Russian prisoners of war have been tortured in Ukraine between December 2023 and February 2024, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) said.
The employees of the OHCHR visited 44 Russian prisoners of war in Dnepropetrovsk, Kharkov, Lvov, Nikolayev, Sumy, Vinnitsa and Zaporozhye regions of Ukraine from December 2023 to February 2024.
“While these Russian POWs did not make any allegations of torture occurring at these facilities, they provided credible accounts of torture or ill-treatment in transit places after their immediate evacuation from the battlefield,” the OHCHR said in a report on Tuesday.
Ukrainian authorities do not sufficiently prosecute those responsible for torture, violence against civilians and prisoners of war, the OHCHR said.
“OHCHR has documented arbitrary detentions, enforced disappearances, and the use of torture and ill treatment, including sexual violence, by Ukrainian authorities during the detention of conflict-related civilian detainees and Russian POWs, as well as the summary execution of at least 25 Russian servicemen hors de combat (all in 2022 and early 2023),” the report said, adding that “Ukrainian authorities have launched at least five criminal investigations into allegations of violations committed by their own security forces, involving 22 victims.”
These results show a lack of progress in the investigation and prosecution of such violations, the OHCHR said.
The Russian-speaking minority in Ukraine is subjected to discriminatory treatment in comparison to other linguistic minorities that speak EU languages, the OHCHR stressed.
OHCHR examined the law adopted by the Parliament of Ukraine on December 8, which amends a number of legislative acts related to the rights of national minorities.
“While the law is a significant step forward in improving the rights of national minorities, it maintains a discriminatory differential treatment between, on the one hand, national minorities speaking an official language of the EU, and on the other hand, national minorities whose languages are not official languages of the EU, such as Russian, Armenian or Romani. Although the first category of national minorities saw their rights broadened, as described above, national minorities whose language is not an EU language will not be able to enjoy the same rights,” the OHCHR highlighted.
Ukrainian authorities continued intimidating the priests and worshipers of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church from December 2023 to February 2024, the OHCHR pointrd out.
“Clergymen and parishioners of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) continued to experience intimidation during the reporting period. OHCHR recorded six cases across five regions where groups of people forcefully broke into UOC churches, justifying their actions with decisions from local authorities to register new religious communities of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) at the same address as existing UOC communities,” the OHCHR said.
March 28, 2024
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Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes | Human rights, Ukraine |
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Documented testimonies have been collected regarding the execution of Palestinian children in Gaza by the Israeli occupation forces in and around Al-Shifa Hospital, at a time when a UN expert has confirmed her belief that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor confirmed that it has “documented the execution of 13 children by the Israeli occupation forces in Al-Shifa Hospital and its surroundings.”
The NGO also confirmed that it had received “identical statements and testimonies regarding the crimes of executing Gaza children between the ages of 4 and 16.” Two of the children, named as Ali Islam Salouha. 9, and Saeed Mohammad Sheikha, 6, are said to have been killed “in cold blood in front of their families and residents of the area having been targeted deliberately using live bullets.”
Some of the children were killed while surrounded by the occupation army inside their homes with their families, said Euro-Med. Others were displaced and following routes that the occupation army had specified as “safe” for them to use.
“The documented cases of the execution of Gazan children embody a flagrant violation of international law, including international humanitarian law, and constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity in and of themselves,” the NGO pointed out, “and have been committed in the context of the crime of genocide to which the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip have been subjected for six months.”
It also emphasised that the occupation army has committed and continues to commit horrific crimes systematically during its military operations lasting for more than a week inside and around Al-Shifa Hospital. “These crimes include premeditated killings and extrajudicial executions of Palestinian civilians.”
March 27, 2024
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Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes | Gaza, Human rights, Israel, Palestine, Zionism |
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Prominent Palestinian political prisoner Marwan Barghouti has been attacked with clubs by Israeli prison guards and suffered bleeding in his eye, Al-Arabi Al-Jadeed reported the Palestinian Commission for Detainees and Ex-Prisoners’ Affairs and Barghouti’s family saying.
Barghouti, 64, who is a member of the Central Committee of Fatah, is being subjected to isolation, torture and humiliation, said his wife, Fadwa Barghouti.
Fadwa explained that her husband’s life and the lives of other prominent prisoners are in great danger, adding that the Israeli prison administration “deliberately brutalises them in order to break their morale.”
“Marwan was subjected to continuous attacks, which we learned of on 6 and 12 March [through lawyers], which caused bleeding in one of his eyes, while the prison’s repressive forces constantly threatened him,” she added, explaining that he had been relocated five times during the last three months, and each time he was assaulted and his prison conditions were tightened.
In four prisons he was put in solitary confinement, she said, warning of a “real war” being waged against Palestinians prisoners and their leaders, which hurts their morale.
For its part, the Free Marwan Barghouti and All Palestinian Political Prisoners campaign said in a statement that lawyers who had visited Megiddo Prison learned of the brutal attack on Barghouti and other prominent prisoners by the prison’s special repression units, adding that many of them had been placed in solitary confinement.
The campaign said it had contacted a number of international figures, including diplomats, parliamentarians and human rights institutions, as well as leaders of the Fatah movement and the National and Islamic Action factions, calling on them to provide protection to the Palestinian people including political prisoners in Israeli jails.
Barghouti was arrested in 2002 and later sentenced to five life terms on charges of “killing and injuring Israelis.”
In parallel with the onslaught on the Gaza Strip that has killed more than 31,000 Palestinians, Israel has increased raids and arrests in the occupied West Bank, arresting more than 7,000 people, alongside a campaign of harassment against prisoners in Israeli jails, resulting in the deaths of at least 13 prisoners since 7 October 2023.
March 19, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes | Human rights, Israel, Palestine, West Bank, Zionism |
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While Israel’s unsubstantiated claims of rape on 7 October have dominated western media headlines, credible documented cases of rape against Palestinians and Israeli-on-Israeli sexual assault have received far less attention.
Israel’s scourge of sexual violence and rape incidents did not originate five months ago – its roots go deeper and farther back than that, and there is a crucial context essential for understanding the country’s domestic environment of abuse.
Israel’s massive sexual violence problem
On 8 February, Haaretz brought to light a harrowing revelation: 116 separate files detailing instances of sexual assault and domestic violence against women and minors among Israelis ‘displaced’ from their illegal settlements due to the ongoing military conflicts with Gaza and Lebanon.
