By Sarah Macaraeg and Yana Kunichoff
On a breezy June evening in 1995, twenty years before the fatal police shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald would envelop Chicago in scandal, Derrick Flewellen hobbled into St Bernard’s Hospital on the south side of the city, seeking care for an open wound on his right foot. As the night progressed and Flewellen’s girlfriend kept him company, the 31-year-old was treated with antibiotics and pain medicine before being bandaged up and discharged around 2am the next morning.
But soon after his departure from the hospital, Flewellen would again be in pain. Two Chicago police detectives, Francis Valadez and Steve Buglio, had arrived to St Bernard’s in search of Flewellen and allegedly intimidated the couple into heading straight to violent crimes unit headquarters from the hospital, for questioning. According to testimony from the criminal trial that eventually saw Flewellen’s acquittal for two murder charges, based on DNA evidence, he was heard screaming from inside a police interrogation room, in the hours that followed, after Valadez – now one of 22 district commanders leading the Chicago Police force – stomped on Flewellen’s injured foot and proceeded to crush the wheels of a metal chair into his wounds.
In all, Flewellen says in his lawsuit that seven detectives beat him over the course of 36 hours, ignoring his pleas for a lawyer, sleep and pain medication while threatening that the department of children and family services would take his girlfriend’s infant son away from her. Following the barrage, he “confessed”.
“My life totally changed,” said Flewellen, speaking to the Guardian by phone from the Chicago suburb where he now lives with his sister. “Being falsely accused of murder and having three, four detectives slapping me around to get a confession … It wasn’t pretty, I got beat up, tortured. I have been beaten up by inmates, I’ve been beaten up by Cook County sheriff’s police. I almost got stabbed in there after they posted my picture on the news.”
Unable to afford bond, Flewellen languished for four and a half years in Cook County jail before a judge would find him not guilty, even after each of the officers who interrogated Flewellen testified against him. Six months after he was set free, Flewellen filed a civil complaint against the detectives. Although the officers denied his accusations, the City of Chicago eventually settled Flewellen’s claims of false arrest and malicious prosecution for $250,000 in 2002.
Despite the evidence that Flewellen’s confession was false – corroborated further by the assertion of a medical examiner that one of the murders of which he was charged would not have been deemed a homicide absent his statement – five of the detectives who Flewellen said tortured him remain on the force today. Three, in fact, have ascended ranks: Commander Francis Valadez, Lieutenant Luke Kelly and Sergeant Daniel McDonald.
“I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the
Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit
that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger
race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way,
has come in and taken their place.”
“I hate Indians, they are a beastly people with a beastly religion.”
“I am strongly in favor of using gas against uncivilized tribes, it would spread a lively terror.”
"Sir" Winston Churchill
Among his numerous debaucheries, Winston Churchill was literally responsible for deliberately
starving millions of people to death
Among his numerous debaucheries, Winston Churchill promoted eugenics, torture, chemical warfare, and was literally responsible for deliberately starving millions of people to death: "The myth of Churchill is Britain’s greatest propaganda tool because it
rewrites Churchill’s true history in order to whitewash Britain’s past
imperialist crimes against humanity."
By Garikai Chengu
Sunday marked the anniversary of the death of one of the most lionized leaders in the Western world: Sir Winston Churchill.
The current British Prime Minister, David Cameron, has called Churchill “the greatest ever Prime Minister”, and Britons have recently voted him as the greatest Briton to have ever lived.
The story that British schoolbooks tell children about Churchill is of a British Bulldog, with unprecedented moral bravery and patriotism. He, who defeated the Nazis during World War II and spread civilisation to indigenous people from all corners of the globe. Historically, nothing could be further from the truth.
Noam Chomsky on Winston Churchill and Racism
To the vast majority of the world, where the sun once never set on the British empire, Winston Churchill remains a great symbol of racist Western imperialist tyranny, who stood on the wrong side of history.
The myth of Churchill is Britain’s greatest propaganda tool because it rewrites Churchill’s true history in order to whitewash Britain’s past imperialist crimes against humanity. The Churchill myth also perpetuates Britain’s ongoing neo-colonial and neo-liberal policies, that still, to the is day, hurt the very people around the world that Churchill was alleged to have helped civilize.
The same man whose image is polished and placed on British mantelpieces as a symbol of all that is Great about Britain was an unapologetic racist and white supremacist. “I hate Indians, they are a beastly people with a beastly religion”, he once bellowed. As Churchill put it, Palestinians were simply “barbaric hordes who ate little but camel dung.”
In 1937, he told the Palestine Royal Commission: “I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.”
It is unsurprising that when Barack Obama became President, he returned to Britain a bust of Churchill which he found on his desk in the Oval office. According to historian Johann Hari, Mr. Obama’s Kenyan grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, was imprisoned without trial for two years and was tortured on Churchill’s watch, for daring to resist Churchill’s empire.
Apart from being an unrepentant racist, Churchill was also a staunch proponent of the use of terrorism as a weapon of war.
During the Kurdish rebellion against British dictatorship in 1920, Churchill remarked that he simply did not understand the “squeamishness” surrounding the use of gas by civilized Great Britain as a weapon of terror. “I am strongly in favor of using gas against uncivilized tribes, it would spread a lively terror,” he remarked.
In the same year, as Secretary of State for War, Churchill sent the infamous Black and Tans to Ireland to fight the IRA. The group became known for vicious terrorist attacks on civilians which Churchill condoned and encouraged.
While today Britons celebrate Churchill’s legacy, much of the world outside the West mourns the legacy of a man who insisted that it was the solemn duty of Great Britain to invade and loot foreign lands because in Churchill’s own words Britain’s “Aryan stock is bound to triumph”.
