by Lisa Hajjar
CounterPunch [US]
October 29th, 2007

Should the United States, seeking to recalibrate the balance between security and liberty in the "war on terror," emulate Israel in its treatment of Palestinian detainees?

That is the position that Guantanamo detainee lawyers Avi Stadler and John Chandler of Atlanta, and some others, have advocated. That people in U.S. custody could be held incommunicado for years without charges, and could be prosecuted or indefinitely detained on the basis of confessions extracted with torture is worse than a national disgrace. It is an assault on the foundations of the rule of law.

But Israel's model for dealing with terrorism, while quite different from that of the U.S., is at least as shameful.

Long before the first suicide bombing by Palestinians in 1994, Israel had resorted to extrajudicial killings, home demolitions, deportations, curfews and other forms of collective punishment barred by international law.

WKMG Local 6 [US] (Jacksonville, FL)
Wed Sep 19, 9:38 AM ET

One, she's in a wheelchair. Two, she's schizophrenic. Three, they're using a Taser on a person that's in a wheelchair, and then four is that they tasered her 10 times for a period of like two minutes

A Clay County woman's family said it's seeking justice after their loved one died shortly after being shocked 10 times with Taser guns during a confrontation with police.

by Adam Morris
The Scotsman [UK]
August 24th, 2007

A CIA "torture flight" aeroplane which regularly visited Guantanamo Bay landed at Edinburgh Airport on its way from Afghanistan to the United States, according to a new report.

The civil rights charity Reprieve said it had evidence which showed one of the planes at the centre of the controversial "rendition" flights stopped in the Capital - and also highlighted a second "suspicious" landing.

The refuelling stopover was made on a flight from Kabul to Washington on November 25, 2002, at the height of the Afghanistan war.

In case you live under a rock (or you watch Fox News for your information) the Internets have been ABUZZ for months and months over the Executive orders that Bush has been creating that give him greater and greater controls over US citizens, and the country. For example, in the event of a catastrophe (which is defined loosely, this could be a hurricane like Katrina) Bush is given control of the entire country, congress, law enforcement, state governments, etc. Everything.

This video is a radio broadcast interview of Paul Craig Roberts, he was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration.

Paul Craig Roberts is an economist and a nationally syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate. He served as an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration earning fame as the "Father of Reaganomics". He is a former editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and Scripps Howard News Service. He is a graduate of the Georgia Institute of Technology and he holds a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. He was a post-graduate at the University of California, Berkeley, and Oxford University where he was a member of Merton College.

In 1992 he received the Warren Brookes Award for Excellence in Journalism. In 1993 the Forbes Media Guide ranked him as one of the top seven journalists in the United States

This is NOT some conspiracy theorist/some guy off the street. People laugh at the worries of some people that Bush is being given too much power, but this guy is saying the US is in danger of becoming a police state within one year. Republican Senator Rick Santorum recently stated that “all this American anti war ’sentimentalism’ will disappear after the next series of attacks we’re gonna experience”.

Compiled by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)

MYTH #1: There were no intentional violations of NSL policy or procedure, so no one should be held accountable.

by Mike Carney
USA Today [US]
August 14, 2007

A report in the Los Angeles Times says Attorney General Alberto Gonzales would be empowered to speed up state-run executions under new regulations that are being finalized by the Justice Department.

Under a provision in the USA Patriot Act, the attorney general is authorized to decide whether defendants received adequate representation at trial, thereby ending years of potential appeals and putting states on a "fast track" to carry out executions, the paper reports.

By Warren Richey
The Christian Science Monitor
from the August 13, 2007 edition

Reports find that Jose Padilla's solitary confinement led to mental problems

Miami - Jose Padilla had no history of mental illness when President Bush ordered him detained in 2002 as a suspected Al Qaeda operative. But he does now.

The Muslim convert was subjected to prison conditions and interrogation techniques that took him past the breaking point, mental health experts say.

Two psychiatrists and a psychologist who conducted detailed personal examinations of Mr. Padilla on behalf of his defense lawyers say his extended detention and interrogation at the US Naval Consolidated Brig in Charleston, S.C., left him with severe mental disabilities. All three say he may never recover.

by Katherine Eban
Vanity Fair [US]
July 17th, 2007

America's coercive interrogation methods were reverse-engineered by two C.I.A. psychologists who had spent their careers training U.S. soldiers to endure Communist-style torture techniques. The spread of these tactics was fueled by a myth about a critical "black site" operation.

by Ben Fox
Associated Press [US]
July 20th, 2007

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba - Twice a day at the U.S. military prison here, Abdul Rahman Shalabi and Zaid Salim Zuhair Ahmed are strapped down in padded restraint chairs and flexible yellow tubes are inserted through their noses and throats. Milky nutritional supplements, mixed with water and olive oil to add calories and ease constipation, pour into their stomachs.

Shalabi, 32, an accused al-Qaida militant who was among the first prisoners taken to Guantanamo, and Ahmed, about 34, have refused to eat for almost two years to protest their conditions and open-ended confinement. In recent months, the number of hunger strikers has grown to two dozen, and the military is using force-feeding to keep them from starving.

An Associated Press investigation reveals the most complete picture yet of a test of wills that's taking place out of public view and shows no sign of ending, despite international outrage.

UPI Newswire [US]
June 25th, 2007

WASHINGTON, June 25 (UPI) -- The United States currently is holding about 19,000 terror suspects, a human rights group said Monday.

"It is estimated that there are currently about 18,000 detainees held in Iraq, over 660 in Afghanistan, and about 375 at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay," the American Civil Liberties Union said in a statement.

