli media initially dutifully reported that all the Palestinian hostage takers were killed in the bus assault. This concealed the fact that the Shabak chief personally approved the cold-blooded murder of the two surviving Palestinians. In this case, it was Israeli security forces who stove in their heads, this time with rocks instead of a rifle butt. The moral being: the only good Palestinian terrorist is a murdered one, the gorier the better.
Israel’s military is continuing the Kuntar charade to justify his execution in an Israeli air attack over Damascus, which destroyed the apartment building where he was living, killing eight others as well. He not only bashed a little girl’s head in way back. He continued his evil ways as a mastermind of terror in Assad’s regime. Read this fantasia:
Samir Kuntar, the notorious terrorist killed Saturday night near Damascus, was believed to be preparing a major terror attack against Israel from the Golan Heights, according to highly reliable Western sources.
According to these sources, last year Kuntar turned into a kind of independent terror entrepreneur and was considered by Israel and the West to be a “ticking bomb”. The sources said Kuntar had recently not been working on behalf of Hezbollah, but rather acting with increasing independence alongside pro-Assad militias in Syria.
The organization with which Kuntar was working was founded by the Syrian regime to replace the brutal Shabiha (an Alawite militia), which even the Syrian regime opted to reject. Assad’s regime therefore established a less vicious militia, the Syrian National Resistance Committee, which did not engage in the economic and criminal activities of the Shabiha. Farhan al-Shaalan, another senior leader killed Saturday night in the same building where Kuntar ran his secret operation, also belonged to the Syrian National Resistance Committee…
Western sources believe Kuntar was in the final stages of planning and carrying out another attack against Israel, which senior Hezbollah officials apparently did not know about…
Syria, Hezbollah, Iran and the Russians have no interest in a confrontation with Israel now, and certainly not a confrontation ignited by a “freelancer” such as Kuntar, driven by his hostility to Israel.
This suggests that Kuntar was eliminated because he was considered a ticking bomb by more than one entity in the Middle East.
One absolute trademark of Israeli disinformation is after such murders it always suggests the killing wasn’t necessarily Israel’s doing, but due to internal disputes within the ranks of the terrorists. It’s been used by Israel’s security apparatus from time immemorial (h/t to Joan Peters!).
I’ve often written about specific instances in which the Israeli security apparatus blatantly lies to cover up embarrassment or deflect from the truth of events. In the case of Kuntar, the IDF knows that I, and perhaps other journalists will begin calling this what it was, an extrajudicial execution. To pre-empt this inconvenient narrative, it puts forth yet another bubbeh meiseh portraying Kuntar as a revitalized terror mastermind. A man who had to die to save Israeli lives. He was a “ticking bomb.” Apparently, the ticking was in the ear of the beholder. What was he planning? A vague terror attack somewhere in the Golan. But it would’ve been big, trust me, or so they claim.
Note there is no proof whatsoever offered to support these claims. They are threads of narrative spun, not from gold, but from lead.
As I read the passage above, two possibilities struck me: one, the reporter really had a “western intelligence source” who offered this information. If that were the case, my money would be on the U.S. being the source. Since the Obama administration had placed Kuntar on a specially designated Global Terrorist list in September, it seemed entirely possible it would be monitoring his communications to keep track of him. It would be easy to share this information with the IDF thus enabling it to target him. If this were so, then the U.S. would be collaborating with Israeli targeted assassinations. Unlikely, but still possible.
Ronen Bergman claimed just such an intelligence collaboration enabled the Mossad to locate and track Imad Mugniyeh, who was similarly assassinated in Damascus in 2008.
But there was an even more probable scenario. Ron Ben Yishai, like most Israeli security reporters (and unlike most U.S. reporters covering the same beat) has only one set of sources: the military. Not only will he not question the veracity of these sources, he will not consult critics or skeptics in order to qualify the accuracy of his reports. So the chances were high that the story was entirely manufactured by Kuntar’s killers, the IDF.
Indeed, when I questioned an Israeli security source about the authenticity of the “western sources,” he replied “They are as western as Bogie!” In other words, the source of this story is most likely Defense Minister Bogie Yaalon.
