Lawyers acting for prisoners in Guantanamo say the real figures may be higher, but officially of the 166 inmates in Guantanamo, 100 are currently on hunger strike. Of these, 30 are being force-fed through a nasal tube and three are in hospital.Follow RT’s day-by-day timeline of the Gitmo hunger strike. The 166 prisoners have been there eleven and a half years and 90 per cent of them haven’t been charged with a crime. The hunger strike began in February after an altercation between prisoners and guards, after guards allegedly interfered with the inmates personal belongings including the mishandling of Koran’s. Original only a few dozen of the prisoners were refusing to eat but by the end of April the authorities in charge of Guantanamo were forced to admit that the number had jumped to 100. On April 14th, Cindy Panuco, a lawyer for the Afghan detainee Obaidullah told RT that guards were moving prisoners from communal living into single cells under the pretext of stopping them from acquiring weapons, but almost certainly in an attempt to break their resolve and stop them hunger striking. Feroz Abbasi, who was released from Guantanamo without charges, described how he was psychologically tortured by the Guantanamo guards. “For some reason on the same night Iraq was bombed in March 2003, I was moved into isolation, solitary confinement, and I was there for two years. Six months of which were without sunlight,” he said.Clive Stafford Smith a British human rights lawyer who is representing Sahker Aamer, the last British inmate in Guantanamo, told RT that the conditions his client experiences are worse than “death row ”.“When a prisoner doesn’t do exactly what they are told, six guys dressed up as if they are in Darth Vader outfits come in and basically beat him up. If [Aamer] wants a bottle of water, they send them, if he wants his medicines, they send them. Now he just doesn’t ask for his medication.” Hunger strikers who have been force-fed describe it as the final humiliation. There are three stages to the pain, firstly there is the sensation of a tube being forced past their sinuses into their throat, which causes their eyes to water, then an intense burning and gagging sensation as it goes down the throat and finally when the tube enters the stomach there is a strong urge to vomit. When the tube has delivered the ‘food’, it triggers the most painful sensation of all: the return of hunger.Disturbing accounts by lawyers for Guantanamo inmates emerged Monday, that prisoners who wish to talk to their legal representatives are being subjected to humiliating new body searches.David Remes, a lawyer for a Guantanamo inmate, told AFP that under the new search policy, “a detainee who leaves his camp is subject to a search including his private parts and holding his private parts.” Remes said that the searches were deliberately intended to deter detainees from meeting with their lawyers.President Obama declared earlier this month that the “Pentagon is trying to manage the situation [in Guantanamo] as best in can”.But on March 29th, well over a month since the hunger strike began, RT reported that a Pentagon briefing by Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel made no reference to the strike.Also in March the Department for Defense requested almost $200 million to renovate the prison camp, while at the beginning of 2013 the state department wound up the office that was in charge of closing down the prison.As the strike enters its 100th day, it now commands interest from the mainstream western media, but as the British MP George Galloway told RT in March, initially only RT and a handful of other outlets such as the British newspaper the Guardian, gave it significant coverage.Human Right’s plea A consortium of 20 human right’s organizations, pressure groups and law bodies including Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union, issued a plea Monday to the US defense secretary Chuck Hagel to end the practice of force-feeding in Guantanamo. The letter noted that the practice of force-feeding at Guantanamo amounts to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and is in violation of the Geneva conventions to which the US is a signatory. There is also a growing level of discomfort about what is happening in Guantanamo among the medical community. An editorial published in the medical journal the Lancet earlier this month said that in this case force-feeding prisoners who had chosen not to eat as a form of protest “infringes the principle of patient autonomy.” The hacktivist group Anonymous has also announced it will mark the 100th day of the hunger strike by calling for 3 days of protests. “We stand in solidarity with the Guantanamo hunger strikers. We will shut down Guantanamo,” an online statement from Anonymous reads. The group didn’t specify how it would achieve its goal but promised “Twitter storms, email bombs and fax bombs.”Petition While the Pentagon drags its heels on Guantanamo, a number of high profile figures from the US establishment have come forward to actively campaign for its closure. A petition, which was started by Morris Davis, the former Chief Prosecutor for terrorism trials at Guantanamo Bay, was filed earlier this month and includes a letter to President Obama to bring about the closure of the prison. Hosted by the Change.org website it has already received 204,642 signatures well over the goal of 200,000. It calls on the president to “Direct Secretary of Defense Charles Hagel to use his authority to issue the certifications or national security waivers required by the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA 2013) to affect transfers from Guantanamo.” Davis served for 25 years in the US air force and was a Guantanamo prosecutor for two years, personally charging Bin Laden’s driver Salim Hamdan. Davis notes in the introduction to why he started the petition, “There is something fundamentally wrong with a system where not being charged with a war crime keeps you locked away indefinitely and a war crime conviction is your ticket home.”