Thursday, Jun 20th
Last update12:30:26 AM GMT
Human Rights Glance
Manning’s case has gained considerable media attention as his execution date approached. Manning, who is black, was convicted in 1994 by a white-majority jury of killing white Mississippi State University students Jon Steckler and Tiffany Miller in 1992. He was convicted despite there being no physical evidence linking him to the crimes while an inmate who claimed Manning confessed to the crimes later recanted his testimony.
An Afghan captive at Guantánamo said in a just-released sworn statement that guards rifled through Qurans to trigger the ongoing 100-captive hunger strike at the prison camps in Cuba.
The four-page affidavit by an Afghan captive in his 30s, Obaidullah, is the first detainee court document to attest to what lawyers have said for months: Something went terribly wrong in a shakedown at the showcase, communal prison, called Camp 6, in February.
Foreign secretary William Hague is considering making a dramatic public plea for the return of the last former British resident held inside Guantánamo Bay, as fresh reports indicate that the treatment of prisoners within the camp continues to deteriorate.
In the wake of President Barack Obama's renewed promise on Tuesday to close the prison, the foreign secretary has told MPs that he will escalate efforts to bring Shaker Aamer home to his family in south London.
In the last eight years, the Israeli government has sought to rebrand Israel as a “liberal haven” for gay rights in an otherwise-homophobic Middle East as a means of increasing tourism and international goodwill.
Critics refer to the campaign as “pinkwashing,” an attempt to whitewash the Israeli occupation by focusing on gay and lesbian issues. Many of these critics are queer people themselves, and their movement against Israeli policies is building within the LGBT community. But recent pro-Israel initiatives hope to change that; rather than simply promoting Israeli gay images in the international sphere, these Israel advocates are actually attempting to sanitize LGBTQ spaces of pro-Palestinian activism entirely.
At least four of the captives being force-fed at Guantánamo were cleared for release years ago.
As of Wednesday, the U.S. prison in southeast Cuba classified 100 of its 166 captives as hunger strikers, according to Army Lt. Col. Samuel House, a prison spokesman. Navy medical workers were administering tube feedings to 23 of the hunger strikers, four of them at the prison hospital.
An attorney who represented prisoners detained at Guantanamo Bay was found dead last week in what sources said was a suicide.
Andy P. Hart, 38, a federal public defender in Toledo, Ohio, apparently died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Hart left behind a suicide note and a thumb drive, believed to contain his case files. It is unknown where Hart died, what the suicide note said or whether an autopsy was performed.
A former chief prosecutor for the controversial American prison camp at Guantánamo Bay has called for the prison to be closed, launching an online petition that has gathered some 60,000 signatures in less than 24 hours.
Col Morris Davis served for two years as the chief prosecutor for terrorism trials at Guantánamo. He decided to campaign for the closure of the camp in the wake of a hunger strike that now involves more than 100 prisoners, including some 21 who are being force fed to keep them from starving to death.
Page 6 of 167
