Tag: torture

The Court Lets Trump Keep Third-Country Deportations, but Adds a Big Condition

Six months ago, we checked in on President Donald Trump’s fight over third-country deportations after the First U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals gave his administration breathing room while the case continued.

Trump won that round.

Friday, the judges finally ruled on the substance, and the answer is more complicated.

Related: Trump Scores Court Win as Biden-Appointed Judge’s Deportation Block Stalls

The First Circuit ruled that the government may continue removing illegal aliens to third countries, meaning countries other than their own, but DHS can’t simply put someone on a plane without meaningful notice and an opportunity to raise a fear of persecution or torture.

From Bloomberg Law:

DHS issued the guidance permitting the removals in early 2025 as part of a broader immigration enforcement push and arranged deals with third countries to accept deportees who aren’t their citizens.

“An individual’s right to contest removal to a country based on a fear of persecution in that country means little if one does not receive prior notice of the intended removal destination and a meaningful opportunity to contest that destination,” Judge Seth Aframe wrote for the unanimous panel.

The dispute matters because third-party removals have become an important tool for Trump‘s immigration enforcement program. Some countries refuse to take their own nationals back. In other cases, the administration has reached agreements allowing migrants to be sent elsewhere.

More than 25,000 people have been sent to at least 29 third countries under the policy.

The legal problem begins when the destination was never part of the migrant’s original removal proceeding.

Federal law prohibits sending someone to a country where he is likely to be tortured. Existing regulations also provide procedures for people raising fear-based claims. The First Circuit concluded that DHS’s streamlined policy didn’t provide enough opportunity to use those protections.

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“No Help for a White Man”: Inmate Found Dead in Feces-Filled South Carolina Jail Cell After Water Was Cut Off — Autopsy Finally Rules HOMICIDE After Two Months

A South Carolina inmate who told his family he was being intentionally starved inside the Chesterfield County Detention Center has now been ruled a homicide victim, nearly two months after jailers found his dehydrated, emaciated body on the floor of a feces-covered cell with the water shut off.

Gary Donald “Bubba” Blair, 43, was found lifeless on the floor of his E Pod cell at the Chesterfield County Detention Center on July 24. The cell was covered in inches-deep feces.

For context, Blair was not serving time for a violent crime. Deputies arrested him on February 22 after he showed up at his sister’s house wearing a Chesterfield County Sheriff’s Office golf shirt, a security badge, handcuffs, and pepper spray. He was charged with impersonating a law enforcement officer.

A judge later found him incompetent to stand trial but restorable with treatment and ordered the South Carolina Office of Mental Health to take him on June 3. The agency never did. Officials cited a nine-month backlog. Blair sat in the county jail for another 51 days and died there. His family says he has suffered from serious mental illness since age 18.

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How Romania Came To Host A Post-9/11 CIA Black Site & Got US Cash Bonanza

Ammar al-Baluchi remembers the cold most of all. Held nearly naked in a cell lit around the clock by fluorescent bulbs, he referred to his detention “as if I was living in a refrigerator”.

The nephew of self-declared 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Baluchi was one of six to a dozen men believed to be held and tortured in a secret CIA prison in Bucharest between 2003 and 2005. The treatment of detainees at the facility, formally known as “Detention Site Black”, is described in detail in Guantanamo court filings.

Solitary confinement under lights that never switched off, sleep deprivation that at times meant being forced to stand shackled for days, repeated dousing with icy water, and forced shaving and physical handling that interrogators euphemistically logged as “attention grasps” and “facial holds” were common practice.

A photo released by Baluchi’s lawyers to the press in 2024 shows him stripped naked and photographed. It is believed to be the first published image – of tens of thousands – of a “war on terror” detainee in a CIA black site.

“We know they were tortured horrifically,” Ben Keith, a British barrister representing Baluchi outside the US, told Middle East Eye. “It’s not always possible to say which bit of torture took place because they were tortured for days and weeks, but you don’t detain somebody in a black site with the purpose of just talking to them.”

A quarter-century after the 9/11 attacks, which triggered the so-called “war on terror” and devastating US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq that directly killed at least 940,000 people, a US military judge has finally set a trial date for Baluchi: 5 June 2028.

