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Israeli occupation offers the deportation of five Palestinian prisoners for two years

Palestine Information Center – 11/06/2012

RAMALLAH — Palestinian human rights sources unveiled occupation efforts to deport a number of Palestinian prisoners from the occupied territories, after their release.

The Palestinian Prisoner Committee said in a press release on Monday, that the Israeli occupation intelligence service the “Shin Bet” is keeping five Palestinian prisoners in solitary confinement cells in Jalama prison, despite the end of their interrogation with them, with no charge.

The Committee stated that the court gave the occupation investigators from the “Shin Bet” one week to provide it with an indictment against the five detainees, if not the prisoners should be released. Thus, the intelligence officers proposed the prisoners an offer requiring their deportation for two years in exchange for their release.

The statement stressed the prisoners’ complete rejection of the deportation and their determination to stick to their position. The prisoners also called on all local and international human rights organizations to take urgent action and pressure on the Israeli occupation authorities to release them after being detained for two months without charge.

Meanwhile, the Israeli prison administration is imposing sanctions that include fines, solitary confinement and denial of visitation rights, against nearly two hundred Palestinian prisoners in Megiddo, the Negev, Jalama and Raymond detention centers.

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June 12, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

Supreme Court Denies Request to Hear American Torture Victim’s Lawsuit

ACLU | June 11, 2012

WASHINGTON – The U.S. Supreme Court today announced that it would not review the American Civil Liberties Union’s lawsuit against current and former government officials for their roles in the unlawful detention and torture of U.S. citizen José Padilla. In January, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the district court’s ruling that an American citizen designated an “enemy combatant” by the executive branch could not sue to vindicate his constitutional rights based on a claim that he was tortured at the direction of senior government officials.

“The Supreme Court’s refusal to consider Jose Padilla’s case leaves in place a blank check for government officials to commit any abuse in the name of national security, even the brutal torture of an American citizen in an American prison,” said Ben Wizner, the ACLU’s lead counsel on the case. “To date, not a single victim of the Bush administration’s torture regime has received his day in court. It is precisely the role of the courts to ensure that allegations of grave misconduct by executive Branch officials receive fair adjudication. That vital role does not evaporate simply because those officials insist that their actions are too sensitive for judicial review.”

Padilla was taken from a civilian jail in New York in 2002 by military agents, declared an “enemy combatant” and secretly transported to the Naval Consolidated Brig in Charleston, S.C. He was imprisoned without charge for nearly four years, subjected to extreme abuse and was unable to communicate with his lawyers or family for two years. The illegal treatment included forcing Padilla into stress positions for hours on end, punching him, depriving him of sleep and threatening him with further torture and death.

More information and case documents are available at:
http://www.aclu.org/national-security/padilla-v-rumsfeld

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June 11, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , , , | Leave a comment

Judge Forrest and the NDAA

By CARL J. MAYER | CounterPunch | June 11, 2012

In 1774 the American patriot John Adams said of John Witherspoon (the Scottish Presbyterian Minister and co-signer of the Declaration of Independence): “He is as high a Son of Liberty, as any man in America.”

Future generations may well say of United States Federal District Court Judge Katherine B. Forrest that she is as high a Daughter of Liberty as any person in the land.

Judge Forrest, of the Southern District of New York in Manhattan, issued a ruling on May 16 that will be regarded as a watershed moment in reversing a decade-long bi-partisan assault on civil liberties and the Constitution. Her honor took the extraordinary step of issuing a preliminary injunction and striking down as unconstitutional a provision of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that would have allowed for the indefinite detention of United States citizens in military prisons without trial or counsel.

This so-called “Homeland Battlefield Act” was thought by many to be the latest and most egregious incursion on the liberties of all Americans, coming on the heels of warrantless wire-tapping, the USA Patriot Act, drones flying over American cities and the use by American police of Para-military garb and tactics.

Like John Adams and John Witherspoon, Forrest can hardly be characterized as a radical. A former entertainment lawyer with the powerhouse corporate law firm of Cravath, Swaine and Moore, Forrest is an Obama appointee.

Nor can her opinion be characterized as precipitous or far-flung. To the contrary, Judge Forrest’s sober 68-page ruling was firmly rooted in established First Amendment and due process precedent. Judge Forrest almost had no choice but to strike down the offending statute because its terms were so vague: the law would have captured anyone accused of giving “substantial support” to Al-Qaeda or “associated forces.” These terms are not only inherently nebulous and imprecise, but they were not defined in the statute. Like most lawyers, in all my years of legal practice, I have never encountered a law that does not have a definitional section: the NDAA did not.

To remove any doubt, at trial Judge Forrest cross-examined the United States Government lawyers about whether they could give assurances to the plaintiffs in the case – all of whom were either journalists or activists with no ties to terrorists, other than reporting – that their speech and conduct would not subject them to the provisions of the NDAA. Repeatedly, Justice Department lawyers refused, in open court, on the record, to offer any such assurances. As Judge Forrest wrote in her opinion: “At the hearing on this motion, the government was unwilling or unable to state that these plaintiffs would not be subject to indefinite detention under [Section] 1021 [of the NDAA]. Plaintiffs are therefore at risk of detention, of losing their liberty, potentially for many years.”

The government could appeal Judge Forrest’s ruling, but the plaintiffs in the case have publicly called on the President, a former constitutional scholar himself, to announce that he will abide by the sound reasoning of Judge Forrest, forgo an appeal and voluntarily enter into a permanent injunction that would forever ensure that American’s rights to trial by jury would be secure.

Candidate Romney would be wise to take a similar position. Indeed as many Republicans oppose the NDAA as Democrats. In fact, a coalition of conservative and Republican groups took the extraordinary step of filing an amicus curiae brief in Federal District Court. The signatories to the brief included a Virginia Republican State Senator, the Conservative Legal Defense and Education Fund, and the Gun Owners of America.

The Congress, just days after Judge Forrest’s ruling, failed to pass an amendment to the NDAA that would have fixed some of the constitutional problems with the statute. On May 25, the Friday before the Memorial Day weekend, the Justice Department filed a motion for reconsideration (which are virtually never granted) before Judge Forrest signaling the Administration’s determination to keep fighting to overturn decades of constitutional jurisprudence and enshrine indefinite, undefined detention as the law of the land.

The most astonishing moment at trial before Judge Forrest was the sound of silence. The government refused to call any witnesses from any of the national security agencies that could have explained why undermining the civil liberties of civilians in this country is necessary to fight terrorism. The government simply cannot explain why habeas corpus and trial by jury should be jettisoned when these concepts date back hundreds of years and were enshrined by the Supreme Court during active war time as far back as the Civil War.

On June 6, 2012, in another courageous opinion, Judge Forrest denied the Obama administration’s request for reconsideration and made clear that her order is so broad that it applies to every area of the country and by implication protects all journalists and activists in America.

The battle to restore civil liberties in America has begun.

Carl J. Mayer, with Bruce Afran, was lead-counsel representing the plaintiffs in Hedges v. Obama, decided by Judge Forrest on May 16, 2012.

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June 11, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , , | Leave a comment

Obama: less rights, more drones–don’t worry, it’s legit

By BRIAN WILLIAMS | The Militant | June 18, 2012

When President Barack Obama was campaigning for president in 2008 he condemned the assaults on constitutional rights and military operations that marked the George W. Bush administration’s “war on terror.” On his second day in office, Obama issued several executive orders as a symbol of the new administration’s break with the past and pledged to “restore the standards of due process and … core constitutional values.”

But over the last three and a half years Obama has in fact deepened the assault, strengthening the executive powers of his office and establishing new legal precedents to legitimatize major aspects of it—from indefinite detentions and military tribunals to presidential-ordered assassinations of U.S. citizens. Unlike his predecessor, Obama has intimately involved himself in directing hunter-killer operations carried out by aerial drone pilots and commando hit squads from Pakistan to Yemen to Somalia—which have mushroomed under his watch.

