Marshall Coulter, 14, is in critical condition after being shot in the head on Friday by Merritt Landry, 33, a white homeowner and buildings inspector for the Historic District Landmarks Commission who believed Coulter was trying to break into his home in Marigny.
But according to police, Coulter was unarmed and did not pose a threat to Landry, who has been charged with attempted second-degree murder.
Read More
On the afternoon of Sunday, July 21, 30-year-old Lamont Earl Dukes and his friend, both African American males, were stopped at a Walgreens pharmacy by a St. Louis police officer conducting a “pedestrian check”, a euphemism for stopping people of color in “high-crime neighborhoods” without probable cause. Read More
Over 100 Guantanamo prisoners have been on hunger strike since February to protest indefinite detention without charge trial at the hands of the U.S. government. At least 40 hunger strikers are being force-fed to prevent death, a procedure human rights organizations say amounts to torture.
In case you had any doubts about the validity of that claim, the British human rights organization Reprieve posted a disturbing video of Yasin Bey, (formerly known as Mos Def) voluntarily undergoing a force-feeding as laid out by Guantanamo’s standard operating procedures leaked to Al Jazeera in May. Read More
From 2006 to 2010, doctors contracted by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation performed tubal litigation (surgical sterilization) on 150 pregnant inmates without proper approval, according to the Center for Investigative Reporting.
State documents reveal that California paid doctors $147,460 from 1997 to 2010 to perform the procedure, meaning at least 100 more women were sterilized prior to 2006.
Eugenics has a sordid history in the United States, especially in California where 20,000 people were forcibly sterilized between 1909 and 1963 in an effort to purge those deemed “defective”(prisoners, the mentally ill, the poor) from society. That’s why forced sterilization was banned in 1979. Yet here we are in the 21st century and it’s still happening. Read More
Dan Somers (right) performing at his band’s CD Release Show (Phoenix New Times/Melissa Fossum)
On June 10, 2013, 30-year-old Iraq War veteran Daniel Somers killed himself after writing a powerful letter to his family explaining his reasons for doing so.
“My mind is a wasteland filled with visions of incredible horror, unceasing depression, and crippling anxiety, even with all of the medications the doctors dare give,” reads the letter, which Somers’ family allowed Gawker to publish. Somers went on to reveal the source of his pain: Read More
A 10-year-old Yemeni boy named Abdulaziz was killed on June 10, reports McClatchy. And it was the U.S. government that killed him.
Perhaps he should have known better than to be the younger brother of al Qaeda chief Saleh Hassan Huraydan, the target of the drone strike. At least that’s what President Obama’s former press secretary turned MSNBC contributer, Robert Gibbs, might say considering his justification for the U.S. drone strike that killed 16-year-old American Abdulrahman Al-Awlaki two weeks after his father, Anwar, was killed in a separate strike.
Though Obama has not commented on the death of Abdulaziz, I imagine he would chalk this up to the unintended consequence of war, just another tragic casualty. And most Americans would probably agree.
Still, I don’t understand how dead civilians, particularly dead children, quality as war casualties when the people we target aren’t actually involved in any sort of battle at the time of the attack. In this latest strike, “a U.S. drone fired up to five missiles at an SUV that was carrying suspected militants in Mahashama.” How on earth does an SUV packed with what might be “militants” (whatever that means) pose a “continuing and imminent threat to the American people”, the standard by which Obama decides who to assassinate.
Can you imagine if al Qaeda attacked a minivan they suspected was being driven by a US soldier and ended up killing that soldier along with his/her entire family? That would be murder, plain and simple. So why is it any different when we drop bombs on suspected al Qaeda soldiers when they’re likely with their families driving, eating, or sleeping, far from any battlefield?
If that isn’t enough to make you question U.S. targeted killing policy, then perhaps the anger toward America provoked by civilian deaths will. As McClatchy points out, Abdulaziz’s death “set off a firestorm of complaints that underscores how American airstrikes can so outrage a community that even though al Qaida loses some foot soldiers, it gains dozens of sympathizers.”
“Killing al Qaida is one thing, but the death of an innocent person is a crime that we cannot accept,” said a sheikh from the area, who like other tribal leaders McClatchy interviewed spoke only on the condition of anonymity because of security concerns. “What did Abdulaziz do? Was this child a member of al Qaida?”
Since the NSA spying story broke last week, I’ve been thinking a lot about this Martin Niemöller saying:
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out–
Because I was not a Socialist.Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out–
Because I was not a Jew.Then they came for me–and there was no one left to speak for me.
Unless you live under a rock, you’ve heard about the NSA collecting phone records and tapping into the central servers of nine internet giants to extract massive amounts of data on Americans. Read More
Richard Engel and Robert Windrem of NBC News published a horrifying report today revealing that the CIA doesn’t always know the identities of the people it’s executing in drone strikes. Their findings are based on a review of 14 months worth of classified documents that describe 114 drone strikes in Pakistan and Afghanistan beginning in September 2010.
About one of every four of those killed by drones in Pakistan between Sept. 3, 2010, and Oct. 30, 2011, were classified as “other militants,” the documents detail. The “other militants” label was used when the CIA could not determine the affiliation of those killed, prompting questions about how the agency could conclude they were a threat to U.S. national security. Read More
The Philadelphia School District’s (PSD) state-run School Reform Commission voted in March to close 23 public schools, nearly 10 percent of the city’s total, in a move they say is necessary to plug a $304 million budget deficit. Read More
This video shows a remarkable scene of police overkill in a Harlem subway station on the afternoon of May 13. What begins as two cops from the NYPD trying to handcuff a seemingly unthreatening black man quickly spirals into over two dozen officers flooding the station to arrest him.
The video opens with one of the two arresting officers repeatedly shouting, “Put your hands behind your back and stop resisting!” at the suspect, who they have pinned to the ground. The second officer, who looks extremely uncomfortable, gently asks his partner to “relax” several times.
The two officers then force the suspect—or, more accurately, the victim—to his feat and try to handcuff him up against the wall. But the suspect keeps planting his foot and hand on the wall and explains to the officers that he’s afraid they will slam his face into it. They assure him they won’t and they cuff him, at which point all hell breaks loose.
Around the 1:02 mark, two more cops come rushing in and literally grab the victim’s feet from under him, slamming his body to the ground as he screams “I haven’t done anything, I haven’t done anything!”
At the 1:30 mark, the handcuffed man is being held face down on the ground by all four police officers when cop comes storms in asking his fellow officers “You guys alright?” as though they were the ones who had just been brutally attacked. Still, more cops trickle and then flood into the station until the victim is completely submerged under what looks like an angry lynch mob.
The person recording the incident on his cell phone is then forced out of the station, which has been surrounded by a dozen police cars outside.
The video ends with witnesses telling the cameraman that the victim was just “standing there” when he was arrested for “no reason”.
Can you imagine how difficult it would be to live in an environment where this shit goes down on the regular? Make no mistake, the scene in the above video is routine in certain NYC communities where people of color are disproportionately stopped, questioned, frisked and harassed as a matter of policy. And the slightest sign of resistance, like instinctively protecting your face from being slammed into a wall, could land you behind bars for “resisting” or even “assaulting” a police officer, a label that brings on a world of trouble.
Recent Comments