Bahraini activists sentenced to 700 years in prison in September: report
09 October, 2013 – Tehran Times

According to a report released by al-Wefaq National Islamic Society, over the past month, Bahrain has seen the highest levels of violence used by the regime since the uprising began in 2011.

Al-Wefaq has documented 1,900 cases of human rights violations in a report only in the month of September, including incidents in which regime forces used excessive force or torture.

According to the report, last month, 214 anti-regime protesters were arrested, including two women and 40 children, the highest number since the revolution began.

The al-Wefaq report also said that 111 activists, who were convicted by a Bahraini court and given sentences of up to 15 years, were tried based on fabricated charges, Press TV reported.

On Monday, Bahrainis took to the streets in the northeastern island of Sitra for the sixth consecutive day to denounce the regime’s unrelenting crackdown on pro-democracy protests.

People from all walks of life attended marches in Sitra to demand reforms and an end to the decades-old rule of the Al Khalifa dynasty.

Earlier in the day, a court in Bahrain sentenced nine anti-regime activists to life in prison after convicting them of being allegedly involved in an attack in November 2011 in the capital Manama.

Four of the defendants, who were present at the court, had previously said that they were subjected to torture and mistreatment in solitary confinement.

Five other defendants, tried in absentia, were handed additional 10-year jail terms for failing to hand themselves in.

The verdict brought to 104 the number of pro-democracy protesters sentenced to lengthy jail terms in Bahrain.

Similar rallies were also held in the villages of Nuwaidrat and Samahich close to Sitra, where protesters expressed solidarity with the detainees and condemned the unjust sentences.

Since mid-February 2011, thousands of pro-democracy protesters have staged numerous demonstrations in the streets of Bahrain, calling for the Al Khalifa royal family to relinquish power.

According to local sources, scores of people have been killed and hundreds arrested.

Physicians for Human Rights says doctors and nurses have been detained, tortured, or disappeared because they have “evidence of atrocities committed by the authorities, security forces, and riot police” in the crackdown on anti-government protesters. …source

Petition: Drop the Charges Against CUNY Protesters

The NYPD violently arrested six CUNY students protesting David Petraeus’ new professorship at the Honors College, and charged them with disorderly conduct, riot, resisting arrest and obstruction of governmental administration, for which they could face serious jail time. Video obtained by Firedoglake’s Dissenter blog shows their use of force was completely unprovoked.

Can you please sign the following petition asking Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. to drop all charges against the students? PETITION HERE

Students and faculty at the City University of New York have the constitutional right to engage in peaceful protest against David Petraeus’ professorship at the Honors College. Recent video of NYPD officers engaging in outrageous and abusive acts of force against these protesters cannot go unchallenged. We, the undersigned, demand all charges against these individuals be dropped immediately and for the arresting officers be investigated for their conduct immediately.

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20 Extraordinary Facts about CIA Extraordinary Rendition and Secret Detention
5 February, 2013 – by Jonathan Horowitz & Stacy Cammarano – Open Society Justice Initiative

After the 9-11 attacks against the United States, the Central Intelligence Agency conspired with dozens of governments to build a secret extraordinary rendition and detention program that spanned the globe. Extraordinary rendition is the transfer—without legal process—of a detainee to the custody of a foreign government for purposes of detention and interrogation.

The program was intended to protect America. But, as described in the Open Society Justice Initiative’s new report, it stripped people of their most basic rights, facilitated gruesome forms of torture, at times captured the wrong people, and debased the United States’ human rights reputation world-wide.

To date, the United States and the vast majority of the other governments involved—more than 50 in all—have refused to acknowledge their participation, compensate the victims, or hold accountable those most responsible for the program and its abuses. Here are 20 additional facts from the new report that expose just how brutal and mistaken the program was:

1. At least 136 individuals were reportedly extraordinarily rendered or secretly detained by the CIA and at least 54 governments reportedly participated in the CIA’s secret detention and extraordinary rendition program; classified government documents may reveal many more.

2. A series of Department of Justice memoranda authorized torture methods that the CIA applied on detainees. The Bush Administration referred to these methods as “enhanced interrogation techniques.” “Enhanced interrogation techniques” included “walling” (quickly pulling the detainee forward and then thrusting him against a flexible false wall), “water dousing,” “waterboarding,” “stress positions” (forcing the detainee to remain in body positions designed to induce physical discomfort), “wall standing” (forcing the detainee to remain standing with his arms outstretched in front of him so that his fingers touch a wall five four to five feet away and support his entire body weight), “cramped confinement” in a box, “insult slaps,” (slapping the detainee on the face with fingers spread), “facial hold” (holding a detainee’s head temporarily immobile during interrogation with palms on either side of the face), “attention grasp” (grasping the detainee with both hands, one hand on each side of the collar opening, and quickly drawing him toward the interrogator), forced nudity, sleep deprivation while being vertically shackled, and dietary manipulation.

