Full Text of Human Rights Record of the United States in 2011 - 2

English.news.cn 2012-05-25 20:03:53
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/china/2012-05/25/c_131611554_2.htm

II. On Civil and Political Rights

In the United States, the violation of citizens' civil and political rights is severe. It is lying to itself when the United States calls itself the land of the free (The Washington Post, January 14, 2012).

Claiming to defend 99 percent of the U.S. population against the wealthiest, the Occupy Wall Street protest movement tested the U.S. political, economic and social systems.

Ignited by severe 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 protesters were treated in a rude and violent way, with many of them being arrested -- the act of willfully trampling on people' s freedom of assembly, demonstration and speech -- could provide a glimpse to the truth of the so-called U.S. freedom and democracy.

Almost 1,000 people were reportedly arrested in first two weeks of the movement, according to British and Australian media (The Guardian, October 2, 2011).

The New York police arrested more than 700 protesters for alleged blocking traffic over Brooklyn Bridge on October 1, and some of them were handcuffed to the bridge before being shipped by police vehicles (uschinapress.com, October 3, 2011).

On October 9, 92 people were arrested in New York (The New York Times, October 15, 2011).

The Occupy Wall Street movement was forced out of its encampment at Zuccotti Park and more than 200 people were arrested on November 15 (The Guardian, November 25, 2011).

Chicago police arrested around 300 members of the Occupy Chicago protest in two weeks (The Herald Sun, October 24, 2011).

At least 85 people were arrested when police used teargas and baton rounds to break up an Occupy Wall Street camp in Oakland, California on October 25.

An Iraq war veteran had a fractured skull and brain swelling after being allegedly hit in the head by a police projectile (The Guardian, October 26, 2011).

 A couple of hundred people were arrested when demonstrations were staged in different U.S. cities to mark the Occupy Wall Street movement' s two-month anniversary on November 17 (USA Today, November 18, 2011).

Among them, at least 276 were arrested in New York only. Some protesters were bloodied as they were hauled away. Many protesters accused the police of treating them in a brutal way (The Wall Street Journal, November 18, 2011).

As a U.S. opinion article put it, the United States could be considered, at least in part, authoritarian. (The Washington Post, January 14, 2012).

While advocating press freedom, the United States in fact imposes fairly strict censoring and control over the press and "press freedom" is just a political tool used to beautify itself and attack other nations.

The U.S. Congress failed to pass laws on protecting rights of reporters' news sources, according to media reports. An increasing number of American reporters lost jobs for "improper remarks on politics."

U.S. reporter Helen Thomas resigned for critical remarks about 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, December 28, 2011).

While forcibly evacuating the Zuccotti Park, the original Occupy Wall Street encampment, the New York police blocked journalists from covering the police actions. They set cordon lines to prevent reporters from getting close to the park and closed airspace to make aerial photography impossible.

In addition to using pepper spray against reporters, the police also arrested around 200 journalists, including reporters from NPR and the New York Times (uschinapress.com, November 15, 2011).

By trampling on press freedom and public interests, these actions by the U.S. authorities caused a global uproar. U.S. mainstream media' s response to the Occupy Wall Street movement revealed the hypocrisy in handling issues of freedom and democracy.

Poll by Pew Research Center indicated that in the second week of the movement, reports on the movement only accounted for 1.68 percent of the total media reports by nationwide media organizations.

On October 15, 2011, when the Occupy Wall Street movement evolved to be a global action, CNN and Fox News gave no live reports on it, in a sharp contrast to the square protest in Cairo, for which both CNN and Fox News broadcast live 24 hours.

The U.S. imposes fairly strict restriction on the Internet, and its approach "remains full of problems and contradictions." (The website of the Foreign Policy magazine, February 17, 2011) "Internet freedom" is just an excuse for the United States to impose diplomatic pressure and seek hegemony.

The U.S. 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 any Internet content "harmful to national security." Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act of 2010 stipulates that the federal government has "absolute power" to shut down the Internet under a declared national emergency.

 According to a report by British newspaper the Guardian dated March 17, 2011, the U.S. military is developing software that will let it secretly manipulate social media sites by using fake online personas, and will allow the U.S. military to create a false consensus in online conversations, crowd out unwelcome opinions and smother commentaries or reports that do not correspond with its own objectives. The project aims to control and restrict free speech on the Internet (The Guardian, March 17, 2011).

According to a commentary by the Voice of Russia on February 2, 2012, a subsidiary under the U.S. government' s security agency employed several hundred analysts, who were tasked with monitoring private archives of foreign Internet users in a secret way, and were able to censor as many as five million microblogging posts.

 The U.S. Department of Homeland Security routinely searched key words like "illegal immigrants," "virus," "death," and "burst out" on Twitter with fake accounts and then secretly traced the Internet users who forwarded related content.

According to a report by the Globe and Mail on January 30, 2012, Leigh Van Bryan, a British, prior to his flight to the U.S., wrote in a Twitter post, "Free this week, for quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America?" As a result, Bryan along with a friend were handcuffed and put in lockdown with suspected drug smugglers for 12 hours by armed guards after landing in Los Angeles International Airport, just like "terrorists" .

Among many angered by the incident in Britain, an Internet user posted a comment, "What' s worse, being arrested for an innocent tweet, or the fact that the American Secret Service monitors every electronic message in the world?" (The Daily Mail, January 31, 2012).

The U.S. democracy is increasingly being influenced by capitalization and becoming a system for "master of money."

Data issued by the U.S. Center for Responsive Politics in November 2011 show that 46 percent of the U.S. federal senators and members of the House of Representatives have personal assets of more than a million dollars.

