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.
