#abu ghraib cw

[mourntomidnight]

Yt feminists, r*dfems: “Women are incapable of violence and rape, I swear it’s just men that do it!”

Also yt women:

[littledoggyboy]

So I was watching the Simpsons this morning and it made a fuckinf abu ghraib reference and I was so caught off guard and was like whoa.

I never would’ve even gotten it if I hadn’t done a project on it last semester but like. Idk. I love the Simpsons and I love that it’s their version of calling out the government for their actions but I just feel like they could’ve done it in a different way?? Idk. Maybe I’m being sensitive. But it was just a very intense subject to research so maybe that’s why. I’ll attach the video

[athena5898]

I have been collecting links and resources for and from Palestine as they have come in front of me over the past several months. Here is a full list of what I have so far. CW: Links talk about sexual assault, rape, violence, death, etc. You know genocide and colonization. edit: okay it won't post all of them so i'm going to reblog with the rest.

'Israel' releases detained al-Shifa Hospital chief, 49 others | Al Mayadeen English

"May Gaza burn": The flood of genocidal rhetoric from Israel's soldiers

About | Israelism

Germany: Parliament rejects proposal to stop arms exports to Israel – Middle East Monitor

The Failure to Protect Palestinian Cultural Heritage

Air Force Engineer Resigns as Dissent Against Gaza War Spreads in Military

Palestinian journalist describes torture, abuse at Israeli detention camp

Palestinians protest against Israel land theft in Kafr Qaddum

Fears rise for Gaza's starving children | The Electronic Intifada

British far-right and pro-Israel activists are fighting the Palestinian movement together | Middle East Eye

'Israel' commits horrendous massacre on refugee tent, over 20 killed | Al Mayadeen English

On October 7, Gaza broke out of prison | Gaza | Al Jazeera

The Night Won’t End: Biden’s War on Gaza | Fault Lines Documentary - YouTube

US To Remove Aid Pier From Gaza Coast - ac.news

Gloom about the ‘day after’ the Gaza war pervasive among Mideast scholars | Brookings

Israel's use of bombs in 6 'emblematic' attacks likely violated laws of war, UN says

Running Amok | Mary Turfah

The destruction of press infrastructure in Gaza: A strategy to blind the public - Forbidden Stories

‘The grey zone’: how IDF views some journalists in Gaza as legitimate targets | Israel-Gaza war | The Guardian

Exclusive: Israeli documents show expansive government effort to shape US discourse around Gaza war | Israel | The Guardian

Exclusive: Israeli documents show expansive government effort to shape US discourse around Gaza war | Israel | The Guardian

Doctor admits Israeli pathologists harvested organs without consent | Israel | The Guardian

Israelis are celebrating mass slaughter in Gaza

Israel's skin bank raises ethical concerns on organ consent...

“Genocide Denial”: House Votes to Bar State Dept. From Citing Gaza Death Toll | Truthout

Biden Has Not Seen Pictures Of Beheaded Israeli Children, White House Says | HuffPost

A compound crime: Israeli army hits Gaza family, uses them as human shields, and runs over their mother

UK election 2024: Labour's non-Zionist Jews complain of 'disdain' | Middle East Eye

Israel announces largest Palestinian land grab in over 30 years | Middle East Eye

Israel turbocharges West Bank settlement expansion with largest land grab in decades | AP News

How Israel destroyed Gaza’s ability to feed itself | Israel-Palestine conflict News | Al Jazeera

‘More horrific than Abu Ghraib’: Lawyer recounts visit to Israeli detention center

Inside Sde Teiman, the Base Where Israel Detains Gazans - The New York Times

Palestinian Released From Israeli Prison Describes Beatings, Sexual Abuse and Torture - Twilight Zone - Haaretz.com

PAST AND FUTURE PRESENT(S): No Palestinians Involved: An Open Letter to My Colleagues

Report: Israel demolished 318 facilities, uprooted 10,000 olive trees in West Bank this year – Middle East Monitor

The Luxury of Death | Institute for Palestine Studies

Pro-Israel tycoon gives Labour half a million pounds

We Spoke Up For Palestine and Got Kicked Out of the White House Pride Party | Autostraddle