Another media stenographer for the IDF is Roni Daniel. His report on this story had a different spin. Kuntar was a demon-mastermind. But not for Assad. Rather for Iran. In Daniel’s report it is not a western source who defines Kuntar as a ticking bomb but Israel itself. So either the two different sources miraculously came up with the same locution independently of each other; or the same source told two different journalists the same thing and told each to attribute them differently (or the journalists did so on their own). … Full article
Israeli Apartheid Wall destroys Palestinian lives
Palestine Information Center
On 29 March, 2002, the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) conducted a large-scale military operation in the West Bank, called “Operation Defensive Shield”. During the operation, the Israeli forces raided many Palestinian towns and villages and committed heinous crimes against the Palestinians.
The operation brought to light the Israeli government’s plans to conquer more Palestinian lands and to expel the Palestinians from their own homes. A major step in these plans was to build the Apartheid Wall, or what Israel calls the Separation Wall.
The Israeli government commenced building the Apartheid Wall on 23 June, 2002, at a planned length of 770 km. Now, around 406 km, i.e. 52.7%, of the Wall is completed.
The Wall in numbers
The Wall is 60-150 meters wide in some areas. This includes a buffer zone and roads on both sides of the Wall that the Israeli military uses to watch the Wall. The Wall is 8 meters high, and it contains:
1. Barbed wire
2. A 4-meter wide and deep trench, aiming to prevent the vehicles and pedestrians from passing
3. Military patrol roads
4. A sandy road to track footsteps
5. An electric fence with an 8-meter high cement wall
6. Watchtowers with cameras and sensors
The Wall separates an area of 733 km2 of the Palestinian lands that falls behind the Wall from the West Bank. In other words, these 733 km2 would be under full Israeli control, besides the occupied lands of 1948.
The Wall would also occupy 220 km2 of Jordan Valley, east of Palestine. The Valley is a main source of food for Palestinians, and is also known as their “food basket”.
The Wall passes through eight Palestinian governorates. In Jerusalem, building the Wall accelerated in 2006-2007. It separates a number of heavily populated Palestinian neighborhoods, like Shufat and Kafr ‘Aqab.
Effects of the Wall
In spite of the claimed Israeli security motives behind building the Wall, it negatively impacts the Palestinian people and cause.
First: Effects on the Palestinian daily life
As the Wall passes through the West Bank, it negatively impacts the lives of 210,000 Palestinians, who live in 67 Palestinian towns and villages.
Because of the Wall, 13 Palestinian neighborhoods would be isolated between the green line and the Wall. Furthermore, a second wall would create a security belt, stranding 19 Palestinian neighborhoods in isolated areas.
The Wall would also hinder the Palestinians’ movement and would prevent them from reaching their farms and selling their goods and produce.
Second: Economic and environmental effects
37% of the Palestinian villages, cut with the Wall, would lose their economic resources. Moreover, 12 km of irrigation systems were destroyed.
Confiscating and bulldozing Palestinian farms would cost the Palestinians 6500 jobs, in addition to harming the olive oil industry and fruit and vegetable farming.
The Apartheid Wall would affect the Palestinian water resources, as the West Bank would lose 200 million cubic meters of the Jordan Valley water.
Third: Effects on movement
Statistics show that the Wall would violate the right of movement of two million Palestinians. They will have to seek Israeli permits to be able to reach their houses and farms in different Palestinian areas. Such restrictions would force at least 2.8% Palestinians to leave their homes and find other places to live in.
Fourth: Effects on education and medical sectors
Many Palestinian students and teachers were affected by the Wall, as it prevented them from reaching their schools, forcing 3.4% Palestinians to drop out.
On the medical level, it is getting increasingly difficult for Palestinians to reach the hospitals and medical centers to the east of the Wall, and the Palestinian villages to the west of the Wall have no medical services at all.
Fifth: Effects on Palestinian water resources
The Israeli occupation has strategically chosen the path of the Wall in order to guarantee Israel as much water as possible and thus depriving Palestinians of a basic right. Once finished, the Wall will enable Israel to confiscate and control 165 water wells and 53 springs, which in total culminate into 55 million cubic meters annually. Furthermore, the Wall now means Israel controls an additional amount of 679 million cubic meters annually.
Israeli forces injure 3 Palestinians before shooting tear gas at passers-by in the market of Hebron
Israeli forces used the roof of a Palestinian family’s house to shoot
International Solidarity Movement | December 20, 2015
Al Khalil, Occupied Palestine – Sunday, 20th December 2015, Israeli forces shot and injured three Palestinians at Shuhada checkpoint in occupied al-Khalil (Hebron), before arbitrarily firing towards civilians and journalists in the area.