The cases surfaced during a special Knesset committee on the Status of Women and Gender Equality, where “committee chair MK Pnina Tamano-Shata [National Unity Party] chastised police representatives for failing to collect accurate data from each hotel regarding violence and sexual attacks.”
Although there were disputes over a lack of complete data, disturbing incidents were highlighted, including a case of pedophilia involving a 23-year-old establishing a “relationship with a 13-year-old girl, both living in the same hotel” and a rape committed after a man followed a woman to her room. It also noted that elevators were places of particular vulnerability for sexual assault and violence.
Cases of sexual assault were not confined to the approximately 200,000 ‘displaced’ settlers. There have also been credible claims by a female soldier that she was raped by a fellow serviceman during the ongoing brutal military assault on Gaza.
Sexual harassment and violence are nothing new among Israel’s armed forces. According to a Haaretz report, “a third of female conscripts in the military had suffered sexual harassment at least once in the previous year [2022].”
Haaretz noted that most victims avoid reporting what happened to them and that “70 percent of those young women who did report what happened to them stated that their report was not handled at all, or not handled sufficiently.”
In 2020, the Israeli army’s sexual violence crisis was recognized after only 31 indictments were filed out of 1,542 sexual assault complaints registered within the military establishment.
That’s a stunning indictment of the ‘world’s most moral army.’ And it isn’t just Israel’s war establishment afflicted with the rape bug.
Rape, normalized in Israel
In addition to being a regional hub for human trafficking and a haven for pedophiles, Israel consistently ranks the highest in West Asia for documented cases of rape and sexual assaults.
In 2020, protests erupted across Israel after 30 men gang-raped an intoxicated 16-year-old girl, which prompted Ilana Weizman, of the Israeli women’s rights group HaStickeriot, to disclose that a shocking one in five Israeli women was raped during her lifetime, with 260 cases reported every day.
In March 2021, a series of gang rapes against minors, with the youngest victim being just 10-years-old, sparked widespread concern in Israel over the prevalence of sexual assault. APCCI said that the rate of violent sexual offenses in Israel was 10 percent higher than the average for Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, labeling it as an “epidemic.” A Knesset report from the same year revealed that nearly half of the sexual abuse cases between 2019 and 2020 involved underage girls.
Back in 2016, activists from Jewish Community Watch warned that Israel was becoming a “safe haven for pedophiles,” noting that sexual offenders were using the Israeli Law of Return, which allows any Jew to claim citizenship and live in occupied Palestine. Years later, in 2020, CBS News released a report entitled ‘How Jewish American pedophiles hide from justice in Israel,’ which demonstrated how wanted individuals were walking free in Israel, leaving behind a spate of unresolved criminal cases.
To add insult to injury, Hebrew media reported that 92 percent of civil rape investigations were closed without charges in Israel.
According to the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel (ARCCI), despite the country’s ‘good laws’ on sexual assault, inadequate enforcement of these laws means that people use “legal tricks” to avoid retribution for assaults, with many assailants avoiding prosecution. In short, “people are not afraid to hurt. There is no fear or retribution.”
Occasionally, in high-profile cases of rape and sexual assault, the Israeli judicial system has been known to act, as evidenced by the conviction of former Israeli president Moshe Katsav in 2010 for raping an aide and sexually harassing two other women.
However, Katsav’s release after serving just five years of a seven-year sentence ignited a debate on the early release of sex offenders. In 2022, APCCI reported that 75 percent of sexual offenders in Israel are released before completing their full sentence.
Israel, weaponizing rape against Palestinians
From the time of Israel’s founding, rape has been extensively documented in its use as a weapon of war against Palestinians. In a 2022 documentary named after the Israeli massacre in the Palestinian village of Tantura, horrific admissions of rape committed by the Alexandroni Brigade were acknowledged for the first time on camera.
There are also various other reported cases of rape from that period: at least three rapes, one committed against a 14-year-old Palestinian girl, that occurred during the Safsaf massacre in October of 1948.
Because rape and other forms of sexual violence are often difficult to prove conclusively, it is essential to note that early Zionists also weaponized the threat of sexual violence, especially surrounding the massacre of Deir Yassin in 1948.
As documented by Israeli historian Ilan Pappe in his book “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine,” stories of explicit gendered atrocities were deliberately spread to encourage residents of other villages to flee. In a recent series of interviews conducted with two Nakba survivors, both revealed that they fled their villages specifically due to the rape atrocities in the village of Deir Yassin.
Today, that same attitude of sexualizing vulnerable Palestinians is apparent in the countless snuff films published widely on social media with the approval of the Israeli military, featuring male Israeli soldiers going through the underwear drawers of Palestinian women and even mockingly wearing their lingerie.
This, coupled with what a UN panel of experts recently said were “credible allegations” of sexual assault against Palestinian women by Israeli soldiers operating in Gaza, indicate a clear pattern of gendered violence taking place in the war.
At least two cases of rape, along with numerous cases of sexual humiliation and threats of rape, have also been recorded. Reem Alsalem, the UN special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, has noted that “We might not know for a long time what the actual number of victims are.”
Systematic sexual humiliation
In 2002, during the Second Intifada, Israeli occupation soldiers took control of Palestinian TV networks in the West Bank city of Ramallah to broadcast pornography on several channels. Knowing that Palestinian society is a socially conservative one, it is clear that this was done with the intent of humiliation.
A prominent case of recent sexual humiliation in the West Bank occurred just last year near the city of Al-Khalil (Hebron) and was investigated in a joint Haaretz-B’Tselem report. On 10 July, between 25–30 Israeli soldiers burst into the Ajluni family’s home, forcing five Palestinian women to strip naked at gunpoint and threatening to unleash army attack dogs on them.
One woman named Amal was taken into a private room with her children and forced to take off her clothes. The report states: “the children also had to witness their mother being ordered to turn around while naked as she sobbed over the humiliation. About 10 minutes later she and the children were taken out of the room pale and trembling.”
While it is not possible to note every single case of sexual violence perpetrated against Palestinian women by Israeli forces, it is well documented that female prisoners have been subjected to some of the worst forms of it.
During the Second Intifada, there were countless allegations of sexual violence against women and girls in Israeli military detention, a trend which Israeli human rights group B’Tselem reports is again on the rise. The rights group said that the Palestinian female detainees recently released in the Hamas–Israel prisoner exchange were subjected to “threats of rape” and “were humiliatingly strip-searched several times” after their violent arrests.
