Graham Peebles - Incarcerated Inside Israel Palestinians Tortured And Isolated

Detention without trial, the presumption of guilt, denial of family visits, solitary confinement, torture, violent interrogation, and denial of access to appropriate health care, such is the Israeli judicial system and prison confinement experienced by Palestinian men, women and indeed children.

Currently there are, according to B'T selem “4,484 Palestinians – security detainees, confined in Israeli prisons.” Family contact is virtually impossible for prisoners, most of who are held inside Israel . This contravenes international law in the form of the universally trumpeted Fourth Geneva Convention (Article's 49 & 76), consistently violated and disregarded by Israel .

International laws – legally binding upon Israel , who are not above the rule of law, must be respected and enforced. Richard Falk UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, in the UN news 2/5/12 called “on the international community to ensure that Israel complies with international human rights laws and norms in its treatment of Palestinian prisoners.” The UN makes its feelings clear in the ‘Question of Palestine Administrative Detention' report (UNQAP) when it says, Israel “has historically ratified international agreements regarding human rights protection, whilst at the same time refusing to apply the agreements within the Occupied Palestinian Territory , attempting to create legal justifications for its illegal actions.” A comprehensive list of international legally binding agreements dutifully signed, ratified and consequently disregarded by various Israeli governments are cited by the UN, which sits hands tied, impotent it seems in the face of Israel's illegal and violent occupation (a fact that cannot be stated often or loudly enough), submissive to the imperialist Godfather. America .

Since the six-day war in 1967 an estimated 750,000 Palestinians have been incarcerated in Israeli prisons, including 23,000 women and 25,000 children. This constitutes, Richard Falk states “approximately 20 per cent of the total Palestinian population in the occupied territory or 40 per cent of the Palestinian male population there.” Staggering figures of those personally imprisoned, whist a whole nation is held captive intimidated by an illegal occupying power upon their homeland.

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http://www.countercurrents.org/peebles120812.htm

Dina Rasor - Prison Industries: "Don't Let Society Improve or We Lose Business"

One out of every 100 people in the United States is imprisoned. Even though we are 5 percent of the world's population, we have 25 percent of the prisoners in the world. We are number one in the world in the number of people we imprison - we even beat China. A normal reaction to this situation would be to try to reform our laws, our judicial system - including sentencing - our prison system and our society so that we would not have the disconcerting distinction of being the number-one jailer in the world.

Instead, in the past decade, there has been a movement to privatize more and more of our state and federal prisons to save money (which has not materialized) and ease overcrowding under the pressure of the courts. This has led to a wide world of influence peddling, self-dealing and lobbying while preying on a captured group of people to fill prison beds. Just as I have feared that privatizing the logistics of war will encourage private war-service industries to lobby for a hot war or long occupation to keep their industries viable, there has emerged a group of prison industries, state and federal legislators, and other players who will continue to benefit from our disgraceful ranking as the world's largest warden.

There are two very large and influential prison companies in the United States who are manipulating the system to make sure they have plenty of business: The GEO Group (formerly Wackenhut) and Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). In the first part of this two-part series, I will explore The GEO Group's influence peddling; next week, I will look at CCA.

Read More:

http://truth-out.org/news/item/8731-prison-industries-dont-let-society-improve-or-we-lose-business-part-i

Alain Sherter - Jailed for $280: The Return of Debtors' Prisons

How did breast cancer survivor Lisa Lindsay end up behind bars? She didn't pay a medical bill -- one the Herrin, Ill., teaching assistant was told she didn't owe. "She got a $280 medical bill in error and was told she didn't have to pay it," The Associated Press reports. "But the bill was turned over to a collection agency, and eventually state troopers showed up at her home and took her to jail in handcuffs."

Although the U.S. abolished debtors' prisons in the 1830s, more than a third of U.S. states allow the police to haul people in who don't pay all manner of debts, from bills for health care services to credit card and auto loans. In parts of Illinois, debt collectors commonly use publicly funded courts, sheriff's deputies, and country jails to pressure people who owe even small amounts to pay up, according to the AP.

