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the old skull & bones club .....

the old skull & bones club .....

The United States is operating "floating prisons" to house those arrested in its war on terror, according to human rights lawyers, who claim there has been an attempt to conceal the numbers and whereabouts of detainees. 

Details of ships where detainees have been held and sites allegedly being used in countries across the world have been compiled as the debate over detention without trial intensifies on both sides of the Atlantic. The US government was yesterday urged to list the names and whereabouts of all those detained. 

Information about the operation of prison ships has emerged through a number of sources, including statements from the US military, the Council of Europe and related parliamentary bodies, and the testimonies of prisoners. 

The analysis, due to be published this year by the human rights organisation Reprieve, also claims there have been more than 200 new cases of rendition since 2006, when President George Bush declared that the practice had stopped. 

US Accused Of Holding Terror Suspects On Prison Ships

The new president

Degrees of Significance: The Nomination of Barack Obama    

Written by Chris Floyd  
Thursday, 05 June 2008

...

The salient point of this truly degrading campaign has always been: what will the winner do in office? Will he (there is no need to add the "or she" now) immediately begin the process of withdrawing from Iraq and making reparations for the mass slaughter and mass destruction of our war crime there? And speaking of war crimes, will the winner instigate investigation and prosecution of Bush Administration officials for a host of high crimes, foreign and domestic? Will he begin the process of winding down America's worldwide military empire of more than 700 bases? Will he halt the militarization of space? Will he end the multi-generational boondoggle of "missile defense"? Will he call for the immediate repeal of the draconian Bankruptcy Bill, that bipartisan weapon of mass destruction in the elite's unrelenting class war against working people, artisans, small business owners and the poor?

These are just a very few of the many essential and highly urgent issues that a new president committed to genuine change in the corrupted currents of our moribund Republic would have to take on. It goes without saying that John McCain will do none of the things outlined above.

record porridge...

New Criminal Record: 7.2 Million
Nation's Justice System Strains to Keep Pace With Convictions

By Darryl Fears
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 12, 2008; A09

The number of people under supervision in the nation's criminal justice system rose to 7.2 million in 2006, the highest ever, costing states tens of billions of dollars to house and monitor offenders as they go in and out of jails and prisons.

According to a recently released report released by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, more than 2 million offenders were either in jail or prison in 2006, the most recent year studied in an annual survey. Another 4.2 million were on probation, and nearly 800,000 were on parole.

The cost to taxpayers, about $45 billion, is causing states such as California to reconsider harsh criminal penalties. In an attempt to relieve overcrowding, California is now exporting some of its 170,000 inmates to privately run corrections facilities as far away as Tennessee.

"There are a number of states that have talked about an early release of prisoners deemed non-threatening," said Rebecca Blank, a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution, a centrist think tank. "The problem just keeps getting bigger and bigger. You're paying a lot of money here. You have to ask if some of these high mandatory minimum sentences make sense."

The bureau's report comes on the heels of a Pew Center on the States report showing 1 percent of U.S. adults behind bars, a historic high. The United States has the largest number of people behind bars in the world, according to the Pew report.

post-traumatic stress

Chimpanzees used for medical testing 'show signs of torture'

By Steve Connor, Science Editor [The Independent]
Saturday, 2 August 2008
Chimps show symptoms of post-traumatic stress

REUTERS

Chimpanzees subjected to medical experiments suffer similar psychiatric symptoms to those shown by tortured humans, according to a study to be released next week.

An assessment of the behaviour of 116 chimpanzees who have been involved in animal research found that 95 per cent display at least one of the distinctive patterns of behaviour that people show when suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.

The chimps now live in a primate sanctuary in the United States but their unusual behaviour is still causing concern years after they were released from the animal-research laboratories in which they were experimented upon.

The findings, which will be made public at an international primate conference in Edinburgh on Monday, will be used to press for a Europe-wide ban on the use of great apes in medical research. Although experiments on chimps were banned in Britain in 1998, they are still legal in the rest of Europe even though the two research facilities where chimps had been kept have recently closed. However, in the US there is no such ban and about 1,200 chimps are still kept for medical research. Hope Ferdowsian, an American doctor who has treated torture patients from around the world, said that it is clear that chimps suffer many of the extreme psychological conditions shown by human torture victims.

"There are obvious differences between species but it's obvious that these chimps are suffering chronically," Dr Ferdowsian said.

til the end of the whaonterra???...

August 8, 2008 Military Panel Sentences bin Laden Driver to a Short Term

 

By WILLIAM GLABERSON

GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — Rejecting a prosecution request for a severe sentence, a panel of military officers sentenced the convicted former driver for Osama bin Laden to five and a half years in prison on Thursday. The sentence means that the first detainee convicted after a war crimes trial here could complete his punishment by the end of this year.

The military judge, Capt. Keith J. Allred of the Navy, had already said that he planned to give the driver, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, credit for at least the 61 months he has been held since being charged, out of more than six years in all. That would bring Mr. Hamdan to the end of his criminal sentence in five months. After that his fate is unclear, because the Bush administration says that it can hold detainees here until the end of the war on terror.