Among Obama’s inaugural executive decrees was a pledge to close the Pentagon’s notorious military prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, within a year. Today it’s still open with 169 prisoners. The administration’s policy has been to send no new prisoners there, but instead to expand its prison at the U.S. airbase in Bagram, Afghanistan, where some 2,000 languish further from public attention and without a pretense of any rights.

The order’s fine print made clear the president was not challenging the indefinite detention of detainees without charges. Inmates “not approved for release or transfer,” the order said, “shall be evaluated to determine … whether it is feasible to prosecute” them.

Two months later the administration was filing its first court brief defending indefinite military detention for Guantánamo detainees under executive wartime powers. In May of that year Obama defended his prerogative to indefinitely hold those “who cannot be prosecuted yet who pose a clear danger.” His administration has designated 46 prisoners for detention without trial.

Another executive order signed on Obama’s second day announced the closure of secret CIA “detention facilities,” commonly referred to as “black sites.” The order included a clause stating that “detention facilities … do not refer to facilities used only to hold people on a short term, transitory basis.”

The undefined “short term” and “transitory basis” allowed the CIA to continue its practice of “extraordinary renditions” to other countries for “enhanced interrogation,” with a new air of legitimacy. In September 2010, a U.S. appeals court ruled in favor of the Obama administration, dismissing a suit by five victims of torture under the CIA’s renditions program based on the government’s “state secrets” privilege.

In his first week in office President Obama suspended military commissions at Guantánamo. In March 2011 Obama issued an executive order resuming them with some minor tweaks. Some three dozen have been designated by the current administration to face military “justice” in which the Pentagon assigns military officers to serve as judge and jury and the use of secret evidence and hearsay is permitted.

Another presidential order in March 2011 further validated indefinite detention by establishing a periodic government review of Guantánamo prisoners slated for military prosecution or considered neither fit for trial nor release.

Since assuming office the Obama administration has conducted nearly 300 drone strikes—255 of which have taken place in Pakistan, according to the Long War Journal website. This is roughly six times more than were carried out during the entire Bush administration.

The current president has taken a peculiar interest in the remote assassination campaign. “Obama has placed himself at the helm of a top secret ‘nominations’ process to designate terrorists for kill or capture, of which the capture part has become largely theoretical,” said a May 29 article in the New York Times titled “Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will.”

The president approves every name on the kill list and every strike in Yemen and Somalia, as well as many of the “more complex and risky strikes in Pakistan,” the Times said. “Every week or so, more than 100 members of the government’s sprawling national security apparatus gather, by secure video teleconference, to pore over terrorist suspects’ biographies and recommend to the president who should be the next to die,” reported the paper. The president’s strikes have included some that were certain to result in what the administration counts as civilian casualties. The official civilian body count is kept low by recording all men in a strike zone as combatants, unnamed officials told the Times.

Obama’s first strike in Yemen in December 2009 killed more than 40 civilians, including women and children, and left behind a number of deadly cluster bombs to kill more. More recently a May 6 airstrike reportedly killed Fahd al-Quso, an alleged al-Qaeda leader, and 19-year-old Nasser Salim, who was tending to his farm when al-Quso drove into the area.

The latest U.S. drone assault June 4 in Pakistan’s tribal agency of North Waziristan killed 15 “suspected militants,” according to the Long War Journal. It was the eighth strike in Pakistan in 12 days. Since April, Washington has conducted 14 airstrikes in Yemen.

The Obama administration has established a protocol in Pakistan and Yemen that targets unidentified people based on “patterns of behavior” and “gathering places,” according to numerous press reports.

Last September a U.S. drone strike killed U.S.-born citizen Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen after Obama publicly announced he put him on the hit list. That decision was “an easy one” Obama told associates, according to the Times.

Following the killing, the administration declared the president’s authority to assassinate citizens who pose an “imminent threat” if “capture is not feasible,” as Attorney General Eric Holder put it in a speech March 5 at Northwestern University School of Law. Referring to the Fifth Constitutional Amendment’s prohibition on taking life without due process, Holder said “‘due process’ and ‘judicial process’ are not one and the same.” In other words, as long as the administration has really mulled it over and Congress is not complaining, don’t worry, it’s all good.

