Superior Force: An Inferior Method Of Survival

What becomes of an empire as it sinks into a depraved desire to expand and, ultimately, survive at any cost? This is the question on my mind since I finished Orhan Pamuk's tome Nights of Plague which some reviewers called a work in three genres: historical novel, murder mystery, and political allegory.

Pamuk lives and writes in Türkiye, rump of the once powerful Ottoman Empire. He's often in trouble with his government for not depicting their antecedents splendidly enough -- as for instance when he acknowledged the Armenian genocide and was placed under house arrest as a result. This time he's accused of mocking Atatürk, the founder of modern Türkiye. But the events of his new novel, set as the Ottoman Empire sputters out, are as imaginary as its physical setting: an island besieged by bubonic plague.

It was impossible for me to read this book without noticing the many parallels to my own failing empire. 

When spying and surveillance become the way to hold on to power long after rulers have lost the confidence of the ruled, I think of the U.S. Not only informers but technology-based surveillance of every phone call (thank you, Edward Snowden), every email (no thank you, Google), and every social media post is the fuel our sputtering empire runs on. We've now seen firsthand evidence that Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and other platforms are deeply infested by U.S. alphabet agencies like the CIA, FBI, and NSA -- one might even say, controlled by them.

Fake news? Dying empires specialize in it. The inability to reflect on blunders and correct course is baked in to imperial hubris. This guarantees more mistakes and the kind of poor decisions that hasten one's demise. For example, a series of failed wars in the Middle East and 800+ military outposts in other nations that are economically, morally, and environmentally unsustainable. Extreme weather events batter us while the empire continues pumping greenhouse gasses out at an alarming rate to maintain its self-appointed dominance. And funding failed rocket launches that trash the environment while government entities like the FAA look away.

Inability to manage public health in an atmosphere of suspicion and deliberate misinformation by governments who must proclaim their glory (whether D or R flavored) characterizes our day. When almost no one trusts government at all levels, the only way to get people to cooperate with it is through fear and intimidation. These methods are notoriously bad at promoting healthy outcomes.

Which brings us to torture.

A central conflict is Pamuk's book is the tension between methods of solving a crime such as murder. The Ottoman method is to decide who the culprits are, then torture them until they confess. The Sherlock Holmes method (the reigning sultan is a fan) is to use deductive reasoning to discover the culprits. Our modern Turkish novelist paints these as "East" versus "West" and indeed this lens was prevalent at the turn of the 20th Century. But is that still accurate today?

Who bombed the Nord Stream pipeline? Only examine the obfuscation and determination not to know the answer to see what "the West" has come to. 

Where did SARS-CoV-2 come from? Many have concluded based on the evidence that it was invented in a lab especially its highly significant gain-of-function ability to be spread via aerosols. The U.S. government in particular has distinguished itself in spreading false information and in punishing those who offer a counter narrative, or even those who wonder aloud if the official narrative is plausible.

On World Press Freedom Day our thoughts are with the many journalists who suffer severe consequences for their work

In particular we think of our own Julian Assange, detained for more than 13 years and facing a 175 year sentence if extradited to the US for revealing war crimes… pic.twitter.com/YKl0LRUBze

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) May 3, 2023

Julian Assange is the most visible victim of torture inflicted for telling the truth about U.S. war crimes. His torment is meant as a warning to us all: practice actual journalism and prepare to forfeit your freedom, your health, even your life. As the torturers signal their false respect for press freedom and journalists.

Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo stand as exemplars of torture regimes that even an Ottoman sultan would admire. But once instilling fear in others reaches the level of terrorizing, the information gained is practically worthless.  The cruelty of extraordinary rendition as a fishing expedition for possible future informants and infiltrators is a source of pride for the twisted individuals responsible.

Plausible deniability is also as U.S.ian today as it was once Ottoman. Pamuk's sultan gets rid of political enemies by making sure they're murdered far away from the capitol by agents whose actions cannot be traced back to the head of state. Similarly, the U.S./NATO proxy war on Russia via Ukraine has been a huge disinformation success. My venal senator Susan Collins just sent me email claiming we're there to defend democracy (in one of the least democratic of European nations) and to respond to Russia's "unprovoked" invasion of the Donbas region.

