Guantanamo Bay-Just some thoughts....

It doesn't matter if one person or a million people died on the same say as your birthday.

There will always be at least one person who regards your happy birthday as insignificant. Someone they knew died. Or left for their secretary. Or did something shitty to them.

If you're lucky, you mght have at least one person who wants to make it a happy occasion.

Grief is private. These people remembering have no need for you to join in.

You go off to your restaurant. They won't be there.

Right, someone else do the "Guantanamo Bay" perspective.

The argument is not whether there are people who wish to kill Americans. The argument is whether we truly live up to the higher standard we claim in comparison.

Pardon us, Sir, for we are but simple goatherders

Well that's a big fat drag.

PH33L MY PA1N!!!!

If they're now licensing from the AMG database for CD reviews, then yep, I'm him, unless there's a clone of me going around. ;-)

he had us! we are pwned!

Silly us.

I imagine some Taliban militia find RPG's very relaxing.

No one ever suspects the blind man!

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http://img60.imageshack.us/img60/5247/storemullah7sg.gif

http://store.rushlimbaugh.com/Products.aspx?ParentID=48661

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Illustrate absurdity by being absurd. This one will really get under the skin of the lib next-door. Club G'itmo logo on front "My Mullah went to Club G'itmo and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt" emblazoned on back. Available in Institutional Orange only in sizes: S, M, L, XL, XXL, and now in XXXL & XXXXL!

The Club G'itmo T-Shirt - Your Tropical Retreat from the Stress of Jihad

Illustrate absurdity by being absurd! Wear your Club G'itmo T-shirt and drive liberals nuts. Club G'itmo logo on front. "Your Tropical Retreat from the Stress of Jihad" emblazoned on back. Available in Institutional Orange only in sizes:S, M, L, XL, XXL, and now in XXXL & XXXXL!

The Club G'itmo T-Shirt - I Got My Free Koran and Prayer Rug at G'itmo

The left will throw a fit over this one. Club G'itmo logo on front. "I got my free Koran and prayer rug at Gitmo" emblazoned on back. Available in Institutional Orange only in sizes: S, M, L, XL, XXL, and now in XXXL & XXXXL!

The Club G'itmo T-Shirt - What Happens in G'itmo Stays in G'itmo

A MUST Have. Club G'itmo logo on front. "What Happens in G'itmo stays in G'itmo emblazoned on back." Available in Institutional Orange only in sizes: S, M, L, XL, XXL, and now in XXXL & XXXXL!

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they're now even available for XXXL _AND_ XXXXL! Even the Big Dogs can wear them!

Also, where do you stand on the whole "lite-stick sodomizing" or "raping your male prisoners" thing?

CIA uses secret prisons abroad: report

By Joanne Allen
36 minutes ago

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The CIA has been hiding and interrogating al Qaeda captives at a secret facility in Eastern Europe, part of a covert global prison system that has included sites in eight countries and was set up after the September 11, 2001, attacks, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday.

The secret network included "several democracies in Eastern Europe" as well as Thailand and Afghanistan, the newspaper reported, but it did not publish the names of the European countries at the request of senior U.S. officials...

[...]

'BLACK SITES'

According to the Washington Post, the prisons are referred to as "black sites" in classified U.S. documents and virtually nothing is known about who the detainees are, how they are interrogated or about decisions on how long they will be held.

About 30 major terrorism suspects have been held at black sites while more than 70 other detainees, considered less important, were delivered to foreign intelligence services under a process known as "rendition," the paper said, citing U.S. and foreign intelligence sources.

The top 30 al Qaeda prisoners are isolated from the outside world, have no recognized legal rights and no one outside the CIA is allowed to talk with or see them, the sources told the newspaper.

The paper, citing several former and current intelligence and other U.S. government officials, said the CIA used such detention centers abroad because in the United States it is illegal to hold prisoners in such isolation...

I guess Poland HAS been helping out!

Oh yeah, and Cheney is still pushing to exempt CIA folks from the John McCain's anti-torture legislation...

