Souvenirs from Guanatanamo Bay.
Making torture fun for the whole family.
Tag Archive for 'guantanamo-bay'
Al-Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Haj, held without charge in Guantanamo Bay for over six years, speaks out after his release from the American gulag:
An imprisoned man in Guantanamo Bay is told he has AIDS and authorities refuse him access to a lawyer or medical help.
Last week the executive director of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, spoke in Sydney. He gave a passionate, wide-ranging talk, outlined the “rules of the game” for tyrannies around the world and a West that loves to collaborate with them:
The Bush administration, for example, seems to prefer promoting a narrow conception of democracy as a softer, fuzzier alternative to the embarrassing issue of human rights. Democracy is a metric by which the United States still measures up fairly well, but talk of human rights brings up such inconvenient topics as Guantanamo, secret CIA prisons, water-boarding, rendition, military commissions, and the suspension of habeas corpus.
But by divorcing democracy from the international human rights standards that give it meaning, the administration sends the message that mere elections, regardless of the circumstances, are sufficient.
Its response in November to then-General Musharraf’s declaration of “emergency rule” in Pakistan was illustrative. Even after Musharraf’s effective coup and his detention of thousands of political opponents, President Bush said that Musharraf had somehow not “crossed the line”. Bush could hardly trumpet Musharraf’s human rights record, so he declared that Musharraf is “somebody who believes in democracy” and that Pakistan was “on the road to democracy”.
But if, unlike human rights law, “the road to democracy” permits locking up political opponents, dismissing independent judges, and silencing the independent press, it is easy to see why autocrats the world over are tempted to believe that they, too, might be eligible.
Roth is a voice of sanity.
Music has been used in American military prisons and on bases to induce sleep deprivation, “prolong capture shock,” disorient detainees during interrogations—and also drown out screams. Based on a leaked interrogation log, news reports, and the accounts of soldiers and detainees, here are some of the songs that guards and interrogators chose.
According to Col. Morris Davis, former chief prosecutor for Guantánamo’s military commissions, the process has been manipulated by Administration appointees in an attempt to foreclose the possibility of acquittal.
Welcome to American justice, Bush administration style.
Australian New York based documentary producer Eva Orner, discussing her recently Oscar-nominated film Taxi to the Dark Side about the “war on terror” and torture:
It’s really important that we’ve made a film basically suggesting that [the Administration] are a bunch of war criminals and that they should be accountable. What they’ve done is outrageous. They’re messing with the rule of law. They’re messing with habeas corpus. They’re messing with the Geneva Convention.
The film has caused controversy around the world, and rightly so. The Discovery Channel has even decided not to screen the documentary because it’s apparently afraid of the subject matter.
Orner is also a friend. Her film deserves to win.
The perfect place to display contempt for the legal procedures at Guantanamo Bay.
The New York Times likes to think of itself as the finest newspaper in the world.
Sometimes it produces essential stories, such as this recent piece about a death at Guantanamo Bay.
Then, at other times, it becomes craven in the face of criticism.
Once a rogue state, always a rogue state:
The Central Intelligence Agency, backed by bodies including the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research and the Defense Intelligence Agency, determined in August 1974 that Israel had nuclear “weapons in being,” a “small number” of which it “produced and stockpiled.”
Israel was also suspected of providing nuclear materials, equipment or technology to Iran, South Africa and other then-friendly countries.
This information was released days before George W. Bush visited Israel’s Holocaust memorial and allegedly stated that the US should have bombed Auschwitz or the railways leading to it.
The irony is tragic. Bush feels sympathy for millions of murdered Jews - and it is indeed true that the allies during World War II often ignored the suffering of the oppressed people - but today comfortably bombs, tortures and occupies lands across the world, causing the deaths of untold thousands.
Perhaps Bush needs some reminding of what his country has become. Start with Guantanamo Bay.
And you thought Guantanamo Bay was just about illegal detention and torture?
Think again (thanks to the essential Wikileaks site):
The US detention facility at Guantanamo Bay has been caught conducting covert propaganda attacks on the internet. The attacks, exposed this week in a report by the government transparency group Wikileaks, include deleting detainee ID numbers from Wikipedia last month, the systematic posting of unattributed “self praise” comments on news organization web sites in response to negative press, boosting pro-Guantanamo stories on the internet news site Digg and even modifying Fidel Castro’s encyclopedia article to describe the Cuban president as “an admitted transexual”.
Shayana Kadidal, Managing Attorney of the Center for Constitutional Rights Guantanamo Global Justice Initiative, said in response to the report:
“The military’s efforts to alter the record by vandalizing Wikipedia are of a piece with the amateurism of their other public relations efforts: their ridiculous claims that released detainees who criticize the United States in the media have ‘returned to the battlefield,’.
The United States, a torturing nation (sanctioned by the White House.)
Welcome to the world’s only superpower.
It still astounds me how many in the mainstream media refuse to condemn the use of torture. Their silence is little better than complicity.
Wikileaks, the essential site for uncovering the darkest secrets of the “war on terror”, has posted further information about the legal and moral blackhole that is Guanatanamo Bay.
The Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) from 2004 reveals:
1. Non-compliance with the Geneva Conventions remains official US Policy,
according to leading Habeas Corpus lawyers from the Center for Constitutional Rights. Systematic denial of Red Cross access to prisoners remains. The use of dogs remains. Segregation and isolation are still used routinely and systematically – including an initial period of at least 4 weeks “to enhance and exploit the disorientation and disorganization felt by a newly arrived detainee”, only terminated at the behest of interrogators. Both manuals assert that detainees will be treated in accordance with the “spirit” of the Geneva conventions “to the degree consistent with military needs”, but never assert that the conventions are actually being followed at Guantanamo. Put into practice, neither manual complies with the Geneva conventions.
Guantanamo Bay, some facts:
Number of books in the Guantánamo detention library: 5,143.
Personal items provided to detainees upon departure: a Koran, a denim jacket, a white T-shirt, a pair of blue jeans, high-top sneakers, a gym bag of toiletries and a pillow and blanket for the flight home.
Number of daily calories per detainee: Up to 4,200, including halal meat
