I can't say a thing given the my nation's government and what it has done.
"Wife says Chinese lawyer ill-treated in prison" Associated Press August 17, 2014
BEIJING — The wife of Chinese human rights attorney Gao Zhisheng said Saturday that her husband was kept in isolation for 2½ years and starved before his release from prison a week ago.
He wasn't on a hunger strike like the guys who will never be released from Gitmo?
Geng He said by telephone from San Francisco that Gao lost about 50 pounds while in prison and now can barely eat or talk.
In 2006, Gao was convicted of subversion and released several times only to be taken away again without explanation by security agents.
Kind of like a rendition, huh?
His wife said he can eat only soft food because he has lost several teeth and others are loose.
She added that he could hardly speak when he communicated by telephone from her sister’s house in the city of Urumqi in far western Xinjiang province. State security agents were watching him inside the sister’s house, she said.
No GPS ankle device?
‘‘He didn’t respond and then the connection went dead,’’ Geng said. ‘‘My sister told me he’s been in a dark room for so long eating just a few vegetables and buns. You have to be patient when you talk to him.’’
The 50-year-old attorney won international renown for his courage defending members of the outlawed spiritual movement Falun Gong and fighting for the land rights of farmers.
After he was detained, he upset authorities by publicly denouncing the torture he said he had suffered.
Geng and Gao’s attorney, Jarod Genser, are asking that he be allowed to leave China and join his wife and two children in California. His family fled China in 2009 and won political asylum in the United States.
Related: Crazy Chen
Cut the crap, will ya'?
‘‘He’s been in a small cell that’s dimly lit with no natural light,’’ Genser said. ‘‘The guards had strict instructions to not talk to him. He had no reading materials, nothing in his cell other than his bed and the toilet, a hole in the ground. Under those circumstances, I think any person would be traumatically affected.’’
Did they waterboard him?
Genser said he was told Gao had been tortured but didn’t have any details about his treatment.
The first thing Gao needs, his wife said, is to fix his teeth so he can eat and regain weight. She said he has so far put on just a few pounds since his Aug. 7 release.
‘‘I’m thankful for everyone who’s showed concern for Gao and for human rights in China,’’ Geng said. ‘‘I really hope he can come and live in freedom.’’
Is that what he thinks he will find here?
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He's not Muslim, is he?
"New light on black sites; Foreign courts crack down on US-led human rights abuses" by Joshua Eaton | August 17, 2014
"We tortured some folks.”
Who is we because I didn't touch anybody.
President Obama’s words were all the more chilling for their
casualness. He was speaking to reporters on Aug. 1 about a Central
Intelligence Agency program that disappeared terrorism suspects into
secret CIA prisons abroad for “enhanced interrogation.” That program was
just one aspect of the post-9/11 global war on terror, an ongoing
conflict that also includes the mass surveillance programs revealed by
Edward Snowden over the last year. Both government initiatives share a
common thread: They offshore massive human rights abuses.
It is well-documented that since 2001, American authorities have used
overseas black sites and foreign data collection as legal gray areas
for things that would clearly be illegal if done to US citizens on
American soil. This practice increases the chances that officials who
violate the spirit of the law — or even break its letter outright — will
never be prosecuted in an American court.
But such a widespread global operation requires the participation of
other governments, and that is where human rights advocates may find new
inroads. Foreign leaders and international courts have increasingly
begun to step in to inform the public and hold the United States
accountable for abuses. It gives hope that the United States itself will
re-examine these practices and put an end to them altogether.
A week prior to Obama’s comment, the
European Court of Human Rights found Poland complicit in torture for
allowing the CIA to hold and interrogate two detainees at the country’s
Stare Kiejkuty military base. Officials believed the suspects — Abd
al-Rahim al-Nashiri, 49, and Abu Zubaydah, 43 — were top Al Qaida
operatives. Both men are still under indefinite detention at Guantanamo
Bay.
“Poland had facilitated the whole process, had created the conditions
for it to happen and had made no attempt to prevent it from occurring,”
the court explained. “Accordingly, the Polish State . . . had to be
regarded as responsible for the violation of the applicants’ rights
committed on its territory.”
Stare Kiejkuty was just one of many secret black sites in Asia,
Africa, and Europe where CIA detainees faced techniques like
waterboarding, forcible stripping, mock executions, and stress
positions, according to a 2005 Washington Post expose by Dana Priest and subsequent reports.
But before the CIA could torture detainees, the US Justice Department
had to bypass the laws meant to protect such suspects. Officials
decided that American territories, including military bases, carry legal
constraints that foreign soil does not. The agency and its contractors
clearly wanted to be where they would have the greatest chance of
impunity. They had to offshore.
While the CIA sent its dirty work to places like Poland, Thailand,
and Romania, the National Security Agency was able to find a way to
circumvent American law from the comfort of its headquarters at Fort
Meade, Md. The agency needs a warrant to target a US citizen or
permanent resident, but it is free to keep and search any American data
it “incidentally” collects during foreign surveillance. A recent Washington Post investigation
based on a cache of ostensibly foreign NSA intercepts found that
“nearly half” of the documents mentioned Americans. Nine out of 10
accounts mentioned in the files were not ones that the agency was
targeting.
The NSA is also allowed to share this incidentally collected American
data with the CIA, the FBI, and the National Counterterrorism Center.
According to a June report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, those agencies search Americans’ data thousands of times per year — all without a warrant.
From torture to mass surveillance, the US intelligence apparatus has
relied on complicity by foreign governments to carry out missions that
most Americans would never tolerate back home. That may satisfy the
Justice Department’s contrived legal analyses, but the CIA’s foreign
black sites and the NSA’s “incidental” warrantless spying clearly go
against the deepest values our country claims. That is true no matter
where these programs are located or under what legal authority they
operate. The longer these practices go on, the less and less the
credibility the United States has as a democracy.
The American government has so far refused to prosecute CIA torture
or to close the loopholes in surveillance law. As the European Court of
Human Rights’ ruling proves, however, the rest of the world is going
ahead without us.
In 2009, an Italian court convicted in absentia 23 American officials
who abducted Egyptian cleric Abu Omar off the streets of Milan in 2003
and rendered him to Egypt, where he spent four years enduring torture
while being held without trial. And last year, Brazil and Germany
launched inquiries into NSA surveillance on their countries’ leaders and
citizens. Those inquiries are admittedly weak, but in time expect
strong action on mass surveillance from international courts and foreign
governments.
No longer willing to let the United States hide behind national
security, the world is beginning to unearth our crimes and try them in
open courts. Since scores of countries cooperated with CIA torture and
NSA surveillance, it seems unlikely that Poland and Italy will be alone
for very long.
Ultimately, however, it is Americans who will have to rethink the
hard distinction between foreign and domestic if we want to rein in the
global war on terror and prevent these kinds of abuses in the future.
That will take more than just admitting that we tortured some folks.
Reading and posting that was torture.
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Related: Making This Post About Syria Disappear
That Libyan guy already has (he's calling for help now).
