May 26
GUEST: Jim Lafferty, Executive Director Emeritus of the National Lawyers Guild in LA, member of the Governing Board of the Southern California ACLU, and host of The Lawyers Guild Show on LA’s Pacifica Radio station, KPFK, talks about the continuing shame of the US in Guantanamo.
The continuing shame of Guantánamo
"Our soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, and Coast Guardsmen are much more than that. Yes, they are highly trained in their craft, but they also are imbued with core values and a duty under the law to conduct war professionally, ethically, and to the maximum extent possible, humanely." - Captain Thomas R. Beall
This is one of those Orwellian moments when the exact opposite is true. We have Captain Beall, writing for the US Navel Institute, extolling the ethics and humanity of Guantanamo. It is more than just a lie. It is the complete reversal of what is actually happening behind those barbed wire walls.
Our country excels in such irony. Most Americans believe that our many wars since WW II were fought for the right reasons. Yet, almost all of the "reasons" have turned out to be fabrications. We killed three million Vietnamese trying to "bring democracy" to its people. We have murdered millions more in Iraq and Afghanistan, all based on crude lies about "weapons of mass destruction," and retribution for 9/11. We have a CIA that kills people with impunity around the world, and doesn't stop because the victims are US citizens. Yet the citizenry of our country still believe that our all encompassing US military empire somehow cares about justice.
So it shouldn't be surprising that the United Staters set up a prison in a foreign country so that we could torture and kill hundreds of Muslims without due process or any semblance of human rights. We didn't know what they had done when we brought them in, some as young as 13 years old. We had no evidence and no proof. Proof of what you may ask; what crimes were committed? No one in authority knew or cared.
Habeas corpus ("show me the body" in Latin) is the Constitutional right for personal freedom unless there is some proof of wrongdoing. A Supreme Court ruling in 2006 (Hamdan v. Rumsfeld) found that holding prisoners at Guantanamo without charges was invalid. Moreover, the court held that these detentions violated the Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions regarding the treatment of detainees. Congress, in all its wisdom, then passed the Military Commissions Act later that year, essentially overriding our Constitution as well as international laws. Another step in the "Honor Bound" treatment of Muslim prisoners.
So the country that continually talks about morality and human rights, punished over 779 men over the course of twenty years. And not only punished them, but tortured them as well. Locked them in boxes, temporarily drowned them, and anally raped them. Yes, all this behavior seems to be part of the "core values" so important to the citizens of the empire.
Perhaps shooting children in schools is part of our great American values as well. We certainly let the gun manufactures control the debate with their money and their right wing agenda. We sit back, wring our hands and cry. But the empire has no morality. What is done to our children is what we have done to children in so many parts of the world. Why would the empire stop at our shores?