Israeli forces shot a girl in the head with live ammunition. A Palestinian bystander, trying to help the girl and pull her towards the Palestinian side of the checkpoint right after she was shot, was shot in the mouth by Israeli forces. The man was trying to help, knowing that Israeli forces would most likely deny the girl any medical aid if the Palestinian ambulance was unable to reach her. Another Palestinian bystander was shot. The Palestinian girl, according to eye-witnesses, did have a knife, but instead of trying to disarm her, Israeli forces directly shot her in the head.
Whereas the Palestinian Red Crescent ambulance, at the scene after only a few minutes, was denied access to the girl in order to deliver first aid, the two Palestinians injured were taken to hospital. After this happened, the Israeli forces threw stun grenades and shot tear-gas at passers-by and Red Crescent medics to prevent them from coming any closer and seeing what happened. Journalists that arrived at the scene were also attacked with stun grenades and threatened by Israeli forces with rubber coated steel bullets.
Israeli forces entered the H1-side of al-Khalil, that is under full Palestinian control, running into the Palestinian market and indiscriminately shooting tear gas at civilians going about their everyday life. They entered the roof of a Palestinian family’s home to use it as a base for shooting tear gas and rubber coated steel bullets at Palestinians in the street. A 5-year old boy was injured when Israeli forces fired directly at a school-bus passing by the checkpoint.
Shuhada checkpoint has recently been closed for ‘renovations’, stopping Palestinians from accessing the Palestinian neighbourhood of Tel Rumeida, located in the H2-area under full Israeli control. This neighbourhood, including the small stretch of Shuhada Street that Palestinians still had access to, has been declared a ‘closed military zone’ on November 1st. With the closure of the checkpoint, the restricted freedom of movement of Palestinians, has been completely brought to a halt.
The Logic of the Police State
People Are Waking Up to the Darkness in American Policing, and the Police Don’t Like It One Bit
By Matthew Harwood | TomDispatch | December 20, 2015
If you’ve been listening to various police agencies and their supporters, then you know what the future holds: anarchy is coming — and it’s all the fault of activists.
In May, a Wall Street Journal op-ed warned of a “new nationwide crime wave” thanks to “intense agitation against American police departments” over the previous year. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie went further. Talking recently with the host of CBS’s Face the Nation, the Republican presidential hopeful asserted that the Black Lives Matter movement wasn’t about reform but something far more sinister. “They’ve been chanting in the streets for the murder of police officers,” he insisted. Even the nation’s top cop, FBI Director James Comey, weighed in at the University of Chicago Law School, speaking of “a chill wind that has blown through American law enforcement over the last year.”
According to these figures and others like them, lawlessness has been sweeping the nation as the so-called Ferguson effect spreads. Criminals have been emboldened as police officers are forced to think twice about doing their jobs for fear of the infamy of starring in the next viral video. The police have supposedly become the targets of assassins intoxicated by “anti-cop rhetoric,” just as departments are being stripped of the kind of high-powered equipment they need to protect officers and communities. Even their funding streams have, it’s claimed, come under attack as anti-cop bias has infected Washington, D.C. Senator Ted Cruz caught the spirit of that critique by convening a Senate subcommittee hearing to which he gave the title, “The War on Police: How the Federal Government Undermines State and Local Law Enforcement.” According to him, the federal government, including the president and attorney general, has been vilifying the police, who are now being treated as if they, not the criminals, were the enemy.
Beyond the storm of commentary and criticism, however, quite a different reality presents itself. In the simplest terms, there is no war on the police. Violent attacks against police officers remain at historic lows, even though approximately 1,000 people have been killed by the police this year nationwide. In just the past few weeks, videos have been released of problematic fatal police shootings in San Francisco and Chicago.
While it’s too soon to tell whether there has been an uptick in violent crime in the post-Ferguson period, no evidence connects any possible increase to the phenomenon of police violence being exposed to the nation. What is taking place and what the police and their supporters are largely reacting to is a modest push for sensible law enforcement reforms from groups as diverse as Campaign Zero, Koch Industries, the Cato Institute, The Leadership Conference, and the ACLU (my employer). Unfortunately, as the rhetoric ratchets up, many police agencies and organizations are increasingly resistant to any reforms, forgetting whom they serve and ignoring constitutional limits on what they can do.