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June 10, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

A Thousand Years of Solitude

By Joanne Mariner | Justia.com | June 4, 2012

Imagine spending a month alone in a windowless cell the size of a small bathroom.  Now multiply that by 100, and you can begin to understand the average period of solitary confinement endured by prisoners held in the Security House Unit at California’s Pelican Bay State Prison.

The SHU, as the unit is called, houses more than 1,000 men, most of them remaining in solitary confinement for years, even decades.

According to official prison statistics, more than 500 prisoners at the SHU (or about half the total population) have been held there for more than 10 years. What is more, 78 prisoners have been held at the SHU for more than 20 years.

The Center for Constitutional Rights, a non-profit public interest law firm, filed a class action complaint in federal court last week on behalf of ten named plaintiffs who are incarcerated in the SHU, calling the SHU’s solitary confinement regime “inhumane and debilitating.”  The plaintiffs, who had originally filed the case without legal assistance, have each been held in solitary confinement for between 11 and 22 years.

These numbers are stunning no matter how one looks at them. A recent European human rights court case condemned Russia for holding a prisoner in solitary confinement for three years, which, compared to the length of prisoners’ stays in the SHU, is a short stint. In the aggregate, prisoners held at the SHU spend thousands of years in their cells alone. It is a large-scale experiment in sensory deprivation and social isolation.

Communication as a Disciplinary Offense

The complaint paints a stark picture of daily life in the SHU.  Prisoners in the SHU “normally spend between 22 and one-half and 24 hours a day in their cells. They are typically allowed to leave their cells only for ‘exercise’ and to shower.”

The cells are made entirely of concrete and measure approximately 80 square feet.  They contain a concrete bed, a sink, and a toilet, as well as a concrete desk and stool.  Prisoners’ personal belongings are extremely limited.  The cell doors are made up of solid steel, not bars, and have small round perforations that allow a partial view into the hallway.

The only means prisoners have to communicate is to yell or speak loudly to their neighbors, which may be deemed to be a disciplinary offense.

“Exercise,” according to the complaint (which puts the word in quotes), takes place in “a barren, solid concrete exercise pen, known as the ‘dog run.’” Until last year, the exercise pen was empty.  Following an organized hunger strike by prisoners, the authorities added a handball to the pen.

Phone calls are not allowed, except in exceptional circumstances like a death in the family, and even then permission to make a call is granted at the prison authorities’ discretion.  The complaint describes how one of the plaintiffs, Gabriel Reyes, “was denied a telephone call home after his stepfather died, because he had been allowed a telephone call several months earlier when his biological father died.”

Family members are limited to non-contact visits, behind plexiglass, with communication taking place over a telephone handset.  The prison gets few visitors, as it is located far from most prisoners’ home cities, near the state’s northern border with Oregon, and visiting hours are extremely limited. As the complaint explains, many prisoners have “been without face-to-face contact with people other than prison staff for decades.”

Prisoners have no access to recreational or vocational programming.  Psychological counseling is minimal, despite the obvious mental health risks at issue. When one plaintiff requested mental health care, the complaint asserts, “he was referred to a ‘self-help’ library book.”

While most prisoners are held in solitary confinement, a few are double-celled.  The complaint suggests that the only thing nearly as bad as solitary confinement is being locked in close quarters with one other person, with no possibility of leaving the room. “[D]ouble-celling,” the complaint says, “requires two strangers to live around-the-clock in intolerably cramped conditions, in a cell barely large enough for a single human being to stand or sit.”

Indefinite Confinement

No judge ever sentences a prisoner to serve time at the Pelican Bay SHU.  Instead, it is the state prison bureaucracy that puts people there and keeps them there.  California has a serious problem of gang violence, both in the prisons and beyond, and segregation in the SHU, where prisoners’ ability to act and communicate is extremely limited, is viewed as an effective control mechanism.

Prisoners end up at the SHU via a process called prison gang validation, which often relies on information provided by confidential informants. Prisoners who are believed to be associated with a gang—even without any indication of gang activity, or even actual gang membership—are “validated” as gang affiliates.  They then can be placed in the SHU for an indefinite term.

