House Speaker Kevin Johnson is trying to pass a continuing funding resolution for the federal government that also contains a voter ID requirement that even some Republicans oppose. An October 1st deadline looms, but will anyone care if the federal government ceases to operate?
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis will tout his military experience in his race for President. But his experience at Guantanamo torture camp includes highly credible allegations that he volunteered to watch brutal torture and approved of what he saw.
Unless congress raises the debt ceiling, the government will run out of money and be unable to pay its bills as early as June 1, according to Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen. Would it really be so bad?
A country that loudly and repeatedly expresses what it purports to be its principles, yet cavalierly ignores them on a whim, rightly earns the contempt of its own citizens and those of other nations, especially when the hypocritical government of that nation criticizes others for failing to adhere to their pompously proclaimed rules-based international order.
Guantánamo Bay concentration camp epitomizes this phenomenon.
Now in its third decade of operation under four presidents, Gitmo still houses 30 men. None of them has ever been charged in a court of law. Indeed, none of them ever will. It is a bedrock principle of American jurisprudence that we are all, citizens and non-citizens alike, presumed innocent until proven guilty. Which makes all 30 prisoners, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, as innocent as a newborn child as far as the law is concerned.
For whatever it’s worth, the Pentagon itself says it has no evidence that half of these people committed a crime. They are all cleared for release, but the U.S. refuses to admit them and no other country has issued an invitation.
These 30 innocent men and the 750 others who have cycled through and subsequently been released were kidnapped (after having been sold for a bounty in many cases), deprived of their constitutional right to a speedy trial and their right to legal counsel, tortured in order to deprive them of their right not to incriminate themselves, prohibited from receiving visits from family members and blocked from using a telephone. Unsurprisingly, the Red Cross has determined that these innocent men are “experiencing the symptoms of accelerated aging worsened by the cumulative effect of their experiences and years spent in detention.”
According to The New York Times: “Lawyers for some of the prisoners, particularly those who spent years in harsh, secret CIA custody before Guantánamo, have said detainees have brain damage and disorders from blows and sleep deprivation, damaged gastrointestinal systems from rectal abuse and issues possibly linked to prolonged shackling and other confinement.”
Linger on that: damaged gastrointestinal systems from rectal abuse. Nice rules-based international order you got there, Uncle Sam.
Though he hasn’t made it a priority, President Biden would like to close Guantánamo. Toward that end, the military has talked to lawyers for some detainees. “Settlement talks are underway at the U.S. military court in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, that would allow alleged 9/11 architect Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and his four co-defendants to plead guilty, avoid the death penalty, and serve life in prison—although some of them may try to negotiate lesser sentences,” NPR reported a year ago. There’s been no word since.
This is an obscenity. A law-abiding society doesn’t negotiate a reduced sentence for innocent men. Innocent men are released. Innocent men released after having been mistreated are compensated financially and otherwise for having been abused and deprived of their rights.
The Gitmo 30 should be released and brought to the United States if their home countries don’t want them or it’s dangerous for them to go back. They and the 750 former detainees should be housed, given healthcare and treatment for mental trauma, jobs if they want them, as well as generous financial compensation. The federal standard for compensating the wrongfully imprisoned is $50,000 per year of incarceration plus an additional amount for time spent on death row. Conditions at Guantánamo demand more.
We do, however, need to punish those at Guantánamo—not the prisoners, who are innocent victims, but the guards and commanding officers. Anyone who has served at Guantánamo concentration camp is guilty of kidnapping, punishable by up to 20 years in prison under federal law. If two or more people conspire to commit kidnapping, which is plainly the case here, they face life imprisonment.
Everyone involved in keeping innocent people confined at Guantánamo should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. This includes the last four presidents of the United States, generals, and others in the chain of command down to the guards, as well as lawyers like John Yoo, who authored convoluted legal opinions justifying kidnapping and torture. Let’s not forget the CIA agent-torturers who gleefully carried out “enhanced interrogation techniques” as well as their superior officers. Hey Democrats! Really want to get rid of Donald Trump? Here’s your chance.
Writing an essay like this annoys me. Calling for justice for the wronged and accountability for the evildoers, and pointing out that people are innocent until proven guilty, is kindergarten editorial commentary that takes away time and energy I ought to be devoting to complex policy issues. These concepts are so simple and self-evident that there should be no more need to express them than to announce in a newspaper that the sun will rise in the east tomorrow morning.
Yet I have to do it. No one else is talking about Gitmo. The American people don’t think, much less care, about what’s being done in their name and at their expense. Reality has been turned inside-out so thoroughly that seemingly otherwise sane journalists don’t see anything strange about America having its very own concentration camp, where 30 innocent people are trying to negotiate life imprisonment instead of execution, while those who actually committed crimes have suffered no punishment whatsoever. One torturer was subsequently appointed to run the CIA and is now a big-deal lawyer, while another is a top contender for the U.S. presidency!
The U.S. keeps talking about human rights—in other countries. People might start to pay attention if it closed Guantánamo, released its victims and prosecuted its employees.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis and co-hosts “The Final Countdown” radio show Mon-Fri 10 am – 12 noon ET. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
Two of America’s top political analysts, left-wing cartoonist Ted Rall and right-wing cartoonist Scott Stantis, discuss the week’s events and cultural happenings on the DMZ America podcast.
In a surprising move, the United States Senate has voted to revoke the 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force legislation that presidents beginning with George W. Bush relied upon in order to invade and occupy Iraq, as well as a number of other military conflicts. Will the House of Representatives follow suit? The answer is more complex than you might expect. Will Congress reassert its Constitutional exclusive right to wage war?