Churchill’s legacy in the Far East, Middle East, South Asia and Africa is certainly not one of an affable British Lionheart, intent on spreading civilization amongst the natives of the world. To people of these regions the imperialism, racism, and fascism of a man like Winston Churchill can be blamed for much of the world’s ongoing conflicts and instability.
As Churchill himself boasted, he “created Jordan with a stroke of a pen one Sunday afternoon,” thereby placing many Jordanians under the brutal thumb of a throneless Hashemite prince, Abdullah. Historian Michael R. Burch recalls how the huge zigzag in Jordan’s eastern border with Saudi Arabia has been called “Winston’s Hiccup” or “Churchill’s Sneeze” because Churchill carelessly drew the expansive boundary after a generous lunch.
Churchill also invented Iraq. After giving Jordan to Prince Abdullah, Churchill, the great believer in democracy that he was, gave Prince Abdullah’s brother Faisal an arbitrary patch of desert that became Iraq. Faisal and Abdullah were war buddies of Churchill’s friend T. E. Lawrence, the famous “Lawrence of Arabia”.
Much like the clumsy actions in Iraq of today’s great Empire, Churchill’s imperial foreign policy caused decades of instability in Iraq by arbitrarily locking together three warring ethnic groups that have been bleeding heavily ever since. In Iraq, Churchill bundled together the three Ottoman vilayets of Basra that was predominantly Shiite, Baghdad that was Sunni, and Mosul that was mainly Kurd.
Ask almost anyone outside of Iraq who is responsible for the unstable mess that Iraq is in today and they are likely to say one word, either “Bush” or “America”. However, if you asked anyone within Iraq who is mainly responsible for Iraq’s problems over the last half century and they are likely to simply say “Churchill”.
Winston Churchill convened the 1912 Conference in Cairo to determine the boundaries of the British Middle Eastern mandate and T.E. Lawrence was the most influential delegate. Churchill did not invite a single Arab to the conference, which is shocking but hardly surprising since in his memoirs Churchill said that he never consulted the Arabs about his plans for them.
The arbitrary lines drawn in Middle Eastern sand by Churchillian imperialism were never going to withstand the test of time. To this day, Churchill’s actions have denied Jordanians, Iraqis, Kurds and Palestinians anything resembling true democracy and national stability.
The intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict can also be traced directly back to Churchill’s door at number 10 Downing Street and his decision to hand over the “Promised Land” to both Arabs and Jews. Churchill gave practical effect to the Balfour declaration of 1917, which expressed Britain’s support for the creation of a Jewish homeland, resulting in the biggest single error of British foreign policy in the Middle East.
Churchill’s legacy in Sub-Saharan Africa and Kenya in particular is also one of deep physical and physiological scars that endure to this day.
Of greater consequence to truth and history should be a man’s actions, not merely his words. Whilst Churchill has become one of the most extensively quoted men in the English speaking world, particularly on issues of democracy and freedom, true history speaks of a man whose actions revolved around, in Churchill’s own words, “a lot of jolly little wars against barbarous peoples”.
One such war was when Kikuyu Kenyans rebelled for their freedom only to have Churchill call them “brutish savage children” and force 150,000 of them into “Britain’s Gulag”.
Pulitzer-prize winning historian, Professor Caroline Elkins, highlights Churchill’s many crimes in Kenya in her book Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya. Professor Elkins explains how Churchill’s soldiers “whipped, shot, burned, and mutilated Mau Mau suspects”, all in the name of British “civilization”. It is said that President Obama’s grandfather Hussein Onyango Obama never truly recovered from the torture he endured from Churchill’s men.
The Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has proved how in Bengal in 1943 Churchill engineered one of the worst famines in human history for profit.
Over three million civilians starved to death whilst Churchill refused to send food aid to India. Instead, Churchill trumpeted that “the famine was their own fault for breeding like rabbits.” Churchill intentionally hoarded grain to sell for profit on the open market after the Second World War instead of diverting it to starving inhabitants of a nation controlled by Britain. Churchill’s actions in India unquestionably constituted a crime against humanity.
Churchill was also one of the greatest advocates of Britain’s disastrous divide-and-rule foreign policy.
Churchill’s administration deliberately created and exacerbated sectarian fissures within India’s independence movement, between Indian Hindus and Muslims that have had devastating effects on the region ever since.
Prior to India’s independence from Britain, Churchill was eager to see bloodshed erupt in India, so as to prove that Britain was the benevolent “glue holding the nation together”. For Churchill, bloodshed also had the added strategic advantage that it would also lead to the partition of India and Pakistan. Churchill’s hope was this partition would result in Pakistan remaining within Britain’s sphere of influence. This, in turn, would enable the Great Game against the Soviet empire to continue, no matter the cost to innocent Indian and Pakistanis. The partition of India with Pakistan caused the death of about 2.5 million people and displaced some 12.5 million others.
According to writer, Ishaan Tharoor, Churchill’s own Secretary of State for India, Leopold Amery, compared his boss’s understanding of India’s problems to King George III’s apathy for the Americas. In his private diaries Amery vented that “on the subject of India, Churchill is not quite sane” and that he didn’t “see much difference between Churchill’s outlook and Hitler’s.”
Churchill shared far more ideologically in common with Hitler than most British historians care to admit. For instance, Churchill was a keen supporter of eugenics, something he shared in common with Germany’s Nazi leadership, who were estimated estimated to have killed 200,000 disabled people and forcibly sterilised twice that number. Churchill drafted a highly controversial piece of legislation, which mandated that the mentally ill be forcibly sterilized. In a memo to the Prime Minister in 1910, Winston Churchill cautioned, “the multiplication of the feeble-minded is a very terrible danger to the race”. He also helped organise the International Eugenics Conference of 1912, which was the largest meeting of proponents of eugenics in history.
