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igotthisguitar
Joined: 08 Apr 2003
Location: South Korea (Permanent Vacation)
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 Posted: Mon Jun 12, 2006 3:52 am Post subject: Road To Guantanamo |
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AP: Gitmo Movie Subjects Discuss Suicide
By PAISLEY DODDS, Associated Press Writer
LONDON - Three British youths formerly detained at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay and now the subjects of a new film about their experiences say they were driven to desperation knowing others had tried to kill themselves at the camp.
http://www.roadtoguantanamomovie.com/
In an interview with The Associated Press, Shafiq Rasul and his two friends � Ruhal Ahmed and Asif Iqbal � describe how they were held at Guantanamo for more than two years without charge. Many of the some 460 detainees accused of links to Afghanistan's Taliban regime or the al-Qaida terror network have been held for more than four years without charge.
"There is no hope in Guantanamo. The only thing that goes through your mind day after day is how to get justice or how to kill yourself," Rasul, 29, who waged a hunger strike at the camp to protest alleged beatings, said Saturday. "It is the despair � not the thought of martyrdom � that consumes you there."
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/entertainment/movies/14799161.htm
The U.S. government accused the British men of attending a rally in Afghanistan where Osama bin Laden was addressing a crowd. The men deny the claim, saying the rally was held before they entered the country. Still, they said they eventually lied and agreed, thinking that it may set them free.
They were released in March 2004. After receiving death threats, all three moved away from Tipton. Iqbal returned to Pakistan last year to marry his intended bride.
Since they started promoting their film across Europe, they say they are also questioned or searched when they land in Britain. After returning from Spain recently, armed police in Birmingham boarded the plane and searched their seats. Even two actors who play the men in the film were stopped in February and held for questioning under the anti-terror laws.
"It's weird because when we left we weren't even that religious," Rasul said.
"We were young - average British lads," Ahmed added. "Obviously if we knew what we were getting ourselves into we would have never gone." |
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Guri Guy
Joined: 07 Sep 2003
Location: Bamboo Island
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| Posted: Mon Jun 12, 2006 7:12 am Post subject: |
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| Where is the justice there? I mean if you detained don't they have to press charges or give a reason why in a certain amount of time? I'm not an expert on law or anything but it doesn't sound right to me. Of course by saying this I could be labled anti-American. Meh... |
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igotthisguitar
Joined: 08 Apr 2003
Location: South Korea (Permanent Vacation)
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| Posted: Tue Jun 13, 2006 1:47 am Post subject: |
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| Guri Guy wrote: |
| Where is the justice there? I mean if you detained don't they have to press charges or give a reason why in a certain amount of time? I'm not an expert on law or anything but it doesn't sound right to me. Of course by saying this I could be labled anti-American. Meh... |
Anti-fascist is more like it.
Few would argue people are not in fact being detained for extended periods of time without any formal charges.
Denied the basic right of "HABEUS CORPUS". Hmmmmmmmm, wonder where that went?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habeus_corpus
Who may have been behind this? Hmmmmm ...
The most common reason being used is "suspected ties" to Al-Quaeda BLAH BLAH BLAH ...
Bring em on !!!
Military Contractors Make Billions On The Front Line
Private military contractors are earning billions of dollars in Iraq -- much of it from U.S. taxpayers. The government says it cannot provide a total amount for the contracts -- many of which are secret -- but
industry experts estimate Iraq's security business costs tens of billions of dollars.
The work, which includes protecting people and transport convoys, is dangerous or, as one contractor put it: "It sounds crude, but basically our job is to be a bullet sponge." |
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ddeubel
Joined: 20 Jul 2005
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| Posted: Mon Jun 19, 2006 7:53 pm Post subject: |
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Another voice calling to close down this hellhole. And people wonder why others the world over and in America don't support this government?????????? If this ain't against the constitution, I don't know what is? Seems they are using the constitution as toilet paper.....
| Quote: |
Sending shameful signals
James Carroll Bloomberg News
Published: June 19, 2006
BOSTON 'No question Guant�namo sends, you know, a signal," President George W. Bush said last week. "It provides an excuse, for example, to say the United States is not upholding the values that they're trying to encourage other countries to adhere to." This frank admission is anomalous, of course, because Bush intends to maintain the prison complex in Cuba indefinitely. And every day that he does so, the signal sent grows louder.
It didn't take the recent suicides of three detainees to make known Guant�namo's character as a center of human-rights violations. A sorry list of accusations and criticisms has besmirched the place, including charges of deliberate insult to the religion of Muslims and interrogation practices that are "tantamount to torture." Prime Minister Tony Blair and the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, have called for its closure, and last week the European Parliament passed a resolution doing the same. This week, Bush is likely to face criticism on the question at the EU-U.S. summit meeting in Vienna.
Representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross, meanwhile, are at Guant�namo to learn more about the three suicides, which one U.S. official characterized as "acts of asymmetric warfare." The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to rule soon on Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, a case involving questions of detainee rights at Guant�namo and the powers of military commissions to try terror suspects held there.
But all of this unfolds in the context identified by Bush himself - that of "values" represented by this astounding American prison. How might perceptions of the United States be different today, especially in Arab and Muslim worlds, if the hundreds of prisoners captured in Afghanistan in 2001 had been treated with scrupulous adherence to the highest standards of international law; if they had been provided lawyers, promptly charged, and brought to public trials - all showing that the United States treats even its purported enemies as persons with rights, worthy of due process?
