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Anonymous ID: 1c407e Jan. 11, 2019, 9:59 a.m. No.4712475   🗄️.is đź”—kun   >>2478

New America Discussion on 17th Anniversary of Guantanamo Prison

 

https://www.c-span.org/video/?456881-1/america-discussion-17th-anniversary-guantanamo-prison

 

https://twitter.com/cspan/status/1083779978251116545

Anonymous ID: 1c407e Jan. 11, 2019, 10:01 a.m. No.4712486   🗄️.is đź”—kun   >>2514

Guantánamo Bay branded a 'stain on US human rights record'

 

Amnesty International calls US naval prison a symbol of Islamophobia and xenophobia

 

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/jan/11/guantanamo-bay-branded-a-stain-on-us-human-rights-record?CMP=share_btn_tw

Anonymous ID: 1c407e Jan. 11, 2019, 10:04 a.m. No.4712524   🗄️.is đź”—kun

AG Nominee William Barr Endorsed “More Incarceration”

 

After the tenure of former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, advocates for civil rights, decarceration and police accountability are frustrated and furious.

 

Sessions jump-started the failed war on drugs, rescinded protections for transgender students and workplace protections for LGBTQ people, undermined federal efforts to hold local police accountable for racism and violence, and defended the Trump administration’s ill-fated family separation policy that helped create the humanitarian crisis on the southern border. The list goes on.

 

Sessions was forced out of office in November for reasons that have nothing to do with civil rights. Indeed, next week’s Senate hearings on President Trump’s nomination of William Barr to be his successor are likely to focus on Barr’s views of presidential power and whether he would interfere with special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian election meddling.

 

However, advocates warn that Barr’s record on issues from drug policy to immigration and women’s rights is cause for grave concern. So is a striking endorsement of mass incarceration that Barr issued while serving as attorney general during the height the drug war in the early 1990s.

 

Kristine Lucius, vice president of policy at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said Barr’s record suggests that he would continue taking the Justice Department in the same direction as Sessions. At next week’s hearings, she says, senators should demand Barr demonstrate that he will not continue to “turn back the clock” on civil rights for immigrants, LGBTQ people and communities of color.

 

“We believe civil rights needs to be the main thrust when the Senate decides whether William Barr should be the next attorney general,” Lucius said.

 

Lucius said the just application of civil rights laws depends on the Justice Department’s ability to act fairly and independently, particularly under a president like Trump, who has been eager to attack the civil rights of citizens and noncitizens alike in pursuit of his hardline “law and order” agenda. Trump and Sessions may have butted heads over Mueller, but they shared a love of racist law enforcement and a public disdain for immigrants and communities of color that they paint as sources of drugs and crime.

 

Barr’s record on civil rights is now setting off alarm bells as it emerges into the spotlight, and he appears to share many of Sessions and Trump’s views on immigration, law enforcement, drugs and incarceration. For example, Barr wrote that the travel restrictions on Muslim countries Trump put in place after taking office (commonly known as the “Muslim Ban”) were within his constitutional authority. Federal judges disagreed and the ban was thrown out in court, even after revisions.

 

“After the nightmare we had with Jeff Sessions, we didn’t think we could go much lower, but William Barr gives Sessions a run for his money,” said Michael Collins, director of national affairs at the Drug Policy Alliance, which advocates for approaching drugs as a public health issue rather than criminal problem.

 

https://truthout.org/articles/ag-nominee-william-barr-endorsed-more-incarceration/