OUR CRUCIAL SPRING CAMPAIGN IS NOW UNDERWAY
Please donate now to keep the mission and independent journalism of Common Dreams strong.
For Immediate Release
May, 15 2015, 04:45pm EDT
Contact:
AIUSA media office,Email:,media@aiusa.org,Phone: 202-544-0200 x302
Amnesty International USA Responds to Death Penalty in Boston Bombing Case
WASHINGTON
In response to the announcement that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was sentenced to death after being convicted in the Boston Marathon bombings, Steven W. Hawkins, executive director of Amnesty International USA issued the following statement:
"We condemn the bombings that took place in Boston two years ago, and we mourn the loss of life and grave injuries they caused. The death penalty, however, is not justice. It will only compound the violence, and it will not deter others from committing similar crimes in the future.
It is outrageous that the federal government imposes this cruel and inhuman punishment, particularly when the people of Massachusetts have abolished it in their state. As death sentences decline worldwide, no government can claim to be a leader in human rights when it sentences its prisoners to death."
Amnesty International has documented a steady decline in the use of the death penalty in the United States and around the world over the past several years, though in 2014 there was a marked increase in death sentences to address a real or perceived threat of terrorism especially in Egypt and Nigeria. There remains no evidence showing that the death penalty deters crime or has any effect in reducing terrorism.
Annual death sentences in the U.S. have declined since 2000. In the last eight years the number of death sentences has been lower than any time since reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976. In 2014 there were 72 death sentences, the lowest number on record since 1976. Executions have declined as well, from a high of 98 in 1999 to just 35 in 2014, the lowest in 20 years; there were 43 executions in 2011 and 2012 and 39 in 2013.
Amnesty International USA opposes the death penalty in all cases without exception as the ultimate cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment. As of today, 140 countries have abolished the death penalty in law or practice. The U.S. was one of only nine countries in the world that carried out executions each year between 2009 and 2013.
Amnesty International is a global movement of millions of people demanding human rights for all people - no matter who they are or where they are. We are the world's largest grassroots human rights organization.
(212) 807-8400LATEST NEWS
After UK Rejects Appeal, Press Freedom Groups Say Biden Must Drop Assange Extradition Push
"If Biden lets this case proceed," said one advocate, "future administrations will surely use the precedent of the Assange prosecution... to go after journalists they don't like."
Jun 08, 2023
Press freedom groups on Thursday said that following the United Kingdom High Court's rejection of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's appeal against his extradition order to the United States, U.S. President Joe Biden has a choice to make: continue with the federal case against the publisher or stand on the side of journalists everywhere and drop the charges against Assange.
High Court Judge Jonathan Swift on Tuesday handed down the decision rejecting Assange's appeal of an extradition order that was signed a year ago by U.K. Home Secretary Priti Patel, leaving Assange's legal team with less than a week to submit another appeal to a panel of two judges.
The judges could convene a public hearing on the case of Assange, who has been charged in the U.S. with violating the 1917 Espionage Act for publishing classified military documents that revealed the United States' alleged war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Press freedom and human rights groups have maintained that Assange has been prosecuted for publicizing government information just as newspapers routinely do and have demanded that the White House drop the charges.
"The idea of Assange or anyone being tried in a U.S. court for obtaining and publishing confidential documents the same way investigative reporters do every day should be terrifying to all Americans," said Seth Stern, director of advocacy for Freedom of the Press Foundation. "It's time for Biden to drop this case and show the world he's serious about press freedom."
\u201cFPF's statement on the rejection of Julian Assange\u2019s extradition appeal.\nhttps://t.co/sbPqRfVH8j\u201d— Freedom of the Press (@Freedom of the Press) 1686247315
The Daily Mail reported Thursday that the U.K. Home Office is currently preparing paperwork to rapidly extradite Assange and that he could be sent to the U.S. "in the next few weeks."
Human rights lawyer Stella Assange, who is married to the WikiLeaks publisher, said Assange will "make a renewed application for appeal to the High Court."
"We remain optimistic that we will prevail and that Julian will not be extradited to the United States where he faces charges that could result in him spending the rest of his life in a maximum security prison for publishing true information that revealed war crimes committed by the U.S. government," she said.
Assange's extradition was originally blocked in 2021 when a Westminster Magistrate Court judge ruled that he should not be sent to the U.S. because of the risk that being held in an American maximum security prison would pose to Assange's mental health.
