The United States Wants to Hold Terrorists at Guantanamo Bay. Only "TERRORISTS" are held there. The number of actual TERRORISTS held there is debated. All there are considered ENEMY COMBATANTS, a new TERM, not quite legal, that gives a cover of legality to harsh treatment, abuse at best, TORTURE at worst. Some claim people are being held at Gauntanamo by mistake. The United States agrees mistakes cannot be made, but from a different point of view. All detainees must stay at Guantanamo until the WAR ON TERROR is over, possibly forever. All detainees must be treated harshly to get “results.” The United States recently won AN APPEAL to treat the detainees at Guantanamo as it sees fit. The United States has no real reason to rethink its original classification of everyone at Guantanamo as terrorists. But mistakes are inevitable and those who were not terrorists before become radicals in Guantanamo, as do the friends, families and sympathizers of all people caught in an absurd web. The United States gets what it wants.
MOAZZAM BEGG IS A BRITISH CITIZEN who was taken by gunpoint from his home in PAKISTAN. In a long strange journey he ended up at Gitmo, where among other things he was witness to the cruelty of see two prisoners beat to death before his eyes. He also had kindness visited upon him by guards he calls friends. Moazzam Begg has come out of his experience with a sense of dignity intact. We should all be so lucky.
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[WAKE UP CALL] THE STORY OF MOAZZAM BEGG If America is the land of the free, believing in its own justice and legal system, then put me through it. If you can't, it means that you don't believe in it. You have your military code of justice. You have civil courts. Put me through either of those, if you think I committed a crime against you. The audacity [of the US government] for me is that the United States came to my house in in Pakistan, where I was a resident at the time, held me at gunpoint in front of my family, and took me to their territory, and then say that I have no rights. That is the most audacious thing they did to me, and they did it to 500 other people.
A CONNECTION TO THE NEW SUPREME COURT NOMINEE
[SLATE] But an opinion that the 50-year-old judge [JOHN ROBERTS]joined just last week in the case Hamdan v. Rumsfeld
should be seriously troubling to anyone who values civil liberties. As
a member of a three-judge panel on the D.C. federal court of appeals,
Roberts signed on to a blank-check grant of power to the Bush
administration to try suspected terrorists without basic due-process
protections.
MORE TO FOLLOW
And there are people in this country wearing "I Heart Gitmo" t-shirts with matching stickers on the back of their honking SUVs, thanks to "Move America Forward" and Rush.
It's like Ayn Rand got her wish: we are a nation of selfish assholes. Problem is, it hasn't made our country better as promised. It's not even improved the lives of the Republicans, as witnessed by their growing anger and agression. Nor has it improved our economy! It's only proved that we are more like Rome in its last throes than we could have dreamed, losing ourselves to our greed and gluttony, desperately grasping to our desires to slow our long fall down.
Gitmo is a disgrace.
Posted by: Kate | July 20, 2005 at 11:29 AM