MetaFilter posts tagged with Detention

"Files Vanished, Young Chinese Lose the Future."

Keter — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 16:12:08 -0800

Imagine you're living in China, trying to work your way out of the family date farming business (which garners approximately $450 annually). You do all the right things. You apply for (and receive) Communist Party membership. You study literally to the point of collapse, and despite coming from coal-town origins, you score high on your gao kao ("high test," more-or-less the only thing that matters in getting into a Chinese university). Your already-poor family goes deep into debt to send you to college, and you even manage to come out with a degree. Classic rise-up-by-your-own-bootstraps tale, right? However, finally, when you go to apply for a job—your state-sanctioned educational, occupational, and political records are inexplicably, awfully gone. What has happened to that plain manila folder (!) that serves as your only legitimate, official history in Chinese society? Probably stolen and sold so a party official's child can get everything you worked so hard for. And then, of course, your family is detained by party officials when your parents demand to know where the hell your life went. Of course. Then again, local corruption by local officials in China isn't terribly surprising. It's had some time to evolve. This just isn't what you normally think about when you think "government corruption."

Permanent Vacation for 17 Only $200M!

l33tpolicywonk — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 13:56:19 -0800

GITMO's 17 Uighurs - a dissident Chinese religious group - sent to Palau. Oppressed in China [previously and previously], the group were among several exonerated Guantanamo detainees [previously] who remained at the prison because no one would take them. Palau will receive $200 million in aid later this year, which the State Department argues is not quid pro quo. Austrialia, among 100 other nations, declined to house the Uighurs several times, initially proposing to send GITMO refugees to Nauru, an island left bankrupt from its participation in Russian banking, terrorism and other corruption. Citing the need to present a united front against China, the US has long argued several nations must simultaneously accept Uighur refugees. Instead, they head to a nation which acted as a US trust territory until 1994, and which the Secretary of State calls a staunch ally. Palauan President Johnson Toribiong on the agreement: "This is but a small thing we can do to thank our best friend and ally for all it has done for Palau."

The sins of the fathers

Joe Beese — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 08:52:02 -0800

Yarl's Wood immigration removal centre has seen hunger strikes and rioting. Now the British government has issued a report finding that its children "are being denied urgent medical treatment, handled violently and left at risk of serious harm". The Border and Immigration Minister replies, "If people refuse to go home then detention becomes a necessity." Plans have been approved to double the size of the facility. Of course, the right-wing feels that the detainees have it too good already.

Voices from the Black Sites

shoesfullofdust — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 16:38:59 -0800

Interrogation techniques used by the CIA on al-Qaeda suspects "constituted torture", according to a report by the International Red Cross.

Closing Guantánamo

homunculus — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 22:00:42 -0800

Closing Guantánamo: A forum on what to do with detainees.

Six weeks was enough time for Mozart to write three of his greatest symphonies.

cjorgensen — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 13:48:32 -0800

A bunch of writers (42 to be exact), having decided civil liberties are important, have launched a website with poems, essays, and short stories protesting the extension of the pre-charge detention period in the UK from 28 to 42 days. Of course, Not everyone thinks it's a good idea. Sadly, Douglas Adams is not one of them and is unavailable for comment.

James Powderly's story of his Beijing detention

kliuless — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 07:11:13 -0800

An American in Beijing's Detention Facilities (via kottke)

After hours without sleep and threats against their lives and the lives of their loved ones, Powderly and the other Americans began to crack. “That’s when I started to realize that I’m really good at being a douche-baggy art star, but I’m really bad at this secret agent business,” he said.

which can be compared/contrasted with recent police action in st. paul (and of course guantanamo), but also the larger image and reality in china.

The irony of being a patsy to tyrrants

petrilli — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 18:19:12 -0800

The media begins to awaken. Recently, Tom Curley, the President and CEO of Associated Press lashed out at the absurd conditions surrounding the detention of Bilal Hussein. After being detained for over 18 months, the US Military has finally decided to charge him, but nobody can say for what, or when, or why, or what evidence might be brought forth. Strangely, Mr. Curley writes this without a hint of the irony present in being caught in the net of lies, deception and constructed memory hole that the media has participated in the creation of. Playing patsy comes back to bite. AP hosts a timeline of articles.

California Inspects Spector and cannot decide. There is more to this than meets the eye.

Rancid Badger — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 22:55:21 -0800

California Where the Rich do Fine While the Poor are Doing Time "Hell, you got to live with it, there's nothing else to live with except mendacity, is there?" Big Daddy, Cat On A Hot Tin Roof

The Great Writ

homunculus — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 12:49:45 -0800

Habeas Corpus, R.I.P. (1215 - 2006). It was so pre-9/11 anyway. Instead we may get "our generation’s version of the Alien and Sedition Acts." What could go wrong?

