BETHLEHEM – Israeli forces have killed nearly 2,300 Palestinians and injured 7,700 in Gaza over the last five years, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said Thursday.
Some 27 percent of the fatalities in Gaza were women and children, the UN agency said in a report highlighting the effects of Israel’s blockade.
The land, sea and air blockade of Gaza entered its sixth year on Thursday.
Under the blockade, exports have dropped to less than 3 percent of 2006 levels.
“The continued ban on the transfer of goods from Gaza to its traditional markets in the West Bank and Israel, along with the severe restrictions on access to agricultural land and fishing waters, prevents sustainable growth and perpetuates the high levels of unemployment,
food insecurity and aid dependency,” UNOCHA said.
Israel’s naval blockade has undermined the livelihood of 35,000 fishermen, and farmers have lost around 75,000 tons of produce each year due to Israeli restrictions along Gaza’s land border, it added.
Meanwhile, Israeli restrictions on imports have led to the growth of the smuggling trade. At least 172 Palestinians have been killed working in tunnels under Gaza’s border with Egypt, the report said.
Despite the risks, young men are still drawn to tunnel work in Gaza, where more than half the youth is unemployed and 44 percent of people are food insecure.
Mark Regev, spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said Thursday that the blockade was necessary because Gaza’s ruling party Hamas is a “terrorist organization.”
“All cargo going into Gaza must be checked because Gaza is controlled by Hamas, an internationally recognized terrorist organization,” Regev told Reuters in response to a petition by 50 aid groups, including six UN agencies, calling on Israel to lift the blockade.
Ken O’Keefe — University of Westminster, London — February 2012
It is very important to be honest with yourself and with the people you interact with, to keep your own self-respect intact. In my opinion, self-respect is worth more than money, or the lie our governments in the West adhere to when they back Zionism unconditionally. When I die, I will know that I did not sell out my beliefs for 30 pieces of silver, but tried to make this World a better place than when I came into it. I ask everyone that calls me friend to walk down that road with me and challenge the evil bastards that use deceit, lies, war and violence as a means of democracy and peace… join with me and be the change we want to see in this World.
Many thanks to Ken O’Keefe for being a voice of the voiceless and encouraging many to speak out and take action.
Dozens of youth of Nabi Saleh Palestinian village, near the central West Bank city of Ramallah, opened on Tuesday evening, the main gate that was installed by the army at the entrance of their village; clashes were reported between the residents and Israeli soldiers.
The Palestine News network reported that dozens of youths broke the chains and locks that were sealing the iron gate, and managed to open it despite the Israeli army attempts to prevent them by firing rounds of live ammunition, and gas bombs. Dozens of residents were treated for the effects of teargas inhalation.
The illegally installed gate was placed by the Israeli army closing the main entrance of Nabi Saleh, depriving the residents from using the road, the only paved road that leads to the village, forcing them to use a longer, unpaved bypass road.
Nabi Saleh village is one of several Palestinian villages that hold weekly nonviolent protests against the illegal Annexation Wall and settlements built on privately owned Palestinian lands, preventing the residents from accessing their orchards.
A baseball-esk ID card, one man and an army of drones now determine the fate of a 17 year old girl in Yemen. As the moral scale on determinations to label terrorists and to legitimate counter-terrorism tilts away from the Allegiance’s pledge to “liberty and justice for all”, September 11th, 2001 remains a current issue.
On the evening of September 10 2001 I was welcomed home by a voicemail from my best friend Zoe Falkenberg. She proudly told me that she had ridden in a limo to the airport, I bet it was one of those normal airport shuttles misleading called limos. Zoe and I were two of an inseparable trio, friends who had fought and loved as sisters since the early months of our lives, when we began sharing a nanny. Zoe called from the airport; she was leaving the next morning for Australia with her little sister Dana, her dad Charlie Falkenberg, and her mom Leslie Whittington. Mama Les was taking her sabbatical at a university there.
September 11, 2001 was a sunny Tuesday, picturesque clouds spread beautifully across a splendidly blue sky. I was an 8 year old in Mrs. Kelly’s 4th grade class at University Park Elementary School in University Park, MD. An administrator announced over the PA system that there would be an early dismissal, one thirty I think. There was a funny atmosphere, I think there was a movie playing in our classroom, I was doing something for the teacher with colored computer paper. Not the kind with bright colors, the sad kind that comes in creepy green and peculiar purple. A lot of parents were picking their kids up early, mine didn’t. After we were officially dismissed, my dad came to pick up a neighbor and me, her dad was still teaching. My dad had a funny look on his face, a strained smile. After arriving at my home, my neighbor and I began playing beanie babies in my top bunk. At some point I must have speculated about the peculiarity of the day because my neighbor told me she had heard something about planes crashing in the sky. The story line of our beanie baby game included planes crashing in the sky. When my mom got home she talked to my dad, and then laid in an unusual way on the hammock in our back yard, I was watching through my window.
