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Zach Hartnett

Freed Guantanamo detainee says U.S. behind his torture | Reuters - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...idUSLN54079120090223

human rights torture US UK Pakistan Morocco Ethiopia

shared by Zach Hartnett on 23 Feb 09 - Cached
  • I was abducted, hauled from one country to the next, and tortured in medieval ways -- all orchestrated by the United States government."
  • he was tortured and abused by Pakistani intelligence officers in the presence of a British intelligence agent.
    • Zach Hartnett
      Zach Hartnett on 23 Feb 09
       
      At least we know we can count on Pakistan.
  • Morocco on a CIA flight
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Morocco has denied holding him and the U.S. government has denied that he was subjected to "extraordinary rendition."
  • I realized in Morocco that the people who were torturing me were receiving questions and materials from British intelligence," he said. "I had met with British intelligence in Pakistan. I had been open with them. Yet the very people who I had hoped would come to my rescue, I later realized, had allied themselves with my abusers."
Ed Webb

Tortured and killed: Hamza al-Khateeb, age 13 - Features - Al Jazeera English - 0 views

english.aljazeera.net/...201153185927813389.html

torture Syria protests

shared by Ed Webb on 01 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • "This is a campaign of mass terrorism and intimidation: Horribly tortured people sent back to communities by a regime not trying to cover up its crimes, but to advertise them."
  • A week after his body was returned, a Facebook page dedicated to Hamza had more than 60,000 followers, under the title, "We are all Hamza al-Khateeb", a deliberate echo of the online campaign on behalf of Khaled Saeed, the young Egyptian whose death in police custody last year proved a trigger for the revolution in Cairo.
  • Rezan Mustapha, spokesman of the opposition Kurdish Future Movement said he and others had also seen the horrifying footage. "This video moved not only every single Syrian, but people worldwide. It is unacceptable and inexcusable. The horrible torture was done to terrify demonstrators and make them stop calling for their demands." But, said Khateeb, protestors would only be spurred on by such barbarity. "More people will now go to the street. We hold the Syrian secret police fully responsible for the torturing and killing of this child, even if they deny it."
Ed Webb

The Pulitzer Problem | Rafia Zakaria - 0 views

thebaffler.com/...the-pulitzer-problem-zakaria

GWOT journalism imperialism Guantanamo torture book opinion

shared by Ed Webb on 13 May 20 - No Cached
  • Taub’s article was published in 2019, slightly more than four years after Salahi himself published his best-selling Guantánamo Diary, which notably did not win a Pulitzer Prize. Large parts of “Guantánamo’s Darkest Secret”—awarded a Pulitzer this week in the Feature Writing category—particularly those that deal with Salahi, rehash with the customary “he wrote” what had already been written. Yet while the content may be mostly the same, the purpose is different. Taub, unlike Salahi, is out to deliver absolution to his American reader: casting Steve Wood as an integral player is one part of this; leaving the still-constrained reality of Salahi’s present (he cannot leave tiny Mauritania) to the very end of the piece is another.
  • Credibility and journalistic heroism, as each year’s prizes show, reside in the pages of prestige publications; the New York Times and the Washington Post are mainstays, and since the prizes were first opened up to include magazines in 2015, The New Yorker is as well. No truth is really a truth, particularly a courageous truth, until it appears in their pages. The brown man, the accused terrorist, the actual torture survivor Mohamedou Ould Salahi may have written a great book. But the definitive story about “Guantánamo’s Darkest Secret” is the one penned by Taub.
  • Such hefty institutional backing has a relationship to truth-telling and to truth creation. It doesn’t matter that Taub, per his own admission, did not speak Arabic, that he seems to have rehashed a large chunk of his Pulitzer-winning article from an already published book, or even that he spent only a week in Mauritania where Salahi now lives. His article legitimizes a process through which the Western liberal frame is conflated with the lack of any frame at all and applied to foreign places or people through the roving foreign correspondent. Ben Taub is not the problem, of course. It’s just that the edifices of elite journalism consistently elevate the voices of those like him. In a story about how a system of silencing allowed the most shameful cruelties to happen, considering the architecture of truth and silence seems important.
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  • Salahi and countless non-Western others have long known and written about torture at Guantánamo or Bagram or any of the many places where it occurred. But it only becomes a literary, notable, and prize-worthy truth when it flows from the pen of a foreign correspondent at a prestige publication like The New Yorker.
  • “If you say that you are angry,” Salahi tells the two white men, “it is understood as an emotion. If I say that I am angry, it is seen as a threat to national security.”
  • Salahi’s words underscore the truth Taub has not told: that writing an article about torture that does nothing to disrupt a worldview that has left brown men forever suspect is not getting anywhere at all.
Ed Webb

