Tag: human rights

It’s indecent for these guys to share a bed

Posted on by kathiemm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FH25VEmWLmo&feature=player_embedded

Cool, huh? An 11-man SWAT team, heavily armed, yelling, swearing, breaking in an open door, and throwing flash bang grenades, raids a house and (pant, pant) captures a 68-year-old grandmother and her adopted daughter. Whoops, wrong house.

Viewing this video really steamed me up. It was another unneeded reminder of the issues that obsess me everyday anyway. Militarization of police. Unnecessary force. Guns, guns, guns. Violation of civil rights. Violation of human rights. Inhumane behavior.

But the steam that built up in me was nothing compared with the sense of outrage, disbelief, and anger I felt when I watched this second brief video, a newscast report by a member of the local TV network invited to come along with the SWAT team and see them in action.

What happened to the free press? David Shepherd, the so-called reporter for this story, seems more like the “bought press,” or the “seduced press.” Here is a blatant example of what can happen when people whose job it is to report the news become “embedded” in the action.

I was less steamed and could only laugh when I read a report on the raid in Police: The Law Enforcement Magazine, entitled “Ind. SWAT Team Tricked Into Raiding Grandma’s Home”. The moral of the story seems to be that the raid, the intimidation, the destruction of property was not the fault of the police who did those things. They were tricked into it.

A lot of people in this country go nuts in response to particular forms of coupling (white with black, men with men, etc.) It is the increasing tendency of coupling between members of the press  and gun-bearing members of the power structure that makes me nervous.

The good news is that the grandmother filed a law suit and the judge ruled that the SWAT team does not get immunity from prosecution.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology

Can this be your day too?

Posted on by kathiemm
Waterboarding From The Inquisition To Guantanamo, Constitution Ave., NW (Washington, DC).
Image by Jim Kuhn and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

June 26 is the United Nations International Day in Support of Victims of Torture—an important if mostly neglected reminder that torture continues to victimize people around the world today–often at the behest of powerful forces within the US government. Torture  destroys the well-being of millions of direct victims as well as their loved ones. The theme for 2015 is the Right to Rehabilitation (R2R); we should never forget that victims of torture may suffer for a life time.

The Miriam Webster Dictionary defines torture “as the act of causing severe physical pain as a form of punishment or as a way to force someone to do or say something, something that causes mental or physical suffering, a very painful or unpleasant experience.” This is a broad definition but useful.

How many of you still feel anguish when you remember traumatic experiences of physical or psychological punishment or coercion—e.g., beatings, humiliation, terrorizing–at the hands of family members or bullies? How many of you needed either professional or other support to deal with the effects of those experiences? Can you imagine how much worse it would be to be the victim of the more commonly-acknowledged forms of torture, such as waterboarding, prolonged solitary confinement, rectal feeding, and other atrocities outlined in the recent US Senate report on torture by the CIA?

Torture is a moral issue, one that all people of conscience can address—not only on a community, national, and international level but in their own lives. See the following links for some ideas of what you might do in honor of International Day in Support of Victims of Torture… and every day.

NRCAT DVD Discussion Guides

R2R

NRCAT film, Breaking Down the Box

Today is a good day to at least think about those things.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology

Corporate America: Purveyor of Inhuman “Rights”

Posted on by kathiemm
U.S. Supreme Court Building
U.S. Supreme Court Building, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. Photo by Farragutful

When you hear the word “rights” in the American corporate media, it is usually preceded by “Constitutional” rather than “human.”

 The Supreme Court has declared that corporations have the same rights as people. Their first declaration of this principle came as early as 1818 and most recently in 2010 in the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission case.

 The Citizens United decision serves the latest cabal of robber barons and further empowers the military industrial complex, which may be credited by the Court as having enough brain to exercise rights but has manifested little in regard to a heart.

 Indeed, in exercising their putative Constitutional rights, the profiteers of the military industrial complex have shown an enormous talent for crushing human rights both within the borders of the United States and in other lands wounded by US hegemony.

 In one of the latest examples of human rights violations in the US, the City of Detroit has been shutting off water to the poorest residents of the city, unable to pay their water bills.

 The shutoffs have been linked to a push towards privatization of the water system. Like the privatization of prison management, this effort is one more giant step forward in the rush to privatization that disproportionately violates the human rights of people of color and poverty in the U.S.

 Former President Jimmy Carter is appalled by the U.S. record on human rights violations.

How about you?

 Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology

 

4,520 Palestinian political prisoners

Posted on by kathiemm

By guest author Dahlia Wasfi

In the early morning hours of December 12, 2012, Israeli forces raided the offices of three Palestinian civil society organizations in Ramallah in the West Bank, including the Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association.

Photo by Peter used under CC Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Addameer is a non-governmental institution that works to support Palestinian political prisoners held in Israeli and Palestinian jails. Israeli soldiers confiscated four computers, a hard drive, a video camera, and an unknown amount of files and documentation. Posters of prisoners and hunger strikers were ripped down from the walls and strewn on the floor.

Addameer’s last monthly report from November 1, 2012, listed 4,520 Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli prisons and detention centers, including 156 administrative detainees, 10 women, and shockingly, 164 children.

Addameer was likely targeted by occupation forces because of its efforts to document Israel’s violations of the rights of prisoners.

These violations include:

  • Systematic torture and ill-treatment
  • Unjust solitary confinement and isolation
  • Collective punishment
  • Medical negligence

Violations of the human rights of prisoners and detainees—many of whom are held indefinitely and without charge—have driven many of those behind bars to go on hunger strike.

Like Bobby Sands and his fellow imprisoned Irish Republicans who united in hunger strike against the UK government, Palestinian political prisoners are on hunger strike demanding respect for their human rights. Some prisoners are also striking for the broader cause of ending the illegal occupation of Palestine.

Two cases that have received international attention were the hunger strikes of Khader Adnan, who protested his detention without charge or trial, and Mahmoud Sarsak, who began his hunger strike after his detention was renewed for the sixth time, without charge or trial.

Israeli officials agreed to release Adnan on the 66th day of his strike. Sarsak—a gifted soccer player who was detained in 2009 while en route from his home in Gaza to play in the West Bank–was released after 96 days without food (See Truthout article).

Thousands more, however, continue to languish in Israeli jails. Addameer reports that Israel continues to arrest an average of 11 to 20 Palestinians every day, totaling around 7,000 new detainees each year. Arbitrary administrative detention without charge or trial is an unacceptable practice, as is the harassment of Addameer’s human rights workers.

The United States should suspend aid to the Israeli military until the time that compliance with international humanitarian law becomes Israeli policy.

Dr. Dahlia Wasfi