The Rise of October 7th Tourism

IDF Ordered Hannibal Directive on October 7 to Prevent Hamas Taking Soldiers Captive - Israel News - Haaretz.com

‘I’m bored, so I shoot’: The Israeli army’s approval of free-for-all violence in Gaza

IDF Ordered Hannibal Directive on October 7 to Prevent Hamas Taking Soldiers Captive - Israel News - Haaretz.com

Counting the dead in Gaza: difficult but essential - The Lancet

IDF Ordered Hannibal Directive on October 7 to Prevent Hamas Taking Soldiers Captive - Israel News - Haaretz.com

Israel turbocharges West Bank settlement expansion with largest land grab in decades | AP News

Palestinians recount abuse inside Israeli prisons

Silenced at School: NYC Public Schools Chancellor suppresses Palestinian voices – Mondoweiss

The Frankfurt Book Fair and multinational publishers are complicit in the Gaza genocide – Mondoweiss

On the Record with Hamas - by Jeremy Scahill

Sabra and Shatila massacre - Wikipedia

Sabra (character) - Wikipedia

‘Israel in collapse’: 46,000 businesses forced to close since 7 Oct

Israel war on Gaza updates: ICJ finds Israel in breach of international law | Israel-Palestine conflict News | Al Jazeera

ICJ says Israel’s presence in Palestinian territory is unlawful | Israel-Palestine conflict News | Al Jazeera

We Volunteered at a Gaza Hospital. What We Saw Was Unspeakable. - POLITICO

The end of Israel’s economy – Mondoweiss

Palestine and “Xinjiang” under Capitalist Rule: An Analysis from the Chinese Left | Chuang

One Name, Two Lists

Devil in the details: How HRW laundered Israel’s 7 October falsehoods

UK drops plans to challenge ICC arrest warrant request against Benjamin Netanyahu | AP News

Palestinian factions strike a reconciliation deal - will this time be any different? – Mondoweiss

Gaza live: UK won't challenge ICC on Netanyahu arrest warrant | Middle East Eye

Only a failing US empire would be so blind as to cheer Netanyahu and his genocide | Middle East Eye

“Oslo Is Over” - by Jeremy Scahill - Drop Site News

Kamala Harris responds to DC protests over Netanyahu visit

Pro-Palestinian protesters vow to push on at UBC, VIU encampments | CBC News

Israel’s Netanyahu dissolves war cabinet | Israel-Palestine conflict News | Al Jazeera

Travel to Israel declines from 533,200 in June 2023 to 97,700, June 2024 - The Jerusalem Post

'Horrifying' Israeli strike on girls' school in Gaza kills at least 30 | Middle East Eye

Remembering Eman Qamom – Mondoweiss

Canada set to revoke Jewish National Fund’s charitable status – Mondoweiss

Operation Olive Branch - Google Sheets

Israel privately pressures Biden admin to fast-track more weapons during Netanyahu visit - POLITICO

Living in a nightmare – Mondoweiss

As US Congress cheered for Netanyahu, protesters gathered to denounce him | Israel-Palestine conflict News | Al Jazeera

After polio detected in wastewater investigators search Gaza for active cases : Goats and Soda : NPR

Despite UN appeal, US and UK don’t fund ‘critical lifeline’ to Palestinians | Israel-Palestine conflict News | Al Jazeera

Christian Zionism and the Unseeing of the People of Palestine – Institute for Christian Socialism

As the Games open in Paris: “Israel” out of the Olympics — Boycott colonial athletics! | Samidoun: Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network

Paris Olympics 2024: Key issues – Israel, Russia, Seine, hijab ban, workers | Paris Olympics 2024 News | Al Jazeera

All the Times Israel Has Rejected Peace With Palestinians

Violence of planting in Israel-Palestine - The Architectural Review

War on Gaza: How Israel is stripping Palestinian women of their dignity | Middle East Eye

[sparkylurkdragon]

I’m fine with anti-antis having ways to express themselves, but you do have to realize that stuff rarely exists in a vacuum and that fiction does effect reality to a certain extent when conditions are similar. This has been studied and proven. This phenomenon of fiction impacting reality has been given a name. Normalizing certain csem has the potential to normalize those types of relations to a culture that is already fine with sexualizing minors. I know these types of things (and even things like age play) can be coping mechanisms, but survivors can definitely become perpetrators of the same evils they were plagued with. It is a common tactic amongst groomers to show examples of adults and minors being in a relationship to promote the idea that kind of ‘love’ can be healthy. Mine obsessively made me watch The Professional and used celebs with large age gaps as an excuse. Nowadays, loli porn is being used similarly. What do you think is a good middle ground stance? (Asking because I would love to know different opinions on this topic. I’m not trying to attack some random person on the internet who writers or reads fanfiction).

