> family members and attorneys in touch with SAMs prisoners can be prosecuted and incarcerated for repeating anything the inmate told them
This is interesting and I'd be very curious to know what the courts have made of this kind of prior restraint. I'm not skeptical that threats of this nature have been made, but I am skeptical that such a prosecution could actually be brought- under what statute? Lawyers may be gagged somewhat, as an officer of the court, but a family member seems like a real stretch.
> Prisoners under SAMs are prohibited from communicating with anyone except a few pre-approved individuals – their attorneys and immediate family members – and SAMs prohibit those individuals from repeating the prisoner’s words to anyone else.
I am still awfully curious as to what possible statutory authority the DoJ could have to regulate the speech of people who aren't actually incarcerated.
I imagine that it isn't actually prior restraint in the classic sense, but instead in the form of an agreement that the lawyers and family members have to sign before talking to the prisoners in question.
Yes, I suspect that they're non-disclosure agreements. So violating them puts one in contempt of court. And punishments for contempt are whatever judges say they are.
See, that would make a least some sense. But apparently "The U.S. Attorney General has sole discretion to impose SAMs". With court imposed gag orders there's a court order from a judge. These things seem to be administrative decisions about detention conditions (the same way prisons can regulate the books prisoners can have, etc). But if so, they wouldn't ordinarily regulate the speech of people not actually in jail. I think the worst they'd be able to do is ban that person from visiting again, not actually prosecute them. How can you be in contempt of court if SAMs are at the sole discretion of the AG?
I guess that the US AG has that power. Or maybe some tame judges. I suppose that it could go to the Supreme Court.
However, many cases have been quashed, based on national security grounds. For criminal cases, charges against suspects have been dropped. But about SAMs, that would likely leave the status unchanged. IANAL, though.
This is mortifying and humiliating. It makes me ashamed to be associated(by being a citizen and armed services veteran) with the country. I suppose I could speak out and try to change things...but I fear that doing so would ensure a similar fate for myself; rotting away in a secret prison, while my family is threatened with prosecution if they talk about it.
It's all happy times here in the USA, anyone that will tell you otherwise has already been imprisoned and/or re-educated.
1.) The US is imprisoning people who speak out against bad things happening in the US?
2.) Any proof of citizens being forced into re-education facilities?
Manning is currently in prison for refusing the illegal attempt to abuse a grand jury to make her testify when the grand jury has already made a charge and should have no further role.
It’s just exposure and acceptance (or lack thereof).
Fifty years ago we (the US) were carpet bombing neutral countries as part of a bloody war to prop up a brutal dictatorship.
Around the same time, we were shooting protestors and systematically shutting minorities out of civic involvement.
A couple of decades before that, we put a hundred thousand innocent civilians in concentration camps because of their ancestry.
Less than a century before that, “the land of the free” had laws allowing people to buy and sell other people. And slavery was never really ended: the 13th Amendment has a big fat exception for prisoners, which we’ve taken advantage of ever since.
What’s different now is that we find out what’s happening more quickly and in a way that makes more people take notice.
I don't know about "western nations" generally, but "American exceptionalism" is well known.
And about TFA, millions of prisoners, mostly male and mostly black, suffer in arguably worse conditions. Especially, I gather from a recently posted article, prisoners in county jails.
We aren't retreating from anything, it's just that in this political climate it's hard to continue to scream about moral high ground when the reality always seems to come crashing through.
That's an extremely low bar, particularly when you consider the detention conditions of Anders Breivik.
Norway imprisoned Breivik in the most comfortable conditions possible; in doing so, they neutered his message. They showed that he was weak and they were strong. They took someone who could have been a far-right martyr and turned him into a pathetic figure, slowly fading into irrelevance in a gilded cage.
That's what real power looks like - no fear, no anger, no hatred, just the calm machinations of a compassionate state. By choosing not to retaliate, the Norwegian government demonstrated the futility of Breivik's actions with perfect clarity.
"It's our moral high ground that stops us from killing the terrorist or letting him starve himself to death."
The US kills alleged terrorists (or allegedly suspected terrorists) all the time via drone bombings and various other military actions, and has also killed them in captivity -- all this usually without any kind of trial.
