Tag: torture

“They brought Israeli civilians to watch our nude torture”: IDF torture of Palestinian prisoners is turned into entertainment for Israeli viewers

The Israeli army introduced groups of Israeli civilians into detention centres and prisons holding Palestinian prisoners and detainees from the Gaza Strip, permitting the civilians to witness torture crimes against the detainees, with many allowed to film them on their own phones.

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor received shocking testimonies from recently released Palestinian prisoners and detainees, in which they reported that the Israeli army invited a number of Israeli civilians during their interrogation sessions to witness torture and inhumane treatment, to which they were deliberately subjected in the presence of the civilians.

Arrested during ground incursions by Israeli army forces into the Strip, the prisoners and detainees were held for varying periods of time inside two detention centres: one located in the Zikim area on the northern border of the Gaza Strip, and another affiliated with the Naqab prison in southern Israel.

The released detainees told Euro-Med Monitor that the Israeli soldiers had purposefully presented them before Israeli civilians, falsely claiming that they were fighters affiliated with Palestinian armed factions and that they had taken part in the 7 October attack on Israeli towns on Gaza Strip borders.

According to testimony received by Euro-Med Monitor, groups of ten to twenty Israeli civilians at a time were permitted to watch and laughingly film Palestinian prisoners and detainees in their underwear while Israeli army soldiers subjected them to physical abuse, including beating them with metal batons, electric sticks, and pouring hot water on their heads. The detainees were also verbally abused.

This is the first time that these illegal practices have come to the attention of Euro-Med Monitor. It adds a new crime to the list of those committed by the Israeli army against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, and specifically against prisoners and detainees who are subjected to cruel torture, enforced disappearances, arbitrary arrests, and denials of a fair trial, among other atrocities.

Palestinian Omar Abu Mudallala, 43, told the Euro-Med Monitor team: “I was arrested at the checkpoint set up near the Kuwait roundabout, which separates Gaza City from the central region, as part of the Israeli random arrest campaigns. I was subjected to all types of torture and abuse for approximately 52 days,” pointing out that Israeli soldiers “brought Israeli civilians to watch our nude torture.”

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Bill to ‘end solitary confinement’ under federal government introduced in Senate

Democratic-aligned senators introduced legislation Tuesday that would largely ban the use of solitary confinement in federal institutions and give states and local jurisdictions incentives to do the same.

The End Solitary Confinement Act, a companion to a bill that over a dozen House Democrats introduced in July, would also prevent inmates and detainees from being segregated alone for more than four hours to de-escalate emergency situations and, even then, require staff members to meet with them at least once an hour.

And, similar to the House bill, incarcerated people would also be entitled to at least 14 hours of daily time out of their cells, including access to seven hours of programming meant to address topics such as mental health, substance abuse and violence prevention.

The Senate legislation is being introduced by Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey, both D-Mass.; Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.; and Peter Welch, D-Vt.

“Being forced into a small, concrete cell without windows for hours, days, weeks, and even months on end isn’t rehabilitation, it’s cruelty,” Markey said in a statement. “Solitary confinement is unjust and inhumane torture that disproportionately targets our nation’s most vulnerable groups.”

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The Mind-Breakers: the Case of Ramzi Bin al-Shibh

On the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Pakistani ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) forces raided several houses in Karachi, hunting for suspected members of Al Qaeda. In one of the incursions, the Pakistanis captured a young Yemeni man named Ramzi bin Al-Shibh. Three days later, the Pakistanis turned Bin al-Shibh and Hassan bin Attash, a 17-year-old Saudi, over to the CIA, who renditioned the pair into what was known as the Dark Prison outside Kabul, where, according to an account Bin al-Shibh later gave to the International Red Cross, he was stripped of his clothes, denied food and water and kept shackled from the ceiling in a painful position for the next three days while loud music was blasted into his cell.

This was just the opening act in the prolonged torture of Ramzi Bin al-Shibh that took him to torture chambers in at least seven different countries in four years– Afghanistan, Jordan, Morocco, Poland, Gitmo, Romania, and Lithuania–and left Bin al-Shibh a broken man, psychologically shattered and physically depleted.

After four days in the Dark Prison, al-Shihb was apparently transferred to the Wadi Sir site in Amman, Jordan, where he was interrogated and tortured by the GID (Jordanian intelligence). According to a Human Rights Watch report, the torture included “electric shocks, long periods of sleep deprivation, forced nakedness and being made to sit on sticks and bottles.”

From Jordan, Bin al-Shihb was flown to Morocco, where he was held in a CIA-financed prison near Rabat for the next five months and regularly interrogated by both the CIA and Moroccan intelligence. Many of these sessions were recorded, and the tapes sent back to Langley. In 2005, the CIA ordered all of the interrogation tapes of “high-level detainees” destroyed, but two years later two videotapes and an audio tape of Bin al-Shihb’s interrogation were discovered under a desk in the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center. The Agency had twice told a federal judge that no tapes of Bin al-Shihb’s interrogation existed.