Churchill had a long standing belief in racial hierarchies and eugenics. In Churchill’s view, white protestant Christians were at the very top of the pyramid, above white Catholics, while Jews and Indians were only slightly higher than Africans.
Historian, Mr. Hari, rightfully points out, “the fact that we now live in a world where a free and independent India is a superpower eclipsing Britain, and a grandson of the Kikuyu ‘savages’ is the most powerful man in the world, is a repudiation of Churchill at his ugliest – and a sweet, ironic victory for Churchill at his best.”
Amid today’s Churchillian parades and celebratory speeches, British media and schoolbooks may choose to only remember Churchill’s opposition to dictatorship in Europe, but the rest of the world cannot choose to forget Churchill’s imposition of dictatorship on darker skinned people outside of Europe. Far from being the Lionheart of Britain, who stood on the ramparts of civilisation, Winston Churchill, all too often, simply stood on the wrong side of history.
Churchill is indeed the Greatest Briton to have ever lived, because for decades, the myth of Churchill has served as Britain’s greatest propaganda tool to bolster national white pride and glorify British imperial culture.
The execution-by-frying occurred almost four years ago. State officials just received the autopsy report.
Darren Rainey mugshot (Miami- Dade Corrections)
By Tom Boggioni The death of a mentally ill Florida inmate who begged for his life as his skin was scalded from his body in a locked shower stall has been ruled accidental, according to reports.
According to the Miami Herald, the death of Darren Rainey, 50, in 2012 was attributed to complications stemming from schizophrenia, heart disease and “confinement” in the shower where he was placed as punishment for defecating in his cell and then refusing to clean it up.
A recently released autopsy report from the Miami-Dade Medical Examiner’s Office states that Rainey was shoved into a narrow shower stall with the scalding water turned on full blast, eventually leading to his death.
Two hours after being placed in the stall, his lifeless body was found face up with his skin burned so badly that it had shriveled away from his body — a condition medical examiners call “slippage.”
After being removed from the shower, staff administered CPR, with one a nurse registering Rainey’s internal temperature at 102 degrees, well above the normal temperature of 98.6. The autopsy report states that 12 hours after his death, Rainey’s body still had a temperature of about 94 degrees.
According to an inmate working as an orderly in the prison, Rainey could be heard screaming, “I can’t take it no more, I’m sorry. I won’t do it again.”
Although Rainey’s death occurred almost four years ago, Florida state officials only received the autopsy report last week in a case that had previously been described as “accidental.”
By Felix Horne
“Badessa” was a third-year engineering student in western Ethiopia in April 2014 when he and most of his classmates joined a protest over the potential displacement of ethnic Oromo farmers like his family because of the government’s plan to expand the capital, Addis Ababa, into the farmland.
The night of the first protests he was arrested and taken to an unmarked detention center. Each night he heard his fellow students screaming in agony as one by one they were tortured by interrogators. “I still hear the screams,” he told me later. Eventually his turn came to be interrogated. “What kind of country is it when I voice concern that my family could lose their farm for a government project and I am arrested, tortured, and now living as a refugee?”
Since mid-November, large-scale protests have again swept through Oromia, Ethiopia’s largest region, and the response from security forces has again been brutal. They have killed countless students and farmers, and arrested opposition politicians and countless others. On January 12, the government announced it was cancelling the master plan, but that hasn’t stopped the protests and the resultant crackdown.
Although the protest was initially about the potential for displacement, it has become about so much more. Despite being the biggest ethnic group in Ethiopia, Oromos have often felt marginalized by successive governments and feel unable to voice concerns over government policy. Oromos who express dissent are often arrested and tortured or otherwise mistreated in detention, accused of belonging to the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), a group that has long been mostly inactive and that the government designated a terrorist organization.
The government is doing all it can to make sure that the news of these protests doesn’t circulate within the country or reach the rest of the world. Ethiopia’s allies, including governments in the region and the African Union, have largely stood by as Ethiopia has steadily strangled the ability of ordinary Ethiopians to access information and peacefully express their views, whether in print or in public demonstrations. But they should be worried about what is happening in Oromia right now, as Ethiopia — Africa’s second most-populous country and a key security ally of the US — grapples with this escalating crisis.
This may prove to be the biggest political event to hit Ethiopia since the controversial 2005 elections resulted in a crackdown on protesters in which security forces killed almost 200 people and arrested tens of thousands .
Although the government focuses its efforts on economic development and on promoting a narrative of economic success, for many farmers in Oromia and elsewhere economic development comes at a devastating cost. As one Oromo student told me “All we hear about is development. The new foreign-owned farms and roads is what the world knows, but that just benefits the government. For us [Oromos] it means we lose our land and then we can’t sustain ourselves anymore.”
It has become almost impossible for journalists and human rights monitors to get information about what is happening, especially in smaller towns and rural areas outside Addis Ababa.
Ethiopia is one of the most restrictive environments for independent investigation, reporting, and access to information, earning the country a top-10 spot in the global ranking of jailers of journalists. For the past decade, the government has limited access to information by regularly threatening, imprisoning, and prosecuting individual activists, bloggers, and journalists and sending a clear public message that the media must self-censor and that dissent or criticism of government policy will not be tolerated.
Independent media have dwindled—more than 70 journalists have fled the country since 2010 and five of the last independent publications closed down before the May elections. Meanwhile the state-run media parrot the government line, in this case claiming that the Oromo protesters are linked to “terrorist groups” and “anti-peace elements” who are “aiming to create havoc and chaos.”
Very few international journalists are based in Ethiopia. Those who have attempted to cover events on the ground since the protests began have braved threats and arrest, but these are a few lone voices.