The only real way to exit the SHU, short of being released from prison after serving one’s sentence(s), is to “debrief” to the prison authorities, i.e., to formally renounce any association with a gang and to report on other prisoners’ gang activity.  This is an obviously dangerous option, and many prisoners refuse to try it.

After six years in the SHU, there is supposed to be another way out, but the complaint alleges that it does not operate as it should.  Prisoners receive a six-year review to evaluate whether they are “active” with a gang or have gained “inactive” status.  But, the complaint states, the review lacks seriousness, with the prison authorities pointing to reading material, artwork, and minor disciplinary offenses such as talking to other prisoners as grounds for denying inactive status.

The empty promise of the six-year review is especially damaging for prisoners who are eligible for parole.  One such prisoner is George Ruiz, is a 69-year-old Latino man who has spent the last 28 years of his life in solitary confinement, 22 of those years at the SHU. Ruiz has been eligible for parole since 1993, but the parole board has reportedly told him that he will never obtain parole as long as he is held at the SHU.

A recent UN report, issued by the UN special rapporteur on torture, criticized this sort of indeterminate segregation.  It explained that “[t]he feeling of uncertainty when not informed of the length of solitary confinement exacerbates the pain and suffering of the individuals who are subjected to it.”  “Indefinite solitary confinement,” the report concluded, “should be abolished.”

The Outer Bounds of Psychological Tolerance

Conditions at the Pelican Bay SHU have been challenged in court before.  In the early 1990s, a few years after the prison opened, a class action suit was brought on behalf of prisoners there. The resulting court decision found SHU conditions to be unconstitutional for mentally ill prisoners and prisoners who were at high risk of mental illness.

Although the court emphasized that the harsh conditions at the SHU “may press the outer bounds of what most humans can psychologically tolerate,” it did not find them to constitute cruel and unusual punishment for all prisoners held there. The court emphasized, however, that its ruling covered people who had been held at the SHU for a few years—mostly three years or less—and that it could “not even begin to speculate on the impact on inmates confined in the SHU for periods of 10 to 20 years or more.”

The present case poses exactly the situation that the previous court did not reach.  It catalogues a range of psychological harms stemming from confinement at the SHU, including depression, nervousness, headaches, insomnia, nightmares, fears of an impending nervous breakdown, hallucinations, and multiple suicide attempts.

“I feel dead,” said Luis Esquivel, one of the plaintiffs in the suit, to his lawyers. “It’s been thirteen years since I have shaken someone’s hand and I fear I’ll forget the feel of human contact.”

~

Joanne Mariner, a Justia columnist, is the director of Hunter College’s Human Rights Program. She is an expert on human rights, counterterrorism, and international humanitarian law. She is the author of the Human Rights Watch report, No Escape: Male Rape in U.S. Prisons.

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June 8, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

US cops taser 8-month pregnant black woman for parking dispute

Press TV – June 8, 2012

Chicago police officers have reportedly used a Taser stun gun on a black woman days away from giving birth and arrested her over a parking dispute.

Tiffany Rent, who is eight months pregnant, was tasered, dragged out of her car and forced to the ground and handcuffed by police officers on Wednesday outside a drug store for parking violation.

Rent was approached by officers in a parking lot and ticketed for parking in a handicapped space. According to police report she tore up the ticket and threw it at the officer.

The police report also said that, Rent attempted to take off after being fined, however she was shocked by a taser gun. Joseph Hobbs, the father of the child, was also arrested by police when he tried to intervene. He suffered a dislocated elbow during the arrest.

The superintendent of the Chicago Police Department, Garry McCarthy, said that the officers were not wrong in the way they arrested Rent and Hobbs, and the reason the officer used Taser was because “you can’t always tell whether somebody is pregnant.”

However, Rent told the Chicago Tribune that she was standing “at the squad car close enough for him to see that I was pregnant.”

Rent’s sister, Shareeta Rent, said the family believed that the police employed excessive force on a pregnant woman. “How could you do that to a pregnant woman? My niece and nephew are in the back seat of the car crying. They did that in front of her kids.”