As for keeping them from starving to death, the prisoners seem to prefer to die of starvation rather than be tortured in prison for the rest of their lives. In this case, letting them die may be less cruel than forcing them to live. Not to mention that force feeding is itself a form of torture.
It's your moral high ground that keeps him alive so you can torture him by forcing ground food into his rectum using the largest, most painful, and most damaging tubes available as a form of "total behavior control" (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/dec/09/cia-report-r...).
Force-feeding hunger strikers is the opposite of "moral high ground." If you're a jailer, and a prisoner dies in your care, then there may be questions asked, there may be accountability. You don't want that. As long as you can keep them more or less alive, it's a lot easier to piously claim the moral high ground while doing basically whatever you want to them.
It's propaganda. It's not done because we value their lives, but specifically because we don't.
Why is western news media intentionally muddying the waters of public perception by comparing an American blacksite to everything in a sensationalist manner?
Let's save, "Nazi" and "Guantanamo" for the men who did the deeds.
Setting aside this specific situation. Let's say you run a prison, and an inmate goes on a "hunger strike" for a reason that's important to them. What should the prison operators do? Force feed the inmate, negotiate, give into their demands, or let them die? Let's say you try to negotiate, but the inmate is making unreasonable demands or you are not willing to meet their demands, then what?
They should be allowed to die. This is the reasonable position. Societal reaction to such action may change administrative policy, but it would do so through entirely proper political channels. The job of the civil servant is to implement policy and advise, not to determine or defend it from changes made in a proper fashion.
I'm not trying to muddy the waters on this issue or take a consequentialist perspective, but how is this materially different from someone rejecting oxygen?
The moral response seems to be to intervene rather than let someone commit suicide, regardless of how long it takes.
But we have to admit that ok, hanging yourself in your cell should be fine, because of this logic.
The reason it's not is political: looks a lot better to have somebody run a story "those horrible prisons are making prisoners eat!" than it is "two-hundred inmates supposedly hung themselves last year because they had the right to"
This is a political battle the prisoner is having with the jail: I am unhappy and ready to die. Make my life just a tiny bit more bearable or I will die in a way that makes you look bad.
I could go into a long rant about all the problems of the American system of jurisprudence. There are tons. We've lost our way on the reasons for prisons and the purpose of incarceration, amongst a lot of other related matters. I still think these folks should have absolute control over their bodies. If it looks bad? Well, it looks bad for a very good reason.
Political systems exist for political reasons. People forget that and ascribe all sorts of things to these systems they never deserved even when they were working well. We need a lot of reform. I wish these folks the best of luck.
Refusing food is less violent. Just like people have the right to refuse refuse to take medicine, refuse medical treatments etc, they should be able to refuse food.
To everyone saying to let them die, then where is the punishment? Most terrorists would rather and, in fact, intend to die during their attacks. If you let them die, not only are you giving them what they want, but then there is no deterrent to carrying out suicide missions.
I don't see any reason to believe that the fear of prison should they fail to die has ever, or will ever, deter even a single person from carrying out a suicide mission.
The lack of deterrent effect doesn’t mean that society’s desire for punishment vanishes. If there was a treatment that could make Osama Bin Laden a perfectly normal accountant in Des Moines I would not advocate for it compared to a trial and execution.
C/f this vindictive attitude with how the Norwegians have treated Brivik. He has been gently and humanly turned into a joke when he could have been a martyr...
The deterrent premise is as old as at least the Inquisition (12th century) and has worked out quite well to reduce crime and recidivism rates in the world to nigh zero levels in the centuries since... /s
Crazy how there are people out there that can live with performing these acts, or "reviewing" them even. How many thousands before they are completely desensitized?
The "Banality of Evil" is a useful idea when trying to understand how the Nazis did what they did. It's wrong to think that it was anyone other than 'normal' human beings who have committed atrocities through the ages.
On one hand your right, he's trying to justify torture and most of us here probably don't agree with that.
On the other hand statements of the "when you start a sentence with X then you're wrong" variety are just a more wordy and upscale analog of the jerks who are posting "yikes" in reply to any comment they don't like on Reddit and add nothing to the conversation.
We don't demand Supermax treatment for 5 victims, or 4 or 3 so why now? And it's hard to take your lust for draconian punishment seriously when many in the US are celebrating Gallagher who is up for shooting elderly and children.
