Crapaganda.com

President Barack Obama approved Monday the resumption of military trials for detainees at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, ending a two-year ban.

Secretive political prisons for “domestic terrorists” called Communications Management Units have been operating for more than three years on U.S. soil. Last week the federal Bureau of Prisons quietly submitted a proposal to make the experimental units permanent: a process that, by law, should have occurred before they were ever opened.

As a quick introduction, there are two Communications Management Units, or CMUs, in the country. They radically restrict prisoner communications with the outside world to levels that rival, or exceed, the most restrictive facilities in the country, including the “Supermax,” ADX-Florence. [For more information on CMUs and who is housed there:"Secretive U.S. Prison Units Used to House Muslim, Animal Rights and Environmental Activists."]

On April 6, the Bureau of Prisons submitted a proposed rule (Docket No. 1148-P), listed in the federal register. Under the Administrative Procedures Act, there is now a required public comment period for responses to this proposal.

The public notice comes after the Center for Constitutional Rights and the American Civil Liberties Union each filed lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of the secretive facilities, where political prisoners have been transferred without notification, without explanation, and without opportunity for appeal. [See "5 Things You Should Know About America’s 'Little Guantanamo.'"]

FOLLOWING THE LAW IN HINDSIGHT

The submitted proposal is clearly a response to these lawsuits, and an acknowledgment that the Communications Management Units were opened secretly and illegally. Now government officials are trying to cover their tracks and follow the legal process in hindsight.

It is a positive development that the government is recognizing, and being forced to defend, prison facilities kept hidden from the public. There is the possibility of placing true checks and balances on the government’s power to create experimental units that are unparalleled in the federal prison system.

However, this step in the right direction is negated by the Bureau of Prisons’ proposal to actually make these secretive prisons even more inhumane.

INCREASING RESTRICTIONS

The lawsuit by the Center for Constitutional Rights argues that the facilities are unconstitutional for a variety of reasons, including the fact that they are cruel and inhumane. The extreme restrictions on inmate communications, including not allowing them to hug family members at the few visits they are allowed, go against a body of research and official government policy on prisoner treatment. Generally, the government encourages contact visits by family because they improve prisoner behavior, increase morale, and further rehabilitation.

“I haven’t been able to hug my husband, or even hold his hand, for two years,” said Jenny Synan, the spouse of a CMU prisoner and a plaintiff in the lawsuit. “This proposed rule does not explain how prohibiting a husband from holding his wife’s hand or keeping a father from hugging his daughter, is necessary for prison security.”

The new proposal includes even more restrictions, including:

• “Written correspondence may be limited to three pieces of paper, double-sided, once per week to and from a single recipient;
• Telephone communication may be limited to a single completed call per calendar month for up to 15 minutes;
• and Visiting may be limited to one hour each calendar month.

MORE POWER, LESS OVERSIGHT

It should be noted that all federal prisoners have their communications monitored. And there are already policies in place for dangerous inmates who need additional monitoring.

The most prevalent of those policies are called Special Administrative Measures, or SAMs. SAMs are authorized by the attorney general based on information from the FBI and U.S. Attorney’s office.

This new proposal lowers the threshold for such special restrictions. According to the proposal, it allows for prison officials to act on “evidence which does not rise to the same degree of potential risk [emphasis added] to national security or risk of acts of violence or terrorism which would warrant the Attorney General’s intervention by issuance of a SAM.”

The government is arguing two competing claims simultaneously: (1) That Communications Management Units are needed because the inmates are heightened security risks, and (2) That traditional oversight is too cumbersome because these inmates are not dangerous enough.

The aim is, admittedly, to place more unchecked power in the hands of lower-ranking government officials.

POLITICAL PRISONS

If, according the Bureau of Prisons, these inmates “do not rise to the same degree of potential risk to national security,” who is housed here?

As I have discussed here before, inmates and guards at the CMUs call them “Little Guantanamo.” They have also been described as prisons for “second-tier” terrorists.

The proposal confirms this, saying: “One important category of inmates which might be designated to a CMU is inmates whose current offense(s) of conviction, or offense conduct, included association, communication, or involvement, related to international or domestic terrorism.”

It references past behavior as grounds for inmates being transferred there, but as I have reported, and as the recent lawsuits make clear, many of these inmates have no disciplinary history and no communications violations. Furthermore, these individuals were not the 9/11 hijackers or what most people think of as terrorists. They are prisoners like Daniel McGowan, who destroyed property as part of the Earth Liberation Front in the name of defending the environment.