Lieutenant Colonel Michael Schrama ruled this month that the case against Mohammed, Baluchi, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi will begin on that date.

Schrama is the fifth military judge to preside over a case that has been trapped for more than a decade in disputes over evidence, national security secrecy and, above all, whether confessions obtained under torture before the men ever reached Guantanamo can be used at trial.

That question runs directly through a basement in Bucharest, where the accused are believed to have been detained and tortured.

In April 2025, a Guantanamo military judge ruled that statements Baluchi gave the FBI in 2007 were involuntary and inadmissible, tainted by what the court called torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment inflicted on him in CIA custody, including in Romania.

The judge found that Guantanamo’s “modestly changed confinement circumstances” had not been enough to remove the “lingering taint” of what happened before he arrived there.

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25 Years Ago, 9/11 Triggered a US Crusade of Torture

A quarter-century has passed since the terrorist attack that killed almost 3,000 people in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001. During the first seven years after that mass atrocity, Pentagon spending doubled. The aftermath of 9/11 was also a huge boost for “the intelligence community.” Despite – and because of – their failure to prevent the carnage on that day, the CIA and the National Security Agency as well as 14 smaller spy agencies boomed with enormous jolts of funds.

Along the way, some line items paid for torture that persisted during the George W. Bush presidency under the euphemism of “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

The most publicized location was Guantánamo on the island of Cuba. There, “the U.S. opened the offshore detention facility in an attempt to evade the rule of law,” the London-based organization Freedom From Torture reports. “In the name of the U.S.’s ‘War on Terror,’ people deemed by the U.S. to be ‘enemy combatants’ were detained at the facility. Many were tortured and denied basic human rights and due process… Since the first detainees arrived in 2002, Guantánamo Bay has imprisoned 780 men and boys from 48 countries… Yet only 16 detainees have ever been convicted of a crime – just 2 percent.”

Despite public pressure, Bush vetoed a version of the Intelligence Authorization Act in March 2008 that would have required CIA interrogators to adhere to Army Field Manual regulations. As soon as Barack Obama became president, he issued an executive order rescinding the free hand for the CIA director on interrogations that Bush had reaffirmed in a July 2007 order. Obama’s directive removed the CIA’s detention power and required the agency to follow Army Field Manual rules.

Yet five and a half years went by before President Obama acknowledged, in his notable words, “We tortured some folks.” He told a news conference: “When we engaged in some of these enhanced interrogation techniques, techniques that I believe and I think any fair-minded person would believe were torture, we crossed a line.”

The acknowledgement came four months before the long-awaited release of a report in December 2014 by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. While heavily redacted, it was a political indictment of torture. “CIA personnel, aided by two outside contractors, decided to initiate a program of indefinite secret detention and the use of brutal interrogation techniques in violation of U.S. law, treaty obligations, and our values,” wrote the committee’s chair, Senator Dianne Feinstein. Among the report’s conclusions:

  • “The CIA’s justification for the use of its enhanced interrogation techniques rested on inaccurate claims of their effectiveness.”
  • “The interrogations of CIA detainees were brutal and far worse than the CIA represented to policymakers and others.”
  • “The CIA has actively avoided or impeded congressional oversight of the program.”
  • “Two contract psychologists devised the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques and played a central role in the operation, assessments, and management of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program.”

Months later, the New England Journal of Medicine summed up aspects of the Senate committee’s findings: “Medical professionals, primarily private contractors, filled four basic roles at the black sites: clearing terrorist suspects as ‘medically fit’ for torture; monitoring torture to prevent death and treat injuries; developing novel torture methods; and actually torturing prisoners. All these actions were taken only after CIA and U.S. Department of Justice attorneys assured the medical professionals that they had immunity from prosecution and would not be held legally responsible for violating U.S. and international law against torture as long as they used the techniques approved in legal memos (since withdrawn) written to justify their actions. Lawyers agreed to provide immunity assurances that specific torture techniques were legal ‘enhanced interrogation’ methods only if the physicians assured them that they would be present to prevent permanent harm to prisoners. The CIA opened more than a dozen black sites around the world after 9/11, in which at least 117 prisoners were held; 39 of these prisoners were subjected to one or more torture techniques.”

