Tortured Reasoning

George W. Bush defended harsh interrogations by pointing to intelligence breakthroughs, but a surprising number of counterterrorist officials say that, apart from being wrong, torture just doesn’t work. Delving into two high-profile cases, the author exposes the tactical costs of prisoner abuse.

In researching this article, I spoke to numerous counterterrorist officials from agencies on both sides of the Atlantic. Their conclusion is unanimous: not only have coercive methods failed to generate significant and actionable intelligence, they have also caused the squandering of resources on a massive scale through false leads, chimerical plots, and unnecessary safety alerts—with Abu Zubaydah’s case one of the most glaring examples.
Here, they say, far from exposing a deadly plot, all torture did was lead to more torture of his supposed accomplices while also providing some misleading “information” that boosted the administration’s argument for invading Iraq.

Read More At Vanity Fair

Eritrean asylum-seekers face deportation

A group of up to 104 Eritrean asylum-seekers held in a detention facility in Sinai in Egypt are at risk of imminent deportation to Eritrea. The group is believed to comprise 78 men, 23 women, including one pregnant woman, and three children.

Any member of the current group, if forcibly returned, could also face torture or other ill-treatment, particularly as many of them are believed to have left Eritrea to avoid forced conscription. The standard punishment for those evading or escaping military service in Eritrea is detention without trial and torture or other ill-treatment by beatings and being tied in painful positions.

Read More At Amnesty International

US balks at backing condemnation of anti-gay laws

"Alone among major Western nations, the United States has refused to sign a declaration presented Thursday at the United Nations calling for worldwide decriminalization of homosexuality.

In all, 66 of the U.N.'s 192 member countries signed the nonbinding declaration — which backers called a historic step to push the General Assembly to deal more forthrightly with any-gay discrimination. More than 70 U.N. members outlaw homosexuality, and in several of them homosexual acts can be punished by execution."

Read More AT SF Chronicle

Cheney Defends Use of Torture

Vice President Dick Cheney has admitted for the first time that he was directly involved in approving the use of torture by the CIA. In an interview with ABC News, Cheney was questioned about the treatment of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was held in a secret CIA prison where he was waterboarded over 100 times.

Read More At Democracy Now!

Escapee Tells of Horrors in North Korean Prison Camp

In Camp No. 14, the North Korean political prison where Shin Dong-hyuk was born and where he says he watched the hanging of his mother, inmates never saw a picture of Kim Jong Il.

Inmates did not need to know the face of their "Dear Leader," as Kim is called. Behind electrified fences, they tended pigs, tanned leather, collected firewood and labored in mines until they died or were executed.

The exception is Shin, who is 26 and lives in a small rented room here in Seoul. There are burn scars on his back and left arm from where he was tortured by fire at age 14, when he was unable to explain why his soon-to-be-hanged mother had tried to escape. The middle finger of his right hand is cut off at the first knuckle, punishment for accidentally dropping a sewing machine in the garment factory at his camp.

There are 14,431 North Korean defectors living in South Korea, according to the latest government count. Shin is the only one known to have escaped to the South from a prison camp in the North.

Read More At The Washington Post

A Watershed For Gay Rights

A declaration calling for the global decriminalisation of homosexuality will be put before the United Nations general assembly in the next two weeks. It will be the first time in its history that the UN General Assembly has considered the issue of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) human rights.

If you want to understand why this decriminalisation declaration is so important and necessary, ponder this: even today, not a single international human rights convention explicitly acknowledges the human rights of LGBT people. The right to physically love the person of one's choice is nowhere enshrined in any global humanitarian law. No convention recognises sexual rights as human rights. None offers explicit protection against discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity.

Yet 86 countries (nearly half the nations on Earth) still have a total ban on male homosexuality and a smaller number also ban sex between women. The penalties in these countries range from a few years jail to life imprisonment. In at least seven countries or regions of countries (all under Islamist jurisdiction), the sentence is death: Saudi Arabia, Iran, Yemen, Sudan, Mauritania and parts of Nigeria and Pakistan.

Read More At The Gaurdian

Iraqi Refugee Sinks Roots In Atlanta: Part I

"Since the war in Iraq began in 2003, an estimated 4.7 million Iraqis have fled their homes, scattering within the country and beyond. Some 2 million now live outside their homeland, mostly in Jordan and Syria. In mid-2007, the U.S. government began resettling Iraqi refugees in this country: Some 15,000 Iraqi refugees already have arrived, and 17,000 more are expected in the next year. Atlanta is a prime destination for them.

