You have to travel to the China Daily to find this report issued about how the `human rights' of our citizens stack up. You certainly didn't expect our FREE PRESS to cover it - did you? Here is a long excerpt of one section:
On civil and political rights
In the United States, the violation of citizens' civil and political rights is severe. It is lying to itselfwhen the United States calls itself the land of the free (The Washington Post, Jan 14, 2012).
Claiming to defend 99 percent of the US population against the wealthiest, the Occupy WallStreet protest movement tested the US political, economic and social systems. Ignited bysevere social and economic inequality, uneven distribution of wealth and high unemployment,the movement expanded to sweep the United States after its inception in September 2011.Whatever the deep reasons for the movement are, the single fact that thousands of protesterswere treated in a rude and violent way, with many of them being arrested - the act of willfullytrampling on people' s freedom of assembly, demonstration and speech - could provide aglimpse to the truth of the so-called US freedom and democracy.
Almost 1,000 people were reportedly arrested in first two weeks of the movement, according toBritish and Australian media (The Guardian, Oct 2, 2011). The New York police arrested morethan 700 protesters for alleged blocking traffic over Brooklyn Bridge on Oct 1, and some ofthem were handcuffed to the bridge before being shipped by police vehicles(uschinapress.com, Oct 3, 2011). On Oct 9, 92 people were arrested in New York (The NewYork Times, Oct 15, 2011). The Occupy Wall Street movement was forced out of itsencampment at Zuccotti Park and more than 200 people were arrested on Nov 15 (TheGuardian, Nov 25, 2011). Chicago police arrested around 300 members of the OccupyChicago protest in two weeks (The Herald Sun, Oct 24, 2011). At least 85 people were arrestedwhen police used teargas and baton rounds to break up an Occupy Wall Street camp inOakland, California on Oct 25. An Iraq war veteran had a fractured skull and brain swellingafter being allegedly hit in the head by a police projectile (The Guardian, Oct 26, 2011). Acouple of hundred people were arrested when demonstrations were staged in different UScities to mark the Occupy Wall Street movement' s two-month anniversary on Nov 17 (USAToday, Nov 18, 2011). Among them, at least 276 were arrested in New York only. Someprotesters were bloodied as they were hauled away. Many protesters accused the police oftreating them in a brutal way (The Wall Street Journal, Nov 18, 2011). As a US opinion articleput it, the United States could be considered, at least in part, authoritarian. (The WashingtonPost, Jan 14, 2012).
While advocating press freedom, the United States in fact imposes fairly strict censoring andcontrol over the press and "press freedom" is just a political tool used to beautify itself andattack other nations. The US Congress failed to pass laws on protecting rights of reporters'news sources, according to media reports. An increasing number of American reporters lostjobs for "improper remarks on politics." US reporter Helen Thomas resigned for critical remarksabout Israel in June 2010 ("Report: On the situation with human rights in a host of world states,"the website of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Russia, Dec 28, 2011). While forcibly evacuatingthe Zuccotti Park, the original Occupy Wall Street encampment, the New York police blockedjournalists from covering the police actions. They set cordon lines to prevent reporters fromgetting close to the park and closed airspace to make aerial photography impossible. Inaddition to using pepper spray against reporters, the police also arrested around 200journalists, including reporters from NPR and the New York Times (uschinapress.com, Nov 15, 2011). By trampling on press freedom and public interests, these actions by the US authoritiescaused a global uproar. US mainstream media' s response to the Occupy Wall Streetmovement revealed the hypocrisy in handling issues of freedom and democracy. Poll by PewResearch Center indicated that in the second week of the movement, reports on the movementonly accounted for 1.68 percent of the total media reports by nationwide media organizations.On Oct 15, 2011, when the Occupy Wall Street movement evolved to be a global action, CNNand Fox News gave no live reports on it, in a sharp contrast to the square protest in Cairo, forwhich both CNN and Fox News broadcast live 24 hours.
The US imposes fairly strict restriction on the Internet, and its approach "remains full ofproblems and contradictions." (The website of the Foreign Policy magazine, Feb 17, 2011) "Internet freedom" is just an excuse for the United States to impose diplomatic pressure andseek hegemony.