A nursing supervisor at the Roseland Community Hospital ran tests on Rent later on Wednesday, saying the unborn child was in good health but the mother still has fears as she formerly lost two children during pregnancy.

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June 8, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | , , , | Leave a comment

Colombia and Guatemala Again Ranked 1st and 2nd in Murders of Trade Unionists

USLeap | June 6, 2012

In its 2012 Annual Survey of Violations of Trade Union Rights released June 6, 2012, the International Trade Union Confederation found that Latin America remains the most dangerous region of the world for trade unionists, with Colombia again leading the world, followed by Guatemala.

The ITUC says 29 trade unionists were reported murdered in Colombia in 2011, with 10 more in Guatemala, together accounting for a bit over half of the 76 trade unionists reported murdered in 2011.  Colombia’s share of total murders dropped significantly, however, reflecting a decreased in 2010 murders of 51, representing 55% of the 92 trade unionists murdered in 2010.

Ironically, Colombia and Guatemala are also the two countries in Latin America that have been at the heart of U.S. policy on worker rights and Free Trade Agreements, with the Obama Administration pushing forward with implementation of the Colombia FTA in mid-May despite insufficient progress on worker rights while continuing to deal with a CAFTA (Central America Free Trade Agreement) labor complaint on Guatemala filed over four years ago that has yielded little progress even as violence against Guatemala unionists has escalated.

In a welcome and some say historic development, the conservative Guatemalan agribusiness sector has called on its own government to investigate and prosecute those responsible for the violence that has been directed at the country’s largest union, Sitrabi, which represents Del Monte banana workers and is a filer of the CAFTA labor complaint.  Sitrabi reports that seven members of its union members have been murdered since April 2011.  The Camara del Agro released its remarkable letter [ English translation here] in late May; no response from the government has been reported as yet.

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June 8, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Economics, Solidarity and Activism, Subjugation - Torture | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Killing Pakistanis by US drone attacks violates human rights: Pillay

Press TV – June 7, 2012

A senior United Nations human rights official says the killing of civilians in non-UN-sanctioned airstrikes by the US assassination drones in Pakistan is illegal and in violation of human rights.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay made the remarks on Thursday at the end of a four-day visit to Pakistan, where more than 150 people have died in twenty US drone attacks since the beginning of the year.

“Drone attacks do raise serious questions about compliance with international law,” she added.

The commissioner noted that in her opinion “the indiscriminate killings and injuries of civilians in any circumstances” was in violation of international norms of human rights.

Pillay also called for a UN investigation into civilian casualties, which she said were difficult to track.

“I suggested to the government that they invite the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Summary or Arbitrary Executions and he will be able to investigate some of the incidents,” she said.

Washington claims its drone strikes target militants, though casualty figures clearly indicate that Pakistani civilians are the main victims of the non-UN-sanctioned attacks.

On Tuesday, Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry summoned the US Charge d’affaires Richard Hoagland over Washington’s continued drone attacks saying they violate Pakistan sovereignty.

However, the US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta says Washington would continue its drone attacks in the country despite complaints from Islamabad.

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June 8, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes | , , , , , | Leave a comment

US Muslims sue to stop NYPD spying program

RT | June 6, 2012

Eight American Muslims have filed a federal lawsuit to put an end to a post-9/11 surveillance program run by the New York Police Department. The lawsuit follows a New Jersey Attorney General probe saying the NYPD had done nothing wrong.

The lawsuit was filed in federal court in Newark Wednesday by Muslim Advocates, a group who has taken up the New Jersey Muslims’ cause. The suit claims that identifying as Muslim does not constitute “a legitimate criterion” for law-enforcement officials to target individuals for surveillance.

“This case is critical to protecting the civil rights of American Muslims and all Americans,” Muslim Advocates legal director Glen Katon said.

New Jersey Representative Rush Holt called the lawsuit “a thoughtful, sensible step toward bringing law enforcement practices back into line with constitutional protections and the standards of good policing.”

It is the first such legal action to directly challenge the NYPD for spying on Muslims following the attacks of September 11, 2001. An Associated Press investigation last year uncovered a systematic surveillance program that put entire Muslim neighborhoods under a watchful eye, recording the every move of their residents. Undercover police infiltrated dozens of mosques and student groups while investigating scores more in New York City and neighboring New Jersey.