Under the law, debtors aren't arrested for nonpayment, but rather for failing to respond to court hearings, pay legal fines, or otherwise showing "contempt of court" in connection with a creditor lawsuit. That loophole has lawmakers in the Illinois House of Representatives concerned enough to pass a bill in March that would make it illegal to send residents of the state to jail if they can't pay a debt. The measure awaits action in the senate.

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http://finance.yahoo.com/news/jailed-for--280--the-return-of-debtors--prisons.html

John W. Whitehead - Jailing Americans for Profit: The Rise of the Prison Industrial Complex

“Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today – perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system – in prison, on probation, or on parole – than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under ‘correctional supervision’ in America – more than six million – than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.”

~ Adam Gopnik, “The Caging of America”

In an age when freedom is fast becoming the exception rather than the rule, imprisoning Americans in private prisons run by mega-corporations has turned into a cash cow for big business. At one time, the American penal system operated under the idea that dangerous criminals needed to be put under lock and key in order to protect society. Today, as states attempt to save money by outsourcing prisons to private corporations, the flawed yet retributive American “system of justice” is being replaced by an even more flawed and insidious form of mass punishment based upon profit and expediency.

As author Adam Gopnik reports for the New Yorker:

[A] growing number of American prisons are now contracted out as for-profit businesses to for-profit companies. The companies are paid by the state, and their profit depends on spending as little as possible on the prisoners and the prisons. It’s hard to imagine any greater disconnect between public good and private profit: the interest of private prisons lies not in the obvious social good of having the minimum necessary number of inmates but in having as many as possible, housed as cheaply as possible.

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http://lewrockwell.com/whitehead/whitehead42.1.html

Death Penalty 2011: Alarming Levels of Executions in the Few Countries that Kill

Countries that carried out executions in 2011 did so at an alarming rate but those employing capital punishment have decreased by more than a third compared to a decade ago, Amnesty International found in its annual review of death sentences and executions.

Only 10 percent of countries in the world, 20 out of 198, carried out executions last year.

People were executed or sentenced to death for a range of offences including adultery and sodomy in Iran, blasphemy in Pakistan, sorcery in Saudi Arabia, the trafficking of human bones in the Republic of Congo, and drug offences in more than 10 countries. Methods of execution in 2011 included beheading, hanging, lethal injection and shooting. Some 18,750 people remained under sentence of death at the end of 2011 and at least 676 people were executed worldwide.

But these figures do not include the thousands of executions that Amnesty International believes were carried out in China, where the numbers are suppressed. Nor do they account for the probable extent of Iran’s use of the death penalty – Amnesty International has had credible reports of substantial numbers of executions not officially acknowledged.

Read More:

http://www.amnesty.org/en/news/death-penalty-2011-alarming-levels-executions-few-countries-kill-2012-03-27

Susoni - CGI: U.S. judges' tragic kickback greed exposes prison system profiteering

Sad state of affairs when those we elect to office are the real crooks.

Rumor 
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http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/forum.cgi?read=228644

Chris Hedges - Thank You for Standing Up

I spent Friday morning sitting on a wooden bench in a fourth-floor courtroom in the New York Criminal Court in Manhattan. I was waiting to be sentenced for “disturbing the peace” and “refusing to obey a lawful order” during an Occupy demonstration in front of Goldman Sachs in November.

Those sentenced before me constituted the usual fare of the court. They were poor people of color accused of mostly petty crimes—drug possession, thefts, shoplifting, trespassing because they were homeless and needed a place to sleep, inappropriate touching, grand larceny and violation of probation. They were escorted out of a backroom by a police officer, stood meekly before the judge with their hands cuffed behind them, were hastily defended by a lawyer clutching a few folders, and were sentenced. Ten days in jail. Sixty days in jail. Six months in jail. A steady stream of convictions.  My sentence, by comparison, was slight. I was given an ACD, or “adjournment in contemplation of dismissal,” which means that if I am not arrested in the next six months my case is dismissed. If I am arrested during this period of informal probation the old charge will be added to the new one before I am sentenced.

