Tag: torture

Prisoner CNN helped free from Syrian prison was actually notorious Assad regime torturer: report

The prisoner CNN helped free from a secret facility in Syria was actually a notorious member of Bashar al-Assad’s forces known to torture those who refused to pay him off, according to a shocking local fact check.

The network went viral last week with footage of the startled prisoner being led from the prison by journalist Clarissa Ward, who called it “one of the most extraordinary moments I have witnessed” in her 20 years of reporting.

But “independent and unbiased” fact-checkers Verify-Sy published a detailed report Sunday saying that the seemingly innocent prisoner was actually Salama Mohammad Salama — a first lieutenant in Syrian air force intelligence with a long history of alleged war crimes.

“We have subsequently been investigating his background and are aware that he may have given a false identity,” CNN acknowledged to The Post. “We are continuing our reporting into this and the wider story.”

The CNN story last week showed Ward and a camera crew, escorted by a rebel fighter, visiting a former Syrian air force intelligence headquarters in Damascus and freeing the man who was found under a blanket locked in a windowless cell. 

He gave his name as Adel Ghurbal and claimed to have been arrested by government authorities three months earlier — and said he had no idea the Assad regime had collapsed.

Verify-Sy noted, however, that he appeared “well-groomed, and physically healthy, with no visible injuries or signs of torture — an incongruous portrayal of someone allegedly held in solitary confinement in the dark for 90 days.”

He also “did not flinch or blink even when gazing up at the sky” despite having said he had not seen sunlight for three months.

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US Jury Awards $42 Million To 3 Iraqi Men Tortured At Abu Ghraib By Defense Contractor

The released photos documenting torture of prisoners at the United States government’s Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq during the Iraq War disgusted many people who could look beyond the war propaganda to feel sympathy for their fellow human beings.

Even if it was assumed that all the people pictured in the midst of their torture were themselves guilty of heinous crimes — an assumption that lacked foundation, the torture was a breach of civilized behavior.

Two decades later, some accountability has been meted out by a jury in Alexandria, Virginia.

The jury decided Tuesday that the military contractor CACI Premier Technology Inc. is liable to pay a total of 42 million dollars in damages to Suhail Al Shimari, Salah Al-Ejaili, and Asa’ad Zuba’e — three former detainees at Abu Ghraib in the 2003 through 2004 time period who had brought a lawsuit against the company whose employees worked as interrogators at the prison.

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Editor-in-Chief of The Atlantic who compared Trump to Hitler was a prison guard at IDF facility known for abusing prisoners

The Editor-in-Chief of The Atlantic who recently compared former President Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler has a disturbing past as a prison guard for the Israel Defense Forces at a facility that is known for torturing prisoners and sexually abusing them.

Jeffrey Goldberg penned the piece entitled “Trump: ‘I Need the Kind of Generals That Hitler Had’” published earlier this week. It was filled with claims such as: “Trump has frequently voiced his disdain for those who serve in the military and for their devotion to duty, honor, and sacrifice.”

Even more outrageously, Goldberg went on to claim that Trump grew “more and more interested in the advantages of dictatorship, and the absolute control over the military that he believes it would deliver. “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had,” Trump said in a private conversation in the White House, according to two people who heard him say this. “People who were totally loyal to him, that follow orders.”

Trump spokesperson Alex Pfeiffer has categorically denied this, writing in an email that Trump “never said this.”

While this attack came directly from Goldberg, there has been a pattern of anti-Trump articles under his leadership, including recent examples such as “Trump Is Speaking Like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini” and “Hypocrisy, Spinelessness, and the Triumph of Donald Trump.”

It’s all part of a smear campaign from an editor who doesn’t exactly have a spotless past.

Goldberg, who is Jewish and was raised by “very left-wing parents,” is a dual American-Israeli citizen who left college to move to Israel and serve for the IDF during the First Intifada.

The facility where he worked, Ketziot prison camp, was a holding place where Palestinians who were arrested for participating in the uprising were held. The prison camp was condemned by human rights groups during the time Goldberg served there for violating the Geneva Convention.