Can somebody explain to me why American interrogation techniques seem to always involve sticking objects up prisoners' asses? This has got to be some sort of "method" because it is reported over and over again...

[talking about reports of violent force-feedings of the Gitmo prisoners and Rumsfeld's casual dismissals of it all]

...If even one American were held prisoner in the same way by another country, and if even one American were force-fed in the manner some of these prisoners are alleged to have been, can you imagine the outrage that would erupt from the administration -- outrage that would be immediately amplified by the rightwing media? It would be deafening.

But these people...well, they're not our kind, of course. They're not at all like us. They're barely even human. Who cares?

Almost no one, including most Americans. And since the administration views itself as inherently and unquestionably good, noble and virtuous, nothing it does could possibly be wrong. If you dare to suggest such a thing...why, one of these days, you might end up in Guantanamo yourself....

Your trivialisation of these issues is astounding and actually quite sickening. Read some history books and Amnesty International reports before making uninformed, chauvinistic, confused and offensive comments.

And don't EVER condescend to ILX again. Your "intellectual ability" would not even rate on a graph compared to all of the great intellects on this board.

oh yeah, and this:

The vice president drew support from at least one lawmaker, Sen. Jeff Sessions (news, bio, voting record) of Alabama, while Arizona Sen. John McCain (news, bio, voting record) dissented, officials said....

Incident reports reviewed by The Associated Press indicate Military Police guards are routinely head-butted, spat upon and doused by "cocktails" of feces, urine, vomit and sperm collected in meal cups by the prisoners.

most played track on condi's ipod = super roots 7

george bush cares about black people

george bush is a compassionate conservative

george bush is a uniter, not a divider

george bush is The Decider

george bush will not stand for a nucular Iran

Army Col. Larry James, whose team of psychologists assists interrogators, said he does not want to know where Camp 7 is.

"I learned a long, long time ago, if I'm going to be successful in the intel community, I'm meticulously — in a very, very dedicated way — going to stay in my lane," he said. "So if I don't have a specific need to know about something, I don't want to know about it. I don't ask about it."

Sheesh, way to go Army Col. Larry James.

"hey, I just work here"

Befehl ist Befehl

I wish I could find that Bush speech on Iraq where he talked about how no Baathists would be able to say they were "just doing their jobs"

not the cold desert floor of Iraq, eating worms, bugs, and goat.

Goat meat's nice!

http://z.about.com/d/movies/1/0/c/o/N/goodgermanposter2.jpg

also: look at this waterboarding cat, proving it isn't torture at all:

http://i25.tinypic.com/2vn03de.jpg

haha

aww

"waterboarding" is the new "dirty bomb," i.e. unintentionally funny terror-related buzzword

Ten years today

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/10/guantanamo-bay-anniversary_n_1197661.html

Guantanamo
He googled Guantanamo
Guantanamo-o
He was just some random schmo

lol this was me

― and what

scumbags.

Last week, the Obama administration imposed new arbitrary rules for Guantanamo detainees who have lost their first habeas corpus challenge. Those new rules eliminate the right of lawyers to visit their clients at the detention facility; the old rules establishing that right were in place since 2004, and were bolstered by the Supreme Court’s 2008 Boumediene ruling that detainees were entitled to a “meaningful” opportunity to contest the legality of their detention. The DOJ recently informed a lawyer for a Yemeni detainee, Yasein Khasem Mohammad Esmail, that he would be barred from visiting his client unless he agreed to a new regime of restrictive rules, including acknowledging that such visits are within the sole discretion of the camp’s military commander. Moreover, as SCOTUSblog’s Lyle Denniston explains:

Besides putting control over legal contacts entirely under a military commander’s control, the “memorandum of understanding” does not allow attorneys to share with other detainee lawyers what they learn, and does not appear to allow them to use any such information to help prepare their own client for a system of periodic review at Guantanamo of whether continued detention is justified, and may even forbid the use of such information to help prepare a defense to formal terrorism criminal charges against their client.