Records showed that police paid special attention to grocery stores that carried halal or kosher food products, eavesdropped on Muslim-owned stores, cafes and hair salons, placed Mosques under surveillance during Friday prayers, and even went so far as to photograph an elementary school for Muslim girls.

While New Jersey lawmakers were up in arms upon learning of the intrusive spying program, after a three month review, the state’s attorney found there was no legal means to stop the NYPD from carrying out their practice of targeting mosques, business and student groups for surveillance.

Both NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly and the city’s mayor Michael Bloomberg have supported the spying program, saying the information is obtained within departmental guidelines which are within constitutional bounds.

Kelly further stated that the 2001 attacks showed that the city could not rely solely on the federal government to provide for its security.
As it is, the program operates with limited oversight. The New York City Council claims it isn’t qualified to supervise intelligence operations, while Congress says the NYPD is out of its jurisdiction despite the billions in federal largesse the city receives each year.

Lawmakers and civil rights groups have urged the Justice Department to investigate the NYPD’s practices. A Justice Department spokeswoman said those requests were currently under review.

But Farhana Khera, executive director of Muslim Advocates, said state and federal stonewalling made the lawsuit inevitable.

“With New York officials refusing to look into the NYPD’s abuses, the New Jersey Attorney General saying his hands are tied, and the U.S. Department of Justice dragging its heels, this lawsuit is the victims’ last resort for justice to prevail.”

June 6, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Islamophobia | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Israeli forces detain Hebron journalist

Ma’an – 03/06/2012

Sharif Rajoub works as a reporter for al-Aqsa radio station.

HEBRON – Israeli forces detained a local journalist in Hebron early Sunday, relatives said.

Soldiers raided the home of Sharif Rajoub in the village of Dura and took him to an unknown destination, his brother Mahmoud told Ma’an.

Rajoub works as a reporter for Al-Aqsa radio station. He was preparing for his wedding, which was set to take place next week, his brother added.

An Israeli army spokeswoman said that a man had been arrested in Dura overnight Saturday, but could not provide further details about his identity.

Another man was arrested in Ramallah overnight, she added.

Israeli forces have raided several Palestinian news outlets in recent months.

In late February, Israeli forces raided the university institute’s Al-Quds Educational TV in Ramallah-district Al-Bireh and confiscated its broadcasting equipment, claiming it was interrupting legal broadcasting.

The same day, Israeli forces also raided Watan TV’s newsroom in Ramallah and seized transmitters.

In May, Israeli forces arrested the director of a Jenin-based satellite channel after raiding his home. Soldiers confiscated Al-Asir TV station’s broadcasting equipment, the director told Ma’an.

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June 3, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Obama At Large: Where Are The Lawyers?

By Ralph Nader | May 31, 2012

The rule of law is rapidly breaking down at the top levels of our government. As officers of the court, we have sworn to “support the Constitution,” which clearly implies an affirmative commitment on our part.

Take the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The conservative American Bar Association sent three white papers to President Bush describing his continual unconstitutional policies. Then and now civil liberties groups and a few law professors, such as the stalwart David Cole of Georgetown University and Jonathan Turley of George Washington University, have distinguished themselves in calling out both presidents for such violations and the necessity for enforcing the rule of law.

Sadly, the bulk of our profession, as individuals and through their bar associations, has remained quietly on the sidelines. They have turned away from their role as “first-responders” to protect the Constitution from its official violators.

As a youngster in Hawaii, basketball player Barack Obama was nicknamed by his schoolboy chums as “Barry O’Bomber,” according to the Washington Post. Tuesday’s (May 29) New York Times published a massive page-one feature article by Jo Becker and Scott Shane, that demonstrated just how inadvertently prescient was this moniker. This was not an adversarial, leaked newspaper scoop. The article had all the signs of cooperation by the three dozen, interviewed current and former advisers to President Obama and his administration. The reporters wrote that a weekly role of the president is to personally select and order a “kill list” of suspected terrorists or militants via drone strikes or other means. The reporters wrote that this personal role of Obama’s is “without precedent in presidential history.” Adversaries are pulling him into more and more countries – Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and other territories.

