Hundreds of known innocent men imprisoned at Guantanamo

As reported by the UK Times Online Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as Colin Powell's Chief of Staff has confirmed that most of the men imprisoned at Guantánamo were innocent, and that the Bush Administration knew this. Most of them were taken into custody without ever having had their cases reviewed by a member of the U.S. military, and most of them were turned over to the U.S. by others in return for reward money ranging from $3,000 to $25,000:

Referring to Mr Cheney, Colonel Wilkerson, who served 31 years in the US Army, asserted: “He had absolutely no concern that the vast majority of Guantánamo detainees were innocent ... If hundreds of innocent individuals had to suffer in order to detain a handful of hardcore terrorists, so be it.” He alleged that for Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld “innocent people languishing in Guantánamo for years was justified by the broader War on Terror and the small number of terrorists who were responsible for the September 11 attacks”.

Though many of the prisoners were immediately known to be innocent, the Bush Administration kept them imprisoned so as not to hurt its image as being tough on the "War on Terror." The innocence of almost all of these prisoners compounds the evidence that many of them were tortured and at least several of them were murdered while in U.S. custody. 759 men were imprisoned at Guantanamo. Only about 35 of them will be prosecuted in federal or military courts. Fifty others will be "held indefinitely without trial under the laws of war."

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What’s more interesting? War or Peace?

What's more interesting? War or Peace? I ran a query on Google Trends, and you could probably have predicted that war is far more interesting than peace. Here's the graph that resulted: war-and-peaceWar is always more interesting that peace. That's how we are wired. We find conflict so interesting that the news media creates conflict when there isn't any naturally occurring. We are have thus become a society addicted to conflict, the more the better, it seems. Thus, with media reinforcing our dark urges to be entertained by violence, we have become a war-mongering society. In this post, I called our addiction "Conflict Pornography."

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Definition of an insurgent

Apparently, an "insurgent" is anyone the U.S. military deems to be hostile, this definition being illustrated by the military's explanation for this horrific video taken from a military helicopter. It certainly makes you wonder how many other dead "insurgents" were, in any way, threatening American interests. Consider also, this recent statement by General Stanley McChrystal: "We've shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat to the force." Then again, a person who is outspokenly interested in joining the Taliban is not an "insurgent" as long as that person is propped up by the U.S. government in order to rule over Afghanistan. See the latest on Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Will someone please tell me what the Afghanistan and Iraq "missions" are? It's got to be about more than feeding the military industrial complex, right (and see here)?

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How big is the U.S. military budget?

This article by the U.K. Guardian puts it in perspective:

[T]he United States spent a staggering $607bn (£402 bn) on defence in 2008. Currently engaged in what will likely be the longest ground war in US history in Afghanistan. Harbourer of thousands of nuclear weapons. 1.5m soldiers. Fleets of aircrafts, bombs and seemingly endless amounts of military technology.
I know that many Americans would read the above paragraph with pride and contentment. I consider it succinct evidence that we are a paranoid war-mongering nation. I consider these enormous military expenditures tragic, considering all of the other things that we could and should be doing with most of that money.

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Seventh anniversary of the Iraq invasion

Truthout has published a recap of what the invasion of Iraq has brought to the United States:

We are still shocked. We were never awed. We have not adjusted. The senseless waste of our blood and treasure, our honor and our reputation continue. Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom - the latter unleashed seven years ago today - have morphed into a single Operation Enduring Occupation, set to bankrupt this country financially as well as morally, to destroy our own security as it has that of the over 31 million people who populate Iraq and 32 million people of Afghanistan. . . . Of course, the loss of our troops (over 4,200 dead and 30,000 wounded) and treasure (three trillion dollars according to economics Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz), the perversion of our language, the mangling of our laws, the broken bodies and tortured brains of our veterans really bear no comparison with the suffering we have inflicted on the citizens of Iraq.

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