Once my neighbor’s parents picked her up I went down to join my family. I sat down on the green and white striped self-standing hammock. My parents were standing in front of me,my older brother was nearby. I was cheery, after all I had gotten out of school early then spent an afternoon playing with a friend. Then my parents told me that Zoe and her family were gone forever. My parents must have said that their plane crashed too, but I only remember hearing that my Zoe F and her family were gone forever.
In the years following the attacks, the Falkenbergs have never been far from my mind, but I thought of the people themselves, not of the attack as a whole. And then in May of last year, US troops killed Osama Bin Laden. While my facebook newsfeed roared with patriotic statuses, I could not understand why I was not overwhelmed with pride in my country’s recent feat. I found myself reading Osama Bin Laden’s obituary in the New York Times, trying to rationalize the experiences that lead him to project so much trauma into my own life. Not long after, the faces of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Walid bin Attash, Ramzi bin al Shibh, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al Hawsawi appeared on the public television screens. The broadcast was to announce that the prime 9/11/01 suspects were to be tried in military tribunals at Guantánamo Bay. I felt as if I were eight years old again.
It pains me to know that the US government is using the deaths of the Falkenbergs, and thousands of other innocents, to justify atrocious human rights violations. Anthropological theory can help to explain how human rights violations against the 9/11/01 suspects, including torture, and refusal of due process, inherently violate the rights of both those victims murdered and those still living. My specific usage of victim defines persons whose lives were profoundly affected by the attacks, mainly those involved in the attacks and their loved ones. The methods used for interrogation of the 9/11/01 suspects, and the decision to try the suspects in military commissions instead of criminal courts violate the rights of the victims both dead and alive and forces victims into accomplices in the state’s violence.
During their detention, Guantánamo prisoners including the 9/11/01 suspects have been subjected to violations against their basic human rights, including protection from torture. Interrogators use knowledge of Islamic religious beliefs and values to embarrass and mutilate the detainees’ spiritual rights. These coercion tactics include female interrogators rubbing red dye that signifies menstrual blood on prisoners to make them dirty, preventing the men’s ability to pray. Waterboarding is another form of torture practiced at Guantánamo, entailing drowning simulation to produce a panic response in the victim. Mohammed is one of three prisoners who former CIA director General Michael Hayden has publicly recognized as having been subjected to the now explicitly illegal, waterboarding .
The alleged use of these torture tactics is to discover whether or not the suspects were involved in the 9/11/01 attacks, to learn more about the attacks, and to prevent future acts of terror, all while seeking justice for the victims. However, in April of 2011 Attorney General Eric Holder stated that the justice department had developed a strong case to seek the death penalty for the five suspects up for trial Evidence retrieved from torture can be used in military commissions; coerced evidence is not legitimate in criminal courts. Thus, because Holder stated that the plaintiff legal team was prepared to prosecute Mohammed, bin Attash, bin al Shibh, Abdul Aziz Ali, and al Hawsawi in federal courts, we can assume that there is a sufficient amount of evidence for their persecution that was not obtained through torture. If there is sufficient legitimate evidence to prosecute the suspects then the Guantánamo torture is unnecessary for a successful judicial trial, making the human rights abuses against these men superfluous for conventional justice.
In addition to violating the rights of the attack suspects, the human rights abuses against the suspects inherently violate the rights of the 9/11/01 victims to dignity postmortem. One specific atrocity was committed against Mohammad al-Quahtani, the sixth 9/11/01 suspect who has been denied trial, and will instead be held indefinitely at Guantánamo. The interrogator taped a picture of a 9/11/01 victim to his pants. The use of this image violates the rights of the dead victims to peace postmortem. But more than that, by using a victim’s image as a tool to harm the suspects, interrogators force the victims’ bodies into tools of aggression.