At least hundreds more “suspected terrorists” who’d been captured by the U.S. were turned over to ruthless governments. “If you want a serious interrogation, you send a prisoner to Jordan,” former CIA officer Bob Baer said. “If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear – never to see them again – you send them to Egypt.”

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Inside Israel’s Torture Camps: Abuse, Secrecy and Impunity

After October 7, 2023, Israel expanded and reorganized a system of military detention facilities used for people detained in the Gaza Strip. Thousands of Palestinians passed through facilities under the direct control of the Israel Defense Forces, brought there for registration, interrogation and decisions about further incarceration. But what was officially intended as a temporary stage quickly turned into prolonged detention; the Israeli military itself later acknowledged that, because of the unprecedented number of detainees and overcrowding in regular prisons, many remained in military camps far longer than anticipated.

Behind the barbed wire, accounts of abuse quickly piled up. Released detainees described routine blindfolding, shackling, beatings, dog attacks, starvation, sleep deprivation, denial of medical care and sexual violence. These abuses were independently documented by Amnesty International, the UN human rights office and later UN special mechanisms. In May 2024, the Israeli military conceded that Sde Teiman and Anatot are military lockups where Palestinians are held indefinitely without trial or charges under the “Unlawful Combatants” law. Two years later, the system is still operating.

Geopolitics Prime has assembled a comprehensive picture of this system, drawing on survivor testimonies, legal documents, internal military correspondence and findings from human rights organizations and UN mechanisms.

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The Gloves Are Off: ICE, Electric Shock Weapons and Secret Police

“Electric shock has long been a common method of inflicting torture or other forms of ill-treatment worldwide. While electric shocks are sometimes inflicted using makeshift equipment—for instance, car batteries, mains wires or cattle prods—a wide variety of electric shock devices are specifically designed for and marketed to law enforcement.”—Amnesty International

This is what comes of giving a lawless agency unlimited funds to build detention centers, terrorize communities, and act as a secret police force.

Anything goes.

Masked raids. Unmarked vehicles. Warrantless arrests. Racial profiling. Sweeping surveillance. Detention camps. Excessive force. Citizens dragged off the streets. Protesters targeted. Congressional oversight obstructed. Government agents operating behind masks while refusing to identify themselves or explain the authority under which they act.

Now add electric shock gloves to the arsenal.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement is preparing to spend as much as $20 million to equip its agents with thousands of gloves capable of delivering painful electric shocks through direct contact with a person’s skin.

The devices are called G.L.O.V.E.s—Generated Low Output Voltage Emitters—and the government has dressed them up in the predictably sanitized language of the police state as “conductive distraction and de-escalation devices.”

Don’t be fooled by the benign-sounding euphemisms.

These are pain-compliance weapons.

ICE agents wearing the gloves will be able to touch a person’s exposed skin and deliver an electric shock intended to compel obedience.

White House border czar Tom Homan has been remarkably candid about the purpose: “It’s another device to help someone get compliant when they are not.”

There is that word again: compliance.

It has become one of the most dangerous words in the vocabulary of the American police state.

Increasingly, government agents are being taught—and the public conditioned to accept—that refusal to immediately comply with a government agent’s command is sufficient justification for force.

Question an officer. Hesitate. Pull away. Protest. Demand to know why you are being detained. Refuse to surrender your phone. Attempt to record an arrest. Insist on your constitutional rights. Fail to obey quickly enough.

The government’s answer is increasingly the same: comply or die—comply or suffer the consequences.

Now those consequences may come through the touch of a gloved hand.

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Trans Leader in ‘764’ Satanic Cult That Grooms Children for Sexual Abuse, Torture, Terrorism and Blood Rituals Sentenced to 77 Years in Prison

A transgender member of a violent satanic death cult network was sentenced to 77 years in federal prison Wednesday after pleading guilty to sexually exploiting and terrorizing underage girls around the world and grooming them into mutilating themselves and torturing animals to death.

Kyle William Spitze, 27, pleaded guilty in late 2024 to producing child sexual abuse material (CSAM), possessing and accessing with the intent to view CSAM and helping distribute animal torture videos, but he wasn’t sentenced until Wednesday by U.S. District Judge Thomas A. Varlan. The judge sentenced him to the entirety of what the prosecution had sought.