Opinion | Saudi Arabia sentences U.S. citizen Saad Ibrahim Almadi to 16 years in prison... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...-sentenced-tweets-saudi-arabia

Saudi KSA MBS twitter repression US USA expression speech

shared by Ed Webb on 17 Oct 22 - Cached
  • The Saudi government has sentenced a 72-year-old U.S. citizen to 16 years in prison for tweets he posted while inside the United States, some of which were critical of the Saudi regime. His son, speaking publicly for the first time, alleges that the Saudi government has tortured his father in prison and says that the State Department mishandled the case.
  • On Oct. 3, Almadi was sentenced to 16 years in prison. He also received a 16-year travel ban on top of that. If he serves his whole sentence, he will leave prison at age 87 — and would have to live to 104 before he could return to the United States.
  • Almadi was charged with harboring a terrorist ideology, trying to destabilize the kingdom, as well as supporting and funding terrorism.
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  • while the Biden administration has gone to considerable effort to secure the release of high-profile Americans from Russia, Venezuela and Iran, it has been less public and less successful in securing the release of U.S. citizens held in Saudi Arabia. In fact, despite that Saudi Arabia is supposedly a U.S. ally, the Saudi government under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) is dealing with its U.S.-citizen critics more harshly than ever.
  • Almadi has been tortured in prison, forced to live in squalor and confined with actual terrorists — all while his family was threatened by the Saudi government that they would lose everything if they didn’t keep quiet
  • Nobody from the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh visited Almadi until May, six months after his arrest. At that meeting, Almadi declined to ask the U.S. government to intervene. Ibrahim said that Saudi jailers threaten to torture prisoners who involve foreign governments in their cases. In a second consular meeting in August, Almadi did ask for the State Department’s assistance in his case. He was then tortured, Ibrahim said.
Ed Webb

Syria 'smoking gun' report warrants a careful read - CSMonitor.com - 0 views

www.csmonitor.com/...report-warrants-a-careful-read

Syria warcrimes analysis media propaganda torture

shared by Ed Webb on 22 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Ed Webb on 22 Jan 14
     
    This piece is not an attempt to defend Assad from the charge of war crimes carried out against his government. There has been much stronger and more credible evidence of this than the Qatar report going back years. Just as there is strong and credible evidence of torture, summary executions, and associated war crimes being carried out by various rebel factions (a fact completely ignored in today's report). But after the lies gobbled up the US people and Congress from anonymous sources from the first Gulf War (remember Hill & Knowlton's fabrication of Iraqi soldiers tossing Kuwaiti babies out of incubators) to the second (the fabricated intelligence of weapon's of mass destruction peddled by "Curveball" and the like) to the ongoing reassessment of the strength of the public evidence presented by the US about the certainty that the Assad government used sarin last year, this kind of report has to be treated with kid gloves.
Ed Webb

How a man setting fire to himself sparked an uprising in Tunisia | Brian Whitaker | Com... - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...tunisia-ben-ali

