90 Miles From Tyranny

Sunday, October 27, 2019

'Guard said he’d ‘f**k each and every one of us’ – released gun activist Butina recalls humiliation in US prison

The US penal system takes lives away from female inmates and turns them into constantly humiliated slaves, Maria Butina, who returned to Russia after spending more than a year in an American prison, said.

Butina, who was charged with failing to properly register as a foreign agent, spent a month in solitary confinement before pleading guilty to the charges. The Russian said she only did it because she knew that her persecution was politically motivated and a fair trial was impossible.

“The worst thing is the US Marshals Services where they humiliate you; forbid you from going to the toilet for 16 hours; deny you water or food,” Butina said as she talked to RT and Sputnik news agency on a plane that was taking her from the US back to Moscow. After that a low-security prison in Tallahassee, Florida seemed like “paradise” for her as she was allowed to go for walks and got a lot better rations.

“I was just a stack of bones,” she recalled, but daily jogging and other exercises helped a lot. “I had problems with my memory, but it returned to me. My eyesight also improved.”

However, it’s still a very tough environment where humiliation of inmates is widespread as some officers treat prisoners “absolutely terribly.”

Butina recalled that just one day before she was to be released, a guard, who became unhappy with how the prisoners were executing their duties in the kitchen, warned them: "If you will do that again I will f**k each and every one of you."

When a guard is cursing at you in the most obscene words possible… It just shouldn’t be like that. We’re women after all.

At first, the relations with fellow inmates were “tense” after she was transferred from Alexandria to a correctional facility in Tallahassee because “everybody watched the news” where she was portrayed as a villain, the 30-year-old recalled.

But that changed quickly when people got to know her. The activist said that a newspaper article in her defense was also passed on inside the prison and after some time “even some guards were telling me: ‘It seems that they lied to us on this one.’”

When she returned to her block after being handed the “shocking” 18-month sentence the girls hugged her, saying “It’s OK. You’ll get through this.”

“We had good relations with the other inmates,” Butina said, also adding that many in prison simply called her...

BAGHDAD/WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is believed to have been killed in a U.S. military operation in Syria, sources in Syria, Iraq and Iran said on Sunday, as U.S. President Donald Trump prepared to make a “major statement” at the White House.

The United States had put up a $25 million reward for the capture of Baghdadi, who has led the group since 2010, when it was still an underground offshoot of al Qaeda in Iraq.

A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters that Baghdadi was targeted in the overnight raid but was unable to say whether the operation was successful.

He was believed to have been killed in a raid in the early hours of Sunday involving helicopters, warplanes and a ground clash in the Syrian village of Barisha near the Turkish border, according to a commander of a militant faction in the northwestern province of Idlib.

Baghdadi was long thought to be hiding somewhere along the Iraq-Syria border. His self-declared “caliphate” will be remembered for atrocities against religious minorities and attacks on five continents in the name of a fanatical interpretation of Islam that horrified mainstream Muslims.

Two Iraqi security sources and two Iranian officials said they had received confirmation from inside Syria that Baghdadi had been killed.

“Our sources from inside Syria have confirmed to the Iraqi intelligence team tasked with pursuing Baghdadi that he has been killed with his personal bodyguard in Idlib (province) after his hiding place was discovered when he tried to get his family out of Idlib towards the Turkish border,” one of the Iraqi officials said.

Iraqi state television broadcast footage from the raid, including daytime images of a crater in the ground and what appeared to be the aftermath of a clash, with torn and blood-stained clothes on the ground. It also showed night-time footage of an explosion.

The broadcaster quoted an expert on terrorism saying Iraqi intelligence agencies had helped pinpoint Baghdadi’s location.

U.S. magazine Newsweek, which first reported the news, said it had been told by a U.S. Army official briefed on the raid that Baghdadi was...

US attorney reportedly 'very interested' in interviewing former CIA Director Brennan and former DNI Clapper

John Durham, the U.S. attorney tasked with investigating the origins of the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign in 2016, is expected to seek an interview with former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, following an expansion of his investigation.

It was reportedly the meetings that Durham and Attorney General William Barr recently had in Rome—where they obtained new evidence—that were the impetus for the broadening of the scope of the probe.