Part of the CIA’s Operation Greystone, which authorized the Agency to hold suspected terrorists in secret prisons and rendition them back and forth to other countries, the Moroccan black site was a kind of way station, where prisoners could be warehoused and interrogated, then shuttled to another site. Bin al-Shibh, who was already beginning to show signs of extreme mental distress, was kept in the Moroccan prison for five months before being shipped to Poland. He would return here two more times in the following four years. Bin al-Shihb’s psychological instability would deteriorate with each new stop in the Agency’s torture archipelago. People the CIA considered “high-value detainees” were kept on the move, from one black site to another, in large part to keep them out of reach of the US courts and international human rights investigators, a shell game with human beings. By the time Bin al-Shihb had been captured and hidden away, our old friend the late Michael Ratner and the Center for Constitutional Rights had already filed a federal lawsuit challenging the legality of the “secret prison” at Guantánamo.

By the CIA’s own account, Bin al-Shibh had been one of their most cooperative detainees, talking freely. The videotapes from Morocco show calmly him answering questions while sitting at a desk. One former interrogator derisively described Bin al-Shihb as “folding like a wet suit.” In the 9-11 Commission Report, Bin al-Shihb’s interrogation is cited 119 times. Only Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is referenced more often.

Nevertheless, while Bin al-Shibh was detained in Rabat, the CIA was busy planning a much more aggressive approach to extract information from him, a routine of torture and abuse that would become the model for the Agency’s “enhanced interrogation techniques.” These methods were designed by psychologists like Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell, who had taken oaths to heal minds and then capitalized ($81 million in payments from the CIA) on fracturing them.

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Grandma Sexually Abused by Police Over Window Tint, in Ominous Secret ‘Torture Warehouse’ — Lawsuit

In a recent revelation that sends chills down the spine of those familiar with the Homan Square revelations in Chicago, the Baton Rouge Police Department (BRPD) has come under intense scrutiny for allegations of a “torture warehouse” eerily echoing those harrowing tales. This disturbing discovery underscores a pervasive trend of covert police operations and the lengths some officers will go to abuse their power.

The BRPD is currently reeling from lawsuits and investigations relating to a facility dubbed the “Brave Cave.” Ternell Brown and Jeremy Lee, two victims of this ominous facility, have come forward with their experiences. Both their stories are a crude reminder of the unchecked power and brutal tactics that some police officers resort to.

For those unfamiliar, Homan Square in Chicago was a secretive police detention facility where detainees were reportedly held without legal counsel, subjected to physical abuse, and went missing from official records. The story of the “Brave Cave” draws chilling parallels.

Ternell Brown, a 47-year-old grandmother, narrates an ordeal of being “sexually humiliated” following unnecessary strip and body cavity searches, all stemming from a traffic stop due to window tint. Even after clarifying that she possessed legal prescription drugs, Brown was forcibly taken to the “Brave Cave,” where she underwent what her legal team terms illegal strip searches.

Similarly, Jeremy Lee’s experience sounds straight out of a dystopian narrative. Arrested and taken to the warehouse, Lee was allegedly subjected to such intense physical abuse that the jail demanded he receive hospital treatment before being admitted. Upon his arrival at the warehouse, the surveillance footage suggests that officers deliberately turned off their body cameras — a telling act that speaks volumes — before claiming he “charged” officers, giving them a reason to beat him to a pulp.

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The CIA’s Unpunished Torturers

When I joined the C.I.A. in January 1990, I did it to serve my country and to see the world.  I believed at the time that we were the “good guys.”  I believed that the United States was a force for good around the world.  I wanted to put my degrees—in Middle Eastern studies/Islamic theology and legislative affairs/policy analysis—to good use.  

Seven years after joining the C.I.A., I made a move to counterterrorism operations to stave off boredom.  I still believed we were the good guys, and I wanted to help keep Americans safe.  My whole world, like the worlds of all Americans, changed dramatically and permanently on Sept.11, 2001.  Within months of the attacks, I found myself heading to Pakistan as the chief of C.I.A. counterterrorism operations in Pakistan.  

Almost immediately, my team began capturing Al-Qaeda fighters at safehouses all around Pakistan.  In late March 2002, we hit the jackpot with the capture of Abu Zubaydah and dozens of other fighters, including two who commanded Al-Qaeda’s training camps in southern Afghanistan.  And by the end of the month, my Pakistani colleagues told me that the local jail, where we were temporarily holding the men we had captured, was full.  They had to be moved somewhere.  I called the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center and said that the Pakistanis wanted our prisoners out of their jail.  Where should I send them?

