...Guantanamo Bay is a United States naval base/detention camp located off of the coast of Cuba. The camp was established by the Bush administration in 2002, and has been in the mainstream media ever since. What draws the media to this specific base is the ongoings there. People have been held there indefinitely without trial and been relentlessly tortured. This is seen as an extremely controversial breach of human rights by Amnesty International, which is one of (if not the) biggest human rights groups focused on the equality of all human beings. George W. Bush’s administration opened Guantanamo Bay as a detention center during the “War on Terror”. Bush coined this term after 9/11 as a promise to stop terrorism in the U.S. Since it’s opening,...
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...Kenny Anderson Political Science Prof. Hawn 10 October 2012 Government and Torture Means of torture have been used around the world for a number of years. At one point in time it had been terminated in the United States; however, after the events of September 11, 2001, it has come back as an acceptable way to acquire information from terrorists. Torture is, according to the United Nation Convention Against Torture in 1984: “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him, or a third person, information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in, or incidental to, lawful sanctions.” (OHCHR) This definition, regardless of any country's own rules, regulations and laws is obligatory to be carried out by all the countries. When someone is accused of being a culprit of torture, there are various credentials, which are modified to wartime situations when needed. In general to be a culprit, one must bring severe physical, mental pain or suffering upon the victim. In most scenarios...
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...last couple of years is the Existence of Guantanamo bay. The debate is whether it should be closed or stay open. Guantanamo Bay detention camp is a military prison in cuba on the Guantanamo bay Naval base. The detention camp was created to house suspected terrorist and fighters of the Taliban . The Issue came about in about ‘07 - ‘08 toward the conclusion of the Bush Administration. President Obama was the first to openly speak about closing Guantanamo as it was one of his campaign promises .One of the main setbacks is where the detainees will be placed if it was to close. Most of the detainees haven’t been approved for transfer...
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...Guantánamo Bay First-hand accounts of torture are described in the book “The Guantánamo Diary”, and the 115 page report on the “Tipton Three”, which was made into the documentary drama “The Road to Guantánamo Bay.” (Branigan) The evidence shows the harsh realities for the people who face judgment because of whom the United States is in war with at that time. Guantánamo Bay is a cruel environment for detainees, do these stories about the torture detainee’s face change the way people perceive the facility? It is something that is based on opinions and beliefs, but look at the facts, do people deserve to be treated like animals because they are of a certain religion or race? The stories about the facility are frightening and disgusting. Guantánamo...
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...Schumacher | Professor Dena HurstPHI 210 | Strayer University | 6/21/2013 | | How is torture defined? Article 5 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 says “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel; inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” Does imposing torture amongst terrorist detainees help the United States in fighting the war on terror? Al Qaeda started its war against America by carrying out the simultaneous bombings of our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 2008, the bombing of the USS Cole in October 2000 and what pulled the United States into the global war on terrorism, September 11, 2001. What I will be discussing will be the political atmosphere after September 11th and the roles of our government officials and intelligence agencies. America is supposed to be a country of human rights and not to inflict cruel and unusual punishment on criminals sentenced in our own penal system. Where have we as a nation fallen? I do not believe that torturing or using “enhanced interrogation techniques” will give us the upper hand in the global war on terror. Who ultimately authorized the United States to enter into torturing another human being? The United States became aware of abuses and torturing of detainees from the Abu Ghraib scandal in Afghanistan in April 2004. Detainees underwent serious mistreatment, torture, threatened with dogs and other degrading situations. The photography of the military captors were...
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...Guantanamo Bay A seemingly endless war is upon us, between the United States and the countless terrorists of ISIS, Al Qaeda and others. The Naval Station detention camp located in Cuba, referred to as Guantanamo Bay or Gitmo (GTMO), holds prisoners, or detainees, who have been involved in terrorist activities. Some believe that Gitmo should be closed because of recent torture stories involving U.S. officials on the prisoners of the camp. They surmise that by closing Gitmo, tensions with the terrorists will lessen, which is far from true. Closing Guantanamo Bay would have a negative effect on the overall position of the United States in this arduous battle with the terrorists. President George W. Bush decided to transfer high value detainees from Central Intelligence Agency sites in the summer of 2006. Usually, captured soldiers would have protection under the Geneva Convention, which establishes the standards of law for the humanitarian treatment of war, or the basic rights of wartime prisoners. The detainees, being suspected Taliban and al Qaeda operatives, were not viewed as a part of a legitimate government, so it is not clear whether they should be protected under international law (Dahlstrom). The purpose of Guantanamo Bay was to capture any person who was involved in the terrorism that caused many U.S. deaths; it is a way, and maybe the only way, that the United States has in order to protect its citizens. In an article called, “The Historical Perspective on Guantanamo...