Most of those detainees "do not have access to attorneys or family members, and, under terms of the Military Commissions Act eliminating habeas corpus protections, have been denied the right to challenge their detention in civilian courts," the ACLU said.

by Rob Schmitz
National Public Radio [US]
May 13, 2007

Weekend Edition Sunday, May 13, 2007 · In Los Angeles, the unusual case of two immigrants whose deportations were botched by U.S. immigration officials has allowed a rare glimpse into internal proceedings within the Department of Homeland Security.

The men say that U.S. immigration officials drugged them in order to ease their removal from the country — but airline officials ultimately put a stop to the deportations.

Both immigrants are back in Los Angeles, appealing their deportations. And they've now obtained government medical records that seem to confirm their accounts.

One of the men, Raymond Soeoth, is a Christian minister from Indonesia who came to the United States in 1999 to flee religious persecution. But on Dec. 7, 2004, immigration agents told him he was going to be deported.

Soeoth says that an agent asked him if he needed medication to relax him for the trip. He replied that he did not. But a few hours later, says Soeoth, several agents came into his cell. One of them, he says, was a medic. He was holding a syringe.

"Two officers grabbed my legs, two officers grabbed my hands. Then they opened my pants. And then I said, 'Why are you guys doing this to me?' and I was crying and crying, and I said 'Why? I'm not animal.'"

Soeoth says the medic injected him in the buttocks. He says he lost consciousness on the way to the airport.

UK Channel 4

By Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 3, 2007; Page B01

"It really is a secret police: This is an effort to suppress political dissent," said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard of the Partnership for Civil Justice. "If this was happening in another country that the U.S. was targeting, U.S. officials at the highest levels would be decrying this as a violation of human rights,"

A secret FBI intelligence unit helped detain a group of war protesters in a downtown Washington parking garage in April 2002 and interrogated some of them on videotape about their political and religious beliefs, newly uncovered documents and interviews show.

Reuters newswire [UK]
January 26th, 2007

OTTAWA (Reuters) - Canada will formally apologize to software engineer Maher Arar on Friday, who was deported to Syria by U.S. agents after Canadian police mistakenly labeled him an Islamic extremist, and pay
 him C$10 million ($8.5 million) compensation, the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. said.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper is due to make a formal announcement on Arar at 12:15 p.m. (1715 GMT). Harper officials did not respond when asked about the CBC report.

Arar, who says he was repeatedly tortured during the year he spent in Damascus jails, had initially sued Ottawa for C$400 million, a figure he later cut to C$37 million. Separately CTV said Ottawa would also pay Arar's C$2 million legal bills.

The affair tarnished the reputation of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and strained relations with the United States, which has kept Arar on a security watch list despite Ottawa insisting he has no links to terror groups.

By Nick Turse and Deborah Nelson, Special to The Times
The Los Angeles Times [US]
August 6, 2006

The men of B Company were in a dangerous state of mind. They had lost five men in a firefight the day before. The morning of Feb. 8, 1968, brought unwelcome orders to resume their sweep of the countryside, a green patchwork of rice paddies along Vietnam's central coast.

They met no resistance as they entered a nondescript settlement in Quang Nam province. So Jamie Henry, a
 20-year-old medic, set his rifle down in a hut, unfastened his bandoliers and lighted a cigarette.

Just then, the voice of a lieutenant crackled across the radio. He reported that he had rounded up 19 civilians, and wanted to know what to do with them. Henry later recalled the company commander's response:

Kill anything that moves.

Henry stepped outside the hut and saw a small crowd of women and children. Then the shooting began.

Moments later, the 19 villagers lay dead or dying.

By Richard Waddington
Reuters [UK]
July 28th, 2006

GENEVA (Reuters) - A U.N. human rights body told Washington on Friday that any "secret detention" centres
the United States was operating abroad violated international law and should be shut immediately.

Saying it had "credible and uncontested" reports of such jails, the Human Rights Committee said the United States appeared to have been detaining people "secretly and in secret places for months and years".

"The state party should immediately abolish all secret detention," it said, echoing a similar demand in May by
 the U.N. Committee Against Torture.

In its findings on U.S. observance of the U.N.'s main political rights' treaty, the committee said that the International Committee of the Red Cross must be given access to anybody held during armed conflict.

by Joshua Holland
AlterNet [US]
May 27th, 2006

A group of enraged Marines entered homes in the Iraqi town of Haditha and murdered their occupants, including children, in cold blood. And it's not an isolated incident.

Last month, the details of a horrific atrocity emerged from Haditha, a town in the Sunni-dominated Anbar province.

In November, a roadside bomb killed Marine Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas, a 20-year-old Texan, on a road not far from Haditha. According to Time magazine, "The next day a Marine communique from Camp Blue Diamond in Ramadi reported that Terrazas and 15 Iraqi civilians were killed by the blast and that 'gunmen attacked the convoy with small-arms fire,' prompting the Marines to return fire, killing eight insurgents." Another military
official later said the military command in Baghdad "knew of no civilian deaths in the engagement."

Marine officials have now confirmed that those accounts were false. What really happened, according to reports confirmed by the Pentagon, was this: A group of enraged Marines entered several homes in Haditha and murdered their occupants, including children, in cold blood. A video of the aftermath -- showing that the residents were unarmed when they were shot at point-blank range -- was obtained by Time. Some were still
 in their nightclothes.

by Allan Uthman,
Buffalo Beast [US]
May 26th, 2006

From secret detention centers to warrantless wiretapping, Bush and Co. give free rein to their totalitarian impulses.

Is the U.S. becoming a police state? Here are the top 10 signs that it may well be the case.