But sure let's keep claiming that Russia is the one shelling the nuclear power plant in Zaporizhzhia that they've controlled for a year now. By refusing to see the truth that Ukraine is doing the shelling (with U.S. or NATO equipment), we also refuse to understand how to stave off a possible meltdown. 

Our hands are tied by our own lies.

When the application of force is seen as the solution to any and all problems, your society is bound to fail. Because many problems -- like pandemics -- cannot be solved by force. Education, persuasion, and confidence that leaders can make tough but beneficial public health decisions are the stuff of public health management. In their absence, the infection rages on.

#BoweBergdahl, Michael Hastings, And The Unburied

There has been a lot of news this week about the working class men and women struggling through our long imperial wars.

Saddest news: this about troops (I hate calling human beings by that name) that the U.S. public apparently forgot to support.

Bodies of 52 vets accumulate at L.A. County morgue

Source: Washington Times

Los Angeles officials cannot explain why the unclaimed bodies of 52 U.S. military veterans had accumulated over the last 15 months at a county morgue because no one arranged for their burial.

“All the people who touched this process are working together to figure out how this occurred,” said county spokesman David Sommers, The Los Angeles Times reported Thursday...

The problem began last year when Rose Hills Mortuaries, which transported the bodies of homeless veterans to Riverside National Cemetery under a charity program, started cutting back services...

Most moving news: Video testimony by the father of POW Bowe Bergdahl reflecting on his son's five years of captivity in Afghanistan, and the significance of the imperial expansion project that Bowe lost faith in.

The elder Bergdahl reportedly told The Guardian reporter Sean Smith: 

"I don’t think anybody can relate to the prisoners in Guantánamo more than our family, because it’s the same thing. How could we have such a high standard of judicial process for horrible war criminals [during World War II] ... and yet now we can go for 10-11 years without even having judicial process? It’s just wrong."

Most mysterious and disturbing news: the reminder that when reporter Michael Hastings went up in a ball of flames while driving his car in Los Angeles last year, he was investigating the Bowe Bergdahl story.

Vice News' Alice Speri (whose courage I admire) noted that the FBI was investigating Hastings at the time when his car mysteriously blew up:

Three years into the disappearance of Bowe Bergdahl in Afghanistan, Michael Hastings — the journalist whose reporting cost General Stanley McChrystal his job — wrote a Rolling Stone story on the missing soldier, a piece which the magazine called “the definitive first account of Bowe Bergdahl.” 

Hastings, who died in a car accident in Los Angeles in June 2013, had unparalleled access for that story. 

He spoke to Bergdahl’s parents, who had by that time stopped talking to the press, following “subtle pressure” from the army, and he quoted from emails the young soldier had sent to them, documenting his growing disillusion with the war and the US military.

Most hopeful news: The release of five prisoners from Guantánamo prison, that most notorious island in the U.S. gulag archipelago.

The Obama administration brokered the deal to swap the five for Bergdahl without consulting Congress and thus established that the POTUS does have the power to close Guantánamo -- as he has repeatedly promised.

From Medea Benjamin and Alli McCracken of  CODEPINK on the blog Antiwar.org:

Called "the hardest of the hardcore" by hawkish Republican Senator John McCain, the Guantánamo prisoners released in the swap have been identified as high-level Taliban operatives. According to Human Rights Watch, one of those released, Mullah Norullah Nori, could be prosecuted for possible war crimes, including mass killings. All of the men were recommended for continued detention because of their "high-risk" status. Qatar has assured the US that the released men will be held and monitored in Qatar for at least a year, but some US officials are highly critical of the move, saying that the men are likely to return to their former positions within the Taliban. 

If Obama is willing to take the risk with these "high-risk" prisoners, and if he really wants to close Guantanamo as he has claimed many times, why hasn’t he been using his authority all along to release the 77 prisoners already cleared for release? Of the remaining 149 Gitmo prisoners, 77 were cleared by the President’s Guantánamo Review Task Force – meaning the US government has deemed them innocent or not a threat to Americans. But since President Obama’s speech at the National Defense University in May of 2013, in which he reiterated his promise to close the detention facility, only 12 of these men have been transferred.

Why were those five dangerous men released while scores of detainees who have been cleared for release for years remain? Refer back to most mysterious news of the week. And stay tuned.

