Guantanamo homicides; government cover-up

I am feeling as though I'm in shock after reading "The Guantánamo 'Suicides,'" an article by Scott Horton that appears in the March 2010 edition of Harper's Magazine (available online only to subscribers). The official story offered by the United States government is that these three prisoners, who occupied non-adjacent cells, simultaneously committed suicide on June 9, 2006. According to the NCI as documents, each prisoner had fashioned a noose from torn sheets and T-shirts and tied it to the top of his cell's 8-foot high steel mesh wall. Each prisoner was able somehow to bind his own hands, and, in at least one case, his own feet, then stuff more rags deep down into his own throat area we are then asked to believe that each prisoner, even as he was choking on those rags, climbed up on his wash basin, slipped his head through the news, tightened it, and left from the wash basin to hang until he asphyxiated. Horton's incredible article names names and provides details with regard to all of the following: * The United States appears to have murdered at least three of the prisoners at Guantánamo. None of these three men had been charged with any crime. Two of these men were set to be released. There is no credible evidence that any of them were terrorists. Evidence strongly suggests that they were beaten and then further tortured through waterboarding on the night they were killed. * The United States has worked furiously to cover up these murders, spewing countless lies in the process. * The United States maintained a special torture building ("a black site") far from the main prison camp at Guantánamo, and those who worked at Guantánamo were told to not ask any questions about it. It was called "Camp No," and those who have come forward at considerable risk have reported hearing screaming from that building. * After the three prisoners were apparently murdered, those in charge of Guantánamo viciously attacked the dead men, arguing to the press that "They have no regard for human life, neither ours nor their own." * In the process of "investigating the suicides," the U.S. government seized all written communications possessed by the other Guantánamo prisoners, including communications clearly constituting attorney-client privilege. * When presented with the facts presented in Horton's article, the Bush administration and the Obama administration's both refused to conduct any meaningful investigation. Both administrations actively suppressed the truth. * The Obama administration would simply rather not have to deal with the criminal actions of the Bush administration. I'm sure that many Americans are disgusted, as I am, that the United States has engaged in this sort of behavior. I'm also sure that millions of Americans would be outraged that Horton would dare to accuse the United States of anything improper; these sorts of people (I've met some of them and I've heard many on television) don't care whether the Guantanamo prisoners were really terrorists and don't care whether they were tortured. It's disturbing on many levels. It all makes you wonder what has become of us. The following is from a related article from yesterday's NYT, where it is reported that the Obama Administration is upset that a British Court released U.S. information indicating that U.S. treatment of prisoners "violated legal prohibitions against torture and cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of prisoners." You'd think that Mr. Obama would abide by his campaign promise to be an open book, but he's doing the opposite: A spokesman for President Obama expressed “deep disappointment” in the court’s decision, which might have been shocking except that Mr. Obama has refused to support any real investigation of Mr. Bush’s lawless detention policies. His lawyers have tried to shut down court cases filed by victims of those policies, with the same extravagant claims of state secrets and executive power that Mr. Bush made. In another a related matter, Dick Cheney reminded the world yesterday that he has long been a big fan of A) waterboarding and B) telling his lawyers what to tell him.

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Kangaroo Courts and Show Trials

A debate is raging over the wisdom of the administration's decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) in a civilian court in New York City. Those opposed to the decision assert that it's simply too dangerous, that a military tribunal in Guantanamo would be better, and that it's foolish to afford any constitutional protections to terrorists. They argue that KSM and other terrorists should be held under the law of war-- that their actions were not crimes, but rather acts of war and are therefore undeserving of access to our normal criminal justice system. There is so much wrong with this way of thinking, it's difficult to know where to begin to refute them. I think I'll go on a point-by-point basis. Those opposed to civilian trials initially cite security concerns. For example, see this bipartisan letter from six senators to Attorney General Eric Holder. The typical argument goes like this:

The security and other risks inherent in holding the trial in New York City are reflected in Mayor Bloomberg’s recent letter to the administration advising that New York City will be required to spend more than $200 million per year in security measures for the trial. As Mayor Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Kelly know too well, the threat of terrorist acts in New York City is a daily challenge. Holding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s trial in that city, and trying other enemy combatants in venues such as Washington, DC and northern Virginia, would unnecessarily increase the burden of facing those challenges, including the increased risk of terrorist attacks.

