The Guardian asks Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad what it would take to normalise relations with the US: Change should happen in practice. Which change has happened? Was Guantánamo Bay shut down? Were the US policies supporting Zionists and the mass murder of Palestinians stopped? Were the US policies in Afghanistan changed? Were the policies in…
Showing all posts tagged Guantanamo Bay
Should Jews watch their speech around J Street?
The disappointments mount. J Street believes in dissent, just not dissent that may upset conservative, hardline Zionists: Five days ahead of the leftist pro-Israeli lobby J Street’s first National Conference in Washington, D.C., the controversies continue to mount. The Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren refuses to attend the conference, despite the open letter issued by the…
Chomsky could influence “terrorists” badly
America, sometimes you can be hilariously counter-productive and anti-intellectual: Professor Noam Chomsky may be among America’s most enduring anti-war activists. But the leftist intellectual’s anthology of post 9-11 commentary is taboo at Guantanamo’s prison camp library, which offers books and videos on Harry Potter, World Cup soccer and Islam. U.S. military censors recently rejected a…
The luxury of distance and money
Sometimes, Jewish blogger Richard Silverstein nails it: Bill Clinton and George Bush Jr. spoke in Canada yesterday, each earning more than $150K for the gig. Frankly, I can’t imagine anyone possessing enough wisdom to be worth paying such a sum to them for dispensing it. But I guess enough people are star struck that they…
Just a bit of the old war on terror behaviour
The actions of a rogue state? God no, wonderfully democratic Britain: MI5 secretly tried to hire British men held in Guantanamo Bay and other US prison camps by promising to protect them from their American captors and help secure their return home to the United Kingdom, The Independent has learnt. One of the men, Richard…
How to create terror part 9753
Incompetence (and criminality?), according to Lawrence B. Wilkerson, chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, was the order of the day in the beginning of the “war on terror”: There are several dimensions to the debate over the U.S. prison facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba that the media have largely missed and, thus,…
The cry of the innocent
The following list (also see Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4) is the culmination of a three-year project to record the stories of all the prisoners held at the US prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
Don’t read satire
Why the “war on terror” is a fraud, part 7532: A British ”˜resident’ held at Guantanamo Bay was identified as a terrorist after confessing he had visited a ”˜joke’ website on how to build a nuclear weapon, it was revealed last night. Binyam Mohamed, a former UK asylum seeker, admitted to having read the ”˜instructions’…
Can we skin them alive and watch?
“War on terror” soldiers, fight to keep Guantanamo Bay open: Why? Just ask one of the organisers of the above TV ad: Closing Gitmo is just plain wrong. It is a slander against the professionalism of our troops at Gitmo who are guarding some of the most evil monsters running around this rock we call…
The victim recalls a war crime
My following book review appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald on November 29: My Story: The Tale Of A Terrorist Who Wasn’t By Mamdouh Habib; with Julia Collingwood; Scribe, 272 pp, $32.95 Before tortured Australian Guantanamo Bay detainee Mamdouh Habib was released in 2005, then prime minister John Howard said his government didn’t “have any…