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International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group
Coalition pour la surveillance internationale des libertés civiles
June 7, 2025 - 7 juin 2025
| | New Border Bill Raises Major Concerns for Civil Liberties, Privacy, and Refugee Rights | |
ICLMG 05/06/2025 - The Liberal government has introduced a sweeping new national security and border omnibus bill, Bill C-2, the Strong Borders Act.
We are still analyzing the bill, but it is already highly troubling. Many aspects of the bill have little to nothing to do with “securing the border,” and many aspects that do relate to the border present a significant threat to human rights and civil liberties. It is clear that, under the guise of addressing border security and placating the Trump administration, the government is seeking unrelated powers that they have unsuccessfully attempted to obtain in the past, and which will have wide-ranging negative impacts.
While further study may result in other areas of concern, key aspects we have identified so far include:
- Changes to the Canada Post Act would allow Canada Post (based on regulations approved by Cabinet) to open and search letter mail, which is currently prohibited.
- Changes to the Oceans Act would transform the Canadian Coast Guard (CCG) into a security force, allowing them to engage in “security patrols and the collection, analysis and disclosure of information or intelligence.” There is no independent oversight or review body for the CCG.
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Changes to the Department of Citizenship and Immigration Act and Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA) would allow for the widespread sharing of the personal information of individuals immigrating to Canada with other government departments, as well as with foreign entities (with some minimal safeguards in place).
- Other changes to IRPA would severely and arbitrarily limit the ability of individuals to claim asylum in Canada, in violation of international human rights law. This includes requiring asylum claims to be made within one year of an individual arriving in Canada, ignoring that circumstances can change in one’s country of origin at any moment; this goes even further than current US limitations on refugee claims, which allows for some exceptions. Amendments to IRPA would also change the rules for refugee claimants who enter Canada from the US between ports of entry – rules that were already made too restrictive under the Safe Third Country Agreement with the US. Currently, refugees are able to make an asylum claim after being in Canada for 14 days; the bill would eliminate this possibility completely. This would force even more claimants to remain in the US, although it is not a safe country for refugees.
- Changes to IRPA will also allow the government to cancel or suspend groups of immigration documents (visas, for example), pause the acceptance of new applications, or pause/cancel applications already in the queue, on the basis of the “public interest” including national security – which could allow for the mass cancelation or suspension of the processing of individuals from certain countries, or under certain kinds of visas or immigration documents, etc., similar to what we have seen in the US.
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The bill once again resurrects efforts to establish “lawful access” powers for police and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, which many previous governments have attempted to legislate. Changes to the Criminal Code and CSIS Act would make it easier for these agencies to access information such as IP addresses, including without a warrant in urgent circumstances. It would also allow law enforcement and intelligence agencies to request this information from foreign entities, and open the door to reciprocal requests (ie, foreign governments requesting information and data held in Canada).
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Bill C-2 would also create a new Supporting Authorized Access to Information Act that would oblige “electronic service providers” (email providers, social media platforms, internet service providers, etc.) to ensure that they operate in a way that allows them to fully comply with requests to access or intercept information and communications (for example, ensuring information held by email providers is organized and stored in a way that it can be accessed by police or CSIS). Despite assurances that “backdoors” into encryption would not be required from ESPs, the bill allows for the Governor in Council to make regulations respecting the meaning of “encryption”, raising concerns that the government’s definition could circumvent those assurances.
Given the breadth of these concerns and dangers to civil liberties and human rights that they present, we call on the government and MPs to withdraw Bill C-2. If the government is serious about addressing concerns regarding illegal gun and drug trafficking, it must introduce legislation specifically tailored to that goal, as opposed to a wide-ranging omnibus bill. In the event of any new legislation to replace Bill C-2, the government should ensure to fully consult with civil liberties, privacy, migrant and refugee rights experts before it is introduced.
We encourage you to contact your MP and urge them to reject the bill and ask that it be withdrawn. Thank you! Source
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Version française : Le nouveau projet de loi frontalier soulève des préoccupations majeures pour les libertés civiles, la vie privée et les droits des réfugié-es
Interview with the ICLMG: Liberal border security bill poses serious risk to rights and liberties
Migrant Rights Network Condemns Bill C-2’s Anti-Refugee & Mass Deportation Provisions
Amnesty International: Bill C-2, Canada’s new border bill, an attack on the human right to seek asylum
Canadian Council for Refugees: Dangerous new border legislation erodes refugee rights and will make many in Canada less safe
Michael Geist: More Than Just Phone Book Data: Why the Government is Dangerously Misleading on its Warrantless Demands for Internet Subscriber Information
Althia Raj: Border bill primed to give Mark Carney’s government sweeping new powers. Who asked for this?
Jeremy Appel: Carney's Capitulation: The Strong Borders Act is a total betrayal of the Liberals' pledge to stand up to Trump
| | What we’ve been up to from January to May 2025 and our plan for the rest of the year | |
ICLMG 30/05/2025 - Thanks to the support of our members and donors, here is what we were able to work on so far in 2025 :
- Open letter to the new Prime Minister and government
- 2025 federal election and National Security Info Card
- C-20: First independent watchdog for the CBSA
- C-27: Digital Charter Implementation Act, 2022
- Online Harms
- Foreign Interference
- Combatting Racism & Islamophobia
- Canada’s terrorist entities list
- Palestine and the right to dissent
- Impacts of Counter terrorism financing
- Hassan Diab & Extradition
- Civil Society Coalition on Human Rights and Counter-terrorism
- And more!
What we have planned for the rest of 2025!
We have our work cut out for us! In response to threats of tariffs and annexation from the Trump administration, the Canadian government has problematically committed to the rapid expansion of border security, surveillance and information sharing with the US, and expanded the use of rights violating anti-terrorism tools. We also cannot ignore the US crackdown on protesters and migrants under the guise of fighting terrorism and protecting national security. We need to ensure that Canada disentangles itself from the US national security regime, resists US pressure to expand surveillance and counter-terror powers and tools at the expense of our civil liberties, and increases protections for privacy, dissent, migrants and asylum seekers.