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Warming to Climate Claims

As Washington D.C. gets record snowfall, climate denialists cackle with glee. It was a cool summer, and now a cold winter. So, they wonder, where is this global warming? "People," I want to condescendingly say, "look at the sun." Weather girls of all genders and persuasions are mentioning that this is the coldest winter in 11 years. Notice that? Are they unaware that there is an 11 year cycle of solar warming and cooling that corresponds to -- and can be measured by -- sunspots? So it's like saying with implied importance that this is the coldest month since 12 months ago. The spots are just starting up, much like the days getting longer at the end of December. Here is a nice look at the sunspot phenomenon. It is intuitively confusing that dark spots mean more heat. But the pair of images here shows visible and ultraviolet views of the same scene. Those dark spots are tunnels into the gamma-hot regions of the sun. Our eyes can only see one octave on the spectrum. Both hotter than blue and cooler than red ranges are invisible. Dark. Red hot is the coldest temperature that gives off light. (Read about Black Body Radiation if you want to know how this is known.) Another detail that climate denialists get wrong is the meaning of heavy snowfall. If you get heavy precipitation, it implies much moisture aloft. That is, many more megatons of water are evaporated. By heat. So before you point to a low local current temperature as evidence against global warming, please look at the time scale that climatologists use, like the Temperature record of the past 1000 years, or even for the last century and a half:

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Hypocrisy on parade

Perhaps you've heard about the American hikers being held in an Iranian prison? A couple of Belgian bicyclists who were detained at the same prison have some updates on their situation:

"We're deeply concerned for their well-being," Van den Bosch and Falleur wrote in a news release. "The psychological stresses of detention were very great, especially during interrogation and solitary confinement." As of early December, when Van den Bosch and Falleur were released, the American hikers were being held in solitary confinement, a harrowing experience the Belgian men describe in detail. "We were in cells with no outside contact and a ceiling light on day and night," they wrote. "No communication was possible with other prisoners or with our families. Everything was designed to make us feel very lonely." Van den Bosch and Falleur added, "From our own experience, we can only imagine that the psychological pressure put on the hikers to confess to crimes they are innocent of is extremely intense. Their feeling of loneliness must be extreme."
Yes, no doubt the psychological pressures one must face in those sorts of situations must be intense. Not as intense as the pressures innocent Muslims face in America's torture prisons and secret black-ops sites, but extreme in any case!

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Cost of our new high-speed trains is dwarfed by the tax dollars we waste in our Afghanistan and Iraq “wars.”

President Obama has recently announced that he will allocate $8 billion ($4 billion each year, over two years) to develop a new system of high-speed passenger rail service. This is an excellent idea. The new rail lines will be created within 10 geographical corridors ranging from 100 to 600 miles long. Note, however, that the high-speed rail line system will be an extremely expensive project, and that the $8 billion bill will need to be paid by 138 million tax-paying Americans. Dividing the $8 billion cost by the number of taxpayers, we can see that, on average, each taxpayer will pay almost $60 ($30 per year, for two years) to support this massive new high-speed rail service. Again, this high-speed rail project will cost an immense amount of money. Consider, though, how small this pile of rail money looks when compared to the amount of money we are wasting in the "wars" in Iraq and Afghanistan. For 2009, the United States spent approximately $87 billion for Iraq and $47 billion for Afghanistan. The fiscal 2010 budget requests $65 billion for Afghanistan operations and $61 billion for Iraq. the cost of these two "wars" together is $126 billion for 2010. Compare these expenditures on a bar chart: Graph by Erich Vieth

Continue ReadingCost of our new high-speed trains is dwarfed by the tax dollars we waste in our Afghanistan and Iraq “wars.”