Goldberg later recounted in his book that he observed one of his fellow IDF prison guards beating up a Palestinian prisoner after he talked back to him. According to Goldberg, he did try to stop the guard from abusing the man but then later helped him cover it up, writing: “’He fell,’ I lied.”

After returning to the U.S., he became one of the most well-known reporters on the Middle East, working for outlets such as the Washington Post, Slate, New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker before ending up at The Atlantic. He has interviewed everyone from Benjamin Netanyahu and Jordan’s King Abdullah to Fidel Castro and Hillary Clinton.

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These Texas Inmates Wrote a Book. Then the Prison System Banned It.

The Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) has banned yet another book in its prisons. Except this time, it was written by inmates themselves.

TEXAS LETTERS, an ongoing anthology of letters written by inmates detailing their experiences with solitary confinement, will no longer be accessible to those in custody. The publisher and editor, Damascus James, says he received a letter from the TDCJ in July apprising him of the decision.

James describes the project on his website as a work that “explores the loss of sanity, humanness, and, oftentimes, hope through the personal writings” of inmates who have spent months, years, and sometimes even decades in solitary confinement. Much of the collection features portrayals of violence from correction officers and grueling accounts of the living conditions within solitary confinement cells. 

Studies on the long-term effects of solitary confinement attest to the brutal nature described in many of the letters. Half of all suicides in prisons and jails occur in solitary confinement, according to a study published in JAMA Network Open, a medical journal. Even just experiencing solitary confinement at any time during incarceration increased the chances of dying within the first year of release by 24 percent.

The banning of TEXAS LETTERS was not a surprise for James. Not only does the Texas prison authority have a reputation for book banning but also for trying to evade the term solitary confinement altogether by instead using alternative phrases.

“They’ve euphemized torture, calling it ‘administrative segregation’ and ‘restrictive housing’ for years in an effort to conceal the harsh realities of torturous isolation for thousands of people,” James tells Reason. The ban “was clearly an attempt to silence the voices of those who have suffered the torture of solitary confinement.” 

More than 10,000 books are currently banned from Texas prisons. TEXAS LETTERS vol. 1 and vol. 2 join a long list of prohibited material, which includes the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Color Purple, Freakonomics, and even Where’s Waldo? Santa Spectacular. Notable omissions include books such as Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, as well as two books by former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke. 

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Crown cover-up? When the state turned on its victims

It was a short statement, uttered in the dry atmosphere of an international legal forum in Geneva 10 years ago. It passed unnoticed at the time. To many New Zealanders the statement would appear uncontroversial, even self-evident. But the statement was wrong. Badly wrong. And the person who uttered those words should have known better. If she’d briefed herself properly she quite likely would have.

The statement was made by the Minister of Justice at the time, Judith Collins, on behalf of New Zealand. She was appearing before the United Nations as part of New Zealand’s regular obligation to give an account of itself and its adherence to various UN conventions. Usually New Zealand takes an approach of nothing-to-see-here nonchalance.

But in 2014 a delegate from Iran had the temerity to challenge New Zealand’s casual attitude.

“We would like to express our concern over a number of human rights issues in the country as follows.

“Ensuring safeguards to protect the rights of minorities from discrimination and marginalisation which pose them a higher risk of torture and ill-treatment.”

The Iranian delegate continued to rattle off a bunch of other concerns, such as discrimination in the justice system.

After other countries gave their views, Collins gave a response for New Zealand, which she read from prepared notes. However, she paused for emphasis and looked up from her notes when responding to Iran, singling out the allegation of torture.

“In response to Iran, I can advise that there is no state torture in New Zealand.” 

The problem with this statement is that it wasn’t true.

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Woman Sues After Being Arrested, Jailed, Tortured with Death-Metal Recordings Over Clerical Paperwork Blunder

Police refused to accept her own identification even though description didn’t match up.

A woman is suing Broward County, Florida, after law enforcement officers there arrested her for something someone else did, refusing to accept her own identification and ignoring the fact that the description of the wanted woman didn’t match.

The Institute for Justice reports the complaint against the county is on behalf of Jennifer Heath Box.

She charges authorities violated her constitutional right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure, as well as due process.