Indeed, a closer look at law enforcement arguments against commonsense reforms like independently investigating police violence, demilitarizing police forces, or ending “for-profit policing” reveals a striking disregard for concerns of just about any sort when it comes to brutality and abuse. What this “debate” has revealed, in fact, is a mainstream policing mindset ready to manufacture fear without evidence and promote the belief that American civil rights and liberties are actually an impediment to public safety. In the end, such law enforcement arguments subvert the very idea that the police are there to serve the community and should be under civilian control.
And that, when you come right down to it, is the logic of the police state.
Due Process Plus
It’s no mystery why so few police officers are investigated and prosecuted for using excessive force and violating someone’s rights. “Local prosecutors rely on local police departments to gather the evidence and testimony they need to successfully prosecute criminals,” according to Campaign Zero . “This makes it hard for them to investigate and prosecute the same police officers in cases of police violence.”
Since 2005, according to an analysis by the Washington Post and Bowling Green State University, only 54 officers have been prosecuted nationwide, despite the thousands of fatal shootings by police. As Philip M. Stinson, a criminologist at Bowling Green, puts it, “To charge an officer in a fatal shooting, it takes something so egregious, so over the top that it cannot be explained in any rational way. It also has to be a case that prosecutors are willing to hang their reputation on.”
For many in law enforcement, however, none of this should concern any of us. When New York Governor Andrew Cuomo signed an executive order appointing a special prosecutor to investigate police killings, for instance, Patrick Lynch, president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, insisted: “Given the many levels of oversight that already exist, both internally in the NYPD [New York Police Department] and externally in many forms, the appointment of a special prosecutor is unnecessary.” Even before Cuomo’s decision, the chairman of New York’s District Attorneys Association called plans to appoint a special prosecutor for police killings “deeply insulting.”
Such pushback against the very idea of independently investigating police actions has, post-Ferguson, become everyday fare, and some law enforcement leaders have staked out a position significantly beyond that. The police, they clearly believe, should get special treatment.
“By virtue of our dangerous vocation, we should expect to receive the benefit of the doubt in controversial incidents,” wrote Ed Mullins, the president of New York City’s Sergeants Benevolent Association, in the organization’s magazine, Frontline. As if to drive home the point, its cover depicts Baltimore State Attorney Marilyn Mosby under the ominous headline “The Wolf That Lurks.” In May, Mosby had announced indictments of six officers in the case of Freddie Gray, who died in Baltimore police custody the previous month. The message being sent to a prosecutor willing to indict cops was hardly subtle: you’re a traitor.
Mullins put forward a legal standard for officers accused of wrongdoing that he would never support for the average citizen — and in a situation in which cops already get what former federal prosecutor Laurie Levenson calls “a super presumption of innocence.” In addition, police unions in many states have aggressively pushed for their own bills of rights, which make it nearly impossible for police officers to be fired, much less charged with crimes when they violate an individual’s civil rights and liberties.
In 14 states, versions of a Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights (LEOBR) have already been passed, while in 11 others they are under consideration. These provide an “extra layer of due process” in cases of alleged police misconduct, according to Samuel Walker, an expert on police accountability. In many of the states without a LEOBR, the Marshall Project has discovered, police unions have directly negotiated the same rights and privileges with state governments.
LEOBRs are, in fact, amazingly un-American documents in the protections they afford officers accused of misconduct during internal investigations, rights that those officers are never required to extend to their suspects. Though the specific language of these laws varies from state to state, notes Mike Riggs in Reason, they are remarkably similar in their special considerations for the police.
“Unlike a member of the public, the officer gets a ‘cooling off’ period before he has to respond to any questions. Unlike a member of the public, the officer under investigation is privy to the names of his complainants and their testimony against him before he is ever interrogated. Unlike a member of the public, the officer under investigation is to be interrogated ‘at a reasonable hour,’ with a union member present. Unlike a member of the public, the officer can only be questioned by one person during his interrogation. Unlike a member of the public, the officer can be interrogated only ‘for reasonable periods,’ which ‘shall be timed to allow for such personal necessities and rest periods as are reasonably necessary.’ Unlike a member of the public, the officer under investigation cannot be ‘threatened with disciplinary action’ at any point during his interrogation. If he is threatened with punishment, whatever he says following the threat cannot be used against him.”
