Torture in the USA

USA: http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/01/amnesty-intl-recent-notes-us-us-backed-dictatorships.html

Torture: Amnesty International USA is partnering with human rights allies around the world for a two-year global campaign to stop torture, from Chicago to Nigeria

• Chicago police under the direction of former Commander Jon Burge systematically tortured more than 100 people of color

• …officers repeatedly shocked Anthony [Holmes] with an electric shock box referred to by the detectives as the “ni**er box.” They wrapped the wires around his shackles while suffocating him with a plastic bag. Anthony passed out from the pain [and later] confessed to a murder he did not commit. His confession kept him behind bars for thirty years.

• …detectives tortured Darrell [Cannon] … They pressed a cattle prod to his testicles and put it into his mouth. …They repeatedly made him believe that they had loaded a shotgun and rammed in into his mouth, pulling the trigger which, at each click, made him think his head was about to be blown off. …Darrell falsely confessed – and spent 24 years in prison on the basis of his confession.

• [As Obama ensures of all torture committed by the US] Neither Burge nor any of the detectives under his command have been prosecuted for torture. Not one of the torture survivors have received the reparations (financial compensation, psychological counseling, vocational training) needed to make them whole, as required by international law.

• The Intercept noted Tuesday that Obama is voraciously persecuting whistle-blowers while protecting torturers and other international and national criminals.

Torture, prison: The USA stands virtually alone in the world in incarcerating thousands of prisoners in longterm or indefinite solitary confinement, a form of torture.

• [The number of prisoners in some form of solitary punishment in the US is] estimated to be approximately 80,000 on any given day

• …psychological harm … can result from isolating people even for relatively brief periods

• The journal New Scientist finds that psychological torture is “as bad as physical torture”. 

• The journal also points out that “US Senator John McCain, who experienced torture as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, has said that if he were forced to make a decision between enduring psychological or physical torture, he would not hesitate to pick the latter.”

• (Interesting side note: On roots of the USA’s unique standing in terms of its immense incarceration and prisoner isolation-torture rates, see this essay by Mark Lewis Taylor, Professor of Theology and Culture, Princeton Theological Seminary, which delves into white Christian and European ideas of isolation as a means of appeasing god.  He quotes de Tocquville’s observation that US prisons were illustrations of “complete despotism”, and notes how when African Americans were transferred out of slavery and into prisons, things became even “more abject”.)

Policing: Amnesty International condemns the excessive, unnecessary or arbitrary use of force and will not rest until all policing in the United States respects human rights.

Death Penalty: Rather than continuing a practice that has been abandoned in all but a few counties—and risking more botched executions—Oklahoma should join the national trend and end the death penalty.

• On the occasion of one such botched execution in Oklahoma, Obama took the opportunity to dissent from virtually all of the world’s human rights organization, including Amnesty, and defend his isolated stance on the death penalty, stating “there are certain circumstances in which a crime is – is so terrible that the application of the death penalty may be appropriate”.