Subjects Archives: Incarceration

The functioning of the Establishment, the way it forms a collective view and how that view is transmitted, is a mystery to many.

Last Friday, it became known that the 77-year-old Native American political prisoner Leonard Peltier was sick with COVID-19. Peltier has been in prison for over 46 years, which makes him the oldest political prisoner in the United States.

The information shared by Wikileaks has strengthened the resistance against repressive governments by exposing the gaps between their actions and their carefully crafted narratives.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who took office January 1, wasted no time getting in the headlines, telling his prosecutors (New York Times, 1/6/22) that they should seek “jail or prison time only for the most serious offenses—including murder, sexual assault and economic crimes involving vast sums of money.”

One county prosecutor asked oil company Enbridge for reimbursement to help with some of the prosecutions clogging up rural courts.

Iklakh Rahim Shaikh, who spent time with the Jesuit priest in Taloja jail, says while “VIP prisoners” get access to all kinds of facilities, prisoners like Swamy are denied even the most basic rights.

Amid the wreckage of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States and its allies have turned their sights on China. University of Victoria professor emeritus and historian John Price examines the rise of the coalition of Anglo settler colonial states of Canada, the United Kingdom, the U.S., Australia, and New Zealand, and how they are today fomenting conflict in the Asia Pacific.

What is at stake is both a courageous man’s life and, if we remain silent, the conquest of our intellects and sense of right and wrong: indeed our very humanity.

They are killing Julian Assange. Experts agree that they are killing him. Assange’s stroke is just another item on the mountain of evidence we already had for this.

Israel announced the completion of an underground wall and maritime barrier surrounding the besieged Gaza Strip. Not a single mainstream media outlet used the term “concentration camp” to report on it but they should have.

The activist-lawyer was granted default bail on December 1 following more than three years of her incarceration without trial in the Bhima Koregaon case in which a number of other activists were also implicated.

This April, the Iowa Department of Corrections issued a ban on charities, family members, and other outside parties donating books to prisoners.

Peltier has served about four-and-a-half decades in prison for a crime–the killing of two FBI agents in a 1975 gun battle at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota–that even his erstwhile prosecutor now admits that Peltier did not commit.

Chilling testimony of the torture and abuses committed against Majid Khan, at the illegal U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo, was recently presented by the prisoner.

For women inside prison, the fight for survival is less physical than psychological.

Opposition leaders have lashed out at the police’s ‘highhanded’ behaviour.

The damage done to the Wikileaks co-founder in his decade of incarceration and uncertainty, including more than two years in Belmarsh is beyond doubt. But so, too, is his courage beyond doubt.

CounterSpin interview with Paul Paz y Miño on Chevron vs. Steven Donziger.

While Bush rushed to designate the Holy Land Foundation a terrorist organization and declare that closing them down was somehow a great achievement in the fight against terrorism, the fact of the matter was that he had no proof.

After nearly 40 years in prison, Gilbert transformed his life and the lives of countless others behind bars.