Who were the prisoners of Guantanamo? Andy Worthington has compiled a four-part series telling us their stories. Here's the disturbing bottom line:
[A]t least 93 percent of the 779 men and boys imprisoned in total — were either completely innocent people, seized as a result of dubious intelligence or sold for bounty payments, or Taliban foot soldiers, recruited to fight an inter-Muslim civil war that began long before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and that had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden or international terrorism.
I don't pretend to know enough to know whether these accounts are totally accurate, but they are filled with details, personal anecdotes, statistics and reports regarding individual court cases. It has a strong ring of authenticity. Further, these individual accounts corroborate general accounts produced elsewhere. I have no reason to disbelieve any part of Andy Worthington's work. He is a well-reputed journalist who has published elsewhere, such as this post at Huffington Post.
I am proud to be an American. America does much right in the world and has the potential to do much more that is admirable. This account by Andy Worthington, however, describes America at its shameful worst.
On February 17, 2009, Pamela Olson gave a riveting talk on the details of daily life in the Palestinian West Bank. She gave her talk at a recent session of "TechTalks," a series of talks sponsored by Google.
Olson graduated from Stanford in 2002 with a major in physics. She lived in Ramallah, West Bank, for a year and a half beginning in the summer of 2004 and worked as a journalist for the Palestine Monitor.
What is startling about this video are the many gorgeous scenes from the West Bank accompanying Olson's introduction to day-to-day life in the West Bank, something which Americans rarely learn of from the American media. The happiness and charm of the West Bank is covered in the first half of Olson's talk. But there is more to the West Bank, of course. Behind all of the charm:
looms the conflict, the occupation, and violence. Since September 2000, more than 5,500 Palestinians and 1,100 Israelis have been killed. A series of walls, fences, roadblocks, checkpoints, army bases, and settlements keep the Palestinians in the West Bank under an almost constant state of siege and strangle the economy of many towns and villages, including Bethlehem. Gaza has been turned into an open-air prison whose desperate inmates can only get vital supplies through smuggling tunnels -- which also transport weapons that Palestinian militants use to target Israeli civilians.
[Her story is] a fascinating world of beauty and terror, of hospitality and homicide, of the absurd and the sublime constantly together -- a microcosmic view of a little-understood human story with global implications.
Olson talks in detail about the numerous checkpoints, the wall and the Israeli settlements. She plainly explains that the occupation, the checkpoints, the wall and the settlements are indisputably illegal pursuant to international law. The wall now runs 70 km., cutting Palestinians off from each other. The wall is a "huge scar on the landscape." It keeps Palestinians from each other, keeps them from farming, keeps them from their own hospitals and keeps their children from getting to school. Even Palestinian politicians are prevented from having free access to their own people. Entire neighborhoods are being destroyed, to make way for more illegal Israeli settlements. The Palestinians are essentially being herded into an ever-smaller prison. Olson backs up her statements with extensive photography.
Olson's vivid photos and her calm commentary makes the violence by Palestinians much more understandable. Watching this talk gave me more information than watching dozens of the simplistic stories told by the American Media. Perhaps this unrelenting stream of simplistic media stories is a major cause of America's unflinching support of Israeli's harsh policies toward the Palestinians. Sadly, it is a common Palestinian saying that "The silence of the West is worse than the bullets of the Israelis."
Here is Olson's talk, which lasts 80 minutes:
For more information on Pamela Olson, you can visit www.pamolson.org
The pages of legal history reveal many tragic miscarriages of justice involving innocent men and women who were prosecuted, wrongfully convicted, and sentenced to prison or to death. Opinions differ on prevalence rates, but it is clear that a disturbing number of cases have involved defendants who were convicted based only on false confessions that, at least in retrospect, could not have been true. Indeed, as in the case of the Central Park incident, disputed false confessions have convicted some people notwithstanding physical evidence to the contrary. As a result of technological advances in forensic DNA typing--which enables the review of past cases in which blood, hair, semen, skin, saliva or other biological material has been preserved--many new, high-profile wrongful convictions have surfaced in recent years, up to 157 in the U.S. alone at the time of this writing.
Typically 20 to 25 percent of DNA exonerations had false confessions in evidence. Why would an innocent person confess to a crime? A scan of the scientific literature reveals how a complex set of psychological factors comes into play . . . [One of those factors is the tendency] toward compliance or suggestibility in the face of two common interrogation tactics--the presentation of false incriminating evidence and the impression that giving a confession might bring leniency. In short, sometimes people confess because it seems like the only way out of a terrible situation.
This webpage from Bill Moyers' Journal features a highly charged written exchange between journalist Bill Moyers and Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League on the topic of Israel's recent military incursion into Gaza. This exchange is a good illustration on how to handle the rhetorical tactics employed by those who…
I watched a good portion of Bush's last press conference and couldn't help thinking it was an audition for the part of a recovering junkie recently fallen off the wagon. It wasn't the words so much as the body language and facial expressions that held my attention. Surreal? Hasn't the…
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