The drones have killed civilians, families with small children, and even allied soldiers in this undeclared war based on secret “facts” and grudges (getting even). These attacks are justified by secret legal memos claiming that the president, without any Congressional authorization, can without any limitations other that his say-so, target far and wide assassinations of any “suspected terrorist,” including American citizens.

The bombings by Mr. Obama, as secret prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner, trample proper constitutional authority, separation of powers, and checks and balances and constitute repeated impeachable offenses. That is, if a pathetic Congress ever decided to uphold its constitutional responsibility, including and beyond Article I, section 8’s war-declaring powers.

As if lawyers needed any reminding, the Constitution is the foundation of our legal system and is based on declared, open boundaries of permissible government actions. That is what a government of law, not of men, means. Further our system is clearly demarked by independent review of executive branch decisions – by our courts and Congress.

What happens if Congress becomes, in constitutional lawyer Bruce Fein’s words, “an ink blot,” and the courts beg off with their wholesale dismissals of Constitutional matters based on claims and issue involves a “political question” or that parties have “no-standing-to-sue.” What happens is what is happening. The situation worsens every year, deepening dictatorial secretive decisions by the White House, and not just regarding foreign and military policies.

The value of The New York Times article is that it added ascribed commentary on what was reported. Here is a sample:

– The U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan, Cameron P. Munter, quoted by a colleague as complaining about the CIA’s strikes driving American policy commenting that he: “didn’t realize his main job was to kill people.” Imagine what the sidelined Foreign Service is thinking about greater longer-range risks to our national security.

– Dennis Blair, former Director of National Intelligence, calls the strike campaign “dangerously seductive.” He said that Obama’s obsession with targeted killings is “the politically advantageous thing to do — low cost, no US casualties, gives the appearance of toughness. It plays well domestically, and it is unpopular only in other countries. Any damage it does to the national interest only shows up over the long term.” Blair, a retired admiral, has often noted that intense focus on strikes sidelines any long-term strategy against al-Qaeda which spreads wider with each drone that vaporizes civilians.

– Former CIA director Michael Hayden decries the secrecy: “This program rests on the personal legitimacy of the president and that’s not sustainable,” he told the Times. “Democracies do not make war on the basis of legal memos locked in a D.O.J. [Department of Justice] safe.”

Consider this: an allegedly liberal former constitutional law lecturer is being cautioned about blowback, the erosion of democracy and the national security by former heads of super-secret spy agencies!

Secrecy-driven violence in government breeds fear and surrender of conscience. When Mr. Obama was campaigning for president in 2007, he was reviled by Hillary Clinton, Joseph Biden Jr. and Mitt Romney – then presidential candidates – for declaring that even if Pakistan leaders objected, he would go after terrorist bases in Pakistan. Romney said he had “become Dr. Strangelove,” according to the Times. Today all three of candidate Obama’s critics have decided to go along with egregious violations of our Constitution.

The Times made the telling point that Obama’s orders now “can target suspects in Yemen whose names they do not know.” Such is the drift to one-man rule, consuming so much of his time in this way at the expense of addressing hundreds of thousands of preventable fatalities yearly here in the U.S. from occupational disease, environmental pollution, hospital infections and other documented dangerous conditions.

Based on deep reporting, Becker and Shane allowed that “both Pakistan and Yemen are arguably less stable and more hostile to the United States than when Obama became president.”

In a world of lawlessness, force will beget force, which is what the CIA means by “blowback.” Our country has the most to lose when we abandon the rule of law and embrace lawless violence that is banking future revenge throughout the world.

The people in the countries we target know what we must remember. We are their occupiers, their invaders, the powerful supporters for decades of their own brutal tyrants. We’re in their backyard.

So lawyers of America, apart from a few stalwarts among you, what is your breaking point? When will you uphold your oath of office and work to restore constitutional authorities and boundaries?

Someday, people will ask – where were the lawyers?

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May 31, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Progressive Hypocrite, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

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