Guantánamo Prisoners Cleared For Release, Yet Still Tortured For Years

Abandon hope ye who enter Guantánamo, apparently

Indefinite detention has such a bland sound on the word level. As a lived experience it must be a special kind of hell with no end in sight. Prisoner Shaker Aamer wrote this moving account of his treatment, "The Torture Remains The Same." We are now nearing the 12th anniversary of a bunch of young Muslim men being hustled away to a special prison than an ex-guard called "a concentration camp."

At the heart of indefinite detention lies habeus corpus, a prisoner's right to a day in court. Especially if the prisoner was jailed kind of randomly because someone collected a bounty. Twelve years later, where are those innocent men? Still in Guantánamo, locked in a torture prison with forced feedings. In Cuban territory. At the U.S. taxpayers' expense.

Time for action to say enough is enough! From an anniversary PinkTank post by Cayman Macdonald:

Thousands of protesters will take to the streets this Saturday [Jan 11] to show their courage and give voice to the men whom Guantánamo has tried to silence. They will speak truth in defiance of the countless lies, including the blatant lies about Guantánamo being “safe, humane, legal, and transparent.” It is time to send the message loud and clear: close Guantánamo Bay!

Find an action near you by going here. If you can't get there in person, take time to contact Obama and your members of Congress with the message: #closeGitmo! 

Photo from fb event 12 Years Too Many! No More Excuses! CLOSE GUANTANAMO! 
"We will say no to torture! No indefinite detention! Repeal the NDAA!"

I just changed my profile picture on facebook to help spread the word. You can, too.

You can also write to the prisoners. Here is information on how to do that.

@CODEPINK Associates Hot Summer Of Actions

Photo posted by Nancy Mancias July 2, 2013: #BARTstrike workers & #nurses join #socialsecurity march to Sen. Dianne Feinstein's office 

Summer is underway and CODEPINK associates are busting out all over with actions challenging the status quo of drone strikes, wars/occupations, illegal detentions at Guantanamo, and austerity cuts to crucial programs for vulnerable populations so the Pentagon can continue to gobble up 57% of the federal budget.

Co-founders Medea Benjamin and Jodie Evans along with Tighe Barry, Ann Wright and other allies visited Yemen in June to meet with families affected by drone strikes and Guantanamo indefinite detentions. Here's Medea explaining some of what she heard in Yemen, speaking in an interview with Dennis Trainor:

Support for whistleblower Bradley Manning was strong as CODEPINK Bay Area joined thousands of other supporters to march in San Francisco's Pride Parade 2013. Because Manning was removed as a Grand Marshall despite having been democratically selected for the honor, this was a perfect venue to support Manning during his court martial trial for providing evidence of war crimes to all of us via Wikileaks. Here are some of Manning's rocking Pink supporters in SF:

In Maine our most recent action on the streets in Portland called for a ceasefire to end the tragic levels of bloodshed in Syria and for the U.S. to abandon plans to send weapons there.

Local artist William Hessian designed and printed recycled t-shirts for CODEPINK Maine with a drone on the front and "One Nation Under Drones" on the back.  We'll be wearing them again on 4th of July when we march in Bath with a giant drone puppet and wearing our surveillance eyeballs. Maine recently passed a bill requiring law enforcement to obtain warrants before using drones to gather information -- but allowing military drones to be tested in Vacationland. Bad idea!

CODEPINK NYC is hot on the trail of Stolen Beauty with the call to boycott cosmetic products by Ahava, made from mud pillaged in settlements near the Dead Sea in occupied Palestine. Their petition to the department store chain Nordstrom to stop carrying products made illegally hopes to gather 5,000 signatures. Click here to sign the Causes petition or, if you are not on Facebook, you can sign the letter here instead.

A most inspiring ongoing action, pictured above, is the eloquent demand for justice at Guantanamo taking place regularly at the White House. Especially of note: Diane Wilson has been fasting since early May in solidarity with hunger strikers protesting inhumane conditions at the notorious prison where innocent men cleared for release are kept in limbo for years at a time. When Diane's weeks of fasting didn't get the attention of the President, who has the ability to release prisoners and even shut down Guantanamo, she hopped the fence. Diane and Medea and others were then arrested.

Here's Medea being slammed to the pavement by police on the sidewalk in front of the White House after protesters were told to clear the area and she paused to help another hunger striker who was having trouble walking:

It occurred to me that police might have been angered by the street theater enactment of forced feeding a la Gitmo, as shown here by Tighe Barry and a CODEPINK "prisoner":



As I watched this I reflected on news today that hunger strikers being held in Cuba would be force fed only after dark as they are Muslims observing Ramadan. Even George Orwell could not forsee this criminal absurdity.