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...behind barbed wire at the U.S. Naval Station, Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. In April 2004, when the case challenging the legality of their detention was argued before the U.S. Supreme Court, Guantánamo still appeared to many as a strange aberration, as an “animal,” with “no other like it,” as Justice Ginsburg stated. Descriptions of Guantánamo as a lawless zone enhanced this image of its exceptional status: a legal black hole, a legal limbo, a prison beyond the law, a “permanent United States penal colony floating in another world.”3 Yet since the revelations of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib in Iraq and the leak of the Washington “torture memos,” it has become increasingly clear that, more than an anomaly, Guantánamo repre- sents the start of the “road to Abu Ghraib,” one island in a global penal archi- pelago, where the United States indefinitely detains, secretly transports, and tortures uncounted prisoners from all over the world.4 As a rallying cry against human rights abuses in the U.S. “war on terror,” Guantánamo has come to embody what Amnesty International calls a “gulag for our times.”5 The global dimensions of Guantánamo cannot be understood separately from its seemingly bizarre location in Cuba. Prisoners captured in Afghani- stan and around the world were transported here, to a country quite close geographically, yet far politically, from the United States, a country with which the United States has no diplomatic relations. Guantánamo occupies a transi- tional political space...
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...The events following Khadr’s arrest was horrific and unjust, to say the least. In 2004, Omar Khadr was charged with murder, attempted murder, conspiracy, and aiding the enemy (Law uoft Mackin). Firstly, Khadr was treated unjustly in the period of his detention. Omar was subjected to harsh interrogation method such as the “frequent flyer program”, which is a technique used specifically in Guantanamo Bay. This technique deprives the detainee of sleep by moving them from one cell to another, multiple times a day, for weeks on end (torture). It is proven that sleep deprivation can cause impaired memory and cognitive functioning, decreased short term memory, and stress. Omar Khadr was subjected to this technique to make him less resistant to interrogation....
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...The Case of Omar Khadr: Summary + Timeline Omar Khadr is a Canadian citizen born in Ottawa, Ontario in 1986. Omar has been in the custody of the United States Department of Defense since he was 15 and has been detained at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba since he was 16 years old. The United States alleges that Omar’s father took him to meet Al-Qaeda leaders when Omar was ten years old, that he received military training, and fought in Afghanistan. In July 2002, Omar was captured by the U.S. military after its forces bombed and assaulted the compound in which he was living. The U.S. raid and subsequent firefight resulted in the death of a U.S. soldier and Omar being severely wounded. Thereafter, he was detained at Bagram Air Base and was subjected to cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment and torture. At the age of 16, Omar was sent to the U.S. detention facility in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. While detained, Omar was subjected to excessively harsh interrogation methods in violation of international law, including: shackling in painful stress positions for hours on end; beatings by guards; express threats of rendition to third countries for the purposes of torture; solitary confinement for lengthy periods; and confinement in extremely cold cells. While other minors at Guantánamo were segregated from the adult population and ultimately repatriated, Omar has never received any age-appropriate treatment. In nearly five years of imprisonment, Omar has only once been permitted contact with his family...
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...to realize that every individual is different, we all have our different style and taste which makes us have our own unique look. Eating disorders are amongst the most common psychiatric syndromes, this leads to impatient hospitalization and suicide attempts for morality. According to recent studies both anorexia and bulimia are most common in the United States. This research paper will point out the importance of eating disorders: bulimia and anorexia, how the theory “Social comparison” can be used for this topic when comparing the US to other countries that are the opposite of bulimia and anorexia such as force-feeding and will also state how different it is in a little town in Africa called Mauritania and a prison in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. First of all, what are eating disorders? Eating disorders are psychological illnesses defined by abnormal eating habits that may involve either insufficient or excessive food intake to the determined of an individual’s mental and physical health. Bulimia nervosa and Anorexia nervosa are the most common form of eating disorders. What is Bulimia? Bulimia is an eating...