Spitze is a leader of the “HarmNation” group, which is part of the “764” satanic accelerationist cult-like online network.

The decentralized network of mostly teen boys and young men grooms its minor victims into producing child sex abuse material of themselves, mutilating their bodies, abusing or killing animals and, in some cases, committing suicide and/or killing others. They often target victims on online gaming platforms popular with children, such as Minecraft and Roblox.

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The Bomb in Monaco and a Torture Room Near Kyiv

They took her trainers. That is the detail that survives, once the rest is stripped away – the belongings removed from the corpse, the shoes pulled from her feet, the shallow hole in woods sixty kilometers west of Kyiv. Anastasiia Berezovska had been shot in the back of the head, then shot again as she lay on the ground, four rounds in all. She was thirty-nine. Six days earlier she had walked out of a stairwell in Monaco having left a backpack in the lobby of an apartment building, and the backpack had torn three people apart. The distance between those two moments – the placing of the bomb and the emptying of a pistol into the woman who placed it – is the whole of this story, and almost everything inside it has been arranged so that the distance cannot be measured.

The device was packed with buckshot and bolts, a charge built for a confined space and for flesh. Monaco’s Minister of State, Christophe Mirmand, said it contained bolts and pellets – a thing made, in plain terms, for the maximum killing of its target. It was detonated by remote control at the moment Vadym Iermolaiev and his family returned from dinner at a seaside restaurant on the evening of 29 June. The man survived with burns and shrapnel. His partner’s legs were amputated in hospital. Their thirteen-year-old son was hurt less badly. The figure who left the bag was seen on the building’s cameras and then seen fleeing on foot toward the French commune of Beausoleil, a few metres and one border away. It was the first attack of its kind in the principality’s history, and the chief prosecutor, Stéphane Thibault, moved quickly to rule out terrorism. A targeted killing, then, in the one place in Europe designed to guarantee that the origins of a wealthy man’s fortune are never examined too closely.

The person who placed it had prepared to disappear. Berezovska disguised herself as a man and fled in a car with German registration plates, across the French border, then into Italy. She had been living in Frankfurt, where German police would later search her apartment and prepare to hand what they found to the Monegasque authorities. On 1 July, the day after the bombing, she crossed into Ukraine and caught a bus to her home town of Zhytomyr, west of Kyiv. The state border service would afterwards insist she entered lawfully, through a regular crossing point, with no database alert – including from Interpol – flagging her as wanted. That is technically true and quietly damning: Interpol did not issue its Red Notice until 4 July, three days after she was already home. The one suspect in an atrocity on European soil walked back into Ukraine unimpeded, and by the time the world’s police apparatus formally wanted her, she was already among the people who would kill her. Her body was recovered on 6 July.

The two men arrested for her murder had both been sending her money — cryptocurrency and transfers into her bank accounts, which is how, the Security Service of Ukraine says, they were identified at all. One of them, Vladyslav Reut, thirty-three, appeared in a Kyiv court on 10 July and described how it was done. His accomplice, a former Kyiv-region police officer named Vitalii Zhykovych, took her at gunpoint to a forest near the village of Yuriv. “Zhykovych fired the first shot at her in the back of the head. She fell down. He came up and fired another shot. I was standing a few meters away at that moment.” Reut said he was then made to dig the hole, while Zhykovych stripped the body of its possessions and took the dead woman’s trainers. He told the judge he would insist on a polygraph to prove his innocence. Zhykovych, through his lawyer, denies the allegations.

Reut is not a criminal picked off the street. He studied law at Kyiv’s national university and served in Ukraine’s military intelligence directorate, the GUR, in unit A2772 – a training center for special-operations forces. That was established not by Moscow’s propagandists but by the investigative journalists of Radio Liberty’s Schemy project, and reported by Luke Harding in the Guardian from Kyiv. So the plain shape of it is this: a serving officer of a state intelligence service financed and helped carry out the execution of the only witness to a bombing in a European city. This is not the allegation of Ukraine’s enemies. It is the account produced by Ukraine’s own security service, in its own statement, within days of the killing.

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US and Ecuadorian militaries burn homes and torture workers in “Operation Total Extermination”

The US-Ecuadorian joint military operation launched March 3, ostensibly against drug cartels, has turned Ecuador into a proving ground for unleashing military violence upon every country in the hemisphere in furtherance of US hegemony.