The US Patriot Act and Homeland Security Act both have clauses about monitoring the Internet,giving the government or law enforcement organizations power to monitor and block anyInternet content "harmful to national security." Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act of2010 stipulates that the federal government has "absolute power" to shut down the Internetunder a declared national emergency. According to a report by British newspaper the Guardiandated Mar 17, 2011, the US military is developing software that will let it secretly manipulatesocial media sites by using fake online personas, and will allow the US military to create a falseconsensus in online conversations, crowd out unwelcome opinions and smother commentariesor reports that do not correspond with its own objectives. The project aims to control andrestrict free speech on the Internet (The Guardian, Mar 17, 2011). According to a commentaryby the Voice of Russia on Feb 2, 2012, a subsidiary under the US government' s securityagency employed several hundred analysts, who were tasked with monitoring private archivesof foreign Internet users in a secret way, and were able to censor as many as five millionmicroblogging posts. The US Department of Homeland Security routinely searched key wordslike "illegal immigrants," "virus," "death," and "burst out" on Twitter with fake accounts and thensecretly traced the Internet users who forwarded related content. According to a report by theGlobe and Mail on Jan 30, 2012, Leigh Van Bryan, a British, prior to his flight to the US, wrotein a Twitter post, "Free this week, for quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America?" As aresult, Bryan along with a friend were handcuffed and put in lockdown with suspected drugsmugglers for 12 hours by armed guards after landing in Los Angeles International Airport, justlike "terrorists". Among many angered by the incident in Britain, an Internet user posted acomment, "What's worse, being arrested for an innocent tweet, or the fact that the AmericanSecret Service monitors every electronic message in the world?"
The US democracy is increasingly being influenced by capitalization and becoming a system for"master of money." Data issued by the US Center for Responsive Politics in November 2011show that 46 percent of the US federal senators and members of the House of Representativeshave personal assets of more than a million dollars. That well explains why US administration' splans to impose higher tax on the rich who earn more than one million dollars annually havebeen blocked in the Congress (www.finance-ol.com). As a commentary put it, money hasemerged as the electoral trump card in the US political system, and corporations have aSupreme Court-recognized right to use their considerable financial muscle to promotecandidates and policies favorable to their business operations and to resist policies and shutout candidates deemed inimical to their business interests (Online edition of Time, Jan 20, 2011). According to a media report, nearly two thirds of all the contributions that the chairmanof the House Financial Services Committee received during the 2010 election cycle came fromindustries regulated by his committee. A ranking Democrat Representative on the AgricultureCommittee, who served as chairman between 2007 and 2010, saw a 711 percent increase incontributions from groups regulated by his committee and a 274 percent increase incontributions over all, in the same period (The New York Times, Nov 16, 2011). According to aWashington Post report on Aug 10, 2011, nearly eight in 10 of Americans polled weredissatisfied with the way the political system is working, with 45 percent saying they are verydissatisfied (The Washington Post, Aug 10, 2011).
The US continued to violate the freedom of its citizens in the name of boosting security levels(The Washington Post, Jan 14, 2012). The Electronic Frontier Foundation in 2011 released areport, "Patterns of Misconduct: FBI intelligence violations from 2001-2008," which reveals thatdomestic political intelligence apparatus spearheaded by the Federal Bureau of Investigation,continues to systematically violate the rights of American citizens and legal residents. Thereport shows that the actual number of violations that may have occurred from 2001 to 2008could approach 40,000 possible violations of law, Executive Order, or other regulationsgoverning intelligence investigations. The FBI issued some 200,000 requests and that almost60 percent were for investigations of US citizens and legal residents(www.pacificfreepress.com). The New York Times reported on Oct 20, 2011, that the FBI hascollected information about religious, ethnic and national-origin characteristics of Americancommunities (The New York Times, Oct 20, 2011). According to a Washington Postcommentary dated Jan 14, 2012, the US government can use "national security letters" todemand, without probable cause, that organizations turn over information on citizens' finances,communications and associations, and order searches of everything from business documentsto library records. The US government can use GPS devices to monitor every move of targetedcitizens without securing any court order or review (The Washington Post, Jan 14, 2012).
