PakistaniandProud
FULL MEMBER
- Joined
- Apr 30, 2012
- Messages
- 1,336
- Reaction score
- 0
- Country
- Location
Occupy Seattle
protesters, an off-shoot of the Occupy Wall Street movement, scuffle
with police officers during a May Day rally and anti-capitalist march in
Seattle. Stuart Isett / Bloomberg
The State Department of the United States released its Country
Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2011 on May 24, 2012. As in
previous years, the reports are full of over-critical remarks on the
human rights situation in nearly 200 countries and regions as well as
distortions and accusations concerning the human rights cause in China.
However, the United States turned a blind eye to its own woeful human
rights situation and kept silent about it. The Human Rights Record of
the United States in 2011 is hereby prepared to reveal the true human
rights situation of the United States to people across the world and
urge the United States to face up to its own doings.
I.
On life, property and personal security
The United States has mighty strength in human, financial and
material resources to exert effective control over violent crimes.
However, its society is chronically suffering from violent crimes, and
its citizens' lives, properties and personal security are in lack of
proper protection.
A report published by the US Department of Justice on Sept 15, 2011,
revealed that in 2010 the US residents aged 12 and above experienced 3.8
million violent victimizations, 1.4 million serious violent
victimizations, 14.8 million property victimizations and 138,000
personal thefts. The violent victimization rate was 15 victimizations
per 1,000 residents (Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS)). The crime rate surged in many cities
and regions in the United States. In the southern region of the United
States, there were 452 violent crimes and 3,438.8 property crimes per
100,000 inhabitants (in 2010) on average (The Wall Street Journal, Sept
20, 2011). Just four weeks into 2011, San Francisco saw eight homicides -
compared with five during the same time of the previous year, with
Oakland racking up 11, when the previous year in the same period it had
four (The San Francisco Chronicle, Jan 29, 2011). Grand larcenies in the
subway in New York City increased from 852 in 2010 to 1,075 cases in
the first nine months of 2011, a 25 percent jump (The China Press, Sept
24, 2011). Homicide cases in Detroit in 2011 saw a 13.5 percent rise
over 2010 (Buzzle). Between January and October 2011, a total of
123,924 serious crime cases took place in Chicago
(portal.chicagopolice.org). An anti-bullying public service announcement
declared in January 2011 that more than six million schoolchildren
experienced bullying in the previous six months (CNN, Mar 10, 2011).
According to statistics from the Family First Aid, almost 30 percent of
teenagers in the United States are estimated to be involved in school
bullying (Troubled Teen Help Military Boarding Schools).
The United States prioritizes the right to keep and bear arms over
the protection of citizens' lives and personal security and exercises
lax firearm possession control, causing rampant gun ownership. The US
people hold between 35 percent and 50 percent of the world' s
civilian-owned guns, with every 100 people having 90 guns (Online
edition of the Foreign Policy, Jan 9, 2011). According to a Gallup poll
in October 2011, 47 percent of American adults reported that they had a
gun. That was an increase of six percentage points from a year ago and
the highest Gallup had recorded since 1993. Fifty-two percent of
middle-aged adults, aged between 35 and 54, reported to own guns, and
the adults' gun ownership in the south region was 54 percent (The China
Press, Oct 28, 2011). The New York Times reported on Nov 14, 2011, that
since 1995, more than 3,300 felons and people convicted of domestic
violence misdemeanors had regained their gun rights in the state of
Washington and of that number, more than 400 had subsequently committed
new crimes, including shooting and other felonies (The New York Times,
Nov 14, 2011).
The United States is the leader among the world's developed countries
in gun violence and gun deaths. According to a report of the Foreign
Policy on Jan 9, 2011, over 30,000 Americans die every year from gun
violence and another 200,000 Americans are estimated to be injured each
year due to guns (Online edition of the Foreign Policy, Jan 9, 2011).
