Blogger Amina Abdalla has Been Abducted

Amina Abdalla is the author of the blog A Gay Girl in Damascus. Abdalla has written negatively about the Syria's repressive government. Abdalla has been a target of the government for quite some time. Abdalla's cousin, Rania O. Ismail, told Abdalla's readers that she was abducted.

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LisaNova Visits IRC Community

Youtube star Lisa Donovan (aka LisaNova) did a Thanksgiving video to spotlight the work of International Rescue Committee. The organization helps displayed refugees forced out of their countries because of violence. The refugees grow their own food on a green community. The work they did to build their own community is inspiring.

Civil Rights Is Not A Laughing Matter

Karl Rove and Bill Kristol literally laugh off serious claims that the Bush administration profiled and violated the civil rights of American Muslims. Even if you agree with the Bush administration's detainment policy (which I don't), Kristol and Rove show a childish lack of sensitivity.

KRISTOL: What have we done to Muslims in America? What has happened?

JENKINS: Arrested them.

KRISTOL: We’ve arrested Muslims in America? [LAUGHTER]

JENKINS: Incarcerated them without trial.

KRISTOL: We’ve incarcerated Muslims in America without trial?

ROVE: Rounded them up? Rounded, rounded them up? Name one?

KRISTOL: Nonsense.

ROVE: Name one instance.

JENKINS: The, [UNCLEAR] belabor me all day with lists of people who have vanished. Vanished.

ROVE: You know-

KRISTOL: Well, that-

ROVE: This is on the border of lunacy, with all due respect.

JENKINS: But you didn’t need to do it, you didn’t need to do it-

ROVE: We didn’t do it!

The United States just aren't detaining American citizens. Canadian Maher Arar was detained during a JFK International Airport layover. He was rendition to Syria and tortured. The Canadian government has cleared Arar. The Bush administration will not talk publicly about Arar's case.

"The information is also significant because it shows that the CIA was involved, and that two days after Maher was jetted out of the U.S., before anyone knew where he was, CSIS (Canadian Security Intelligence Service) officials thought the U.S. wanted to send him to a country that 'could have their way with him' -- confirming that the U.S. officials who sent Maher to Syria did so to have him interrogated under torture," she said.

"The revelations from last week about complicity and torture confirm our worst suspicions of the dangers of unchecked executive power in a democracy," Jason Gratl, president of the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, told IPS in an interview.

"The willingness of the RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) to mislead the judiciary with respect to the origins of the information derived from torture demonstrates once again that balance of power must be rectified."

Kristol and Rove are delusional. They are less scary than torture architects Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. The latter felt the United States was too timid and wanted even harsher torture.

Rape Victims Punished Twice

Another despicable human rights story: a Saudi man and women were kidnapped and raped. The Saudi Arabian justice system sentenced both victims to 90 lashes. The woman appealed and the story broke to the media. Her sentenced was increased to 90 lashes.

Equality Florida Meetup

Equality Florida is having a meetup.

When:
Tuesday, September 18, 2007, 7:00 PM 2007
Where:
LES BEANS COFFEE HOUSE
410 SECOND AVE. NORTH LAKE WORTH
Lake Worth , FL 33460

Be there or be square.

Dishonorable

Via Bryan: Du'a Khalil Aswad was a a lovely 17-years-old Iraq woman of the Yazidi sect faith. She was beaten and stoned to death because she was romanticly involved with a man who was a Sunni Muslim. Three police officers watched as Aswad was murdered. Her male attackers believed this was an honor killing. She was beaten for 30 minutes. There is nothing honorable about murdering a defenseness woman. The level of sickness is these men filming Aswad's murder on phone cameras.

Al Jazeera reports three men have been arrested. The police may have delivered Aswad to her killers.

They ran away together to an address in Bashika. The girl's family alerted the police and Du'a and her boyfriend were found just a few days later.

According to Ms Nammi, who is calling for the girl's killers to be brought to justice, Du'a was arrested and put into prison.

A few days later, the police apparently received assurances from the leader of her tribe - who Ms Nammi believes is Du'a's uncle - that the girl would not be harmed.

But the police were present during Aswad's murder. The stories become conflicted. No one is going to take responsibility for an international human rights scandal.

On the video, Du'a's screams can be heard as she is dragged to the ground. In a further humiliation, her lower body has been stripped.

Instinctively, Du'a tries to cover herself; only later was a piece of clothing thrown over her.

She is surrounded by an enormous crowd jockeying for a good view of the ritualistic killing. About nine men take part in the attack, including, it is thought, members of the girl's family.

To any father of a daughter, that a helpless girl should be set upon with such cowardly savagery is beyond comprehension. One can barely imagine her terror.

It is a profoundly disturbing spectacle. One man kicks her hard between the legs as she screams in agony. Du'a tries to lift herself up, but someone hurls a concrete block into her face.

Another man stamps on her face. Someone kicks her in the stomach. Police officers stand idly by, some of them apparently enjoying the spectacle as much as anyone else.