Given restrictions on local and international media, you might think that ordinary citizens, local activists, and nongovernmental organizations would fill the gaps and document the events in Oromia. But Ethiopia’s human rights activists and independent groups have been crushed by draconian legislation and threats, and even ordinary people are often terrified to speak out. People who dare to speak to international media outlets or independent groups have been arrested. The government taps phone lines and uses European-made spyware to target journalists and opposition members outside the country.
Since the protests began, the restrictions have become even harsher. Authorities have arrested people, including health workers, for posting photos and videos or messages of support on social media. The state-run telecom network has also been cut in some areas, making it much more difficult to get information out from hotspots.
Radio and satellite television outlets based outside Ethiopia, including some diaspora stations, play a key role disseminating information about the protests within Oromia, as they also did in 2014 during the last round of protests. Last year numerous people were arrested in Oromia during the protests merely for watching the diaspora-run Oromia Media Network (OMN).
The government has frequently jammed foreign stations in the past, violating international regulations in the process. When the government is unable to jam it puts pressure on the satellite companies themselves. Throughout the protests government agents have reportedly been destroying satellite dishes.
Yet despite the clear efforts to muzzle voices, information is coming out. Some protesters are losing their fear of expressing dissent and are speaking openly about the challenges they are facing. Social media plays a key role in disseminating information as people share photos and videos of rallies, of bloodied protesters, and of expressions of peaceful resistance in the face of security forces using excessive force.
In the coming days and weeks Ethiopia’s friends and partners should condemn the use of excessive force by security forces that is causing tragic and unnecessary deaths. But they should also be clear that Ethiopia needs to ensure access to information and stop disrupting telecommunications and targeting social media users. The world needs to know what is happening in Oromia—and Ethiopians have a right to know what is happening in their country.
Reprinted with permission from Human Rights Watch.
Today you have Donald Trump and Ted Cruz competing over how horrible America's torture will be if they get elected - That's because generations of American human rights violators have gone free after they instituted their own programs of assassination, kidnapping and torture.
18 Former Guatemalan Military Officers Arrested for Crimes Against Humanity
By Annie Bird
Guatemalan authorities have arrested at least 18 high-ranking Guatemalan military officers yesterday on charges of crimes against humanity and forced disappearance, according to local press reports.
The arrests include retired generals Benedicto Lucas Garcia, head of the military under his now-deceased brother and former dictator Romeo Lucas Garcia, and Manuel Antonio Callejas y Callejas, long known for his high-level positions during the dirty war and his concurrent management of organized crime networks.
The crimes with which they are charged were part of operations conducted from a military base in the department of Coban between 1981 and 1988, including acts that formed part of the Maya Achi genocide. Exhumations at the base in 2012 recovered remains from over 550 victims–a fraction of the tens of thousands of killings the military is believed to have conducted in Alta and Baja Verapaz from that base but an important step in gathering evidence.
Arrests are ongoing. In a press conference Jan. 6, prosecutors declined to provide specific information regarding pending warrants. Journalists suggested that as many as 25 warrants exist. Initial hearings are expected to begin this Friday. There is no possibility of release pending trial on these charges.
These prosecutions are the result of over 20 years of efforts by the victims, coupled with hard-fought gains in cleaning up corruption in the justice system promoted by human rights and judicial reform activists. ADIVIMA, the association of Maya Achi genocide victims, is a co-complainant in the prosecution, along with the national victims associations, the Association of Relatives of the Detained/Disappeeared in Guatemala (FAMDEGUA) and the Mutual Support Group (GAM).
Unearthing Crimes of the Past and Present
The retired general who was in charge of the Coban base during much of the violence, Ricardo Mendez Ruiz, would undoubtedly have been among those arrested today had he not died on January 1, 2016. Mendez Ruiz maintained a high profile in Guatemala over the past several years due to the activities of his son of the same name. The younger Ricardo Mendez Ruiz is director of the Foundation Against Terrorism, which has promoted malicious legal complaints against those pursuing justice for the crimes committed during Guatemala’s dirty war–a form of political persecution backed by influential retired military officers.
[...]
Concern for the safety of those pursuing justice in Guatemala is heightened as the incoming president, Jimmy Morales, a founder of the National Convergence Front (FCN) party, is set to take office on January 14. Guatemala’s last elected president, Otto Perez Molina, was forced to resign in September 2015 to face corruption charges, and his party, the Partido Patriota (PP), partially collapsed in the scandal. Analysts described the FCN as the Plan B for the political networks that formerly backed the PP. The FCN and PP are both dominated by retired military officers.
The newly elected congress convened its first session yesterday. On the first day of the lawmakers four-year term, Congress was asked by prosecutors to impeach the newly elect FCN congressman and former military officer, Edgar Justino Ovalle Maldonado, so he can face charges of crimes against humanity and forced disappearance.
Concerns over the safety of justice advocates have heightened since the arrests. The former military men arrested today have close ties to Guatemala’s organized crime networks. Criminal groups in complicity with politicians operate regionally in Central America’s “Northern Triangle” of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, and are largely responsible for some of the highest murder rates in the world.
Many slave masters had "black girlfriends" (rape victims). That didn't end slavery or stop the savagery.
Don't Worry: This cop has a "black girlfriend."
_____________
Sheriff Claims Officer Who Manhandled Black Female Student Isn't Racist Because his Girlfriend is African American
By Khaleda Rahman and Snejana Farberov
A female high school student who was arrested after standing up for her classmate as she was violently dragged from a classroom by a school resource officer has spoken out about the incident.
Both teenagers are black – and in a strange defense put forward by the Richland County Sheriff, they claim the incident was not racially-motivated because the officer in question has a black girlfriend.
Niya Kenny, 18, was taken into custody and held on $1,000 bail for ‘disturbing schools’ after filming Senior Deputy Ben Fields as he overturned a student’s desk with her still in it.