One man's terrorist...

szechuan — Mon, 21 Nov 2005 17:39:18 -0800

The Cult of Zaoui. Algerian Ahmed Zaoui arrived in New Zealand in December 2002, having been convicted in Belgium and France (in absentia) for terrorism-related offences, on a false passport requesting refugee status. He was imprisoned for two years (spending ten months in solitary confinement) as a result of the Security Intelligence Service issuing a security risk certificate, before the NZ Supreme Court granted him bail. He now lives in a Dominican Priory in Auckland under curfew, but manages (accompanied by his crusading young lawyer) to give public lectures, offer eulogies, publish a book of poetry, appear in a music video (wmv), sing onstage at the NZ Music Awards, inspire a fund-raising cookbook "Conversations over Couscous", and has become (depending on your viewpoint) a reluctant or carefully cultivated celebrity.

Cruel and Unusual - The End Of The Eighth Amendment

y2karl — Mon, 08 Nov 2004 21:42:08 -0800

Cruel and Unusual - The End Of The Eighth Amendment
It might seem at first that the rules for the treatment of Iraqi prisoners were founded on standards of political legitimacy suited to war or emergencies; based on what Carl Schmitt called the urgency of the ''exception,'' they were meant to remain secret as necessary ''war measures'' and to be exempt from traditional legal ideals and the courts associated with them. But the ominous discretionary powers used to justify this conduct are entirely familiar to those who follow the everyday treatment of prisoners in the United States—not only their treatment by prison guards but their treatment by the courts in sentencing, corrections, and prisoners' rights. The torture memoranda, as unprecedented as they appear in presenting ''legal doctrines . . . that could render specific conduct, otherwise criminal, not unlawful,'' refer to U.S. prison cases in the last 30 years that have turned on the legal meaning of the Eighth Amendment’s language prohibiting ''cruel and unusual punishment.'' What is the history of this phrase? How has it been interpreted? And how has its content been so eviscerated?

The Road To Abu Ghraib

y2karl — Wed, 27 Oct 2004 09:03:17 -0800

The Road To Abu Ghraib A generation from now, historians may look back to April 28, 2004, as the day the United States lost the war in Iraq... It was a direct—and predictable—consequence of a policy, hatched at the highest levels of the administration, by senior White House officials and lawyers, in the weeks and months after 9/11. Yet the administration has largely managed to escape responsibility for those decisions; a month from election day, almost no one in the press or the political class is talking about what is, without question, the worst scandal to emerge from President Bush's nearly four years in office... Given the particular conditions faced by the president and his deputies after 9/11—a war against terrorists, in which the need to extract intelligence via interrogations was intensely pressing, but the limits placed by international law on interrogation techniques were very constricting—did those leaders have better alternatives than the one they chose? The answer is that they did. And we will be living with the consequences of the choices they made for years to come.

Hookie nicked at last!

terrymiles — Thu, 27 May 2004 00:02:35 -0800

Hookie hooked... Arrested at 3am, Abu has a kennel waiting at Guatanamo Bay...

The Scandal's Growing Stain

Postroad — Sun, 09 May 2004 11:12:36 -0800

The Scandal's Growing Stain Time Magazine: "Abuses by U.S. soldiers in Iraq shock the world and roil the Bush Administration. the inside story of what went wrong—and who's to blame"

US fires Guantanamo defence team

Postroad — Wed, 03 Dec 2003 12:11:58 -0800

US fires Guantanamo defence team If we make the rules, we will win the game. "A team of military lawyers recruited to defend alleged terrorists held by the US at Guantanamo Bay was dismissed by the Pentagon after some of its members rebelled against the unfair way the trials have been designed, the Guardian has learned"

Girl to sue over detention

feelinglistless — Sat, 28 Dec 2002 03:57:10 -0800

Girl to sue over detention "The family, who want compensation, will argue that the detentions were unlawful because they took place in Freya's free time. " If you can't give kids detention, how else are they going to be punished for breaking school rules?

Ty Webb — Wed, 02 Oct 2002 10:48:04 -0800

TRAPPED, CUFFED & BUSSED Two Diamondback (Univ. of Maryland student newspaper)reporters covering the IMF-World Bank protests were arrested Friday morning and manacled for 23 hours. Surrounded by hundreds of protesters in Pershing Park, Washington Metropolitan Police circled and arrested the entire group. Jason Flanagan and Debra Kahn were there as impartial observers, and despite the newspaper's efforts to release them, they were stripped of all their possessions - even their shoelaces. What follows is a first-person account of their arrest and detention.

metrocake — Fri, 14 Sep 2001 12:06:36 -0800

Airport Detainees Cleared At least 10 travelers of Middle Eastern descent who were detained at two New York airports have been cleared of any connection with Tuesday's terrorist attacks, Sen. Joseph Biden said Friday.

"Anyone with dark skin or who spoke with an accent was taken aside and searched," passenger Mike Glass of Seattle told the Times. "And then they went to any male with too much facial hair."

Isn't this going too far? >more<