America: Leader of the Unfree World

On Friday, the U.S. Sentencing Commission voted unanimously to allow nearly 50,000 nonviolent federal drug offenders to seek lower sentences. The commission's decision retroactively applied an earlier change in sentencing guidelines to now cover roughly half of those serving federal drug sentences. Endorsed by both the Department of Justice and prison-reform advocates, the move is a significant step forward—though in a global context, still modest—in reversing decades of mass incarceration.

How large is America's prison problem? More than 2.4 million people are behind bars in the United States today, either awaiting trial or serving a sentence. That's more than the combined population of 15 states, all but three U.S. cities, and the U.S. armed forces. They're scattered throughout a constellation of 102 federal prisons, 1,719 state prisons, 2,259 juvenile facilities, 3,283 local jails, and many more military, immigration, territorial, and Indian Country facilities.

Compared to the rest of the world, these numbers are staggering. Here's how the United States' incarceration rate stacks up against those of other modern liberal democracies like Britain and Canada:

States of Incarceration: The Global Context

That graph is from a recent report by Prison Policy Initiative, an invaluable resource on mass incarceration. (PPI also has a disturbing graph comparing state incarceration rates with those of other countries around the world, which I highly recommend looking at here.) "Although our level of crime is comparable to those of other stable, internally secure, industrialized nations," the report says, "the United States has an incarceration rate far higher than any other country."

Some individual states like Louisiana contribute disproportionately, but no state is free from mass incarceration. Disturbingly, many states' prison populations outrank even those of dictatorships and illiberal democracies around the world. New York jails more people per capita than Rwanda, where tens of thousands await trial for their roles in the 1994 genocide. California, Illinois, and Ohio each have a higher incarceration rate than Cuba and Russia. Even Maine and Vermont imprison a greater share of people than Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, or Egypt...

Excerpt, read the entire article here.

Obama Authorizes Humanitarian Drops and Limited Airstrikes in Iraq

[Click image to be redirected to a video of Obama's speech.]

President Barack Obama said he authorized airstrikes against militants in Iraq if they threaten U.S. personnel, and he dispatched planes to drop food and water for trapped civilians threatened with “genocide.”

U.S. aircraft dropped supplies today to Iraqis threatened by fighters from the Islamic State extremist group near Sinjar, close to the border of Syria. All the planes safely left the airspace.

The airlift was precipitated by the plight of about 50,000 people, half of them children, who have been stranded in mountainous territory after advances by the militant Islamic State. The people are Yezidis, an ethno-religious minority. The militants have also targeted Christians, Obama said.

The extremists “have called for the systematic destruction of the entire Yezidis people, which would constitute a genocide,” Obama said tonight in televised remarks from the White House. “The United States of America cannot turn a blind eye.”

Obama, who campaigned for office on a vow to end the Iraq war, and oversaw the full withdrawal of forces from Iraq in 2011, said the U.S. has no intention of putting forces on the ground. He said he authorized airstrikes against Islamic State militants if they move toward the Kurdish city of Erbil, where the U.S. has diplomatic personnel.

Excerpt, read more here.

When Dangerous Logic is Used to Justify the Killing of Innocent Civilians

Image credit: A Palestinian man holds his daughters, who were injured in an Israeli tank attack, as he leaves al-Shifa hospital, Gaza City (Getty Images).

After the September 11 terrorist attacks, Osama bin Laden argued that Al Qaeda was perfectly justified in killing all those people inside the World Trade Center because they weren't really civilians–they were complicit in U.S. might and misdeeds. Didn't their taxes fund America's CIA assassinations and war planes? As every American understood perfectly well at the time, the attack that day would not have been justified even if all office workers in the Twin Towers had voted for a president and supported a military that perpetrated grave sins in the Middle East. Or even, indeed, if they were all subletting spare bedrooms to U.S. soldiers.

Killing civilians is wrong, no matter how often those who do it insist that the humans they killed weren't really innocent. Everyone understands this truth when the civilians being killed are one's countrymen or allies–but forget it quickly when the civilians are citizens of a country one is fighting or rooting against in war, even though the civilizational taboo against killing civilians becomes no less important.

The latest to succumb to this seductive illogic, to insist that slain civilians weren't really civilians, is New York University's Thane Rosenbaum, who writes in the Wall Street Journal:

Gazans sheltered terrorists and their weapons in their homes, right beside ottoman sofas and dirty diapers. When Israel warned them of impending attacks, the inhabitants defiantly refused to leave. On some basic level, you forfeit your right to be called civilians when you freely elect members of a terrorist organization as statesmen, invite them to dinner with blood on their hands and allow them to set up shop in your living room as their base of operations. At that point you begin to look a lot more like conscripted soldiers than innocent civilians. And you have wittingly made yourself targets.

For purposes of this article, let's set aside all the adults killed in Gaza, just for the sake of argument. The dead Palestinian children are evidence enough that "real civilians" are being slaughtered. In the above passage, the author focuses on the dirty diapers rather than the baby that produced them. Elsewhere, he acknowledges the revolting number of kids killed in this conflict, and then adds, as if it's concession enough, "Surely there are civilians who have been killed in this conflict who have taken every step to distance themselves from this fast-moving war zone, and children whose parents are not card-carrying Hamas loyalists. These are the true innocents of Gaza." In fact, even a toddler whose father is a card-carrying Hamas loyalist is an innocent, by virtue of being a young child!

Except, read entire article here.

Amnesty International: No One To Trust, Nowhere To Turn In Nigeria

Amnesty International has been documenting and highlighting human rights abuses perpetrated by both Boko Haram and government security forces in northeast Nigeria for some time – those abuses were a key theme of a trip I made to Nigeria in 2012. But this latest research has uncovered incontrovertible evidence – including video footage – of extrajudicial executions and other serious violations by the Nigerian military and Boko Haram, on a truly horrifying scale.