Abuse of power, brutal enforcement of law and overuse of force by US police have resulted inharassment and hurt to a large number of innocent citizens and have caused loss of freedomof some people or even deaths. According to a report carried by the World Journal on Jun 10, 2011, the past decade saw increasing stop-and-frisks by the New York police, which recordedan annual of 600,000 cases in 2010, almost double of that in 2004. In the first three months of2011, some 180,000 people experienced stop-and-frisks, 88 percent of whom were innocentpeople (World Journal, Jun 10, 2011). In early July of 2011, two police officers beat a mentallyill homeless man to death in Orange County, Southern California (FoxNews.com, Sept 21, 2011). In August 2011, North Miami police shot and killed a man carrying realistic toy gun (TheNY Daily News, Sept 1, 2011). On Jan 8, 2011, a Central California man was shot and killed bythe police, who thought of him as a gang member only because the jacket he was wearing wasred, "the chosen color of a local street gang." (www.kolotv.com, Jan 19, 2011) In May 2011,Arizona' s police officers raided the home of Jose Guerena and shot him dead in what wasdescribed as an investigation into alleged marijuana trafficking. However, the police later foundnothing illegal in his home (The Huffington Post, May 25, 2011). Misjudged and wrongly-handled cases continued to occur. According to media reports, Anthony Graves, a Texas man,was imprisoned for 18 years for crimes he did not commit (CBS News, Jun 22, 2011). Forty-six-year-old Thomas Haynesworth spent 27 years in prison after being arrested at the age of 18for crimes he didn't commit (Union Press International, Dec 7, 2011). Eric Caine, who wasconvicted and sentenced to life imprisonment after being tortured by police into confessing totwo murders, spent nearly 25 years behind bars.(Chicago Tribune, Jun 13, 2011).
The US lacks basic due lawsuit process protections, and its government continues to claim theright to strip citizens of legal protections based on its sole discretion (The Washington Post, Jan14, 2012). The National Defense Authorization Act, signed Dec 31, 2011, allows for theindefinite detention of citizens (The Washington Post, Jan 14, 2012). The Act will placedomestic terror investigations and interrogations into the hands of the military and which wouldopen the door for trial-free, indefinite detention of anyone, including American citizens, so longas the government calls them terrorists (www.forbes.com, Dec 5, 2011).
The US remains the country with the largest "prison population" and the highest per capita levelof imprisonment in the world, and the detention centers' conditions are terrible. According tothe US Department of Justice, the number of prisoners amounted to 2.3 million in 2009 and onein every 132 American citizens is behind bars. Meanwhile, more than 140,000 are serving lifesentences (Report: On the situation with human rights in a host of world states, the website ofthe Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Russia, Dec 28, 2011). According to a Los Angeles Times reporton May 24, 2011, in a California prison, as many as 54 inmates may share a single toilet andas many as 200 prisoners may live in a gymnasium (Los Angeles Times, May 24, 2011).According to data issued by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the estimated number of prisonand jail inmates experiencing sexual victimization totaled 88,500 in the US between October2008 and December 2009 (www.bjs.gov). Since April 2011, officials stopped serving lunch onthe weekend in some US prisons as a way to cut food-service costs. About 23,000 inmates in36 prisons are eating two meals a day on Saturdays and Sundays instead of three (The NewYork Times, Oct 20, 2011). Harsh conditions and treatment in prisons have caused recurringprotests and suicides of inmates. There were two major hunger strikes in California prisonsstaged by a total of more than 6,000 and 12,000 prisoners in July and October 2011,respectively, to protest against what they call harsh treatment and detention conditions (CNN,Oct 4, 2011; The New York Times, July 7, 2011). According to a Chicago Tribune report on July20, 2011, since 2000, at least 175 youths have attempted to kill themselves inside Departmentof Juvenile Justice lockup facilities in Chicago and seven youths committed suicide. The UNSpecial Rapporteur on Torture in a 2011 report noted that in the US, an estimated 20,000 to25,000 individuals are being held in isolation, and the US government in 2011 for twice turneddown the Special Rapporteur's request for a private and unmonitored meeting with detaineesheld in isolation.
Get the full report HERE. BS does politics.
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