Neither the Pentagon nor the Ecuadorian Ministry of Defense, which has dubbed the onslaught “Operation Total Extermination,” have reported casualty figures.

Subsequent reports, however, have made clear that the Pentagon and Ecuadorian forces are following a scorched-earth policy aimed not at cartels but civilians, akin to that employed by the military dictatorships in Central and South America over the last century.

Last Friday, the Ecuadorian Armed Forces boasted on social media that “Ecuador and the US destroyed” the training grounds and a vacation home of the Border Commands—a drug trafficking group formed by former Colombian FARC-EP guerrilla fighters along the Colombian-Ecuadorian border.

The announcement included aerial videos showing military helicopters bombing rural properties and rustic homes in the northeast town of Santa Rosa, Sucumbíos Province. “During the subsequent search, weapons and other evidence linked to illegal activities were found,” the publication claims.

The US Southern Command, the branch of the US armed forces that oversees forces in Latin America, issued an accompanying statement indicating the US and Ecuador had launched “lethal kinetic operations against Designated Terrorist Organizations.”

Sean Parnell, chief Pentagon spokesman, added: “At the request of Ecuador, the Department of War executed targeted action to advance our shared objective of dismantling narco-terrorist networks.”

The following day, Saturday, President Daniel Noboa shook hands with Donald Trump at the “Shield of the Americas Summit” in Miami, where the fascist American president announced a “brand new military coalition” against drug cartels. “The only way to defeat these enemies is by unleashing the power of our militaries,” he declared.

To capture drug traffickers, Trump might have simply called for the arrest of Noboa himself, whose billionaire family’s Noboa Trading Co. has been caught shipping cocaine to the Balkans in crates with bananas sold under the Bonita label.

Instead, in real time, the true character of this coalition was shown in Sucumbíos, where local news reporters were informing Saturday that the US and Ecuadorian militaries had bombed the homes of peasants and small farmers and tortured agricultural workers who deny any illegal activities.

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Prosecutor Investigating U.S. Boat Strikes and Claims of Torture Was Murdered in Ecuador

Alexandra Bravo, the prosecutor assigned to investigate U.S. strikes on three Ecuadorian boats and the 36 survivors’ subsequent accounts of torture and kidnapping, was shot dead in the coastal city of Manta last month. According to police, on June 14 a hitman aboard a black motorcycle opened fire on Bravo as she and her sister were leaving a café at about 11 a.m. Bravo’s sister, who jumped to protect her, was also killed in the attack.

Upon arriving at the crime scene, officers say they found five 9mm shell casings and Bravo’s injured driver, but no sign of the police detail that had been assigned to protect her. The Police Directorate, which operates entirely under the executive branch, has launched a probe to determine if there’d been an internal security breach.

Bravo is the 26th member of Ecuador’s justice system to be assassinated since 2020 and the second individual investigating state crimes murdered that week. Besides her usual caseload of homicide and organized crime, Bravo had been working the Fiorella, Negra Francisca, and Don Maca cases—a series of drone attacks on civilian fishing ships exposed by Drop Site in April. Two of the boat’s crews returned home and reported being abducted, blindfolded, and starved for eight days by American gunmen in U.S. military uniforms aboard a U.S.-flagged patrol ship, before being abandoned in El Salvador. The UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances endorsed the calls for an investigation, demanding that the U.S. provide information on the whereabouts of the eight still-missing men and any involvement in the matter by April 27. To date, the United States has not responded.

Under Ecuador’s right-wing president Daniel Noboa—a Miami-born billionaire often characterized as a “U.S.-backed dictator”—the country has become a central testing ground for Operation Southern Spear, Washington’s extrajudicial bombing campaign purporting to target “narco-terrorists,” which has killed 221 people to date. There is no evidence that many of the victims, including those in Bravo’s investigation, had engaged in drug trafficking.

“I can’t make any assertion regarding it being a political assassination, but evidently, when a prosecutor is killed it’s because of the investigation they’re conducting,” Fernando Bastias, a renowned human rights attorney with Ecuador’s CDH and member of the Geneva-based World Organization Against Torture, told Drop Site, “That’s something we’ve learned from our experience in Ecuador.”

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