We will continue our work on these issues and much more:
- Protecting our privacy from government surveillance, including facial recognition, and from attempts to weaken encryption, along with advocating for good privacy law reform
- Addressing the lack of regulation on the use of AI in national security
- Advocating for restrictions on Canadian information sharing with the US, including the application of the US No Fly List in Canada
- Campaigning for the repeal of secretive and rights violating national security lists, such as the Terrorist Entities List and the Canadian No Fly List
- Halting the rapid expansion of new security measures at the border and continuing to push back against the false narrative depicting migrants and refugees as security risks, and advocating for rights protection and accountability for border agencies, including by monitoring the creation of a new CBSA and RCMP watchdog agency
- Advocating with lawmakers and officials to protect civil liberties from the overall negative impact of national security
- Countering the escalating repression of free expression, dissent and protest in the name of “countering terrorism,” including the crackdown on protests in support of Palestinian human rights and against the genocide in Gaza. This includes countering new “bubble zone” laws at the municipal and federal levels
- Fighting for Justice for Mohamed Harkat, an end to security certificates, and addressing problems in security inadmissibility
- Fighting for Justice for Hassan Diab and reforming Canada's extradition law
- Addressing the impacts of measures to counter terrorism financing on civil society groups, including the CRA’s targeting of Muslim-led charities and restrictions and criminalization of the provision of international assistance and humanitarian aid
- Calling for the return of Canadian citizens and the non-Canadian mothers of Canadian children, who remain indefinitely detained in Syrian camps
- Pushing for restrictions on the implementation of new foreign interference laws
- Keeping you and our member organizations informed via the News Digest
- And much more! Read more - Lire plus
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| | Joint Letter Calls for Overhaul of Canada’s Approach to Digital Policy | The ICLMG is on of the 14 signatories to the joint letter | |
CCLA 28/05/2025 - On May 28, 2025, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association joined with 13 prominent Canadian civil society organizations and digital policy experts to deliver a joint letter to key federal ministers, urging fundamental reform of Canada’s strategy for digital policymaking.
The letter calls for an end to the last government’s practice of packing digital legislation into sprawling, multi-part omnibus bills such as Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act, and Bill C-27, which covered private sector privacy reform and AI regulation. The signatories agree the government must address critical issues such as online safety, privacy, and artificial intelligence, but believe separate pieces of legislation advanced to fulfill a unified digital policy vision is the best approach for our new government to regulate them.
The signatories observe that a fragmented approach to Canada’s digital policy, split between different government agencies with competing mandates and agendas, has led to the failure of long-promised digital policy reforms to receive due study, appropriate amendments, and be adopted by Parliament. The letter’s authors point to the recent appointment of Evan Solomon as Minister for AI and Digital Innovation on May 13th as a key opportunity for the government to better signal its priorities and implement a more cohesive legislative vision.
Many signatories engaged the government throughout its consideration of illegal online content that informed Bill C-63, including through a 2024 letter that recommended splitting the Bill, 2023 expert letter outlining red lines and recommendations for potential legislation, and by individual submissions to the government’s 2021 consultation. Many also participated in Parliament’s INDU Committee consideration of Bill C-27, delivering recommendations on privacy amendments, artificial intelligence regulation amendments, or both. Through this experience, the signatories observed Parliament struggle to grapple effectively with either bill. Controversial proposals attached to both overwhelmed productive discussion, preventing amendment and passage of more substantive and widely supported sections.
The letter concludes with five core recommendations for future legislation, including placing overall coordination responsibility for digital policy under a single department; advancing Canada’s digital policy agenda through separate legislative proposals; and prioritizing areas of broad consensus for rapid legislative improvement first. Source
An open letter to Evan Solomon, Minister of Artificial Intelligence
Online event: Artificial intelligence, artificial security: Digital technologies and authoritarian politics, June 17, 11am ET
| | Groups mount legal challenge against Ottawa over refugee treaty with U.S. | |
The Globe and Mail 26/05/2025 - The federal government is facing a legal challenge arguing that its oversight of a two-decade-old refugee treaty with the United States is “fundamentally flawed.”
The bilateral agreement is premised on both countries being safe for asylum seekers. It prevents refugee claimants passing through the U.S. from seeking protection in Canada and vice versa.
Canada is legally required to regularly review its neighbour’s human-rights record and refugee protections as part of the treaty, the Safe Third Country Agreement, or STCA. Ottawa has not publicized its findings since 2009.
In January, U.S. President Donald Trump ordered a sweeping immigration crackdown that has heightened asylum seekers’ risk of detention and deportation. Immigration rights groups have asserted that migrants and asylum seekers have been held in “secret” detention at the northern border.
In an application for judicial review, the Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers (CARL) and the South Asian Legal Clinic of Ontario (SALCO) argue that the lack of publicly available information about Ottawa‘s refugee monitoring process shields the government from accountability − and could violate the Constitution.
“This is so crucial because what we see happening at the Canada-U.S. border is quite troubling,” said lawyer Maureen Silcoff, who is representing CARL in the legal challenge.
Advocates in Canada have long maintained that cracks in American refugee protections leave asylum seekers at risk, raising concerns about the legality of the STCA treaty. Executive orders issued by the U.S. President in January, which initiated drastic immigration changes, have heightened fears over detention conditions for asylum seekers and rapid deportation without due process.
Sujit Choudhry, who is representing SALCO in the case, said that without detailed evidence of how Ottawa determines its neighbour is safe for asylum seekers, it is impossible to know if Canada is complying with its legal obligations to refugee claimants.
An inaccurate designation – one that results in refugee claimants at the Canadian border being returned to the U.S. and then deported to a country where they would face torture – would violate the Canadian Constitution, he added.
“In this country, we have a cabinet, not a king. The cabinet is a statutory decision-maker that is bound by the law,” said Mr. Choudhry, who has previously challenged the federal government in court over its use of the Emergencies Act against the 2022 convoy protests.
In response to questions from The Globe and Mail, a spokesperson for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada said the ministry regularly reviews developments south of the border. The U.S. continues to meet the legal criteria of a safe country, the spokesperson said. The ministry did not say when its reviews occurred or provide any further details about its findings.
The federal government is seeking to strike down the legal challenge of its monitoring process, arguing that neither group should be able to bring the case forward because neither is directly affected by the refugee treaty. The courts must rule on this motion before the legal challenge can be granted leave to proceed.
Ms. Silcoff said the two legal organizations are acting as public-interest litigants because the case is not about individuals being refused access to the Canadian asylum system but about Canada‘s legally mandated oversight of its bilateral refugee treaty. Asylum seekers who are detained in the U.S. and possibly deported would have no realistic prospect of mounting this type of legal challenge, she added.
“If we win the case, the outcome will be that the government has to conduct lawful reviews. It’s not that an individual [asylum] case would be overturned,” she said.
In submissions responding to the legal challenge, the federal government argued that its monitoring framework cannot be subject to review in court because it does not impact anyone’s legal rights.
Mr. Choudhry said that would set a “dangerous” precedent of putting government decisions beyond the scope of judicial scrutiny.
Redacted copies of two STCA reviews conducted by the federal Immigration Ministry in 2016 and 2017 were filed in a separate case challenging the constitutionality of the refugee treaty, court records obtained by The Globe show. In those proceedings, the government also acknowledged the existence of a 2018 review but did not produce a copy.
Ms. Silcoff said the redacted information produced in court failed to provide sufficient clarity on how the government justifies its designation of the U.S. as a safe country for asylum seekers. Read more - Lire plus
| | Human Rights Commission to Hear Discrimination Complaints of Canadians Detained in Syria | |
Stop Canadian Involvement in Torture 29/05/2025 - The Canadian Human Rights Commission has agreed to hear a series of complaints made by Canadian children and men who have been arbitrarily detained in Northeast Syria for between 6 and 8 years under conditions the United Nations has called akin to torture.