She said she was detained simply for speaking up after the officer launched the violent attack on the student.
_______________
NYC Cop Justin Volpe: In 1997 he sodomized Haitian immigrant Abner Louima (he rammed a police baton
up his rectum causing Louima severe internal injuries. He pleaded guilty). The cover he tried to use initially? -
"I couldn't possibly have done that. I have a black girlfriend." Volpe was one of the first cops to use the "But
I have a black girlfriend" defense. It didn't work.
_______________
Meanwhile, local authorities in Richland have asked the FBI and the US Department of Justice to investigate the incident at Spring Valley High School in Columbia, South Carolina, on Monday, which was captured on at least three video recordings.
Sheriff Leon Lott said he asked independent authorities to investigate the incident as a possible civil rights violation and admitted that he wanted to ‘throw up’ after viewing his deputy’s actions.
‘I wanted to throw up,' he said. 'It just makes you sick to your stomach.’
But according to the New York Daily News, Lott added that Fields has been dating an African-American woman for 'quite some time.'
This is the Type of Garbage that the US has a Key MidEast Alliance With
Saudi Prince Majed Abdulaziz Al-Saud: He was recently arrested with a massive amount of drugs at an airport in Lebanon - A screaming, bleeding, naked woman had to be rescued by neighbors who saw her trying to escape his
clutches by climbing an eight-foot fence in his backyard in BeverlyHills, California.
By David Ferguson
The recent arrests of two Saudi Arabian princes — one for smuggling literal tons of illegal drugs in his private plane and one for a series of sexually abusive incidents involving his employees — call attention to a long and august tradition of fabulously wealthy people from the highly religious Islamic monarchy acting in absolutely horrible ways.
On Monday, Saudi prince Abdel Mohsen Bin Walid Bin Abdulaziz and four associates were caught at the Beirut airport attempting to carry “two tons of Captagon pills” into Saudi Arabia as well as a quantity of cocaine.
Captagon is the brand name for fenethylline, a combination of the stimulants amphetamine and theophylline. Sources in the Middle East say Captagon is fueling fighters on both sides of Syria’s bloody civil war.
The Guardian said that the drug was first synthesized in the 1960s to treat “hyperactivity, narcolepsy and depression,” but was ultimately banned as too addictive. It remains wildly popular in the Middle East, but virtually unheard-of anywhere else.
Last week, in Los Angeles, 29-year-old Majed Abdulaziz Al-Saud was arrested on suspicion of “forced oral copulation” of an adult and other charges.
Al-Saud is accused by three anonymous female employees of going on a violent, debauched rampage in which he attacked male and female aides and house workers, forcing them to strip on command and perform sex acts against their will.
Last week neighbors spotted a naked, bleeding woman frantically trying to scale the 8-foot fence around Al-Saud’s Beverly Hills compound. They helped the woman escape and called police.
By Thursday Al-Saud — who is the son of Saudi Arabia’s late King Abdullah — was free on $300,000 bail.
The arrests echo other instances of wealthy Saudis running afoul of the law, including the case of 27-year-old Monsour Alshammari. Alshammari was apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border attempting to flee the country to escape prosecution on rape charges in Utah.
According to the Salt Lake Tribune, Alshammari is related to Saudi royalty and U.S. authorities say that if he is allowed to return to that country, they will lose the ability to extradite and try him.
By Spencer Ackerman
Police “disappeared” more than 7,000 people at an off-the-books interrogation warehouse in Chicago, nearly twice as many detentions as previously disclosed, the Guardian can now reveal.
From August 2004 to June 2015, nearly 6,000 of those held at the facility were black, which represents more than twice the proportion of the city’s population. But only 68 of those held were allowed access to attorneys or a public notice of their whereabouts, internal police records show.
The new disclosures, the result of an ongoing Guardian transparency lawsuit and investigation, provide the most detailed, full-scale portrait yet of the truth about Homan Square, a secretive facility that Chicago police have described as little more than a low-level narcotics crime outpost where the mayor has said police “follow all the rules.”
The police portrayals contrast sharply with those of Homan Square detainees and their lawyers, who insist that “if this could happen to someone, it could happen to anyone.” A 30-year-old man named Jose, for example, was one of the few detainees with an attorney present when he surrendered to police. He said officers at the warehouse questioned him even after his lawyer specifically told them he would not speak.
“The Fillmore and Homan boys,” Jose said, referring to police and the facility’s cross streets, “don’t play by the rules.”
According to an analysis of data disclosed to the Guardian in late September, police allowed lawyers access to Homan Square for only 0.94% of the 7,185 arrests logged over nearly 11 years. That percentage aligns with Chicago police’s broader practice of providing minimal access to attorneys during the crucial early interrogation stage, when an arrestee’s constitutional rights against self-incrimination are most vulnerable.
But Homan Square is unlike Chicago police precinct houses, according to lawyers who described a “find-your-client game” and experts who reviewed data from the latest tranche of arrestee records obtained by the Guardian."Not much shakes me in this business – baby murder, sex assault, I’ve done it all,” said David Gaeger, an attorney whose client was taken to Homan Square in 2011 after being arrested for marijuana. “That place was and is scary. It’s a scary place. There’s nothing about it that resembles a police station. It comes from a Bond movie or something.”
The narcotics, vice and anti-gang units operating out of Homan Square, on Chicago’s west side, take arrestees to the nondescript warehouse from all over the city: police data obtained by the Guardian and mapped against the city grid show that 53% of disclosed arrestees come from more than 2.5 miles away from the warehouse. No contemporaneous public record of someone’s presence at Homan Square is known to exist.
