Close Guantanamo

Close Guantanamo

It's Time to Close the USA's Torture Center

The Bush Administration has finally admitted that the detainees at Guantanamo are covered by the Geneva Convention. Then in the same breath said that, of course, they were already being treated humanely and in accordance with the Geneva Convention. BU*SH*IT! In point of fact, the express purpose of Guantanamo in their own words was to create the legal of equivalent of "outer space". Well, I don't know know where it says in the Geneva convention that you can "waterboard" someone into thinking you are going to drown them. I don't know where it says you can keep them living outside in all weather for months at time. I don't know where it says you can deny Red Cross visits. And I don't know where anything in America says that you can deny alleged criminals their attorneys! I have a Geneva Convention card, dated through March of 2009, so I am clear that the Bushevicks are NOT adhering to the contents of that Treaty. As a Candidate, as an American, I'm fed up with an Administration that squeezes through non-existent legal loopholes to get what they want. In this case it's the ability to abuse and/or torture men and women who haven't been proven guilty of anything yet. In one case, one man's attorney hadn't been able to see him for three years. The Supreme Court is beginning to take action to end the legal nightmares. Perhaps that is a beginning of a long legal process. But MOW is time for the American people to DEMAND that we end the abuse and horrors of our torture center in Guantanamo! We must live up to our American ideals or the terrorists truly have won. Write your letter below and fill it with your voice and your feelings. Our Congresspeople and Senators need to know that it is time to close GITMO! Click on the form on the link above and send your personal message to all your government representatives selected below, with the subject "Close Guantanamo." At the same time you can send your personal comments only as a letter to the editor of your nearest local daily newspaper if you like.

Washington is Losing 'War on Terror': Experts

Washington is Losing 'War on Terror': Experts

If there was no war on terror before, and it was just a fabricated excuse for US to go to war, I can assure you there is a war on terror now, and for that you can Thank the USA

Despite high-profile arrests, security operations and upbeat assessments from the White House, the United States is losing its "global war on terror," experts warn.

Five years after Washington launched its hunt for those responsible for the September 11 attacks, the world has not become a safer place, and a new large-scale strike against America at some point appears likely, they say.

A picture released by the US Army shows a US soldier patrolling the market center in the town of Bayji, north of Iraq. Despite high-profile arrests, security operations and upbeat assessments from the White House, the United States is losing its "global war on terror," experts warn. (AFP/US ARMY-HO/Staff Sgt. Russell Lee Klika)

Even the killing last month of Al-Qaeda's leader in Iraq Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, hailed by the White House as a major blow against the terror network, has not dented its ability to recruit new militants or mount attacks.

In May the influential US magazine Foreign Policy and a Washington-based think-tank questioned 116 leading US experts -- a balanced mix of Republicans and Democrats -- on the progress of the US campaign against terrorism.

Among others, they consulted a former secretary of state, two former directors of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and dozens of the country's top security analysts.

The result? Eighty-four percent believe the United States is losing the "war on terror," 86 percent that the world has become a more dangerous place in the past five years, and 80 percent that a major new attack on their country was likely within the next decade.

"We are losing the 'war on terror' because we are treating the symptoms and not the cause," argued Anne-Marie Slaughter, head of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.

"Our insistence that Islamic fundamentalist ideology has replaced communist ideology as the chief enemy of our time feeds Al-Qaeda's vision of the world," boosting support for the Islamic radical cause, she said.

For Leslie Gelb, president of the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations, the unity of views expressed by those questioned reflects a deeply critical attitude towards the administration of President George W. Bush.

"It's clear to nearly all that Bush and his team have had a totally unrealistic view of what they can accomplish with military force and threats of force," he said.

Other experts questioned the very nature of the US campaign.

"It was a doomed enterprise from the very start: a 'war on terror' -- it's as ridiculous as a 'war on anger'. You do not wage a war on terror, you wage a war against people," said Alain Chouet, a former senior officer of France's DGSE foreign intelligence service.

"The Americans have been stuck inside this idea of a 'war on terror' since September 11, they are not asking the right questions."

"You can always slaughter terrorists -- there are endless reserves of them. We should not be attacking the effects of terrorism but its causes: Wahhabite ideology, Saudi Arabia and the Muslim Brotherhood. But no one will touch any of those," Chouet argued.

Instead he said US policy in the Middle East, which had "turned Iraq into a new Afghanistan," was acting as a powerful recruiting agent for a generation of Islamic radicals.

The continued US presence in Iraq and "the atrocities committed by a campaigning army", the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal in Iraq and the "grotesque" US detention centre at Guantanamo in Cuba all "provide excuses" for violent radicals, he said.

The United States "have fallen into the classic terrorist trap -- they're lashing out at the wrong targets," causing collateral damage that boosts the cause of their opponents, he said.

Michael Scheuer, who headed the CIA's Osama Bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999, agreed that Washington was acting as its own worst enemy in the fight against Islamic terrorism.

"We're clearly losing. Today, Bin Laden, Al-Qaeda and their allies have only one indispensable ally: the US' foreign policy towards the Islamic world."

"The cumulative impact of several events in the past two years has gone a good way towards increasing Muslim hatred for Americans, simply because they are Americans," he said, citing Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and the East-West row over cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed.

"Each of these events is unfortunate but not terribly serious for Western minds. But from the Muslim perspective they are deliberate and vicious attacks against the things that guide their lives and their faith."