The following is part of 47-year-old Lama al-Fakhouri’s testimony, recorded by B’Tselem after her release from detention:
An interrogator came in and asked me in English what I thought about what Hamas did. He swore at me and called me a ‘whore.’ He said there were 20 soldiers in the room and that they would rape me like Hamas–ISIS raped Jewish women in southern Israel. He kept swearing at me and threatening me and my family. Then, a female soldier came and took me to another room with more female soldiers, who told me: ‘Welcome to hell.’ They sat me in a chair and started laughing at me and calling me ‘whore’ again and again.
Speaking to the media following her release from Israeli detention late last year, Baraah Abo Ramouz said the following about the “devastating” conditions faced by female Palestinian prisoners:
They are being constantly beaten. They’re being sexually assaulted. They are being raped. I’m not exaggerating. The prisoners are being raped.
In 2022, the Shin Bet dropped a case of sexual assault against a Palestinian woman detained in 2015 over “lack of evidence.” This is despite the fact that a doctor and female soldiers had admitted to inappropriately touching the woman’s private parts, while the company commander in control admitted to giving the order. The victim’s filed appeal states:
In a situation in which there is no dispute that acts that constitute rape and sodomy were committed, [in which] there is sufficient evidence, and when no one is punished, it’s outrageous and unbearable.
According to former US State Department official Josh Paul, after he and his colleagues received credible evidence that Israeli forces had raped a 14-year-old Palestinian boy in Al-Moskibiyya detention center, Israel raided the offices of the human rights group that passed the information on to the State Department, later declaring it a terrorist organization.
False narratives fueling war crimes
While the Israeli government pushes the story that Hamas implemented a pre-planned systematic rape campaign on 7 October, for which there has been no independent investigation or evidence produced, documented cases of sexual violence are undermined and ignored.
The mere fact that Israel’s notorious ZAKA rescue service relied upon heavily for testimonies of rape on 7 October, was founded by serial rapist Yehuda Meshi-Zahav, nicknamed the ‘Haredi Jeffrey Epstein,’ is telling.
The wholly unsubstantiated rape claims of the Israeli government – widely amplified and parroted by western media – are impossible to take seriously when a known propaganda outfit like ZAKA is the source.
The UN Office of the Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict recently released a report after its Special Representative Pramila Patten completed an eight-day trip requested by the Israeli government.
The report on sexual violence allegations was produced by a team of nine UN experts and had no investigative mandate. Yet statements from it made headlines in western media, suggesting that the UN had confirmed Israel’s narrative, although the report in no way substantiated it.
In the case of sexual violence allegations made about Kibbutz Be’eri, from where the majority of the allegations emerged, there was no evidence found. Two cases were debunked by the UN team as having been “unfounded.”
In one, widely cited as proof of rape, a woman was found separated from her family with her underwear pulled down. The UN team said that the “crime scene had been altered by a bomb squad, and the bodies moved.”
The UN report also noted that the interrogations of alleged participants in Operation Al-Aqsa Flood by Israeli intelligence agencies were not considered as evidence, another major blow to Israel’s body of claims.
In Kibbutz Kfar Aza, where the report concluded “the recurring pattern of female victims found undressed, 18 bound, and shot – indicates that sexual violence, including potential sexualized torture, or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, may have occurred,” it also notes that “verification of sexual violence against these victims was not possible at this point.”
Given that the UN team found that Israelis had altered other crime scenes, an independent investigation would be needed to confirm that the crime scenes weren’t equally compromised.
The human cost of Israel’s lies
It should also be noted that the recent New York Times scandal – where its investigation into sexual violence on 7 October was directly discredited by the family members of a woman they tried to claim was raped – dealt a massive blow to the credibility of Israel’s narrative.
During Primila Patten’s press conference, in which she addressed the findings of her UN mission, she admitted that they had not interviewed any victims and did not find a systematic campaign of sexual violence, nor was the team able to attribute sexual violence to any specific Palestinian resistance group.
To make matters worse, a thread on X showed that the head of the Israeli National Center of Forensic Evidence, Chen Kugel, was responsible for sharing debunked atrocity propaganda himself, such as the beheaded babies lie.
Amidst the recurrent circulation of unverified claims lacking independent investigation, these graphic and unsubstantiated allegations fuel widespread sexual violence against vulnerable Palestinians.
Israel, grappling with its own internal sexual assault issues, has a troubling history of utilizing gender-based violence within its military jurisdiction. The disproportionate lack of attention towards the ongoing atrocities perpetrated by the occupation state illustrates a clear double standard perpetuated by western mainstream media.
March 13, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular | Human rights, Israel, New York Times, Palestine, Zionism |
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The head of the UN aid organization for Palestinians, UNRWA, reported that Tel Aviv has rejected aid shipments for Gaza because the supplies included children’s scissors and other life-saving mediations. Israel has used a multitude of tactics to reduce the flow of aid to a trickle, as top UN officials warn of an intentional famine in Gaza.
On Monday, UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini explained that the Israeli restrictions on Gaza are getting even more severe, to the point that child scissors were rejected. “A truck loaded with aid has just been turned back because it had scissors used in children’s medical kits,” he posted on X. “Medical scissors are now added to a long list of banned items the Israeli Authorities classify as ‘for dual use.’”
Aid groups have repeatedly condemned Tel Aviv’s tight restrictions on aid, pointing to its policy of rejecting entire shipments even if one banned item is found. According to Lazzariri, the list of prohibited goods includes “basic and lifesaving items: from anesthetics, solar lights, oxygen cylinders, and ventilators, to water cleaning tablets, cancer medicines, and maternity kits.”
Aid shipments in the Strip have plummeted from 500 to under 100 per day. Tel Aviv has deployed a series of bureaucratic and military obstacles to prevent aid from reaching the starving Palestinians. Israeli officials have blocked aid deliveries from being offloaded at the port while government agencies continue to reject visas for international aid workers.
Israeli citizens have also helped to block aid shipments by staging large protests at checkpoints, with the military standing by as demonstrators prevent the transit of life-saving aid. Additionally, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have attacked several aid shipments and the police that escort the convoys.
Michael Fakhri, special UN rapporteur on the right to food, told Mondoweiss that the Strip is now on the brink of famine, also noting the official death toll of 31,000 is an undercount. “We’ve never seen children pushed into malnutrition so quickly. This was all preventable.” He continued, “I have no doubt – and this is again in consultation with experts all over the world – we all have no doubt that the horror, the numbers, the degree of hunger, the degree of death from malnutrition will be higher than we’re able to measure right now.”