That's a bit harsh, I was just pointing out that this guy is directly responsible for six deaths and it should be taken into the context of the article.
> so why now?
But to your main point, there's a big, big difference between a shooting from a disgruntled employee and a coordinated terrorist attack. The later is deliberately killing and creating an atmosphere of terror for political means. They intend to change US policy -- or else.
Do you think countries should take these attacks in stride, and change their policies to what the terrorists want? Should the perpetrators always get the minimum sentence? Should we release them and give them visas to stay in the country? Where is the line?
> These letters made three demands: an end to all US aid to Israel, an end to US diplomatic relations with Israel, and a pledge by the United States to end interference "with any of the Middle East countries' interior affairs." He stated that the attack on the World Trade Center would be merely the first of such attacks if his demands were not met. In his letters, Yousef admitted that the World Trade Center bombing was an act of terrorism, but this was justified because "the terrorism that Israel practices (which America supports) must be faced with a similar one."
Why isn't there more of a highlight on Salameh's actual charges. This is grossly glossed over especially when understanding what you have to do to land oneself in a blacksite to begin with.
"It’s for this reason that I didn’t ask Salameh to tell me about his crimes. The harm he caused should not be forgotten, but it must be held apart. Under international law, the right to be free from torture is inalienable and absolute—and that protects all of us."
It's pretty sinister that your first response is not to address the torture but "he must be guilty of something". The US has done plenty to demonstrate it will do far worse without wrongdoing by the victim.
The author really glossed over the reasons for the communications ban imposed on the terrorist prisoner - multiple people he spoke with ended up committing terrorist acts. Seems like a good enough reason to completely cut him off. In addition, the author really stretches when she complains that they brought in a gallon of liquid to feed him. If you’ve tried to feed a prisoner multiple times and you know they’re going to deliberately vomit it up, of course you’ll bring extra. There’s enough going on here where the author doesn’t need to add in things that actually seem logical, because now I’m questioning everything she wrote and how much of it was exaggerated.
Arguably. But if you let the prisoner die while in your custody, a lot more people are going to be screaming about how evil you are to allow that, and how it's your fault that they died because you didn't protect them, and it's even more your fault because you probably wanted them dead and at least encouraged it to happen, and and and...
While I agree with humane treatment of prisoners, that's a very slippery argument. Every prison is technically inhumane enough to send some people to attempt suicide.
It’s not slippery at all. Life isn’t fair. Keeping prisoners means you’re responsible for them, and that means that sometimes you’re going to be responsible for problems. There doesn’t have to be a way out of this.
Make your prisons humane, don’t force-feed anyone, and accept the condemnation that occurs when one of your prisoners decides to starve himself to death anyway.
I read it as implying that all prisons are inherently inhumane, and therefore that nobody should be in them. But that's one of the problem with drive-by questions like that - you can't tell for sure what their actual point is.
The restrictions placed upon the fellow are more “capricious” in the words of the judge than necessary. Perhaps all his communications need to be read. I somehow doubt that prevention of communications by his lawyers is an important part of counter-terrorism, or that it can take more than a day or two to make sure that correspondence does not promote terrorism.
And I fail to see why we should force-feed a prisoner in the first place, which is the main problem.
What anti-terrorist point is there in restricting his reading material? In what universe does 'Audacity of Hope' or any book pose a national security threat in the hands of a man who spends all but a few hours a day completely alone?
This is interesting and I'd be very curious to know what the courts have made of this kind of prior restraint. I'm not skeptical that threats of this nature have been made, but I am skeptical that such a prosecution could actually be brought- under what statute? Lawyers may be gagged somewhat, as an officer of the court, but a family member seems like a real stretch.
Edit to add: here's a simple explainer on SAMs and what they do: https://ccrjustice.org/sites/default/files/attach/2017/10/SA...
> Prisoners under SAMs are prohibited from communicating with anyone except a few pre-approved individuals – their attorneys and immediate family members – and SAMs prohibit those individuals from repeating the prisoner’s words to anyone else.
I am still awfully curious as to what possible statutory authority the DoJ could have to regulate the speech of people who aren't actually incarcerated.