“The Supreme Court here in the US, every decision they’ve come out with involving Guantanamo has been adverse to the government. So there is no good reason to keep it open other than political talking points for the far right,” Davis told RT earlier this month.He also said that it is “extraordinarily expensive” to operate.“It is over a $100 million a year just to operate the facility, not counting the $200 million that General Kelly said he needs to rehabilitate these warn-out facilities,” he said.Cleared to leave 86 of the 166 prisoners still in Guantanamo have been cleared to leave the facility but haven’t been allowed to leave because there is no arrangement as to where they can be sent. On the 25th April, Senator Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, sent a letter to the Obama administration requesting it re-examine the release of low-level Guantanamo detainees to Yemen. Following an attempt by the Yemini branch of Al-Qaeda to blow up a Detroit-bound jet liner, the transfer of 56 Yemeni bound inmates was halted.But Feinstein, argues that in light of the unprecedented desperation among detainees, and in light of Yemeni President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi’s strong resistance to Al-Qaeda, transfers to Yemen should resume.’Problems in Guantanamo’ President Obama has repeatedly said he wants to close the detention center, but insists that he must persuade Congress that it is in America’s interests to shut it down. He promised to “re-engage with Congress to try to make the case that this is not something that’s in the best interests of the American people.” He went on to insist that justice has been served in a way that is “consistent with the rule of law” and the American constitution. But he conceded that it was no surprise that there were “problems in Guantanamo” and that it isn’t necessary in keeping America safe. “It is expensive, it is inefficient. It hurts us in terms of our international standing. It lessons cooperation with our allies on counterterrorism efforts. It is a recruitment tool for extremists. It needs to be closed,” he said. … Read More
Ten civilization-shaping trends for 2013 that are driving us into social and spiritual crisis
Most people feel that a time of great change is upon us. But what kind of change is unfolding, exactly? … Read More
Rapists should not get custody
Imagine that after one of the most harrowing experiences a person could endure, a woman not only found herself pregnant but also made the bold, difficult choice to raise the child. Imagine next that her decision would then give her rapist an opportunity to remain firmly in her life, in one of the most intimate of relationships.Imagine he wanted – and legally had the right to be – that child’s father. It’s a very real scenario, all across America. But in one state, that may soon be changing.As a riveting CNN story last summer, at the height of “legitimate rape” fever, illuminated, a stunning majority of states – 31 of them – offer some form of visitation and custody rights for men who impregnate their rape victims. And it’s not just the threat of having to co-parent with one’s assailant that’s a nightmare for many victims — it’s the ugly opportunism it inspires. As attorney Shauna Prewitt, whose daughter was the product of a sexual assault, wrote back then, “When no law prohibits a rapist from exercising these rights, a woman may feel forced to bargain away her legal rights to a criminal trial in exchange for the rapist dropping the bid to have access to her child.” A baby can become a bargaining chip.Continue Reading… … Read More
Boston nurses tell of bloody marathon aftermath
BOSTON (AP) — The screams and cries of bloody marathon bombing victims still haunt the nurses who treated them one week ago. They did their jobs as they were trained to do, putting their own fears in a box during their 12-hour shifts so they could better comfort their patients.Only now are these nurses beginning to come to grips with what they endured — and are still enduring as they continue to care for survivors. They are angry, sad and tired. A few confess they would have trouble caring for the surviving suspect, 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, if he were at their hospital and they were assigned his room.And they are thankful. They tick off the list of their hospital colleagues for praise: from the security officers who guarded the doors to the ER crews who mopped up trails of blood. The doctors and — especially — the other nurses.Nurses from Massachusetts General Hospital, which treated 22 of the 187 victims the first day, candidly recounted their experiences in interviews with The Associated Press. Here are their memories:THEY WERE SCREAMINGContinue Reading… … Read More
A Vocabulary Site Shows How to Tailor Online Education
One of the educational potentials of computing is the ability to tailor learning experiences to the skills of individual students. A vocabulary-building site, Vocabulary.com, is an example of that potential, some educators say. … Read More
Why It’s Important For Each Of Us To Explain And Keep Explaining The Net And Its Civil Liberties
I founded the Swedish and first Pirate Party on January 1, 2006. The party has now spread to 70 countries. When it was founded, I saw it as a really long project – from January of 2006 to September 17 of the same year, when the elections were held. I considered this timespan to be almost overkill in terms of changing the values of society.
It didn’t work that way. It doesn’t work that way. Changing society for the better takes time. It’s easy to laugh at it in retrospect, but I’m taking the opportunity to share my experience and underscore the importance of understanding it. We were elected to the European Parliament in 2009, which was still record time.
What strikes me is that after seven years, I still find myself explaining the most basic concepts of why there is a conflict between the copyright monopoly and private communications as a concept, and every time I explain it patiently, the penny drops for a few more people. That’s how you change society for the better. You explain, explain, and explain again, until you are blue in the face. You need to increase society’s understanding one person at a time, one article at a time.
