I don't know about you, but I am really, really, really starting to get seriously pissed off over shit like this coming from an Obama Administration.
President Obama, regardless of your motives, no matter how noble your intentions, this is what you are defending, whether you want to acknowledge it or not:
Nazar Chaman Gul, an Afghan who was held at Bagram for more than three months in 2003, said he was beaten about every five days. American soldiers would walk into the pen where he slept on the floor and ram their combat boots into his back and stomach, Gul said. "Two or three of them would come in suddenly, tie my hands and beat me," he said.When the kicking started, Gul said, he'd cry out, "I am not a terrorist," then beg God for mercy. Mercy was slow in coming. He was shipped to Guantanamo around the late summer of 2003 and imprisoned there for more than three years.
According to Afghan officials and a review of his case, Gul wasn't a member of al Qaida or of the extremist Taliban regime that ran Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001. At the time he was detained, he was working as a fuel depot guard for the U.S.-backed Afghan government . . .
Guards said they routinely beat their prisoners to retaliate for al Qaida's 9-11 attacks, unaware that the vast majority of the detainees had little or no connection to al Qaida.
Former detainees at Bagram and Kandahar said they were beaten regularly. Of the 41 former Bagram detainees whom McClatchy interviewed, 28 said that guards or interrogators had assaulted them. Only eight of those men said they were beaten at Guantanamo Bay.
Because President Bush loosened or eliminated the rules governing the treatment of so-called enemy combatants, however, few U.S. troops have been disciplined under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and no serious punishments have been administered, even in the cases of two detainees who died after American guards beat them.
Much has been written of Obama's potential to reshape America's image for the better throughout the Muslim world. Maybe that will come to pass eventually, but no matter how many TV interviews you grant Al-Arabiyah, they will all be so much bright-colored bunting obscuring a mirror streaked with the blood and sinew of innocent people who were guilty of nothing more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time; and who were subjected to obscene torments because their captors knew they could get away with it. This is what the Nazis did, this is what the Soviets did, and the Stasi and the Khmer Rouge and the Chilean Secret Police. And this is what the Bushies did too, at Bagram and at Guantanamo and God knows wherever else. Perhaps the scale was much smaller at Bagram and at Gitmo than in those other places and times, but the affect on our morality as a people was no less cancerous and no less corrosive. And there can be no steps taken toward healing these self-inflicted wounds to our national psyche, toward restoring our rightful position among the league of civilized nations, and toward making amends to the victims of our abuses, until the policies that enabled the extraction of torture and the wholesale violation of human rights are not only rescinded, but abolished by law and denounced for all time.
In other words, you cannot decry the use of torture while simultaneously arguing for indefinite detentions and the withholding of habeas corpus. The former is the inevitable byproduct of the latter.
Bagram and Guantanamo are one and inseperable. Close one, close them both. Anything less is morally unforgivable at this point. Mister President, are you listening?
Update: And closer to home, this crap ain't makin' my day any easier, either. WTF?!?
---Vitelius
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