The crux of the complaints centres on Global Affairs Canada and Public Safety Canada’s use of a Trudeau cabinet-approved 2021 “Government of Canada Policy Framework to Evaluate the Provision of Extraordinary Assistance: Consular Cases in North-Eastern Syria” that determines whether the detainees can even be considered for repatriation, despite their Kurdish jailers having repeatedly called on Canada to come and take its citizens home. Since 2020, 32 Canadian women and children have been repatriated from arbitrary detention in eight separate returns courtesy of private actors, court action, and U.S. military assistance.
According to Ottawa lawyer Nicholas Pope, who launched the complaints, “These cases present clear illustrations of discrimination based on age, sex, and family status. For example, the Framework gives less favourable treatment to Canadian children whose mothers were not born in Canada. Canada has insisted that the remaining detained Canadian children (of three non-Canadian mothers) be forcibly separated from their mothers and become orphans in Canada in order to receive repatriation services. In doing so, the government is making the exercise of the children's equality rights contingent upon forfeiting another fundamental right: the right not to be separated from their parents.”
Currently in Northeast Syria, in addition to the three detained mothers and eight Canadian children (with one non-Canadian minor sibling), there are believed to be 9 Canadian adult male detainees. The men’s complaints centre on the Framework thusfar being employed to offer assistance to Canadian women but not men, as well as refusing to consider repatriation for adults in the same way as for those under the age of 18.
“When my son Jack’s case was before the Federal Court, the government seemed to realize it had no case and immediately agreed on the eve of the decision to repatriate a group of women and children,” says Sally Lane, whose son Jack Letts, one of the complainants, just marked 8 years of arbitrary detention in Northeast Syria. “Yet when the Court ordered Jack and the other men brought home, Canada appealed and had that order dismissed. Then the Supreme Court twice refused to hear the case. If that does not scream discrimination against the male detainees, I don’t know what does.”
Lane has not seen her son, who was the focus of a W5 investigation last November, for over a decade.
“The Two Michaels were arbitrarily detained in China for 1,019 days, and the federal government rightfully made their return a top foreign policy priority,” says Lane. “My son will soon mark 3,000 days of arbitrary detention. But for him, and the other men, the barrier is not in Syria, it’s in Canada, which has invested endless resources in refusing the long-standing request of their Kurdish jailers to come and get them.”
Another mother of one of the Canadian men detained, who asked that her name not be shared, declared: “My son is having his rights as a Canadian stripped away with every day that he’s enduring physical and psychological torture, starvation, and inhumane living conditions. He has no contact with the outside world and has no updates about his family or loved ones. This is cruelty beyond words to me, and as a Canadian he has the right to be heard in a Canadian court instead of being held with no charge in a foreign country. Our government has the responsibility to bring the men home, the same way they did the women and children.”
As the Canadian Human Rights Commission considers the detainees’ complaints, it may benefit from the findings of Federal Court Justice Henry Brown, who in January 2023 ordered the government to begin the three-step process to repatriate the men: write a letter to Kurdish authorities in northeast Syria, issue travel documents, and provide a representative to attend a signing ceremony, after which the US military would handle the rest.
Justice Brown wrote that he felt “compelled to observe the three threshold criteria for eligibility to be considered under the Policy Framework appear drafted to exclude the Canadian men imprisoned,” adding that it would not likely withstand Charter scrutiny. He wrote those comments “in the hope the Policy Framework will be materially revised, or that the Canadian male prisoners be considered for repatriation [as was] the case with the Canadian women and children.”
In addition to the complaint of discrimination, the Framework has also come under fire by repatriation advocates for its denial of basic procedural fairness, failure to provide benchmarks or results of its alleged ongoing assessments, and its assumption of guilt.
“The Framework hinges on a legally non-compliant foundation that improperly balances the risks posed to Canadian citizens enduring an arbitrary detention that it is within Canada’s power to end, and the rationale that unspecified, unsubstantiated, unsourced, uncontestable secret security concerns prevent Canada from ending that arbitrary detention and bringing them home,” says Matthew Behrens of Stop Canadian Involvement in Torture, which leads the campaign to repatriate the detainees. “The Framework paints all detainees with a singular, damning brush, and demands that they defend themselves against this labeling without having any access to the alleged evidence that may be in the Government of Canada’s hands.”
Pope hopes that a favourable ruling will declare the Framework inconsistent with Canadian human rights standards and call on the Government of Canada to act quickly to return the detainees. “Every Canadian has the right to be treated equally,” he explains. “This is a rare situation in which the detaining authority holding Canadians abroad is actually pleading with us to end the detention, but it is Ottawa that is selectively refusing to let some Canadians return home.”
A petition in support of repatriation has over 28,500 signatures. Source
ACTION “Canadians are dying": Free Jack Letts & 19 Canadian Kids, Women & Men in Syria
| | Critics say Ottawa harmed progress on intimate partner violence by invoking national security in case of assault by elite soldier | |
The Globe and Mail 31/05/2025 - The federal Justice Department is facing criticism from victims’ rights advocates and legal experts who say it set a worrisome precedent and undermined progress on intimate partner violence by invoking national security in the case of a violent assault by an elite Canadian soldier on his spouse.
The Globe and Mail reported Friday that the Justice Department – at the urging of the Canadian Armed Forces – invoked Section 38 of the Canada Evidence Act, a rarely used provision that restricts disclosure of national security matters and is typically used in terrorism cases and to protect classified information.
The case involved Master-Corporal Michael Spence, a member of Joint Task Force 2, an elite special-forces unit that carries out top-secret missions around the world.
Mr. Spence pleaded guilty on Wednesday to assault and possession of illegal ammunition magazines. He received 36 months of probation after a plea deal that saw more serious charges of aggravated assault, choking and assault with bodily harm dropped. He was first charged in 2023.
The victim in the case, Brittany Makort, and her lawyer accuse the federal government of using the law to avoid the embarrassment of the public knowing that an elite soldier had violently attacked his spouse.
She was prevented from discussing anything to do with her estranged partner’s military career and could not mention that he was a member of JTF2. Government lawyers provided an 85-page document that detailed matters she could not talk about in court. That document is not public and The Globe has not viewed it.
JTF2 is a highly specialized unit of the Canadian Armed Forces whose members receive lethal training in hand-to-hand combat and weapons.
“My biggest concern is the potential precedent, aside from the outrage about the incident, that this sets for other people who say serve in JTF2,“ said retired Col. Michel Drapeau, a lawyer specializing in military affairs. ”Some of them may assume that this gives them a legal precedent because their job is so important and they have a licence to do what they want."
Neither the Justice Department nor National Defence would give Ms. Makort or her lawyer the reason for invoking Section 38. [...]
Retired Major Donna Van Leusden, who works with battered military spouses and sexual trauma victims, said the the government is sending the signal that it used national security to protect the reputation of JTF2.
“I understand the need for having security around a unit like JTF2, but the fact it is being used to shield abusers is deeply offensive and reprehensible,” she said.
Ms. Van Leusden said any member of the military, but particularly someone with the dangerous skills of a JTF2 soldier, should be dismissed if they can’t control their anger.