The Marshall Project refers to these laws as the “Blue Shield” and “the original Bill of Rights with an upgrade.’’ Police associations, naturally, don’t agree. “All this does is provide a very basic level of constitutional protections for our officers, so that they can make statements that will stand up later in court,” says Vince Canales, the president of Maryland’s Fraternal Order of Police.
Put another way, there are two kinds of due process in America — one for cops and another for the rest of us. This is the reason why the Black Lives Matter movement and other civil rights and civil liberties organizations regularly call on states to create a special prosecutor’s office to launch independent investigations when police seriously injure or kill someone.
The Demilitarized Blues
Since Americans first took in those images from Ferguson of police units outfitted like soldiers, riding in military vehicles, and pointing assault rifles at protesters, the militarization of the police and the way the Pentagon has been supplying them with equipment directly off this country’s distant battlefields have been top concerns for police reformers. In May, the Obama administration suggested modest changes to the Pentagon’s 1033 program, which, since 1990, has been redistributing weaponry and equipment to police departments nationwide — urban, suburban, and rural — in the name of fighting the war on drugs and protecting Americans from terrorism.
Even the idea that the police shouldn’t sport the look of an occupying army in local communities has, however, been met with fierce resistance. Read, for example, the online petition started by the National Sheriffs’ Association and you could be excused for thinking that the Obama administration was aggressively moving to stop the flow of military-grade equipment to local and state police agencies. (It isn’t.) The message that tops the petition is as simple as it is misleading: “Don’t strip law enforcement of the gear they need to keep us safe.”
The Obama administration has done no such thing. In May, the president announced that he was prohibiting certain military-grade equipment from being transferred to state and local law enforcement. “Some equipment made for the battlefield is not appropriate for local police departments,” he said. The list included tracked armored vehicles (essentially tanks), bayonets, grenade launchers, camouflage uniforms, and guns and ammo of .50 caliber or higher. In reality, what use could a local police department have for bayonets, grenade launchers, or the kinds of bullets that resemble small missiles, pierce armor, and can blow people’s limbs off?
Yet the sheriffs’ association has no problem complaining that “the White House announced the government would no longer provide equipment like helicopters and MRAPs [mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles] to local law enforcement.” And it’s not even true. Police departments can still obtain both helicopters and MRAPs if they establish community policing practices, institute training protocols, and get community approval before the equipment transfer occurs.
“Helicopters rescue runaways and natural disaster victims,” the sheriff’s association adds gravely, “and MRAPs are used to respond to shooters who barricade themselves in neighborhoods and are one of the few vehicles able to navigate hurricane, snowstorm, and tornado-strewn areas to save survivors.”
As with our wars abroad, think mission creep at home. A program started to wage the war on drugs, and strengthened after 9/11, is now being justified on the grounds that certain equipment is useful during disasters or emergencies. In reality, the police have clearly become hooked on a militarized look. Many departments are ever more attached to their weapons of war and evidently don’t mind the appearance of being an occupying force in their communities, which leaves groups like the sheriffs’ association fighting fiercely for a militarized future.
Legal Plunder
In July, the American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Arizona sued law enforcement in Pinal County, Arizona, on behalf of Rhonda Cox. Two years before, her son had stolen some truck accessories and, without her knowledge, fitted them on her truck. When the county sheriff’s department arrested him, it also seized the truck.
Arriving on the scene of her son’s arrest, Cox asked a deputy about getting her truck back. No way, he told her. After she protested, explaining that she had nothing to do with her son’s alleged crimes, he responded “too bad.” Under Arizona law, the truck could indeed be taken into custody and kept or sold off by the sheriff’s department even though she was never charged with a crime. It was guilty even if she wasn’t.
Welcome to America’s civil asset forfeiture laws, another product of law enforcement’s failed war on drugs, updated for the twenty-first century. Originally designed to deprive suspected real-life Scarfaces of the spoils of their illicit trade — houses, cars, boats — it now regularly deprives people unconnected to the war on drugs of their property without due process of law and in violation of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. Not surprisingly, corruption follows.
Federal and state law enforcement can now often keep property seized or sell it and retain a portion of the revenue generated. Some of this, in turn, can be repurposed and distributed as bonuses in police and other law enforcement departments. The only way the dispossessed stand a chance of getting such “forfeited” property back is if they are willing to take on the government in a process where the deck is stacked against them.