The response was quick.  Put them on a plane and send them to Guantanamo.  “Guantanamo, Cuba?” I asked.  “Why in the world would we send them to Cuba?”  My interlocutor explained what, at the time, sounded like it had been well thought out.  “We’re going to hold them at the U.S. base in Guantanamo for two or three weeks until we can identify which federal district court they’ll be tried in.  It’ll be Boston, New York, Washington, or the Eastern District of Virginia.”  

That made perfect sense to me.  The U.S. is a nation of laws.  And the country was going to show the world what the rule of law looked like.  These men, who had murdered 3,000 people on that awful day, would go on trial for their crimes.  I called my contact in the U.S.  Air Force, made the arrangements for the flights and loaded my handcuffed and shackled prisoners for the trip.  I never saw any of them again.

The problem is that U.S. leaders, whether they were at the White House, the Justice Department or the C.I.A., never really intended any of these men to face trial in a court of law, being judged by a jury of their peers.  The fix was in from the beginning.  

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9/11 defendant unfit to stand trial, US judge rules

A military judge at Guantanamo Bay has ruled one of the five defendants charged over the 9/11 attacks is not fit to stand trial in a death-penalty case.

The defendant Ramzi bin al-Shibh has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, associated psychotic features and a delusional disorder.

His lawyer has long claimed his client was “tortured by the CIA”.

Al-Shibh was scheduled to face pretrial proceedings on Friday.

Colonel Matthew McCall in the US base on the eastern tip of Cuba accepted the findings of the doctors which said in August that al-Shibh was too psychologically damaged to defend himself.

The medical board of doctors concluded al-Shibh had become delusional and psychotic, The New York Times reported.

That made him incompetent to either face trial or plead guilty, according to a report filed with his trial judge on 25 August.

According to the report, the military psychiatrists said his condition left him “unable to understand the nature of the proceedings against him or cooperate intelligently”.

He was supposed be on trial on Friday with four other defendants, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, believed to be the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks.

Before the trial, Colonel McCall has decided to remove al-Shibh from the case. The hearing of the other four defendants is expected to proceed as scheduled.

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Six former Mississippi cops known as ‘The Goon Squad’ plead guilty to torturing and abusing two black men during raid on their home

Six former Mississippi law enforcement officers have pleaded guilty to charges accusing them of torturing and abusing two black men during a raid.

Members of the self-called ‘Goon Squad’ each carried a coin with the name emblazoned on one side and the other with Rankin County Sheriff’s Office’s badge. 

Lieutenant Jeffrey Middleton appeared to be the ringleader of the group, with his coin embossed with ‘Lt Middleton’s Goon Squad’. 

Five other deputies for the Sheriff’s Office, and one from the Richland Police Department, have been charged with conspiracy to commit obstruction of justice.

Christian Dedmon, Hunter Elward, Brett McAlpin, Middleton and Daniel Opdyke, and ex-police officer Joshua Hartfield, were all charged in relation to the assault of Michael Corey Jenkins and Eddie Terrell Parker in January. 

Elward was charged with home invasion and aggravated assault for shoving a gun in the mouth of Jenkins and pulling the trigger – in what prosecutors called a ‘mock execution’.

They are accused of assaulting them with sex toys, firearms, stun guns, milk, eggs, alcohol and chocolate syrup on January 24. 

The cops are potentially facing a maximum combined sentence of 641 years and two life sentences in prison for state and federal charges, as well as a combined $12.25 million in fines. 

Dedmon was charged with home invasion after kicking in a door, with McAlpin, Middleton, Opdyke and Hartfield each facing an additional charge of first-degree obstruction of justice.

Middleton admitted in court that he was convicted of vehicular manslaughter in 2007 for hitting/killing a man. 

The victims stared down their attackers after arriving together in court, sitting in the front row just feet away from their attackers’ families.  

Prosecutors say that some of the officers nicknamed themselves the ‘Goon Squad’ because of their willingness to use excessive force and cover it up.

They were targeted after a white neighbor complained that two black men were staying at the home with a white woman. 

Parker was a childhood friend of the homeowner, Kristi Walley, who has been paralyzed since she was 15 – and he was helping to care for her.  

All of the officers have pleaded guilty to the state charges on Monday, and previously pleaded in a connected federal civil rights case. 

In January, the officers entered a property in Mississippi without a warrant, and handcuffed Jenkins and Parker before assaulting them. 

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British intelligence in the dock for CIA torture

Recent developments raise the prospect that British intelligence agents could finally face justice for their little-known role in the CIA’s global torture program.