Ms. Makort was allowed to read a victim-impact statement during the sentencing hearing on Wednesday, but she told the court she was being prevented from speaking fully about what had happened. She said Mr. Spence’s attack left her with severe injuries to her face and jaw, as well as traumatic brain injury.
“They directed that key portions of my evidence be redacted and not spoken in court. In doing so, they have effectively silenced me and compromised the court’s essential role in fully and fairly assessing the evidence to uphold justice,” she told the court as she also criticized the simple assault plea deal worked out between the Crown and Mr. Spence’s legal counsel. “What has been labelled an ‘assault’ left me with catastrophic injuries.”
Jennifer Dunn, executive director of the London Abused Women’s Centre, said what happened to Ms. Makort is a classic example of how institutions like the military protect male abusers and not victims.
“When we see stuff like this, women ask themselves why would I bother to report at all,” she said. “It completely minimizes the seriousness of incident partner violence.” Source
| | NDP statement on Canada’s response to the genocide in Palestine | |
NDP 23/05/2025 - Mark Carney must immediately suspend the Canada-Israel Free Trade Agreement and Impose Sanctions on Netanyahu.
For nineteen months, millions of Canadians have advocated for an end to Netanyahu’s horrific genocide of the Palestinian people and the return of all hostages. Throughout this time New Democrats have consistently called on Canada’s Liberals to put into place an arms embargo on Israel, impose sanctions on Netanyahu and his cabinet, and recognize the State of Palestine as a step towards a two-state solution where Palestinians and Israelis can live in peace and security. The Liberals have refused our calls at every turn.
The current humanitarian blockade and forced starvation of Palestinians in Gaza violates every moral code and relevant international legal norms. Bombings, shootings, starvation, dehumanization – Netanyahu and his cabinet are war criminals who must be brought to justice.
As Israeli peace advocates march in the streets of Tel Aviv, as Palestinians look to world leaders for help, and as people everywhere demand an end to this brutality, Canada has shamefully refused to uphold our obligations as a state party to the Genocide Convention.
Earlier this week Mark Carney and the Liberals joined the UK and France in threatening action. But their threats ring hollow as thousands more Palestinians are slaughtered indiscriminately and thousands more risk starving to death.
Statements mean nothing now. The EU and the UK are now revisiting their trade relationships with Israel.
Canada must do the same and suspend the Canada-Israel Free Trade Agreement. We must ban products from settlements in occupied territories. We must impose a comprehensive two-way arms embargo that includes all materials that go through the United States and on to Israel.
And Mark Carney must sanction Netanyahu and his fellow war criminals in the same way Canada has sanctioned Hamas. Canada must no longer pick and choose whose crimes we tolerate and whose we condemn.
Palestinians, like all people, deserve life. They deserve to thrive in their homeland without fear of genocide, annexation, and starvation. The Palestinian people are not responsible for the crimes of Hamas, just as Israelis are not responsible for the crimes of Netanyahu and his government.
Today is the day for Mark Carney to announce real action to ensure Canada is no longer complicit in this genocide. Not next week, not next month: Today. Source
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| | The U.S. launched 16 jets from the USS Harry S. Truman to drop 125,000 pounds of bombs in Somalia, killing 14 | |
The Intercept 23/05/2025 - [...] The strike involved 16 F/A-18 Super Hornets that launched from the Truman as the carrier strike group operated in the Red Sea, a Navy official told The Intercept on condition of anonymity. When it was over, Somalia had been pummeled by around 125,000 pounds of munitions, according to Kilby. Those 60 tons of bombs killed just 14 people, according to Africa Command, or AFRICOM. [...]
At the time of the mega-strike in the Horn of Africa, AFRICOM downplayed the scale of the attack using boilerplate language. “In coordination with the Federal Government of Somalia, U.S. Africa Command conducted airstrikes against ISIS-Somalia on Feb. 1, 2025,” reads the press release. “The command’s initial assessment is that multiple ISIS-Somalia operatives were killed in the airstrikes and no civilians were harmed.” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth also offered a similarly blasé assessment of the mammoth bombing at the time.
AFRICOM did not respond to requests for clarification about why it took 60 tons of bombs to kill less than 15 militants, but it was likely the type and location of the target: a series of cave complexes in the rugged terrain of the Golis Mountains in the north of Somalia.
In the months since the strike, two F/A-18 jets have fallen off the deck of the USS Harry S. Truman. In both incidents, personnel were injured in the course of the accident, and the approximately $60 million warplanes were lost to the sea. Since taking office, President Donald Trump has ramped up the conflict in Somalia, despite running as an anti-war candidate and pitching himself as a “peacemaker.”
After Trump relaxed targeting principles during his first term, attacks in Somalia tripled. Counts of civilian casualties published by the U.S. military and independent organizations across U.S. war zones — including Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen — increased. Since taking office a second time, Trump has again rolled back constraints on American commanders to authorize airstrikes outside conventional war zones.
During his first overseas trip as defense secretary, Hegseth met with senior AFRICOM leaders and signed a directive easing policy constraints and executive oversight on air attacks. “The president and the secretary of defense have given me expanded authorities,” Gen. Michael Langley, the chief of AFRICOM, told the Senate Armed Services Committee last month. “We’re hitting them hard. I now have the capability to hit them harder.” The Trump administration even boasted about its growing body count in Somalia on Monday.
“We haven’t forgotten the threat posed by Jihadis. 10 more were permanently removed from the battlefield in Somalia yesterday,” the White House posted on X above black-and-white footage that shows a bomb dropped on men innocuously walking in a rural area. “That brings the total to over 100 bloodthirsty terrorists killed since President Trump was sworn in.” The administration added: “WWFY/WWKY: We will find you, and we will kill you.”
The White House did not respond to requests for additional information about the strike or civilian casualties resulting from the attacks that have killed more than 100 people in Somalia since January 20. AFRICOM recently stopped providing civilian casualty assessments in its press releases announcing U.S. attacks in Somalia. “As the new administration settles in, we’re refraining from reporting estimated battle damage assessments and providing initial assessments on civilian harm probability as a matter of course,” AFRICOM spokesperson Lt. Col. Doug Halleaux told Antiwar.com last week.
A 2023 investigation by The Intercept determined that an April 2018 drone attack in Somalia killed at least three, and possibly five, civilians, including 22-year-old Luul Dahir Mohamed and her 4-year-old daughter Mariam Shilow Muse. At the time, AFRICOM announced it had killed “five terrorists” and that “no civilians were killed in this airstrike.”
The Intercept’s investigation revealed that the strike was conducted under loosened rules of engagement sought by the Pentagon and approved by the Trump White House, and that no one was ever held accountable for the civilian deaths. For more than six years, Luul and Mariam’s family has tried to contact the U.S. government, including through an online civilian casualty reporting portal run by AFRICOM, but has not received a response. Read more - Lire plus
| | What exactly is Trump’s new travel ban about? Not national security | |
CNN 06/06/2025 - Any reasonable American could objectively ask what exactly President Donald Trump’s new travel ban, which affects a dozen countries, is about.
Is it about protecting Americans from “murderers,” as Trump said Thursday, or punishing small countries for a modest number of students who overstayed their visas?
The drive for Trump’s first-term travel ban in 2017 and 2018 was clear. He was seeking to deliver on an ugly campaign promise to ban all Muslims from entering the US. That morphed, over the course of years as the administration adapted to court cases, into a ban on travel to the US by people from certain countries, most of which were majority-Muslim.
It was only by agreeing to ignore Trump’s anti-Muslim 2016 campaign statements and focus solely on the security-related language in his third attempt at a travel ban that the US Supreme Court ultimately gave its blessing to that ban.
“… We must consider not only the statements of a particular President, but also the authority of the Presidency itself,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts in the majority opinion.
Trump is using that authority again in his second term. But this time, as he said Thursday in the Oval Office, the ban is about removing “horrendous” people who are in the country now and about keeping murderers out.
The data suggest the travel ban will primarily affect students and businesspeople from countries in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean as well as the Middle East. It was an attack on Jewish community members in Colorado by an Egyptian national that convinced Trump to speed up plans to ban people from a dozen countries from entering the US, restarting the travel ban policy he pioneered during his first term.
But Egypt is not on the travel ban list. Neither is Kuwait, the country where Mohamed Sabry Soliman, the suspect in the Boulder attack, lived before coming to the US.
“Egypt has been a country we deal with very closely. They have things under control,” Trump told reporters Thursday. Instead, the travel ban includes countries that Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who assembled the list, feel don’t have things under control.
That includes places like Equatorial Guinea in Africa and Burma, also known as Myanmar, in Asia. Neither is a nexus of terror threatening the American homeland.
Trump’s order announcing the travel ban explains that these countries have high rates of students and other travelers overstaying their visas in the US. It points to a report of DHS “overstay” data from 2023 to argue that for more than 70% of people from Equatorial Guinea with US student visas, there is no record of them leaving the US when their visa ended.
In real numbers, that equals 233 people with student visas. The numbers are similarly small for other African countries. [...]
The reinstated travel ban does include countries associated with terrorism, including Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen, all of which were also included in Trump’s first-term travel ban. But it’s worth noting that no immigrant or traveler from one of these countries has launched a terror attack on the US in recent years, according to a review by the Washington Post during Trump’s first term. A man from Sudan killed one person at a Tennessee church in 2017.
“The president claims that there is no way to vet these nationals, yet that is exactly what his consular officers and border officials have successfully done for decades,” Bier said. The man responsible for the ISIS-inspired truck bomb in New Orleans in January, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, was a Texas-born Army veteran and US citizen.
The new travel ban also includes Afghanistan, which could jeopardize many Afghans related to those who aided the US during its war there, as Shawn VanDiver, president of the aid organization #AfghanEvac, told CNN’s Jim Sciutto on Thursday.
“There are 12,000 people who have been separated through the actions of our government, who have been waiting for more than three and a half years,” he said. The Trump administration recently paused the processing of student visas, interrupting the plans of thousands of people to study in the US.
In the Oval Office, Trump said he was not interested in banning students from China. “It’s our honor to have them, frankly, we want to have foreign students, but we want them to be checked,” Trump said, suggesting there will be even more strenuous background checks in the future.
The existence of the travel ban list could also factor into tariff negotiations the Trump administration has taken on with nations across the world, as well as its effort to countries nations to take back migrants it wants to deport.
“It’s about power and control and manipulating both the US population to suppress dissent as well as trying to manipulate foreign relations with these countries by getting them to do whatever he wants in order to get off the disfavored nation list,” Bier said. Source
| | Trump’ immigration crackdown is leaving children terrified and ‘truly alone’ | Advocates say unaccompanied minors are being detained longer and used as bait to arrest those who care for them | |
The Guardian 05/06/2025 - A 10-year-old girl showed up for a routine check-in about her immigration case – and agents cuffed and detained her mother on the spot. A 14-year-old boy was shaken out of bed at 6am when plainclothes officers showed up, unannounced, at his door for what the agents claimed was a “wellness check”. A 17-year-old girl has been detained for months with her newborn baby due to new restrictions on who can sponsor unaccompanied minor immigrants.
Hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied children have arrived at the US southern border in recent years, seeking refuge. The Trump administration is now targeting them – and their caregivers – for deportation.
In the past few months, the administration has enacted a series of punitive policies to expedite the removal of unaccompanied minors and strip them of legal representation. It has attempted to tear down the basic rights and protections for children under the government’s care, while simultaneously issuing new restrictions on who can take custody of them – leaving children to languish in detention. In several troubling cases across the US, advocates say the children are being used as “bait” to arrest and deport the adults around them.
Taken together, advocates and lawyers say the changes represent a terrifying new strategy in the government’s crackdown on immigrants, designed to instill fear and chaos in families.
“The level and intensity of the attacks on children that we’re seeing currently is unprecedented in my legal career, which has spanned over 10 years,” said Marion Donovan-Kaloust, director of legal services at the Immigrant Defenders law center (ImmDef). “It’s not just one thing – it’s a concentrated attack on children from so many different angles. And it’s really shocking to the conscience.”
Children who come to the US without their parents – classified as “unaccompanied minors” by the government – have always been among the most vulnerable people navigating the US immigration system. Some, fleeing poverty, war, gangs, violence or environmental catastrophes in their home countries, have made the journey alone. Others become separated from their parents or guardians along the way.
During Joe Biden’s administration, when record numbers of children were arriving at the southern border, human rights advocates and internal government monitors raised alarms that children were held in overcrowded, jail-like facilities. Now, Donovan-Kaloust said, the Trump administration is attempting to strip these children of basic human rights and legal protections – exposing them to harm and isolating them from loved ones and lawyers who can advocate for their needs.
“Our team works with unaccompanied children every day who are detained, and we’re seeing an incredible increase in just the emotional distress that the children are expressing,” said Donovan-Kaloust. “They’re talking about how they’re not able to sleep, not able to eat. They’re crying a lot, unable to participate in attorney-client meetings.” [...]
In a leaked Ice document, agents were instructed to first locate children who have been released by ORR into the care of relatives, and then evaluate whether they can be removed from the country. Officers are advised to seek out “unaccompanied alien children (UAC)” who could pose potential threats to public safety, and to look for “UAC with gang or terrorist ties/activities”, according to the document. Ice officers were also told to both remove children who may have missed an immigration appointment, and to target sponsors who are not of blood relations.
At the same time, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has enlisted the FBI and other criminal investigators to conduct “wellness checks” on children and young people who came to the US without their parents – alarming and unsettling children who have encountered armed agents at their homes. Read more - Lire plus
| | How Student Protesters and Immigrants Became Targets of Trump’s Surveillance Tech | |
The Intercept 30/05/2025 - “Catch and revoke” — the phrase sounds like something from a dystopian thriller, but it’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s very real characterization of the Trump administration’s new one-strike visa cancellation policy targeting foreign students. A State Department spokesperson said that “full social media vetting” will be used for visa interviews and will be ongoing while the student remains in the U.S. for studies.
On this week’s episode of The Intercept Briefing, host Akela Lacy speaks to anthropologist Sophia Goodfriend and Chris Gelardi, a reporter for New York Focus investigating surveillance and the criminal legal system. They unpack how AI and surveillance technology are being weaponized to silence dissent on American campuses and fuel the deportations of immigrants nationwide.
“In the past few months, as we see the expansion of government surveillance, the crackdown of ICE on both legal residents and undocumented people in this country, we see these technologies lending a veneer of algorithmic efficiency to increasingly draconian policies,” says Goodfriend.
The effort is powered by more companies than most people realize. “To enforce all of that and to bolster those efforts are a host of different kinds of both small AI startups, of data brokers, of large tech conglomerates like Meta, OpenAI, Palantir, and the like. So it is really this kind of enormous dragnet of surveillance that’s bolstered by the tech industry that’s increasingly aligned with the Trump administration,” she says.
But this surveillance machine extends well beyond university campuses. The same technologies are being deployed against immigrant communities across the country.
This means every digital footprint becomes potential evidence for deportation proceedings. Social media posts, location data, facial recognition from community events, and even routine traffic stops feed into massive databases. Gelardi explains that one of the more concerning sources of information comes from state police gang databases, which are rife with mistakes. “I think all evidence suggests that these are very under-regulated and that they operate in a way where they’re really ripe for garbage data and inaccuracies,” he says. He cites some gang databases that had children under 5 listed.
Gelardi explains that local law enforcement enters names into state databases that feed to the national crime information center run by the FBI. Law enforcement at all levels — local, state, and federal — can access it on their phones. “Anything that the state police funnels to the feds is immediately available to pretty much any ICE agent,” he says.
To understand more about the tech infrastructure powering deportations and what this digital crackdown means for everyone, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Source
| | “Panic, Terror, Chaos, Trauma”: SCOTUS Ruling Lets Trump Strip Protections for 500K+ Immigrants | |
Democracy Now! 03/06/2025 - As the Trump administration vows to escalate its targeting of immigrants to 3,000 arrests a day, and the Supreme Court rules it can proceed with stripping some 500,000 people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela of their legal status, we get an update from Guerline Jozef, co-founder and executive director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance. “It is the biggest mass delegalization in modern history of people who followed every single rule that the U.S. government asked of them,” says Jozef. “This has been a nightmare.” [...]
On Friday, the Supreme Court ruled the Trump administration could strip the legal status and work permits for 500,000 people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela who had been granted protection by the Biden administration under the humanitarian parole process. The Supreme Court’s ruling is only temporary as lower courts consider the legality of Trump’s move. Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor dissented. Justice Jackson wrote, quote, “The Court has now apparently determined … that it is in the public’s interest to have the lives of half a million migrants unravel all around us before the courts decide their legal claims,” she said. Read more - Lire plus
Deportation Flights to Venezuela Soar, Outpacing Previous Four-Year Total
US homeland security removes list of ‘sanctuary’ cities after sheriffs’ criticism
| | Judge rules Trump’s deportations to El Salvador under Alien Enemies Act were illegal | | |
Politico 04/06/2025 - A federal judge ruled Wednesday that nearly 140 Venezuelan men flown from the U.S. to El Salvador in March based on a wartime power invoked by President Donald Trump were deported illegally, but the court stopped short of ordering the Trump administration to seek to bring the men back.
Chief U.S. District Judge James Boasberg gave the administration a week to propose a plan for how the men — believed to currently be in a notorious anti-terrorism prison in El Salvador — can pursue cases in U.S. courts challenging their deportations.
“Mindful of national-security and foreign-policy concerns, the Court will not — at least yet — order the Government to take any specific steps. It will instead allow Defendants to submit proposals regarding the appropriate actions,” Boasberg wrote in a 69-page opinion.
But Boasberg said the Trump administration had plainly violated the rights of the men it summarily deported to El Salvador on March 15 just hours after Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act. The 1798 statute has been used just three other times in U.S. history and is meant to hasten deportations during wartime.
Those men, who Trump claimed were members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, had no chance to contest their designations — a fact that several courts, including the Supreme Court, have determined violated their due process rights.
For the men in El Salvador’s infamous prison, known as CECOT, that violation is most egregious, Boasberg said. “Significant evidence has come to light indicating that many of those entombed in CECOT have no connection to the gang and thus languish in a foreign prison on flimsy, even frivolous, accusations,” Boasberg wrote.
On the day the men were deported in March, Boasberg issued an emergency order for U.S. officials to keep the men in their custody and to turn the planes carrying them around, if necessary. However, the planes continued to their destination and — under Hollywood-style lights and rolling cameras — the men were turned over to Salvadoran authorities who made a spectacle of shaving the prisoners’ heads and stripping them.
In April, Boasberg ruled that there was probable cause to believe that Trump administration officials deliberately flouted his order. He ordered the first phases of contempt-of-court proceedings that could result in criminal charges for individual officials who allegedly defied his directive, but an appeals court paused that process.
As a result of his handling of the high-profile deportation dispute, Boasberg has become a lightning rod for criticism from Trump and his allies. In March, Trump called for Boasberg’s impeachment and denounced him on social media as a “Radical Left Lunatic,” although the Obama appointee is widely viewed as moderate and mild-mannered.
The Supreme Court ultimately ruled, apparently unanimously, that Alien Enemies Act deportees are entitled to enough notice and time to “actually seek” relief in court to block their deportations. However, the high court voted, 5-4, that Boasberg should not have handled the original lawsuit brought by the March 15 deportees. Rather, they should have filed in the Texas district in which they were confined in the days before they were sent to El Salvador.
But those already deported no longer have a geographically obvious U.S. court to take up their claims, so lawyers for the men have pressed Boasberg to allow them to continue to seek relief from him in Washington, D.C. In the ruling Wednesday, he agreed.
Several other courts have backed up Boasberg’s concerns about the administration’s handling of deportations under the Alien Enemies Act. Judges in Texas, Colorado and New York have agreed that the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act was flawed because the United States is not at war with Venezuela, nor is Tren de Aragua plausibly an arm of the Venezuelan government. Judges in Pennsylvania and California backed Trump’s invocation of the law but said the Trump administration had nevertheless failed to give its targets enough time to contest their designations.
