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For Immediate Release
January, 22 2016, 11:00am EDT
Contact:
Jonathan Hutson,Chief Communications Officer,jhutson [at] phrusa [dot] org,Tel: (617) 301-4210,Cell: (857) 919-5130
U.S. Government Must Release Guantanamo Force-Feeding Tapes
Obama Administration Must Immediately End Force-Feeding and Other Abuses
NEW YORK
Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) denounced the U.S. government's latest move to block the release of tapes showing force-feeding at Guantanamo, calling it a patent effort to conceal this unlawful and unethical practice from the public.
U.S. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli yesterday appealed a federal judge's October 2014 order to publicly release the redacted footage, which shows the force-feeding and "forcible cell extraction" of former Guantanamo hunger striker Abu Wa'el Dhiab. Dhiab has since been resettled in Uruguay, but his counsel, Reprieve, has continued seeking the release of the tapes, along with 16 media organizations.
"The Obama administration's refusal to release these force-feeding tapes is part of an effort to conceal ongoing abuse of Guantanamo detainees, and prevent accountability for these practices," said Dr. Vincent Iacopino, PHR's medical director. "Force-feeding is a form of inhuman treatment that violates medical ethics. The government must not only release the tapes, but must end force-feeding altogether and address the underlying violation of indefinite detention at Guantanamo."
The American Medical Association and the World Medical Association consider force-feeding to be a form of inhuman and degrading treatment and prohibit the force-feeding of competent adults under any circumstance. Iacopino said the U.S. government is suppressing the footage because it would expose the military's abusive treatment of detainees on hunger strike and call into question the continued practice of force-feeding and "forcible cell extractions," the use of military police in riot gear to restrain and move detainees from their prison cells to restraint chairs.
PHR also noted that today marked the seven year anniversary of President Obama's executive order to close the detention facility at Guantanamo. PHR has repeatedly called for an end to indefinite detention without trial and the closure of the prison.
PHR was founded in 1986 on the idea that health professionals, with their specialized skills, ethical duties, and credible voices, are uniquely positioned to investigate the health consequences of human rights violations and work to stop them. PHR mobilizes health professionals to advance health, dignity, and justice and promotes the right to health for all.
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Trump Chief of Staff Wiles Subpoenaed in Foreign Lobbying Criminal Case
“This kind of entanglement shows exactly why a person with Wiles’ lengthy record of controversial corporate and foreign lobbying clients is too conflicted to be running the White House," said one advocate.
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A court filing in a federal criminal lobbying case against a former Republican congressman confirmed what the government watchdog Public Citizen warned against as soon as President Donald Trump appointed Susie Wiles to be his chief of staff: that her "lobbying client list is both extensive and littered with controversial clients who stand to benefit from having their former lobbyist running the White House."
The court filing was submitted Thursday by the US Department of Justice (DOJ) and sought to "quash" a subpoena that was served to Wiles in December.
Wiles was called to testify as a witness in the case against former Rep. David Rivera (R-Fla.) and his political associate, Esther Nuhfer. They are accused of violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) by lobbying on behalf of the sanctioned Venezuelan businessman Raul Gorrín.
According to a grand jury indictment from December 2024, Rivera sought to lobby top US government officials to remove Gorrín from the Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List. He allegedly worked to conceal and promote Gorrín's criminal activities by creating fraudulent shell companies using names associated with a law firm and with a government official.
Rivera received over $5.5 million for his lobbying activities and did not register under FARA as required by law, according to the DOJ.
The Miami Herald reported late last month that Rivera and Nuhfer are "also accused of trying to 'normalize' relations between the [Venezuelan President Nicolás] Maduro regime and the United States while Rivera’s consulting firm landed a head-turning $50 million lobbying contract with the US subsidiary of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company."
Attorneys for Rivera subpoenaed Wiles at the White House, seeking to compel her to testify about her lobbying work for Ballard Partners on behalf of Globovision, a Caracas-based TV station owned by Gorrín.
As the Herald reported, Wiles worked at Ballard shortly after running Trump's presidential campaign in Florida. Due to her presidential ties she "brought an instant cachet" to the firm, where Gorrín was "hoping to gain access to the new Trump administration, which was threatening economic sanctions against the Maduro regime and Venezuela’s oil industry."
Gorrín was working with Ballard in an attempt to expand Globovision to the US as a Spanish-language affiliate—an aim that presented challenges due to the government sanctions and the Federal Communications Commission's limits on foreign ownership of US TV stations.
Rivera and Nuhfer's lawyers are seeking Wiles' testimony to show that her lobbying firm was trying to influence Trump, "on behalf of Gorrín, to bring about a regime change in Venezuela."
The subpoena document said the defendants' lawyers want to question Wiles on her "extensive communications" regarding Ballard's work with Gorrín and efforts to help the businessman gain access to Trump.