Nor are any booking records generated at Homan Square, as confirmed by a sworn deposition of a police researcher in late September, further preventing relatives or attorneys from finding someone taken there.
“The reality is, no one knows where that person is at Homan Square,” said Craig Futterman, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School who studies policing. “They’re disappeared at that point.”
A Chicago police spokesman did not respond to a list of questions for this article, including why the department had doubled its initial arrest disclosures without an explanation for the lag. “If lawyers have a client detained at Homan Square, just like any other facility, they are allowed to speak to and visit them,” the police claimed in a February statement.
Prosecutor claims that torturers were trying to be nice while they tortured their hooded victim to death
Natasha McKenna's graduation photo. (Courtesy of Natasha McKenna's family)
By Matthew Barakat Fairfax County Commonwealth's Attorney Ray Morrogh said Tuesday he will not bring criminal charges against jail deputies who used a Taser on a partially restrained inmate who later died, calling the death a "tragic accident."
In a 51-page report, Morrogh concluded that deputies acted appropriately in their efforts to restrain 37-year-old Natasha McKenna during a cell transfer in February. He had been evaluating whether to bring charges for the past two months.
McKenna, who was African-American, lost consciousness at the conclusion of the Feb. 3 incident, and was declared brain dead four days later.
A team of five deputies used a hood called a "spit sock" and eventually fired four Taser shots at McKenna during a 20-minute struggle to get her restrained for a transfer to the Alexandria jail, about 9 miles south of Arlington.
Deputies told Morrogh in the report that the 181-pound McKenna was the most difficult inmate they had ever encountered, that she possessed what they described as superhuman strength during the struggles. One inmate said the growls McKenna made during a prior struggle were comparable to a demonic possession.
"There is no evidence that any of the deputies acted maliciously, sadistically or with the intent to punish or cause harm to Ms. McKenna at any point in the struggle. To the contrary, they did their best, under very difficult circumstances, to restrain, control and prevent Ms. McKenna from injuring herself or others," Morrogh wrote in the report.
The video shows a Los Angeles sheriff's deputy beating a man with a flashlight while another deputy punches the man repeatedly and a third deputy holds his
legs so he couldn't move during the beating.
Nigerian soldier abusing captives. (Screen capture from video)
By Amnesty International The story is so shocking it is almost hard to believe. But evidence released today by Amnesty International – based on dozens of military documents and correspondence as well as interviews with victims, eyewitnesses and members of the security forces -- reveals that senior officials of the Nigerian military had full knowledge of the arbitrary detentions and high rates of deaths and failed to take action to stop these human rights violations.
A high-ranking military officer gave Amnesty International a list of 683 detainees who died over a five-month period from October 2012 in Giwa barracks. Based on his visits and discussions with soldiers stationed there, he estimated that “close to 5,000 people” have died there since the beginning of 2013.
Most of the deaths are still officially unrecorded.
"The hundreds of unidentified bodies, the evidence of mass graves and the harrowing stories of starvation and abuse coming out of the country’s military barracks demand nothing less than an urgent investigation and for those responsible to be brought to justice," said Salil Shetty, Amnesty International's Secretary General.
Records obtained by The Baltimore Sun show that city police often disregard or are oblivious to injuries and illnesses among people they apprehend — in fact, such cases occur by the thousands.
In those records, intake officers in Central Booking noted a wide variety of injuries, including fractured bones, facial trauma and hypertension. Of the detainees denied entry, 123 had visible head injuries, the third most common medical problem cited by jail officials, records show.
The jail records redacted the names of detainees, but a Sun investigation found similar problems among Baltimore residents and others who have made allegations of police brutality.
Salahudeen Abdul-Aziz, who was awarded $170,000 by a jury in 2011, testified that he was arrested and transported to the Western District after being beaten by police and left with a broken nose, facial fracture and other injuries. Hours later, he went to Central Booking and then to Bon Secours Hospital, according to court records.
Abdul-Aziz said last week that jailers at Central Booking "wouldn't let me in the door as soon as they saw my face. ... I thought I was gonna die that day. Freddie Gray wasn't so lucky."
Some critics say the data from the state-run jail show that city officers don't care about the condition of detainees.
"It goes to demonstrate the callous indifference the officers show when they are involved with the public," said attorney A. Dwight Pettit, who has sued dozens of city officers in the past 40 years. "Why would they render medical care when they rendered many of the injuries on the people?"
Hundreds of bodies were also found in a border town held by Boko Haram
A video posted by Boko Haram shows a member whipping a Nigerian citizen. (Screen capture from YouTube video)
By Reuters
Nigeria's army has rescued 200 girls and 93 women during a military operation to wrest back the Sambisa Forest from the Boko Haram Islamist militant group, it said on its Twitter feed on Tuesday.
"Troops this afternoon rescued 200 girls and 93 women from Sambisa Forest. We cannot confirm if the Chibok girls are in this group."
How Boko Haram Militants Brutally Govern Captured Territories In Northeastern Nigeria
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Witnesses: Hundreds of bodies in town held by Boko Haram
By Associated Press
Hundreds of skeletons of children, women and men believed killed by Boko Haram have been found in a recaptured Nigerian border town, indicating another atrocity by the Islamic extremists, witnesses say.
A local government committee that entered northeastern Nigerian town of Damasak through neighboring Niger said it also found decomposing bodies of men presumed to be Boko Haram fighters killed when troops from Chad and Niger recaptured the town in March.
"I know that there was a large-scale atrocity, but I cannot tell you the precise number of dead bodies," Senator-elect Abubakar Kyari on Monday told reporters in Maiduguri, the Borno state capital 180 kilometers (110 miles) southeast of Damasak, which borders Niger.
The officials visited Damasak on Saturday and found the town littered with bodies, said Babagana Mustapha, spokesman for the Mobbar local government.
