The Grapes of Wrath was about arriving in California as much as it was about leaving the dustbowl of bank foreclosures.......

Being met with repression and prejudice is no different then than it is today and was when African were brought in chains to America and other “settler societies”.

Well, Al Jazeera has turned out to be one of the very best media organizations on the planet (that’s not hard these days). And they have extensive on-the-ground coverage throughout Asia (from Turkey to Taiwan). What is more, they understand what they report on in a way that Westerners can’t.

So, perhaps the entire Guantanamo ‘exercise’ was about intimidating such interests outside of the USA? After all, if you are reporting on a story and know that you can at any moment find yourself bound and gagged on a CIA “black flight” to an unknown country, you are supposed to be mindful of what you say.

Note that the Bush administration didn’t particularly care, either, that their “renditioning” came to light as well as the things that happen on a military base located offensively in someone else’s country. The fact that Guanatanamo is in Cuba should explain something in itself, uhh.

But you have missed the point, Ernesto, if you think that BushCo is “...a movement that does not accept the legitimacy of the established order...”. It is merely an update on the established order that you all blindly accepted being deceived by all of your life.

What you all fail to understand is that this is something that has been worked up to diligently since 1945. Not that it didn’t have its roots a century earlier but it has been continuous since then. You are all as helpless as the prisoners in Guantanamo yourselves!

Maybe she was going to “beat his brains out”, too.........

KenDen…

You are right to wonder, but I have to tell you, there are so many that we’ll honestly never know. Even among those captured at the same time as this journalist, there were hundreds more that just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Or no, that’s not at all correct. They were NOT in the ‘wrong place’ as they were where they’ve always been. There were hundreds of merchants, sheep herders, farmers, and regular PEOPLE..Afghanis and Pakistanis and others, who were captured at the time, in the ‘sweep’ for ‘terrorists’. Many of them were captured by Pakistanis and ‘sold’ to the US military for bounties. Like I said..regular people.

There have been over 1,000 men ‘processed’ through the torture chambers of Guantanamo. Less than a dozen have actually been charged with anything. I’ve lost count now of the numbers that remain, but keep in mind that George Bush and others of his regime have OFTEN claimed that ‘THERE ARE NO INNOCENT MEN AT GUANTANAMO’. That has ALWAYS been a lie.

For those that have been captured (or rendered) from here and other countries, and taken to secret prisons that the CIA maintains around the world, we’ll never really know the number. We’ve learned of a few, but there are so many that have been ‘disappeared’ that it will take decades to learn of them all, if we ever do.

^ Thank you!

Very appropriate quote here Nancy. WE knew exactly what he was talking about, eh?

The same thing applies to every single story of torture and other crimes against humanity, of which there are now millions notched into the belt that is America.

God should BLESS US? And just exactly what sort of God would do that?

Aegrus,

I don’t think ANY of these men are returned mentally in-tact, because of the torture. That in itself is reprogramming.

According to the complete article, he was one of the many that went on hunger strikes, (400+ days for him) and so they did the feeding tube thing to him, and that’s torture.

So, I don’t know. For the few who HAVE been interviewed after the years of captivity and torture, they all seem not so much ‘reprogrammed’ in the old sense of the practice, but just totally whacked out from the torture. KSM wound up ‘confessing’ to every crime under the sun, even though there’s no possible way he could have been in or involved in all those activities at the same time.

Others that they’ve finally charged can’t be tried for the same reasons...all of the stuff they’re charging them for was obtained under torture. How can we ever find out?

This man may certainly be an exception, if he’s ever able to talk, but still. The stuff they’ve done to all of these men is so far beyond the pale that it seems impossible to believe they could ever be ‘right’ again.

Which makes me wonder about John McCain. We’ve been told that he was tortured in captivity, and I have no reason to doubt that. But, I don’t think any of the details of his captivity, or the specific torture methods have ever been revealed. Hard to imagine anyone undergoing the types of torture that have been revealed now, could ever be fully restored to any measure of mental health. 6 years is a very long time.

It makes me so sick just thinking about it.