Naz also mentioned the Duka Brothers case and that a judge recently rejected their Habeas petition. The brothers wanted to testify and their lawyers made the decision for them saying they were not prepared to out them on the stand.
Facts about the Ft Dix Five/Duka Brothers from the NSJ site:
Dritan Duka, Shain Duka and Eljvir Duka were born into a close-knit Albanian family from Macedonia that immigrated to the United States in 1984. The boys grew up in Cherry Hill, New Jersey and in 2003 opened a roofing business together. In January 2006 the brothers decided to take a week off, their first vacation in years, and travel with eight friends to the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. They dropped off their vacation video footage—which included film of the brothers and their friends firing guns at a shooting range and playing paintball—at a local Circuit City for duplication. Worried by images of young men with guns shouting “God is Great” in Arabic, a Circuit City clerk called the FBI and turned copies of the footage over to them.
Thus began a costly and secret FBI monitoring of the Duka brothers and two others who had vacationed with them, Mohammed Shnewer and Serdar Tatar. This monitoring included the use of two paid informants who moved to Cherry Hill to become part of the local community there and befriended the five men. Over the course of more than a year, the two FBI informants secretly taped hundreds of hours of conversations with the Duka brothers. They also bombarded the brothers with talk of violence, trying to goad them into action and encouraging them to download videos depicting individuals committing violent acts in the name of Islam.
In August 2006, one of the informants drove Mohammed Shnewer to Fort Dix and other sites, a trip the government later characterized as “reconnaissance.” Ten months later, when the Duka brothers went to pick up guns that were being offered for sale to them by one of the informants, they were arrested and charged with weapons possession and conspiracy to attack Fort Dix.
During the course of their trial in 2008, one of the FBI informants testified in court that the brothers had no idea of the plan nor any knowledge of the trip that he had taken Shnewer on to Fort Dix. Nevertheless, the defendants were all found guilty in a case that involved an anonymous jury. Anonymous juries have been criticized for tainting the presumption of innocence, by treating the defendants as so potentially dangerous that anonymity for all of the jurors is necessary to protect their safety.
Eljvir Duka and Mohammed Shnewer received life sentences; Shain and Dritan Duka each received life sentences plus 30 years; and Sedar Tatar got a 33-year sentence. An appeal to the US Supreme Court failed in June 2012. Shain Duka is currently held in USP Big Sandy, Kentucky; Eljvir Duka is in the Communications Management Unit in Terre Haute, Indiana; and Dritan Duka continues to be held in solitary confinement at the federal “supermax” prison in Florence, Colorado (ADX).
How Chris Christie Used A Manufactured Terrorist Plot To Boost His Political Career
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150625/17081531464/how-chris-christie-used-manufactured-terrorist-plot-to-boost-his-political-career.shtml
George addressed the crowd telling them that he worked for 20 years as a psychotherapist. He talked about the prisoners/patients who were routinely abused, taunted, tortured “and in the case of Darren Rainy, MURDERED BY CORRECTIONAL OFFICERS”. He then, proceeded to explain the circumstances surrounding the murder of Darren Rainy and how he was in the scalding hot shower for 2 hours with NO control over the water temperature. Darren Rainy had another 2 months to go on his ‘sentence’. Rainy was serving a 2-year sentence for a victimless crime; possession of cocaine. At the time of his death, he had only one month to go before his release.
“HIS MENTAL ILLNESS BECAME A DEATH SENTENCE”.
A review of Getting Away With Murder
December 24, 2015. By Grady Harp, HALL OF FAME, TOP 100 REVIEWER, VINE VOICE
Florida author George Mallinckrodt places before us one of the most terrifying yet factual examinations of the abuse in our prisons. Not only is the news he unveils about the conditions present in those dark walls of incarceration shocking and deeply disturbing, but the manner in which he relates it is razor sharp – the kind of reading material that grabs you by the throat until the book is finished.
George is a psychotherapist working in a Florida state prison psychiatric ward where severely mentally ill patients in his caseload were abused, starved, taunted, tormented, and beaten by correctional officers. ‘After a patient on my caseload was beaten by guards, my attempts to raise the issue of patient abuse were met with silence. My vociferous advocacy for the humane treatment of our patients ended in my dismissal. Ten months after my departure, guards put a man named Darren Rainey in a boiling hot shower and scalded him to death. Deeply impacted by Rainey’s horrific death, I became an advocate for his justice on a local level, with FBI agents, and filing a complaint with the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, Special Litigation Section. The complaint provided secondhand details of Darren Rainey’s murder and a host of other abuses I witnessed in my former unit. Two and a half years after I spoke with FBI agents, the Miami Herald reported that the DOJ had initiated a criminal investigation into Rainey’s death.’
The human rights and civil rights abuses taking place in the military prison at Guantanamo Bay have, rightly, been placed under a spotlight by people of conscience around the world. Some believe that if only those detained at Guantanamo could be transferred to American soil, to be held and tried as civilians, the abuses would end and justice would be done. Yet many of the same abuses can be found in the hundreds of “war on terror” cases that have been processed through courtrooms and federal prisons across the United States since 9/11.
These abuses–which include inhumane conditions of confinement both pre- and post-trial; secret evidence; intrusive surveillance; vague material support charges; FBI-created plots brought into communities through paid informants; and the criminalization of Islamic speech and association–remain largely invisible. The mission of the No Separate Justice campaign is to place these abuses, taking place in prisons and courtrooms across the United States, firmly on the agendas of human and civil right organizations, the media, and the U.S. public through education and activism that draws directly upon the experiences and voices of those most directly affected. in lower Manhattan – 150 Park Row – a federal prison where people accused of terrorism-related offenses have been held in solitary confinement for years, even before they have been tried.
Naz Ahmad reading the letter of Bob Boyle, the attorney of the Fort Dix Five
https://www.democracynow.org/2016/1/7/the_fbi_entrapping_muslims_web_exclusive
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