Category Archives: Security and Human Rights

News and updates on security and human rights including the war on terror.

CIA 'Shocked' Prisoners They Sent To Libya Were Tortured

September 8, 2011 at 4:36 PM

Abdel Hakim Belhaj ©Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images

This past weekend has provided a few new insights into what Dick Cheney’s policy of ‘working the dark side’ actually entailed and offered a piquant example of the law of unintended consequences.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) was able to gain access to the headquarters of Libyan Intelligence after the organization’s building in Tripoli fell to rebel control. HRW’s researcher found files detailing the relationship that developed between the CIA and Gadhafi’s external intelligence service in the years after September 11th.

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Amnesty Activists Surprise Cheney at His 'Today Show' Appearance

August 31, 2011 at 3:03 PM

Closing shot after Cheney's Today Show interview

By Stephanie Velasco, Field Organizing Assistant for the Northeast Region

(New York, 8/30/11) I feel a bit like I’m wading through a dream world today. Maybe it’s because I—like several others who accompanied me at the Today Show—have been awake since around 3am. Or maybe it’s because I really am drifting into my own dream world where the idea of accountability for torture seems like an utterly simple task. After all, people are tweeting and blogging about it, so a concrete resolution must be soon to follow, right? Somebody pinch me, please.

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Dick Cheney's Ten Year War on Truth

August 31, 2011 at 9:44 AM
Amnesty activists protest Cheney's memoir at Department of State

Amnesty activists present Cheney's memoir as evidence of war crimes to the Department of Justice on August 30th. (Mladen Antonov/AFP/Getty Images)

On Tuesday former Vice-President Richard ‘Dick’ Cheney published his memoirs, In My Time, and, as widely expected, he has used this new platform to restate his wholehearted support for some of the most egregious human rights abuses committed by the Bush administration.

We thought it might be instructive to examine some of the claims he makes in his memoirs and see how well they stack up against the established facts.

In an interview with CNN in June 2005 Dick Cheney spun a rosy picture of conditions in Guantanamo:

“We spent a lot of money to build it. They’re very well treated there. They’re living in the tropics. They’re well fed. They’ve got everything they could possibly want.”

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Turk Bombings and Civilian Casualties in Northern Iraq

August 30, 2011 at 2:40 PM
Hundreds of Iraqi Kurds hold up torches

Iraqi Kurds hold up torches as they protest to denounce Turkey's latest bombing campaign on Kurdish separatist bases in northern Iraq. (Shawn Mohammed/AFP/Getty Images)

In the early afternoon of August 21, 2011 Hussain Mostafa Hassan, a 61-year-old Kurdish farmer from the village of Bolle near Mount Qandil on the Iraq-Iran border, was heading to the town of Rania, accompanied by six members of his family, when the car he was driving was bombed, reportedly by a warplane belonging to the Turkish armed forces.

Hussain Mostafa Hassan, his 43-year-old wife, Mer Haci Mam Kak, his daughter Rezan Hussain Mostafa, aged 20, together with her two daughters Sonia Shamal Hassan, aged two, and Sholin Shamel Hassan, aged six months, his son Zana Hussain Mostafa, aged 11, and his niece Oskar Khuzer Hassan, aged 10, all died as a result. Later their burnt bodies were taken to a hospital in Rania and buried the same day.

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Accountability for Torture: What Would @FakeCheney Say?

August 29, 2011 at 2:28 PM

Former Vice President Dick Cheney’s memoir In My Time is slated for release tomorrow, and the media — and former Cheney colleagues like Colin Powell — are already abuzz with anticipation.

Amnesty International can’t let Cheney, a man who called waterboarding a “no-brainer”, have the last word. Not only does our Security with Human Rights campaign plan to submit Cheney’s own prose as evidence of war crimes to the Department of Justice, we also set up a parody Twitter account, @FakeCheney, with Cheney’s hypothetical reactions to Amnesty’s unwelcome calls for accountability.

We’ve used the tool Storify to put together a play-by-play of @FakeCheney’s Twitter antics for social change.
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Close Gitmo and Help Solve the Debt Crisis

August 23, 2011 at 1:33 PM

(JTF Guantanamo photo by U.S. Air Force Senior Airman Gino Reyes)

It is not news to any taxpayer in the country that the United States is facing a debt crisis and that public spending is under scrutiny like never before, yet one decade-long drain on the public exchequer has so far escaped the financial meltdown completely unscathed: The Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp.