Tunisia riots demonstration revolution dictatorship media censorship analysis opinion

shared by Ed Webb on 28 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • Reporting of these events has been sparse, to say the least. The Tunisian press, of course, is strictly controlled and international news organisations have shown little interest: the "not many dead" syndrome, perhaps. But in the context of Tunisia they are momentous events. It's a police state, after all, where riots and demonstrations don't normally happen – and certainly not simultaneously in towns and cities up and down the country.So, what we are seeing, firstly, is the failure of a system constructed by the regime over many years to prevent people from organising, communicating and agitating.Secondly, we are seeing relatively large numbers of people casting off their fear of the regime. Despite the very real risk of arrest and torture, they are refusing to be intimidated.
  • Ben Ali may try to cling on, but his regime now has a fin de siècle air about it. He came to power in 1987 by declaring President Bourguiba unfit for office. It's probably just a matter of time before someone else delivers that same message to Ben Ali.
  • international news organisations have shown little interest: the "not many dead" syndrome, No, that's not the reason. The reason is that this SOB is one of our SOBs. We must be absolutely sure that we don't risk letting let any nasty Islamists or not-compliant folk near the levers of power before we start to fan the flames of democracy.
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  • Tunisia could be the most "laique" eligible country , more than many other arab and some european countries. Women emancipation and civil family laws are an example. Education rate is very high, and the gdp per capita is good.What's missing : transparency, freedom and real democraty.Please don't think that the regime of Ben Ali is the bastion againt extremists .. the unique bastion against all extremists are education , freedom , respect and well being. Fighting extremists by guns , fire and jail is a complete failure. Please note that the modern governments in maghreb countries have destroyed the islamic in-country traditional institutions known by their moderation and their knowledge of the religion whick maked the influence of "eastern islamic schools" like wahabism from saudi be predominant on the new era of staellite channels .. which is not very good news for all of us ..
Ed Webb

Giulio Regeni: Scattered Facts - 0 views

www.jadaliyya.com/...giulio-regeni_scattered-facts

Egypt academia torture police policing crime labor labour workers unions

shared by Ed Webb on 11 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Giulio’s first stay in Egypt in 2012 ended after the hysteria about foreign spies. Government television aired public service announcements warning of foreign spies, and as news spread of citizens detaining foreigners they suspected of being spies, “leaving Egypt seemed the most logical next step,”
  • the first time he became nervous during his second stay in Egypt was after his photo was taken at the independent union meeting on 11 December 2015
  • A week before the anniversary of the revolution, he told me he would not leave his house for a week starting on January 18, except for necessities…He understood that the security situation on the anniversary of the revolution was not good
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  • “From the first moment, I knew that his disappearance was not voluntary,”
  • “Everything pointed to that—the state’s hysteria about everything it does not know, the forced disappearances, the anniversary of the revolution with all the regime’s panic, his turned-off telephone. They were all clear signs. The disappearance was not an accident. We had to move fast.”
  • nside the morgue, confusion reigned. Two doctors with the Forensic Medicine Authority were about to begin the autopsy after conducting a half-hour preliminary examination. But then they received orders to stop, according to a source inside the morgue who preferred to remain anonymous. They were told to wait for Dr. Hisham Adel-Hamid, the head of the authority, to supervise the drafting of the final report.
  • “The young man was tortured for five separate, not continuous days…The torture was not ongoing. On some days of his 10-day disappearance, he was not assaulted.”
Ed Webb

Egypt: Forcibly disappeared transgender woman at risk of sexual violence and torture | ... - 0 views

www.amnesty.org/...of-sexual-violence-and-torture

Egypt LGBT LGBTQ policing police rights abuse abuses authoritarianism

shared by Ed Webb on 08 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • Fears are growing for the safety and wellbeing of Malak al-Kashef, a transgender woman seized during a police raid from her home in Giza in the early hours of 6 March and who has not been heard from since, Amnesty International said. Malak al-Kashef was taken by police to an undisclosed location. Her lawyers have not been able to locate her and police stations have denied she is in their custody.
  • Egyptian authorities have a horrific track record of persecuting people based on their sexual orientation and gender identity
  • Amnesty International believes that Malak’s arrest relates to her calls for peaceful protests following a major train crash in Cairo’s central train station on 27 February that killed at least 25 people. “Malak al-Kashef appears to have been detained solely for peacefully exercising her rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly
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  • Due to her gender identity, Malak is at increased risk of torture by the police, including rape and sexual violence, as well as assault by other detainees
  • Malak al-Kashef is a transgender woman who is undergoing gender affirming surgery. However, she has not yet managed to have her gender identity officially recognized and is therefore registered as male in official documents
Ed Webb

