A “little death penalty” case: One refugee’s story of seeking protection in the United States.

A fascinating interview from inthefray.org about the story of a Kenyan farmer who, after being tortured for organizing a protest, applied for asylum in the United States .

David Kenney was a political activist in his native Kenya in the early 1990s. He didn’t choose to become a political activist; he was a peasant farmer trying to grow tea and making a living. By doing so he discovered he couldn’t make a living growing tea because the price the government was paying was so low that it was causing him to lose money to grow tea. And yet the contract he had signed with the government monopoly prevented him from growing any other crops on his land.

So he organized a farmers’ boycott and protest to try to get the government to justify its policy or change it. And as a result, he was put in jail [and] nearly executed at gunpoint in a forest. He was saved at the last minute because the security forces of Kenya thought he could be more useful to the regime alive than dead. So they tortured him for a week, putting him in a water-filled cell in which he was in constant threat of being killed by drowning, and eventually put in solitary confinement for eight months.

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He ended up coming to the United States on a basketball scholarship. He got a U.S. college degree, and when his education was over, Daniel arap Moi, who was in charge of Kenya when he was jailed and tortured, was still in power. So he applied for asylum. The book tells the story of his four-year struggle with our immigration services, in which he was constantly denied asylum by one bureaucracy after another, and eventually forced to go back to Africa, where he was nearly killed once again.

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Lawyers for Detainee Assert Coercion

A brief article from The New York Times relating an account by Salim Hamdan, Osama Bin Laden's driver and the first detainee tried for war crimes, of sexual humiliation and coercion at Guantanamo.

A secret government document submitted at the trial of the first detainee to face a war crimes trial confirms the detainee’s account of having been sexually humiliated while interrogated by a female government agent, defense lawyers said at the tribunal here on Wednesday.

The lawyers described the document as an account by the unidentified agent and said it bolstered their claim that their client, Salim Hamdan, was subjected to measures at Guantánamo including late-night interrogations that amounted to coercion.

One of the lawyers, Harry H. Schneider Jr., said in the courtroom that Mr. Hamdan was “right on the money” in his description of a female interrogator’s physical contact with him in a way that a Muslim man would find nearly unbearable.

read the brief article