Friday, Dec 12th
Last update08:39:16 AM GMT
Human Rights Glance
Although a great deal is now known about the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Bagram, and Abu Ghraib, little has been asked - and less revealed - about the years of solitary military detention and interrogation without trial at naval brigs in Virginia and South Carolina endured by two U.S. citizens and a legal resident - Yaser Hamdi, Jose Padilla and Ali al-Marri.
A U.S. military officer warned Pentagon officials that an American detainee was being driven nearly insane by months of punishing isolation and sensory deprivation in a U.S. military brig, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press.
While the treatment of prisoners at detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and in Afghanistan and Iraq have long been the subject of human rights complaints and court scrutiny, the documents shed new light on how two American citizens and a legal U.S. resident were treated in military jails inside the United States.
A federal judge is considering whether to order a group of detainees held at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay released into the United States, in what would instantly become a landmark legal decision in the years-long battle over the rights of terrorism suspects there.
The men, a small band of Chinese Muslims who have been held for nearly seven years, are no longer considered enemy combatants by the U.S. government, but they are caught in a well-documented diplomatic bind.
In Israel's ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, where the rule of law sometimes takes a back seat to the rule of God, zealots are on a campaign to stamp out behavior they consider unchaste. They hurl stones at women for such "sins" as wearing a red blouse, and attack stores selling devices that can access the Internet.
In recent weeks, self-styled "modesty patrols" have been accused of breaking into the apartment of a Jerusalem woman and beating her for allegedly consorting with men. They have torched a store that sells MP4 players, fearing devout Jews would use them to download pornography.
Of five prominent women interviewed three years ago by The Independent for an article on post-Taliban female emancipation, three, including Ms Kakar, are dead and a fourth has had to flee after narrowly escaping assassination in an ambush in which her husband was killed.
TVNL Comment: The US invaded Iraq to overthrow a government that gave women total equality without the restraints of Sharia law. Today, the women of Iraq are once again under fundamentalist rule and are not better off than those in Afghanistan
The Adelaide teacher is wanted by the District Court in Mannheim Germany on charges of publishing material on the internet of an anti-Semitic and/or revisionist nature.
Holocaust denial is a crime in Germany with a maximum jail term of five years.
In 1999 Dr Toben spent seven months in jail in Germany for breaching that law.
TVNL Comment: This suppression of freedom of speech can not be permitted. Questioning history is a crime? Only when you question Jewish history.
The techniques themselves -- forced nudity, sleep deprivation, painful shackling -- had been used for years to prepare U.S. fighter pilots for possible capture by an enemy. But Col. Steven Kleinman, an Air Force instructor, said he was shocked in 2003 to see the same harsh methods used haphazardly on Iraqis in a U.S. prison camp.
"It had morphed into a form of punishment for those who wouldn't cooperate," said Kleinman, a career intelligence officer and survival-school instructor.
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