All Videos Tagged Abuse (12160 Social Network) - 12160 Social Network

True Tales From The Front Lines Of Rescuing Children From Abuse & Trafficking With Jon Wedger

2020-09-14T18:35:36.160Z

Jon Wedger is a retired Police Detective with over 25 years of service in the investigation into child abuse. He was threatened and bullied out of his job fo...

18 LA Sheriffs ARRESTED! MORE Evidence U.S. Cops Are The Worst Kind Of Criminals! (WAR CRIMINALS)

2013-12-11T00:11:39.553Z

Richmond Police Department coming after Cox over a blog he published on VirginiaCopBlock.org

2013-04-28T00:04:07.181Z

Chris Staples, one of Virginia Cop Block's writers/ editors gets the chance to interview Nathan Cox's attorney, in regards to the Richmond Police Department ...

Four Days in Guantanamo

2013-03-13T21:00:10.814Z

In July 2008, like millions of Canadians, we watched 10 minutes of video footage of the interrogation of Omar Khadr.

This material that Omar’s Canadian lawyers had just released stunned us. We were shaken by the moment in which Omar realises that the Canadian intelligence agents who showed up at his cell in Guantanamo had not come to help and protect him as a Canadian citizen but rather to make clumsy attempts to cajole, manipulate and threaten him into making incriminating statements.

We felt compelled to use this footage as the basis for a short film.

Our mission would be to craft a documentary in which interviews would provide the context to help us understand what the recording of the interrogation was trying to tell us.

As is often the case in documentaries, the story evolved. Through contacts, we were able to obtain an additional seven hours of interrogation video, which the public had never seen. Some of the sound had been erased by the Canadian Security Intelligence Agency (CSIS), yet enough remained for us to realize that we had something special and rarely seen - the confrontation between an interrogator and a prisoner.

Indeed this is the only footage available that shows - partially - what takes place inside Guantanamo, the prison where, in the words of Dick Cheney, the former US vice president, the "cream of international terrorists" are supposedly locked up.

If you assume that documentaries reflect reality, you would also agree that reality includes segments that sit within the shadows of the invisible. Once in a while some of those segments leave their confinement to fall directly under the public spotlight. Making it public, as a documentary was, for us, a compelling though somewhat bizarre privilege.

Omar’s story was turned down almost everywhere. Disappointed but not defeated, we approached Canal D, a French-language private Canadian broadcaster. The channel gave us a small licence. It was not enough to cover production costs, but we invested our time and some of our own money.

As filmmakers we wanted to encourage a deeper dialogue over current Canadian security policy.

Since the US launched its global 'war on terror' following 9/11, there has been a corresponding shift in Canadian military and security policy. Omar’s video and other recently released documents mean that the Canadian government can no longer claim to be unstained by torture. In fact, Canada has sent several teams of interrogators to Guantanamo.

Before the Canadian interrogators visited Omar, Ottawa knew that he had been tortured. The military lawyer defending Omar established that in 2002, before his transfer to Guantanamo, Omar was detained at Afghanistan’s Bagram Air Base. His chief interrogator there was Joshua Claus., who had pleaded guilty to torturing to death a young Afghani taxi driver named Dilawar.

Knowing all that, the Canadian government continued to claim that the American authorities treated Omar humanely and that he had committed a very serious crime.

International conventions that protect the rights of children in wartime, and in particular the rights of child soldiers, should have applied to Omar. But Ottawa was able to sidestep those laws.

In October 2010, Omar pleaded guilty to all the charges pressed by the US. It was clearly a plea bargain that allowed the young Canadian to serve eight years in jail, rather than 40. He became the first person ever convicted as a war criminal for acts committed as a juvenile.

The failing state of Guantanamo Bay

2013-03-13T20:52:17.226Z

"I think we need to understand what we mean when we talk about closure, we don't mean transfer or prosecute which is what many of the critics of Guantanamo would like to see happen. When the US government talks about closing Guantanamo, they talk about moving some set of detainees to some other place where they continue to be detained without charge."

- Jennifer Daskal, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center

Attorneys representing detainees at Guantanamo Bay prison say most of their clients are on hunger strike as a result of deteriorating conditions at the camp.

They say the protest has entered its fourth week and there are reports that some men are coughing up blood and losing consciousness.

But a public affairs official at the detention facility denies the reports. In an email to Al Jazeera wrote that of the 166 prisoners seven are currently on hunger strike and that all inmates are closely monitored for health, food and water intake.

Four years ago, Barack Obama, the US president, vowed to close down the facility. But the issue of what should be done with Guantanamo has since disappeared from the radar.

Meanwhile, some human rights attorneys say the situation has actually worsened since Obama became president.

But American public opinion reveals another view: An ABC News and Washington Post poll says that during the 2012 campaign it showed that more than two-thirds of people favour keeping Guantanamo Bay open while only 24 percent think that it should be closed.

To discuss the future of Guantanamo Bay, Inside Story Americas, with presenter Shihab Rattansi, speaks to guests: Morris Davis, a retired US Air Force Colonel and the former chief prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay; Jennifer Daskal, currently an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center, who has also served as a lawyer at the National Security Division of the US department of justice; and David Remes, one of the attorneys representing Guantanamo detainees. He returned from Guantanamo last week.

"There is a rule book for Guantanamo but it seems to get reinterpreted every time there is a new rotation of guards that come in .... There is a lot of world attention on it so you would think that we would want to be on our best behaviour, put our best foot forward, so I just don't see the incentive for trying to be more harsh rather than more compassionate."

- Morris Davis, a former chief prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay