Category Archives: Indian Country

Torture in the US Prison System: The Endless Punishment of Leonard Peltier | Truthout

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by: Preston Randolph and Dan Battaglia, Truthout | Op-Ed

In June 2006, the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons released “Confronting Confinement,” a 126-page report summarizing its 12-month inquiry into the prison systems. The commission follows up the analysis based on its findings with a list of recommendations. Topping the list of needed improvements is better enforcement of inmates’ right to proper health care and limitations on solitary confinement. Five years after the report’s release and despite its detailed and well-researched studies, inmate abuse continues. More recently, news reports from California’s Pelican Bay Prison amplified the need for change, but after the three-week inmate hunger strike ended, the torture of solitary confinement continues nationwide.

Former Bureau of Prisons (BOP) official Bruce Smith served nearly 20 years at Leavenworth State Penitentiary in Kansas. Smith experienced firsthand the wrongdoings and mistreatment toward Peltier during the decades Peltier spent at Leavenworth.

“It’s obvious they [the FBI and the BOP] have an agenda out against Leonard. What has happened to him is wrong. See, they have the tendency to know where they want to go in a case, and then build their evidence to that point, and that’s exactly what happened to Leonard,” said Smith.

Torture in the US Prison System: The Endless Punishment of Leonard Peltier | Truthout.

Cynthia McKinney Blasts Obama On Libyan TV | News One

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“I want to say categorically and very clearly that these policies of war … are not what the people of the United States stand for and it’s not what African-Americans stand for,” she told state TV.

“Under the economic policies of the Obama administration, those who have the least are losing the most. And those who have the most are getting even more,” she said. “The situation in the United States is becoming more dire for average ordinary Americans and the last thing we need to do is to spend money on death, destruction and war.”

 

See the video | News One.

Native American Activist, Author Winona LaDuke on “The Militarization of Indian Country” and Obama Admin’s “Lip Service” to Indigenous Rights

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Native American activist and writer Winona LaDuke joins us to discuss her new book, The Militarization of Indian Country. LaDuke covers the legacy of the seizure of Native American lands by the U.S. government—which became sites for industrial and military use, including army bases, nuclear testing sites, coal and uranium mining—and how the military-industrial complex is encroaching on native communities. LaDuke lives and works on the White Earth Nation in northern Minnesota and is executive director of the group Honor the Earth. “Indian country is not to be assaulted by the U.S. military,” says LaDuke.

via DemocracyNow.