The main detention facility at Gitmo cost about $220 million to build and, according to the White House, estimated annual operating expenses come in at around $150 million.

To give you an idea of the kind of value for money this investment represents, the Bureau of Prisons noted last year that it cost $27,251 to incarcerate someone in the federal prison system for a year, as compared to an estimated cost of $650,000 per inmate at Guantanamo.

In additional to the hundreds of millions of dollars lavished on the detention facilities, still more money has been poured into the development of courtrooms for the Military Commissions which, since their establishment in 2006, have only heard six cases.

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Thousands of Unmarked Graves Discovered in Kashmir

August 23, 2011 at 9:52 AM

For more commentary of Kashmir and India as a whole, please follow me on twitter at http://twitter.com/acharya_dude. 

Following a report by a police investigation team, confirming the existence of over 2,700 unmarked graves containing bodies of people subject to enforced disappearances, urgent action needs to be taken including preserving the evidence and widening the investigation across Jammu and Kashmir.

Over 2,700 unmarked graves have been identified by the 11-member police team of the State Human Rights Commission (SHRC) in four districts of north Kashmir. Despite claims of the local police that the graves contained dead bodies of “unidentified militants”, the report points out that 574 bodies have been identified as disappeared locals – 17 of these have already been exhumed and shifted to family or village grave sites.

The police report concludes that there is “every probability” that the remaining over 2,100 unidentified graves “may contain the dead bodies of [persons subject to] enforced disappearances.” The report further clarifies that the only way to negate such a claim is to study the DNA profiles of the unidentified dead bodies and warns that in the absence of such tests, “it has to be assumed/ presumed that [the] State wants to remain silent deliberately to hide the Human Rights violations”.

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From Rory Stewart and Gerald Knaus, the Second Title in Amnesty International’s Global Ethics Book Series – Now Available!

August 15, 2011 at 10:34 AM

Bestselling author Rory Stewart and political economist Gerald Knaus examine the impact of large-scale interventions, from Kosovo to Afghanistan in Can Intervention Work?, the second title in the Amnesty International Global Ethics Book Series. Below, an excerpt:

Our experience suggests the following rules of thumb: that interveners must distinguish brutally between the factors they can control, the dangers they can avoid, and the dangers they can neither control nor avoid (whether permanent features of the place or specific to the crisis). An outsider can—indeed, should—provide generous resources, manpower, equipment, encouragement, and support. Courage, thought, and pre-planning are relevant. But they are not enough on their own. The best way of minimizing the danger of any intervention is to proceed carefully, to invest heavily in finding out about the specific context, particularly after the intervention, and to define concrete and not abstract goals.

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Turkey's Disappeared: The Pain of the Past and New Dangers

August 4, 2011 at 12:03 PM

Turkey, more than most countries, is a place where forgetting the past has become a central component of national culture.   This August 30, the International Day of the Disappeared, is a time when Turkey should renew its efforts at uncovering and facing some of the uglier pages of that past in the hopes of creating a freer, more democratic future.

Kurdish women hold portraits of their missing sons during a demonstration against the killing of 12 Kurdish rebels by security forces. © Mustafa Ozer/AFP/Getty Images

Although many mass graves in Turkey can be traced to the beginning of the century, a map recently published in the daily, Radikal, highlights the startling extent of such sites dating from the 1990’s, when the war between the Turkish state and the Kurdish nationalist, PKK, or Kurdish Workers’ Party, burned hottest.  The bodies of thousands were unceremoniously dumped into mass graves.

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Act Now or Gitmo Never Ends

August 3, 2011 at 3:30 PM

© US DoD

When Congress returns from its summer recess in September one of the first tasks on its agenda will be hammering out a final draft of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).  Unless we take action now this bill will lay the foundation for a permanent military prison camp at Guantanamo Bay.

As things currently stand, both the House and Senate have both produced language in their respective drafts of the NDAA that seeks to redefine the authority under which the President conducts the ‘war’ on al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and ‘associated forces’.

One lingering concern in Congress is that the original Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) passed in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks failed to create a framework under which to detain private individuals captured during military operations. SEE THE REST OF THIS POST