Mm. You seem to be coming into this in good faith, so I’ll bite.

Content warnings: Nongraphic mentions of CSEM, torture, violent intrusive thoughts, underage/loli smut, Abu Ghraib, rape, real life suicides, and school shootings. If I missed something, please take my apologies in advance and let me know.

1.) [Citation needed]

Which studies? Who did the research? Who funded them? Sorry, but after living through “videogames are murder simulators and your kid will definitely shoot up their school if they play Doom or Mortal Kombat or Night Trap,” I’m wary of taking that at face value. From my own wanderings and listening to experts in the mental health field, I don’t think fiction affects reality in the way you are suggesting it does. I see it as more of a funhouse mirror: it may reflect real-world biases, and it may distort the truth sometimes, but it’s really, really hard for it to create real-world problems wholesale.

Violent videogames are also a decent analogy here, because the solution the industry settled on was a rating system. Much like the solution fandom settled on with AO3 was a tagging system.

Also, this is one of my hard lines: do not call fictional art and writing CSEM. CSEM stands for “child sexual exploitation material”. It means that a child was exploited, someone real was abused, to make it. No living breathing person is exploited to write weird fanfiction. Conflating the two is incredibly fucking dangerous and leads to alarm fatigue, and has led to several incidents of purity types distributing abuse material because they thought it was anime characters. So. We will not be calling weird fanfiction or fanart CSEM. It’s about as insulting as calling a whump fic as bad as the Abu Ghraib prison.

2.) With great sincerity that is hard to convey in text: I’m truly sorry that happened to you. No one deserves to be groomed. I hope that you are now out of that situation and have been able to take steps towards healing.

But... do you want The Professional banned and erased from the collective human consciousness? I can understand why the knee-jerk reaction may be “yes”, because it was used to hurt you. But the thing is, your abuser would have used something else if The Professional didn’t exist. Your abuser would have used something else if all celebrities only had relationships with people born on their exact birthdays. That’s what abusers do. If there was nothing to groom people with but forks, then abusers would groom people with forks.

To pull it back some, do you want to ban candy? Someone might use it to lure a kid into the back of a van, after all. 

Like, I don’t like loli porn. It grosses me out viscerally, and I’m happy if it stays at least five miles away from me at all times. It makes my skin crawl to know some folks get off on it.

But, to be honest? If it prevents even one person from hurting a real person, or if it helps even one victim work out their trauma, then it has done too great a service in the world to destroy it, for no one was hurt in its creation, yet it has helped someone. And I don’t know any way to “objectively” see which pieces are irredeemable jack-off material and which are going to help someone. They might very well exist in the same piece.

To make another analogy... torture is one of the worst things a human being can do to another human being. (Indeed, one can argue convincingly that CSEM and all forms of rape are a form of torture.) I feel that very strongly. I have outright dropped stories where the “good guys” torture people before. It viscerally grosses me out, and I think it’s a harmful narrative to perpetuate. I really do think we’d be better off as a society without that trope.

And yet, I would never want those works banned. Rated and warned for, sure, given a forward explaining that torture doesn’t work, even better, but not banned. Because even the most vile “good guy saves the day by torturing information out of someone” piece may have helped somebody, in either its creation or its consumption, if only by showing how the mind of someone who thinks torture is a good thing works.

Also, I have a lot of violent intrusive thoughts. Having a safe outlet for them in the form of things like fiction where the good guys are tortured has in all likelihood saved my life, and possibly the lives of others. So perhaps, for me, there’s an element of feeling like I live in a glass house and can’t throw stones.

