“Being in isolation to me felt like I was on an island all alone…dying a slow death from the inside out…”

Letter from Kyle B. (pseudonym), from California to Human Rights Watch, 2012.

Human Rights Watch and the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) have just released ‘Growing Up Locked Down’, a 141 page report examining the plight of children in solitary confinement in US prisons. Based on research in both US jails and prisons in five states ­– Colorado, Florida, Michigan, New York, and Pennsylvania – and correspondence with young people in 14 others, this report is freely and publicly available here @ HRW.org:

“The isolation of solitary confinement causes anguish, provokes serious mental and physical health problems, and works against rehabilitation for teenagers…”

Here in Australia, independent public broadcaster the ABC, has recently reported on child detention in the state of Victoria – an excerpt from Josie Taylor’s 31 Oct 2012 story, ‘Aboriginal teen kept in solitary confinement’ follows:

Victorian lawyers and the Child Safety Commissioner have raised serious concerns about a 16-year-old Aboriginal boy who was held in solitary confinement at one of the state's adult jails.The teen spent nearly four months in solitary confinement at the Charlotte maximum security unit inside Port Phillip Prison while under the protection of the Department of Human Services (DHS). Legal experts now want to know how many other juveniles are inside adult jails...

More recent reports, including a social worker’s estimate, say up to six children are being kept in solitary confinement in a maximum-security adult prison in Victoria, (Oz), …on an island all alone?

Al Jazeera’s Andrew Thomas reports from Sydney on the plight of 70 North Koreans who have fled their troubled country for Australia, where they’ve found that the country’s restrictions – that no one with dual citizenship may apply for an Australian passport – means they might soon be forced to leave to face an uncertain future in South Korea where the sustainability of their safety is a matter of concern…

‘…during his time as head honcho of Bain Capital, there were no women partners in the firm. Today, only 4 of 49 partners are women. The candidate did mention that women need special accommodations “if” they work.  

And just as the poorly chosen words rolled out of Romney’s mouth, social media users latched on to the phrase. #Bindersfullofwomen trended on Twitter while an industrious user created an@Romneys_Binder account; it currently boasts more than 14,000 followers. “Binders full of women” was the “third-fastest rising search on Google during the televised debate,” according to the Daily Beast.’

Submitted by Bill Weinberg @ ww4 report    on Tue, 10/23/2012 – 00:2

Bill Weinberg is an award-winning 25-year veteran journalist in the fields of human rights, indigenous peoples, ecology and war. He is the author of Homage to Chiapas: The New Indigenous Struggles in Mexico (Verso Books, 2000) and War on the Land: Ecology and Politics in Central America (Zed Books, 1991). As a correspondent and contributing editor for Native Americas, Cornell University’s quarterly journal of hemispheric indigenous issues, he won three awards from the Native American Journalists Association for his reportage from Nicaragua to Arizona. His work has appeared in The Nation, The Progressive, The Village Voice, NACLA Report on the Americas, Middle East Policy,  Al Jazeera, Yes! Magazine, Indian Country Today, The Ecologist 

Mitt Romney clearly wants to run away from the Bush legacy of unnecessary war, budget-busting tax cuts for the rich and economic collapse. When a town-hall debate questioner finally forced the GOP nominee to directly compare himself to Dubya earlier this week, Romney insisted: “President Bush and I are different people.” But place the two men’s biographies side by side, and the similarities that emerge are not just striking, they’re uncanny…

click here for piece in full @ Rolling Stone (US)

…and here @ the interpretOr, we view Romney as a disingenuous, oleaginous and highly dangerous Reagan/Bush Mk II figure of fear and loathing, with a bulging Swiss bank account, private jet and bizarre Tupperware fetish…

I remember as a young kid asking my lovely English grandma – “granny, what was the most scary thing about the war?”

…and she answered immediately and unequivocably – “the Doodlebugs, darling…the Doodlebugs.”

– “oh, what are those?”

“V2 rockets, love. I was back in London with your mum and aunties and grandpa was still at sea. Mister Hitler fired them over the Channel and they’d come down when they ran out of fuel…they’d explode and were very powerful. Absolutely dreadful.”

– “very, very bad, then?”

“Well, yes, you’d hear noise in the sky…and then if it became suddenly silent….that meant the rocket had run out of fuel…the silence was very, very frightening.”

– “oh.”

This reaction came from a modest, strong and resilient woman who had survived an unexploded bomb descending through her sitting room, raised four kids and endured the pain of separation – her husband, my grandpa, on Arctic patrol, dodging U-boats, as best he could.

I was reflecting on this recently when I came across the following….

Men, women and children are subjected to almost constant trauma – including fear of attack, severe anxiety, powerlessness, insomnia and high levels of stress – says a nine month investigation into CIA drone strikes in Pakistan by two top US university law schools. More than 130 ‘victims, witnesses and experts’ were interviewed in Pakistan for the study.