3. President Bush has stated that about a hundred detainees were held under the CIA secret detention program, about a third of whom were questioned using “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

4. The CIA’s Office of Inspector General has reportedly investigated a number of “erroneous renditions” in which the CIA had abducted and detained the wrong people. A CIA officer told the Washington Post: “They picked up the wrong people, who had no information. In many, many cases there was only some vague association” with terrorism.

5. German national Khaled El-Masri was seized in Macedonia because he had been mistaken for an Al Qaeda suspect with a similar name. He was held incommunicado and abused in Macedonia and in secret CIA detention in Afghanistan. On December 13, 2012, the European Court of Human Rights held that Macedonia had violated El-Masri’s rights under the European Convention on Human Rights, and found that his ill-treatment by the CIA at Skopje airport in Macedonia amounted to torture.

6. Wesam Abdulrahman Ahmed al-Deemawi was seized in Iran and held for 77 days in the CIA’s “Dark Prison” in Afghanistan. He was later held in Bagram for 40 days and subjected to sleep deprivation, hung from the ceiling by his arms in the “strappado” position, threatened by dogs, made to watch torture videos, and subjected to sounds of electric sawing accompanied by cries of pain.

7. Several former interrogators and counterterrorism experts have confirmed that “coercive interrogation” is ineffective. Col. Steven Kleinman, Jack Cloonan, and Matthew Alexander stated in a letter to Congress that that U.S. interrogation policy “came with heavy costs” and that “[k]ey allies, in some instances, refused to share needed intelligence, terrorists attacks increased world wide, and Al Qaeda and like-minded groups recruited a new generation of Jihadists.”

8. After being extraordinarily rendered by the United States to Egypt in 2002, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under threat of torture at the hands of Egyptian officials, fabricated information relating to Iraq’s provision of chemical and biological weapons training to Al Qaeda. In 2003, then Secretary of State Colin Powell relied on this fabricated information in his speech to the United Nations that made the case for war against Iraq.

9. Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded at least 83 times by the CIA. FBI interrogator Ali Soufan testified before Congress that he elicited “actionable intelligence” from Zubaydah using rapport-building techniques but that Zubaydah “shut down” after he was waterboarded.

10. Torture is prohibited in all circumstances under international law and allegations of torture must be investigated and criminally punished. The United States prosecuted Japanese interrogators for “waterboarding” U.S. prisoners during World War II.

11. On November 20, 2002, Gul Rahman froze to death in a secret CIA prison in Afghanistan called the “Salt Pit,” after a CIA case officer ordered guards to strip him naked, chain him to the concrete floor, and leave him there overnight without blankets.

12. Fatima Bouchar was abused by the CIA, and by persons believed to be Thai authorities, for several days in the Bangkok airport. Bouchar reported she was chained to a wall and not fed for five days, at a time when she was four-and-a-half months pregnant. After that she was extraordinarily rendered to Libya.

13. Syria was one of the “most common destinations for rendered suspects,” as were Egypt and Jordan. One Syrian prison facility contained individual cells that were roughly the size of coffins. Detainees report incidents of torture involving a chair frame used to stretch the spine (the “German chair”) and beatings.

14. Muhammed al-Zery and Ahmed Agiza, while seeking asylum in Sweden, were extraordinarily rendered to Egypt where they were tortured with shocks to their genitals. Al-Zery was also forced to lie on an electrified bed frame.

15. Abu Omar, an Italian resident, was abducted from the streets of Milan, extraordinarily rendered to Egypt, and secretly detained for fourteen months while Egyptian agents interrogated and tortured him by subjecting him to electric shocks. An Italian court convicted in absentia 22 CIA agents and one Air Force pilot for their roles in the extraordinary rendition of Abu Omar.

16. Known black sites—secret prisons run by the CIA on foreign soil—existed in Afghanistan, Lithuania, Morocco, Poland, Romania, and Thailand.

17. Abd al Rahim al Nashiri was secretly detained in various black sites. While secretly detained in Poland, U.S. interrogators subjected al Nashiri to a mock execution with a power drill as he stood naked and hooded; racked a semi-automatic handgun close to his head as he sat shackled before them; held him in “standing stress positions;” and threatened to bring in his mother and sexually abuse her in front of him.

18. President Obama’s 2009 Executive Order repudiating torture does not repudiate the CIA extraordinary rendition program. It was specifically crafted to preserve the CIA’s authority to detain terrorist suspects on a short-term, transitory basis prior to rendering them to another country for interrogation or trial.

