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I think you will enjoy this new article from Virtual Citizens titled "Bush Spreads Guantanamo Gangrene Around World: Tens of Thousands Held".

The case of Jumah al-Dossari

Jumah al-Dossari has been rotting in Guatanamo for five years now without ever having been charged of an offense.  Joshua Colangelo-Bryan, the attorney for al-Dossari says that his client believes that “he has been condemned to live forever on an island where there is no law.”   Colangelo-Bryan adds, “He may well be right.”

Al-Dossari is forced to spend virtually the entire day in solitary confinement, under conditions that make Devil’s Island look like a health spa on the Riviera.  Al-Dossari was kidnapped illegally, transported halfway around the world, torn from his family and others, denied sunlight, short-shackled, beaten, and told, by his sadistic tormentors, that he will never get out.  On three occasions al-Dossari has attempted suicide, according to his lawyer Joshua Colangelo-Bryan, who told his story in the April 5 Miami Herald.

Al-Dossari cannot believe that a human being can be flung in prison with no evidence, but what does he know of how President Bush and Congress have torched our Constitution?  Al-Dossari’s fate differs little from 400 other Guantánamo captives and of tens of thousands held by the U.S. military around the world (currently 18,000 in Iraq alone), the bitter harvest of illegal wars by an illegitimate regime.

What does Amnesty say?

In a report published on 5 April 2007, Amnesty International called for the Guantánamo detainees either to be released from their “super max” high security cells or allowed to stand trial, a modest request under the circumstances.  Amnesty said that Guantánamo prisoners exist for 22 hours a day in windowless cells and never seeing daylight; they suffer from extreme sensory deprivation; and are denied proper access to human rights groups and independent medical doctors.  Amnesty’s Kate Kelly branded Guantánamo “a travesty of justice,” substantiating the charges leveled by Colangelo-Bryan and others with first-hand knowledge of this horrific mortuary.

The miseries of Guantánamo are being multiplied by the “compassionate conservative” in the White House.  According to the Observer (UK), the U.S. operates an “invisible” (and hence illegal) network of prisons stretching from the island of Diego Garcia to Iraq to Thailand, and including prison ships on the Indian Ocean.  The Washington Post reported that six days after September 11th, 2001, Bush gave the CIA “broad authorization to disrupt terrorist activity, including permission to kill, capture and detain members of al Qaeda anywhere in the world.” This order, appropriate for a Roman Emperor, has not the merest shred of legality.  By the time of his 2003 State of the Union, though, Bush crowed that more than 3,000 suspected terrorists “[had] been arrested in many countries.”

Soon after, tens of thousands of men, mostly from Iraq and Afghanistan, were being detained – without charges, without allegation of war crimes and often in secret.  Ensuing brutalities, torture, and murders at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, have been well documented.  John Sifton of Human Rights Watch, reported that Iraqi detainees were and are routinely beaten.  Torture was “condoned and commonly used,” says Sifton. 

Likewise at the American prison on their Bagram Air Force Base, north of Kabul, Afghanistan, where prisoners were chained and hanged from ceilings for days and repeatedly beaten; where they have been put in cold rooms so long their hands and feet became swollen, inflicting excruciating pain.  According to forensic reports from the U.S. military, some prisoner deaths were ruled homicide.  Some captives at Bagram were simply beaten to death.  

Government in the Shadows

Of course, the agents of the Bush administration prefer to commit such crimes in secret. Reminiscent of the odious practices of Stalin, Hitler, Mbutu, and Pincohet, the CIA illegally denies Red Cross access to a compound in Kabul, known as “The Pit.”  CIA members look to avoid criminal and civil liability by keeping prisoners “off the books” which is an illegal practice under American and international law.  

An official of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, Shamsullah Ahmadzai, told the New York Times that the Afghan police, courts, and prosecutors are limited by law in how long they can hold criminal suspects.  However, Ahmadzi reports, “The Americans are detaining people without any legal procedures.  Prisoners do not have the opportunity to demonstrate their innocence.”

According to the Observer (UK), the system of brutal and unconscionable detention extends across the globe and into the Muslim world with governments that are friendly with the Bush administration.  In Morocco, the government has obligingly locked U.S. captives in the Al-Tamara interrogation center near Rabat.  In Syria, the U.S. consigns detainees for torture in Damascus.  Egypt also gets a flow of alleged militants to be tortured.  The U.S. houses prisoners in Baku, Azerbaijan, at a U.S. airbase in Qatar, and as far away as Thailand.  Still other prisoners are alleged to be held in Poland, and some are known to have been tortured in Saudi Arabia and Aman, Jordan. 

Many suspects are illegally kidnapped off the street or from their houses in Europe.  Italy has arrest warrants out for a score of CIA agents for nabbing a suspect off the streets in Milan.  On January 23, 2006, the Council of Europe put the number of illegally seized men on that continent at about 100.  Swiss Senator Dick Marty told the Council:

“I believe it is absolutely demonstrated that alleged terrorists or terrorist sympathizers were kidnapped, transported against their will across Europe, detained outside any jurisdiction, deprived of all rights, and sent to countries that, notably, offer no guarantees at all of the respect for fundamental rights.”

Amnesty International has denounced the U.S. for its “two-faced strategy to torture.”  The two parts of the strategy are: (1) to deny the existence of an American torture program it in public, as President Bush does; and (2) to practice it in secret, all the while seeking ways for the torture goons to elude criminal liability.  Amnesty also criticizes the U.S. for its silence “on human rights abuses committed by many of its new-found friends.”  In January 2007, Amnesty cited the case of Baloch National Movement political leader Akhtar Mengel, held incommunicado in solitary confinement in Karachi, Pakistan, “without access to needed medical care” and hit America’s failure “to take any effective public action.”

Standard Operating Procedures

Yet, why should the American government and or Bush take any action?  The rights of opposition political leaders in Pakistan mean nothing to G. W. Bush who is allied with a dictator in Pervez Musharraf and his regime that is developing nuclear weapons and selling nuclear weapons technology.  The indifference shown by Bush to the plight of people tortured under his direction or omission, like that of Jumah al-Dossari, is just another aspect of Bush’s contempt for human life and law.

Recall Bush is the man who scrapped nuclear and germ warfare treaties, violated the Geneva and Hague Conventions and the Nuremberg Principles, trampled the Charter of the United Nations, ringed the world with military bases, sold billions worth of arms to dictators, killed hundreds of thousands of Iraq civilians, bombarded the Middle East with illegal cluster bombs and uranium shells, threatened a small nation with the “nuclear option,” created a gigantic war machine bent on militarizing space to dominate every crevice of the Earth, and is spending his taxpayers into bankruptcy while offering thousands of their youth as human sacrifices on the altar of his wars of aggression.  We could say more about abandoning the people of the Gulf Coast and New Orleans post-Katrina.  Nowhere, though, does G. W. Bush reveal the depth of his degenerate character more clearly than by ordering the arbitrary arrest and torture of human beings – turning back the clock 800 on the political development of the West and the Magna Charta. Victims should not look for mercy from this man.  His Christian veneer is little more than a shroud of hypocrisy.                               

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Sherwood Ross is a Miami-based columnist. Reach him at sherwoodr1@yahoo.com

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