The IJ explained the background:

In December 2022, Jennifer went on a cruise with family members to celebrate the news that her younger brother, Mark, had beat cancer for the second time. After a fun week aboard the Harmony of the Seas, the cruise ship returned to Port Everglades on the morning of Christmas Eve, giving Jennifer enough time to spend Christmas with her three adult children. But when Jennifer scanned her ID to get off the ship, police surrounded her and told her there was a warrant for her arrest for child endangerment out of Harris County, Texas.

The IJ reported the warrant did seek a woman named Jennifer, but it wasn’t this Jennifer. And she documented that her own children already all were adults.

“It was a really scary and confusing experience, because I’ve never had run-ins with law enforcement and I have no criminal record,” she explained. “I couldn’t believe that I could be stopped, arrested, and jailed, just because my name was similar to someone they were looking for.”

She knew the officers were wrong, so she cooperated calmly and provided police with her license and date of birth, as well as information about her children.

It didn’t matter to officers.

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Alaska man arrested for threatening to torture and assassinate six Supreme Court justices

An Alaska man was arrested for threatening to torture and assassinate six Supreme Court justices and their family members. 

The Justice Department announced Thursday that the man, identified as 76-year-old Panos Anastasiou, sent over 464 messages through the court’s public website. 

The messages from between March and July 2023 contained ‘violent, racist, and homophobic rhetoric,’ according to the complaint. He also allegedly threatened to kill the justices through ‘torture, hanging and firearms.’

The man was arrested and charged with a total of 22 counts of making threats against a federal judge and through interstate commerce. He faces over 100 years in prison if convicted on all counts.

It is unclear whether the justices targeted are the six conservative justices, whose opinions Anastasiou ‘disagreed’ with. According to FEC records, he donated to ActBlue, a Democratic platform, as recently as July.

‘We allege that the defendant made repeated, heinous threats to murder and torture Supreme Court Justices and their families to retaliate against them for decisions he disagreed with,’ said Attorney General Merrick Garland. 

According to his Facebook page, he has no friends and hasn’t posted in years. 

His account simply contains a profile photo and a 2014 posting calling Supreme Court justices ‘jack booted thugs.’

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Israeli Torture Chambers Aren’t New. They Provoked October 7

For many years I lived just up the road from Megiddo prison in northern Israel, where new film of Israeli guards torturing Palestinians en masse has been published by Israel’s Haaretz newspaper. I drove past Megiddo prison on hundreds of occasions. Over time I came to barely notice the squat grey buildings, surrounded by watch towers and razor wire.

There are several large prisons like Megiddo in Israel’s north. It is where Palestinians end up after they have been seized from their homes, often in the middle of the night. Israel, and the western media, say these Palestinians have been “arrested”, as though Israel is enforcing some kind of legitimate legal procedure over oppressed subjects – or rather objects – of its occupation. In truth, these Palestinians have been kidnapped.

The prisons are invariably located close to major roads in Israel, presumably because Israelis find it reassuring to know Palestinians are being locked up in such large numbers. (As an aside, I should mention that transferring prisoners out of occupied territory into the occupier’s territory is a war crime. But let that pass.)

Even before the mass round-ups of the past 11 months, the Palestinian Authority estimated that 800,000 Palestinians – or 40 per cent of the male population – had spent time in an Israeli prison. Many had never been charged with any crime and had never received a trial. Not that that would make any difference – the conviction rate of Palestinians in Israel’s military courts is near 100 per cent. There is no such thing as an innocent Palestinian, it seems.

Rather, imprisonment is a kind of terrifying rite of passage that has been endured by generations of Palestinians, one required of them by the bureaucracy managing Israel’s apartheid-occupation system.

Torture, even of children, has been routine in these prisons since the occupation began nearly 60 years ago, as Israeli human rights groups have been regularly documenting.

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Palestinian detainees electrocuted, raped with rifles by Israeli soldiers: HRW

Israeli troops are torturing Palestinians from Gaza, including through the use of electric shocks and anal rape using M-16 rifle butts, according to the testimony of a Palestinian medic published by Human Rights Watch (HRW) on 27 August.

Walid Khalili, a Palestinian paramedic and ambulance driver, was abducted by Israeli soldiers in Gaza in November and taken to the Sde Teiman and Negev (Al-Naqab) detention centers in Israel.