Last year, we introduced NPR audiences to a single mother of three who heads one of the first refugee families to arrive in Atlanta. Bothinaa Mohammed had worked for the U.S. Army in Iraq and was targeted as a traitor. She brought her family to the United States in late August 2007, after three years in Jordan. In Atlanta, she got a job as a hotel maid."

Read More At NPR

Iraqi Refugee Sinks Roots In Atlanta: Part II

"Among those displaced is Alaa Naji, a single mother of two small children who lost her husband in a terrorist attack. A United Nations employee, he was fatally injured when a car bomb exploded at the Jordanian Embassy in Iraq in August 2003. To support their two small children, Naji — who has an English degree — found work with the U.N. and the U.S. Army in Baghdad. But within a couple of months, she started getting notes that threatened her family.

"And they said, 'Prepare yourself. You gonna be killed,'" Naji recalls. "And the colleagues, they said, 'Alaa, your life very dangerous, your work is very sensitive. You work in a very dangerous place. Please think for your kids.'"

Read More At NPR

Ex-Brazilian cop questioned in death of 13 gays

A retired police officer has been detained in connection with the murders of 13 gay men in a low-income suburb of Sao Paulo, police said Thursday.

Retired state police Sgt. Jairo Francisco Franco was taken into custody Wednesday night after a witness identified him as the killer of a homosexual man on Aug. 19, said police inspector Paulo Fortunato.

Franco is suspected of acting alone in all of 13 killings between February 2007 and August 2008 at Paturis Park, a favorite meeting point for gay men, Fortunato said.aulo, police said Thursday.

Read More At SF Chronicle

UN Declaration of Human Rights Marks 60th Anniversary

"Diplomats and rights activists have marked the 60th anniversary of the United Nations declaration of human rights that 'all human beings are born free and equal.'

But critics have questioned the effectiveness of the document, saying the UN's focus has shifted to other concerns - such as 'fighting terrorism' - and often at the cost of human rights.

Rights advocates list the suffering of Palestinians, atrocities committed in Sudan's Darfur region, the humanitarian disaster in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the US human rights record following the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York, as failures of the human dignity standard."

Read More At AlJazeera

Disastrous Flight For Deported Kurds

"A plane deporting 49 rejected asylum seekers was forced to return to Britain when it was refused permission to land in Kurdistan.

Two passengers on the charter flight from Stansted had been removed before take-off after wounding themselves in their seats, the Guardian has learned.

The drama comes after reports that a 19-year-old deported to Kurdistan on November 27 killed himself soon after landing."

Read More At The Gaurdian

Senate Report Holds Rumsfeld Responsible For Torture

"A bipartisan Senate report released today says that former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other top Bush administration officials are directly responsible for abuses of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and charges that decisions by those officials led to serious offenses against prisoners in Iraq and elsewhere.

The Senate Armed Services Committee report accuses Rumsfeld and his deputies of being the principal architects of the plan to use harsh interrogation techniques on captured fighters and terrorism suspects, rejecting the Bush administration's contention that the policies originated lower down the command chain.

'The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of 'a few bad apples' acting on their own," the panel concludes. "The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees.' "

Read More At CommonDreams.org

Palestinian Refugees Trapped on Iraq-Syria Border

"Having fled killings, kidnappings, torture, and death threats, about 3,000 Palestinian refugees from Iraq are currently stranded in three camps along the border between Syria and Iraq. Denied asylum and refugee rights, they are extremely vulnerable in poorly situated camps."

Read More At Refugees International

Musicians Protest the Use of Songs As Weapons

"The auditory assault went on for days, then weeks, then months at the U.S. military detention center in Iraq. Twenty hours a day. AC/DC. Queen. Pantera. The prisoner, military contractor Donald Vance of Chicago, told The Associated Press he was soon suicidal.

The tactic has been common in the U.S. war on terror, with forces systematically using loud music on hundreds of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, then the U.S. military commander in Iraq, authorized it on Sept. 14, 2003, "to create fear, disorient ... and prolong capture shock."

Now the detainees aren't the only ones complaining. Musicians are banding together to demand the U.S. military stop using their songs as weapons."

Read More At SF Chronicle

UC Professor's 'Torture Memo' At Center of Controversy

"Berkeley's City Council will delve into national policy again next week when it votes whether to demand the United States charge Berkeley resident and former Bush adviser John Yoo with war crimes.

Yoo, a tenured professor at UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law, wrote the memos offering legal justification for torture while he worked for the White House...arguing that habeas corpus and other legal protections don't apply to CIA detainees because Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib are not on U.S. soil. "

Read More At SF Chronicle

UN Urges End To Abuses of Women

The United Nations secretary general has said the world must do more to combat the abuse of women and girls. Ban Ki-moon spoke as organisations around the world marked the UN's International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women.