Hot summer of actions ahead! Click here to find Codepink associates in your area.

Obama Poses, Medea Exposes At National "Defense" U.

Source: AlterNet  Medea, surrounded by Secret Service and security after being removed from the room,

"President Obama interrupts Medea Benjamin" was one of many, many headlines reporting on the CODEPINK co-founder's disruption of yet another insincere speech by the orator-in-chief.

Empty promises go a long way when issuing forth from a tall, good-looking, articulate man. Who doesn't want to believe him when he promises -- again -- to close down the empire's most notorious concentration camp? Or when he claims that new rules on how to deploy aerial bombing of civilians using drones are to keep you and your family safer?

Unlike the governor of my state, Medea can get her points made without name calling, insults or empty promises. The format she used was posing a series of questions to the president, whom she recognizes as the head spokesman for the global oligarchs that own and operate our government. Listen to how much truth she packs into 27 seconds in this clip:



In case the video is not working for you, here is some of what she said:

Can you tell the Muslim people that their lives are as precious as our lives? Can you take the drones out of the hands of the CIA? Can you stop the signature strikes that are killing people on the basis of suspicious activities? Will you apologize to the thousands of Muslims that you have killed? Will you compensate the innocent family victims? That will make us safer. (Emphasis mine.)

(AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta) Victims of drone strikes under Obama.

Medea said afterwards that she was gratified to have made it in to hear the speech, to which she had been properly invited, and to have not been arrested for speaking out  --- as she has been numerous times in congressional hearings. She said she appreciated living in a country where you could gainsay the president and not find yourself in jail for a year, being tortured.

Clearly Obama was gratified by the opportunity for some liberal posturing, especially considering that he had just made a speech pretending that the executive branch of government makes, administers, and ajudicates the law on matters such as indefinite detention and assassinations. It is important for his liberal defenders to be able to pretend that he respects the Constitution, even while he shreds it by punishing whistleblowers at a rates that leaves all other U.S. presidents in the dust.

Guantánamo inmates -- who have been in prison for multiple years, some more than a decade, and tortured by force-feeding, sleep deprivation and other methods -- reportedly watched on television while Obama talked the talk but Medea called on him to walk the walk.

CODEPINK co-founder Diane Wilson has been on a water only hunger strike in solidarity with Guantánamo prisoners. She was arrested earlier this month for locking herself to the White House fence, trying to get Obama's attention. Teamwork!

Photos: The Banality Of Evil At Guantánamo #Fast4Gitmo

The Behavioral Health Unit where the detainees receive psychological medical care, Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, April 10, 2013. (Photo By Army Sgt. Brian Godette)

The blog Public Intelligence published these photos with the note that they were released by the U.S. government on May 2, no doubt in response to more than 100 men engaged in a hunger strike since February. The men have been "treated" in the "Behavioral Health Unit" at Guantánamo by force feeding.

The majority of them have been cleared for release but continue to languish in indefinite detention -- so far, it has lasted a decade.

They are starving themselves in order to be released from this bureaucratic hell. You can join them in a solidarity fast to help get the word out -- details on how to #Fast4Gitmo here.

Feeding chair used during internal nourishment procedure inside the Joint Medical Group where the detainees receive medical care, Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, April 10,2013. (Photo By Army Sgt. Brian Godette)

Feeding chair and internal nourishment preparation inside the Joint Medical Group where the detainees receive medical care, Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, April 10, 2013. (Photo By Army Sgt. Brian Godette)

Outdoor recreation area in the Behavioral Health Unit where the detainees receive psychological medical care, Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, April 10,2013. (Photo By Army Sgt. Brian Godette)

From Wikipedia:

Banality of evil is a phrase used by Hannah Arendt in the title of her 1963 work Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.^[1] Her thesis is that the great evils in history generally, and the Holocaust in particular, were not executed by fanatics orsociopaths, but by ordinary people who accepted the premises of their state and therefore participated with the view that their actions were normal.

Because convincing people to accept "the premises of their state" nearly always involves an avalanche of euphemism -- employing bland bureaucratic phrases for horrors inflicted by the state -- here is a Guantánamo glossary to accompany these photos:

Honor bound to defend freedom Hey, it's a paycheck. And if we don't fight them over "there" we'll have to fight them over here to defend capitalism's stranglehold on the planet's natural resources.