Israeli troops abducted Khalili after he was dispatched to the Tal al-Hawa neighborhood of Gaza City to rescue four wounded men.

When he arrived, he saw Israeli troops execute the men on Mughrabi Street, near the Labor Ministry building.

“I saw the four men being executed in cold blood,” Khalili said. “I saw it with my own eyes, I was three meters away. When they were shot, I hid under the ambulance, and next to it there was a building, so then I ran inside the building. The Israeli forces raided the building and started yelling at me to raise my hands.”

Soldiers kicked and beat Khalili with their rifle butts, breaking his ribs, before transferring him to the Sde Teiman facility in southern Israel.

HRW writes that Israeli soldiers dragged him on the ground, removed the cuffs on his ankles, and dressed him in adult diapers. They then took him to a warehouse where dozens of detainees, also in diapers, were suspended from the ceiling, with the chains attached to their square metal handcuffs.

Khalili said he was suspended from a chain so his feet would not touch the ground. The soldiers dressed him in a garment and a headband attached to wires. They shocked him with electricity and threw cold water on him every second day.

He told HRW, “The world was spinning around, and I fainted. They hit me with batons. I kept fainting and hallucinating. He kept asking me about the hostages, and moving Hamas hostages, and where I was on October 7. With every question I was electro-shocked to wake me up. He told me confess and we will stop torturing you.”

Every three days, he was taken to a new location and given an unknown drug in pill form before being interrogated further.

“The pill made me feel weird, it was the first time I have felt like this, as if my inner mind was speaking what was in my heart, not me. I felt like I’m flying. I saw hallucinations.”

An Arabic-speaking Israeli guard interrogated him, asking him about the captives taken by Hamas to Gaza on 7 October. Khalili said the interrogator knew “how many children I have, all their names, my address,” and threatened they would be killed if he did not confess.

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Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the Problem of Torture

In the months following the attacks of 9/11, the government laid the blame for orchestrating them on Osama bin Laden. Then, after it murdered bin Laden, the government decided that the true mastermind was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

By the time of bin Laden’s death, Mohammed had already been tortured by CIA agents for three years at various black sites and charged with conspiracy to commit mass murder, to be tried before an American military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Mohammed and four other alleged conspirators have been awaiting trial since their arrivals at Gitmo in 2006. Since then, numerous government military and civilian prosecutors, as well as numerous military judges, have rotated into and out of the case. Two weeks ago, the government and the defendants agreed to a guilty plea in return for life in prison at Gitmo. Then, last week, the Department of Defense abruptly changed its mind and rescinded its approval of the guilty pleas.

Here is the backstory.

The concept of military tribunals for the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks was born in the administration of President George W. Bush, who argued that the attacks, though conducted by civilians on civilians, were of military magnitude and thus warranted a military response. Throughout the entire 22-year existence of the U.S. military prison at Gitmo, no one has been tried for causing or carrying out the crimes of 9/11. The government tried only one person for crimes related to 9/11. That was Zacarias Moussaoui, who pleaded guilty in federal court in Virginia to conspiracy for being the 20th hijacker and then was tried in a penalty phase trial where the jury chose life in prison.

Bush’s rationale not only brought us the fruitless and destructive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; it also brought a host of legal problems unforeseen by Bush and his revenge-over-justice colleagues. The first legal issue was conspiracy. Since Mohammed did not carry out the attacks, he could only be charged with planning them. But conspiracy is not a war crime, and thus no military tribunal could hear the case. So Congress came up with a historic first — a military tribunal that would try civilian crimes.

The next issue was where to try Mohammed and his colleagues. President Barack Obama wanted to close Gitmo, which costs $540 million annually, and try Mohammed and the others in federal courts. This would have been consistent with federal law and the U.S. Constitution. But Republicans in Congress viewed Mohammed as too dangerous to bring onto U.S. soil, and so Congress enacted legislation that prohibits the removal of Mohammed and the others to the U.S. for any purpose.

The prohibition on removal means that any life terms would need to be spent at Gitmo. It also means that there would be a legal obstacle to the execution of a death sentence, as Gitmo is not equipped to execute anyone.

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