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Tagged: dance , prison

A German citizen, Murat Kurnaz, was released from Guantanamo after being tortured there for five years. He was sold by Pakistani police to the US for a $3000 bounty, and only released due to efforts by the Chancellor of Germany.

Every story you hear of people released from Guantanamo is the same. They are innocent, they were sold to the US for a $3000-$5000 bounty, and they were tortured for ~5 years until their release. It’s hard to believe the US is willing to release anyone from Guantanamo at all, but it seems that they don’t have to be afraid of former prisoners telling their stories. The American press won’t report stories of innocent people being tortured at Guantanamo (exception, NPR, TAL episodes 310 and 331), and even when the stories to hit the international news wires, Americans don’t seem to care at all.

In the prison camp in Kandahar, Kurnaz said, he was hoisted on chains and was forced to hang by his hands while he was being interrogated. He was left hanging for “hours and days” after the interrogators left. An American physician in camouflage would come and check his vital signs to determine if he could withstand more enhanced interrogation.

Previously: toturtured and held without charge for 5.5 years in Guantanamo after he was sold to the US for a $5000 bounty - via reddit

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You should watch this episode of Democracy Now.

Thirty-five years ago this weekend, Beacon Press lost a Supreme Court case brought against it by the US government for publishing the first full edition of the Pentagon Papers. It is now well known how the New York Times first published excerpts of the top-secret documents in June 1971. But less well known is how the Beacon Press - a small, nonprofit publisher affiliated with the Unitarian Universalist Association - came to publish the complete 7,000 pages that exposed the true history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Their publication led the Press into a spiral of two and a half years of harassment, intimidation, near-bankruptcy, and the possibility of criminal prosecution.

Today, we hear the story from three men at the center of the storm: Former Pentagon and RAND Corporation analyst, famed whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times. Mike Gravel - the former Alaska Senator who is now a Democratic Presidential candidate - who tells the dramatic story of how he entered the Pentagon Papers into the Congressional record and got them to the Beacon Press. And Robert West, the former president of the Unitarian Universalist Association which owned the Press and agreed to risk publication of the Pentagon Papers. [includes rush transcript]

This is a story that has rarely been told in its entirety. Last weekend I moderated an event at the Unitarian Universalist conference in Portland, Oregon commemorating the publication of the Pentagon Papers and its relevance today.

• Link to Democracy Now page and transcript
• Link to hi-res video
  

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via mefi

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The Times is running a story of a guy was toturtured and held without charge for 5.5 years in Guantanamo after he was sold to the US for a $5000 bounty:

He was freed after the sole allegation against him – that he had been a senior figure at an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan in July 2001 – fell apart. The claim came from an unidentified source and was proved false by lawyers from the London-based charity Reprieve.

Pakistani police passed him to American agents in return for a $5,000 bounty and he was taken to Bagram, then to a prison camp at Kandahar.

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This is a pretty sick video of police in St. Petersburg slashing and destroying tents used by homeless people in St. Petersburg. It’s hard to imagine something like this happening in the United States and not somewhere like Zimbabwe.

I’m glad that San Francisco Values don’t include hating poor people so much that we demolish their homes..

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Tagged: bigotry

This one’s for bobslobster, who is at UCLA and happens to be the same shade of brown..

via mefi

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Tagged: bigotry , LA