They are also seeking similar testimony from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who as a senator met privately with Rivera, Nuhfer, and Gorrín at a hotel in Washington in 2017, according to the Herald.
In the court filing, the DOJ said Wiles had "no apparent connection to any of the allegations in the superseding indictment concerning defendants’ activities as unregistered agents of the government of Venezuela."
Public Citizen noted Wiles' work with Ballard in November 2024 when it published the report Meet Susie Wiles’ Controversial Corporate Lobbying Clients, which revealed 42 lobbying clients the chief of staff had between 2017-24.
The client list was "extensive and littered with controversial clients who stand to benefit from having their former lobbyist running the White House," said Public Citizen on Friday.
In addition to Gorrín's TV station, Wiles' represented a waste management company that resisted removing nuclear waste from a landfill, a tobacco firm that sought to block federal restrictions on its candy-flavored cigars, and a foreign mining private equity firm seeking approval to develop a gold mine on federal public lands.
Jon Golinger, Public Citizen's democracy advocate, said Friday that the subpoena in the Rivera case raises even more questions about Wiles' potential conflicts of interest.
“This kind of entanglement," he said, "shows exactly why a person with Wiles’ lengthy record of controversial corporate and foreign lobbying clients is too conflicted to be running the White House."
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The largest pro-Israel lobbying organization in the US has become increasingly toxic among Democratic voters, and a Friday report from Drop Site News revealed how the organization has gone to great lengths to conceal its support for candidates in the party's primaries.
Drop Site examined campaign donations in competitive Democratic primaries in Illinois and found that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) "is resorting to ever more sophisticated methods to support its preferred candidates while cloaking its own involvement."
According to Drop Site, AIPAC appears to have pioneered its concealment tactics during a 2024 Democratic primary in Oregon, when it funded super political action committees (PACs) that dumped money into the race to benefit Rep. Maxine Dexter (D-Ore.), who was challenging Susheela Jayapal, the sister of Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.).
"The main super PAC in question (named 314 Action) explicitly denied that any funding came from AIPAC—a claim revealed as a flagrant lie once disclosure records finally became public," the report noted. "But by then, Dexter had triumphed and was on her way to Congress."
The same tactics are being used in Illinois, Drop Site continued, where AIPAC has been quietly spending to benefit the campaigns of Democratic candidates Laura Fine, Donna Miller, and Melissa Bean, who are all facing off against progressive challengers who have been critical of Israel.
What is notable about the Illinois operation is that many past donors to AIPAC and its major affiliated super PAC United Democracy Project (UDP) have been lining up to give individual contributions to the Fine, Miller, and Bean campaigns.
"A whopping 237 former AIPAC/UDP donors have given to both Miller and Bean, contributing $396,288.01 to Bean and $429,083.00 to Miller," the report found. "Forty-four of these donors have given to all three candidates, sending a total of $208,753.33 to them. Several of the donations were given to the candidates on the same day, by the same donors, for the same amounts."
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Of course, these operations, which Drop Site describes as "impressively coordinated," do not guarantee victory.
AIPAC's UDP super PAC recently spent heavily in a New Jersey Democratic primary that concluded on Thursday to take down former Rep. Tom Malinowski, who earned the group's displeasure when he came out in support of putting conditions on US aid to Israel.
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It was part of a suite of policies Mamdani announced at an interfaith breakfast to reaffirm New York's status as a sanctuary city amid President Donald Trump's surges of immigration agents to other US cities, which have resulted in extrajudicial killings and rampant civil rights violations by agents.
"Across this country, day after day, we bear witness to cruelty that staggers the conscience. Masked agents, paid by our own tax dollars, violate the Constitution and visit terror upon our neighbors," Mamdani said. "That is why this morning, I am signing an executive order that will strengthen our city's protection of our fellow New Yorkers from abusive immigration enforcement."
As part of what the mayor called "a sweeping reaffirmation of our commitment to our immigrant neighbors," federal agents will not be allowed to enter city property—including parking garages, parking lots, schools, shelters, hospitals, and other public spaces—without a judicial warrant.
The order comes after the publication last week of a leaked memo from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) telling agents they had the authority to indiscriminately round up people suspected of being undocumented immigrants without obtaining a warrant from a judge, instead using "administrative warrants" signed by agents themselves.
A previous memo issued in May to all ICE personnel by acting ICE Director Todd Lyons asserted that agents had the authority to forcibly enter private residences without a judicial warrant, a claim that legal experts roundly condemned as a violation of the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable searches and seizures.
In Minneapolis, where more than 2,000 agents have been deployed as part of President Donald Trump's "Operation Metro Surge," reports abound of agents harassing, detaining, and brutalizing mostly nonwhite residents, many of them US citizens, often using explicit racial profiling.
Mamdani emphasized that "this cruelty is no faraway concept."
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