Last week, a group of seven UN experts said the famine in Gaza was a deliberate Israeli policy of collective punishment. “Israel has been intentionally starving the Palestinian people in Gaza since 8 October. Now it is targeting civilians seeking humanitarian aid and humanitarian convoys,” the UN experts said. “Israel must end its campaign of starvation and targeting of civilians.”
While President Joe Biden has repeatedly stated over months that he is pressing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to allow more assistance into Gaza, less aid has reached the Strip. Rather than use Washington’s substantial leverage over Tel Aviv to reverse course, the White House has resorted to complicated and deadly methods of bringing small amounts of aid into the Strip.
The US and several other countries have used air drops to get food to starving Gazans. However, people on the ground report the drops are often difficult to access, while a botched airdrop resulted in five people being crushed to death last Friday.
During his State of the Union address, Biden declared the US would establish a temporary pier allowing aid to reach Gaza via a sea corridor. Tel Aviv says it will only permit the shipments if it has control over the process, all but ensuring Israel will continue severe restrictions on life-saving medicine even if the military can build a functioning dock.
March 12, 2024
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Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes | Human rights, Israel, Palestine, United States, Zionism |
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Over the past month, mainstream Israeli television channels have aired what can only be described as snuff films. They depict the systematic torture of Palestinians from Gaza in Israeli jails. Such videos have aired on at least three occasions — twice on Channel 14, and once on the public broadcaster, Channel 13. While Channel 14 is considered right-wing, so is about two-thirds of the Israeli public, and the more “mainstream” Channel 13 has shown no qualms about airing similar footage.
The broadcasts follow prison officials into detention centers to document the mistreatment of prisoners, which seems to be something that the officials — and apparently the viewers — find satisfying rather than revolting. The airing of these snuff films is a demonstration of societal sadism.
As Yumna Patel has recently reported, several rights groups have sounded the alarm over the widespread and systemic abuse that Palestinian prisoners face at the hands of the Israeli authorities. These groups’ calls have been unintentionally buttressed by Israeli soldiers’ unapologetic videos of themselves torturing or demeaning Palestinian detainees, which they boastfully post on social media. Now, it seems that the phenomenon has expanded to mainstream Israeli television.
The two aforementioned reports on Channel 14 (threads with subtitles can be found here and here) contained footage of actual interrogation sessions during which torture was used. The Channel 13 report did not, but it exposed some of the worst prison conditions to be broadcast to the public. These conditions include forcing prisoners to live in inhumane conditions and subjecting them to torture and harassment. Here’s the 11-minute video with translated subtitles.
‘The feeling is one of pride’
“Here, we see the cells in which the Nukhba terrorists are held,” the narrator says.
The “Nukhba” refers to elite Hamas-led fighters who carried out the October 7 attack. In the cell, viewers notice metal bunkbeds without mattresses, and instead of a toilet, there is just a hole in the floor. The room is almost completely dark throughout the day, and prisoners have their hands and legs chained together.
We hear attack dogs barking constantly as prisoners are made to kneel while bound and blindfolded, their heads touching the floor.
“This is how it should be,” a guard says. “This is how a Nukhba prisoner should be… what happened on October 7 will never return.”
In another scene, a guard shouts at prisoners as dogs continue to bark incessantly. “Heads down! Heads on the floor!” he yells.
“There are many prisoners here that I personally saw at the [October 7] events,” a prison official says, taking pride in humiliating them. “The difference is that this time, he is afraid, shaking, with his head on the floor…no Allahu Akbar, nothing. You won’t hear a squeak from him.”
“They have no mattresses,” says a warden shift commander. “They have nothing…we control them 100% — their food, their shackling, their sleep…[we] show them we are the masters of the house.” Even without knowing the background to that phrase, to hear him say it is chilling.
“Masters of the house” was the election slogan of Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Jewish Power leader and current Minister of National Security. Ben-Gvir declared war on Palestinian prisoners long before October 7, and this has included shutting down bakeries that supply bread to prisoners — described by Ben-Gvir as an “indulgence” — and drastically limiting prisoners’ water use. So now it’s become much worse.
While one is tempted to believe that all prisoners here are “Nukhba” members, it turns out that many of them aren’t even suspected of that. Rather, they were rounded up in Gaza after October 7, during mass arrests in which hundreds of Gazan men were stripped and paraded in a most sadistic demonstration of power. The mass arrests also included hundreds of women, including pregnant women detained with their babies. Israeli security officials told Haaretz that by their own estimate, “only 10 to 15 percent of the hundreds of the semi-naked and bound Gazan men arrested in the Strip during the recent days are Hamas members or those who identified with the organization.”
Back to the Channel 13 coverage, viewers can hear the nonstop blasting of the Zionist anthem, Am Israel Hai (“the people of Israel live”).
“The prison authorities claim that it is meant to boost the morale of the staff,” the narrator declares. “But it is clear that this is another part of the psychological warfare against the prisoners.”
Torture, in other words.
It’s hard to imagine the depths to which Israeli society has sunk. The official tells the Channel 13 reporter that “the feeling is one of pride.”
The reason such sadism has become formalized as a matter of policy is because this is what the Israeli public demands. The Israeli Democracy Institute released a survey last week showing that two-thirds of Jewish Israelis oppose “the transfer of humanitarian aid to Gaza residents at this time,” even if “via international bodies that are not linked to Hamas or to UNRWA.” For right-wing voters, the opposition to aid jumps from 68% to 80%.
This is not Israel’s Abu Ghraib moment, because when Abu Ghraib was revealed, most Americans were revolted. Israeli society, on the other hand, is thirsting for genocide. No wonder they consume such videos as entertainment on mainstream TV.
March 9, 2024
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Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, Video | Human rights, Israel, Palestine, Zionism |
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An unpublished report from UNRWA said some of its employees released from Israeli detention were tortured into falsely stating that the agency has Hamas links and that staff took part in the 7 October attacks, Reuters reported on 9 March.
The testimonies are contained in a report by the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) reviewed by Reuters and dated February 2024.
“Agency staff members have been subject to threats and coercion by the Israeli authorities while in detention and pressured to make false statements against the Agency, including that the Agency has affiliations with Hamas and that UNRWA staff members took part in the 7 October 2023 atrocities,” the report says.
The report included allegations of abuse and torture in Israeli detention, including severe physical beatings, waterboarding, and threats of harm to family members.
Though waterboarding is widely viewed as torture by human rights groups, the Reuters report described Israeli actions only as “coercion” and “pressure” to force detained Palestinians to make false statements.
