Sunday, May 24th
Last update08:26:43 AM GMT
Human Rights Glance
Recently declassified documents on the Bush administration interrogation program describe several techniques used on detainees in US custody, some of which may have violated the United Nations Convention Against Torture, to which the United States is a signatory.
The “purpose” of the abdominal slap is defined in the documents as being “to instill fear and despair, to punish selective behavior and to instill humiliation or cause insult.”
In its 2009 International Religious Freedoms Report, the U.S. State Department accuses Israel of “governmental and legal discrimination against non-Jews and non-Orthodox streams of Judaism.” The JewishIsrael organization, in its review of the document, calls it a “protracted denunciation against Israel’s Jewish character.”
A Canadian engineer cannot sue the United States after being mistaken for a terrorist when he was changing planes in New York a year after the 2001 terrorist attacks, a federal appeals court ruled Monday.
F.B.I. agents who arrived at a secret C.I.A. jail overseas in September 2002 found prisoners “manacled to the ceiling and subjected to blaring music around the clock,” and a C.I.A. official wrote a list of questions for interrogators including “How close is each technique to the ‘rack and screw,’ ” according to hundreds of pages of partly declassified documents released Friday by the Justice Department.
The documents include handwritten notes, apparently prepared by Justice Department officials, discussing the possibility of prosecuting some employees of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Newly-released documents show that the FBI interviewed a naked, chained terror suspect back in 2002 as the bureau struggled with the CIA over how to treat high-value prisoners.
The state board responsible for licensing - and disciplining - psychologists in Louisiana is "fighting awfully hard to turn a blind eye to serious allegations of abuse" brought against one of its members, who is being accused of complicity in beatings, religious and sexual humiliation, rape threats and painful body positions during his service as a senior adviser on interrogations for the US military in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.
Dr. Trudy Bond, an Ohio-based psychologist, is suing the Louisiana State Board of Examiners of Psychologists to compel it to investigate the behavior of Louisiana psychologist and retired US Army Col. Dr. Larry C. James, a former high-ranking adviser on interrogations for the US military in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.
There was much praise for the UN investigations into war crimes committed in Gaza, led by Richard Goldstone. However, I feel that this report did not go far enough to investigate some other more serious allegations that were made.Page 135 of 205
