General Wesley Clark: ‘Disloyal Americans Need To Be Put Into Camps’

Retired Four-Star General Wesley Clark thinks “disloyal Americans” need to be sent away to special camps to “segregate them from society.” He’s referring to people like the Chattanooga shooter, who just shot and killed four Marines and One Navy sailor. What makes his comments so appalling, though, is there’s simply no evidence that the shooter, who happens to be Muslim, did this because of his religion or that he was even “radicalized.”

In fact, Mohammod Abdulazeez showed no outward signs of radicalization at all and even struggled with being a devout Muslim. The FBI has devoted a significant amount of resources to the case, but so far they have produced very little to warrant General Clark’s claims.  All they can seem to find out about Mohammod is that he was suffering many of the same problems a lot of Americans face on a continual basis, i.e., debt problems, and drug and alcohol abuse.

More at Addicting Info

Were Gitmo Murders Covered Up As Suicides?

What really happened at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility on the night of June 9, 2006.

Jailed Pussy Riot Member in Hospital on Seventh Day of Hunger Strike

A jailed member of the Russian punk group Pussy Riot was hospitalized Tuesday on the seventh day of a hunger strike to protest what she calls a persecution campaign against her.

Maria Alekhina was transferred to a hospital in her prison colony in the Ural Mountains town of Berezniki. Alekhina went on a hunger strike last Wednesday after she was barred from attending her own parole hearing. The court, which is across the street from the colony, denied her release.

Three members of the band — Alekhina, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Yekaterina Samutsevich — were convicted last year of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred” for an impromptu punk protest against Vladimir Putin in Moscow’s main cathedral and given two-year sentences.

Reason.com

The closing statements from Maria Alyokhina in trial 8 august 2012, Khamovnichesky Courthouse, Moscow

Please turn subtitles on.

Reforming China's controversial labor camps

China is a country where the rule of law is selective and often unjust. One source of injustice is the 50-year-old system known as "laodong jiaoyang," or re-education through labor. Under this system, tens of thousands of offenders are imprisoned in China without trial.

A United Nations Human Rights Council report estimates that some 190,000 Chinese were locked up in 320 re-education -- or "laojiao" -- centers in 2009. That is in addition to an estimated 1.6 million Chinese convicted in regular courts and held in the formal prison system.

The "re-education through labor" system dates back to the 1950s when the newly established communist regime swept up "counter-revolutionaries" and "class enemies" to maintain order. Today it empowers police to jail accused offenders -- from petty thieves and prostitutes to drug abusers -- for up to four years without a judicial hearing.

Though the practice is supposedly meant for only minor offenders, critics of the system say it is often used as a tool to persecute government critics, including intellectuals, human rights activists and followers of banned spiritual groups like the Falun Gong, and is a major source of human rights violations.

CNN.com

Sobibor death camp closed

The museum at the Nazi death camp where convicted war criminal John Demjanjuk was a guard during the Holocaust has been closed because of a lack of funding.

Around 20,000 people visit the site of Sobibor death camp in eastern Poland every year to pay tribute to the 250,000 Jews and non-Jews who were murdered there.

But according to German press agency dpa, the museum is no longer being allocated sufficient money by the regional government to stay open to the public.

The Jewish Chronicle

More here…

North Korea 'holding 200,000 prisoners'

Amnesty International says new satellite images and testimony from a former inmate show North Korea is holding around 200,000 people in its huge network of political prison camps where torture is rampant and conditions near slavery.

The human rights group based in London released on Wednesday recent satellite photos which show four of six camps located in the impoverished country's South Pyongan, South Hamkyung and North Hamkyung provinces.

North Korea has long been regarded as having one of the world's worst human rights records, but it rejects outside criticism and denies the existence of prison camps. "North Korea can no longer deny the undeniable," Sam Zarifi, Amnesty International Asia Pacific director, said in a statement.

"Hundreds of thousands of people exist with virtually no rights, treated essentially as slaves, in some of the worst circumstances we’ve documented in the last 50 years," Zarifi said. "Conditions in these camps are inhuman and [leader] Kim Jong-il must close them immediately," he added.

Prison camps are believed to have been operation since the 1950s and can be categorised into two: 'total control zones' where inmates are never released without any proper trials; and 'revolutionary zones' where conditions are more lenient, Zarifi said. "These are places out of sight of the rest of the world, where almost the entire range of human rights protections that international law has tried to set up for last 60 years are ignored," he said.

Kyoung-il Jeong, a former inmate at a revolutionary-zone Yodok prison, testified that inmates are fed 200 grams of corn gruel and often thrown into a cube "torture cell" where it is impossible to either stand or lie down.

Al Jazeera

Drawings from the Gulag

Drawings from the Gulag consists of 130 drawings by Danzig Baldaev (author of the acclaimed Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia series), describing the history, horror and peculiarities of the Gulag system from its inception in 1918. Baldaev's father, a respected ethnographer, taught him techniques to record the tattoos of criminals in St. Petersburg's notorious Kresty prison, where Danzig worked as a guard. He was reported to the K.G.B. who unexpectedly offered support for his work, allowing him the opportunity to travel across the former U.S.S.R. Witnessing scenes of everyday life in the Gulag, he chronicled this previously closed world from both sides of the wire. With every vignette, Baldaev brings the characters he depicts to vivid life: from the lowest "zek" (inmate) to the most violent tattooed "vor" (thief), all the practices and inhabitants of the Gulag system are depicted here in incredible and often shocking detail. In documenting the attitude of the authorities to those imprisoned, and the transformation of these citizens into survivors or victims of the Gulag system, this graphic novel vividly depicts methods of torture and mass murder undertaken by the administration, as well as the atrocities committed by criminals upon their fellow inmates.

Artbook

More images on itsdeadlicious.com and more about gulags on the very interesting gulaghistory.org