In addition to describing the torture of UNRWA employees, the report stated that Israel has subjected Palestinian detainees more broadly to beatings, humiliation, threats, dog attacks, and sexual violence. Some detainees have also died after Israel denied them medical treatment, the report added.
UNRWA communications director Juliette Touma said the agency planned to hand the information in the 11-page, unpublished report to human rights investigators at UN agencies and outside rights groups.
“When the war comes to an end there needs to be a series of inquiries to look into all violations of human rights,” she said.
Amid the torture and medical neglect, 27 Palestinians have died in Israeli prisons since the start of the war on 7 October.
Israel has accused UNRWA employees of participation in the 7 October Hamas attack on Israeli settlements and military bases. Israel provided no evidence for the claim, but 16 countries, including the US, paused $450 million in UNRWA funding in response, throwing its aid operations into crisis just as starvation was beginning to grip Gaza.
Israel’s campaign against UNRWA is part of a broader campaign started years ago to dismantle the agency, which helps keep the hope of Palestinian refugees returning to their stolen lands and homes in what is now Israel alive.
March 9, 2024
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Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular | Gaza, Human rights, Israel, Palestine, UNRWA |
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Israel’s documented torture and abuse of Palestinians may evoke comparisons to US tactics employed during the Iraqi occupation, but a closer look reveals their distinct origins rooted in the Zionist entity.
Just five days after the start of the war on Gaza, Israeli soldiers and settlers detained three Palestinian men in the occupied West Bank village of Wadi al-Seeq. Stripped down to their underwear, they were then blindfolded, savagely beaten with an iron pipe, photographed in their humiliation, and subjected to the ultimate indignity of being urinated upon.
One victim, Mohammad Matar, recounting the ordeal to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, likened the barbarity to the infamous Abu Ghraib scandal in Iraq. “It’s exactly like what happened there,” he stated. “Abu Ghraib with the [Israeli] army.”
The sexual humiliation and torture of Palestinians continued – and expanded – following Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza two weeks later. Soon, Israeli soldiers were detaining and humiliating large groups of Palestinian men and women, subjecting them to sexual abuse across various detention facilities.
On 21 February, Khaled al-Shawish became the ninth Palestinian to die while in Israeli prisons since 7 October, likely due to torture.
However, similarities between the torture perpetrated against Palestinians now and against Iraqis 20 years before in Iraq come as no surprise. Israel and the torture techniques its intelligence services pioneered over decades of occupation played an important and largely overlooked role in the 2004 Abu Ghraib prison scandal, most notably through the use of sexual humiliation and rape.
Civilian contractors
In the chaotic aftermath of the illegal US invasion of Iraq in 2003, Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, who had no prior experience in prison management, found herself overseeing Abu Ghraib and other detention facilities – 15 in total, in southern and central Iraq. Though military police (MPs) under her command were ill-equipped for interrogation, Major General Geoffrey Miller, infamous for his tenure at Guantanamo Bay’s Camp X-Ray, advocated for their involvement in the process.
Karpinski stated that after Miller’s visit, large numbers of civilian contractors began arriving at Abu Ghraib to conduct interrogations. These civilian contractors then gave orders to the low-level reservist MPs who carried out the torture depicted in the notorious torture photos that were later leaked to the media.
She notes further that the MPs seen torturing and humiliating Iraqis in the leaked images were deployed to Abu Ghraib just before the first photographs were taken. This means they began torturing Iraqi prisoners in sophisticated ways immediately upon arrival at the prison:
They replaced the national guard unit serving there because they had been deployed for a year. Soldiers don’t just decide one morning, ‘hey, let’s go to abuse some prisoners’ … The date-stamp on some of the photographs is late October, November. So what happened?
Among the contractors interrogating prisoners were employees of the private security firm CACI. One of the interrogators, Eric Fair, was stationed at the Abu Ghraib prison and in the restive city of Fallujah in 2004. He said interrogators in Iraq were taught to use a torture device known as the “Palestinian chair” by the Israeli military during a joint training exercise.
In January of that year, CACI president Jack London traveled to Israel as part of a high-level delegation of US Congressmen, defense contractors, and pro-Israel lobbyists.
During the visit, then-Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz presented London with an award at a gala dinner for “achievements in the field of defense and national security.”
The trip included a visit to Beit Horon, “the central training camp for the anti-terrorist forces of the Israeli police and the border police,” in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
Brigadier General Karpinski also noted the presence of Israeli interrogators in Iraq. She explained that at a Baghdad intelligence facility, “I saw an individual there that I hadn’t had the opportunity to meet before, and I asked him what did he do there.” He answered, “Well, I do some of the interrogation here. I speak Arabic, but I’m not an Arab; I’m from Israel.”
Who is Stephen Cambone?
In November, roughly the time the first photos depicting torture at Abu Ghraib were taken, US Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the top commander in Iraq, signed an order to transfer command of Abu Ghraib from Karpinski to Colonel Thomas Pappas, commander of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade.
US military intelligence at that time was under the control of Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone. The post was created for him in March 2003, just as the Iraq invasion was underway.
Journalist Jason Vest reported for The Nation that Cambone’s post was originally conceived by US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld as a “centralizing measure,” a way to give him “one dog to kick” rather than a “whole kennel” of individual civilian and uniformed defense intelligence agencies.
Although Cambone had no intelligence experience, Rumsfeld viewed him as a protégé and loyal partisan. Under Rumsfeld’s patronage, Cambone rose from his position as principal deputy to Under Secretary Doug Feith, another architect of the Iraq war.
Vest added that a memo from Under Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Cambone’s immediate superior, indicated that Cambone had the authority to provide oversight and policy guidance for intelligence activities in all organizations within the US Department of Defense.
In other words, Cambone controlled US military intelligence, which controlled Abu Ghraib by November 2003 when the first torture photos were shot.
Like Feith, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz, Cambone was a pro-Israel neoconservative who had worked for the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a US think tank that hosted Republican neocons out of government during the Clinton presidency in the 1990s.
In 1998, PNAC famously advocated a shift toward a more assertive US foreign policy, including toppling Saddam Hussein, which would only come following “some catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbor.”
Striking similarities
A November 2003 report in the Los Angeles Times described the close relationship between Israeli and US military intelligence under Cambone.
“Those who have to deal with like problems tend to share information as best they can,” he was quoted as saying. A senior US Army official also told the newspaper:
[The Israelis] certainly have a wealth of experience from a military standpoint in dealing with domestic terror, urban terror, military operations in urban terrain, and there is a great deal of intelligence and knowledge sharing going on right now, all of which makes sense … We are certainly tapping into their knowledge base to find out what you do in these kinds of situations.
