Sen. Chris Dodd (Democrat, CN) is proposing a new bill that would allow all people in U.S. custody to file for a writ of habeas corpus. The bill is called Restoring the Constitution Act of 2007, and it also restricts the definition of enemy combatant. You can sign on to become a citizen co-sponsor here.

Hey, how'd that get there? Nice work, team.

The Road to Guantanamo
Tuesday, March 6th at 7:30PM
Language Corner (260-113)

This excellent editorial from the New York Times today is a great summary of what we must do to restore America's commitment to human rights five years after 9/11:

Five years of presidential overreaching and Congressional collaboration continue to exact a high toll in human lives, America’s global reputation and the architecture of democracy. Brutality toward prisoners, and the denial of their human rights, have been institutionalized; unlawful spying on Americans continues; and the courts are being closed to legal challenges of these practices.

Today we’re offering a list — which, sadly, is hardly exhaustive — of things that need to be done to reverse the unwise and lawless policies of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.

Ban Torture, Really
The provisions in the Military Commissions Act that Senator McCain trumpeted as a ban on torture are hardly that. It is still largely up to the president to decide what constitutes torture and abuse for the purpose of prosecuting anyone who breaks the rules. This amounts to rewriting the Geneva Conventions and puts every American soldier at far greater risk if captured. It allows the president to decide in secret what kinds of treatment he will permit at the Central Intelligence Agency’s prisons. The law absolves American intelligence agents and their bosses of any acts of torture and abuse they have already committed.

9:50PM: Thanks to everyone who came tonight! We estimated that about 80 people were there. Please take a moment to sign our petition, if you have not already. Have a look around the blog to learn more about the issue and stay tuned for future events!

Also, check out our Daily coverage.

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With two hours to go before the film screening, we are releasing an article from the UK Guardian that contains excerpts from the report on the "Tipton Three," the three British citizens who were detained and held without charges at the American prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for two years before being released in 2004. Of the hundreds of detainees held in Guantanamo, only 10 have actually been charged with a crime, and allegations of torture and other abuse of detainees have not been adequately investigated. To this day, detainees in Guantanamo Bay are barred by law from challenging their detentions.

Harsh conditions detailed in the article and in the film, along with the sheer length of detention, have led the International Committee of the Red Cross (which is usually silent about its work) to condemn the conditions as amounting to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. These conditions have caused many detainees to suffer severe mental illness, and many have attempted suicide. Three are known to have succeeded.

The President has said he would like to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, but he has not yet done so.

COLIN FREEZE
From Saturday's Globe and Mail

On a chilly Minnesota night in 2004, FBI agents invited an immigrant truck driver to step out of the April air and warm up in a waiting car. They proceeded to bring him in for questioning, telling him they knew he'd served as a mujahedeen sniper in Afghanistan.

For the Americans, the probe seems never-ending. Mr. Arar, 36, remains on the U.S. watch list, for reasons never publicly explained.

Human Rights Journalism
Spring 2007 / Communication 177K/277K / MW, 10-11:50 a.m.
Room 59, McClatchy Hall (Building 120)

Glenn Frankel, Hearst Professional in Residence
frankelg at stanford.edu

Glenn Frankel is a former Washington Post foreign correspondent who has served as bureau chief for Southern Africa, Jerusalem and London and who won a Pulitzer Prize in foreign reporting for his coverage of the first Palestinian uprising.

The first half of the course will examine a number of case studies from the past 30 years such as El Salvador, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Rwanda, Bosnia, Sudan and Israel, and the second half will focus on American human rights abuses since 9/11.

Course Description:

This is the Age of Human Rights. Since World War Two, we’ve seen the rise of the concept of universal rights and the growth of a global movement dedicated to the cause. Governments have signed treaties and conventions committing themselves to opposing genocide, torture and other crimes against humanity. At the same time, nation-states have jealously guarded their own sovereignty, cracked down whenever threatened and ignored outbreaks of genocide, while superpowers like the United States have forged alliances with despots of many stripes. The distance between what governments have pledged on human rights and what they actually do is a gaping chasm. It’s here---in the gray zone between ambiguity and hypocrisy---that journalism lives.

David Hicks, an Australian detainee who has been held for nearly 5 years at the U.S. prison camp in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has pleaded guilty to terrorist activity including "providing material support" to Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. For those who were not able to attend our campus film screening of The Road to Guantánamo, our Amnesty urgent action letter concerned the Australian government's negligence in regards to Hicks' case and his ongoing detention and alleged claims of torture and maltreatment at Guantánamo. Hicks is the first Guantánamo detainee to face prosecution under the Military Commissions Act passed by Congress in 2006 - a practice that has drawn sharp international criticism.

Several concerns have surrounded Hicks's plea, including the fact that he was denied access to two of his three lawyers at the beginning of the trial, and also the suspicion that his plea may have arisen out of a desperate desire to return home. For more information on the court proceedings during Hicks's guilty plea, take a look at today's International Herald Tribune article here. Australian ministers report that it is "very likely" that Hicks will return home to serve out his prison sentence.

After appearing on the Daily Show last night, today, retired Stanford professor Phil Zimbardo appeared on the radio show "Democracy Now!" to publicize his new book, The Lucifer Effect. Click here to download the show's MP3 or here to watch the segment in Real Player.

As the United States enters the fifth year of its occupation of Iraq, some of the most enduring images of the war remain the vivid photographs of US soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. The pictures were leaked to the press and first revealed to the world in May 2004. Images showed Iraqis with bags over their heads, beaten, set upon by dogs and forced into sexually humiliating acts. The Bush administration tried to paint the scandal as an isolated incident committed by rogue soldiers. But who is really to blame for the abuses at Abu Ghraib? The answer may lie in a landmark study conducted more than three decades ago.

In 1971, psychology professor Philip Zimbardo created an experiment at Stanford University in which 24 male college students were randomly assigned the roles of prison guards and prisoners at a makeshift jail on campus. The experiment was scheduled to run for two weeks. By Day Two, the guards were going far beyond keeping the prisoners behind bars. In scenes eerily similar to Abu Ghraib, prisoners were stripped naked, bags put on their heads and sexually humiliated. The guards had become dangerously sadistic and the prisoners were breaking down emotionally. The two-week experiment had to be canceled after just six days.

Professor Philip Zimbardo has just written a new book that, for the first time, tells the full story of the famed Stanford Prison Experiment. It's called "The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil." Professor Zimbardo joins me today from our firehouse studio in New York.

The Washington Post does a decent job of analyzing this very important story, so I'll just turn it over to them to inform you:

GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba, March 30 -- A high-level al-Qaeda suspect who was in CIA custody for more than four years has alleged that his American captors tortured him into making false confessions about terrorist attacks in the Middle East, according to newly released Pentagon transcripts of a March 14 military tribunal hearing here.

Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who U.S. officials believe was involved in the bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998 and who allegedly organized the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000, told a panel of military officers that he was repeatedly tortured during his imprisonment and that he admitted taking part in numerous terrorism plots because of the mistreatment.

"The detainee states that he was tortured into confession and once he made a confession his captors were happy and they stopped torturing him," Nashiri's representative read to the tribunal, according to the transcript. "Also, the detainee states that he made up stories during the torture in order to get it to stop."