Paying witness from Liberal Street Fighter
Van Gogh – Skull with Burning Cigarette
Margorie Cohn, in her piece “Spinning Suicide”, offers some observations that echo those posted here yesterday:
Meanwhile, George W. Bush expressed “serious concern” about the deaths. “He stressed the importance of treating the bodies in a humane and culturally sensitive manner,” said Christie Parell, a White House spokeswoman.
How nice that Bush wants their bodies treated humanely, after treating them like animals for four years while they were alive. Bush has defied the Geneva Conventions’ command that all prisoners be treated humanely. He decided that “unlawful combatants” are not entitled to humane treatment because they are not prisoners of war.
Article 3 Common to the Geneva Conventions requires that no prisoners, even “unlawful combatants,” may be subjected to humiliating and degrading treatment. Incidentally, the Pentagon has decided to omit the mandates of Article 3 Common from its new detainee policies.
It shouldn’t matter who they are, under what context they were captured. Hell, under international law, one could argue that US soldiers and marines are “unlawful combatants” given the criminal path this country took to war. Like all morality, it only takes a moment to imagine how we’d feel if this was our brother, our son, our father or husband being treated like this. It would, if we were a people capable of compassion and moral reasoning any longer, and not a mob driven mad by fear and our own sense of exceptionalism.
These were human beings. All of the “unlawful combatants” are HUMAN BEINGS. Of course, in this country, proud builder of both the biggest military and biggest prison-industrial complex in the world, it’s pretty plain that we really don’t give a damn about decency and HUMAN BEINGS.
“A stench of despair hangs over Guantánamo. Everyone is shutting down and quitting,” said Mark Denbeaux, a lawyer for two of the prisoners there. His client, Mohammed Abdul Rahman, “is trying to kill himself” in a hunger strike. “He told us he would rather die than stay in Guantánamo,” Denbeaux added.
While the Bush administration is attempting to characterize the three suicides as political acts of martyrdom, Shafiq Rasul, a former Guantánamo prisoner who himself participated in a hunger strike while there, disagrees. “Killing yourself is not something that is looked at lightly in Islam, but if you’re told day after day by the Americans that you’re never going to go home or you’re put into isolation, these acts are committed simply out of desperation and loss of hope,” he said. “This was not done as an act of martyrdom, warfare or anything else.”
“The total, intractable unwillingness of the Bush administration to provide any meaningful justice for these men is what is at the heart of these tragedies,” according to Bill Goodman, the legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents many of the Guantánamo prisoners.
Last year, at least 131 Guantánamo inmates engaged in hunger strikes, and 89 have participated this year. US military guards, with assistance from physicians, are tying them into restraint chairs and forcing large plastic tubes down their noses and into their stomachs to keep them alive. Lawyers for the prisoners have reported the pain is excruciating.
The suicides came three weeks after two other prisoners tried to kill themselves by overdosing on antidepressant drugs.
Hey, though, we Good Americans will be sure to wash their bodies properly. As for the main killing field in our Global State Terrorism in Response to Terror:
America plans to retain a garrison of 50,000 troops, one tenth of its entire army, in Iraq for years to come, according to US media reports.
The revelation came as George W Bush summoned his top political, military and intelligence aides to a summit on Iraq’s future today at the presidential retreat at Camp David.
Tomorrow the Americans will talk by video link to Nouri al-Maliki, Iraq’s prime minister, and members of his cabinet, as well as American military commanders in Iraq.
The meeting marks the highest profile discussion of Iraq’s future so far, and reflects the Bush administration’s determination to exploit the two most promising developments in Iraq for many months – the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qa’eda in Iraq, and the completion of the first permanent post-war cabinet.
Mr Bush said the meeting would decide “how to best deploy America’s resources in Iraq and achieve our shared goal of an Iraq that can govern itself, sustain itself, and defend itself”.
In other words, we’re going to park our gunships and Predator drones and trained killers within easy striking distance to protect our “strategic interests” (coughOILcough) while the people who live in the country we destroyed in a criminal unilateral invasion will be left to fend for themselves. I’m sure we’ll pick a side to arm as well … keep that Military/Industrial complex well-fed with blood, treasure and dripping viscera.
We are a danger to ourselves and ESPECIALLY to others, a nation gone mad.
Update [2006-6-12 19:4:47 by Madman in the Marketplace]:
From the BBC, we learn that a “Dead detainee ‘was to be freed'”:
The Pentagon named the prisoner who had been recommended for transfer as 30-year-old Saudi Arabian Mani Shaman Turki al-Habardi Al-Utaybi.
He was a member of a banned Saudi militant group, the defence department said.
The other two men who died on Saturday morning were named as Ali Abdullah Ahmed, 28, from Yemen, and Yassar Talal al-Zahrani, 21, another Saudi Arabian.
Ahmed was a mid- to high-level al-Qaeda operative who had participated in a long-term hunger strike from late 2005 to May, and was “non-compliant and hostile” to guards, the Pentagon said.
Zahrani, 21, was a “front-line” Taleban fighter who helped procure weapons for use against US and coalition forces in Afghanistan, according to the department.
Professor Denbeaux told the BBC World Service that the feeling among detainees at the Cuba camp was one of hopelessness.
“These people are told they’ll be 50 by the time they get out, that they have no hope of getting out. They’ve been denied a hearing, they have no chance to be released,” he said.
He said US policy was to refuse to tell prisoners they were due to be released until a location had been found.
Utaybi had been declared a “safe person, free to be released” but the US needed a country to send him to, Professor Denbeaux said.
“His despair was great enough and in his ignorance he went and killed himself,” he said.
What else is there to call this than murder? He was killed with silence.