Britain’s foreign and domestic intelligence apparatus is facing scrutiny by a tribunal tasked with intelligence oversight. On May 26, London’s infamously opaque Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) unanimously issued a landmark ruling which means the complaints of two Saudis brutally tortured at CIA black sites and jailed for years in Guantanamo Bay can finally be heard, at least behind closed doors.

The British government insisted that the Tribunal, which explicitly examines wrongdoing by London’s security and intelligence agencies, did not have jurisdiction over the cases of Mustafa al-Hawsawi and Abd al-Rahim Nashiri. But the IPT disagreed.

Noting that “the underlying issues raised by this complaint are of the gravest possible kind,” the tribunal declared that “if the allegations are true, it is imperative that that should be established,” as “it would be in the public interest for these issues to be considered.”

The ruling means the Tribunal is likely to hear a complaint from Mustafa al-Hawsawi, who’s remained in US custody since American troops captured the man they claim is “a senior al-Qaida member” in 2003.

Al-Hawsawi bounced between CIA black sites for three years before being shipped to the US torture camp in illegally-occupied Guantanamo Bay in 2006. Along the way, he was subjected to brutal “enhanced interrogation” techniques, including rectal examinations conducted with “excessive force,” from which he was severely injured and reportedly suffers ongoing health problems to this day.

Lawyers for al-Hawsawi say they have proof that British intelligence agents illegally “aided, abetted, encouraged, facilitated, procured and/or conspired” with the US to torture and abuse their client.

Al-Hawsawi is one of just five remaining Guantanamo detainees to have been charged over alleged involvement in the 9/11 attacks.

According to the declassified summary of the US Senate report into CIA torture, al-Hawsawi was one of several prisoners held and abused “despite doubts and questions surrounding their knowledge of terrorist threats and the location of senior al-Qaeda leadership.”

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HOW A NOTORIOUS GEORGIA ARMY SCHOOL BECAME AMERICA’S TRAINING GROUND FOR GLOBAL TORTURE

Fort Benning, the infamous Georgia U.S. military base, is once again in the news, changing its name to Fort Moore, thereby ditching its Confederate name. Yet none of the media covering the rebranding – not The New York Times, the Associated Press, CNN, ABC, CBS News, USA Today nor The Hill – mentioned the most controversial aspect of the institution.

Across Latin America, the very name of Fort Benning is enough to strike terror into the hearts of millions, bringing back visions of massacres and genocides. This is because the fort is home to the School of the Americas (now known as Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation or WHINSEC), a shadowy academy where around 84,000 Latin American soldiers and police officers have been taught on the U.S. dime on how to kill, torture and how to stamp out political activists.

Thus, these units effectively serve as shock troops for the U.S. Empire, making their country safe for American multinationals to pillage. MintPress has found that no fewer than 16 School of the Americas graduates would go on to become heads of state in their country.

“The school is controversial partly because of its role in promoting US hegemony in Latin America, which undermines the sovereignty and independence of other countries,” James Jordan, national co-coordinator at Alliance for Global Justice, told MintPress, adding,

But even worse, it is how the school has promoted this: teaching methods of torture – even publishing torture manuals, counterintelligence, psyops, repression of political voices that don’t meet the approval of Washington DC. If one looks at cases of human rights abuses by the military throughout Latin America, the number of those responsible who were trained at the School of the Americas is simply staggering.”

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US Prison Allegedly Tortured Prisoners In Retaliation

A new report documents civil rights abuses, including torture, that allegedly occurred at a United States prison in Illinois. It contains several examples of retaliation against prisoners who challenged their abusive treatment and confinement conditions.

Prison staff are accused of creating a “culture of fear and intimidation that systematically suppressed the use of the grievance process,” which effectively emboldens and shields the people who are supposed to be held accountable.

“This report is dedicated to the brave individuals who, despite facing retaliation, physical danger, and psychological trauma, spoke out about the conditions in the Special Management Unit [SMU] at the United States Penitentiary in Thomson, Illinois,” the first page declares.

The Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights & Urban Affairs, Uptown People’s Law Center in Chicago, and Levy Firestone Muse LLP in Washington, D.C. conducted “at least 100 interviews and legal calls, and reviewed over a thousand pages of correspondence and institutional records.”

“We uncovered a widespread culture of abuse involving officials up and down the chain of command,” the report states [PDF]. “Thomson staff assaulted people in the SMU almost daily—for personal reasons, retaliation for grieving prior abuses, and sometimes for no reason at all.”

“Five individuals imprisoned at USP Thomson died unnatural deaths between 2019 and 2022, the most of any BOP [Bureau of Prisons] facility. Countless other individuals suffered serious injuries and unquantifiable psychological trauma, and many risked grave retaliations just to stand up for their rights.”

As the report makes clear, prisoners who challenge their treatment by filing grievance forms do so at great risk.

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