Originally posted at Liberal Street Fighter
What new, monstrous thing will come out of some officer or official to demonstrate, once again, that we are a nation gone insane, a nation that has left behind humanity and compassion? This weekend, Rear Adm. Harry Harris said:
“This was clearly a planned event, not a spontaneous event,” said Rear Adm. Harry Harris, commander of Joint Task Force-Guantanamo.
He described the men, whose names were not released, as committed jihadists captured on the battlefield. “I believe this was not an act of desperation, rather an act of asymmetric warfare waged against us,” Harris said.
“Asymmetrical warfare” is defined as “a conflict in which a much weaker opponent uses unorthodox or surprise tactics to attack the weak points of the much stronger opponent.”
Harris added that there is a “mythical belief” that the Guantanamo detention center would be shut down if three detainees die.
Only an American would use our supposed worship of the sanctity of human life as a rhetorical cudgel to rob a dead enemy of their humanity.
Harris said Saturday that every prisoner at Guantanamo is considered “dangerous.”
“They are smart. They are creative. They are committed. They have no regard for human life, neither ours nor their own,” Harris said. “I believe this was not an act of desperation, but rather an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.”
No regard for human life, unlike we rightous Americans, proud people who bomb indiscriminately from high above anybody unfortunate enough to be near our enemies, a people who are the only ones who’ve used nuclear weapons, yet who are too squeamish to look at pictures of the aftermath. We nurture the largest military that history has ever seen. We regard human life with a system of values that are malliable depending on the comfort and needs and prejudices of our ruling elite.
Two human rights lawyers offer another perspective, a HUMANE perspective, on the dire situation these prisoners find themselves in:
The suicides should surprise no one because the detainees believe they will be held indefinitely with no chance for justice, said Josh Colangelo-Bryan with the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents about 200 of the detainees.
“They’ve been told that while at Guantanamo they have no rights as human beings,” he told reporters during a conference call Saturday.
Colangelo-Bryan said one of his clients told him during a visit to the facility in October 2005 that he “would simply rather die than live here with no rights.”
Jumana Musa, Amnesty International USA’s advocacy director for domestic human rights and international justice, released a statement pointedly blaming the Bush administration for the suicides and calling Guantanamo “an indictment on its deteriorating human rights record.”
“By rounding up men from all over the world and confining them in an isolated penal colony without charge or trial, the United States has violated several U.S. and international laws and treaties,” Musa said in the statement.
As our military is destroyed by their misuse by the Bush Administration, more and more of the civilized world will turn its back on us. We are pariahs, all of us, and it’s only going to get worse over the course of the TWO MORE YEARS that we have ahead of us under this criminal regime. It is fear that keeps the rest of the world from pushing back harder. Fear of our military, and fear of our economy dragging them down into depression along with us. As time passes though, we will see our ties to the rest of the world slowly wither and die. Given the pathetic inadequacies of the Dempubicans, we will probably be faced with another Republican in 2008.
This is our country folks … a nation of heartless monsters who shred international agreements that took CENTURIES to create, many of them created with American leadership. Those of us who oppose the crypto-fascists of our ruling class may quail at that characterization, but we’re plainly unable to dislodge the ugliest segment of our population loose from power, and we’re sadly unable to elevate enough principled humanists to positions of power to offer up a real opposition. Our government, our military, reflect US.
How much that depresses you will be a direct measure of how much decency you have left in your corporate-media-battered soul.
Winning the hearts and minds while blowing out their brains….
There is no difference from dropping a bomb onto a city than there is shooting a baby in the head at point blank range.
Killing is murder. Period.
Torture is wrong. Period.
War is for brutes and warpigs.
There is no excuse or justification for the actions of this Adminstration or it’s Brute Squad.
I am one Human Being who will not be scared away from saying that KILLING IS MURDER. WE ARE THE BAD GUYS.
I look at his barefoot upont the rocks… recently a 15 year old boy was released from Guantanamo… he had been in a cell for 2 years. A cell he was never let out of. A cell where our “heroic troops” who don’t have to abide by any fucking laws or rules or codes – threw rocks at him to keep him from sleeping for long periods of time. He shat and ate off the very same floor.
But… “we support the troops” and “we’re number one” and the Democratic Party and it’s supporter are too cowardly to stop it. We musn’t look as if we don’t support the militarization of the world.
great diary MadMan! Thank you so very very much.
the horror is man’s (and woman’s) inhumanity to others, who are just the same – human. Occasionally there is exceptional depravity, but it crosses racial and national boundaries.
Harris is emblematic of why I do not, and never have, “supported the troops”. That overly simple message is a terrible trap, imo.
I have always supported the trapped, the lost, the suffering, the dying and the dead. The occupied.
Which are on all sides. Some of them are our troops. I am sick to death of the “beheading” commentary from the US right wing. When we blow people to absolute smithereens. In the name of “democracy”.
