islam doesn't speak, muslims do | "the ink of the scholar is worth more than the blood of the martyr" – Prophet Muhammad (PBUH)
This week, the ACLU will be co-hosting an event at the annual PEN World Voices Festival. “Face to Face: Confronting the Torturers” will take place on Thursday April 29 at 9:30 p.m. at Joe’s Pub in Manhattan. The program will include dramatic readings meant to provoke reflection on what it means to “confront” torturers, both figuratively and literally (more information below). Tickets can be purchased online here or at the door.
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Important piece about Syed Fahad Hashmi by Chris Hedges: Syed Fahad Hashmi can tell you about the dark heart of America. He knows that our First Amendment rights have become a joke, that habeas corpus no longer exists and that we torture, not only in black sites such as those at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan or at Guantánamo Bay, but also at the federal Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in Lower Manhattan. Hashmi is a U.S. citizen of Muslim descent imprisoned on two counts of providing and conspiring to provide material support and two counts of making and conspiring to…
Op-ed about military interrogation techniques: Tomorrow will be one year since President Obama signed an executive order outlawing torture, yet our debate about interrogation methods continues. Though the president deserves praise for improving matters, the changes were not as drastic as most Americans think, and elements of our interrogation policy continue to be both inhumane and counterproductive. Americans can now boast that they no longer “torture” detainees, but they cannot say that detainees are not abused, or even that their treatment meets the minimum standards of humane treatment mandated by the Geneva Conventions, the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 (the…
The men in the video – Moazzam Begg, Omar Deghayes, Bisher al-Rawi, Ruhal Ahmed and Shafiq Rasul – were detained by the U.S. in Afghanistan and Guantánamo for years, without charge or trial, and without any meaningful opportunity to challenge their detention. In the weeks ahead, we will be releasing more videos that focus on these individuals’ lives before, after and during Guantánamo. WATCH THE VIDEO HERE: http://www.aclu.org/national-security/justice-denied-video-voices-guantanamo Technorati Tags: torture
Andrew Sullivan brings us two torture related stories today. One pulls on reporting by Glenn Greenwald, in which we find out Binyam Mohamed had his genitals sliced open as torture. If, for some reason, that image doesn’t nauseate you, imagine his name was Benjamin Moses (it is the Hebrew equivalent) and he was in Taliban custody. We surely would be up in arms. Speaking of the Taliban, Andrew also tells us that the Taliban treat their prisoners better than Vice-President Cheney did.
The ACLU is hosting a major event on Oct. 13, 2009, where famous individuals will read excerpts from torture reports to make it more human. Check it out. Flyer (PDF)
Lifted from comments about teaching Geneva Conventions in US schools.
If you can’t stand a comedian questioning you, why didn’t you send in the clowns to Gitmo? Coward. h/t Susanne Ure
Juan Cole is brilliant in his analysis of how the US lost the moral high ground on prisoner treatment, in part because of our torture polices. But I fear that the argument that the public humiliation of prisoners is against international law won’t take the US very far after 8 years of Bush-Cheney. After the evidence surfaced that the US military took all those humiliating pictures of prisoners at Abu Ghraib to blackmail them by threatening to make them public, the US assertion of support for this principle of the Geneva Conventions will be met with, well, let us say…