Frankly, I don’t think there is a middle ground stance at this point. Purity culture has never meant anything good for me and mine and I will never tolerate it. This latest wave in this latest subculture has, quite probably, killed people. Actual, real life people, who suffered and died.

Sorry. There’s no coming back from that.

[politicalsci]

undefined

[chamerionwrites]

Yeah, I quoted the whole article. Read it. Take care of yourselves - content warnings for torture, child abuse, self harm, attempted suicide, racism - but read it if you can. This is a crime against humanity.

Immigrant children as young as 14 housed at a juvenile detention center in Virginia say they were beaten while handcuffed and locked up for long periods in solitary confinement, left nude and shivering in concrete cells.

The abuse claims against the Shenandoah Valley Juvenile Center near Staunton, Virginia, are detailed in federal court filings that include a half-dozen sworn statements from Latino teens jailed there for months or years. Multiple detainees say the guards stripped them of their clothes and strapped them to chairs with bags placed over their heads.

“Whenever they used to restrain me and put me in the chair, they would handcuff me,” said a Honduran immigrant who was sent to the facility when he was 15 years old. “Strapped me down all the way, from your feet all the way to your chest, you couldn’t really move. ... They have total control over you. They also put a bag over your head. It has little holes; you can see through it. But you feel suffocated with the bag on.”

In addition to the children’s first-hand, translated accounts in court filings, a former child-development specialist who worked inside the facility independently told The Associated Press this week that she saw kids there with bruises and broken bones they blamed on guards. She spoke on condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to publicly discuss the children’s cases.

In court filings, lawyers for the detention facility have denied all allegations of physical abuse.

Many of the children were sent there after U.S. immigration authorities accused them of belonging to violent gangs, including MS-13. President Donald Trump has repeatedly cited gang activity as justification for his crackdown on illegal immigration.

Trump said Wednesday that “our Border Patrol agents and our ICE agents have done one great job” cracking down on MS-13 gang members. “We’re throwing them out by the thousands,” he said.

But a top manager at the Shenandoah center said during a recent congressional hearing that the children did not appear to be gang members and were suffering from mental health issues resulting from trauma that happened in their home countries — problems the detention facility is ill-equipped to treat.

“The youth were being screened as gang-involved individuals. And then when they came into our care, and they were assessed by our clinical and case management staff ... they weren’t necessarily identified as gang-involved individuals,” said Kelsey Wong, a program director at the facility. She testified April 26 before a Senate subcommittee reviewing the treatment of immigrant children apprehended by the Homeland Security Department.

Most children held in the Shenandoah facility who were the focus of the abuse lawsuit were caught crossing the border illegally alone. They were not the children who have been separated from their families under the Trump administration’s recent policy and are now in the government’s care. But the facility there operates under the same program run by the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement. It was not immediately clear whether any separated children have been sent to Shenandoah Valley since the Trump administration in April announced its “zero tolerance” policy toward immigrant families, after the lawsuit was filed.

The Shenandoah lockup is one of only three juvenile detention facilities in the United States with federal contracts to provide “secure placement” for children who had problems at less-restrictive housing. The Yolo County Juvenile Detention Facility in California has faced litigation over immigrant children mischaracterized as gang members.  In Alexandria, Virginia, a board overseeing the Northern Virginia Juvenile Detention Center voted this week to end its contract to house federal immigration detainees, bowing to public pressure.

The Shenandoah detention center was built by a coalition of seven nearby towns and counties to lock up local kids charged with serious crimes. Since 2007, about half the 58 beds are occupied by both male and female immigrants between the ages of 12 and 17 facing deportation proceedings or awaiting rulings on asylum claims. Though incarcerated in a facility similar to a prison, the children detained on administrative immigration charges have not yet been convicted of any crime.

Virginia ranks among the worst states in the nation for wait times in federal immigration courts, with an average of 806 days before a ruling. Nationally, only about half of juveniles facing deportation are represented by a lawyer, according to Justice Department data.

On average, 92 immigrant children each year cycle through Shenandoah, most of them from Mexico and Central America.

Wong said many of the 30 or so children housed there on any given day have mental health needs that would be better served in a residential treatment unit. But such facilities are often unwilling to accept children with significant behavioral issues, she said.

