Our newest ambassador

One of the weaknesses of our normally peaceful presidential change of watch is that someone like Bush, leaving office peacefully, with ceremony and not in handcuffs, isn't an event that shows the world we have attempted to cleanse ourselves of his administration and its arrogance. Regardless of who his replacement will be, it will be hard to convince the world that our government has any respect for basic human rights, justice or the rule of law.

Newly released Al Jazeera cameraman Sami al Hajj returned to his native Sudan Monday to begin his new mission of United States bad will ambassador to the world. He was held in our Guantanamo prison camp without charge for seven years, apparently because he contributed money to a charity suspected of supporting terrorists, once interviewed Osama bin Laden and worked for a beverage company whose director supported Muslim forces in Bosnia and Chechnya. After seven years, or as he put it in a televised speech, "After 2,340 days spent in the most heinous prison mankind has ever known" he was released. Was this vengeance for his having reported human rights violations in Afghanistan? Maybe, but if this kind of evidence can justify seven years of enhanced interrogation, nobody the US targets for reprisals is safe and of course the world knows it, hates us for it and hates us the more for our not caring, for nattering endlessly about flag pins, what brand of whiskey is preferred and other insanely meaningless crap.

It will take a long time for the image of the US as a dangerous country run by paranoid megalomaniacs and peopled by cowardly, greedy entertainment junkies who have no clue or care, to fade. Who knows if it ever will? Who knows if we ever will be able to get clean of the addiction to diseased patriotism, ignorance and delusions of grandeur, but if we won't Punish, Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and the entire cabal, perhaps the election of Barak Obama will to some degree signal that a change has occurred in America. Without that perception, ambassadors like Sami al Hajj will unite the world against us and ignite the passions of ten thousand terrorists. We can chose to become an isolated nation dependent upon the fear of our nuclear weapons for protection, or we can begin to reverse course, to live again as free and courageous people who deal with the world honestly.

Our choices are very limited and there is no perfect candidate, but for my part, I think Barak Obama, whatever his faults and weaknesses may be, is the best choice we have.

Guantánamo

O dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon, Irrecoverably dark! total eclipse, Without all hope of day.

-John Milton, Sampson Agonistes-

The worst of the worst, scum de la scum; they're bad, evil, terrible people we are holding in Guantánamo, or so we have been told all along. Don't feel bad for the men in cages, we're only torturing them a little bit and after all, if someone has information about a terrible terrorist plot, wouldn't you torture them to find out?

Try to reconcile that official rationale for dehumanizing a group of people picked up or kidnapped under widely varying circumstances from many different places and sometimes only because somebody accused them, or they had a name similar to somebody who might have known somebody; try to reconcile it with the steady trickle of prisoners who after 5 years of duress and investigation have been released as not being dangerous or knowing nothing and being not guilty of doing anything.

Isa Murbati, a 41-year-old father of five who had been a Guantánamo prisoner for more than five years without having been charged with anything, arrived in Bahrain last night. Oops, never mind. He's the sixth and last Bahraini to be released and all the men had been in coveralls and cages since 2002. At lease one had attempted suicide repeatedly. If it had not been for the persistent efforts of the government of Bahrain and King Hamad Bin Isa al Khalifa, whose kingdom is considered to be "pro-American" and allows the US to base the Fifth Fleet there, who knows what would have happened to these wretches? Many other prisoners have no place to go because no country will take them. No money, no clothes, no country and most assuredly nearly or fully demented from half a decade of no sleep and waterboarding. The worst of the worst.

The government of Bahrain will seek compensation and perhaps they will succeed. After all they do have leverage, but paying damages would be an admission of having done something wrong and admissions of wrong doing do not escape the iron curtain around the White House any more easily that light will exit any other black hole. I'm sure something will be worked out to save the smiling face of our delusional dictator, but what amount of money can restore a ruined life, a ruined mind?