 That well explains why U.S. administration' s plans to impose higher tax on the rich who earn more than one million dollars annually have been blocked in the Congress (www.finance-ol.com).

As a commentary put it, money has emerged as the electoral trump card in the U.S. political system, and corporations have a Supreme Court-recognized right to use their considerable financial muscle to promote candidates and policies favorable to their business operations and to resist policies and shut out candidates deemed inimical to their business interests (Online edition of Time, January 20, 2011).

According to a media report, nearly two thirds of all the contributions that the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee received during the 2010 election cycle came from industries regulated by his committee.

A ranking Democrat Representative on the Agriculture Committee, who served as chairman between 2007 and 2010, saw a 711 percent increase in contributions from groups regulated by his committee and a 274 percent increase in contributions over all, in the same period (The New York Times, November 16, 2011).

According to a Washington Post report on August 10, 2011, nearly eight in 10 of Americans polled were dissatisfied with the way the political system is working, with 45 percent saying they are very dissatisfied (The Washington Post, August 10, 2011).

The U.S. continued to violate the freedom of its citizens in the name of boosting security levels (The Washington Post, January 14, 2012).

The Electronic Frontier Foundation in 2011 released a report, "Patterns of Misconduct: FBI intelligence violations from 2001-2008," which reveals that domestic political intelligence apparatus spearheaded by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, continues to systematically violate the rights of American citizens and legal residents.

The report shows that the actual number of violations that may have occurred from 2001 to 2008 could approach 40,000 possible violations of law, Executive Order, or other regulations governing intelligence investigations.

The FBI issued some 200,000 requests and that almost 60 percent were for investigations of U.S. citizens and legal residents (www.pacificfreepress.com).

The New York Times reported on October 20, 2011, that the FBI has collected information about religious, ethnic and national-origin characteristics of American communities (The New York Times, October 20, 2011).

According to a Washington Post commentary dated January 14, 2012, the U.S. government can use "national security letters" to demand, without probable cause, that organizations turn over information on citizens' finances, communications and associations, and order searches of everything from business documents to library records. The U.S. government can use GPS devices to monitor every move of targeted citizens without securing any court order or review (The Washington Post, January 14, 2012).

Abuse of power, brutal enforcement of law and overuse of force by U.S. police have resulted in harassment and hurt to a large number of innocent citizens and have caused loss of freedom of some people or even deaths.

According to a report carried by the World Journal on June 10, 2011, the past decade saw increasing stop-and-frisks by the New York police, which recorded an annual of 600,000 cases in 2010, almost double of that in 2004.

In the first three months of 2011, some 180,000 people experienced stop-and-frisks, 88 percent of whom were innocent people (World Journal, June 10, 2011).

In early July of 2011, two police officers beat a mentally ill homeless man to death in Orange County, Southern California (FoxNews.com, September 21, 2011).

In August 2011, North Miami police shot and killed a man carrying realistic toy gun (The NY Daily News, September 1, 2011).

On Jan. 8, 2011, a Central California man was shot and killed by the police, who thought of him as a gang member only because the jacket he was wearing was red, "the chosen color of a local street gang." (www.kolotv.com, January 19, 2011)

In May 2011, Arizona' s police officers raided the home of Jose Guerena and shot him dead in what was described as an investigation into alleged marijuana trafficking. However, the police later found nothing 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, June 22, 2011). Forty-six-year-old Thomas Haynesworth spent 27 years in prison after being arrested at the age of 18 for crimes he didn' t commit (Union Press International, December 7, 2011). Eric Caine, who was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment after being tortured by police into confessing to two murders, spent nearly 25 years behind bars.(Chicago Tribune, June 13, 2011).

The U.S. lacks basic due lawsuit process protections, and its government continues to claim the right to strip citizens of legal protections based on its sole discretion (The Washington Post, January 14, 2012).

The National Defense Authorization Act, signed December 31, 2011, allows for the indefinite detention of citizens (The Washington Post, January 14, 2012).

The Act will place domestic terror investigations and interrogations into the hands of the military and which would open the door for trial-free, indefinite detention of anyone, including American citizens, so long as the government calls them terrorists (www.forbes.com, December 5, 2011).

The U.S. remains the country with the largest "prison population" and the highest per capita level of imprisonment in the world, and the detention centers' conditions are terrible.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the number of prisoners amounted to 2.3 million in 2009 and one in every 132 American citizens is behind bars.

Meanwhile, more than 140,000 are serving life sentences

("Report: On the situation with human rights in a host of world states," the website of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Russia, December 28, 2011).

According to a Los Angeles Times report on May 24, 2011, in a California prison, as many as 54 inmates may share a single toilet and as 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 prison and jail inmates experiencing sexual victimization totaled 88,500 in the U.S. between October 2008 and December 2009 (www.bjs.gov).

Since April 2011, officials stopped serving lunch on the weekend in some U.S. prisons as a way to cut food-service costs.

About 23,000 inmates in 36 prisons are eating two meals a day on Saturdays and Sundays instead of three (The New York Times, October 20, 2011).

 Harsh conditions and treatment in prisons have caused recurring protests and suicides of inmates.

There were two major hunger strikes in California prisons staged 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, October 4, 2011; The New York Times, July 7, 2011).

According to a Chicago Tribune report on July 20, 2011, since 2000, at least 175 youths have attempted to kill themselves inside Department of Juvenile Justice lockup facilities in Chicago and seven youths committed suicide.

The UN Special Rapporteur on Torture in a 2011 report noted that in the Untied States an estimated 20,000 to 25,000 individuals are being held in isolation, and the U.S. government in 2011 for two times turned down the Special Rapporteur's request for a private and unmonitored meeting with detainees held in isolation.