The New York Times Editorial Page today denounced these new rules as “spiteful,” cited it as “the Obama administration’s latest overuse of executive authority,” and said “the administration looks as if it is imperiously punishing detainees for their temerity in bringing legal challenges to their detention and losing.” Detainee lawyers are refusing to submit to these new rules and are asking a federal court to rule that they violate the detainees’ right to legal counsel.

http://www.salon.com/2012/07/23/the_obama_gitmo_myth/

otm

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/sep/11/guantanamo-prisoner-death-democrats

The State Department on Monday reassigned Daniel Fried, the special envoy for closing the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and will not replace him, according to an internal personnel announcement...
Mr. Fried will become the department’s coordinator for sanctions policy and will work on issues including Iran and Syria.

http://www.emptywheel.net/2013/01/28/rather-than-close-gitmo-well-just-intercept-more-medical-goods-from-iran/

Put simply, Obama's plan was never to close Gitmo as much as it was to re-locate it to Illinois: to what the ACLU dubbed "Gitmo North".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/29/obama-guantanamo-pentagon-cyber-yemen

having a Gitmo on US soil is very very different tho. subject to laws and shit.

wanna bet?

there's a reason "black sites" aren't on US soil

I'm not a huge fan of the US prison system or anything but the legal apparatus that oversees requires a certain degree of transparency and is subject to rules and procedures that all go out the window as soon as you're dealing with non-citizens somewhere outside the US.

I know you don't wanna give O any credit for intentions but if he never had any intention of closing it why did he bother to make such a big PR stink about trying to. seems pretty clear to me he just underestimated the congressional (and local) opposition to modifying the legal framework for how the country handles terror cases

tsk tsk, ya never learn... Let's go back 3 years, shall we?

The Obama administration announced today that it will purchase the Thomson Correctional Center in Illinois for the purpose of holding some of the detainees currently remaining at Guantánamo. Though the administration is leaving unsaid which detainees will be moved there and for what purposes, the information it has provided indicates that some detainees might be held for military commission proceedings in Illinois while others might be held at Thomson indefinitely without charge or trial.

The administration has stated that "any detainees at Guantánamo who continue to be held, and for whom no prosecution is planned, will be held only under authority granted by Congress in 2001 under the Authorization for Use of Military Force, as informed by the law of war." However, the so-called war on terrorism is not a traditional war, having no temporal or geographical boundaries.

http://www.aclu.org/national-security/creating-gitmo-north-alarming-step-says-aclu

right, nonetheless the legal grounds the ACLU can challenge those detentions under are different than the ones they used to challenge detentions at Gitmo

but yeah let's pretend like O is the real problem here, and not the other two branches of gov't

they're all problems.

^^ otm

damn the level of abuse that goes on at guantanamo is insane

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v212/etienne_saint/ScreenShot2013-05-15at81756AM_zps9cbf8436.png

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2013/jul/08/mos-def-force-fed-guantanamo-bay-video

that crazed lefty.... John Grisham

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/12/john-grisham-guantanamo-bay-us-wrong?CMP=twt_gu

@ggreenwald
From "The Audacity of Hope" to "The Path of Least Resistance": Obama and Gitmo

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/03/i-should-have-closed-gitmo-obama-says-116204.html

No indication of how it would have happened though. As I understand it, there are broadly three groups of detainee - ones who everyone believes are broadly innocent of any serious crimes, ones who are believed to be guilty of crimes that could potentially be prosecuted and third group in the middle who there is no evidence to convict but enough ambiguity to make it difficult to clear them absolutely. The challenge with taking all of them to Indiana or wherever is that it's only one subset who could be detained indefinitely - the ones who could be put on trial. The bigger problem has always been what to do with the prisoners who there is no reasonable prospect of convicting. It would be difficult to deny them asylum, which would raise obvious political challenges.

What they've been doing over the last six years is slowly bribing odd countries like Uruguay, Estonia and Slovakia to take in the innocent ones. It is obviously harder to find places to send the less obviously innocent ones. Unless he's saying all of them should have been taken to the US and given new lives there (which would be brave and arguably correct - but practically unthinkable) idk what he is suggesting.