Hundreds more bodies of insurgents are rotting in the surrounding bush, according to Chadian troops who escorted the officials through the town.
The sadistic cops were fired and face a year in jail, and the city of Marion has been hit with a lawsuit seeking $2 million in damages
By Travis Gettys Two former South Carolina police officers could spend at least a year in prison for repeatedly shocking a mentally disabled woman with a Taser without giving her time to comply with their orders.
Federal prosecutors are recommending prison for Eric Walters and Franklin Brown when they are sentenced Monday after pleading guilty in October to deprivation of rights under color of law, reported the Associated Press.
Walters encountered 40-year-old Melissa Davis during an April 2013 patrol in Marion, when he spotted her leaving the yard of a home for sale and suspected she might have broken into it.
The officer asked Davis what she was doing and then shocked her with a Taser, court records show.
Walters ordered the woman to place her hands behind her back after she fell to the ground and then shocked her four more times before she had time to comply, prosecutors said.
Brown arrived at that point to provide backup, but Walters had determined that Davis had done nothing wrong and was removing the Taser probes from her back.
But Brown noticed one of the woman’s hands slip from the handcuffs – which Walters had applied improperly – and shocked Davis three more times until she rolled over to be handcuffed again.
When he was arrested Freddie Gray was conscious and walking with a limp (top), but by the time he arrived
at the hospital he had spinal injuries, was in critical condition and had to be placed in an induced coma.
By Juliet Linderman
Baltimore police were conducting a criminal investigation Sunday into the death of a man injured in their custody, and the mayor vowed to ensure the city held "the right people accountable."
Freddie Gray, 25, of Baltimore, died Sunday at a hospital, a week after he was hurt following an arrest. A timeline released earlier in the week by police said Gray was taken by a van from the scene to a station, where an ambulance was called to treat him and take him to the University of Maryland R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center. Civilian video showed him being loaded into the van, but did not show the entire encounter.
An attorney retained by Gray's family, Billy Murphy, described extensive injuries in a statement Sunday.
"His spine was 80 percent severed at his neck. He lapsed into a coma, died, was resuscitated, stayed in a coma and on Monday, underwent extensive surgery at Shock Trauma to save his life," Murphy said. "He clung to life for seven days and died today at approximately 7 a.m."
Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and top police officials promised accountability and transparency Sunday at a news conference at City Hall.
By German Lopez Eric Harris, an unarmed, black 44-year-old man, was pinned down on April 2 by multiple officers when one of them yelled, "Taser!" But the sound that followed wasn't the typical click-clack of a stun gun — it was the distinct blast of an actual bullet, which hit Harris, fatally wounding him. Robert Bates, the white, 73-year-old reserve Tulsa County, Oklahoma, deputy who fired his gun instead of his Taser, almost immediately realized his mistake, saying, "I shot him! I'm sorry!"
Harris's death has drawn national attention because Bates, who's now been charged with second-degree manslaughter, shot an unarmed suspect who was already on the ground. But less frequently asked is whether Bates should have even tried to use his stun gun at all, given that Harris was already restrained by multiple police officers. Did Harris really present a threat that required extra force?
Law enforcement experts have increasingly criticized how police use stun guns in recent years, particularly as police use of force comes under mounting scrutiny following the deaths of unarmed black men like Eric Garner in New York City and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
"Sometimes cops go to Tasers too early and too often"
When stun guns were first introduced to police forces over the past few decades, they were originally designed and marketed as strictly nonlethal devices that could be used in place of a gun to incapacitate a violent suspect without deadly force. But it turns out the devices can kill, even when used against otherwise healthy targets.
Yet cops have continued using stun guns as if they're nonlethal weapons, including in situations where a suspect, such as Harris, is being apprehended and doesn't appear to pose a threat to others.
The misuse and deadly risks of Tasers have pushed some law enforcement experts to question whether cops are too trigger-happy with stun guns. "It's what we call the 'lazy cop syndrome,'" Geoffrey Alpert, an expert on police training at the University of South Carolina, said. "Sometimes cops go to Tasers too early and too often."
When stun guns were first introduced to police forces over the past few decades, they were originally designed and marketed as strictly nonlethal devices that could be used in place of a gun to incapacitate a violent suspect without deadly force. But it turns out the devices can kill, even when used against otherwise healthy targets.
Yet cops have continued using stun guns as if they're nonlethal weapons, including in situations where a suspect, such as Harris, is being apprehended and doesn't appear to pose a threat to others.
The misuse and deadly risks of Tasers have pushed some law enforcement experts to question whether cops are too trigger-happy with stun guns. "It's what we call the 'lazy cop syndrome,'" Geoffrey Alpert, an expert on police training at the University of South Carolina, said. "Sometimes cops go to Tasers too early and too often."
In February, deputies used a stun gun on Natasha McKenna, a mentally ill woman at the Fairfax County, Virginia, jail who, according to the Washington Post's Tom Jackman and Justin Jouvenal, was restrained with handcuffs, leg shackles, and a mask. When the officers couldn't get McKenna to bend her knees to sit on a restraint chair, one of them delivered four shocks from a Taser. Within minutes, McKenna stopped breathing and died.
Fairfax County Sheriff Stacey Kincaid told the Post the department defended the use of a Taser on a restrained prisoner, saying it was meant to gain compliance from McKenna without resorting to physical force. This appears to be the norm: previous surveys found that police department policies generally allow officers to use Tasers to help restrain someone who's physical with an officer, even if the suspect isn't actually attacking.
But police training experts are increasingly skeptical of using stun guns in this way, in large part because cases like McKenna's show that these weapons can sometimes kill.
