Obama Administration Fights to Allow Warrantless GPS Tracking
Tuesday, May 10, 2011

The Obama administration has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear a case involving warrantless tracking of suspects by law enforcement using GPS devices.

Federal prosecutors from the U.S. Department of Justice reached out to the Supreme Court after a three-judge panel of Democratic and Republican appointees in Washington D.C. unanimously threw out the conviction and life sentence of Antoine Jones, a nightclub owner convicted of operating a cocaine distribution ring. The judges objected to the month-long auto surveillance of Jones by police, ruling that law enforcement should have obtained a warrant before using a GPS tracker.

In many instances, suspects are not aware police are monitoring the movement of their cars unless they stumble upon the tiny GPS devices, usually hidden behind automobile bumpers.

In addition to the Jones case, an Arab-American college student, Yasir Afifi, has filed a lawsuit against the government alleging the FBI violated his privacy rights by placing a GPS device on his car without a warrant. Afifi contends he was targeted simply because of his ethnic background. -Noel Brinkerhoff …source

Bahraini State Terror Continues

Friday, 13 May 2011 07:47
By Stephen Lendman

Bahraini-crackdownBahraini and Saudi security forces continue daily terror in Bahrain, human rights groups condemning the violence, including Amnesty International (AI), providing regular updates.
[excerpt]
On May 12, the Bahrain Center for Human Rights (BCHR) confirmed over 900 arrested, disappeared, and/or tortured, as well as at least 31 deaths. Most participated in peaceful protests. Others were engaged in routine daily activities, but were arrested anyway in broad sweeps.

Among the dead was a 15-year old boy shot in the eye with a rubber bullet while playing near his home. His father said he was also pistol-whipped on his neck, causing it to snap. “I picked him up, and I could hear him breathing in pain,” he said. “He took his last breath and then he did not breathe again. He died in my arms.”

A 71-year old, Isa Mohammed, died of asphyxiation in his home from heavy tear gas firing. His family’s plea for medical care was denied. Others died in custody from beatings and torture.

BCHR called torture “institutionalized within the Bahraini judicial and penal systems.” A 2010 Omar Ahmed Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC) report titled, “Broken Promises: Human Rights, Constitutionalism and Socio-economic Exclusion in Bahrain” explained abuses and unfulfilled reforms. Most Bahrainis are politically and economically deprived. Poverty and unemployment are extreme. High level corruption is extensive. Past confrontations between protesters and security forces resulted in violence, arrests, torture, other abuses and deaths. Oppressive measures are taken to prevent democratic reforms, including restricting free expression, assembly and association.

Moreover, human rights groups accuse authorities of “arbitrarily detaining opposition figures and….activists, subjecting (them) to torture and ill-treatment.” Overall, monarchical rule represents failed constitutionalism and state cronyism, institutionalized by security force harshness, enforced through brutal crackdowns, including widespread use of torture.

Explicitly prohibited under international law, Chapter III, Article 19, Clause (d) of Bahrain’s 2002 Constitution also states:

“No person shall be subjected to physical or mental torture, or inducement, or undignified treatment, (and any) statement or confession proved (made) under torture, inducement, or such treatment, or the threat thereof, shall be null and void.”

The Arab Charter on Human Rights also bans torture and other abuses and ill-treatment. It’s strictly prohibited at all times, under all conditions, with no allowed exceptions. …more

Testimony of Joe Stork before the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission
Hearing on the Human Rights Situation in Bahrain
May 13, 2011

The efforts of the Obama administration to transform and rehabilitate the role of the Human Rights Council are badly undermined by its deafening silence when it comes to Bahrain.
Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch

Congressman McGovern and other Distinguished Commission Members:

Thank you very much for holding this important hearing on the human rights situation in Bahrain, and for inviting me to participate.

Human rights conditions in Bahrain have grown increasingly grave since mid-March, when the government violently put down pro-democracy and anti-government street protests. Since then, we have seen an unrelenting official campaign of punitive retribution against Bahrainis who participated in or otherwise supported the protests.

This campaign has included the apparently arbitrary detention of more than a thousand persons, of whom some 630 remain in detention. Almost all have had no contact with lawyers or a brief phone call with families and their whereabouts and well-being are unknown, including elected members of parliament as well as doctors and other professionals. This pattern of incommunicado detention is all the more worrisome in that in April four persons died in custody, some apparently as a result of torture and others from medical neglect. Early this week, 14 opposition activists were brought before a special military court, at least one of them bearing unmistakable signs of torture.

More than 1200 workers and employees have been summarily dismissed from their jobs apparently because of participation in the protests, in violation of Bahrain’s labor laws as well as international standards. Several professional associations, such as the Teachers Society and the Bahrain Medical Society have been suspended or effectively taken over by the authorities. The government engineered a hostile takeover of the country’s only independent newspaper, expelled this week the Reuters correspondent who was Bahrain’s only in-country international journalist, and have denied access to other foreign journalists wishing to report from the country. Meanwhile state-controlled Bahrain TV and pro-government print media routinely vilify pro-democracy groups as traitors operating at the behest of Iran and feature commentaries fomenting hatred against the Shia community – who comprise the majority of Bahrainis and majority of protesters.

It is important to note that this fierce and sometimes deadly repression has continued – and indeed intensified – despite the fact that since mid-March the government has been fully in control of the security situation. In Bahrain people continue to face arbitrary arrest, and effectively be “disappeared” and subjected to torture, many weeks after the protests have been suppressed. This is not Libya, where rebel forces have taken up arms against the government, or Syria, where thousands of protesters take to the streets week after week in city after city. This repression is purely vindictive and punitive.

And unfortunately, in contrast to Syria, Libya, and other sites of unrest and repression, the United States government has had little to say about any of this, at least in public, and those few words have tended to be general in the extreme. …more

Activists decry U.S. silence on Bahrain’s crackdown
By WILLIAM DOUGLAS
McClatchy Newspapers

Human rights activists at a congressional hearing Friday implored the Obama administration to publicly and forcefully denounce Bahrain’s violent and abusive crackdown against anti-government protesters.

The only problem was nobody from the administration attended the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission hearing to listen to the pleas. Two top State Department officials – Political Affairs Undersecretary William Burns and Jeffrey Feltman, an assistant secretary in State’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs – were invited to testify, but didn’t show up. “I was expecting at least one, possibly two witnesses from the State Department to testify,” said Rep. James McGovern, D-Mass., the bipartisan commission’s s co-chair. “Regrettably, over the past 72 hours, we were informed that no one in any of the bureaus is available today.” A State Department official said Burns and Feltman were unable to testify because of scheduling conflicts.

Human rights activists complained that the White House has been publicly mum amid reports that Bahrain’s Sunni-led government, a key U.S. ally in the Middle East, is waging a violent and bloody crackdown – destroying Shiite mosques, illegally detaining and torturing dissenters, attacking medical personnel to prevent them from treating wounded protestors, abusing women and girls, and expelling journalists from the island nation. Joe Stork, the deputy director for the Middle East and North Africa division of Human Rights Watch, told the panel that about 1,000 people have been arbitrarily arrested in Bahrain since March, with about 630 still being detained.

“What is most disturbing is the fact that we don’t know where these people are, neither do their family members,” Stork said. “The use of incommunicado detention raises very serious concerns about torture.” …more