As far as anyone knows, the amount of valuable information extracted from the torture rooms is about nil. Of course the black hole doesn't emit much light and what it does emit tends to be disinformation or denial, but what can a man who has been in a dog cage for 5 years tell us about? Not much about Osama perhaps, but he can tell us a lot about the United States of America.

Nothing short of impeachment can restore our ruined reputation and bring back the light to the dark and secret nightmare cellars of our nation.

The enemy in Washington

No, he hasn't died for your sins and he's not going to, but he will lose his freedom, his job, his reputation and probably his career because of our sins and his choice to put conscience above loyalty to George W. Bush; his choice to honor his oath to uphold and protect the US Constitution against all enemies, foreign and in the White House.

Lt. Cmdr. Matthew Diaz, a lawyer for the US Navy, will spend 6 months in prison for having mailed a list of names of 550 men held in secret without the right to council and without the right to know the charges against them to a civil rights lawyer in New York. He claims it was a stupid mistake and it was. He should have been more careful.

"My oath as a commissioned officer is to the Constitution of the United States," Diaz said. "I'm not a criminal."

Not in any moral way and since doing what George W. Bush is doing is not only immoral but illegal and Unconstitutional, I will not call him one. Instead I will call him a patriot and a courageous one at that.

"I made a stupid decision, I know, but I felt it was the right decision, the moral decision, the decision that was required by international law," Said Diaz to The Dallas Morning News. "No matter how the conflict was identified, we were to treat them in accordance with Geneva, and it just wasn't being done. I think a good case could be made for allegations of war crimes, policies that were war crimes," he said. "There was a way to do this properly, and we're not doing it properly."

Diaz disputes the administrations obvious lie that we do not torture and he disputes the statement that the prisoners are "the worst of the worst." It has been said that up to 80% have already been cleared of any charge even after years of torture and yet they remain, illegally denied due process and denied access to council despite the Constitution and despite a Supreme Court decision affirming their right to challenge their imprisonment. Because George W. Bush and his ironically named Department of Justice are refusing to say who is in those cages, no lawyer can represent them or defend them.

No, Diaz will not die for your sins or because of them, but you and I are guilty and will remain so until we terminate the evil that has taken our ideals and our long struggle for justice and trampled them, mocked them and defiled them. Are we men? Are we citizens of a democratic republic? Well then, what are we doing when we tolerate this alien invader and his henchmen dragging us inexorably toward being just another evil dictatorship?

Worst of the worst

They're terrorists -- they're the worst of the worst, besides they're not citizens and they're not in the US so we can do anything we want to them. There is precedent and we're at war and that's the way we do it when there's a war.

You've heard it all and you've heard much more from people who don't seem to want to admit that the prisoners of war at Guantanamo aren't all guilty of anything and were grabbed from all kinds of places and for dubious reasons. The government admits it of course. In fact many have been cleared after years of suffering and isolation and "coercive" interrogation. At the moment there are 82 who have been cleared of charges (whatever they might have been) but we're still holding them for a variety of reasons including the ironic prohibition against sending them back to [other] places that use torture.

The 82 cleared prisoners who remain at the little piece of Cuba we insist isn't US territory and so doesn't have to pretend to be a free country governed by law, come from 16 countries in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia. Even if these people, with what remains of their sanity, dignity and resources are ever repatriated, I'm willing to bet that no hearts and minds have been won amongst them or the families they go home to and I will bet these people who were guilty of having an unlucky name or who were in the wrong place with the wrong face won't get much in the way of compensation for their damaged or ruined lives, much less an apology. Even so, "Sorry - we were looking for the other Abdul" isn't going to matter much.

So what's my point other than giving a damn about justice and the value of human life? It's that the bar stool warriors and Brooks Brothers bully boys have been advocating the torture of innocents and don't give a damn because they're too afraid to care about justice, the rule of law, decency, ethics, morality, human life or the Christianity they profess when someone sleeps with the wrong person or doesn't feel like praying in public. "There's a war on" and accusations of being "soft on terrorism" aren't excuses for barbarism and these pillars of Republican wisdom are starting to smell like the rotten things they are.