I learned it in Guantanamo, when the only thing I could control was my own body. We were disappeared. Isolated. Forced into silence. Our words were redacted. Our letters were stamped secret. Lawyers were blocked. Time stretched and rotted. No court dates were given. No real charges were made. I was reduced to a number in an orange uniform, locked in a metal cage.
Two immigration detention centers in Florida have gained notoriety for inhumane conditions since Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, in close alignment with President Donald Trump's anti-immigrant agenda, has rapidly scaled up mass detention in the state, and a report released Thursday detailed how human rights violations at the two facilities amount to torture in some cases. Amnesty International published the report, Torture and Enforced Disappearances in the Sunshine State, with a focus on Krome North Service Processing Center and the Everglades Detention Facility, also known by its nickname, "Alligator Alcatraz."
Some of the cruelest, most scientifically useless forms of abuse perpetrated under MKUltra occurred on Canadian soil. At McGill University, agents drugged civilians with hallucinogenic and narcotic drugs in the pursuit of novel forms of torture and interrogation. Maybe, instead, we should take as our example the Central Intelligence Agency agents (both named and anonymous) who abetted in the murder of Patrice Lumumba, former prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in 1961.
Ussu grew up in a small and unstable African country, a former Portuguese colony that was no stranger to attempted coups (the country is not being named to protect Ussu's identity). A good student, he dreamed of going to university to train to become a doctor, but he was required to complete two years of military service first. Once he was in the army, though, his superiors refused to release him. Years passed and there was still no sign of an exit route.
First, they blackmailed Andrej, demanding half of the compensation he received for an injury. When he refused to give them the money and bought a car instead, they demanded that he give them the car. He was killed for refusing to hand over the car. Bykova filed a complaint with the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation and the public prosecutor's office, but nothing happened. Andrej Bykov was simply declared missing.
The electrician from central Myanmar was part of an underground assassin squad that targeted security personnel and infrastructure tied to the military government in their city strongholds. Once detained, he knew his military captors would show little mercy. Arkar, who asked to use a pseudonym to protect his identity, said he endured weeks of torture in secret detention centres before being sentenced to three years at Insein Prison, Myanmar's most notorious jail.
Amid the chaos of the Trump Administration, implementing all of Cheney's dreams of unitary executive on Chicago's residents and Latin American fishermen, his death didn't even make it above the fold of the NYT. This blog has written probably 500 stories on Dick Cheney - about torture, about illegal surveillance, about drone strikes, about outing Valerie Plame. But the most recent are telling for his legacy:
Testimonies from released Palestinian prisoners, as well as the condition of bodies handed over, highlight alleged Israeli abuse. Most of the bodies of the more than 100 dead Palestinians Israel released remain unidentified. They were sent back to Gaza with numbers instead of their names, leaving family members of missing Palestinians to pore desperately through pictures of the bodies, hoping to spot their loved ones.
Magnus Humphrey had known Maleesa Mooney only for a few days, but the Minnesota man had already become "obsessive" about the model, who lived in a downtown L.A. apartment. "That's my girl, that's my woman," he would say about Mooney during the five days they spent together in September 2023, according to her friend, Kiersten Dossett. The two were rarely "more than one foot apart," she said. Humphrey made comments about marrying Mooney, 31, who joined him at a family barbecue during their weeklong relationship.
They were arrested in September 2021 after taking Brockman's daughter, A'Miya Dawson, to the emergency room of a Willowbrook hospital after she became unresponsive, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department said. At the hospital, doctors determined that the girl's injuries did not line up with statements made by Brockman and Whalen. Detectives also searched the couple's apartment and found additional evidence, sheriff's officials said.
Osgur Breatnach stated that the Government is avoiding a public inquiry into his wrongful conviction to conceal a policy of torture used to extract false confessions.