The Bureau’s proposal makes clear that the CMUs are intended to keep these cases isolated, and to keep political prisoners with “inspirational significance” from communicating with the communities and social movements of which they are part.

These secretive prisons are for political cases the government would rather have out of the public spotlight.

Source: Green Is The New Red

Prison guards could soon stop fights with a harmless tool that shoots a laser-like beam, video game-style, down into a room where trouble is brewing. The Assault Intervention Device (AID), funded by the National Institute of Justice, is still large and unrefined but will soon be installed for trial in at least one prison, the Pitchess Detention Center in Los Angeles County.

The AID directs an energy beam, which is in the invisible millimeter wavelength, that penetrates just deep enough beneath the skin to make the target’s pain receptors shout. The sensation is a burn like touching a hot stove or an iron. It only lasts up to 3 seconds – the AID controls automatically shut the beam off to prevent shooting for longer without resetting the trigger finger. The beam can hit a target about 100 feet away, and is about as wide as a CD.

According to Raytheon, the device’s manufacturers, it causes no actual damage to nerves or skin. This video shows the sharp reflex caused by an AID hit, and the unscathed hit receivers.

Watch The AID in action:

If you watched, you probably also noticed how big and clunky that device is. Indeed, it stands at seven and a half feet tall and is controlled by joysticks. The shooter aims using a computer screen linked to the device. Seems like it would be an easy transition from Xbox user to AID shooter.

Though it’s better than the current options, batons or pepper spray, Cmdr. Bob Osborne of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department tells TechNewsDaily that its efficacy still needs to be proven in real assault situations before anyone should bother making it smaller and easier to use. I wonder, if it could eventually become hand held, would this compete with Tasers?

Source: Discovery.com

The Defense Department forced all “war on terror” detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison to take a high dosage of a controversial antimalarial drug, mefloquine, an act that an Army public health physician called “pharmacologic waterboarding.”

The US military administered the drug despite Pentagon knowledge that mefloquine caused severe neuropsychiatric side effects, including suicidal thoughts, hallucinations and anxiety. The drug was used on the prisoners whether they had malaria or not.

The revelation, which has not been previously reported, was buried in  documents publicly released by the Defense Department (DoD) two years ago as part of the government’s investigation into the June 2006 deaths of three Guantanamo detainees.

Army Staff Sgt. Joe Hickman, who was stationed at Guantanamo at the time of the suicides in 2006, and has presented evidence that demonstrates the three detainees could not have died by hanging themselves, noticed in the detainees’ medical files that they were given mefloquine. Hickman has been investigating the circumstances behind the detainees’ deaths for nearly four years.

Interviews with mefloquine and malaria experts and a review of peer-reviewed journals and government documents show there were no preexisting cases where mefloquine was ever prescribed for mass presumptive treatment of malaria.

All detainees arriving at Guantanamo in January 2002 were first given a treatment dosage of 1,250 mg of mefloquine, before laboratory tests were conducted to determine if they actually had the disease, according to a section of the DoD documents entitled “Standard Inprocessing Orders For Detainees.” The 1,250 mg dosage is what would be given if the detainees actually had malaria. That dosage is five times higher than the prophylactic dose given to individauls to prevent the disease.

Maj. Remington Nevin, an Army public health physician, who formerly worked at the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center and has written extensively about mefloquine, said in an interview the use of mefloquine “in this manner … is, at best, an egregious malpractice.”

The government has exposed detainees “to unacceptably high risks of potentially severe neuropsychiatric side effects, including seizures, intense vertigo, hallucinations, paranoid delusions, aggression, panic, anxiety, severe insomnia, and thoughts of suicide,” said Nevin, who was not speaking in an official capacity, but offering opinions as a board-certified, preventive medicine physician. “These side effects could be as severe as those intended through the application of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques.’”

Mefloquine is also known by its brand name Lariam. It was researched by the US Army in the 1970s and licensed by the Food and Drug Administration in 1989. Since its introduction, it has been directly linked to serious adverse effects, including depression, anxiety, panic attacks, confusion, hallucinations, bizarre dreams, nausea, vomiting, sores and homicidal and suicidal thoughts. It belongs to a class of drugs known as quinolines, which were part of a 1956 human experiment study to investigate “toxic cerebral states,” as part of the CIA’s MKULTRA mind-control program.

