Human Rights Glance
Some settlers are employing a new strategy to get Palestinians evicted from their land in the northern region of the Jordan Valley, Haaretz has learned. A number of settlers, some of whom are residents of the Maskiot settlement, set up a "protest" tent next to a tent belonging to Bedouin herdsmen near Wad el Maleh, on private Palestinian land.
Last Thursday, after the Palestinians complained to the civil administration, both the Israelis and Palestinians there were handed decrees declaring the area a closed military zone, signed by brigade commander Yochai Ben-Yishai.
Accused war criminal Omar Khadr says his U.S. captors suffocated him with a bag, terrorized him with barking dogs and threatened him with rape if he didn't cooperate with interrogators. All of it, he says, happened while he was a teenager in U.S. custody. Pentagon prosecutors dispute every word of it.
The torture of Iraqi detainees at a new secret prison in Baghdad was far more systematic and brutal than initially reported, Human Rights Watch reported on Tuesday. The existence of the prison, which housed mostly Sunni Arab prisoners, has created a political furor in Iraq, prompted government denials and fanned sectarian tensions.
A former senior MI6 officer has criticised the torture and abuse of terror suspects and says the US response to the threat posed by al-Qaida has been exaggerated and counterproductive. Stinging criticism of the US is made in the Guardian by Nigel Inkster, assistant chief of MI6 until 2006.
The US, the self-proclaimed protector of human rights, has failed to vote in favor of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
For hearings on whether U.S. forces tortured confessions out of a Canadian teenager accused of killing an American soldier in Afghanistan, the Pentagon Monday unveiled a new face to advocate military commissions:
Palestinian protesters and Israeli police have clashed after Jewish settlers marched in the Arab neighbourhood of Silwan in East Jerusalem. The rightwing settlers, who staged the march on Sunday, want Palestinians removed from the area and their homes pulled down.