Last UK Guantanamo Bay detainee arrives in UK

I found the www.ilxor.com web forum this morning through Yahoo search... I was born on September 11th, 1957...

― Michael Thomas, Wednesday, November 2, 2005

lol this was me

― and what, Saturday, September 22, 2007

^^ things that slip past you but when you finally see them you say aha!

all Obama wants to do by closing Gitmo is to save money while continuing indefinite detention.

so, fuck him.

lol @ blaming him for Gitmo

for CONTINUING IT, yes fuck. see also WARS

we've been over this, Congress has thwarted him at every turn, he's tried multiple avenues to closing it. I'm not convinced he just has to use some magical, rarely used legal loophole to close it.

when does Morbs listen?

Charlie Savage's recent book Power Wars goes into the nuances. He had his best shot early in 2009 when, according to Savage's sources (many of whom on the record), he should have started the bureaucratic meals moving instead of merely talking about it; the latter allowed opposition to harden.

But the continued existence of Guantanamo is an excrescence anyway, so he can try.

lol = moves

MAGICAL Cmdr-in-Chief powers! even one of his own legal hustlers say he can do it unilaterally.

i always listen

No one thinks it's going to happen. Call it bad faith + helping the Dem nominee.

Center for Constitutional Rights:

For too long the president has not used his ample, existing legal authority to transfer cleared detainees or to prosecute detainees the government believes have committed crimes in federal court, rather than in unfair and hapless military commissions. The Periodic Review Board (PRB) process is moving too slowly to meaningfully reduce the number of men slated for indefinite detention purportedly under the laws of war. Transferring those men to the U.S. for continued detention simply relocates and thus preserves the core injustice of Guantánamo. The Center for Constitutional Rights strongly opposes importing the regime of indefinite detention into the U.S., except in the cases of certain detainees with particular circumstances....

CCR is particularly concerned about conditions of confinement, which are being described in the news media as “beyond supermax.” Supermax prison conditions, including prolonged solitary confinement, constitute torture, as is increasingly being recognized in the United States, and would violate the Geneva Conventions.

We are also concerned that any deal that might be struck with Congress to allow transfers to the U.S. would come at a high cost, including establishment of a permanent facility to indefinitely detain not only detainees from Guantánamo, but also future captives, which may also be accompanied by new detention authority and efforts to limit detainees’ legal rights.

The plan does not address these concerns, and the public should not accede to it without having these critical concerns addressed.

https://ccrjustice.org/ccr-position-obama-s-new-plan-close-guant-namo

can't believe noted ilx poster "and what" did guantanamo

At the Defense Media Activity, a little-known and oddly named office in Ft. Meade, Maryland, that provides “news and information to U.S. forces worldwide,” there are thousands of classified“educational” films about the American military—including a huge trove of secret home movies from Gitmo....

Some of the previously reported psyops at Gitmo included the use of music in a manner that could certainly be considered torture: “Metallica’s Enter Sandman has been played at cacophonous levels for hours on end,” the Guardian reported in 2008. Involuntary subjection to Rage Against the Machine was another favorite psyop. The DMA possesses a variety of classified psyop recordings, including “SAUDI’S IN CAMP FOUR FOR PSYOPS,” “PSYOP PRODUCTS,” “PSYOPS POSTERS HANGING IN CAMP DELTA,” and “PSYOPS AWARDS.”

The references to interrogations and psychological warfare stand in contrast to apparent recordings of moments that sound almost pleasant, including meals, games of soccer, and even perverse “farewell dinners” for detainees being released to other countries....

http://gawker.com/the-classified-home-movies-of-guantanamo-bay-1774698603

stand in contrast to apparent recordings of moments that sound almost pleasant, including meals, games of soccer, and even perverse “farewell dinners” for detainees being released to other countries....

being relentlessly harsh is not as psychologically effective as randomly switching between harshness and kindness. the dissonance this creates is just another form of cruelty.