The Army tapped the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR) to develop mefloquine and it was later licensed to the Swiss pharmaceutical company F. Hoffman-La Roche. The first human trials of mefloquine were conducted in the mid-1970s on prisoners, who were deliberately inoculated with malaria at Stateville Correctional prison near Joliet, Illinois, the site of controversial antimalarial experimentation in the early 1940s.

The drug was administered to Guantanamo detainees without regard for their medical or psychological history, despite its considerable risk of exacerbating pre-existing conditions. Mefloquine is also known to have serious side effects among individuals under treatment for depression or other serious mental health disorders, which numerous detainees were said to have been treated for, according to their attorneys and published  reports.

In 2002, when the prison was established and mefloquine first administered, there were dozens of suicide attempts at Guantanamo. That same year, the DoD stopped reporting attempted suicides.

By February 2002, there were at least 459 detainees imprisoned at Guantanamo. In March of that year, according to the book “Saving Grace at Guantanamo Bay: A Memoir of a Citizen Warrior” by Montgomery Granger, “the situation” at the prison began “deteriorating rapidly.”

“There is more and more psychosis becoming evident in detainees …,” wrote Granger, an Army Reserve major and medic who was stationed at Guantanamo in 2002. “We already have probably a dozen or so detainees who are psychiatric cases. The number is growing.”

“Presumptively Treating” Malaria

Though malaria is nonexistent in Cuba, DoD spokeswoman Maj. Tanya Bradsher told Truthout that the US government was concerned that the disease would be reintroduced into the country as detainees were transferred to the prison facility in January 2002.

A “decision was made,” Bradsher said in an email, to “presumptively treat each arriving Guantanamo detainee for malaria to prevent the possibility of having mosquito-borne [sic] spread from an infected individual to uninfected individuals in the Guantanamo population, the guard force, the population at the Naval base or the broader Cuban population.”

But Granger wrote in his book that a Navy entomologist was present at Guantanamo in January and February 2002 and during that time only identified insects that were nuisances and did not identify any insects that were carriers of a disease, such as malaria.

Read more »

The Supreme Court has ruled that teenagers may not be locked up for life without chance of parole if they haven’t killed anyone.

By a 5-4 vote Monday, the court says the Constitution requires that young people serving life sentences must at least be considered for release.

The court ruled in the case of Terrance Graham, who was implicated in armed robberies when he was 16 and 17. Graham, now 22, is in prison in Florida, which holds more than 70 percent of juvenile defendants locked up for life for crimes other than homicide.

“The state has denied him any chance to later demonstrate that he is fit to rejoin society based solely on a nonhomicide crime that he committed while he was a child in the eyes of the law,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in his majority opinion. “This the Eighth Amendment does not permit.”

Chief Justice John Roberts agreed with Kennedy and the court’s four liberal justices about Graham. But Roberts said he does not believe the ruling should extend to all young offenders who are locked up for crimes other than murder.

Source: Raw Story

Source: RawStory.com

The journalist who helped break the story that detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were being tortured by their US jailers told an audience at a journalism conference last month that American soldiers are now executing prisoners in Afghanistan.

New Yorker journalist Seymour Hersh also revealed that the Bush Administration had developed advanced plans for a military strike on Iran.

At the Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Geneva, Hersh criticized President Barack Obama, and alleged that US forces are engaged in “battlefield executions.”

“I’ll tell you right now, one of the great tragedies of my country is that Mr. Obama is looking the other way, because equally horrible things are happening to prisoners, to those we capture in Afghanistan,” Hersh said. “They’re being executed on the battlefield. It’s unbelievable stuff going on there that doesn’t necessarily get reported. Things don’t change.:

“What they’ve done in the field now is, they tell the troops, you have to make a determination within a day or two or so whether or not the prisoners you have, the detainees, are Taliban,” Hersh added. “You must extract whatever tactical intelligence you can get, as opposed to strategic, long-range intelligence, immediately. And if you cannot conclude they’re Taliban, you must turn them free.

“What it means is, and I’ve been told this anecdotally by five or six different people, battlefield executions are taking place,” he continued. “Well, if they can’t prove they’re Taliban, bam. If we don’t do it ourselves, we turn them over to the nearby Afghan troops and by the time we walk three feet the bullets are flying. And that’s going on now.”

The video of Hersh was uploaded to Michael Moore’s YouTube account Tuesday.