Wong and other managers at the Shenandoah center, including Executive Director Timothy J. Smith, did not respond to phone and email messages seeking comment this week. A city manager on the local commission that oversees the facility referred questions to an official at the Refugee Resettlement agency, who did not respond to a phone message.

Financial statements reviewed by AP shows the local government commission that operates the center received nearly $4.2 million in federal funds last year to house the immigrant children — enough to cover about two-thirds of the total operating expenses.

The lawsuit filed against Shenandoah alleges that young Latino immigrants held there “are subjected to unconstitutional conditions that shock the conscience, including violence by staff, abusive and excessive use of seclusion and restraints, and the denial of necessary mental health care.”

The complaint filed by the nonprofit Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs recounts the story of an unnamed 17-year-old Mexican citizen apprehended at the southern border. The teen fled an abusive father and violence fueled by drug cartels to seek asylum in the United States in 2015.

After stops at facilities in Texas and New York, he was transferred to Shenandoah in April 2016 and diagnosed during an initial screening by a psychologist with three mental disorders, including depression. Besides weekly sessions speaking with a counselor, the lawsuit alleges the teen has received no further mental health treatment, such as medications that might help regulate his moods and behavior.

The lawsuit recounts multiple alleged violent incidents between Latino children and staff at the Shenandoah center. It describes the guards as mostly white, non-Spanish speakers who are undertrained in dealing with individuals with mental illness. The suit alleges staff members routinely taunt the Latino youths with racially charged epithets, including “wetback,” ″onion head” and “pendejo,” which roughly translates to dumbass in Spanish.

A 16-year-old who said he had lived in Texas with his mother since he was an infant ended up at Shenandoah in September after a police officer pulled over a car he was riding in and asked for ID, which he couldn’t provide. As one of the few Latino kids who is fluent in English, the teen would translate for other detainees the taunts and names the staff members were calling them. He said that angered the guards, resulting in his losing such modest privileges as attending art classes.

“If you are behaving bad, resisting the staff when they try to remove you from the program, they will take everything in your room away — your mattress, blanket, everything,” he said. “They will also take your clothes. Then they will leave you locked in there for a while. This has happened to me, and I know it has happened to other kids, too.”

The immigrant detainees said they were largely segregated from the mostly white juveniles being held on criminal charges, but they could see that the other housing units had amenities that included plush chairs and video gaming consoles not available in the Spartan pods housing the Latinos.

In their sworn statements, the teens reported spending the bulk of their days locked alone in their cells, with a few hours set aside for classroom instruction, recreation and meals. Some said they had never been allowed outdoors, while the U.S.-born children were afforded a spacious recreation yard.

The Latino children reported being fed sparse and often cold meals that left them hungry, though meals of American fast food were occasionally provided. Records show Shenandoah receives nearly $82,000 a year from the Agriculture Department to feed the immigration detainees.

The lawsuit said the poor conditions, frequent physical searches and verbal abuse by staff often escalated into confrontations, as the frustrated children acted out. The staff regularly responded “by physically assaulting the youth, applying an excessive amount of force that goes far beyond what is needed to establish or regain control.”

In the case of the Mexican 17-year-old, the lawsuit said a staff member who suspected him of possessing contraband threw him to the ground and forcibly tore off his clothes for an impromptu strip search. Though no forbidden items were found, the teenager was transferred to “Alpha Pod,” described in the lawsuit as a unit within the facility designated for children who engage in bad behavior.

The lawsuit said Latino children were frequently punished by being restrained for hours in chairs, with handcuffs and cloth shackles on their legs. Often, the lawsuit alleged, the children were beaten by staff while bound.

As a result of such “malicious and sadistic applications of force,” the immigrant youths have “sustained significant injuries, both physical and psychological,” the lawsuit said.

After an altercation during which the lawsuit alleged the Mexican teenager bit a staff member during a beating, he was restrained in handcuffs and shackles for 10 days, resulting in bruises and cuts. Other teens interviewed as part of the court case also reported being punished for minor infractions with stints in solitary confinement, during which some of the children said they were left nude and shivering in cold concrete cells.