19. President Obama’s 2009 Executive Order also established an interagency task force to review interrogation and transfer policies and issue recommendations on “the practices of transferring individuals to other nations.” The interagency task force report was issued in 2009, but continues to be withheld from the public. It appears that the U.S. intends to continue to rely on anti-torture diplomatic assurances from recipient countries and post-transfer monitoring of detainee treatment, but those methods were not effective safeguards against torture for Maher Arar, who was tortured in Syria, or Ahmed Agiza and Muhammed al-Zery, who were tortured in Egypt.

20. The Senate Select Intelligence Committee has completed a 6,000 page report that further details the CIA detention and interrogation operations with access to classified sources. However, the report itself remains classified.

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The United-States abduct one of their ex-agents in Libya
Voltaire Network – 10 October, 2013

President Obama gave the order to abduct Abu Anas al-Libi (a.k.a Nazih Abd al-Hamid al-Ruqhay), on October 6th 2013 in Libya. A team of the Delta Force succeeded without making any victims.

Even supposing that al-Libi is a legitimate target for the US, as said by the Secretary of State John Kerry, this kidnapping constitutes a violation of international law and of Libyan sovereignty.

In 1995, the jihadist, having joined Osama Bin Laden in Soudan, had participated in an failed attempt to assassinate the Egyptian president, Hosni Moubarack. He then took refuge in Doha (Qatar).

In 1996, the english secret services (MI5 and MI6) financed an Al-Qaïda cell to assassinate the Libyan leader Mouammar el-Kadhafi [1]. Anas Al-Libi played the intermediary in the transaction and this way received political asylum in the UK. He lived in Manchester until he was charged, in 2000, by the US.

In 2000, he was accused, by the South District Court of New York, of having proceeded in 1993 in photographic reconnoitring that would have enabled, five years later, the attacks on the US embassies of Daar es-Salam and Nairobi, on the 7th of August 1998, killing 12 americans (and incidently 214 other people, in a total of 5 000 non-american injured). When the List of the most wanted suspects by the FBI was created in 2001, a 5 million dollar reward was offered for his capture.

Various sources claim that he was detained in Iran from 2003 to 2012, at which date he returned to Libya. However, on the 6th of June 2007, Amnesty International claimed that he was actually detained in a secret CIA prison [2].

In December 2010, the Libyan representative at the UN indicated that Al-Libi and his family had returned to their country, as part of a negotiated peace treaty by Saif el-Islam Kadhafi, under US surveillance. With other members of Al-Qaïda and under Abdelhakim Belhaj’s authority [3], he participates, starting February 2011 (three months later) in NATO’s operations in Libya, leading to the Jamahiriya’s overthrowing and to Mouammar el-Kadhafi’s lynching. One of al-Libi’s son’s is killed in retaliation by the nationalists in October 2011.

Kidnapped by the US Secretary of Defence in Tripoli (Lybia) on October 6th 2013, Abu Anas al-Libi was, according to the New York Times, transferred aboard USS San Antonio, in the Mediterranean sea, to be interrogated [4] outside of the US penal system’s protection [5]. He could eventually be handed over to the US justice in a few weeks or months.

USS San Antonio is a landing ship, and it’s holds have been transformed into a secret prison by the US Navy. The detainees are interrogated according to a special techniques program by Dr. Martin Seligman [6]. The goal is not to obtain information, but to condition the victims. Officially, president Barack Obama has closed these secret prisons and forbidden torture.

The United-States have not yet claimed the abduction, contrary to international law since Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame’s abduction on April 19th 2011 (which was made public two months later).
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Bahrain jails 18 men for police station attack
10 October,2013 – Arab News

DUBAI: A Bahraini court on Thursday sentenced 18 men to between five and seven years in prison after they were convicted of attacking a police station, a judicial source said.

Fifteen defendants were jailed for seven years and three for five years after being of attacking the police station in a Shiite village near Manama last November.

They had been charged with “aggression” against police, “possession of petrol bombs” and taking part in an unauthorized protest “aiming at undermining public security.”

No casualties were reported in the attack.

Thursday’s ruling brings to 122 the number of people jailed since September 29 in connection with violence in the kingdom that began in February 2011 with a month-long uprising.

In August, King Hamad decreed stiffer penalties for “terror acts.”

These include a minimum 10-year jail term for an attempted bombing. If such attacks cause casualties, the sentence can be life imprisonment or the death penalty.

Bahraini activists continue to demonstrate in villages outside the capital and frequently clash with police.
At least 89 people have been killed since the protests began two and a half years ago, according to the International Federation for Human Rights.

Strategically located across the Gulf from Iran, Bahrain is home to the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet and is an offshore financial and services center for its oil-rich Arab neighbors.