The torture of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib came to light two months later, in January 2004, after an MP at the prison, Joseph Darby, passed a CD with photos depicting the torture to the military’s Criminal Investigations Division (CID).
The tactics used to torture the detainees were summarized in an email that circulated in the Defense Department. The email said 10 soldiers were shown, involved in acts including:
Having male detainees pose nude while female guards pointed at their genitals; having female detainees exposing themselves to the guards; having detainees perform indecent acts with each other; and guards physically assaulting detainees by beating and dragging them with choker chains.
These tactics were further described by Army Major General Antonio Taguba, who was tasked with investigating events at Abu Ghraib.
In May 2004, Taguba was summoned to a meeting with Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Cambone, and other Defense Department officials, who all professed ignorance of what happened at Abu Ghraib.
Taguba said, “I described a naked detainee lying on the wet floor, handcuffed, with an interrogator shoving things up his rectum, and said, ‘That’s not abuse. That’s torture.’ There was quiet.”
Taguba said elsewhere that he saw “a video of a male American soldier in uniform sodomizing a female detainee” as well as “photographs of Arab men wearing women’s panties.” As he explains it:
From what I knew, troops just don’t take it upon themselves to initiate what they did without any form of knowledge of the higher-ups.
But Taguba was only allowed to investigate the military police, not the military intelligence brigade in control of the prison after November, nor any higher officials overseeing military intelligence, such as Cambone, or other top Defense Department officials with strong links to Israel, including Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz.
These MP troops were not that creative … Somebody was giving them guidance, but I was legally prevented from further investigation into higher authority. I was limited to a box.
The most infamous of the torture photos showed an Iraqi man, Saad, standing on a box, wearing a black blanket and hood, with electric wires attached to his hands, feet, and penis.
Facility 1391
But the “creative” torture techniques focusing on sexual humiliation and rape have a clear origin.
Israeli interrogators were teaching US contractors and MPs torture techniques that Israel has long used against Palestinians and other Arabs.
In November 2003, as Cambone was lauding Israel for its assistance in Iraq, the Guardian published a report detailing the torture Israel subjected prisoners to at a secret prison known as ‘Facility 1391.’
“I was barefoot in my pajamas when they arrested me, and it was really cold,” says Sameer Jadala, a Palestinian school bus driver. “When I got to that place, they told me to strip and gave me a blue uniform. Then they gave me a black sack,” for his head.
Other former prisoners at Facility 1391 have described how they were stripped naked for interrogation, blindfolded, handcuffed, and threatened with rape.
The Guardian report details how torture took place at the facility for decades. The first prisoners at the facility were Lebanese kidnapped by Israeli forces during their 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon starting in 1982.
Sheikh Abd al-Karim Obeid, a spiritual leader in the Lebanese resistance group Hezbollah, was abducted in 1989 and taken to Facility 1391. Obeid had been involved in guerilla operations to expel Israeli forces occupying the country. He was kidnapped from his home in the village of Jibchit in southern Lebanon by Israeli commandos arriving by helicopter.
During the raid to take Obeid, Israeli forces also kidnapped a young man, Hashem Fahaf, who was visiting the sheikh to seek religious guidance. Fahaf was never charged with a crime but was held in Israeli prisons, including Facility 1391, for the next 11 years.
Israel held Fahaf and 18 other Lebanese as hostages, or bargaining chips, to win the return of Israeli airman Ron Arad, whose plane crash-landed in Lebanon while bombing PLO targets.
Haaretz reports that a reserve army colonel from Unit 504, known as “Het,” recounted how one interrogator at the facility “stripped a suspect naked and forced him to drink tea or coffee from an ashtray full of cigarette ashes and then forced shaving cream or toothpaste into the suspect’s mouth.”
Het recalled another instance in which the interrogator, known as “Major George,” inserted “a baton into a suspect’s rectum and asked him to sit on the baton unless the suspect was willing to speak.”
Rather than prosecuting Major George, Israeli authorities opened a criminal case against Het for revealing the torture taking place at Facility 1391.
Dividing Iraq for Israel’s interests
The anger created by the Abu Ghraib revelations is widely viewed as having stoked the Iraqi insurgency seeking to expel US forces. The insurgency itself began after the same pro-Israel conservatives in the Bush administration made the fateful decision to disband the Iraqi army.
This blunder left hundreds of thousands of trained military personnel without employment, many of whom subsequently joined the ranks of the insurgency. With their intimate knowledge of Iraqi army weaponry and tactics, these former soldiers became formidable adversaries in the campaign against US occupation forces.
The violence soon spiraled out of control and evolved into a sectarian civil war, dividing Iraq’s Sunni, Shia, and Kurdish populations. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed as the country was nearly torn apart.
Wired noted years later that although a consensus eventually emerged in the US defense establishment that “the choice to invade Iraq was ill-considered and that the initial plan to stabilize the country was even worse,” Stephen Cambone had another view.
For Donald Rumsfeld’s one-time intelligence chief, the Iraq war and the chaos it created was “one of the great strategic decisions of the first half of the 21st century, if it proves not to be the greatest.”
In the eyes of the Zionist neocons, the cost of human lives and suffering was a necessary sacrifice to achieve their long-standing objectives in West Asia. The architects of the Iraq war, including Cambone, Rumsfeld, Feith, and Wolfowitz, viewed the devastation they wrought as a means to an end – neutralizing potential threats to Israel.
Yet it’s clear, in light of the actions taken by the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, that their grand designs have ultimately floundered.
March 6, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Human rights, Iraq, Israel, Palestine, United States, Zionism |
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Palestinian territory – The Israeli army’s repeated killings of Palestinian civilians by deliberately running them over alive with military vehicles was vehemently denounced by Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor on Sunday, as was the widespread destruction of civilian property. These crimes are part of Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, the rights group said, ongoing since 7 October 2023.
Euro-Med Monitor documented the Israeli army’s killing of a Palestinian man who was deliberately run over in Gaza City’s Al-Zaytoun neighbourhood on 29 February after he was arrested. The man was subjected to harsh interrogation by members of the Israeli army, who bound his hands with plastic zip-tie handcuffs before running him over with a military vehicle from the bottom to the top of his body.
The incident occurred on the main Salah al-Din Street in the Zaytoun neighbourhood, according to eyewitnesses who spoke to the Euro-Med Monitor team. Israeli soldiers restrained the victim’s hands before they crushed him, and tramped on his body from the legs up, confirming that he was alive during the incident. To guarantee thorough and complete crushing, the victim was placed on asphalt rather than in an adjacent sandy area.
