Image by World Can’t Wait via Flickr
by Finian Cunningham
Writer, Dandelion Salad
East Africa
Crossposted from PressTV
March 26, 2013
They are essentially dead men who just happen to breathe. That is the grim assessment of the legal representative for the inmates in the American concentration camp, otherwise known as Guantanamo Bay.
More than 11 years after this penal colony was opened on the American-occupied territory of Cuba, there remains some 166 prisoners who live in a nightmarish world of indefinite detention.
Hundreds of others have been ground through the machine, spewed out like human waste. Denial of human freedom is torture; denial of any sense of when that torture ends adds a whole new barbarous dimension of cruelty.
American vanity likes to indulge in berating other countries for human rights violations: Russia, China, North Korea and Iran are paraded in the American media as pariah states, accused of failing international legal standards. In the past, the Soviet Union and its system of gulags was a particular favourite feature for Americans to contrast their supposed freedoms. How the ‘high and mighty’ self-proclaimed moral titans now stand exposed as hypocrites, charlatans and low-life perverts.
Thanks to the suffering of prisoners at Guantanamo, the world is seeing some shocking home truths about the real nature of American government and its formerly grandiose pretensions. Without Guantanamo, the world may have been duped a little longer by the American art of deception. But not anymore. The American style of dictatorship has everything that the old Soviet system had, but with an added insidious trait – the American delusion of exceptionalism.
Think about it. In Guantanamo, they have been rendered from all over the world by their captors like so much wild animals, physically and mentally tortured, humiliated and defiled. Most of them are Muslim, coming from Africa, the Middle East and Asia, where the US has been waging its permanent charade ‘War on Terror’ since 2001.
Such is the cruel vindictiveness of their captor country that these men’s only freedom – to read their holy Korans in the solitude of their cells – has been denied to them. More. Their sacred beliefs have been stamped on. Not only have their captors incarcerated their bodies; their tormentors want to hunt down their victims’ inner-most thoughts. This is taking human barbarity to scientific levels of depravity where the human spirit is sought out to be murdered.
Ninety percent of the Guantanamo hostages – a more appropriate description than ‘inmate’ – have never been charged with any offence. They are being held merely on the basis of suspicion by an American government that has lost all credibility and moral bearing in the eyes of the world.
For nearly 50 days now, 26 of the men at Guantanamo have been on a hunger strike. It is the only freedom left to these men. To refuse the most basic means of subsistence. That length of time without food is pushing the human body into a fatal condition. The muscles have been eaten away now by the body’s own metabolism to survive against deprivation; at this stage, the last vital organ of the brain becomes internally digested.
‘These men have figured out that probably the only way for them to go home – cleared or not – is in a wooden box,’ said their American-military appointed defence lawyer, Lt Col Barry Wingard, in a recent interview with Russia Today.
Wingard, who has been granted only limited access to consult with the prisoners said that he was shocked by the ‘animal cage’ conditions of the men when he last saw them three weeks ago. ‘They will never get a trial based upon the evidence that is against them,’ adds Wingard.
Let’s recap. Hundreds of men – in all probability innocent of suspected wrongdoing – are held for up to 11 years without charge, tortured and denied proper legal support – all perpetrated by the government of the US that proclaims to be the world’s standard bearer of democratic and human rights and international law. This is the same government that has overseen the invasion and illegal occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, murdering millions of innocents, in the name of establishing democracy and international law.
But don’t confuse. Guantanamo is not a vile contradiction of America’s lofty claims. It is in fact a microcosm of the reality of how truly barbaric the American government has become.
Five years ago, when Barack Obama was running for the US presidency, the closure of Guantanamo was a central promise. To the credit of the American people, they voted him into the White House in order to tear down this abomination of human rights and international law and all the associated torture that it represented under Bush and the neocons.
Into his second administration, Obama has reiterated that Guantanamo is here to stay. How is that for a brazen betrayal and snub to democratic demand of the people? Appropriately, Obama has outdone Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Co. The imperialist permanent war on the world is being stepped and expanded to target Syria, Iran, China and Russia and whomever else dares to stand in the way of American hegemony. Obama’s wielding of secretive executive powers to execute any one, any time, any place in the world exceeds the fantasies of the Bush neocons.
The abomination that is Guantanamo is therefore an important moment of truth as to how far America has gone down the road to all-out fascism.
Ironically, it is men who have been deprived of everything even to the point of death who are exposing this powerful truth.
Finian Cunningham, is a columnist at Press TV and a Featured Writer on Dandelion Salad. He can be reached at cunninghamfinian@gmail.com.
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[DS added the videos.]
‘We died when Obama indefinitely detained us’ – Gitmo inmate
RussiaToday·Mar 27, 2013
The situation is getting desperate in Guantanamo with many of the hunger striking inmates prepared to die, federal public defender Carlos Warner told RT, stressing that his client is calling on the Obama administration to either ‘respect or kill’ them.
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‘ICRC will expose violations at Gitmo’
PressTVGlobalNews·Mar 27, 2013
A political analyst says that the ICRC and the international community will have a presence in Guantanamo, monitoring and exposing the conditions there because it is a serious humanitarian situation.
The comments came after International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) sent a delegation to the United States’ infamous Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba a week earlier than planned as concerns over a hunger strike grows. According to reports, the hunger strike by prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility has entered its 50th day. The US military says 31 of the detainees at the prison are on hunger strike.
Press TV has conducted an interview with Franklin Lamb, international lawyer, to further discuss the issue.
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‘Men live in Guantanamo animal cages, will never get trials’
Russia Today March 24, 2013
The Guantanamo Bay hunger strike has entered its 47th day, with no end in sight. According to the prison’s Director of Public Affairs, 26 inmates are refusing food, with eight detainees receiving enteral sustenance.
The situation has alarmed Lt. Col Barry Wingard, a US military attorney who advocates for Guantanamo detainees.
[…]
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‘Men live in Guantanamo animal cages, will never get trials’
Just Video News for You on Mar 24, 2013
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Re-design? US requests $49 mn to renovate Gitmo instead of shutting down
RussiaToday·Mar 23, 2013
The Guantanamo Bay hunger strike has gone beyond the critical 45 day mark, when doctors say the body is deprived of nutrition. Officials at the detention center in Cuba have acknowledged more detainees are joining the protest over alleged mistreatment. This comes amid a Pentagon request for 49 million dollars to build a new prison building and carry out renovations – despite a 4 year-old promise to shut it down. Gayane Chichakyan has more.
see
The Shock Doctrine in Texas Prisons by Kenneth Foster
Franklin Lamb: US Must End Gitmo Prison Horrors + A Huge Hunger Strike at Guantánamo
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Guatanamo Bay is a disgrace to all Americans. Not just Guantanamo Bay, either. The U.S. has its own gulag, detention facilities at over 1000 military bases around the world. The worst is at Diego Garcia, which nobody has even been allowed to inspect.
Obama has to go down in history as the cruelest, most despotic president that the U.S. has ever had.
And until Americans speak out and take action to shut down the prisons, we are all complicit.
The United States has abused its global power to such an egregious extent, it is now totally discredited in the eyes of all intelligent, discriminating souls.
Guantanamo is a grotesque betrayal. Obama has revealed his true function, to protect and further the interests of criminal elites.
The Monsanto “protection act” is the last straw. This means totalitarian eugenic biocide is now “legal” on a scale undreamed of even by Hitler.
The only thing that is being resurrected in the USA this easter is depravity of an order few could have predicted.
Be very afraid America…