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...J’accuse les États-unis d’Amérique de violation des droits de l’homme Source : http://web.amnesty.org/report2005/usa-summary-fra 1. Peine de mort a. Maintien de la peine de mort i. 59 personnes exécutées en 2004, ce qui porte à 944 le nombre total de prisonniers mis à mort depuis la levée du moratoire sur les exécutions, décidée en 1976 par la Cour suprême fédérale. ii. Le Texas comptabilisait 23 des 59 exécutions de l’année et 336 des 944 ayant eu lieu aux ÉU depuis 1976. iii. Huit personnes jugées dans la juridiction du comté de Harris (Texas) ont été exécutées au cours de l’année, malgré les doutes planant sur la fiabilité des moyens de preuve médicolégaux traités par le laboratoire de police scientifique du service de police de Houston, où des problèmes majeurs avaient été mis en évidence en 2003. b. Exécution de personne ayant des antécédents de graves maladies mentales i. Charles Singleton, exécuté le 6 janvier en Arkansas; pendant qu’il se trouvait dans le couloir de la mort, son affection mentale était parfois si sérieuse qu’il fallait lui administrer des médicaments de force. ii. James Hubbard, exécuté le 5 août en Alabama. Condamné à la peine capitale il y a plus d’un quart de siècle, il était à 74 ans, le prisonnier le plus âgé à être exécuté aux États-unis depuis 1977. il semble qu’il souffrait de démence, oubliant parfois qui il était et pourquoi il se trouvait dans le quartier des condamnés...
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...Perspectives on Torture and the War on Terrorism An evaluation on Several Arguments Tonia Jenkins Critical Thinking and Problem Solving Snelgrove June 13, 2012 Michael Yoo used several definitions from several different places to define torture in his argument. The first definition is the one he used when he defined torture as the following: act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control. The other definition he uses it used to show what the government defines torture as. This definition is as follows: The United States understands that in order to constitute torture, an act must be specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering and that mental pain or suffering refers to prolonged mental pain caused by or resulting from (1) the intentional infliction or threatened infliction of severe physical pain or suffering; (2) administration or application, or threatened administration of application, of mind altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality; (3) the threat of imminent death; (4) the threat that another person will imminently be subjected to death, severe physical pain or suffering, or the administration or application of mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated...
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...especially helpful to know in the case of the highly publicized Bush Administration and Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal of 2003, in which as many as three thousand eight-hundred Middle Eastern people were abused by the guards. In particular, video, as well as picture evidence, surfaced of nude prisoners lying in their own excretions and blood, guards smiling in pictures with deceased prisoners as if they are posing with friends, and a fearful prisoner confronted by guard dogs in front of his cell. On January 15, 2005, the Supreme Court ruled that the government cannot “hold two thousand detainees indefinitely without being charged with anything.” Topic 3: Brandon Neely was a former guard who served in Guantanamo Bay in its first few years of operation, whose accounts of his time there illustrate the atrocities committed by those who were held in positions of power. The first thing he mentioned was that the guards placed in Guantanamo Bay received little training at all. His job was mainly a matter of “trial and error” when issues arose. The basic training was meant for short-term detention, yet Guantanamo was intended for some of the most dangerous criminals in the United States of America. Neely explained in his account that he and other guards were pressured into hurting the prisoners who arrived. For example, he mentions the time a man in his 50’s arrived at Guantanamo Bay, in which he pushed to the ground for no reason other than to instill fear in him as well as the other...
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...The United States has a detention camp on Guantanamo bay in which they are holding not yet convicted people behind bars and beating and torturing them. The fact that the military is holding people without trial connects the two situations. This is the same problem that Salem had in 1692. Even though the United states has good intentions, they do not have the right to hold people that have not yet been convicted of a crime. Suspicion is not enough to detain a human being, making these doings a violation against human rights. In the Salem witch trials, the individuals that confessed to being witches, both men and women, were kept alive. People would plead guilty in order to stay alive. This caused even more problems, because since people were confessing, the one’s that were doing the killing believed in witches even more. Similar to this, at Guantanamo Bay, there have been “alleged human rights violations, including the use of various forms of torture during interrogations” (Nolen). In both instances, innocent people are being accused of crimes. The only difference is that in the witch trials, admitting false guilt saved you, whereas in Guantanamo Bay, you were tortured...
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...confinement’s recent uptick in usage throughout the United States on both the federal and state level, questions have arisen about its implementation, its effects on the prison population, and its ethical implications. With it becoming apparent that solitary confinement will continue to play a large role in the United States correction system in the future, it is important to explore the answers to these questions. In this essay, we will explore these questions in order to understand solitary confinement more fully. History Defined fully as, “…confinement of a prisoner alone in a cell for all or nearly all of the day, with minimal environmental stimulation and minimal opportunity for social interaction,” (trauma of psychological torture 113) solitary confinement strives to eliminate the stimulus of senses such as sight, touch, and hearing, with the elimination of stimulus and social interaction causing psychological damage to its subject. It has a long history of use in the United States. Its first documented use was at Walnut Street Jail in Philadelphia (http://law.jrank.org/pages/11192/Walnut-Street-Prison.html), instituted after the Walnut Street Jail built specific cells to house individual inmates in isolation. Quakers pushed for Philadelphia to institute this solitary...
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