From today’s Democracy Now! headlines a WikiLeaks leak that is making mainstream news as well:
WikiLeaks Documents Reveal Over 150 Innocent Men Knowingly Held at Guantánamo
The whistleblowing website WikiLeaks has begun releasing thousands of secret documents from the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The documents reveal the Bush and Obama administrations knowingly imprisoned more than 150 innocent men for years without charge. In dozens of cases, senior U.S. commanders were said to have concluded that there was no reason for the men to have been transferred to Guantánamo. Among the innocent prisoners were an 89-year-old Afghan villager and a 14-year-old boy who had been kidnapped. Some men were imprisoned at Guantánamo simply because they wore a certain model of Casio watches, which had been used as timers by al-Qaeda. The documents also reveal that the journalist Sami al-Hajj was held at Guantánamo for six years partly in order to be interrogated about his employer, the Al Jazeera news network. Al-Hajj’s file said he was sent to Guantánamo in order to “provide information on…the al-Jazeera news network’s training programme, telecommunications equipment, and news gathering operations in Chechnya, Kosovo and Afghanistan.”
More on this from The Guardian/UK (1, 2).
If you like torture, vote for a Democrat or a Republican for US Congress or President. It won’t matter which candidate or party you pick because apparently you’ll get state-sanctioned torture either way. The illegal, unethical, and ongoing occupations (and commensurate torture) are the preeminent moral and fiscal issues of our day. Virtually all other issues the US faces pale in significance to American occupation. Virtually all other issues the US faces can be remedied if not fixed outright by ending American occupation. That’s because of how much the US spends on occupation (1, 2, and later Stiglitz would say his early estimates were lowballs).
Not only was Obama’s promise to end the prison at Guantánamo a weak promise, the promise was never made good. Guantánamo’s prisoners can be easily moved to Bagram or one of a number of secret prisons the US maintains around the world.
Update 2011-04-26:
- Democracy Now! has more on this (transcript, low-quality video, high-quality video, audio) interviewing The Guardian’s investigations executive editor, David Leigh, one of the authors of the aforementioned Guardian article.
- On 2011-04-25 TheRealNews.com interviewed Vincent Warren, Executive Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights about the WikiLeaks scoop.