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Guantanamo
"Will Not One But Two Guantanamos Define the American Future?" PDF Print E-mail
Monday, 19 April 2010 10:27

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175234/tomgram%3A_karen_greenberg%2C_the_two-guantanamo_solution/#more

Karen Greenberg, , the executive director of the Center on Law and Security at the NYU School of Law, talks about the real meaning of the proposed “Closing Guantanamo” solutions.

from the article:

    The administration’s disingenuousness on this point is overwhelming. On the one hand, we are told that the terms “war on terror” and “enemy combatants” are history and that Guantanamo will soon join them. But Guantanamo was never purely a place in Cuba. What made it so wrong was the system of indefinite detention that lay at its core and that continues to defy the rule of law as defined by the U.S. Constitution, U.S. military law, and the international conventions that this country has signed onto.

    Closing Guantanamo does not simply mean emptying the prison cells at that naval base and throwing away the keys. It means ending the policy that has become synonymous with Guantanamo -- of incarcerating individuals without the need to prove their guilt, and without a clear and recognizable process for determining the grounds for their detention.

    Faced with opposition in Congress and in public sentiment generally, the Obama administration increasingly seems focused on ending not the conceptual nightmare we call Guantanamo, but the irritating problem that Guantanamo represents.  Unfortunately, as this administration will learn to its regret, there is no closing Guantanamo if preventive detention continues. 

 
The abyss will stare right back PDF Print E-mail
Sunday, 24 January 2010 13:52

He who does battle with monsters needs to watch out lest he in the process become a monster himself. And if you stare too long into the abyss, the abyss will stare right back at you.
–Friedrich Nietzsche


Scott Horton reads Homer and Auden and is sensible of  their truth. Their words reach across centuries and decades to Guantanamo Bay.


From Scott’s post:
A society that tortures and kills those placed entirely in its power and passes this fact by as a matter of indifference truly is plunging into the dark side of the world which these two poets describe–one at the dawn of man’s recorded history, the other in the crucible of modernity. On the day of these deaths in 2006, the American commander in Guantánamo violated the Homeric rules of decorum by taunting the dead and afflicting their families. The deceased prisoners “have no regard for human life,” he said. But in the end we must ask to whom those words more appropriately attach–the prisoners or those who have orchestrated the tragedy at Guantánamo? Another saying of the Achaean epoch applies to this tragedy. Long associated with the story of the Minotaur on Crete, it was recalled near the end of the nineteenth century by a philosophy professor at the University of Basel who waded deeply into the history of the era. “He who does battle with monsters,” he wrote, “needs to watch out lest he in the process become a monster himself.”

Here is the entire article:
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2010/01/hbc-90006423 

 
" Political language. . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable" George Orwell PDF Print E-mail
Tuesday, 19 January 2010 09:18

Scott Horton  finds that the “suicides” of 3 prisoners at Guantanamo were not suicides,  the “investigation” of the suicides was not an investigation and “The Justice Department” is not interested in justice.

The Guantánamo “Suicides”: A Camp Delta sergeant blows the whistle

By Scott Horton

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2010/01/hbc-90006368

 

 
Guantanamo 2.0 PDF Print E-mail
Wednesday, 18 November 2009 22:05

Guantánamo: Justice as Paradox 

Jonathan Hafetz describes the Obama Administration’s “new and improved” legal options for convicting those accused of terrorism – the administration always wins.

“As long as the present menu of options for dealing with terrorism suspects remains in place, U.S. detention policy will remain essentially lawless. The government will be free to use federal courts when it is confident it can convict; employ military commissions if it has doubts about the strength of its evidence or faces other obstacles; and dispense with a trial altogether where its case is weakest. Welcome to Guantánamo 2.0.”

Detainees to Get “State Always Wins” System of Justice - Glenn Greenwald describing same

 
Torturing Children: Bush's Legacy and Democracy's Failure PDF Print E-mail
Monday, 03 August 2009 18:51

Article from Truthout

 
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