Some of the video footage, images and testimonies collated have now been verified and an edited version of some of it will be released today. Graphic evidence of multiple war crimes is not easy to watch. But for President Goodluck Jonathan, his government ministers and military commanders it should be compulsory viewing. They should watch not despite it being hard to watch – they should watch because it is so hard to watch.

The footage includes deeply disturbing images of what appear to be members of the Nigerian armed forces and Civilian Joint Task Force (CJTF), a state-sponsored militia, executing detainees. One of the videos shows 16 young men seated in a line. One by one they are called forward and forced to lie down in front of a pit where their throats are slit and their bodies dumped unceremoniously into a mass grave.

The footage shows five young men killed in this way. The fate of the others is not captured on film but eyewitness accounts confirmed that nine of them had their throats cut while the others were shot dead.

These were among the over 600 extrajudicial executions that had taken place in and around Maiduguri on March 14 after the Nigerian military went on a rampage following Boko Haram’s attack on the military detention centre in Giwa Barracks earlier that day.

Other footage, taken in late July 2013, shows a mass arbitrary arrest of alleged Boko Haram members by the Nigerian military and CJTF – a common operation known as a “screening”. Arriving in the town of Bama in the morning, the security forces rounded all the men up in the central market, forcing them to strip. About 300 of them were released, up to 35 were accused of being Boko Haram members and ordered to lie down. Footage shows them being beaten with sticks and machetes before being loaded onto a military vehicle. They were taken away to the local military barracks and on July 29 they were all brought to their communities and shot dead, their corpses dumped around the town.

This was not the first time that the population of Bama had been “screened”, nor is it just the military who inflicts such abuses on the inhabitants. Over the years, Boko Haram has launched a series of deadly attacks against Bama, apparently in retaliation for what the armed group deems to be the locals’ cooperation with the Nigerian military.

Amnesty International has unearthed footage of the aftermath of Boko Haram’s most deadly assault on the town in which they killed nearly 100 people over the course of several hours on February 19. The video shows scores of corpses wrapped for burial.

Thus, the people of Bama are caught between the ruthless attacks by Boko Haram and the routine serious violations by the Nigerian security forces. That experience is mirrored in towns and villages across Borno state. It is little wonder that so many have fled or are living in a state of constant fear.

As the bloody insurgency waged by Boko Haram since 2009 has intensified, so, too, has the brutality of the Nigerian government’s response. Rural communities caught in the middle are terrorised by Boko Haram, on the one hand, and by the very military whose duty it is to protect them, on the other.

More than 4,000 Nigerians, the majority of them civilians, have been killed by both sides in this year alone. This includes the 600 people extrajudicially executed by the Nigerian military in Maiduguri in March. Last month, the town of Damboa fell to Boko Haram and in a separate incident in Kaduna state, 12 people appear to have been killed while in custody by the Nigerian military after being arrested during an apparently peaceful protest in which 21 other protesters were also killed after the military opened fire on them.

The gruesome footage from northeastern Nigeria is deeply troubling. More disturbing still is that these incidents of murderous brutality are only the tip of a larger iceberg. Our research suggests that the extrajudicial executions are part of a pattern of human rights violations by the Nigerian military and its civilian “helpers”, the CJTF.

As today’s revelations make clear, an immediate, impartial, independent, and thorough investigation is urgently needed to look into these serious and systematic violations of human rights and international humanitarian law in northeastern Nigeria.

The Nigerian government must publicly condemn such crimes and ensure an end to the human rights violations being carried out by the Nigerian military, including arbitrary arrests, incommunicado detention, torture and other ill-treatment, and extrajudicial executions. Above all, we must not see the simple denial of responsibility that we have seen far too often before.

“When two elephants fight, it is the grass that is trampled,” says an old African proverb. Nowhere is that truer than in northeastern Nigeria today. The people there have no one they can trust and they have nowhere they can turn. In the words of another proverb, “They have nothing left but their eyes to cry with.”

This Op-ed was originally published in Al-Jazeera

Harkin Applauds Committee Approval of CRPD, Urges Full Senate Consideration (#ABA_IHRLD2014)

Tuesday, July 22, 2014

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) released the following statement today applauding the approval of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CPRD) by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and urging its consideration by the full Senate. Harkin is the Senate author of the 1990

Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and has helped lead the fight in the Senate to ratify the CRPD. He serves as Chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee.

“Today’s Foreign Relations Committee vote is a critical step forward to ensure that people with disabilities across the globe have the same rights and opportunities as everyone else,” Harkin said. “Since the passage of the ADA, the doors of opportunity have been opened to millions of Americans with disabilities. For the U.S. to live up to its role as a global leader on disability rights, we must extend the promise of equality across the globe and bring the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities to a vote by the full Senate as soon as possible.

“In an increasingly global economy, U.S. citizens with disabilities— including our veterans—too often face barriers when they travel, conduct business, study, or reside overseas. Approving this measure would help to break down those barriers,” Harkin added. “I thank Chairman Bob Menendez for his leadership on leading the CRPD to passage by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Senators John McCain and John Barrasso for their continued support. I am hopeful that in working on a bipartisan basis with my colleagues, and by continuing to educate other members on the importance of the treaty, we can get the support we need to ratify the treaty this year.”

An American delegation under President George W. Bush negotiated and approved the Convention in 2006. The United States signed the treaty in 2009 and the President submitted it to the U.S. Senate in May 2012 for its advice and consent for ratification; a vote on the CRPD in December 2012 fell five votes short in 2012. The treaty requires no changes to U.S. laws or new appropriations.

Source: Senate, USICD