Hersh has a long history as an investigative journalist and worked for many years at The New York Times. In 1969, he broke the story of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam.

This video is from YouTube, broadcast May 11, 2010.

The US airbase at Bagram in Afghanistan contains a facility for detainees that is distinct from its main prison, the Red Cross has confirmed to the BBC.

Nine former prisoners have told the BBC that they were held in a separate building, and subjected to abuse.

The US military says the main prison, now called the Detention Facility in Parwan, is the only detention facility on the base.

However, it has said it will look into the abuse allegations made to the BBC.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said that since August 2009 US authorities have been notifying it of names of detained people in a separate structure at Bagram.

The ICRC is being notified by the US authorities of detained people within 14 days of their arrest,” a Red Cross spokesman said.

“This has been routine practice since August 2009 and is a development welcomed by the ICRC.”

The spokesman was responding to a question from the BBC about the existence of the facility, referred to by many former prisoners as the Tor Jail, which translates as “black jail”.

“We are being notified about persons at the Bagram Theatre Internment Facility [now Detention Facility in Parwan] since Feb 2008,” the ICRC spokesman added.

In recent weeks the BBC has logged the testimonies of nine prisoners who say they had been held in the so-called “Tor Jail”.

They told consistent stories of being held in isolation in cold cells where a light is on all day and night.

The men said they had been deprived of sleep by US military personnel there.

In response to these allegations, Vice Adm Robert Harward, in charge of US detentions in Afghanistan, denied the existence of such a facility or abuses.

He told the BBC that the Parwan Detention Facility was the only US detention centre in the country.

Source: BBC

For reporters covering the war crimes tribunal at Guantanamo Bay, the ground rules are pretty draconian: As a condition of attending, they have to sign agreements not to disclose anything the court deems secret; media officers review all photos and videos shot on the island; and there sure as hell ain’t no Tweeting from the super-secure courtroom.

Now the military has taken another great step toward enhancing the credibility of the proceedings by booting four reporters for violating a judge’s secrecy order. Their violation?  Publishing the name of a former military interrogator who was a witness at the hearing. The Pentagon has now barred Miami Herald reporter Carol Rosenberg, Toronto Star reporter Michelle Shephard, Globe and Mail reporter Paul Koring and CanWest news service reporter Steven Edwards from covering future military commissions at Gitmo.

And here’s the kicker: The identity of the interrogator had been widely reported before the trial. The name of the individual — known as “Interrogator No. 1″ in the courtroom at Gitmo — had been published during a 2005 court-martial in which he pleaded guilty to prisoner abuse in Afghanistan. And he had also allowed the use of his name in an interview with Shepard (!) in 2008.

Jeff Stein at Spy Talk has the reaction from several of the news organizations hit by the ban. “Absurd,” said Michael Cooke, editor of the Toronto Star. Mindy Marques, managing editor at Miami Herald, told Stein the paper would appeal.

But the most heartfelt account of all of this comes from our pal Spencer Ackerman, who’s been filing a fantastic series of dispatches from Gitmo. All four of those reporters, he notes, “are invaluable resources about this place and this trial — Michelle literally wrote the book on Omar Khadr — to their readers and their colleagues.”

Ackerman summed up the mood in the press center. “We’re all in the press center working,” he said. “We’ve already become darkly humorous, even, because that’s how reporters are. All of us in the press room are working on filing our stories for our next editions. As am I. Just under a somber cloud.”

A quick footnote on how arbitrary the press rules at Guantanamo Bay can be: On a stopover at Gitmo on my way to Haiti earlier this year, I was told that photos of the control tower — pictured here — were off limits. The image posted here, however, is from the Pentagon’s official website.

Another footnote: This isn’t Carol Rosenberg’s first run-in with touchy military minders. Last year, a Navy commander complained to the Herald that she had, uh, diminished his manhood.

Source:  Wired.com

George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld covered up that hundreds of innocent men were sent to the Guantánamo Bay prison camp because they feared that releasing them would harm the push for war in Iraq and the broader War on Terror, according to a new document obtained by The Times.

The accusations were made by Lawrence Wilkerson, a top aide to Colin Powell, the former Republican Secretary of State, in a signed declaration to support a lawsuit filed by a Guantánamo detainee. It is the first time that such allegations have been made by a senior member of the Bush Administration.