The victim’s mutilated body and the surrounding area bear obvious signs that a military bulldozer or tank was present. It appears that the victim was purposefully stripped of his clothes, as he was seen wearing only his underpants at the time of his death.
The ramming operation occurred before the Israeli army withdrew to the outskirts of the Zaytoun neighbourhood two days ago, as evidenced by the condition of the entrails and other body parts, which had not yet decomposed when the case was documented.
Another documented incident took place on 23 January, when an Israeli tank ran over members of the Ghannam family while they were sleeping in a shelter caravan in the Taiba Towers area of Khan Younis. As a result, a man and his eldest daughter were killed, and his remaining three children and wife were injured. Amina, his 13-year-old daughter, confirmed that her father and older sister were killed when an Israeli tank unexpectedly and repeatedly ran over the caravan, where the family had been sleeping. While her mother and two other siblings survived the attack, Amina experienced extreme pressure in her eyes, nearly losing her sight.
Euro-Med Monitor also documented Israeli tanks and bulldozers running over and crushing displaced people inside their tents in Beit Lahia’s Kamal Adwan Hospital courtyard on 16 December 2023. Several people were killed during the incident, including individuals who were initially injured and did not ultimately survive. The corpses of those who had been previously buried in the courtyard were also crushed in the 16 December incident, stated the rights group.
More recently, a Palestinian family survived a 20 February running attack after Israeli tracks ran over their tent on the shore of the Khan Yunis Sea. A female civilian said that she was shocked by the tank suddenly running over her tent.
In addition, Euro-Med Monitor has documented numerous incidents of Israeli army tanks destroying civilian property, particularly cars, during Israel’s ground incursions into different parts of the Gaza Strip. Most of these tank attacks have targeted vehicles parked in the streets without any military affiliation, indicating the Israeli army’s deliberate and systematic destruction of Palestinian property.
Euro-Med Monitor affirmed that all of these violations are part of a larger Israeli effort to dehumanise every Palestinian in the Gaza Strip, in order to justifiy and normalise the crimes being committed against them. Crushing civilians with tanks is just one of the many cruel ways the Israeli army murders Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, disregarding their humanity, suffering, and dignity. These practices reflect the desire of Israel’s government and military to collectively punish the Palestinian people, with the aim of eliminating, intimidating, and/or harming them physically and psychologically. These crimes come alongside a public incitement campaign by Israeli officials, media figures, and settlers calling for the annihilation of Palestinians in Gaza, and are also a result of the total impunity enjoyed by the perpetrators—evident by the absence of any meaningful action being taken to hold them accountable by any party or at any level.
The human rights organisation warned that the Israeli army has escalated its premeditated murders, extrajudicial executions, and judicial killings against Palestinian civilians since 7 October through direct targeting with snipers, drones, and running operations in various regions of the Gaza Strip. According to Euro-Med Monitor, these actions amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity under the Rome Statute Basic Law of the International Criminal Court (ICC).
There is no justification for the Israeli army to commit these serious crimes, Euro-Med Monitor confirmed. Even its claim that some of the aforementioned acts were directed towards Palestinian fighters does not release Israel from criminal responsibility, seeing as international law protects both civilians and fighters who have given up or lost all means of defense, with the Rome Statute classifying their killing or wounding as war crimes. The Israeli army’s deliberate and widespread destruction of Palestinian property, carried out in an irresponsible manner and without military necessity, also qualifies as a war crime under the Rome Statute.
In parallel to taking all necessary steps to ensure Israel’s accountability for the crimes it commits against the Palestinian people, Euro-Med Monitor reiterated its call for the international community to immediately implement its international obligations to stop the genocide that Israel has been committing against all Palestinians in the Gaza Strip for roughly five months now.
In light of the fact that the ICC has not yet taken any action or filed any charges in relation to the investigations it is supposed to be carrying out into the situation in the Gaza Strip, Euro-Med Monitor expressed deep concern about the ICC Prosecutor’s performance regarding the genocide taking place there. Genocide is one of the most serious international crimes, with catastrophic consequences for civilians. The Court has not said anything about the crimes committed by Israel in the Gaza Strip, even in the face of a plethora of evidence presented by Israeli officials and soldiers themselves, as well as warnings and documentary reports from international organisations, the United Nations and its experts, and the governments of many other nations. The ICC’s last update on the situation in Palestine was posted on 17 November 17 on its official website. This raises serious questions and concerns about its independence and integrity, as well as the extent to which it can perform its duties without becoming politicised or impacted by standards of duality and selective justice.
Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor called for the formation of an independent international investigation committee specialising in Israel’s ongoing military attack on the Gaza Strip. It also urged the international community to enable the work of a separate independent international investigation committee concerned with the Occupied Palestinian Territory, formed in 2021, to carry out its work by ensuring its access to the Strip and opening the necessary investigations into all crimes and violations committed against Palestinians there, including the deliberate killing and extrajudicial execution of civilians.
The rights group also demanded that the Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions visit the Gaza Strip as soon as feasible to look into the illegal killings that fall under the purview of his substantive mandate.
March 4, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Human rights, Israel, Palestine, Zionism |
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As the pre-trial hearings in the case of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and others who are charged with masterminding the 9/11 attacks proceed at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba, the government continues to stumble with its own witnesses. In hearings last week, government lawyers tried to demonstrate that statements the defendants made to CIA and FBI agents were voluntary.
When the government’s principal torturer, a now retired psychologist, had difficulty recalling that during a torture session he threatened one of his victims by offering to slit the throat of the victim’s young son and that he had recounted that threat under oath in previous testimony, it became apparent to all in the courtroom and to those of us who monitor these awful proceedings that the government was encountering a strange and unexpected difficulty in defending the behavior of its torturers.
Here is the backstory.
Mohammed and others were violently tortured at various so-called CIA black sites outside the U.S. for about three years. They were raped, hanged by their wrists for weeks inside large refrigerators, beaten with fists and wooden boards, and waterboarded whereby water was forced into their nasal cavities so as to create the perception of suffocation and drowning. Many of the records of all this were destroyed by CIA officials, a crime for which no one has been prosecuted.
During these horrific events, the torturer in chief, who was conducting his grisly business in Thailand, called a CIA lawyer in Langley, Virginia, and obtained permission to threaten his victim with slitting the throat of the victim’s young son. The torturer admitted this in testimony he gave in court at Gitmo in 2020.