The UN says at least one in three women will be beaten, coerced into sex or otherwise abused in her lifetime.

Women between the ages of 15 and 44 are at greater risk from rape and domestic violence than from cancer, traffic accidents, war and malaria, says the UN.

Read More At BBC News

Thousands Gather at Fort Benning, Georgia to Stop Torture and Close the School of Assassins

Thousands gathered on November 21-23, at the gates of Fort Benning, GA for what organizers hope may be the last mass protest to close the controversial School of the Americas, renamed Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (SOA/WHINSEC). With 35 Representatives who voted to continue funding the SOA/WHINSEC losing their seats in Congress on November 4th, human rights advocates have their sights set on pressuring the new Congress to permanently shut down the school in 2009. The last vote to defund the SOA/WHINSEC, in 2007, lost by a margin of only six votes.

"By closing this notorious school of assassins now, Obama and the new Congress can show the world that we genuinely honor human rights." Hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans have been tortured, raped, assassinated, "disappeared," massacred, and forced into refugee by those trained at the SOA/WHINSEC.

Read More At CommonDreams.Org

As Obama Vows to Close Guantanamo, Advisers Reportedly Crafting Plan to Create a New System of Preventive Detention and National Security Courts

During an interview on 60 Minutes last night President-elect Barack Obama said he plans to close the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay and rebuild the nation’s moral stature. Last week, the Associated Press reported Obama advisers are crafting a plan that would put some Guantanamo Bay prisoners in front of a new court system designed to handle so-called “national security” cases.

Read More At Democracy Now!

Crackdown On Political Activists in Myanmar

Sixty-five years in prison each for 14 former student activists. Twenty-and-a-half years for a blogger. Twelve-and-a-half years for a labor leader. Six-and-a-half years for five Buddhist monks. Two years for a poet.

In the space of just three days this week, more than 30 Burmese were sentenced to prison or hard labor by the country's ruling junta, a chilling legal onslaught that sent a clear message to other potential dissidents: speak out, and get used to life in a prison cell. Even for a notoriously repressive regime, the jail sentences were unusually harsh.

Read More At TIME

Persecuted Gays Find Refuge in US

One night in 2003, on the wintry streets of Kosovo, a group of thugs stalked and beat Gramoz Prestreshi almost to death. Police in the war-scarred Balkan province laughed and called him names. The emergency room workers made him mop up his own blood. It was a sordid but hardly unusual episode in the hostile environment homosexuals encounter in societies of all kinds.

Read More At Washington Post

Possible Pardon for US Officials Involved in Torture

Senior intelligence officers are lobbying the outgoing president to look after the men and women who could face charges for following his orders in the war on terrorism.

Most vulnerable are US intelligence officers who took part in intensive interrogations against terrorist suspects, using techniques including water boarding, which many believe crossed the line into torture.

A former CIA officer familiar with the backstage lobbying for pardons, said: “These are the people President Bush asked to fight the war on terror for him. He gave them the green light to fight tough. The view of many in the intelligence community is that he should not leave them vulnerable to legal censure when he leaves."

Read More At Alternative News

Hard Fate For Returning Afghan Refugees

The refugee label sticks. After 23 years of exile in Pakistan, Qayum and his family returned home to northern Afghanistan six months ago. But even today, they are seen as outsiders and the place they live in is known as Mohajir Qeshlaq, or "refugee village," in the local Dari language.

"In Pakistan, people said there's peace in Afghanistan," says Qayum, 35, as he sits with his mother, wife and five children under a UNHCR tent at Mohajir Qeshlaq. "But when we came back, there was no land and no water. My children used to attend school in Pakistan, but here it's difficult to go to school if we have no identity card."

Read More At UN Refugee Agency

Hmong Refugees Being Held By Thailand

Ninety-two children are among a group of 158 Lao Hmong refugees who have been held at a detention centre in Thailand for two years.

Living in harsh conditions, the refugees are constantly in fear of being forcibly returned to Laos, where they are at risk of serious human rights violations. For 21 hours a day, they are locked inside the building where they live in overcrowded, windowless cells. Some have gone on hunger strike or threatened to commit suicide in protest against their detention.

Read More At Amnesty International

Women Migrant Domestic Workers in Jordan Exploited and Abused

Tens of thousands of women migrant domestic workers in Jordan face isolation, exploitation and abuse, with little or no protection from the state.

Migrant domestic workers are crucial to the economy in Jordan, contributing to the well-being of the households where they work and providing vital incomes for their own families and communities. Many face exploitation and abuse, working up to 19 hours per day. Wages are meagre, and some do not receive payment until years later.

Read More At Amnesty International