Academic studies of prison inmates kept in solitary confinement have found they often experience high anxiety that can cause panic attacks, paranoia and disordered thinking that may trigger angry outbursts. For those with mental health issues, the effects can be exacerbated, often worsening the very behaviors the staff is attempting to discourage.

A Guatemalan youth sent to the center when he was 14 years old said he was often locked in his tiny cell for up to 23 hours a day. After resisting the guards, he said he was also restrained for long periods.

“When they couldn’t get one of the kids to calm down, the guards would put us in a chair — a safety chair, I don’t know what they call it — but they would just put us in there all day,” the teen said in a sworn statement. “This happened to me, and I saw it happen to others, too. It was excessive.”

A 15-year-old from Mexico held at Shenandoah for nine months also recounted being restrained with a bag over his head.

“They handcuffed me and put a white bag of some kind over my head,” he said, according to his sworn statement. “They took off all of my clothes and put me into a restraint chair, where they attached my hands and feet to the chair. They also put a strap across my chest. They left me naked and attached to that chair for two and a half days, including at night.”

After being subjected to such treatment, the 17-year-old Mexican youth said he tried to kill himself in August, only to be punished with further isolation. On other occasions, he said, he has responded to feelings of desperation and hopelessness by cutting his wrists with a piece of glass and banging his head against the wall or floor.

“One time I cut myself after I had gotten into a fight with staff,” the teen recounted. “I filled the room with blood. This happened on a Friday, but it wasn’t until Monday that they gave me a bandage or medicine for the pain.”

The lawsuit alleges other immigrant youths held at Shenandoah have also engaged in cutting and other self-harming behaviors, including ingesting shampoo and attempting to choke themselves.

A hearing in the case is set for July 3 before a federal judge in the Western District of Virginia.

Lawyers on both sides in the lawsuit either did not respond to messages or declined to comment, citing strict confidentiality requirements in the case involving children.

The child development specialist who previously worked with teens at Shenandoah told AP that many there developed severe psychological problems after experiencing abuse from guards.

“The majority of the kids we worked with when we went to visit them were emotionally and verbally abused. I had a kid whose foot was broken by a guard,” she said. “They would get put in isolation for months for things like picking up a pencil when a guard had said not to move. Some of them started hearing voices that were telling them to hurt people or hurt themselves, and I knew when they had gotten to Shenandoah they were not having any violent thoughts.”

She said she never witnessed staff abuse teens first-hand, but that teens would complain to her of injuries from being tackled by guards and reveal bruises. The specialist encouraged them to file a formal complaint.

Though lawyers for Shenandoah responded with court filings denying all wrongdoing, information contained in a separate 2016 lawsuit appears to support some of the information contained in the recent abuse complaints.

In a wrongful termination lawsuit filed against the Shenandoah center, a former staff member said he worked in unit called “Alpha Pod” where immigrant minors were held, “including those with psychological and mental issues and those who tend to fight more frequently.”

The guard, Trenton Farris, who denied claims that he punched two children, sued the justice center alleging he was wrongly targeted for firing because he is black. Farris said most staff members at the facility are white, and that two white staff members involved in the incident over which he was fired went unpunished.

Lawyers for the center denied the former guard’s claims, and the case was settled in January.

[corvid-420]

long before tumblr and around the time facebook was accessible only if you had a .edu email, the world got to see pictures of Americans doing the kind of shit that got Germany firebombed. Abu Ghraib is the one that’s most well-known since there are pictures everywhere, but Bagram in Afghanistan.seems to have gotten a total media blackout in the US, except for like one alternet article. It’s horrendously triggering (rape cw, bestiality cw, torture cw), but that’s what Americans ratify every time they vote, since doing this and covering it up is bipartisan.

The guy who wrote all this is like A Thing in Germany, where he wrote books not just on American barbarity in Afghanistan but also, as he calls it, America’s baby, ISIL.

This is why Obama’s administration and the silence that followed was in many ways a breather, like it was a chance for some of us at least, to take advantage of that the spigot for the endless stream of terror America was unleashing on the world was shut off for a bit. like we still don’t know how rampant this sort of thing was in the international network of clandestine prisons where Americans were warehousing people they randomly kidnapped from the streets, their homes, out of their beds.

anyway, america delenda est