Why was the torture conducted in Thailand? Because CIA lawyers had erroneously told their bosses that the U.S. Constitution and federal law do not apply in foreign lands.
This has never been American law. The common law of England and in America has always been that when government personnel leave the country for the purpose of doing something that is clearly unlawful in the country they have left, they can be held accountable for their criminal behavior when they return. The U.S. Supreme Court made this clear in one of its five major rulings against the George W. Bush administration over its behavior at Gitmo.
Bush’s own White House counsel advised the president that because Gitmo is physically located in Cuba, the Constitution doesn’t apply, federal laws don’t apply and federal courts lack jurisdiction. All of this erroneous advice was tailored to tell Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney who, according to former CIA personnel, had a particular fondness for torture, just what they wanted to hear.
This terrible legal advice became the stated legal basis for the torture regime and the proposed but never implemented kangaroo courts at Gitmo, until the FBI entered the scene and put a stop to the torture and the Supreme Court entered the picture and required real trials.
However, in protecting the rights of these defendants — the Constitution protects all persons who have contact with the government, not just citizens — the courts have overlooked the right to a speedy trial. It is this salient failure that was manifested last week when the chief torturer “forgot” that he had already admitted under oath to threatening to slit the throat of his victim’s young son.
The lack of a speedy trial and the government’s cavalier attitude about it also were made known last week when the lead FBI investigator involved in the post-torture interrogations at Gitmo asserted 199 times in one day under oath that she could not recall what she saw and heard 20 years ago during interrogations in which she participated.
Here is the government’s problem: When the government plans to use the defendant’s own words as evidence against him and the defense counters that the words were extracted under or due to torture, the government must prove beyond a reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty — the highest standard of proof in American law, the same standard for proof of guilt in criminal cases — that the words were uttered voluntarily.
The court is addressing two categories of words — those articulated during torture, and those articulated afterward. Defense and government psychiatrists agree that victims of prolonged torture will say what they think the questioner wants to hear long after the torture has ended, just as victims during torture will say what they think the torturer wants to hear.
Yet, when the torturers have forgotten what they heard or said, when they have intentionally or negligently destroyed records of the torture, they have made it nearly impossible for the government to prove voluntariness beyond a reasonable doubt.
Evidence extracted during or from torture is inadmissible in all American courts, civilian and military. Torture is criminal under federal law and all 50 states’ laws, no matter its purpose or its location. Government lawyers are not permitted to whitewash torture without confronting serious ethical consequences.
The Bush/Cheney torture regime and its Devil’s Island at Gitmo are among the darkest events perpetrated by a modern American presidency. Far from preserving, protecting and defending the Constitution — as Bush and Cheney both swore to do — by destroying the free will and personhood of their victims, they have undermined the values upon which the Constitution is based.
Those values are articulated in the Declaration of Independence and in the Constitution’s Ninth Amendment. Taken together they reflect the unanimous public understanding of the revolutionary generation — those who fought the war for independence and those who crafted the founding documents — that our rights are natural to our humanity, they are indefeasible, and they are permanent. And the sole purpose of the rule of law is to protect our rights.
Why do we repose the safekeeping of our rights into the hands of those who destroy them?
To learn more about Judge Andrew Napolitano, visit https://JudgeNap.com.
COPYRIGHT 2024 ANDREW P. NAPOLITANO
March 3, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular | United States |
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A humanitarian aid vehicle which had been the target of Israeli airstrikes resulting in the death of nine and dozens of injured in Deir Al-Balah of Gaza on March 3, 2024. [Ali Jadallah – Anadolu Agency ]
Scores of Palestinians were killed and injured when the Israeli army dropped bombs on people collecting humanitarian aid from a truck in Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip on Sunday, Anadolu reports.
This is the second major Israeli attack in the last five days on displaced Palestinians in Gaza who are waiting for humanitarian aid.
Earlier on Thursday, at least 112 Palestinians were killed and 760 others injured when Israeli forces shelled a crowd waiting for humanitarian aid south of Gaza City.
“Many people were killed and others wounded in an Israeli bombing that targeted an aid truck in the city of Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip,” sources in the medical field told Anadolu while requesting anonymity.
So far, the number of casualties from the latest attack is not clear as neither the Health Ministry in the besieged Gaza Strip nor Israeli authorities have issued statements.
Israel has launched a deadly military offensive on the Gaza Strip since an Oct. 7, 2023, cross-border attack led by Hamas, in which nearly 1,200 people were killed.
At least 30,410 Palestinians, mostly women and children, have since been killed in Gaza, and 71,700 others injured amid mass destruction and shortages of necessities.
Israel has also imposed a crippling blockade on Gaza, leaving its population, particularly residents in the north where the Thursday shootings took place, on the verge of starvation.
The Israeli war has pushed 85% of Gaza’s population into internal displacement amid acute shortages of food, clean water, and medicine, while 60% of the enclave’s infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed, according to the UN.
Israel stands accused of genocide at the International Court of Justice. An interim ruling in January ordered Tel Aviv to stop genocidal acts and take measures to guarantee that humanitarian assistance is provided to civilians in Gaza.
March 3, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes | Gaza, Human rights, Israel, Palestine, Zionism |
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Distinguished Israeli historian and author Ilan Pappé discusses sexual assaults by Israeli soldiers during its 1948 founding war through the present time. Professor Pappé is a Professor of History and Director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at Exeter University. He obtained a BA degree from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1979 and a PhD from the University of Oxford in 1984.
Professor Pappé founded and directed the Academic Institute for Peace in Givat Haviva, Israel between 1992 to 2000 and was the Chair of the Emil Tuma Institute for Palestine Studies in Haifa between 2000 and 2006. Professor Pappé was a senior lecturer in the department of Middle Eastern History and the Department of Political Science in Haifa University, Israel between 1984 and 2006. He was appointed as chair in the department of History in the Cornwall Campus, 2007-2009 and became a fellow of the IAIS in 2010. His research focuses on the modern Middle East and in particular the history of Israel and Palestine. He has also written on multiculturalism, Critical Discourse Analysis and on Power and Knowledge in general. – https://arabislamicstudies.exeter.ac.uk/staff/pappe/
This video is excerpted from the documentary: “The Black Dress: Unveiling the Truth about Rape, Sexual Assault on October 7”
For more information see https://israelpalestinenews.org/israeli-communities-near-gaza-are-on-stolen-land-former-owners-consigned-to-the-gaza-ghetto/
March 3, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, Video, War Crimes | Human rights, Israel, Palestine, Zionism |
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