I did an interview with The Stanford Spotlight, which is a show my friends put together on the Stanford Cardinal Broadcasting Network. They interviewed me about the Rally Against War Crimes event with Noam Chomsky, which called for the accountability of Condoleezza Rice, and other high government officials, for war crimes. I did this interview about a day after the event took place but it took a while to get the interview uploaded on the Internet. The interview is on 3 video clips posted below. It includes the clip of Noam Chomsky’s speech and my speech, too. Read the rest of this entry »
Category Archives: International Law
Goldman Sachs, the economy, torture, human rights, and war – a collection of thoughts (Part 2)
Here’s Part 2:
TORTURE/HUMAN RIGHTS/WAR:
When it comes to torture, war and human rights, the United States recently unveiled its extended Afghanistan prison at Bagram airbase. Clara Gutteridge, an investigator on secret prisons for human rights organization, Reprieve, told Al-Jazeera that while the U.S. claims that this prison is supposed to more open and transparent, the government refuses to release a list of names of prisoners who are Bagram and none of them have access to a lawyer. However, she does says, “But one thing that the US government is saying is that Afghan prisoners in Afghanistan have less rights than any other prisoner which just seems absurd.” Read the rest of this entry »
Goldman Sachs, the economy, torture, human rights, and war – a collection of thoughts (Part 1)
It’s been quite a while since I’ve written a blog and a lot has happened over the past several weeks. Since I am at home on Thanksgiving break and away from school, I thought I’d jot down some of my thoughts on some of today’s pressing issues. I’m breaking this up into separate parts because there are a lot of things I’d like to cover. This post is Part 1. Read the rest of this entry »
Articles and thoughts on torture, Afghanistan and the environment
I haven’t written about current events lately so I thought I would take the time out to write some of my thoughts and post some good articles about the latest events.
TORTURE:
On Friday, October 16, 2009, the British High Court issued a ruling that rejected the U.S./British cover-up of torture evidence. Binyam Mohamed, a British resident of Ethiopian descent who was suspected to be involved in terrorism, was tortured by the CIA in Pakistan and other countries he was rendered to by the U.S. The CIA told British intelligence exactly what they did to him and the British recorded this on various memos. Last year, the British High Court ruled that Mohamed – who was at Guantanamo then – had the right to obtain those documents from British intelligence in order to prove that his statements to the CIA were the result of coercion. Read the rest of this entry »
Rally Against War Crimes speech (featuring Noam Chomsky, Oct. 4, 2009)
Forty years ago, on April 3, 1969, more than 800 people met in Stanford University’s Dinkelspiel Auditorium to form what became known as the April Third Movement (A3M). This movement called upon Stanford and the Stanford Research Institute, which was owned by the university, to halt chemical and biological warfare research, classified research and other programs related to the Vietnam War. The April Third Movement was more than just an activist movement that took place at Stanford. It was part of a national youth movement that mobilized against America’s colonial and atrocious war in Southeast Asia. This movement occurred on university campuses across America, in which students organized sit-ins, teach-ins and rallies, printed flyers and occupied buildings to express moral outrage against and put an end to the war in Vietnam. Through their hard work and passionate organizing, Stanford students were successful in eliminating classified research at Stanford and contributed to the popular movement that ended the Vietnam War. Read the rest of this entry »
Washington Post (Incorrectly) Asserts that Torture Worked
Trying to provide a justification for the effectiveness of torture, the Washington Post published an article, on August 29, called “How a Detainee Became An Asset: Sept. 11 Plotter Cooperated After Waterboarding”. The article’s main argument can summed up in these paragraphs:
“After enduring the CIA’s harshest interrogation methods and spending more than a year in the agency’s secret prisons, Khalid Sheik Mohammed stood before U.S. intelligence officers in a makeshift lecture hall, leading what they called ‘terrorist tutorials.’…
These scenes provide previously unpublicized details about the transformation of the man known to U.S. officials as KSM from an avowed and truculent enemy of the United States into what the CIA called its ‘preeminent source’ on al-Qaeda. This reversal occurred after Mohammed was subjected to simulated drowning and prolonged sleep deprivation, among other harsh interrogation techniques….
[F]or for defenders of waterboarding, the evidence is clear: Mohammed cooperated, and to an extraordinary extent, only when his spirit was broken in the month after his capture March 1, 2003, as the inspector general’s report and other documents released this week indicate.”
Blues African 