U.S. Terror Suspects Face “Terrifying” Justice System
April 18, 2014 | Posted in Event, News | By No Separate Justice
Sally Eberhardt, a researcher with Educators for Civil Liberties, tells IPS these monthly vigils began in 2009 to highlight legal irregularities in the case against Fahad Hashmi, a Pakistan-born U.S. citizen who was arrested at London’s Heathrow Airport in 2005 and became the first citizen to be extradited to the U.S. under new laws passed after 9/11.
Hashmi spent three years in solitary confinement at the MCC before ever being charged with a crime. He accepted a government plea bargain of one-count of conspiracy to provide material support to terrorist groups and, in 2010, began a 15-year sentence at the federal “supermax” prison in Florence, Colorado.
Weekly vigils held in the autumn of 2009 through Hashmi’s sentencing gradually attracted civil liberties groups, including Amnesty International, the Council on Arab-Islamic Relations and the Centre for Constitutional Rights (CCR), along with family members of other incarcerated Muslims, who have now coalesced into a movement known as the No Separate Justice (NSJ) campaign.
Read More Here: Inter Press Service News Agency
Abu Hamza: Some men are more disabled than others
April 15, 2014 | Posted in News | By No Separate Justice
As the trial of Abu Hamza al-Masri gets under way in New York, Fahad Ansari questions why the British media have tended to emphasise his disability above all else.
A trial is currently underway of a man with a serious disability whose name is known across the world. He stands accused of a very heinous crime for which many would like to see him locked away for the rest of his life. Like many defendants in the public eye, he has been subjected to a form of trial by media as his words and emotions are scrutinised by reporters and experts to ascertain his guilt or innocence. His critics have accused him of lying and playing to the crowd while a sizeable portion of the population have sympathised with his alleged victims. So loathed and dehumanized has this person become within the public perception that the mass media have even been able to repeatedly mock and ridicule his disability with complete impunity.
Read More Here: Cage Prisoners UK
NCPCF Detroit Program – July 16, 2011- Story of Shifa Sadequee by sister Sharmin Sadequee
April 6, 2014 | Posted in News | By No Separate Justice
Story of Shifa Sadequee by sister Sharmin Sadequee
Published on Jul 27, 2011
Sharmin Sadequee speaks about the unjust conviction and imprisonment of her brother, Shifa Sadequee, by the U.S. federal government. (See http://freeshifa.com/) The presentation was part of a panel discussion on “Resisting Profiling, Preemptive Prosecution and Prisoner Abuse, A citizens hearing to confront repression of human rights and civil liberties by the criminal justice system.” The event was July 16, 2011, in Detroit, Michigan (USA).
The panel presentation focused on how the ‘War on Terror’ climate and its repressive legal practices in the criminal justice system have affected civil liberties and human rights of Arab, Muslim, African American, South Asian, and all immigrant communities and the broader social justice movement.
Perspectives: Shifa, from Prayers to Plexiglass
April 6, 2014 | Posted in News | By No Separate Justice
Perspectives: Shi
fa, from Prayers to Plexiglass
by Sharmin Sadequee
My family’s connection with my brother dates back to the time when my parents, grandmother, two siblings and I were stationed among the masses of people dressed in two-piece seamless white linen. We were meditating in the Arabian desert of Arafat under the scorching heat at the holy pilgrimage in 1985. We joined thousands of pilgrims sweltering in the blazing sand under white tents thirsty for cool breeze but all raised their hands up in prayers. My parents wanted a child, and they prayed that day for a son. Melting in supplication with the worshippers, we implored God to bestow upon us a little brother. We were all ecstatic when my little brother was born in Northern Virginia in 1986.
He became the jewel of our family because he was the manifestation of our prayers, my mother’s prayers, grandmother’s prayers, delivered to my family, humbling my parents to their relationship as human beings to the sacred universe.
Shifa’s wellbeing behind bars is always confining our minds, especially my parents as they are unable to be there for him. This is a punishment for us that began with his illegal kidnapping and incarceration. The horrid Bureau of Prison in Atlanta made us visit him through a video monitor and headphones when he was in solitary confinement for over three years before his trial had even begun. When we were allowed contact visits once or twice a year for holidays after many requests, the prison forced us to see him in orange jump-suit shackled with chains in his feet and hands. The iron manacles did not allow him to open a soda can or eat anything we bought him from the vending machine.
Babar Ahmad and Syed Talha Ahsan denied access to secret files
April 5, 2014 | Posted in News | By No Separate Justice
Babar Ahmad and Syed Talha Ahsan denied access to secret files
(Reuters) – Two British men who pleaded guilty to raising money for al Qaeda and the Taliban were denied their bid on Friday to gain access to secret documents about a witness whose testimony could have a major impact on how long they spend in prison.
The pair, 39-year-old Babar Ahmad and 34-year-old Syed Talha Ahsan, have argued in papers filed in U.S. District Court in New Haven, Connecticut, that they have a right to more information on the witness, British citizen Saajid Badat.
According to U.S. prosecutors, Badat was recruited into al Qaeda as a result of Ahmad’s work and went on to play a role in the attempt by “shoe bomber” Richard Reid, another Briton, to blow up a jetliner over the Atlantic Ocean just three months after the September 11, 2001, attacks.
Defense attorneys for Ahmad and Ahsan argued before U.S. District Judge Janet Hall that the government should provide transcripts of 55 taped interviews with Badat conducted in 2008 by British authorities and photos of suspected militants.
Intelligence committee finds methods such as waterboarding did not produce any crucial evidence in hunt for al-Qaida leader
April 1, 2014 | Posted in News | By No Separate Justice
No proof torture helped US find Osama bin Laden, Senate report concludes
A hotly disputed US Senate torture report concludes that waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods provided no key evidence in the hunt for Osama bin Laden, according to congressional aides and outside experts familiar with the investigation.
The CIA still disputes that conclusion.
From the moment of bin Laden’s death almost three years ago in what was America’s biggest counterterrorism success, former Bush administration and some senior CIA officials have cited the evidence trail leading to the al-Qaida mastermind’s compound in Pakistan as vindicating the “enhanced interrogation techniques” they authorized after the September 11, 2001, attacks.
But Democratic and some Republican senators have disputed that account. They described simulated drownings, sleep deprivation and other such practices as cruel and ineffective. With the release edging closer for the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on interrogations, renditions and detentions, they hope to make a persuasive case.
Recent Comments