Egypt braced for 'day of revolution' protests | World news | The Guardian - 1 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...egypt-day-revolution-protests

Egypt internet politics twitter socialmedia Tunisia sidibouzid

shared by Ed Webb on 25 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • Tomorrow's events, dubbed a "day of revolution against torture, corruption, poverty and unemployment" by protest leaders, were initiated by two dissident movements, both based online. One is dedicated to the memory of Khaled Said, an Alexandrian man beaten to death by police last year, while the other, "6 April", is a youth group named after the date of an uprising two years ago in the Nile delta town of El-Mahalla El-Kubra, in which three people were killed by police.
  • In a sign of how seriously the Mubarak regime is taking any challenge to its authority following the downfall of Tunisia's president Ben Ali, counter-protests are being organised under the banner of "Mubarak: Egypt's security". Organisers say they want to express their rejection of the "destruction of state institutions" by the opposition, raising fears of violent clashes on the ground."Regardless of how many people turn up, these protests will be highly significant," said Nabil Abdel Fattah, a political analyst at the semi-official Al-Ahram Research Centre. "Those confronting the regime on Tuesday will be the sons and daughters of virtual activism - a new generation that has finally found something around which they can unite and rally.They are the product of a government that has never offered them any ideological vision to believe in, and now they have themselves become a symbol of contemporary Egypt.
Ed Webb

Sex, Social Mores, and Keyword Filtering: Microsoft Bing in the "Arabian Countries" | O... - 0 views

opennet.net/crosoft-bing-arabian-countries

internet censorship filtering search MENA ArabWorld microsoft Bing

shared by Ed Webb on 06 Jan 12 - Cached
  • There is no filtering by keywords if a user chooses another country (e.g., United States, Canada) as their location even if they are physically located in an Arab country. - One anomaly we found when probing filtering by keywords is that filtering does not work if a filtered Arabic keyword is used together with another non-filtered keyword. For example, a search using the Arabic word for “sex” is banned, but using the Arabic term for “sex stories” is not banned.
  • We found no evidence of filtering of keywords in Arabic or English that could return results in other content categories. We tested keywords that could yield politically sensitive content (e.g., “democracy”, “freedom”, “opposition”), content related to violence and terrorism (e.g., “torture”, terror”, “explosive”), Web sites related to minority and religious rights (e.g., “Shiite”, “Baha’i”, “Christian”, “Jews”), and content related to women’s rights (e.g., “gender”, “equality”). None of the tested keywords were found banned.
  • It is interesting that Microsoft’s implementation of this type of wholesale social content censorship for the entire “Arabian countries” region is in fact not being practiced by many of the Arab government censors themselves. That is, although political filtering is widespread in the MENA region, social filtering, including keyword filtering, is not practiced by all countries in MENA. ONI 2007-2008 and 2008-2009 testing and research found no evidence of social content filtering (e.g., sex, nudity, and homosexuality) at the national level in countries such as Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Libya.10
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  • filtering at the keyword level results in overblocking, as banning the use of certain keywords to search for Web sites, not just images, prevents users from accessing—based on Microsoft’s definition of objectionable content—legitimate content such as sex education and encyclopedic information about homosexuality.
  • The current approach uses a region-wide standard for filtering content as opposed to the more targeted, granular, and country-specific policy. A more targeted approach—either country-based or preferably, defined by the user—is more generally consistent with minimizing the impact on freedom of speech. Through its involvement in the Global Network Initiative, Microsoft has signaled its willingness to be at the forefront in protecting freedom of expression around the world. It is difficult to reconcile this position with Bing’s current filtering standards.
Ed Webb