"Packing It In"

"Packing It In"
http://dahrjamailiraq.com
By Dahr Jamail
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Sunday 09 July 2006

Surprise, surprise. In an interview with John King from CNN last
Thursday, Dick Cheney said that withdrawing US forces from Iraq would be
the "worst possible thing we could do." FU-DC

Doing his best to stoke the always simmering fears of so many US
residents (let us be careful how we use the word "citizen"), Cheney said
of the terrorist groups in Iraq, "If we pull out, they'll follow us."

Because according to Cheney, "This is a global conflict. We've seen them
attack in London and Madrid and Casablanca and Istanbul and Mombasa and
East Africa. They've been, on a global basis, involved in this conflict.
And it will continue - whether we complete the job or not in Iraq - only
it'll get worse. Iraq will become a safe haven for terrorists. They'll
use it in order to launch attacks against our friends and allies in that
part of the world."

Lovely to watch how people like Cheney, and the minions who support his
ilk, conveniently forget that there was no terrorism in Iraq prior to
the US invasion/occupation. And one must love his "logic." For according
to Cheney, "whether we complete the job or not in Iraq" his beloved
"terrorism" will "continue" ... "only it'll get worse."

Then why stay in Iraq, Dick? (Oil, Darh)

Because when Dick said, "only it'll get worse," if he'd been referring
to the situation on the ground in Iraq, he'd have been 100% accurate.

For starters, things for the US military continue to disintegrate. With
raping and pillaging being carried out by soldiers who have long since
surrendered the war for "hearts and minds," other lesser reported
developments underscore the trajectory of the military in Iraq.

According to the Arabic al-Sharqiyah Television channel, on July 6th :
"Gunmen shot down two US Apaches in al-Zur village, north of
al-Miqdadiyah in Diyala Governorate, northeast of Baghdad. Security
sources and local residents said that both gunships were seen crashing
in one of the village's farms, and reported that a US APC carrying 15 US
soldiers was destroyed in clashes that raged in the cities and villages
located north of al-Miqdadiyah. The US Army is yet to comment on the
incident, which comes at a time when US and Iraqi forces are besieging
areas north of al-Miqdadiyah, including al-Zur village."

This comes at a time when the US military are once again aggressively
attacking the forces of Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr - an action which
threatens to spread violence deeper into southern Iraq as well as
unifying Shia and Sunni against the occupation forces. Think March and
April, 2004 - a time when Shia and Sunni were, at times, literally
fighting side by side against US soldiers in places like Najaf and Fallujah.

While the military futilely spins its giant wheels in the bloody sands
of Iraq, it continues to be the Iraqi people who are suffering the most.

Here is a recent email from an Iraqi friend:

/Dear Dahr,/

/ How are you doing? I hope you are fine. I'm sorry for not keeping in
touch with you, but as you know the situation is bad here and it gets so
much worse and worse that words cannot describe it./

/ I really want you to remember someone named Abdul Razak who you met
one day here. He was responsible for the corpses' freezer at one of the
hospitals where you visited. This was the man who helped you as you
nearly fainted when you tried to enter the freezer. This man,
unfortunately, was found killed and his body thrown away on a street on
the 4th of April of this year.

I met his wife and his five children. The oldest child is a girl who is 20 years old and the youngest is 6 years
old. They live in a rented house. The father's salary was the only source of money for the whole family. Now, as he is dead, they have no source of money. I tried to help them by getting some donations for them
from the staff working in the hospital where he used to work, but it seems that it is not enough. Of course for a big family like his, this makes it more difficult. But I hope we can ease their pain and help them
manage their life by finding someone who can donate some money. I am wondering if you can get some donations for this family to start a new life and construct a small project to help them manage their life. Thank
you in advance .../

I get these regularly, and several of my colleagues who have also worked
in Iraq are telling me that they too are receiving requests for help
nowadays.

Here is another email I received the day before the aforementioned, from
another friend in Baghdad:

/Dear friend,/

/ Maybe this is the last message I am going to send ... really I don't
have anyone here. I am like a foreigner in my own country. I am really
feeling very afraid. I am living next to Al Sadr City and the Al Sadr
militia is killing anyone who is Sunni, especially when any explosion
attacks the Shia. They come to our zone and take Sunni people from their
houses and kill them. They killed one of my relatives. They killed my
neighbor, who was only 26 years old. My friend, the situation now in
Baghdad is very bad. Do you know that there is no work and no safety,
even in my own house? I'm very sad to tell you that I am very tired from
changing my house. My family and I leave the house every month for three
weeks and we run away like some one who did a crime. What is our crime?/

/ We are in a very bad situation. It is so bad now. Please help, is all
that I ask as we need help now. We are living, just waiting for our turn
to die ... Please help us if you can ... I don't have any one to ask but
you./

So while Iraqis are being killed or fearing death as they suffer through
the daily hell that is the US occupation, Cheney, the real force behind
this "administration," tells CNN, "No matter how you carve it - you can
call it anything you want - but basically, it is packing it in, going
home, persuading and convincing and validating the theory that the
Americans don't have the stomach for this fight."

And why should they? They are not sick bastards like you.

Guess what, Dick - moral and sane Americans "don't have the stomach for
this fight" because this fight should have never taken place. And anyone with a soul, let alone a conscience, should be more than happy to see US troops in Iraq "packing it in."