Support 150,000 Calls for CA Prisoners through Facebook
Invite all your Facebook friends to the 150,000 Calls for Prisoners event page (click here).

In the Hole

by BILL QUIGLEY Feb 23, 2012

[Only a few days after President Obama signed into law provisions for arbitary and capricious seizure and indefinite detention of US citizens--throwing out habeus corpus and other "Constitutional rights"--one of the most prominent and courageous opponents of such a repressive policy--the US' detention of Japanese American citizens during World War II--has died.  --Frontlines ed.]

———————————-

By Madison Ruppert     Editor of End the Lie

President Barack Obama has leveraged heavy rhetoric on the subject of transparency for some time now, even going as far as to publish on the official White House website that his “Administration is committed to an unprecedented level of openness in Government.”

If this is open government, I can’t begin to imagine what a closed government is.

After Anwar al-Awlaki was allegedly assassinated in Yemen, the New York Times sought to find out the legal basis for the Obama administration’s secretive “kill list” which apparently can now include United States citizens.

My Guantánamo Nightmare   by LAKHDAR BOUMEDIENE   Jan 7, 2012

On Wednesday, America’s detention camp at Guantánamo Bay will have been open for 10 years. For seven of them, I was held there without explanation or charge. During that time my daughters grew up without me. They were toddlers when I was imprisoned, and were never allowed to visit or speak to me by phone. Most of their letters were returned as “undeliverable,” and the few that I received were so thoroughly and thoughtlessly censored that their messages of love and support were lost.

Some American politicians say that people at Guantánamo are terrorists, but I have never been a terrorist. Had I been brought before a court when I was seized, my children’s lives would not have been torn apart, and my family would not have been thrown into poverty. It was only after the United States Supreme Court ordered the government to defend its actions before a federal judge that I was finally able to clear my name and be with them again.

By TRUDY BOND, ROY EIDELSON, BRAD OLSON AND STEPHEN SOLDZ  CounterPunch  Jan 10, 2012

THE SHAME OF CALIFORNIA 

    I’ve been eating well this summer, enjoying the local fruits and vegetables of northwest California, while sixty miles away a group of men risked their health by refusing to eat for three weeks. I’m in Big Lagoon, surrounded by ocean, lagoon, and forest in an area of coastal California described by National Geographic as among the top twenty “unspoiled” tourist destinations in the world. An hour’s drive north of here is Pelican Bay State Prison, a state-of-the-art hellhole that was recently the center of a three-week hunger strike led by prisoners in the Secure Housing Units (SHU).

January 24, 2011: Class 1 Felony of recording a conversation is just below the prison time you'd spend for murder.

March 31, 2010   
By Nina Bernstein, NY Times

More than two months after the earthquake that devastated Haiti, at least 30 survivors who were waved onto planes by Marines in the chaotic aftermath are prisoners of the United States immigration system, locked up since their arrival in detention centers in Florida.

In Haiti, some were pulled from the rubble, their legal advocates say. Some lost parents, siblings or children. Many were seeking food, safety or medical care at the Port-au-Prince airport when terrifying aftershocks prompted hasty evacuations by military transports, with no time for immigration processing. None have criminal histories.