By invoking the deaths and images of 9/11/01 victims to abuse the suspects, the military interrogators reverse the victim/perpetrator roles. The dead do not have agency, but by using the deaths of thousands of innocents to justify these human rights abuses, the state forces the victims into the role of accomplice for the state’s violence against Mohammed, bin Attash, bin al Shibh, Abdul Aziz Ali, al Hawsawi, and al-Quahtani. The state mutilates the dead victims’ bodies into tools of aggression, forcing the victims into the guise of perpetrator, and allowing the attack suspects to become victims. Therefore by torturing the 9/11/01 suspects in the name of justice for those killed on September 11th 2001, the state distorts the victims’ positions as innocents murdered on a tragic day, into allies for terrorism.
This violation of the rights of the victims murdered on 9/11/01 has also yielded a violation of the rights of those victims still alive. The violation of dead victim’s rights leaves one with the question: who is the aggressor, the men whose motivations for and true involvement in the terrorist attacks remain unknown, or the state that consciously links victimized innocents with torture? This confusion is a problem for the legitimacy of the state because, while the presence of the state remains guaranteed, the state’s threat mars its position as a place of justice. The threat of the state prevents living victims from understanding the state as a space for justice. And if we cannot find justice within the bounds of our state, then what can we hope for in a military tribunal at Guantánamo, a place defined by its occupation as outside the binds of law?
Military commissions contain provisions that deny fair trials, and silence defendants, and in doing so, violate their human rights. For example, the allowance of evidence coerced during cruel and inhumane conditions denies the suspects of their right to due process. Also, both the judge and the jury are military appointed, thus an unbiased hearing is not possible, denying the suspects of even a chance of their right to due process. In addition, military commissions bar civilians and press from large portions of the trials. By excluding civilians and press from the trials, the military commissions prevent a witness to controversial trial proceedings. The exclusion of civilians from certain trial proceedings also prevents living victims from learning information about the terror attacks that have so much influenced their lives, an important part of healing. Moreover, at least bin al Shibh and al Hawsawi have submitted requests to represent themselves, however their appointed military council have thus far prevented this occurrence on the grounds of mental incompetency. By denying the 9/11/01 suspects the opportunity to speak on their own behalf, the military tribunals refuse to allow a trial in which any sort of justice is possible. The military commissions are denying justice in their silencing of the suspects because the commissions abjure the defendants of an opportunity to fight for themselves and for their own lives, in essence denying the suspects of their right to life. Some might say that these state-labeled terrorists do not deserve the chance to defend their own life. Nevertheless, denying the 9/11/01 suspects a criminal court trial violates both the rights of the suspects to a fair trial and of the living victims to the information that military commissions refuse.
The images and the information that the government has released of and about Mohammed, bin Attash, bin al Shibh, Abdul Aziz Ali, and al Hawsawi has forced the general public to other these men. The images of the suspects are their Guantánamo mug shots, taken after years of torture. The result is that the representation of the 9/11/01 suspects broadcast to the public is one of men who the public cannot relate too, and so instead we distance ourselves from these men and other them into the unquestionable group of 9/11 terrorists.
Othering prevents true justice because it refuses the opportunity to question the state’s actions and in doing so forces living victims into accomplices in the state’s violence. By denying the 9/11/01 victims the opportunity to gain information about each of these men’s involvement in the attacks, through both military and suspect testimonies, military commissions abjure living victims of the opportunity to gain the information about both the attacks and the 9/11/01 suspects that is necessary to individualize the suspects and their crimes. While Mohammed, bin Attash, bin al Shibh, Abdul Aziz Ali, and al Hawsawi remain abstractly as the 9/11 terror suspects, we do not feel an obligation to recognize their individual rights, therefore we do not question the way in which the state treats them. The denial of information forces silence and in doing so impels us to reflect the position that silence assumes. One of accompaniment with the government as it commits human rights violations in the name of our dead. Thus, not only does the denial of transparency inherent in military commissions violate the rights of the 9/11/01 suspects, this abjuration also refuses living victims of their right to information, and in doing so forces us into the role of accomplice to the government’s human rights violations.
Therefore, in violating the rights of Mohammed, bin Attash, bin al Shibh, Abdul Aziz Ali, and al Hawsawi, the state also violates the rights of 9/11/01 victims both living and dead. The state forces dead victims into accomplice roles in violence. The state withholds information from living victims, causing their othering of the suspects and subsequent position of silence regarding the suspects’ human rights, ultimately forcing living victims to be complicit in the state’s human rights violations. The National Defense Authorization Act gives the president the discretionary power to order military detention of suspected terrorists. Obama signed the NDAA into law on New Years Eve of 2011. This law allows us all to be arbitrarily declared as terrorist suspects. We can no longer allow our government to determine the legacy of September 11th 2001.
