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Posts tagged with: Torture
Jun 18, 2011    |       22 comments

A predominant, ‘one-sex’ nation!

You can never really expect a ‘good’ morning in Pakistan.

After waking up from the sleep last morning, I logged into my facebook account to just get a daily dose of news updates. As I scrolled down my home page, a link shared by a friend caught my eyes that completely bewildered me. The news headline read, “Pakistan ranked as THIRD most dangerous country in the world for women.” I tried to ignore the news ‘labelling’ it a false, rumor story but then I thought to undergo a process of research and thinking on the it.

The process that I did was just a track down of past few years of Pakistan where extremism, radicalization and terrorism had dominated the image of the nation, and where poor-stricken and underprivileged women were often seen as innocent victims of the disease of extremism and terrorism. I recalled how women in Pakistan are just not ‘equally’ treated like men; how they are deprived of their basic rights to live with freedom – free from all sorts of impositions; how they are less accessible to education; how they are less accessible to different sectors in Pakistan when it comes to employment; and how they are treated when what they do is just ‘defend’ their rights or ‘voice’ their concerns.
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May 14, 2010    |       2 comments

Ex-CIA official reveals Waterboarding Torture & the Iraq Invasion

In a video interview John Kiriakou, a former CIA counter-terrorism official reveals new information about the capture and torture of “high-value” detainee Abu Zubaydah. Abu Zubaydah was arrested in March 2002 in a joint operation with the CIA, FBI and Pakistani intelligence agents from Faisalabad, according to intelligence reports from the Bush administration who had wrongly tagged him as the No. 3 person in al-Qaeda and one of the planners of the 9/11 attacks.

Government documents declassified in the years showed that Zubaydah, in addition to being subjected to other brutal torture techniques [also reported by FBI Interrogator Ali Soufan during his congressional testimony in 2009], was waterboarded at least 83 times in a single month. There is to-date, according to Kiriakou no concrete evidence of Zubaydah’s direct involvement in the execution and planning of 9/11.
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Sep 2, 2009    |       6 comments

Torture, Cover-up and the American Civil Liberties Union – A Desi Connection

Jameel Jaffer and Amrit Singh may not mean anything to most readers. Jameel Jaffer is a London, Ont. born litigator for the American Civil Liberties Union and Director of the ACLU’s National Security Project. Amrit Singh is Manmohan Singh’s daughter and is a Staff Attorney at the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project.


credit Ruby Washingon, NYT and wikipedia

Jameel Jaffer, was “instrumental in filing and fighting an unlikely Freedom of Information Act request that eventually unearthed thousands of pages of secret documents which illustrated damning evidence of U.S. government complicity in violations of international humanitarian law.” link. and link
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Apr 23, 2009    |       78 comments

ABC: Torture Tape implicates UAE Sheikh

I seriously don’t know how to react, on one hand we here in Pakistan are fighting a battle against the illiterate Talibans who continue on their rampage of brutality releasing video after video of flogging, beheadings and even suicide bombings, but it shocks me to watch the ‘educated’ stoop exactly to the same level, now the question is who do you stop? Educate the uneducated or uneducate the educated

Sheikh Issa bin Zayed al Nahyan, brother of the UAE’s crown prince, Sheikh Mohammed al Nahyan, has been caught on camera by ABC News where a UAE policeman assists the Sheikh in tying the victim’s arms and legs, later holding him down as the Sheikh pours salt on the man’s wounds, subsequently the Sheikh shoots at the victim and then later drives over him with his Mercedes SUV.
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Jan 24, 2009    |       74 comments

Baluchi women in military torture cells, sexual slavery, Musharraf accused

Asian Human Rights Commission has in early January published a report which reveals a shocking trend in Baluchistan, women who have been struggling for the greater autonomy of Baluchistan have been arrested by state agencies and have been forced into sex slavery under the custody of the Pakistan Army.

AHRC had earlier also published another report accusing General Pervaiz Musharraf of running these military torture cells during his tenure. The report initially originates from a Baluchistan Liberation Front activist Munir Mengal who in 2006 was trying to launch a Baluchi TV channel but as coincidence would have it, the Pakistan Army was dead-set in uprooting the Baluchi uprising which resulted in the assassination of Nawab Akbar Bugti.

The report can be read in its entirety on the AHRC’s website but a few shocking sections are reproduced here. A close look at the incidents that have been quoted range from 2005 to 2007, the Musharraf era. Though we cant be sure that if these cells still do exists or have been dismantled at the fall of military dictatorship in February 2008, and sincerely hope that such heinous crimes are not still being orchestrated by our democratic government. But it seems that Ms. Zarina Marri is still missing and suspected to be held hostage against her free will.
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