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http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/thank_you_for_standing_up_20120123/

Marjorie Cohn - Close the Guantánamo Gulag

Travelers to Cuba and music lovers are familiar with the song “Guantanamera”— literally, the girl from Guantánamo. With lyrics by José Martí, the father of Cuban independence, Guantanamera is probably the most widely known Cuban song. But Guantánamo is even more famous now for its U.S. military prison. Where “Guantanamera” is a powerful expression of the beauty of Cuba, “Gitmo” has become a powerful symbol of human rights violations—so much so that Amnesty International described it as "the gulag of our times."

That description can be traced to January 2002, when the base received its first 20 prisoners in shackles. General Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned they were "very dangerous people who would gnaw hydraulic lines in the back of a C-17 to bring it down." We now know that a large portion of the 750 plus men and boys held there posed no threat to the United States. In fact, only five percent were captured by the United States; most were picked up by the Northern Alliance, Pakistani intelligence officers, or tribal warlords, and many were sold for cash bounties.

The Guantánamo story starts in 1903, when the U.S. Army occupied Cuba after its war of independence against Spain. The Platt Amendment, which granted the United States the right to intervene in Cuba, was included in the Cuban Constitution as a prerequisite for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the rest of Cuba. That provision provided the basis for the 1903 Agreement on Coaling and Naval Stations, which gave the United States the right to use Guantánamo Bay “exclusively as coaling or naval stations, and for no other purpose.”

Read More:

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28677

Call to Action - Bill of Rights Defense

On today's Gary Null Show, we spoke with Shaheed Buttar, the executive director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee and the People’s Campaign for the Constitution which aims to defend civil liberties, constitutional rights and the rules of law threatened by the war on terror. You can hear the full episode below:

Please visit the BoRDC sub-site specifically targeting the National Defense Authorization Act and join the fight against this travesty:

Our nation celebrates Bill of Rights Day every December 15, the anniversary of the ratification of the first ten amendments to the Constitution.

But on December 1—just two weeks before Bill of Rights Day—Congress passed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The NDAA allows the indefinite military detention of US citizens without trial. It contains the most oppressive national security powers we’ve seen in our lifetimes, easily worse than any Bush administration policy.

Join the Bill of Rights Defense Committee in standing against the military detention provisions of the NDAA.

Take action on the NDAA

1. Sign our petition

Add your voice to the thousands of Americans saying "NO!" to indefinite detention without trial.

Sign our petition against the NDAA.

We also have a special petition for military service members, veterans, and retired officers because those voices are uniquely important on this issue.

2. Learn more about the NDAA

Our toolkit on the NDAA includes information on why the NDAA is so dangerous, talking points about the bill, and ideas for anti-NDAA events and actions you can hold in your community.

3. Hold an event in your community

Bill of Rights Day is just around the corner: Thursday, December 15. Standing up for the right to trial, separation of powers, and presumption of innocence is a great way to celebrate the Bill of Rights.

Local actions can help demonstrate widespread opposition to this dangerous law and shift the discussion in Washington. Our toolkit offers a wide range of ideas about what kinds of events you might host.

Tell us about your event and we'll help publicize it!

We also have a full-page flier and quarter-page flier you can use to publicize your event.

Matt Apuzzo - Inside Romania's Secret CIA Prison

Published on Thursday, December 8, 2011 by Associated Press

http://www.ajc.com/news/nation-world/ap-exclusive-inside-romanias-1254038.html

by Matt Apuzzo

WASHINGTON — In northern Bucharest, in a busy residential neighborhood minutes from the center of Romania's capital city, is a secret that the Romanian government has tried for years to protect.

For years, the CIA used a government building — codenamed Bright Light — as a makeshift prison for its most valuable detainees. There, it held al-Qaida operatives Khalid Sheik Mohammad, the mastermind of 9/11, and others in a basement prison before they were ultimately transferred to Guantanamo Bay in 2006, according to former U.S. intelligence officials familiar with the location and inner workings of the prison.

Click to read more ...