Kathryn Fenster is originally from Prince Georges County, MD. She is an anthropology major at Grinnell College, Grinnell Iowa. She can be reached at fensterk@grinnell.edu.
Series Synopsis (from VHS box):
A chilling documentary on U.S. policy in Central America, this three volume series, which took six years to make, was researched and filmed by Allan Francovich, best known for his award winning film about the CIA, On Company Business.
An astonishing range of characters tell their stories, from soon-to-be-assassinated Archbishop Oscar Romero to Salvadoran right wing leader Robert D’Aubuisson; from three then-Presidents of the three republics to Guatemala’s impoverished indigenous peoples; from ousted American Ambassador Robert White, CIA operatives, and National Security officials to the founder of El Salvador’s secret police, who speaks directly of the rape and murder of four American missionary women there, from the top death squad officials to remorseful triggermen whose gruesome accounts of kidnapping, torture and killing lend compelling moral urgency to the case against right-wing dogma.
“The issue is really whether the U.S. government instigated, trained and has direct knowledge regarding a whole series of murders – including American citizens plus hundreds of thousands of local people – and has covered it up. What people know about the world is controlled. These issues are crucial to democracy: without information you can’t expect the population to make decisions knowingly.” – Allan Francovich
‘Jerusalem Day’ was celebrated this year, marking forty five years of occupation.
About a third of the city’s residents are excluded from the celebrations, speeches and promises that speak of: “(Jerusalem) forever and always…freedom of religion… equality…” and other such hollow catchphrases. In addition, and much more importantly, those same residents aren’t granted their civil rights. Ever since the creation of the metropolis sphere called: “Greater Jerusalem”, which is the result of the intention to annex as much territory as possible with as few residents as possible, the basic rights of three hundred and sixty thousand Palestinians living in it, are not recognized. The city that had stretched its body like a spring up to the end of its reach, extending to the outskirts of Ramallah, has left the Palestinians who reside within it discriminated against by the actual classification given to them. Their blue identity card doesn’t provide them with citizenship (due to the ideology to preserve the Jewish majority), but only permanent residency, which in spite of the title doesn’t ensure them permanence as it might be removed through biased legislation or whim of the Minister of Internal Affairs.
Residency provides freedom of movement and a better health care than that which Palestinians without blue IDs receive. According to the figures of the non-profit organization “Ir Amim”, it appears that a higher percentage of Palestinians pay their municipal taxes with respect to the rest of the residents, for fear that they might lose their status and relative rights, and as a result get evicted. The list of discrimination towards the non-Jewish residents of the capital city includes an educational system that does not meet reasonable standards, inadequate and poor infrastructure in the neighborhoods populated by the Palestinian residents of Jerusalem, the partial freedom for performing religious rituals of the Muslims, which on numerous occasions hadn’t been granted to them or that is limited by age restrictions applying to the attendance at their place of worship, discrimination on the issuing of construction permits on Palestinian lands and their automatic classification by the planning authorities as “green” zones (another method for preserving the Jewish numerical advantage), the disinheritance of property, the demolition of homes, and perhaps the draconian of it all is the “citizenship law”, which under the mantra of security prevents people from living with his/her partner and their children, sentencing them to physical and mental alienation.
The Palestinians (women as well as men) that have proven themselves “clean” without any room for doubt, that have no “history” and that hadn’t been caught throwing stones or protesting, not even in their youth which was decades ago, even then, only after arriving at the age of thirty five and after having to run about, to make pleas and to deal with exhausting bureaucracy they would (perhaps) receive what is known as: “a temporary permit to stay under family reunion” – such a long name for an evil procedure.
The few lucky ones that meet all the criteria and break the walls of bureaucracy, those that hadn’t been turned down by the “SHABAK” (GSS) or the messengers of the minister of internal affairs, they too, who had received a permit to live in their own home among their family, have no insurance regarding the duration of this daily routine. A permit is temporary and might expire or be taken at any given time. Its owner must go back and beg for his life every few months in order to renew and re-validate his right. Even the number of months between each visit isn’t fixed, it changes from one person to the other and from one case to the other.
Uncertainty, intimidation and the evoking of the sense of constant persecution are among the efficient tools used by the mechanisms of occupation. They all transform the individual into a perpetual captive in the hand of the representatives of the secret services, his future is unknown since those sitting inside the chambers, that are kept out of sight deciding his fate, owe no explanations.
