It’s the same old story, Middle Eastern people dying in suspicious circumstances in American custody.
“On the night of June 10, 2006, three Guantanamo detainees were found dead in their individual cells. Without any autopsy or investigation, U.S. military officials proclaimed “suicide by hanging” as the cause of each death, and immediately sought to exploit the episode as proof of the evil of the detainees. Admiral Harry Harris, the camp’s commander, said it showed “they have no regard for life” and that the suicides were “not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetric warfare aimed at us here at Guantanamo”; another official anonymously said that the suicides showed the victims were “committed jihadists [who] will do anything they can to advance their cause,” while another sneered that “it was a good PR move to draw attention.”
Who cares? You might say. This happened in 2006, under President Bush. Now we have President Obama, the President of Hope and Change. The president who promised transparency in government. The president who promised to shut down Guantanamo bay. Things are different now, right?
Wrong.
Under President Obama, investigations into the deaths of these men, one of whom was just a 17 year old boy when he was detained have been repeatedly stymied. Not only is Obama not going to prosecute anyone who supported the illegal detention and torture of thousands of Afghani and Iraqi citizens, he’s also going to continue to block efforts to discover the truth of what happened at Guantanamo Bay, whilst allowing torture to continue on his watch.
By this measure alone, Obama has deeply betrayed his supporters. Where is the hope and change in ongoing torture? Where is the hope and change in ongoing lies and coverups that protect those who commit heinous crimes in the name of war profits?
More importantly however, than in the clearly morally corrupt halls of political power, where is the spirit of hope and change amidst the American people?
It is common knowledge that men, women and children are dying and being tortured in the name of ‘freedom’, and in the USA, Tiger Wood’s latest affair is front page news, along with Black Friday sales. Is it possible for a society to be more decadent? Is it possible for a society to be more self centered?
When these atrocities first came to light, Bush was blamed for them, and the world believed that perhaps the American public had been hijacked by a cruel right wing government. Obama was elected and one year on, Guantanamo and other so called ‘Black Prisons’ are still operational in Afghanistan and in many other countries across the globe. Torture has not been stopped. It continues and it victimizes everyone. It creates terrorists in their thousands, both in detaining and torturing innocent people, and in the families of those who have their family members ripped away from them.
With Guantanamo Bay and prisons of its ilk, the USA has shown the world that it no longer has any room for compassion, for the protection of innocence, for the most basic love for its fellow man. Guantanamo Bay will go down in history as a human rights atrocity and American taxpayers are silently complicit in the ongoing sins of their government.
Merry Christmas.