Had America followed such a course, it would have put its best values on display, a not incidental rebuttal to the demonizing of America as a great Satan. But such a course would have been more than propaganda. It would have been a defining act, proof that Americans are the good and exceptional people we think we are.
Just such a thing happened before. After World War II, many Allied leaders, led by Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill, assumed that captured Nazis, whose war crimes were evident, should be summarily executed. But others, led by the U.S. secretary of war, Henry Stimson, understood the importance of dealing with the major criminals according to scrupulous legal procedures. The result was the Nuremberg tribunals, where the rights of defendants, even those defendants, were affirmed. Those trials, from 1945 to 1949, involving more than 200 accused war criminals, demonstrated the values for which the United States had just fought the brutal war. More than that: In a recovery from brutality, the Nuremberg trials rescued those values.
The opposite has been occurring in Guant�namo Bay. Prisoners were taken there in the first place in an obvious end run around the jurisdiction of courts inside the United States, a blatant statement that traditional legal procedures would not apply. Such cynical exceptionalism was reinforced when the captured men were categorized as "enemy combatants" instead of "prisoners of war," a ploy to dodge standards set by the Geneva Conventions of 1949 (which themselves came out of the spirit reflected at Nuremberg). Little thought seems to have been given even now to the consequences for Americans when they are captured in future conflicts by enemies who will surely cite Guant�namo as precedent for methods tantamount to torture.
Guant�namo defenders define the enterprise as an exercise in intelligence gathering, but it has been years since any of those prisoners could have provided meaningful information about enemy intentions or capacity. Something else accounts for this cruelty, this illegality. Instead of the dignity of Nuremberg, it evokes the shame of the World War II incarceration of Japanese-Americans.
Racial hatred, revenge, a blind belief in toughness - these are the values that America is "signaling" in Cuba. After the Sept. 11 attacks, we Americans were determined that our enemies would not wound us again. They did not have to. We have wounded ourselves - nowhere more destructively than at Guant�namo. The time is long past for this disgraceful American prison to be closed.
BOSTON 'No question Guant�namo sends, you know, a signal," President George W. Bush said last week. "It provides an excuse, for example, to say the United States is not upholding the values that they're trying to encourage other countries to adhere to." This frank admission is anomalous, of course, because Bush intends to maintain the prison complex in Cuba indefinitely. And every day that he does so, the signal sent grows louder.
It didn't take the recent suicides of three detainees to make known Guant�namo's character as a center of human-rights violations. A sorry list of accusations and criticisms has besmirched the place, including charges of deliberate insult to the religion of Muslims and interrogation practices that are "tantamount to torture." Prime Minister Tony Blair and the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, have called for its closure, and last week the European Parliament passed a resolution doing the same. This week, Bush is likely to face criticism on the question at the EU-U.S. summit meeting in Vienna.
Representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross, meanwhile, are at Guant�namo to learn more about the three suicides, which one U.S. official characterized as "acts of asymmetric warfare." The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to rule soon on Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, a case involving questions of detainee rights at Guant�namo and the powers of military commissions to try terror suspects held there.
But all of this unfolds in the context identified by Bush himself - that of "values" represented by this astounding American prison. How might perceptions of the United States be different today, especially in Arab and Muslim worlds, if the hundreds of prisoners captured in Afghanistan in 2001 had been treated with scrupulous adherence to the highest standards of international law; if they had been provided lawyers, promptly charged, and brought to public trials - all showing that the United States treats even its purported enemies as persons with rights, worthy of due process?
Had America followed such a course, it would have put its best values on display, a not incidental rebuttal to the demonizing of America as a great Satan. But such a course would have been more than propaganda. It would have been a defining act, proof that Americans are the good and exceptional people we think we are.
Just such a thing happened before. After World War II, many Allied leaders, led by Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill, assumed that captured Nazis, whose war crimes were evident, should be summarily executed. But others, led by the U.S. secretary of war, Henry Stimson, understood the importance of dealing with the major criminals according to scrupulous legal procedures. The result was the Nuremberg tribunals, where the rights of defendants, even those defendants, were affirmed. Those trials, from 1945 to 1949, involving more than 200 accused war criminals, demonstrated the values for which the United States had just fought the brutal war. More than that: In a recovery from brutality, the Nuremberg trials rescued those values.
The opposite has been occurring in Guant�namo Bay. Prisoners were taken there in the first place in an obvious end run around the jurisdiction of courts inside the United States, a blatant statement that traditional legal procedures would not apply. Such cynical exceptionalism was reinforced when the captured men were categorized as "enemy combatants" instead of "prisoners of war," a ploy to dodge standards set by the Geneva Conventions of 1949 (which themselves came out of the spirit reflected at Nuremberg). Little thought seems to have been given even now to the consequences for Americans when they are captured in future conflicts by enemies who will surely cite Guant�namo as precedent for methods tantamount to torture.
Guant�namo defenders define the enterprise as an exercise in intelligence gathering, but it has been years since any of those prisoners could have provided meaningful information about enemy intentions or capacity. Something else accounts for this cruelty, this illegality. Instead of the dignity of Nuremberg, it evokes the shame of the World War II incarceration of Japanese-Americans.
Racial hatred, revenge, a blind belief in toughness - these are the values that America is "signaling" in Cuba. After the Sept. 11 attacks, we Americans were determined that our enemies would not wound us again. They did not have to. We have wounded ourselves - nowhere more destructively than at Guant�namo. The time is long past for this disgraceful American prison to be closed.
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