But all this is over shadowed by the reality in which lives of the Palestinians that were unfortunate to have their homes remain on the wrong side of the separation wall, the residents of the towns and neighborhoods on the main road leading to Ramallah. The wall that rose upwards, had not only infringed on the rights and quality of life of human beings, but cut through the urban sequence and sorely damaged the urban vitality.
The people whose homes face the back of the wall are the big victims of the intentional discriminatory policy of the leaders of the country and the municipality of Jerusalem.
It is important that we focus our attention toward these dark places, because while they are disconnected from the city that is the center of their lives, they are also disconnected from the attention of the public.
Up until a couple of years ago it would have taken these people only a few minutes to reach their educational institutions, their work places, clinics and hospitals, and since finding themselves, against their own will, imprisoned behind the wall, upon leaving their homes they can never know when and if they are going to arrive at their destination.
A woman I know from the neighborhood Dahiat-Al-Barid told me how she must wake her children up before sunrise so that they arrive at their school in East Jerusalem on time. Unfortunately for her the dark side of the wall boarders with her home, and therefore she and the members of her family are disconnected from their relatives and source of income- a business in the ancient city.
The freedom of movement is restricted. Indeed, their vehicles have yellow plates, as they are in Israel, but unlike the Jewish citizens, they are forced to go through strict and time consuming inspections at the checkpoint. Only those who are first-degree relatives are allowed to stay in the vehicle when passing the checkpoint (a spouse, parent, child), the relatives that aren’t indicated in the identity cards or friends, are ordered to walk through the pedestrian checkpoint. The ill and injured, who have insurance according to the Israeli law and are taken care of in hospitals that are located in the western side of the city, are forced to go through the tiring procedure known as “back-to-back”, which includes the authorization of the permits center- meaning, the GSS. And a vile stench rises from the fact that the residents of these areas, that are part of the jurisdiction of the municipality of Jerusalem, don’t receive fundamental services such as waste collection and are forced to deal with the mountains of trash that pile up by lighting bonfires on the side of the roads and inside trash containers.
Like their brothers who live nearby- at Qalandiya refugee camp which is located between the two villages Kufer-Akeb and Samir-Ramis, where many of the residents have residency cards- their place of residence has become a no man’s land, they suffer not only from the neglect of the infrastructure, but also from the loss of the sense of security, since neither the Israeli police nor the Palestinian are present and impose order.
Those who are frequently there, especially during the wee hours of the night, are the soldiers who invade their homes and hunt down people and children.
And in the middle, between the residents of Jerusalem and the checkpoint, is the refugee camp with the tens of thousands that reside within it, like a bone in Israel’s throat- unwilling to swallow it and unable to vomit.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in the Gaza Strip announced that there will be a reduction in its services in Gaza due to a decline in funding from donor countries.
Robert Turner, the new head of UNRWA in Gaza, said that they have decided to cut down on the program for employment by 70%. He also said that the program for distributing food is threatened by the lack of funds.
Turner added that the budget for UNRWA is suffering from a $70 million deficit where the program for food distribution, as part of the emergency program in Gaza, will create a deficit of $5 million in July, followed by an estimated $15 million during the next round of distribution.
Turner pointed out that the donors demanded that UNRWA end the emergency program until 2013 but UNRWA refused due to the deterioration of the situation in Gaza and the continuation of the siege.
Turner called for the end of the siege that has created an overall disaster and added that ending the emergency program and training the refugees demands the end of siege. Freeing the market would also be necessary for the refugees to be capable of depending on themselves. Turner said his main aim is to constantly remind the world of the siege and that the situation in Gaza has to change.
Turner continued to say that there will be no real solution or stability in the area until the siege ends.
The monthly report issued by the PLO’s Department of International Relations has revealed that Israel approved the construction of more than 4,300 new illegal settlement units in May.
“A people under occupation” also gives details of Israeli violations against the Palestinian people and their property, which are ongoing. It says that the occupation army and illegal Jewish settlers uprooted 1,024 olive trees; demolished 37 houses and buildings belonging to Palestinians; and arrested 240 citizens during the month.
The DoIR told Quds Press that Israel has renewed or imposed administrative detention on more than 40 prisoners, including five detained MPs. A further 25 prisoners who were freed under the prisoner exchange deal eight months ago have been rearrested. “This,” claimed the Department, “is another violation of the agreement brokered by the Egyptians last year.”
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The monthly report issued by the PLO’s Department of International Relations has revealed that Israel approved the construction of more than 4,300 new illegal settlement units in May.
Aletho News
Aletho News 