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November 10, 2021

Absent Any Proof, Israel Designates Palestinian Rights Groups “Terrorist”

In an effort to cut off the financial lifelines of six of the most prominent Palestinian human rights groups, the state of Israel has baselessly designated them as “terrorist” organizations.

On October 22, Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz announced that Israel will henceforth officially consider the six groups – Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association, Al-Haq, Bisan Center for Research and Development, Defense for Children International – Palestine, the Union of Agricultural Work Committees and the Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees — as “terrorist organizations,” attempting to link them to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). The PFLP is a leftist Palestinian political party with a military wing.

Israeli leaders have targeted the groups due to their support of the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) investigation of Israeli war crimes as well as the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement against the illegal Israeli occupation.

When Israeli officials endeavored to present secret evidence of the supposed “terrorist” affiliations of the six organizations, they were utterly unable to do so. Israel’s action provoked outrage from international human rights experts and observers, who have depicted the move as an attack on human rights defenders and the Palestinian human rights movement.

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November 4, 2021

SCOTUS Likely to Allow Challenge to Texas Law, But May Still Overturn “Roe”

Texas’s draconian anti-abortion law remained in effect as the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on November 1 about whether it could be challenged in court. Known as the “Texas Heartbeat Law,” Senate Bill 8 (SB 8) outlaws all abortions after cardiac activity can be detected, generally after six weeks of pregnancy when most people don’t know they’re pregnant. The law contains no exception for rape or incest. Since September 1, when SB 8 became operative, it has prevented most abortions in Texas. Nearly 1 in 10 women of childbearing age live in Texas, the PBS NewsHour reported.

SB 8 squarely violates Roe v. Wade, which allows abortions until fetal viability — around 23 weeks. Although it appeared during the arguments that a majority of justices will permit SB 8’s constitutionality to be tested in court, the justices may nevertheless overturn Roe. On December 1, the high court will hear arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, about a Mississippi law that prohibits abortions after 15 weeks. The lawyers representing the State of Mississippi in Dobbs are specifically asking the court to overrule Roe v. Wade.

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October 30, 2021

Biden’s DOJ Downplayed Suicide Risk for Assange in Appeal of Extradition Denial

The Biden administration asked two United Kingdom High Court judges to overturn the British district judge’s denial of extradition of journalist Julian Assange this week during an October 27-28 appeals hearing in London. If extradited to the United States, the WikiLeaks founder would face 175 years in prison for exposing evidence of U.S. war crimes. Determined to bring Assange to trial in the U.S. on the indictment filed by former President Donald Trump, President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice (DOJ) is raising spurious issues on appeal.

On January 6, U.K. District Judge Vanessa Baraitser denied extradition because of the strong likelihood Assange would commit suicide if extradited to the U.S., where he would be held under onerous prison conditions. She relied largely on expert testimony by defense expert Michael Kopelman, emeritus professor of neuropsychiatry at Kings College London. Kopelman testified, “I am as confident as a psychiatrist ever can be that, if extradition to the United States were to become imminent, Mr. Assange will find a way of suiciding.”

The U.K. 2003 Extradition Act forbids extradition if “the physical or mental condition of the person is such that it would be unjust or oppressive to extradite him.” Baraitser found the risk of suicide to be “substantial” or “very high,” and that it would thus be oppressive to extradite Assange to the U.S.

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October 25, 2021

UK High Court Should Deny Extradition Because CIA Planned to Assassinate Assange

Why is Joe Biden’s Department of Justice continuing Donald Trump’s persecution of WikiLeaks founder, publisher and journalist Julian Assange?

Barack Obama, concerned about threats to the First Amendment freedom of the press, decided against indicting Assange for exposing U.S. war crimes. Trump did indict Assange, under Espionage Act charges that could garner him 175 years in prison. A British district judge denied Trump’s request for Assange’s extradition from the U.K. to the United States because of the extremely high likelihood that it would lead Assange to commit suicide. Trump appealed the denial of extradition.

Instead of dropping Trump’s extradition request, Biden is vigorously pursuing his predecessor’s appeal against Assange, which the U.K. High Court will hear on October 27 and 28. At that hearing, the High Court should determine what effect the CIA’s recently revealed plan to kidnap and assassinate Assange will have on his fragile mental state in the event he is extradited to the United States.

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October 10, 2021

Biden Tells Supreme Court That Publicly Documented Torture Is a State Secret

When Abu Zubaydah was apprehended in Pakistan in 2002, the George W. Bush administration falsely characterized him as chief of operations for al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden’s number three man. For the next four years, the CIA sent Zubaydah to its “black sites” in Thailand and Poland where he was viciously tortured. In 2006, Zubaydah was taken to Guantánamo, where he remains to this day. He has never been charged with a crime.

The torture of Abu Zubaydah is thoroughly documented in the 2014 report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. In fact, several of the justices at the October 6 Supreme Court oral argument in United States v. Zubaydah referred to his treatment as “torture.”

