Fadel Abdallah
Bravo , excellent Post .
and congratulations to Sami , what an ordeal !

Fadel, on this, I know what you mean..

“...Sami Al-Haj’s crime was that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, trying to make a living and fulfill his duties as a journalist.”

BUT!! Sami Al-Haj was absolutely NOT in the WRONG place, or at the WRONG time. He was where he was supposed to be.

So it can only be said that as has been for well over a century, it has been the evil imperialism of the US that was in the WRONG place, at what was and continues to be the WRONG TIME!!

I feel your pain expat, as I have about this for over 6 years now, in the most masochistic of ways, since it’s been my decision to intently study and examine this horrific atrocity from the beginning. The renditions, the torture memos, the torture procedures, how these men were captured like animals, and in many cases sold into the hands of the US Government.

Yes, from the beginning…we’ve followed the bureaucracy and the illegality of it all. OVER 1000 MEN have been processed through this gulag…less than a dozen actually charged with anything. The details of the torture would make you physically ill. I won’t repeat them here, but the indignities suffered by these men have been no less enormous than the physical pain to which they have been subjected.

When those three detainees were able to commit suicide in their CAGES, a spokesman for the thugs in DC actually accused THEM of ASYMETRICAL WARFARE AGAINST THE US!!! (Her name escapes me now, and it’s probably just as well).

Having given so much of my energy to this for at least 5 years now, I can in fact feel a semi-sense of accomplishment from the efforts that so many HAVE put forth to stop this, with little or really NO recognitions among the main stream media or even the American people. There are hundreds of people from a collection of Human Rights organizations who have given the past 6 years of their lives, and their careers, to fighting for those men, and it hasn’t been easy. This regime has put every possible obstacle in the way. It took nearly 3 years to force them to even provide a LIST of the people that were being held there!

So many have literally been as psychologically hammered and destroyed as many of the detainees themselves. Career military lawyers, JAGS and others, have been demoted or turned into exiles for their efforts to intervene and expose these atrocities. BUT, had they not, had none of us gone through all of those mostly unknown struggles to stop this thing that is even worse than the concentration camps and gulags of the 20th Century fascist regimes, I fear that those men would still be there, rotting away, completely unknown to the rest of the world, just as it was intended by the designers. As it is, there are still around 300 of them being held, …again, not charged with anything.

Still, without the ‘whistle blowers’ and without those actually in our military who HAVE been willing to fight against gargantuan crime against humanity, it would surely be continuing. All of the original 1000+ men detained and tortured there would still be there, probably joined by more. If not for the scholars, authors and other brave and independent journalists, most Americans would still be in the dark about these atrocities committed in their names.

I don’t know how much that might ease a bit of the pain, but I wanted to put that out there. Can there ever be any measure of ‘justice’ or even accounting for this? “Justice” seems highly unlikely. It’s been 60 years of the same as perpetrated by Israel against the Palestinians. I’m convinced that the CIA was well versed in these policies and procedures as they’ve been practiced by Israel for decades. Millions of innocents remain locked up and tortured in those gulags as well. Gaza is just the outer prison that houses more within. WHILE THE ENTIRE WORLD WATCHES!! So “Justice” seems nothing more than an abstract concept. Accountability though, may be more readily achieved.

Meantime, I too am ‘considering my options’. I’m more inclined though, to consider them for the younger ones first, even more than for myself. I’d like to see them have a chance to live a life of the sort that America used to promise. That isn’t going to happen again here, for a very long time.

New leadership can certainly begin to turn the tide around, but it will be decades before the damage actually stops, let alone begin to reverse itself.

Thank you Expat, Paolo and Don Stivers for your moral support and your further elaboration on what greatly troubles me and you.

However, I feel that I need to say something more to further get it out of my chest and alleviate my pain. I need to say: “God damn Palestine for it allowed all this great injustice to continue for sixty years. God damn Fatah and Hamas for their internal fighting which allows the Zionist marauders occupiers to further continue their brutalities and savagery.

Furthermore, God damn all the Arabs, the 350 million of them, who could not defend their lands as brave men would do, so that I am crying like a woman now for lack of means to act!

And God damn Israel, for despite all the suffering some of its people have experienced at the hands of the Nazis, it has been inflicting similar pain on the natives of Palestine!

And God damn the Inquisition and the Catholics who perpetrated it!

And God damn the Nazis and all the atrocities they committed against the Jews and others!

And God damn successive British governments for their atrocities against the Northern Island Catholic minority, and all the unjust exploitation of third world countries for many years! 

And God damn the American governments under which great injustices and atrocities were committed against Native Americans and Afro-Americans to mention only the two most known groups! 

And God damn all individuals, no matter what their religious or national backgrounds were, who saw evil and injustice committed any place in this God’s vast world, but did nothing to combat it!

“Applying this idea to US foreign policy” is a nice way of describing the CIA’s psyops game it plays with peoples’ souls.

Don’t forget that we have just come out of more than a month of deleriously criticizing China over a dishonest beat-up about ‘their’ supposed human rights abuses.

The reality, though, is that people love it! How easy it is to get them agitated over their own hypocrisies and pet prejudices, uhh.

The answer is that we are all mostly racists at heart. The rest is simple fear…...  and lack of morality in society.

Sounds like a divorce, Expat. The point is, though,  that we are all part of the same humanity, even if it is failing…....

Well said Fadal.

