Lawyer: January 6 Clients Are Being Tortured. By Debra Heine.
A lawyer for several of the January 6 political prisoners says his clients are being “tortured” by a system of “anarcho-tyranny” that considers them to be a “subhuman, sub-constitutional class of people.” In an interview this week, Joseph D. McBride said he is building a case to sue the federal government for millions of dollars over the abuses his clients have suffered. …
“January 6 did not happen in a vacuum,” [McBride said]. “In the year or so that preceded January 6, you had all the BLM and Antifa riots all over the United States of America. We saw the burning down of cities, the attacking of police officers. Members of antifa out there in black bloc covered head to toe in full riot gear going at it with police, the looting of stores — you name it, we saw it.”
McBride posited that the left-wing agitators got a pass in 2020 because of new and expanded definitions of “civil disobedience, and political protest” which allowed government entities to view even violent riots “as grounded in the First Amendment, not criminality.”
In the wake of this, he explained, the pro-Trump protesters showed up in Washington, D.C. on January 6 with the impression there was this “new and modern definition of political protest.” Of course, most of the January 6 rioters came nowhere near the levels of violence the nation saw during the George Floyd riots, McBride was careful to point out.
Leftist rioters good, rightist copiers tortured:
Because of who they were, however, (that is, mainly white, middle-class, patriotic, pro-Trump Americans) they were targeted, persecuted, and not given the constitutional protections the much more violent and destructive left-wing rioters were routinely given, he argued.
“For the first time in U.S. history, the political party in power is hunting down and jailing members of the opposition party for political dissidence, and not only that, they’re torturing them in jail,” McBride said. “This is the stuff of dictatorships.”
Example: Christopher Quaglin
He said he has two clients who are both currently being tortured in jail: Ryan Taylor Nichols of Longview, Texas, and Christopher Quaglin of New Jersey.
The attorney explained that both of these men are routinely thrown in solitary confinement for long periods of time, which violates international norms, and when their advocates on the outside speak out against the abuse, they get treated even worse. …
Quaglin, who is being held in one of the satellites of the DC Gulag, Northern Neck Regional Jail in Warsaw, Virginia, has Celiac disease, a chronic digestive and immune disorder that damages the small intestine. … McBride said Quaglin has lost 45 pounds because prison officials refuse to provide a diet that won’t make him sick. …
“Right now, he is locked away in a cell with no windows — no way to reach out to the world simply because his lawyer and his family are speaking out on his behalf. This is a life or death situation,” he said.
At one point, prison officials took him out of solitary confinement and put him in a block with COVID positive inmates, McBride told American Greatness, so naturally, Quaglin, who was already weak from food deprivation, got COVID.
The attorney noted that Reps. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-Ga.), Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), and about 14 other members of Congress have all spoken out on his behalf.
Example: Ryan Nichols
Ryan Taylor Nichols is a decorated military veteran who served his country honorably in the Marine Corps, and who has no prior contact with the criminal justice system.” … Nichols is currently being held in the D.C. Gulag. …
McBride said the jail stopped doing it after several lawyers made a fuss, but prison officials continue sporadically to put Nichols in solitary confinement anyway “to torture him.”
“On April 20, they put him in solitary confinement for reasons that made no sense,” McBride told [the Blaze‘s Daniel Horowitz]. “They left him there for about three weeks. After three weeks, he needed to be put on suicide watch,” the lawyer continued, because “they had broken him down — he wanted to check out and give up.”
The reaction to this, according to McBride, was more abuse and ridicule, with prison guards appearing to take sadistic glee in Nichols’ pain.
“The remedy for suicide watch was to put him in a plastic tie back suit, put him on a table in a room with lights that didn’t go off for three days, to make fun of him, and to say, ‘look, if you’re really gonna kill yourself, just get it over with because we all want to go to lunch,’” he said. “They have psychologically tortured him for a very long time.” …
McBride noted that the state of New York last year adopted the Nelson Mandela rules — the international standard for solitary confinement in the law.
“Solitary confinement is defined as 22 hours or more a day of being held in isolation absent meaningful contact, and it defines prolonged solitary confinement as solitary confinement for more than 15 days,” he explained. “It outlaws solitary confinement for one day for anybody with a serious physical or psychological condition, and it outlaws the use of prolonged solitary confinement against anyone for any reason.”
Singing the national anthem is right out:
McBride said another one of his clients, Richard Barnett, started the tradition of singing the National Anthem every night at 9:00 p.m.. …
Among the abuses, he stated that Barnett had been beaten, people had been maced, put in solitary confinement, and Ryan Samsel was beaten until “his eye popped out of his head.”
The latter incident happened at the D.C. Gulag in late March of 2021. Samsel’s attorney, Elisabeth Pasqualani, told ABC News that two guards came to his cell in the early morning hours, ordered him to put on zip-tie handcuffs, and took him to a nearby cell.
Pasqualani said Samsel told her that one of the officers then proceeded to “punch him, hit him, kick him” as he lay on the ground.
According to Pasqualani, Samsel was taken to a hospital and suffered a broken nose and a fractured orbital floor in his eye socket, and that he still cannot see out of his right eye, which “might be permanent,” she said.” …
Remember Iraq 2004, Abu Grahib?
McBride said he implored the ACLU and Amnesty International to investigate the allegations of abuse and help the suffering January 6 political prisoners, saying they were fellow Americans in danger of being tortured to death.
“They never even wrote me back,” McBride said. …
McBride also cited the “disgusting unsanitary living conditions” in the jail, including the presence of “black mold, rats, roaches” and being “forced to drink brown and/or black looking water.” …
“I have literally heard hundreds of stories where officers would go to the cell where someone is praying on their knees with the Bible, and say to them, ‘where is your God now?’” McBride said. “That’s evil! That’s the deepest part of evil.”
Rig just one lousy election, and suddenly you’re in the third world vortex.