Zubaydah’s lawyers detailed the torture he suffered in their brief (which referenced the Senate torture report) as follows:

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October 6, 2021

Human Rights Attorney Sentenced to Prison After Winning Case Against Chevron

In a move calculated to shield Chevron and deter other lawyers from suing giant corporate polluters, U.S. human rights attorney Steven Donziger was sentenced on October 1 to the maximum of six months in prison for criminal contempt. Donziger, who had won a $9.5 billion judgement for his Indigenous clients against the oil giant for polluting the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador, refused to provide Chevron with his confidential client communications. Before his sentencing, Donziger spent two years on house arrest wearing an ankle bracelet and confined to his home.

“When the next book is written touting the American judicial system as one built on the rule of law, that shows the ways in which the rule of law prevailed over powerful and moneyed interests,” Donziger attorney Ron Kuby told Truthout after the sentencing, “I can assure you the Donziger case will not be included.”

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October 4, 2021

Biden’s Expulsion of Haitian Migrants Is Racist, Illegal — and Trumpian

Notwithstanding President Joe Biden’s promise to pursue a more humane immigration policy than his predecessor, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been illegally expelling Haitian migrants, with the Border Patrol cracking whips and herding them like cattle. When U.S. authorities put them on a plane to Haiti, “they chained us like animals — our hands, feet and waist — and once we arrived, they unchained us so journalists wouldn’t see us,” one Haitian migrant said, in footage shown by John Oliver on “Last Week Tonight.”

When confronted about his administration’s use of horse reins as whips to menace Black migrants at the southern U.S. border, Biden said it was “horrible … to see people treated like they did: horses nearly running them over and people being strapped. It’s outrageous.”

Biden declared, “I promise you, those people will pay,” and noted that a federal investigation is underway. “There will be consequences. It’s an embarrassment. But beyond an embarrassment, it’s dangerous; it’s wrong. It sends the wrong message around the world. It sends the wrong message at home. It’s simply not who we are.”

Biden’s denial is reminiscent of that of Barack Obama, who reacted to the 6,700-page report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that documented a widespread program of U.S. torture by saying that torture “is contrary to who we are.”

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September 28, 2021

War in Afghanistan Isn’t Over — It’s Taking the Form of Illegal Drone Strikes

Three weeks after his administration launched a drone attack that killed 10 civilians in Kabul, Afghanistan, President Joe Biden addressed the United Nations General Assembly. He proudly declared, “I stand here today, for the first time in 20 years, with the United States not at war.” The day before, his administration had launched a drone strike in Syria, and three weeks earlier, the U.S. had conducted an air strike in Somalia. The commander-in-chief also apparently forgot that U.S. forces are still fighting in at least six different countries, including Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Libya, Somalia and Niger. And he promised to continue bombing Afghanistan from afar.

Unfortunately Biden’s withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan is substantially less meaningful when analyzed in light of his administration’s pledge to mount “over-the-horizon” attacks in that country from afar even though we won’t have troops on the ground.

“Our troops are not coming home. We need to be honest about that,” Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-New Jersey) said during congressional testimony by Secretary of State Antony Blinken earlier this month. “They are merely moving to other bases in the same region to conduct the same counterterrorism missions, including in Afghanistan.”

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September 21, 2021

Justice Department Fights Back Against Texas Anti-Abortion Law

The Supreme Court’s greenlighting of the most draconian anti-abortion law in the country has had the right wing’s “desired effect of deterring abortion providers from offering virtually any abortions” in Texas since September 1, according to the Department of Justice (DOJ).

S.B. 8 prohibits abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, before most people even know they’re pregnant. S.B. 8 is thus in direct conflict with Roe v. Wade, which is supposed to protect the right to abortion until the fetus is viable — about 22-24 weeks.

Outlawing abortion will not prevent abortions. It will prevent safe abortions from occurring within the state. Some pregnant people who can afford to travel out of Texas will get safe abortions elsewhere. Poor, rural, undocumented and non-white women in Texas will be those most directly harmed by S.B. 8.

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September 20, 2021

Samuel Moyn’s Unprincipled Attack on Human Rights Giant Michael Ratner Is Shameful

Samuel Moyn’s vicious and unprincipled attack on Michael Ratner, one of the finest human rights attorneys of our time, was published in the New York Review of Books (NYRB) on September 1. Moyn singles out Ratner as a whipping boy to support his own bizarre theory that punishing war crimes prolongs war by making it more palatable. He disingenuously claims that enforcing the Geneva Conventions and opposing illegal wars are mutually exclusive. As Dexter Filkins noted in the New Yorker, Moyn’s “logic would favor incinerating entire cities, Tokyo style, if the resulting spectacles of agony lead more people to oppose American power.”

Moyn takes Ratner—the long-time president of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) who died in 2016—to task for filing Rasul v. Bush to give people indefinitely detained at Guantánamo the constitutional right to habeas corpus to challenge their detention. Moyn would have us turn our backs on people who are tortured, massacred and locked up indefinitely. He apparently agrees with the preposterous claim of George W. Bush’s first attorney general Alberto Gonzales (who facilitated the US torture program) that the Geneva Conventions—which classify torture as a war crime—were “quaint” and “obsolete.”

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