Charles Freeman fails the loyalty test - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com - 0 views

www.salon.com/...index.html

salon.com greenwald Israel lobby AIPAC intelligence idiocy

shared by Ed Webb on 11 Mar 09 - Cached
  • In the U.S., you can advocate torture, illegal spying, and completely optional though murderous wars and be appointed to the highest positions.  But you can't, apparently, criticize Israeli actions too much or question whether America's blind support for Israel should be re-examined.
  • Blumethal also suggested that right-wing Israel fanatics in the U.S. are particularly interested in controlling how intelligence is analyzed due to their anger over the NIE's 2007 conclusion that Iran had ceased its pursuit of nuclear weapons. “It’s clear that Freeman isn’t going to be influenced by the lobby,” Jim Lobe, the Washington bureau chief of Inter Press Service, remarked to me. “They don’t like people like that, especially when they’re in charge of products like the NIE. So this is a very important test for them.”
  • Does anyone doubt that it's far more permissible in American political culture to criticize actions of the American government than it is the actions of the Israeli Government?
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  • Having the kind of debate in America that they have in Israel, let alone Europe, on the way ahead in the Middle East is simply forbidden.
  • What I find most mystifying is that Israel-centric fanatics actually think it is a good thing for Israel to impose these sorts of Israel-based loyalty tests and orthodoxies on American politics.  Polls show that Americans overwhelmingly want the U.S. Government to be "even-handed" in the Israel/Palestinian dispute and substantial portions of Americans do not favor American policies towards Israel.  Isn't it rather obvious that at some point, there will be a substantial and understandable backlash as Americans watch people like Chuck Schumer openly boast that anyone who makes "statements against Israel" that he deems "over the top" will be disqualified from serving in our Government, despite a long and distinguished record of public service and unchallenged expertise?
Ed Webb

Egypt: Military Intensifies Clampdown on Free Expression | Human Rights Watch - 0 views

www.hrw.org/...fies-clampdown-free-expression

censorship Egypt military expression law rights

shared by Ed Webb on 17 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • “The decision to try Asmaa Mahfouz is a major attack on free expression and fair trials, using the same abusive laws the Mubarak government used against its critics,” said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “The military is using her to silence potential critics, sending the message that criticizing the current military government will land them in jail.”
  • The military prosecutor questioned her for over three hours about her comments on Twitter and media interviews during protests on July 23 in which she criticized the military for failing to intervene to protect protesters.
  • Military courts have sentenced at least 10,000 civilians since January 2011 after unfair proceedings, Human Rights Watch said. All of them should be retried before regular civilian courts.
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  • In an August 15 case, six protesters faced charges of “insulting the military” before a military tribunal for chanting “antagonistic” slogans about Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, the de facto ruler of the country, in addition to charges of assaulting a police officer. The military court sentenced Hassan Bahgat to six months in prison in another case, 3779/2011, for insulting the military in Tahrir square on August 6
  • Abu Bakr, a lawyer representing victims in the Mubarak trial and a Kifaya activist, received her summons to appear before the military prosecutor on charges of “insulting the military” on August 16. During the questioning, the prosecutor showed her video footage from the July 23 demonstration in Abbasiya, Cairo, of a protester who, the prosecutor told her, was “insulting” the military. The prosecutor dropped the charges against her when he realized the footage was not of her. Lawyer Ahmed Ragheb told Human Rights Watch that this footage was not filmed by the media, which would suggest that the military is filming protesters during demonstrations.
  • The Mubarak government frequently used overly broad provisions in the penal code to crack down on legitimate criticism of the government’s human rights record or criticism of the political situation, trying editors, opposition leaders, and activists on charges of “insulting the president” or “insulting public institutions.” The military government and courts are using the same provisions.
  • Military prosecutors have summoned at least seven activists and journalists, including Mahfouz, to question them on charges of criminal defamation after they publicly criticized the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), the military leadership, or alleged abuses by the army. The labor activist and blogger Hossam al-Hamalawy was summoned after he said on television that he held the head of the military police, Gen. Hamdy Badeen, personally responsible for acts of torture by the military police.
  • The United Nations Human Rights Committee, the expert body that provides authoritative interpretations of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Egypt is a party, states categorically in its recently-issued General Comment No. 34, on Article 19 on Freedom of Expression, that, “States parties should not prohibit criticism of institutions, such as the army or the administration.” By this standard, article 184 of the Egyptian penal code, which criminalizes “insulting the People’s Assembly, the Shura Council or any State Authority, or the Army or the Courts,” is incompatible with international law and should be amended accordingly, Human Rights Watch said
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