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| Sign Close Guantanamo With Justice here, and learn more. Source: Center for Constitutional Rights. |
It has now been ten years since the indefinite detention center at Guantanamo was established, ostensibly to conduct the "war on terror." Failing to close the notorious torture prison (see guard Chris Arendt's testimony above for details) is a broken promise made by candidate Obama, at the rotten center of denial employed by the complicit, who cover their eyes and ears in order to keep supporting him.
Last month our corrupted Congress passed and our corrupted president signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act, re-funding the military machine for another year AND making it illegal to release detainees who cannot be convicted of acts of terror due to lack of evidence. Your taxes will continue to feed them -- except that right now they are on hunger strike to mark the 10th anniversary of this particular island in the gulag archipelago -- as they will not be returning to their families, or to residence in a host country. Ever, apparently. It is gruesomely fitting that the legislation refusing to allow these men to be released was packaged with a law enabling the U.S. government to indefinitely detain anyone, anywhere, if deemed a threat by whichever warlord happens to be in the White House at the time. RIP, habeas corpus.
When the purpose is justice, wrongfully imprisoning a children's humanitarian relief worker is a tragedy. When the purpose is intimidation and the display of brute force, locking up Lakhdar Boumediene works as well as does keeping alleged whistleblower Bradley Manning in solitary confinement for months before a day in court. The message your government is sending you: Be frightened, be very frightened -- you could be next.
Obama may have inherited Guantanamo, but Manning and the torture prison at Bagram Air Force base in Afghanistan are all his. In recent days U.S. mainstream media have largely ignored an investigative report of torture and indefinite detention at Bagram -- funded by you and by me, unless you've figured out how to resist paying war taxes.
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| Source BBC: "Afghan investigators have accused the US Army of abusing detainees at its main prison in the country, saying inmates had reported being tortured and held without evidence. |
A decade of torture in the beautiful setting of Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, thus commemorated. Since I cannot be there, I will instead offer this beautiful rendering of the Cuban song Guantanamera, meaning "woman of Guantanamo," superbly performed by Celia Cruz. My mother used to sing this song when I was a child. To the lost innocence of a girl who once believed in the words of the U.S. Constitution -- and to my fellow citizens who still hold to their belief that all human beings are entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, innocent until proven guilty -- I offer an additional verse?
You broke my heart when you tortured
The beautiful ones, and the bad ones.
You broke my heart when the young soldiers
Had to watch all this being done.
How could our Constitution
ever stand for something like this?
If there is such a thing as a court,
I hope all you torturers stand before it.
Guantanamera...oh women of Guantánamo
And may the indigenous
grandmothers save us.
Bring our war $$ home from Bagram, and Guantanamo, and the rest of the torture archipelago.
Update on Israel's fear. Today's one pm newscast on MPBN, from NPR, gave two or three (of five) minutes to the NH primary. They mentioned that Romney won and that Gingrich did not win, then went to Huntsman who came in third with seventeen percent. You'd assume Gingrich came in second? Paul came in second with twenty three percent. He was not mentioned.
ReplyDeleteTriage is a two-factor decision machine. You must estimate how bad the injury is and what can be done about it. Combining those two factors you establish your order of attention.
Seemingly any mention of Israel as a destroyer of democracy is intensely painful to it. This suggests that such mention is a fruitful avenue. As ever, I assume two things: Mearsheimer/Walt/Tessler correctly describe the Israel lobby as running US politics, and the US public is aware of this. That the Jewish state is racist speaks for itself, literally.