I long ago posted that what matters is our children are orphaned – forever, and their children are being killed.
Someone should stop us, but there is no one strong enough.
Marisacat
Someone should stop us, but there is no one strong enough.
The strong are the ones who are being silenced.
This is the best comment I have ever seen on the subject of “supporting the troops.” Thank you for articulating this, M.
From ABC Online:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200606/s1660550.htm
How do you even respond to a statement as sick and heartless as that? Even in death, they’re used as propaganda tools.
but I also read today a quote from a military person at Gitmo that the suicides are an “act of war”.
They need to decide which it is.
PR or War!. Or both.
Clearly tho, in both cases we feel NO RESPONSIBILITY. None.
If suicide is now considered to be an act of war…
Perhaps Adm. Harris, Rummy, Wolfowitz. Perle, Cheney, Rice, Bolton, Powell, DuhBya, and everyone else who supports this exercise in Freedom on the March should become an active asssymmetrical participant…that’d show them ‘terrist’s’ we mean bidness.
“Bring it on” indeed.
Bah!
Peace
The most disgusting display of inhumanity. No wonder troops feel free to bust down Iraqi citizens’ doors and shoot their babies: they mean nothing to the US military. Nothing. Suicide is an act of warfare against the US. I can barely believe that someone would say that.
We are becoming an evil empire. I don’t care if Satan himself is imprisoned at Guantanamo these people need to see the light of day and have their day in court. Common fucking decency to the vanquished enemy is called humanity. Bush and his cronies need to be arrested and tried on war crimes this shit is off the hook. Three people commit suicide and the representatives of the paranoid dark empire see a conspiracy to make them look bad. Good grief. Hello the poor bastards are going insane because they are being subjected to inhumane and illegal treatment.
and it is….
I listen to C-SPAN in the morning before work.
The level of hatred and bigotry expressed on the Republican call-in line is breath-taking and horrifying. The vicious remarks I heard today regarding the Gitmo suicides were so shockingly cruel and willfully ignorant that I shudder to think I live in the same country with these people.
I can only suppose that anyone who is STILL willing to call him/herself a Republican is mentally ill. Depending on the issue, they seem to fall into two equally disturbing camps: the vitriolic haters and the religiously delusional who insist that their infallible leader was appointed by God.
I think a sizable portion of this country is mentally ill, not just Republicans. We nurture and perpetuate fear and hatred and bigotry … we’ve worked harder at those than we’ve practically EVER worked at finding common ground. It saddens and frightens me.
You’re right, Madman.
And if I think about it instead of reacting to a few misguided individuals, I remember that many people still cherished the ideals of communisim despite the horrors of Stalin. I’m sure there are Republicans who hold to their personal definitions of conservativism which, although I may disagree, are nothing like the practices of this administration.
I need to think about the common ground I can share with those folks, too, if I don’t want to be part of the problem.
it’s hard … ie my problems w/ organized religion. It’s something to always work at, but damn, the angry and hateful really seam to hold all the cards.
That is my greatest struggle, too. I find organized religion at worse to be a vessel of cruel repression, and at best a convenient method of avoiding responsibility for making the world better. I am respectful of the motives expressed by many people of faith, but it is their individual character and personal commitment to good works that I admire, not their religious belief.
Where will this kind of depraved, inhumane thinking take us? How far down the scale of what can still be called human decency will we go as a nation? We’ve declared our right to preemptively invade and occupy any foreign nation we want, we continue to ammass our own WMD cache while telling other nations they cannot have any, we’ve declared ourselves outside the scope of international laws, we’ve condoned and encourgaged torture, we easily manufacture whatever justification we need for the killing of innocent Iraqis, we claim the right to imprison suspected enemies forever without charges or trials, and when they kidd themselves, we call it a deliberate act of war.
All in the name of preserving and spreading …DEMOMCRACY?
“DEMOCRACY” (when will I stop hitting “Post” when I’m mad?)
I dunno; my first thought when I saw what the “General” said was “that motherless son of a bitch” (which I think gets the point across, though I admit it leaves a bit to be desired in the coherency department) so maybe “demomcracy” is exactly what we’re dealing with….
There’s absolutely no way for an actual American to say things like this. The logical conclusion is that the entire Republican Party, along with the Bush Administration and much of the Pentagon, has been infiltrated by terrorists who hate our freedoms and want to see them destroyed.
Baby Jesus is PISSED.
No wonder our country’s inhabitants are so much less healthy that other industrialized nations. Denial takes a terrible toll on people, and the level of self deception necessary to maintain our delusional belief that we are a just and humane country is rotting America’s soul.
If I held out any hope there was even a nanobyte of morality in this administration, this reaction has ended it.
They have no regard for human life, neither ours nor their own
Clearly this administration has become so alienated from their own humanity and so deadened to normal emotions that they can’t even recognize that the sickening irony of making this statement about the death of another human beling.