Tag Archives: Political Prisoners

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.

Political Prisoners? Black Lawyers Say Obama Could Free ‘Em All by Jared Ball

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“With their call this week for president Obama to free all political prisoners the National Conference of Black Lawyers (NCBL) have given him yet one more opportunity to actually address a specific concern of many Black and other well-meaning people around the world.  And he might as well because, as Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has written recently, Obama hasn’t done much else for Black America since assuming office.”

via voxunion.com.

Detroit Meeting on the Struggle to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal

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Posted on Pan-African News Wire:

The excellent summary below, written by Saeed Shabazz and just published in the Final Call, about the current repression and brutality against our political prisoners is a very accurate and chilling picture. But there is a more positive counterpart to this story, as evidenced in the event on political prisoners the Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition(FMAJC) and Resistance in Brooklyn held this past Friday night, November 21st, at St. Mary’s Church in New York City.

The evening was one of education and solidarity with political prisoners, on the occasion of the publication of an important new book on political prisoners, Let Freedom Ring by Matt Meyer. Former political prisoners Chairman Fred Hampton, Jr. of POCC, San Francisco 8 defendant Francisco (Cisco) Torres, Tarik Haskins, former BPP and BLA member incarcerated and tortured during a 17 year imprisonment, and Pam Africa of MOVE were among the speakers.

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