The United States government has disclosed the names of fifty-five of the eighty-six prisoners cleared for transfer from Guantanamo Bay prison. All of the names made public were of prisoners President Barack Obama’s interagency Guantanamo Bay Review Task Force approved for release from the prison. Previously, the US government had maintained the names of prisoners cleared could not be made public because it would get in the way of diplomatic efforts to repatriate or resettle prisoners in their home country or other countries.Two cheers for the Obama administration for committing sufficiently to their release to actually name their names. One cheer permanently withheld for holding these apparently not dangerous individuals for a total of eleven years without charge, trial, meaningful access to attorneys, etc. ad nauseam. I'm sorry, but that does not reflect a commitment to civil liberties and human rights on the part of the Obama administration.
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Still, in these ghastly times, we take what positive news we can get. I wonder what kind of poo Rmoney will fling about this announcement...
Paul Craig Roberts has an excellent article at Counterpunch about this: http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2012/09/22/world-without-torture-the-responsibilities-of-the-west/
ReplyDeletekarmanot - it puzzles me how an economic policy nutjob can be a strong human rights advocate, but both terms describe Paul Craig Roberts.
ReplyDeleteI do not know if any US officials, especially presidents, will ever be brought to justice for their violations of international law. There are, to be sure, countries which G.W. Bush can never visit or even pass through, and I assume the same will be true of Obama, next year or four years from now. But a country with its international nukes still pointed everywhere and more or less still on alert cannot be challenged without hazard to the whole world. I do not see how this will end peaceably.
I've been reading Studs Terkel's "The Good War" (the quote marks are part of the name), and noting that the US is coming into line with other nations in its human rights approach. In W.W.II, Japan actively tortured and starved military prisoners, denied them medical treatment and forced them to labor in weapons production, all contrary to international law. The US treated prisoners by the book.
Today, it is the US which wreaks havoc on prisoners, torturing them, imprisoning them indefinitely, etc. We have become the "bad guys," and no one ever asked me (or you, I presume) whether we wanted that done in our name. I, for one, am aghast.
Sometimes I question if the human rights for which I have so long labored will ever really be a staple of American democracy after Martin Luther King. Perhaps it is that the new media revolution has made all information available and we see the ugly truth that is America. Still, for all that, I am not disillusioned, I view human rights as central to a civilized social contract and will hold that conviction while standing in the ashes of our increasingly failed state. Problem is that we are the last generation to remember of what activism required and the principles which influenced it. I am not impressed by the namby pamby rudderless OWS movement of dithering younguns.
ReplyDelete