In marketing, they say that a message hasn’t started to take hold until you personally are absolutely fed up to your limits of sanity with hearing yourself saying it. That’s how it works. That’s how it works when teaching the world what we understand – in particular, the key insight that the copyright monopoly cannot coexist with fundamental civil liberties.
I’ll be returning to that insight and how you – yes, you – can share it. But first, let’s establish that all of us are in different social contexts, and have different experiences and skills in expressing ourselves. When an old insight is communicated in a new context or in a new form of expression, it can reach new people – sometimes, a lot of new people.
We’re used to changing the world in a weekend of coding. We come from the Internet, after all. We’re used to a very long project being on a timescale of weeks. Changing the world and defending civil liberties is a project on a timescale of years, possibly decades – and it’s up to us to do something small every day to make it happen, for the simple reason that nobody else is going to do it for us, as they haven’t understood the importance and connected the dots as we have. It’s up to us to explain it with the skills, words, and expressions that we have at our disposal.
Let’s take one such new expression as an example – the movie TPB AFK by Simon Klose, a movie that documented the banana-republic level miscarriage of justice that was the trial against the two operators of The Pirate Bay, its media spokesperson, and a fourth unrelated person. For all of us readers here at TorrentFreak and similar newsflows, it was old news, and we mostly saw the movie as a valuable expression of our own experiences at the time.
But others were knocked over backwards by the film’s message and its frank, factual documentation. Even people who are quite close to me, people to whom I had been describing all these events in real time with as they played out (and with all the anger that the thorough corruption of the Swedish justice system deserved) called me after having seen the movie – and they were downright devastated. They had no idea of the bigger picture that the movie managed to portray.
Most of us are geeks. We can take it as a personal insult when somebody tells us a fact twice, even if years pass between the two occasions: did they think we weren’t paying attention to what they were saying, or did they think we wouldn’t remember? However, reality outside of our sphere – where the battle of civil liberties, ours and others, are won or lost – is different. And it’s up to us to explain what we know, because people who don’t understand these key concepts are unable to share the the knowledge until we have shared it with them.
It’s a bit like a key message in the movie “Terminator: Salvation”, where people are listening to radio broadcasts from the Resistance, and wondering aloud who the resistance are – and then, the broadcast ends with these words: “If you are hearing this message, you are the resistance”. That’s exactly it.
If you are reading this column, you understand these crucial issues better than most, and therefore have a responsibility toward the civil liberties of yourself and everybody else to explain what you understand about the importance of free speech, the messenger immunity, and a free internet to people around you, in ways that you are personally comfortable with.
If you want a couple of key articles as a primer in explaining why the copyright monopoly cannot coexist with freedom of speech and communications as a concept, and why surveillance is bad, I’d recommend these two which contains reasoning and logic I’ve used successfully for the past seven years:
The Analog Letter explains why the copyright monopoly at today’s level cannot coexist with the concept of a private letter, and how it’s absolutely reasonable that our children have the same civil liberties that our parents had, leading to the inevitable conclusion that the copyright monopoly must be scaled back, and copyright industry profits are irrelevant to the discussion.
Debunking the dangerous “Nothing to fear, nothing to hide” debunks just that dangerous and blatantly false saying of “if you have nothing to fear, you have nothing to hide”, which is wrong on so many levels. (A short retort to that one is “I lock the door when I go to the bathroom, despite nothing unusual going on in there – I just think I have a right to keep it to myself”, which will make some of people think.)
Read them both, and start talking about them, wherever you are, in ways that you are comfortable with. Not just once, but for at least the next decade. Happy changing the world – one conversation, one person at a time. You are the resistance.
About The Author
Rick Falkvinge is a regular columnist on TorrentFreak, sharing his thoughts every other week. He is the founder of the Swedish and first Pirate Party, a whisky aficionado, and a low-altitude motorcycle pilot. His blog at falkvinge.net focuses on information policy.
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Source: Why It’s Important For Each Of Us To Explain And Keep Explaining The Net And Its Civil Liberties
An open letter from a Sandy Hook mom
In an open letter to lawmakers, Newtown, CT., mom Carrie Battaglia shared the trauma her six-year-old daughter experienced as she hid with classmates inside a bathroom while 20 children and 6 adults lost their lives in the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary. The first grader is now frightened by loud noises, suffers from post traumatic stress disorder and has trouble sleeping at night.The letter is part of an effort by Battaglia and other parents from the community to share their experiences with politicians, urging them to pass meaningful gun control legislation. And while progress on gun reform is slow and uneven, Battaglia told the New York Daily News that her and other Newtown parents are “in the fight for the long haul.”“We’re not going to give up. We’ll keep sending letters, calling (politicians) and we’re going to vote, make our voices heard,” she told the News.Battaglia’s letter in full (emphasis mine):Continue Reading… … Read More