Behavioral Health Unit A prison department that specializes in psychological torture.

Feeding chair Equipment used to subject prisoners to full restraint in an upright position, ready for torture.

Internal nourishment procedure Forced feeding using a tube pushed through the nose and down the esophagus.

Outdoor recreation area Pen for humans treated like animals.

Psychological medical care Reports are that sleep deprivation and other brutalities have been used against the hunger strikers.

Mohamedou Ould Slahi photo published by Slate.

From the blogger Alex Kane on Mondoweiss:

Slate magazine has a sharp reminder of this illegal and inhumane treatment. The news outlet has published the memoirs of Guantanamo detainee Mohamedou Ould Slahi. He has been locked up there for 11 years, despite the fact that in 2010 a judge ordered his release. Slahi’s brutal interrogation was personally signed off on by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The U.S. questioned him on his associations with known terrorists, but the U.S. never found Slahi to have been involved with a specific plot. Slahi described one aspect of his torture here: 

The cell—better, the box—was cooled down so that I was shaking most of the time. I was forbidden from seeing the light of the day. Every once in a while they gave me a rec time in the night to keep me from seeing or interacting with any detainees. I was living literally in terror. I don’t remember having slept one night quietly; for the next 70 days to come I wouldn’t know the sweetness of sleeping. Interrogation for 24 hours, three and sometimes four shifts a day. I rarely got a day off.

What is the solution to the problem created by holding random Muslim men for years in a torture prison? Apparently the current gang of thugs running the U.S. government believe it is bombing civilians around the planet with drones. Because air strikes on a village are "surgical" and "humane" and, in theory, they eliminate enemies rather than creating them in droves. Right.

Source: American Friends Service Committee

#Guantánamo Hunger Strikers: Tortured With Your Tax $$

When I was young, in the 20th century, we read about the USSR's crimes against humanity in The Gulag Archipelago and we read about the concentration camps the Nazis used to torture and control millions, and which the Allied forces liberated. We, the USA, were the good guys.

Now I'm aging in the 21st century and Guantánamo Bay is just one site -- perhaps the most notorious -- of my own empire's archipelago of torture prisons. It's isolated from U.S. courts and from the view of most citizens. Reports are the CIA decided to locate a facility to detain "war on terror" prisoners in Cuba especially to piss off Fidel Castro. Closing it is one of the many, many campaign promises that the current occupant of the White House made to trick peaceniks into voting for him the first time.

Photo source: World Can't Wait. Sign their petition and find out how to take action to shut down the torture center the U.S. illegally maintains in Cuba.

89 prisoners there have been cleared of any suspicions of terrorism, but have been held for a decade or more anyway. Many were swept up in a global dragnet following the dramatic events of September 11, 2001, the prey of informants or in some cases guilty of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Their despair at the indefiniteness of their detention is palpable. Their three-month hunger strike is inspiring those of us on the outside of the prisons -- all the prisons we pay for while Head Start programs close and unemployment compensation is cut --- to fast in solidarity with them.

If we fasted for every wrongly imprisoned (man with brown colored skin) in the U.S. archipelago, we would all starve to death.

The executive branch of our failed government recently ordered fresh squadrons of force feeders to Cuba (the propaganda term for them is "medical reinforcements"). The president is afraid if the prisoners succeed in escaping Guantánamo by starving themselves, it will look bad for the U.S. The medical establishment is afraid that if its members succeed in forcing a tube that feels "as sharp as a razor" into the nasal passages and down the esophagi of prisoners, it will make the medical profession look bad.

I am afraid that the people of my country have lost their way so badly that the militarized police state their taxes support will remain invisible to them until the very day that they, or their son or daughter or grandchild or friend, is locked up, too.

When I was young in the 20th century, Guantánamo was known to me only as the subject of a song that my mother would sing. More than a year ago I posted this video of the singer Celia Cruz performing "Guantanamera" or "woman of Guantánamo."

I added this verse to express the pain in my heart here in the 21st Century:

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.