Natasha McKenna's graduation photo. (Courtesy of Natasha McKenna's family)
By Tom Jackman and Justin Jouvenal
A mentally ill woman who died after a stun gun was used on her at the Fairfax County jail in February was restrained with handcuffs behind her back, leg shackles and a mask when a sheriff’s deputy shocked her four times, incident reports obtained by The Washington Post show.
Natasha McKenna initially cooperated with deputies, placed her hands through her cell door food slot and agreed to be handcuffed, the reports show. But McKenna, whose deteriorating mental state had caused Fairfax to seek help for her, then began trying to fight her way out of the cuffs, repeatedly screaming, “You promised you wouldn’t hurt me!” the reports show.
Then, six members of the Sheriff’s Emergency Response Team, dressed in white full-body biohazard suits and gas masks, arrived and placed a wildly struggling 130-pound McKenna into full restraints, their reports state. But when McKenna wouldn’t bend her knees so she could be placed into a wheeled restraint chair, a lieutenant delivered four 50,000-volt shocks from the Taser, enabling the other deputies to strap her into the chair, the reports show.
The account comes from dozens of pages of sheriff’s deputy incident reports that provide the first complete account of the events leading to the death of the 37-year-old Alexandria mother that has troubled her family and local mental health advocates.
Fairfax County Sheriff Stacey Kincaid declined to comment on the case but defended the use of a stun gun on a restrained prisoner, saying it was “a means that is often useful to ensure the safety of a person” rather than using physical force to gain compliance. She said stun guns were used “occasionally” on prisoners who are already restrained.
The city has already paid out $100 million in settlements in lawsuits related to the infamous police commander.
Commander Jon Burge filled prisons with innocent men he tortured into confessing.
By Hal Dardick, John Byrne and Steve Mills
The city of Chicago on Tuesday sought to put to rest one of its most persistent scandals, proposing a $5.5 million reparations fund for dozens of torture victims connected to former Chicago police Cmdr. Jon Burge and his so-called midnight crew of rogue detectives.
The proposal, negotiated with a key plaintiff's attorney and supported by Mayor Rahm Emanuel, would offer free city college tuition for victims and their families, free counseling for psychological issues and substance abuse as well as other assistance to more than 50 potential victims. The city would also issue a formal apology, create a permanent memorial recognizing the victims and ensure that eighth- and 10th-grade students attending Chicago Public Schools would be taught about the Burge case and its brutal legacy, cementing the scandal's role in city history.
But as much as the proposal seeks to end a painful, controversial era — Emanuel said it would "close this book, the Burge book on the city's history" — it is unlikely to stanch the flow of torture claims from victims. A Loyola University Chicago law school dean appointed by a Cook County judge has identified some 20 additional cases in which inmates may have been Burge victims. Other inmates who have made torture claims continue to fight to overturn convictions and win their freedom. And one lawsuit over the torture is pending.
Already, this stubborn scandal has cost taxpayers about $100 million in lawsuit settlements, judgments and other legal costs, according to lawyers.
The victim was likely tortured by cops on the way to the hospital
When he was arrested Freddie Gray was conscious and walking with a limp (top), but by the time he arrived
at the hospital he had spinal injuries, was in critical condition and had to be placed in an induced coma.
By Josie Wales
27-year old Freddie Gray is now hospitalized in critical condition and in induced coma, after an incident with Baltimore police Sunday morning.
An eyewitness captured video footage of Gray being restrained and hauled into the back of a police van after being chased and arrested by bike cops. What happened after that is a mystery, as Freddie Gray is now unconscious in Shock Trauma with multiple injuries.
Gray’s godbrother did not want to be identified, but he did give a statement after he left the ICU, saying “I seen police, him handcuffed, him tased while he was handcuffed. I seen the police officer bending his leg to the point where it looked like he broke it. He was completely healthy, fine being carted off aside from his leg. It’s nowhere near how he’s sitting in the ICU right now.”
According to the family, Gray has spinal injuries and is barely alive. Richard Shipley, Gray’s stepfather, told local news affiliate WJZ, “His face is swollen. He just looks really horrible. Like I said, he’s in an induced coma. We’re all praying.”Police will not say why the bike cops arrested the fleeing Gray, or how he ended up in the hospital in an induced coma.
By Rebecca Gordon
They behead people by the hundreds. They heap headless, handless bodies along roadsides as warnings to those who would resist their power. They havepenetrated the local, state, and national governments and control entire sections of the country. They provide employment and services to an impoverished public, which distrusts their actual government with its bitter record of corruption, repression, and torture. They seduce young people from several countries, including the United States, into their murderous activities.
Is this a description of the heinous practices of the Islamic State (IS) in Iraq and Syria? It could be, but as a matter of fact it’s not. These particular thugs exist a lot closer to home. They are part of the multi-billion-dollar industry known as the drug cartels of Mexico. Like the Islamic State, the cartels' power has increased as the result of disastrous policies born in the U.S.A.
There are other parallels between IS and groups like Mexico's Zetas and its Sinaloa cartel. Just as the U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya fertilized the field for IS, another U.S. war, the so-called War on Drugs, opened new horizons for the drug cartels. Just as Washington has worked hand-in-hand with and also behind the backs of corrupt rulers in Central Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa, so it has done with the Mexican government. Both kinds of war have resulted in blowback -- violent consequences felt in our own cities, whether at the finish line of the Boston Marathon or in communities of color across the country.
In Mexico, the U.S. military is directly involved in the War on Drugs. In this country, that "war" has provided the pretext for the militarization of local police forces and increased routine surveillance of ordinary people going about their ordinary lives.
And just as both the national security state and the right wing have used the specter of IS to create an atmosphere of panic and hysteria in this country, so both have used the drug cartels' grotesque theater of violence to justify their demonization of immigrants from Latin America and the massive militarization of America’s borderlands.