In such cases, for instance, property owners have no right to an attorney to defend them, which means that they must either pony up additional cash for a lawyer or contest the seizure themselves in court. “It is an upside-down world where,” says the libertarian Institute for Justice, “the government holds all the cards and has the financial incentive to play them to the hilt.”
In this century, civil asset forfeiture has mutated into what’s now called “for-profit policing” in which police departments and state and federal law enforcement agencies indiscriminately seize the property of citizens who aren’t drug kingpins. Sometimes, for instance, distinctly ordinary citizens suspected of driving drunk or soliciting prostitutes get their cars confiscated. Sometimes they simply get cash taken from them on suspicion of low-level drug dealing.
Like most criminal justice issues, race matters in civil asset forfeiture. This summer, the ACLU of Pennsylvania issued a report, Guilty Property, documenting how the Philadelphia Police Department and district attorney’s office abused state civil asset forfeiture by taking at least $1 million from innocent people within the city limits. Approximately 70% of the time, those people were black, even though the city’s population is almost evenly divided between whites and African-Americans.
Currently, only one state, New Mexico, has done away with civil asset forfeiture entirely, while also severely restricting state and local law enforcement from profiting off similar national laws when they work with the feds. (The police in Albuquerque are, however, actively defying the new law, demonstrating yet again the way in which police departments believe the rules don’t apply to them.) That no other state has done so is hardly surprising. Police departments have become so reliant on civil asset forfeiture to pad their budgets and acquire “little goodies” that reforming, much less repealing, such laws are a tough sell.
As with militarization, when police defend such policies, you sense their urgent desire to maintain what many of them now clearly think of as police rights. In August, for instance, Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu sent a fundraising email to his supporters using the imagined peril of the ACLU lawsuit as clickbait. In justifying civil forfeiture, he failed to mention that a huge portion of the money goes to enrich his own department, but praised the program in this fashion:
“[O]ver the past seven years, the Pinal County Sheriff’s Office has donated $1.2 million of seized criminal money to support youth programs like the Boys & Girls Clubs, Boy Scouts, YMCA, high school graduation night lock-in events, youth sports as well as veterans groups, local food banks, victims assistance programs, and Home of Home in Casa Grande.”
Under this logic, police officers can steal from people who haven’t even been charged with a crime as long as they share the wealth with community organizations — though, in fact, neither in Pinal County or elsewhere is that where most of the confiscated loot appears to go. Think of this as the development of a culture of thievery masquerading as Robin Hood in blue.
Contempt for Civilian Control
Post-Ferguson developments in policing are essentially a struggle over whether the police deserve special treatment and exceptions from the rules the rest of us must follow. For too long, they have avoided accountability for brutal misconduct, while in this century arming themselves for war on America’s streets and misusing laws to profit off the public trust, largely in secret. The events of the past two years have offered graphic evidence that police culture is dysfunctional and in need of a democratic reformation.
There are, of course, still examples of law enforcement leaders who see the police as part of American society, not exempt from it. But even then, the reformers face stiff resistance from the law enforcement communities they lead. In Minneapolis, for instance, Police Chief Janeé Harteau attempted to have state investigators look into incidents when her officers seriously hurt or killed someone in the line of duty. Police union opposition killed her plan. In Philadelphia, Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey ordered his department to publicly release the names of officers involved in shootings within 72 hours of any incident. The city’s police union promptly challenged his policy, while the Pennsylvania House of Representatives passed a bill in November to stop the release of the names of officers who fire their weapon or use force when on the job unless criminal charges are filed. Not surprisingly, three powerful police unions in the state supported the legislation.
In the present atmosphere, many in the law enforcement community see the Harteaus and Ramseys of their profession as figures who don’t speak for them, and groups or individuals wanting even the most modest of police reforms as so many police haters. As former New York Police Department Commissioner Howard Safir told Fox News in May, “Similar to athletes on the playing field, sometimes it’s difficult to tune out the boos from the no-talents sipping their drinks, sitting comfortably in their seats. It’s demoralizing to read about the misguided anti-cop gibberish spewing from those who take their freedoms for granted.”