Truth Is Behind the Lies People Tell Themselves About Their Empire

Source: Al Jazeera Witness "Four Days in Guantanamo"

A lot of angry responses to the satirical video my husband and I made about the rationalizations people tell themselves in order to continue to support their naked emperor, and some of them mistook us for actual Obama supporters. Stuff Obama Supporters Say has 13,000+ views after a couple of days on YouTube, and 100+ comments in a lively debate where it was posted to Common Dreams (thanks, Abby Zimet).

As one critic of the video put it, "But some of those things are true." In celebration of the success of stop SOPA/PIPA blackout day yesterday, I have used the Internet and yes, Wikipedia, to unearth some nuggets of truth alluded to in the video. It was our intention to lampoon those in denial; the ugly facts of detention in Guantanamo or Bagram, where our tax dollars support the torture of kids as young as 15, are out there just waiting to be discovered. But the mainstream media feed in the U.S. will, as a matter of policy, not help people discover many facts. Instead, it will enable the skewed priorities of valuing organic gardening over drone attacks on civilians.

Inverted priorities have been typical of affluent imperial citizens throughout history. What did "good Germans" mainly do to support the Nazi's genocidal plans? They looked the other way.

Quite possibly they were afraid -- and rightly so -- of becoming the victims of indefinite detention.

Feeble thinkers, they believed that the rule of law was not important to them, because they were not criminals (or Communists, or trade unionists, or terrorists, etc.). A basic failure to understand why the writ of habeas corpus is the cornerstone of equal access to justice goes hand in hand with the failure to understand why the rights outlined in the first ten amendments to the Constitution are worth struggling to uphold.

Source: Mother Jones article on Iranian government's plan to send Obama a pink toy model of the U.S. drone that landed in that country last month.

If I don't see any drones patrolling my skies (yet) then they must not be a problem for me -- right?

Source: http://revolutionaryfrontlines.wordpress.com reprint of Al Jazeera article UK: Campaigners Seek Arrest of Former CIA Legal Chief over Pakistan Drone Attacks

(Obama thinks he is such a good father, he can joke around with his pals about ordering Predator drone strikes against boys that might be interested in his daughters.)

And who is Bradley Manning anyway?

Logan Price, a 27-year-old activist, said he went up to the president and asked why he hadn’t addressed the concerns of the protesters. “I thought that Bradley Manning was the most important whistleblower of my generation..."

Source: Politico

( Chip Somodevilla, Getty Images / March 14, 2011 ) via CODEPINK blog PINKTank

Guantanamo And Bagram Are Torture Prisons Funded By U.S. Taxpayers

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.

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.

Today I wish I were in Washington DC to join my CODEPINK sisters, Amnesty International and others who are paying attention, to form a human chain around the White House, dressed in the iconic orange jumpsuits of Guantanamo.

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.

It Is the 1% Who Should Be Ashamed of Poverty

Lessening or even losing conditioned shame about poverty is one of the most significant developments of the occupy movement. The voices of both the young woman Cat, who is homeless, and Kimberly, whose job is to help people find non-existent jobs, are eloquent around this point in this video I made at Occupy Bangor yesterday.

On Facebook yesterday someone shared this fact from the website Feeding America: 4.8 percent of all U.S. households (5.6 million households) accessed emergency food from a food pantry one or more times. 

The post drew these comments: "I was embarressed at this, but I had to utilize a food pantry twice this year."

"don't be embarassed be proud that you took the courage to ask for help when you needed it. You've taken an important step amongst many to become true to your SELF!!!"

 Where is the wealth of our nation going? What do our taxes actually fund?

New flash: Cost to House a Captive at Guantanamo Bay is $800,000. McClatchy's Carol Rosenberg in, among other papers, Stars and Stripes:

The Pentagon detention center that started out in January 2002 as a collection of crude open-air cells guarded by Marines in a muddy tent city is today arguably the most expensive prison on Earth, costing taxpayers $800,000 annually for each of the 171 captives by Obama administration reckoning. Congress, charged now with cutting $1.5 trillion from the budget by Christmas, provided $139 million to operate the center last year, and has made every effort to keep it open - even as a former deputy commander of the detention center calls it "expensive" and ‘inefficient.’

Then, in the CalTV video below, we see yet more tax-funded public servants. These are Berkeley police officers beating up citizens engaged in nonviolent protests against the rising cost of tuition at Univ. of California, Berkeley. Who pays their salaries? Who paid for the pepper spray and rubber bullets that were used that day but that we don't see in this particular video? Who will pay for the lawsuits by people like Scott Olsen who were injured by the brutality of police in the neighboring town of Oakland recently?