Further along in the song “God Bless America” it is asked that God guide us.  Now then, is it from the Old Testament where God tells the chosen ones to smote the enemy or the New Testament where Jesus preaches about nothing but love,turning the other cheek and loving the enemy?

Yes! This is a travesty of justice and this U.S. administration is the cause.

Mr. Wright was and is RIGHT!!!

I agree about Rev Wright being the only one with the courage and appropriate words to describe this crime against humanity.

I was listening one day to Rev Wright’s Palm Sunday Sermon on, of all places, the Glenn Beck radio program. Beck played the entire sermon over the course of an hour to demonstrate the “context” of Wright’s remarks.

After the sermon, Beck blathered for an hour about Wright’s “anti-Americanism.” I wondered: “Did I listen to the same sermon?”

Wright’s sermon made two main points. First, don’t confuse God and government. As a libertarian, I particularly liked this viewpoint. Second, “do not condemn the mote in your neighbor’s eye, when you have a beam in your own.” And, “if you have a beam in your own eye, how can you see the mote in your neighbor’s eye?”

Applying this idea to US foreign policy, Wright went through a list of criminal American foreign policies, from Hiroshima to Vietnam to Grenada to Iraq. Maybe Beck thought this listing of facts was “anti-American,” but I sure didn’t.

So I now ask: how can we complain about Muslim governments torturing innocent people, when we do the same thing at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib? How can we criticize the mote in our neighbor’s eye, when we have a beam in our own?

This is and should be considered a “Gold Star” media investigative issue.  Nightline, 20-20, 60 minutes should have this front and center.

How I wish this guy was O’Reilly.

I guess those people who would run over a reporter with a bulldozer or tank are running our media.

^ been struggling with an appropriate response as well.  The post of mine on the other thread about Sami Al-Haj is weak/angry.  In reality I just don’t know what to say.  My feelings are so intense, my shame so deep, my guilt so great, my government/country so wrong and cruel.  I did leave and have no regrets; but I struggle every day with what we have done and continue to do.  It doesn’t lessen the shame I feel.  I feel the loss and it’s like a death of something dear and I am grieving.

First, I don’t find the right words to describe this travesty of injustice that went on for six long years. Sami Al-Haj’s crime was that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, trying to make a living and fulfill his duties as a journalist.

How come this much bragged about so-called democracy would allow this flagrant violation of basic human rights? I can only think of one person, namely Rev. J Wright who might have the courage and appropriate words to describe this crime.

I believe that when the history and full story of the sadistic crimes committed at Abu Grieb and Guantanamo are finally told, conscientious and decent Americans would want to disown this country. I am one who is considering my options, since just by writing these words there are so many vultures who are looking for dead carrion, especially when hunger and lack of food is afflicting some who seven years ago might have been counted among the middle class. Possibly, it’s the shortage of food and the need to reduce the number of mouths to feed in these prisons of shame that might have helped Al-Haj to gain his freedom. And to be politically correct, one is supposed to sing, “God bless America!”

randyha

We know from a number of reports on Abu Ghraib, (and I’ll try to find a few of them) that it was intentionally patterned after the ‘model’ that had already been set up at Guantanamo.

In short, the commanders there were instructed to Gitmotize Abu Ghraib.

But, in answer to your question about how the US ‘media’ allows this, (remaining silent) Guantanamo is NOT a place where journalists have been allowed to go…at least none that would be able to independently report.

The few who have tried have never been allowed to find out what’s really going on there..and certainly not before now. The International Red Cross finally managed to gain access, and they made the unprecedented formal call for shutting it down, and defining it as the gulag that it is. And that was at least 3 years ago now, even though it took that long for them to even gain access. (no doubt it was limited as well).

The only reason that I personally believe that Haj was finally released was in part because of what the video says here, but also because the person in charge of that facility, who has answered only to the Cheney regime, (which originally included Rumsfeld of course) is William Haynes III, who recently ‘stepped down’ (like so many of the others) and that may or may not be because the heat is finally on many of these original characters. (like John Yoo and so many of the others who designed this system from the beginning).

In other words, after nearly 7 years, more and more of the original culprits…including the ones at the top who authorized this torture to begin with, are being exposed, INCLUDING bush and his other regime members.

Also, Haj was able to get an attorney, which was next to impossible for ALL of the detainees for the first few years of their captivity. Human Rights groups have needed to fight long and hard and sacrifice their own careers to fight against this regime on behalf of those detainees.

Still, the media and other journalists have never been able to get that far inside Guantanamo, to even be aware of Haj, so it’s not so much a matter of them knowing and remaining silent. Any US media that MAY have been aware of these conditions would be the same as State sponsored media, (most of the MSM) and they would never be allowed to put any of this out anyway.

From the very beginning, we have NEVER been able to get any reliable news on anything this regime is up to, specifically in Iraq, aside from foreign media.

But, it’s not that we haven’t known what was going on at Guantanamo, and doing everything possible to expose it to the world.

I think what more and more Americans need to find out, is just how much of a cruel dictatorship has taken over the US government. Even Hitler didn’t do as much damage, and his reign didn’t last this long.

Note the opening text… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgAuq8XVQw0&feature=related

Who says it was a hunger strike? It was more likey a form of compulsive anorexia from depression and withdrawal from reality in that US-run shithole.

Then again, maybe he just wanted to die after endlessly looking at those ugly white American guards…....???

I agree with this report, Americans will soon find out that this prison is another Abu Ghraib. How does our system and the US media allow the unjust imprisonment of a fellow journalist and remain silent?—Shameful!