The disdain in such imagery, increasingly common in the world of policing, is striking. It smacks of a police-state, bunker mentality that sees democratic values and just about any limits on the power of law enforcement as threats. In other words, the Safirs want the public — particularly in communities of color and poor neighborhoods — to shut up and do as it’s told when a police officer says so. If the cops give the orders, compliance — so this line of thinking goes — isn’t optional, no matter how egregious the misconduct or how sensible the reforms. Obey or else.
The post-Ferguson public clamor demanding better policing continues to get louder, and yet too many police departments have this to say in response: Welcome to Cop Land. We make the rules around here.
Matthew Harwood is senior writer/editor of the ACLU. His work has appeared at Al Jazeera America, the American Conservative, the Guardian, Guernica, Salon, War is Boring, and the Washington Monthly. He is a TomDispatch regular.
Copyright 2015 Matthew Harwood
Nigerian army bulldozes Shia religious center in Zaria
Hussainiyyah Baqeeyatullah in Nigeria’s northern city of Zaria before its reported destruction
Press TV – December 21, 2015
The Nigerian army has completely demolished a religious center belonging to the Islamic Movement in Nigeria (IMN) following the recent massacre of Shia Muslims in the West African country.
The IMN’s website cited a local source as saying that the army bulldozed Hussainiyyah Baqeeyatullah in the northern city of Zaria in Kaduna State on Sunday.
This comes nearly a week after Nigerian soldiers opened fire on the people attending a religious ceremony at the site. Local media said more than a dozen people were killed during the December 12 raid.
The military accused the Shias of stopping the convoy of Nigeria’s Chief of Army Staff Lieutenant General Tukur Yusuf Buratai and attempting to assassinate him. The IMN and its leader Ibrahim al-Zakzaky strongly rejected the assassination accusation.
IMN spokesman Ibrahim Usman also rejected an accusation by local officials that the movement had “blocked roads for four days” during the religious ceremony, which marked Arba’een, the fortieth day to follow the martyrdom anniversary of Imam Hussein (PBUH), the grandson of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) and the third Shia Imam.
One day later, Zakzaky was arrested during a raid by the army on his residence and the buildings connected to the Shia community in Zaria. Local sources say hundreds of people trying to protect the cleric, including three of his sons, were killed in the raid.
Two face politically-motivated execution in Bahrain based on torture ‘confessions’
Reprieve – December 21, 2015
Two Bahrainis who were tortured into ‘confessing’ to an attack on police officers in the wake of anti-Government protests last year could be executed at any moment, unless the country’s King pardons them.
Husain Moosa and Mohammed Ramadan were arrested in February and March 2014 respectively, shortly after demonstrations took place in Bahrain to mark the third anniversary of the ‘Arab Spring’ protests in the country.
February also saw a bomb attack in the village of al Dair, which injured two police officers, one of whom subsequently died. Mr Moosa and Mr Ramadan were arrested one week and one month after the event, respectively, and say they were subjected to extensive torture until they produced ‘confessions’ to being involved in the attack.
No evidence aside from these forced confessions and the testimony of police officers was produced in court to link either man to the attack. But despite this they were both convicted and sentenced to death in December 2014. Last month, Bahrain’s court of cassation rejected their final appeal, meaning they could now face execution at any moment, at the discretion of King Hamad.
Mr Ramadan has described how he was held incommunicado for four days and beaten until he produced the ‘confession’ that the authorities wanted, relating to the bombing. When he subsequently told a judge that the confession had been given under torture, he was taken to another prison and subjected to further beatings, and was forced to listen to other prisoners being tortured, for ten days.
Mr Moosa has described how he was hung from the ceiling and beaten with police batons. He says that officers threatened to fabricate charges against his relatives and rape his sisters unless he confessed. Mr Moosa subsequently recanted his confession in front of the public prosecutor, but like Mr Ramadan was then subjected to further torture as a result.
The case has been the focus of concern from both the European Parliament and UN officials. In July this year, MEPs warned that in Bahrain “… the use of the death penalty in politically motivated cases has expanded since 2011, with “at least seven individuals have been handed death sentences in political cases since 2011… four of these seven being sentenced to death in 2015 alone.”
Earlier this year, five UN human rights experts, including the Special Repporteur on Torture, raised concerns that both Mr Ramadan and Mr Moosa had confessed under duress.
International human rights charity Reprieve is calling on the King of Bahrain to commute the sentences, and on the UK to intervene given its status as a close ally of the country.