The High Court overturned that ruling after the U.S. claimed Assange would not be held in highly restrictive prison conditions.
Christophe Deloire, secretary-general of Reporters Without Borders (RSF), denounced the continued prosecution of Assange as "judicial harassment" and "an attack on global media freedom."
\u201cPresident @JoeBiden, it is now more urgent than ever to put an end to the judicial harassment of Julian Assange and bring the case against him to a close once and for all. Pursuing his extradition and prosecution\u00a0is an attack on global media freedom. It's time to #FreeAssange!\u2026\u201d— Christophe Deloire (@Christophe Deloire) 1686239616
Along with the possibility of a ruling by the High Court in Assange's favor, the European Court of Human Rights could block the extradition following the journalist's appeal to the court last year.
Rebecca Vincent, director of campaigns for RSF, called on Biden to take action instead of leaving it up to British and European judges, in order to end a case that could "land Julian Assange in prison for the rest of his life and permanently impact the climate for journalism around the world."
"The historical weight of what happens next cannot be overstated," said Vincent. "It is time to put a stop to this relentless targeting of Assange and act instead to protect journalism and press freedom. Our call on President Biden is now more urgent than ever: Drop these charges, close the case against Assange, and allow for his release without further delay."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Snowden Warns Today's Surveillance Technology Makes 2013 Look Like 'Child's Play'
"We trusted the government not to screw us," said Edward Snowden. "But they did. We trusted the tech companies not to take advantage of us. But they did. That is going to happen again, because that is the nature of power."
Jun 08, 2023
With this week marking 10 years since whistleblower Edward Snowden disclosed information to journalists about widespread government spying by United States and British agencies, the former National Security Agency contractor on Thursday joined other advocates in warning that the fight for privacy rights, while making several inroads in the past decade, has grown harder due to major changes in technology.
"If we think about what we saw in 2013 and the capabilities of governments today," Snowden told The Guardian, "2013 seems like child's play."
Snowden said that the advent of commercially available surveillance products such as Ring cameras, Pegasus spyware, and facial recognition technology has posed new dangers.
As Common Dreams has reported, the home security company Ring has faced legal challenges due to security concerns and its products' vulnerability to hacking, and has faced criticism from rights groups for partnering with more than 1,000 police departments—including some with histories of police violence—and leaving community members vulnerable to harassment or wrongful arrests.
Law enforcement agencies have also begun using facial recognition technology to identify crime suspects despite the fact that the software is known to frequently misidentify people of color—leading to the wrongful arrest and detention earlier this year of Randal Reid in Georgia, among other cases.
"Despite calls over the last few years for federal legislation to rein in Big Tech companies, we've seen nothing significant in limiting tech companies' ability to collect data."
Last month, journalists and civil society groups called for a global moratorium on the sale and transfer of spyware like Pegasus, which has been used to target dozens of journalists in at least 10 countries.
Protecting the public from surveillance "is an ongoing process," Snowden told The Guardian on Thursday. "And we will have to be working at it for the rest of our lives and our children's lives and beyond."
In 2013, Snowden revealed that the U.S. government was broadly monitoring the communications of citizens, sparking a debate over surveillance as well as sustained privacy rights campaigns from groups like Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Fight for the Future.
"Technology has grown to be enormously influential," Snowden told The Guardian on Thursday. "We trusted the government not to screw us. But they did. We trusted the tech companies not to take advantage of us. But they did. That is going to happen again, because that is the nature of power."
Last month ahead of the anniversary of Snowden's revelations, EFF noted that some improvements to privacy rights have been made in the past decade, including:
- The sunsetting of Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, which until 2020 allowed the U.S. government to conduct a dragnet surveillance program that collected billions of phone records;
- The emergence of end-to-end encryption of internet communications, which Snowden noted was "a pipe dream in 2013";
- The end of the NSA's bulk collection of internet metadata, including email addresses of senders and recipients; and
- Rulings in countries including South Africa and Germany against bulk data collection.
The group noted that privacy advocates are still pushing Congress to end Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which permits the warrantless surveillance of Americans' communications, and "to take privacy seriously," particularly as tech companies expand spying capabilities.