“The court properly ruled that the Trump administration must fix its blatant constitutional violations and cannot simply chose to leave these individuals in a foreign gulag-type prison, perhaps incommunicado for the remainder of their lives,” ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt said after Boasberg’s Wednesday ruling. Source
ACTION USA: RETURN ANDRY AND OTHERS EXPELLED TO EL SALVADOR
Rights Groups Sue Over Illegal Detention of Migrants at 'Notorious' Guantánamo
Asylum seekers deported by the U.S. are stuck in Panama unable to return home
US ‘illegally deported’ Vietnamese and Burmese migrants to South Sudan
| | U.S. Spy Agencies Are Getting a One-Stop Shop to Buy Your Most Sensitive Personal Data | The government wants to build a centralized platform where spy agencies can more easily buy private info about millions of people. | |
The Intercept 22/05/2025 - The ever-growing market for personal data has been a boon for American spy agencies. The U.S. intelligence community is now buying up vast volumes of sensitive information that would have previously required a court order, essentially bypassing the Fourth Amendment. But the surveillance state has encountered a problem: There’s simply too much data on sale from too many corporations and brokers. So the government has a plan for a one-stop shop.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is working on a system to centralize and “streamline” the use of commercially available information, or CAI, like location data derived from mobile ads, by American spy agencies, according to contract documents reviewed by The Intercept. The data portal will include information deemed by the ODNI as highly sensitive, that which can be “misused to cause substantial harm, embarrassment, and inconvenience to U.S. persons.” The documents state spy agencies will use the web portal not just to search through reams of private data, but also run them through artificial intelligence tools for further analysis.
Rather than each agency purchasing CAI individually, as has been the case until now, the “Intelligence Community Data Consortium” will provide a single convenient web-based storefront for searching and accessing this data, along with a “data marketplace” for purchasing “the best data at the best price,” faster than ever before, according to the documents. It will be designed for the 18 different federal agencies and offices that make up the U.S. intelligence community, including the National Security Agency, CIA, FBI Intelligence Branch, and Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis — though one document suggests the portal will also be used by agencies not directly related to intelligence or defense.
“In practice, the Data Consortium would provide a one-stop shop for agencies to cheaply purchase access to vast amounts of Americans’ sensitive information from commercial entities, sidestepping constitutional and statutory privacy protections,” said Emile Ayoub, a lawyer with the Brennan Center’s liberty and national security program. Read more - Lire plus
| | CIA Interrogator Said Infamous Black Site Looked “Like A Nazi Concentration Camp" | |
Forever Wars 26/05/2025 - AT GUANTANAMO BAY last month, a ruling in a pre-trial hearing of the 9/11 military commission contained shocking but little-noticed descriptions from CIA interrogators about one of their most infamous off-the-books prisons of the War on Terror: the Salt Pit black site in Kabul.
The 100-plus page ruling, by U.S. Air Force Col. Matthew N. McCall on April 11, is notably free of euphemism, using the word "torture" to describe what the agency did to one of the defendants, Ammar al-Baluchi. Even more caustic were descriptions McCall included of the Salt Pit—known as Detention Site Cobalt in the 2014 Senate torture report—from CIA interrogators.
One said it looked “like a Nazi concentration camp." Other descriptions McCall cited include "a dungeon" and "something out of a horror show” with cells resembling "horse stalls." Yet another described the Salt Pit having "a stench like no other, enhanced by [the detainees'] fear." Such perspectives contrast sharply with the rough-but-professional narrative of the black sites that the CIA has presented to the public. Torture program co-architect Bruce Jessen, for instance, said the Salt Pit's "atmosphere was very good… nasty but safe."
McCall did not cite specific speakers for those quotes in his ruling. But at a military commissions hearing in January, one of al-Baluchi's attorneys, Alka Pradhan, said that the interrogator who likened the Salt Pit to a concentration camp is known by the cryptonym QY7. QY7 was among several trained by the sadistic lead Salt Pit interrogator known as NX2, who used al-Baluchi as a human guinea pig to certify subordinates in what the CIA called "enhanced interrogation techniques."
QY7 appeared in a 2008 CIA inspector general review of al-Baluchi's torture that FOREVER WARS obtained and published in 2022. In it, the interrogator recoils from much of the torture, stating that interrogations "should be done the right way." QY7 described a colleague being "too much into" inflicting pain on the caged al-Baluchi, and appeared to recognize the brutality they inflicted upon him. "Ammar most likely would consider any of the techniques interrogators used on him as 'beatings,'" QY7 told the inspector general.
QY7's concentration-camp quote does not appear in the 2008 inspector general report. Pradhan found it in a section of U.S. attorney John Durham's 2010-12 inquiry into CIA torture, and a citation for it in the footnotes of McCall's ruling contains the notation "JDM," indicating its origin with the Durham investigation. Durham famously brought no charges against agency officials despite black-site torture surpassing even the lenient restrictions approved by the Justice Department in 2002, which set the standard for impermissible treatment at pain equivalent to "organ failure." Durham's appetite for impunity in service of official crimes prefigured his decision to run interference for Donald Trump. Pradhan said that when she entered the document with QY7's concentration-camp comparison into the record of al-Baluchi's military commission, "the government entirely blacked it out."
Last week, Pradhan and her team filed McCall's ruling as a motion in al-Baluchi's concurrent lawsuit in federal court. Its extensive descriptions of what al-Baluchi experienced in CIA captivity, they hope, will aid them in their pursuit of the court authorizing what's known as a "mixed medical commission" of independent doctors to create a treatment regimen for al-Baluchi, who is in poor health due to the persistent, lingering effects of his torture. [...]
The issue before him was whether statements al-Baluchi made in January 2007 to an FBI "clean team" at Guantanamo—tasked with collecting admissible evidence for a future prosecution of al-Baluchi and others—were sufficiently non-coercive to admit them as evidence in his military tribunal. That's long been in question. In 2023, the military judge in al-Nashiri's commission prevented the prosecution from using al-Nashiri's clean-team confession on grounds that it derived from his torture.
The "clean team" conducted its interview with al-Baluchi in a cell inside Camp Echo II, the literal part at Guantanamo used by the CIA for a year as a black site, "caged with metal mesh." FBI special agents who conducted the interview said they were instructed not to give al-Baluchi any Miranda warnings against self-incrimination, and were specifically advised to tell him, in the event he asked, that he did not have the right to an attorney. "The debriefings (as opposed to interrogations) conducted by the CIA in the RDI program were similar in nature to the law enforcement interviews conducted by the FBI," McCall writes before ruling out al-Baluchi's self-incriminating 2007 statement as insufficiently attenuated from his torture. And just so it's not overlooked: Al-Baluchi told a fellow detainee at Camp VII that "detainees without useful intelligence information would be killed." That should end any remaining question over whether al-Baluchi submitted to his FBI interview of his own free will.
Unusually for a military judge, McCall repeatedly uses the word "torture" in his April ruling. Many, many others in the military commissions have adopted the CIA's euphemisms, or otherwise avoided naming what the agency did to al-Baluchi, to Ghailani, to al-Nashiri, to Majid and to at least 115 others. McCall, by contrast, bluntly writes that al-Baluchi "was tortured during his time in the RDI program. The goal of the program was to condition him through torture and other inhumane and coercive methods to become compliant during any government questioning. The program worked." (That is, the thing that "worked" about the program was its ability to produce compliance, not truth. "I said anything when I was being tortured," al-Baluchi told the CIA inspector general. Later the CIA would defend the program by pointing to the volume of intelligence reports all that Anything produced, as if it were evidence of the latter and not the former.)