Colonel Wilkerson, who was General Powell’s chief of staff when he ran the State Department, was most critical of Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld. He claimed that the former Vice-President and Defence Secretary knew that the majority of the initial 742 detainees sent to Guantánamo in 2002 were innocent but believed that it was “politically impossible to release them”.

General Powell, who left the Bush Administration in 2005, angry about the misinformation that he unwittingly gave the world when he made the case for the invasion of Iraq at the UN, is understood to have backed Colonel Wilkerson’s declaration.

Colonel Wilkerson, a long-time critic of the Bush Administration’s approach to counter-terrorism and the war in Iraq, claimed that the majority of detainees — children as young as 12 and men as old as 93, he said — never saw a US soldier when they were captured. He said that many were turned over by Afghans and Pakistanis for up to $5,000. Little or no evidence was produced as to why they had been taken.

He also claimed that one reason Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld did not want the innocent detainees released was because “the detention efforts would be revealed as the incredibly confused operation that they were”. This was “not acceptable to the Administration and would have been severely detrimental to the leadership at DoD [Mr Rumsfeld at the Defence Department]”.

Referring to Mr Cheney, Colonel Wilkerson, who served 31 years in the US Army, asserted: “He had absolutely no concern that the vast majority of Guantánamo detainees were innocent … If hundreds of innocent individuals had to suffer in order to detain a handful of hardcore terrorists, so be it.”

He alleged that for Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld “innocent people languishing in Guantánamo for years was justified by the broader War on Terror and the small number of terrorists who were responsible for the September 11 attacks”.

He added: “I discussed the issue of the Guantánamo detainees with Secretary Powell. I learnt that it was his view that it was not just Vice-President Cheney and Secretary Rumsfeld, but also President Bush who was involved in all of the Guantánamo decision making.”

Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld, Colonel Wilkerson said, deemed the incarceration of innocent men acceptable if some genuine militants were captured, leading to a better intelligence picture of Iraq at a time when the Bush Administration was desperate to find a link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11, “thus justifying the Administration’s plans for war with that country”.

He signed the declaration in support of Adel Hassan Hamad, a Sudanese man who was held at Guantánamo Bay from March 2003 until December 2007. Mr Hamad claims that he was tortured by US agents while in custody and yesterday filed a damages action against a list of American officials.

Defenders of Guantánamo said that detainees began to be released as early as September 2002, nine months after the first prisoners were sent to the jail at the US naval base in Cuba. By the time Mr Bush left office more than 530 detainees had been freed.

A spokesman for Mr Bush said of Colonel Wilkerson’s allegations: “We are not going to have any comment on that.” A former associate to Mr Rumsfeld said that Mr Wilkerson’s assertions were completely untrue.

The associate said the former Defence Secretary had worked harder than anyone to get detainees released and worked assiduously to keep the prison population as small as possible. Mr Cheney’s office did not respond.

There are currently about 180 detainees left in the facility.

Source: Times UK

Equipment that jams cell phones will get its first federally sanctioned test inside a prison in Maryland this week, as state officials try to show Congress how the technology can prevent inmates from using the contraband devices to commit crimes, a governor’s spokesman said Tuesday.

The state wants to show the equipment can be used without interfering with emergency response and legitimate signals outside the prison perimeter, said Shaun Adamec, Gov. Martin O’Malley’s spokesman.

The Federal Communication Commission can only allow federal agencies — not state or local authorities — permission to jam cell phone signals. But a bill that passed the Senate and awaits action by the House would allow states to petition the FCC to block the use of cell phones from prisons.

Testing is set to begin Wednesday at the Federal Correctional Institution in Cumberland, Adamec said. The governor has strongly backed allowing states to use the jamming technology to battle the growing problem of cell phone use in prisons.

A bipartisan measure sponsored by Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, and Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., was approved by the Senate in September. A companion bill is in the House.

“I think all of this can help Senator Mikulski in her efforts to pass a bill, and hopefully if the FCC sees it coming they might just do it by regulation,” O’Malley said.

The tests are being conducted to provide more information about the technology as the legislation is being considered.

Prisons around the nation have been trying to stem rising problems from prison inmates using cell phones to coordinate criminal activity from behind bars. Officials in New Jersey even intercepted a conference call among gang members from different prisons who were plotting retaliation against another gang member.

Read more at: Feds allow prison phone jamming test (Ap)

New Zealand Jams cell phones in prison – Jamming the phone in the cell (New Zealand Department of Corrections)