Intn'l Human Rights Day, US Day Of Abuse Protests, Mourning, Rage, Condemnation

International Human Rights Day was marked Wednesday by nationwide protests and international condemnation against the United States. Fueled by gruesome details in a Senate report on Central Intelligence Agency torture released Tuesday, shocking Americans and citizens abroad, along with recent police killings of black people with impunity and abused workers, prisoners refugees and targeted individuals including targeted killings, Human Rights Day 2014 is no cause for Americans to celebrate.

Nationwide protests against U.S. human rights abuses were raised another notch on Human Rights Day. Thousands more Americans took to the streets, shutting down bridges, expressways, tunnels and stores.

Today, more groups were added to the already long list of demonstrators demanding equality, the basis of all human rights, and justice. Today, med-school students in five cities joined “die-in” #ICantBreathe protestors around the county. They are outraged over the police killing of Eric Garner. He was put in a choke-hold as he repeatedly said, “I can’t breathe,” his final words.

“This week is an incredibly important time,” said one of the nation’s leading rights defenders, Shahid Buttar, executive director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee in a written statement Monday. “On the heels of an ongoing uprising sparked by police violence with impunity, tomorrow’s release of the Senate’s historic 6,000 page report on CIA torture is anticipated on the eve of Human Rights Day.”

Nationally, the Torture Report added fuel to what has become a raging fire regarding U.S. human rights abuses spurring the nationwide protests, in over 170 cities, for over two months, with rights defenders from many sectors of American society joining in solidarity to expose the violations and demand truth and justice.

World Condemns US Brutal Human Rights Abuses

Internationally, the Torture Report prompted world leaders and media to feature U.S. human rights abuses and tell the White House to clean up its act.

“A gentleman’s club for psychopaths, sociopaths, lunatics, misfits” reports Pravda after Tuesday’s release detailing years of torture conducted by U.S. agents, including health professionals.

The Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) noted “despicable human rights abuses as white American police officers’ brutalities of shooting and strangling black men to death,” a nod to the killings of unarmed black men, Michael Brown and Eric Garner, in two separate incidents at the hands of white police officers.

The Torture Report clearly undermines U.S. efforts to prevent rights abuses conducted overseas, making a mockery of “taking US-style democracy” to other countries: “America is facing a turning point and now needs to reflect on its own human rights abuses,” according an article in a Chinese state-owned national broadsheet Huan Qiu Bao.

The Senate Torture Report, that said techniques like “rectal hydration” and threats to sexually abuse the mothers of detainees had been ineffective in extracting information on security threats, “weakens” not only Washington’s voice on international human rights issues, but the United States’ overall foreign diplomacy.

The “U.S. government should clean up its own backyard first and respect the rights of other countries to resolve their issues by themselves,” reported Xinhua.

Even media from America’s allies “were likewise aghast at the torture details.” For example, in Poland and Morocco, hosts of “black site” CIA-run secret detention centers, pundits expressed concern over their government’s roles in the abuse. This was despite names of countries hosting the black sites was redacted from the report. Radio Poland reported that Warsaw has demanded a copy of the unedited 6,000 page Torture Report.

Change is being demanded for the sake of both Americans and citizens abroad who experience U.S.-sponsored brutality. Particularly African Americans are telling the White House to do something about the epidemic, the racial, racist police killings and related brutality.

Americans Say Stop the Coverups, Expose Injustices, Prosecute

Vigils, protests, workshops, and other human rights-specific events started in cities nationwide today on International Human Rights Day and will continue through Bill of Rights Day (Dec. 15th). Rights groups have held vigils today at major television networks in protest of media lies and coverups of crimes, including U.S. war crimes. Criticized for partial, lack of or false reporting on injustices that have sparked a wave of protests across the United States, starting on Human Rights Day, major news outlets across the nation, whether they wanted or not, are helping expose America’s separate and unequal systems of justice, including CIA and NSA crimes.

Two grand juries deciding to not prosecute in two separate cases in which police killed unarmed black people seems to have been the tipping point in the nation’s list of rights abuse scandals. President Barack Obama deciding to not end torture and not prosecute known torture war criminals, knowing from a former investigation that the U.S. is torturing and who was responsible, has been galvanizing rights groups for years to better stand against the “Bush-Obama” regime.

The major difference in today’s protests from former ones, the difference that has resulted in the nationwide wave of demonstrators on the streets today is that the many groups of Americans being abused and those defending their rights have joined forces. This is precisely what the Occupy movement leaders had envisioned when they began their campaign to stop the machine. Today, groups “occupy” their towns and states, the prisons, the refugee camps, the corporations and the entity controlling them all, Wall Street.

Yesterday, for example, a coalition of organizations from across America, including the the Bill Of Rights Defense Committee is co-sponsoring a week of grassroots action from December 10 (Human Rights Day) to December 15 (Bill of Rights Day).

Workers’ unions and other civil rights groups have joined the Occupiers in protests, bringing tens of thousands of people onto the nations’ city streets demanding justice and accountability. Now that the latest torture report is out, rights defenders urge others to seize the moment to expose rights abuses happening at many levels of society. They do so knowing they risk any freedom that remains and even their lives, since they are being met with militarized police and infiltrators. They also know at least 400 people are killed by police annually.

“The only person the Obama administration has prosecuted in connection with the torture program is a man who revealed its existence to the media,” reports.

After carefully examining evidence in the first torture report, Attorney General Eric Holder decided not to prosecute anyone for the CIA’s torture.

“The department has declined prosecution because the admissible evidence would not be sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction beyond a reasonable doubt,” Holder said before dropping investigations into two torture-related deaths in 2012.

Asked about investigating CIA torture in 2009, Obama’s infamous response was, “It’s important to look forward and not backwards.”

He admitted that “we tortured some folks” earlier this year, but never called for those responsible to be punished.

Today, the one Navy nurse who has refused to torture at Guantanamo bay when ordered to do so Bay faces a discharge.

UN condemns US human rights abuses

The United Nations says it’s past time to prosecute. A UN official wants U.S. administrators involved in torture to be prosecuted and says any country can do this.

“It is now time to take action,” Ben Emmerson, UN special rapporteur on counter-terrorism and human rights, declared in a statement. “The individuals responsible for the criminal conspiracy revealed in today’s report must be brought to justice, and must face criminal penalties commensurate with the gravity of their crimes.”

In concluding observations in March on United States’ compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), a U.S.-ratified treaty that outlines basic human rights, the UN Human Rights Committee issued a slew of criticisms to the U.S. on its failures. These were related to a long list of human rights abuses including everything from detention without charge at Guantánamo, torture, drone strikes, NSA surveillance, death penalty, rampant gun violence and endemic racial inequality.

Pointing out the disproportional representation of African Americans on death rows, Walter Kälin, a Swiss international human rights lawyer on the committee stated: “Discrimination is bad, but it is absolutely unacceptable when it leads to death.”

The U.S. “should revisit its position regarding legal justifications for the use of deadly force through drone attacks,” the UN human rights body stated, echoing rights and justice groups’ charges regarding so-called justification and lack of accountability for targeted killings, civilian casualties and targeted individuals covertly persecuted daily.

On this International Human Rights Day, more so than on any other, the American people are showing they have awakened and that they will not stop protesting until rights abusers are named and held accountable through prosecutions, and individual human rights are honored and upheld.