By the time McCall gets to his summary assessment, he's using the T-word profligately, and even building up a moral head of steam. "It is easy to focus on the EITs [CIA's preferred euphemism for torture, or 'enhanced interrogation techniques'] because the torture of [al-Baluchi] is so absurdly far outside the norms of what is expected in U.S. custody preceding law enforcement questioning. However, the three and a half years of uncharged, incommunicado detention, and essentially solitary confinement—all while being continually questioned and conditioned—is just as egregious," he writes. "The Supreme Court found two weeks in a windowless sweatbox to be a 'shocking display of barbarism,' however that pales in comparison to what the U.S. government did to [al-Baluchi]." Colonel, do I have the book for you.
When I read McCall's ruling on Friday, I recognized such blunt language was rare, even though nearly 25 years have passed since 9/11, and more than a decade has passed since the Senate torture report. But I hadn't understood just how rare. Jay Connell, one of al-Baluchi's attorneys, sure did. "This decision is the first judicial recognition of CIA use of torture in history," Connell noted to FOREVER WARS. Read more - Lire plus
Fourth Military Judge in Sept. 11 Case Retires
| | How the FBI and Big Ag Started Treating Animal Rights Activists as Bioterrorists | |
The Intercept 02/06/2025 - As COVID raged across northern California in March 2020, a pair of farm industry groups were worried about a different threat: animal rights activists.
Citing an FBI memo warning that activists trespassing on factory farms could spread a viral bird disease, the groups wrote a letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom to argue that their longtime antagonists were more than a nuisance. They were potentially terrorists threatening the entire food chain.
“The safety of our food supply has never been more critical, and we must work together to prevent these clear threats of domestic terrorism from being realized,” the groups wrote.
A coalition of transparency and animal rights groups on Monday released that letter, along with a cache of government documents, to highlight the tight links between law enforcement and agriculture industry groups.
Activists say those documents show an unseemly relationship between the FBI and Big Ag. The government–industry fearmongering has accelerated with the spread of bird flu enabled by the industry’s own practices, they say.
The executive director of Property of the People, the nonprofit that obtained the documents via public records requests, said in a statement that the documents paint a damning picture.
“Factory farms are a nightmare for animals and public health. Yet, big ag lobbyists and their FBI allies are colluding to conceal this cruelty and rampant disease by shifting blame to the very activists working to alert the public,” Ryan Shapiro said. “Transparency is not terrorism, and the FBI should not be taking marching orders from industry flacks.”
Industry groups did not respond to requests for comment. In a statement, the FBI defended its relationship with “members of the private sector.” [...]
In 2015, a veterinarian with the FBI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate told a trade publication, Dairy Herd Management, that eco-terrorists were a looming threat.
“The domestic threat in some ways is more critical than international,” Stephen Goldsmith said. “Animal rights and environmental groups have committed more acts of terrorism than Al Qaeda.”
Four years later, emails obtained by Property of the People show, Goldsmith met with representatives of a leading farm trade group, the Animal Agriculture Alliance, at a government–industry conference.
The meeting happened in April 2019, and within weeks the AAA’s president was warning Goldsmith in an email about planned protests by “by the extremist group Direct Action Everywhere,” a Berkeley-based group that conducts “open rescues” of animals.
Within months, the FBI was touting the threat from animal rights groups in stark terms in an official communication: the intelligence note partially produced by Goldsmith’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate.
The August 2019 note written with the FBI Sacramento field office said activists were accelerating the spread of Virulent Newcastle disease, a contagious viral disease afflicting poultry and other birds.
The most withering criticism of the FBI note may have come from another law enforcement agency, however. Four months after the FBI document came out, the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center rebutted the idea that activists were spreading disease.
Those activists, the Bay Area-based fusion center said in the note to local law enforcement, were nonviolent and posed a “diminishing threat to law enforcement.”
Citing the activists’ use of safety precautions and U.S. Department of Agriculture research, the fusion center said that “animal rights activists are probably not responsible” for any of the Virulent Newcastle disease outbreaks. Read more - Lire plus
A Court Debates Whether a Climate Lawsuit Threatens National Security
| | OTHER NEWS - AUTRES NOUVELLES | | ICLMG ACTIONS DE LA CSILC | |
Canada: Abolish rights-violating terrorist entities list!
| | |
On October 15, 2024, the Canadian government placed the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network on Canada’s terrorist entities list. While ostensibly a tool to protect the safety and security of people in Canada and internationally, the list is an arbitrary political tool that undermines freedom of association, of expression and due process in the courts. Its effectiveness as a national security tool has never been demonstrated in a manner that justifies its use.
Due to these deep flaws, and more, the ICLMG has consistently called for the list to be abolished since the Canadian coalition’s founding in 2002. Please join us in urging the Canadian government to abolish the rights-violating terrorist entities list once and for all. Thank you!
| | CSIS isn't above the law! | | |
In recent years, at least three court decisions revealed the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS) engaged in potentially illegal activities and lied to the courts. This is utterly unacceptable, especially given that this is not the first time these serious problems have been raised. CSIS cannot be allowed to act as though they are above the law.
Send a message to the Public Safety Minister demanding that he take immediate action to put an end to this abuse of power and hold those CSIS officers involved accountable. Your message will also be sent to your MP and to the Minister of Justice.
| | Canada must protect Hassan Diab! | | Canada must repatriate all Canadians detained in NE Syria now! | Every day the government fails to bring these Canadians home, it places their lives at risk from disease, malnutrition, violence, and ongoing military conflicts. United Nations officials have even found that the conditions faced by Canadians in prison are akin to torture. Please click below to urge the federal government to repatriate all Canadians illegally and arbitrarily detained in northeast Syria without delay. | | 22 years of fighting deportation to torture: Justice for Mohamed Harkat Now! | | Reform Canada's extradition law now! | |
Canada’s extradition system is broken. One leading legal expert calls it “the least fair law in Canada.” It has led to grave harms and rights violations, as we’ve seen in the case of Canadian citizen Dr Hassan Diab. It needs to be reformed now.
Click below to send a message to urge the Prime Minister, the Minister of Justice and your MP to reform the extradition system before it makes more victims. Thank you!
Version française: Le Canada doit réformer la loi sur l'extradition!
| | Canada must protect encryption! | |
Canada, with other G7 nations, continues to push to weaken our access to strong, reliable encryption, after decades of being supportive of strong encryption. We need encryption to safeguard our data, our online transactions, our communications, and to protect the lives of journalists and human rights activists.
Please send a message to the Prime Minister of Canada, the Minister of Public Safety, as well as your Member of Parliament, to urge them to reverse course and once again commit to protecting encryption.
Regardez la vidéo avec les sous-titres en français + Agir
| | Protect our rights from facial recognition! | Facial recognition surveillance is invasive and inaccurate. This unregulated tech poses a threat to the fundamental rights of people across Canada. Federal intelligence agencies refuse to disclose whether they use facial recognition technology. The RCMP has admitted (after lying about it) to using facial recognition for 18 years without regulation, let alone a public debate regarding whether it should have been allowed in the first place. Send a message to the Prime Minister and the Public Safety Minister calling for a ban now. | | Les opinions exprimées ne reflètent pas nécessairement les positions de la CSILC - The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the positions of ICLMG. | | |
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