Muslim feminist Yanar Mohammed and Dr. Sima Samar speak to Democracy Now about the murder.

YANAR MOHAMMED: Well, you just said it. Honor killing is becoming something to celebrate in Iraq now, and this did not happen before the last years that we experienced in the post-war Iraq. When a young woman is killed -- actually, it was more than eight to nine males around her. It was hundreds of males standing around. None of them helped, but they were very keen on photographing the scene, on videotaping it on their cell phones, on their mobile phones. And on top of that, the part, the information that’s missing in the report is that some of our codes, the penal codes, which is part of our laws, they support the killing of women if they are “dishonorable.”

So what happened in this new Iraq, the so-called liberation of Iraq has turned women into refugees inside their country. Millions of us are vulnerable to be killed, and all our lives are threatened, and there is nobody to secure our lives for us. The policemen were standing and watching, and actually they helped to get the young girl back to the place where she was killed. So by constitution, we have lost our rights. Honor killings are on the rise. Kidnappings of women are getting more now. Our organization’s work proves that human trafficking is still rising, and not much is being done about it.

And when you look at the situation, it’s as if the country was occupied and later on handed down to the extremists who were responsible of the 9/11. Why are all the TV outlets given to Islamists? Where are the democrats? Why aren’t they being supported? Where are the seculars? Why are the women's groups not being supported? And we are one example of those. It is as if it was a plan to make us weaker -- the women, the freedom-loving people of Iraq -- and to support the extremists, to give them, to hand the government over to them.

Iraq is not getting better. The country is a lawless land. The Los Angeles Times reports Iraq is helping fund al-Qaeda.

In one of the most troubling trends, U.S. officials said that Al Qaeda's command base in Pakistan is increasingly being funded by cash coming out of Iraq, where the terrorist network's operatives are raising substantial sums from donations to the anti-American insurgency as well as kidnappings of wealthy Iraqis and other criminal activity.

The influx of money has bolstered Al Qaeda's leadership ranks at a time when the core command is regrouping and reasserting influence over its far-flung network. The trend also signals a reversal in the traditional flow of Al Qaeda funds, with the network's leadership surviving to a large extent on money coming in from its most profitable franchise, rather than distributing funds from headquarters to distant cells.

Al Qaeda was financially broke. The chaos in Iraq changed that.

"Iraq is a big moneymaker for them," said a senior U.S. counter-terrorism official.

The Bush administration's policy has turned Iraq into an Islamic extremist paradise.

Update: Iraqi woman protested the murder in Arbil.

Here is a much more graphic video. The site also has porn ads. Viewer discretion advised.

Enhanced Interrogation Techniques Are Torture

Andrew Sullivan explains to Brit Hume and Mitt Romney that enhanced interrogation techniques is torture. Sullivan cites 18 U.S. Code § 2340.

"As used in this chapter— (1) 'torture' means an act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control;

(2) 'severe mental pain or suffering' means the prolonged mental harm caused by or resulting from— (A) the intentional infliction or threatened infliction of severe physical pain or suffering; (B) the administration or application, or threatened administration or application, of mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality; (C) the threat of imminent death; or (D) the threat that another person will imminently be subjected to death, severe physical pain or suffering, or the administration or application of mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or personality; and

(3) 'United States' means the several States of the United States, the District of Columbia, and the commonwealths, territories, and possessions of the United States."

The bullshit wording by conservatives has changed. Rush Limbaugh described torture as a "fraternity prank." What Romney and Hume don't have the courage to discuss are the murders committed under the Bush administration's policy.

This is the body of Manadel al-Jamadi. He was tortured by the CIA.



Here we see Charles Graner gleefully posing over the body of al-Jamadi.



These are the enhanced interrogation techniques used on al-Jamadi.

Manadel Jamadi was an Iraqi prisoner who died in United States custody during interrogation at Abu Ghraib prison in November 2003. His name became known in 2004 when the Abu Ghraib scandal made news; his corpse, packed in ice, was the background for widely-reprinted pictures of grinning United States Army Specialists Sabrina Harman and Charles Graner, each offering a "thumbs-up" gesture. But the cause of his death was not generally known until February 17, 2005, when it was revealed that he had died after a fruitless half-hour interrogation, during which he was suspended from a barred window by his wrists, which were bound behind his back. News reports introduced the term "Palestinian hanging," a coinage attributed to the alleged frequent use of this technique by Israeli troops on Palestinian prisoners. Since at least the sixteenth century, this torture has been known as strappado.

Associated Press correspondent Seth Hettena reported that 30 minutes after beginning his questioning of the prisoner, the interrogator called for guards to reposition al-Jamadi, who he believed was "playing possum" as he slouched with his arms stretched behind him. But the guards found otherwise.

"After we found out he was dead, they were nervous," Specialist Dennis Stevanus said of the CIA interrogator and translator. "They didn't know what the hell to do." [1]

"They didn't know what the hell to do."

That sums up our interrogation policy.