The 99% are coming together to figure out how to stop paying for this shit.

Torture USA

 Support Bradley Manning, click here.

In the gulag, it doesn't matter if you broke the law. The "decider" can say you broke the law, even though he is a constitutional law teacher who knows better, knows that you are supposed to get a trial to establish whether you did, in fact, break the law.

It also doesn't matter if you actually respected the spirit of the law by revealing evidence of highly illegal acts. The revelation being technically illegal, but morally superior by several upticks to the the beatings and psychological tactics administered at  Guantánamo  -- for being a journalist with info, or for having the type of Casio watch Al-Qaeda was experimenting with as a bomb detonator.

Not for having been tried and convicted in a court of law like the Constitution guarantees.

Used to guarantee.

We already knew about this stuff, at least since the Winter Soldier hearings in 2008. Here is veteran Chris Arendt on How to Become a Concentration Camp Guard Without Really Trying.


Now Wikileaks spills lots more, and the New York Times slaps Obama's wrist for opposing release of the information. The revelations on the complicity of medical personnel are so deeply horrible they arrest my breath, and I think of the irony of it happening in Cuba with all their good doctors.

I refuse to call it Gitmo, an ugly neologism like Af-Pak that reduces words to barked out orders. The word Guantánamo is lovely and graceful and sounds Cuban, not like a gulag for torture.

I would like to offer as an apology to all those who have suffered in the US secret prisons operated around the world by the Forces of Greed this recording of the song "Guantanamera," a song my mom used to sing when I was still an innocent kid. Here it is superbly performed by Celia Cruz.



And I offer new words:

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.

No to Islamophobia

UNAC march NYC April 9, 2011

There are tools, and then there is wealth. I have a tool made for me by my friend Peggy Lovejoy. It is the silliest shade of pink ever with swirls and sparkles. A young man in Union Square asked: "Is that a protest apron?" It has extra long apron strings and extra deep pockets the full width of the garment, each so wide it will hold a regular sheet of paper without folding. What it mostly holds are half sheets printed on both sides, one side telling what Maine or Connecticut or wherever I happen to be could have bought with the funds wasted on war e.g. four years of undergrad tuition for the next 21 entering classes at U Maine. Now that would be wealth.

My apron also holds my camera and phone and lip balm and everything else I need to march for 1.7 miles helping to hold a banner in one hand, a pie chart on my outside hand (54% military for FY10 draws the comments: "It's more now.").

I was honored to march yesterday holding a banner with Pardiss Kebriaei who advocates for prisoners in limbo at Guantanamo, and two school age girls in headscarves whose mom and dad walked behind and popped snacks into their mouths like birds. The UNAC banner we carried said: Stop Government Attacks On Unions, Muslims, Immigrants and Communities of Color. On this day the NYPD was on its best behavior, and the legions of officers were polite and respectful in their attempts to keep us on one half of Broadway while the hipster shopping crowd had their phones out snapping away, looking at us like they had never seen a protest march before. Maybe it was the legions of moms, dads, kids, grandmas and grandpas that had turned out to represent for the Muslim peace community. Such a variety of clothing, languages, chants and messages. One handmade sign read: Islam Means Peace.

A hug from Ann Wright is always welcome, and I was able to shake Cindy Sheehan's hand and thank her for her work. Both were among at least 50 speakers who had 90 seconds at the mike to deliver their message. NYC Codepink coordinator Cristina Castro and I went up together while Denise and Starr held BOW$H banner on the steps down front.

Lots of dot connecting in the remarks. The war against the poor at home and abroad, the war against the environment that is our collective home, and the insane waste of resources all around. I cannot even count how many times I heard or read a reference to the need to bring our war dollars home. On my very early morning drive home after the convivial bus (thank you Steve Burke) dropped me off in Portland I was parsing our demand like this.

Bring: resolutions, op eds, speeches, teach-ins
Our: public forums, big tent marches like this one
War: Libya, Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, aid to Israel, aid to dictators, 800+ military bases around the world, drones, recruiting budgets
$$: taxes the working poor and middle class pay, but corporate "citizens" don't -- cause they're not part of us

Home: green energy, fully funded schools K-post grad, health care, public transportation, jobs / job training, housing, legal aid, infrastructure upkeep