TomDispatch: Compare the searing account Glenn Greenwald has written of the recent release of six Guantanamo detainees to the usual stories about the event here and you get a sense of why Americans generally see even the worst things they do in a thoroughly different light than much of the rest of the world. Here are just a few paragraphs. Tom The U.S. military overnight transferred six Guantánamo detainees to Uruguay. All of them had been imprisoned since 2002 – more than 12 years. None has ever been charged with a crime, let alone convicted of any wrongdoing. They had all been cleared for release years ago by the Pentagon itself, but nonetheless remained in cages until today. Among the released detainees is Abu Wa’el Dhiab, a Lebanese-born Syrian national and father of four who was seized by the Pakistani police and turned over to the U.S. in 2002 for what was reportedly a large bounty. He was cleared for release in 2009 – five years ago – and has repeatedly gone on hunger strikes inside the camp to protest his treatment. At the age of 43, he has become physically debilitated.... One significant reason these six detainees were released today is because Uruguay’s President, Jose Mujica, publicly shamed the U.S. into doing so. He wrote an open letter to Obama last week, posted on his presidential website, urging their release on humanitarian grounds, writing: “We have offered our hospitality for human beings who suffered an atrocious kidnapping in Guantánamo.” Mujica himself is a “former 14-year political prisoner who spent much of his captivity in solitary confinement for his guerrilla activities with the Tupamaro revolutionary movement.” Just as the Obama administration suppressed photos showing U.S. torture and is now attempting to delay if not outright prevent release of the U.S. Senate’s torture report, Obama officials have repeatedly sought to suppress the videos showing the horrors of force-feeding at Guantanámo. It was the family of Dhiab, the Lebanese-Syrian detainee released today, which relentlessly pursued a legal and public campaign to obtain those videos to show the brutality of this treatment.... That is a scenario that has repeated itself over and over for the last 13 years – not just at Guantanámo but other American due-process-free hellholes at Bagram (which the Obama DOJ vehemently defended) and Abu Ghraib, as well as aboard floating lawless ships and CIA black sites. None of this has remotely deterred the U.S. and its uber-national media commentators from continuing to lecture the world on the necessity of due process and fair judicial proceedings (just as Tony Blair’s lucrative subservience to dictators doesn’t prevent him from lecturing the world on the need for democracy). But all of this has increasingly caused the world to stop taking seriously anything American officials have to say on such matters (to the extent anyone took it seriously before). As well they should. The historic evils and shameful actions of the U.S. government during the Endless War on Terror are manifold. Keeping people in cages for more than a decade and counting in the middle of the sea, far from their families, without a shred of due process or hope for release, is near the top of that list.
Posted on: Wed, 10 Dec 2014 05:32:28 +0000
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