According to statistics released by the US Department of Justice, among
the 480,760 robbery cases and 188,380 rape and sexual assault cases in
2010, the rates of victimization involving firearms were 29 percent and 7
percent, respectively (Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS)). On Jun 2, 2011, a shooting rampage
in Arizona left six people dead and one injured (The China Press, Jun
3, 2011). In Chicago, more than 10 overnight shooting incidents took
place just between the evening of Jun 3 and the morning of Jun 4
(Chicago Tribune, Jun 4, 2011). Another five overnight shootings
occurred between Aug 12 evening and Aug 13 morning in Chicago. These
incidents have caused a number of deaths and injuries (Chicago Tribune,
Aug 13, 2011). Shooting spree cases involving one gunman shooting dead
over five people also happened in the states of Michigan, Texas, Ohio,
Nevada and Southern California (The New York Times, Oct 13, 2011; CNN,
Jul 8, 2011; CBS, Jul 23, 2011;USA Today, Aug 9, 2011). High incidence
of gun-related crimes has long ignited complaints of the US people and
they stage multiple protests every year, demanding the government
strictly control the private possession of arms. The US government,
however, fails to pay due attention to this issue.
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, Jan 14, 2012).
Claiming to defend 99 percent of the US population against the
wealthiest, the Occupy Wall Street protest movement tested the US
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 US
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,
Oct 2, 2011). The New York police arrested more than 700 protesters for
alleged blocking traffic over Brooklyn Bridge on Oct 1, and some of them
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 New York Times, Oct 15, 2011). The Occupy Wall Street
movement was forced out of its encampment at Zuccotti Park and more than
200 people were arrested on Nov 15 (The Guardian, Nov 25, 2011).
Chicago police arrested around 300 members of the Occupy Chicago protest
in two weeks (The Herald Sun, Oct 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 Oct 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, Oct 26, 2011). A couple
of hundred people were arrested when demonstrations were staged in
different US cities to mark the Occupy Wall Street movement' s two-month
anniversary on Nov 17 (USA Today, Nov 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, Nov 18, 2011). As a US
opinion article put it, the United States could be considered, at least
in part, authoritarian. (The Washington Post, Jan 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 US 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." US 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, Dec 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,
Nov 15, 2011). By trampling on press freedom and public interests, these
actions by the US authorities caused a global uproar. US 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 Oct 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 US imposes fairly strict restriction on the Internet, and its
approach "remains full of problems 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 and seek
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 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 Mar 17, 2011, the US
military is developing software that will let it secretly manipulate
social media sites by using fake online personas, and will allow the US
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, Mar 17, 2011).
According to a commentary by the Voice of Russia on Feb 2, 2012, a
subsidiary under the US 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 US 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 Jan 30, 2012, Leigh Van
Bryan, a British, prior to his flight to the US, 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 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 2011 show that 46 percent of
the US federal senators and members of the House of Representatives have
personal assets of more than a million dollars. That well explains why
US administration' s plans to impose higher tax on the rich who earn
more than one million dollars annually have been blocked in the Congress
(Finance online - Free Financial Advice|Financial Planning-Personal Financial Planning Advice). As a commentary put it, money has emerged as the
electoral trump card in the US 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, Jan 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, Nov 16, 2011). According to a
Washington Post report on Aug 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,
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 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 US citizens and legal residents (Pacific Free Press - Hard Truths for Hard Times - Progressive opinion, dissident news). The New
York Times reported on Oct 20, 2011, that the FBI has collected
information about religious, ethnic and national-origin characteristics
of American communities (The New York Times, Oct 20, 2011). According to
a Washington Post commentary dated Jan 14, 2012, the US 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 US government can use GPS
devices to monitor every move of targeted citizens 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 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 Jun 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, Jun 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, Sept 21, 2011). In August 2011, North
Miami police shot and killed a man carrying realistic toy gun (The NY
Daily News, Sept 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." (KOLO - HomePage, Jan 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, Jun 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, Dec 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, Jun 13, 2011).
The US 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, Jan 14,
2012). The National Defense Authorization Act, signed Dec 31, 2011,
allows for the indefinite detention of citizens (The Washington Post,
Jan 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
(Information for the World's Business Leaders - Forbes.com, Dec 5, 2011).
The US 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 US
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, Dec 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 US between October 2008 and December
2009 (Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS)). Since April 2011, officials stopped serving lunch
on the weekend in some US 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, Oct 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, Oct 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 US, an
estimated 20,000 to 25,000 individuals are being held in isolation, and
the US government in 2011 for twice turned down the Special Rapporteur's
request for a private and unmonitored meeting with detainees held in
isolation.
Human Rights Record of United States in 2011|Document|chinadaily.com.cn
Also lmao, look at how this Indian Zakari guy is taking shots at China
What in the world? China calls out the U.S. on human rights – Global Public Square - CNN.com Blogs
good revenge action.