"Despite calls over the last few years for federal legislation to rein in Big Tech companies, we've seen nothing significant in limiting tech companies' ability to collect data... or regulate biometric surveillance, or close the backdoor that allows the government to buy personal information rather than get a warrant, much less create a new Church Committee to investigate the intelligence community's overreaches," wrote EFF senior policy analyst Matthew Guariglia, executive director Cindy Cohn, and assistant director Andrew Crocker. "It's why so many cities and states have had to take it upon themselves to ban face recognition or predictive policing, or pass laws to protect consumer privacy and stop biometric data collection without consent."
"It's been 10 years since the Snowden revelations," they added, "and Congress needs to wake up and finally pass some legislation that actually protects our privacy, from companies as well as from the NSA directly."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Big Oil Shill Tells Fox Viewers There Is 'No Health Risk' From Inhaling Toxic Smoke
Fox News brought on a contributor with a history of downplaying the dangers of secondhand smoke and dismissing climate science to tell viewers that particulate matter is "innocuous."
Jun 08, 2023
As smoke from massive wildfires in Quebec blanketed much of the eastern U.S., forcing millions to stay indoors as state governments issued code-red air quality alerts, a longtime shill for the fossil fuel and tobacco industries falsely told Fox News viewers late Wednesday that there is actually "no health risk" associated with inhaling such polluted air.
"Look, the air is ugly, it's unpleasant to breathe, and for a lot of people, they get anxiety over it. But the reality is there's no health risk," Steve Milloy, a senior policy fellow at the Energy & Environment Legal Institute, told Fox's Laura Ingraham. "We have this kind of air in India and China all the time—no public health emergency."
Milloy, who has long worked to spread disinformation about climate science and the health risks of secondhand smoke, neglected to mention research showing that air pollution is responsible for millions of deaths per year in China, India, and worldwide.
Watch Milloy's remarks:
\u201cLaura Ingraham - Steve Milloy, a lobbyist, to talk about the thick smoke over the Northeast. He's worked as a consultant for Philip Morris\n\nMilloy also believes\n\nSecondhand smoke doesn't cause cancer\n\nDDT should make a comeback\n\nHuman activity has no affect on climate change\u201d— Decoding Fox News (@Decoding Fox News) 1686205124
A 2021 study by researchers at Harvard University, the University of Birmingham, the University of Leicester, and University College London directly attributed more than 8 million deaths in 2018 to fine particulate pollution (PM2.5).
But Milloy insisted Wednesday that "this doesn't kill anybody, this doesn't make anybody cough, this is not a health event."
"Particulate matter is very fine soot. It's just carbon particles—they're innocuous," Milloy said, pointing to unspecified EPA research. "There's nothing in them. They have no effect."
The EPA website says, to the contrary, that "particulate matter contains microscopic solids or liquid droplets that are so small that they can be inhaled and cause serious health problems."
"Some particles less than 10 micrometers in diameter can get deep into your lungs and some may even get into your bloodstream," the EPA notes. "Of these, particles less than 2.5 micrometers in diameter, also known as fine particles or PM2.5, pose the greatest risk to health."
Investigative journalist Amy Westervelt observed in response to Milloy's Fox appearance that he "has been trying to recast air pollution—particularly PM2.5—as innocuous for decades, since he was working for Big Tobacco."
"Why is particulate matter such a big deal for his coal and fossil fuel clients? Because regulating it means regulating fossil fuel combustion," Westervelt added.
Meteorologist Eric Holthaus added that "air pollution is literally the 4th highest cause of death globally."
"Every year 9 million people die due to air pollution made worse by fossil fuels," Holthaus tweeted. "The fossil fuel industry knows this AND they lie about it so they can keep making money off of our suffering."
In a deep dive on Milloy's history last year, Westervelt noted that "one of his earliest jobs was running The Advancement of Sound Science Center (TASSC), which was created by Philip Morris and their PR firm APCO in the 1990s to deal with the mounting evidence that linked secondhand smoke and, more broadly, indoor air pollution, to cancer."
"The secondhand smoke issue brought the tobacco industry together with lots of other industries that were worried about air pollution regulation—automotive, manufacturing, and, of course, fossil fuels," Westervelt wrote. "Which is how Milloy, working for the tobacco industry, became one of the first leaders of the climate countermovement."
Tens of millions of people on the East Coast of the U.S. are currently under air quality alerts, with some major cities classifying the conditions as "hazardous."
"Current NYC smoke levels pose a health risk for anyone outside," Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) wrote on Twitter Thursday morning.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular
SUPPORT INDEPENDENT
JOURNALISM TODAY
JOURNALISM TODAY
We Can't Do It
Without You!
Without You!