Guantanamo: Starving for Justice
The Minnesota Daily has an editorial today on the hunger strike at Guantanamo:
About a quarter of the detainees in Guantanamo Bay are engaged in a hunger strike, and 18 prisoners are being force-fed through tubes or intravenously after about a month of not eating. The prisoners are protesting the frightening reality that detainees have gone three years without trials.
....While morality and ethics are abstract ideas, justice is more concrete, hence why there are laws. Guantanamo and the actions that have been taken by our government against the detainees violate the Geneva convention, the Bill of Rights, and our Constitution. Justice is not merely a conditional idea.
The conclusion, which undoubtedly will fall on deaf ears:
The current hunger strike should imbue a sense of urgency in being critical of human rights violations conducted by the U.S. government.
Don't miss George Hunsinger's, a frequent reader and occasional commenter on TalkLeft, latest op-ed on the detainees, The Rights of Detainees: Who Is Protecting Whom From What?
Just before the August congressional recess, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) at the urging of the White House, prevented a Senate vote on legislation that would forbid the cruel, degrading, and inhuman treatment of prisoners. Equally disturbing, the White House blocked the court-ordered release of further photos from the Abu Ghraib prison. According to Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), the images show evidence of "rape and murder." Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has said that these photos depict "acts that can only be described as blatantly sadistic, cruel, and inhuman."
Pentagon officials oppose the release of these photographs, arguing that they would inflame the Muslim world and put the lives of American soldiers at risk. Whether the Pentagon is equally concerned about accountability for the abuses themselves, however, is far from clear.
Meanwhile, the president threatens to veto the Senate military appropriations bill if it contains an amendment by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) banning cruel, degrading, and inhuman treatment of prisoners, or an amendment by Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) that would set up a 9/11-style commission to investigate abuses like the ones captured in the suppressed photos.
Are we still looking at a "few bad apples"? Or at the cover-up of a hidden culture (or subculture) of torture? As the Pew Research Center poll suggests, an increasing number of Americans are beginning to ask: Who is protecting whom from what?
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