The Washington Post revealed that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a possible top contender for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, enthusiastically participated in torture as a JAG at Guantánamo Bay concentration camp in 2006, where he suggested that hunger-striking inmates be force-fed and personally supervised and smiled while observing what international human rights organizations universally describe as torture. DeSantis hasn’t denied the shocking charges. Will Trump make it an issue? Would a Democratic challenger? What does it say about the United States that the story doesn’t seem to be catching on?
San Francisco and the State of California are contemplating the issue of reparations to Black American descendants of slaves in order to compensate them for being the victims of systemic racism. Setting aside the issue of the vast amount of money involved, who would qualify? What would be the practical considerations of such a program? Is it even possible to compensate for such enormous injustice that is baked into the American economic and political system?
Watch the Video Versions of DMZ America Podcast #95:
DMZ America Podcast Ep 95 Sec 1: Senate Votes to Deauthorize Iraq War
DMZ America Podcast Ep 95 Sec 2: DeSantis the Gitmo Torturer
DMZ America Podcast Ep 95 Sec 3: Reparations to Black Americans
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” That statement is often misattributed to Edmund Burke. After Russia invaded Ukraine, many Americans who didn’t have anything to say about the invasion of Afghanistan or Iraq, much less torture at Guantánamo and elsewhere, or Yemen, or Palestine, suddenly started wearing blue and yellow flags. They weren’t good before, so how can these self-serving souls think they are suddenly being good now?
China’s oppression of its Uyghur minority in the western province of Xinjiang has been well documented for decades but it’s only now, that China is hosting the Beijing Olympics, that the West is finally paying attention. Forgotten in the belated outcry is America’s own role in oppressing the very same people, doing China’s dirty work for it as part of the so-called war on terror.
What’s better to draw about, something people care about? Or something people should care about it? Guess which one pays better.
If crisis creates opportunity, we couldn’t possibly have squandered the possibilities presented by 9/11 more spectacularly. We certainly couldn’t have failed its tests more completely. Twenty years after 9/11, it is clear that the United States is ruled by idiots and that we, the people, are complicit with their moronic behavior.
We had to do something. That was and remains the generic explanation for what we did in response to 9/11—invading Afghanistan and Iraq, directing the CIA to covertly overthrow the governments of Haiti, Venezuela, Belarus, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan and a bunch of other countries, lamely legalizing torture, kidnapping via extraordinary rendition to Guantánamo and other concentration camps, building a drone armada and sparking a drone arms race.
Acting purely on speculation, news media was reporting as early as the afternoon of September 11 that Al Qaeda was responsible. That same day, Vice President Dick Cheney argued for invading Iraq. We began bombing Afghanistan October 7, less than a month later, without evidence that Afghanistan was guilty. A week later, the Taliban offered to turn over bin Laden; Bush refused. Before you act, you think. We didn’t.
What should we have done—after giving it a good think?
A smart people led by a good president would have had three priorities: bring the perpetrators to justice, punish any nation-states that were involved, and reduce the chances of future terrorist attacks.
The 19 hijackers were suicides, but plotters like Al Qaeda’s Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who lived in Pakistan, were not. Since we have an extradition treaty with Pakistan, we could have asked Pakistani authorities to arrest him and send him to face trial in the U.S. or at the international war crimes tribunal at The Hague. Instead, we kidnapped him to CIA “dark sites” including Gitmo and subjected him to waterboarding 266 times. Because of this and other torture, as well as his illegal detention in violation of habeas corpus, KSM can’t face trial in a real, i.e. civilian, court. Not only will 9/11 families never see justice carried out, we’ve managed to turn KSM into a victim, just as he wanted.
The Inter-Services Intelligence agency, Pakistan’s CIA, financed and provided intelligence to Al Qaeda. Pakistan harbored bin Laden. Pakistan played host to hundreds of Al Qaeda training camps. Pakistanis I talked to after 9/11 were shocked that the U.S. didn’t attack their country, instead giving its Taliban-aligned dictator General Pervez Musharraf billions in military and financial aid.
Evidence linking top Saudi Arabian officials to 9/11 has been scarce. But 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi, several are reported to have met with mid-level Saudi intelligence agents before the attacks, and, most notably, Saudi Arabia exports its radical brand of Sunni Islam, Wahhabism, all over the world. The Taliban and Al Qaeda initially recruited many of their members from Wahhabi madrassas financed by the Saudis in Pakistan and Central Asia.
We should have treated 9/11 for what it was: a crime. Policemen, not soldiers, should have tracked down the perps. They should have been given lawyers, not torture. They should have faced fair trials. But if we had to go the military route, we should have invaded Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, the two countries responsible, not Afghanistan and Iraq, two countries that had nothing to do with it. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia were and remain far more dangerous to their neighbors than Afghanistan or Iraq.
Occupying Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest exporter of Islamic extremism and global terrorism, would have done a lot to reduce the threat of another 9/11. But the most effective way to make us less of a target is to make the rest of the world look upon us with favor. Some people will always hate us. That’s inevitable. Our goal should be to reduce their number to as close to zero as humanly possible.
We can’t eliminate anti-Americanism by killing its adherents. We’ve been trying to do that for 20 years using drones and missile strikes; all we’ve accomplished is killing a lot of innocent people and making the rest of the world look at us with disgust and contempt. You kill anti-Americanism by treating people everywhere with respect and kindness. That includes those we suspect of doing us harm.
Unfortunately for us and the world, we learned nothing from 9/11. Not even losing Afghanistan back to the Taliban in the most humiliating U.S. defeat since Vietnam, having nothing to show for 20 years of war, has taught us a thing. We’re still a hammer that sees everything as a nail, a blunt, stupid people whose idea of a plan is to keep indiscriminately bombing innocent civilians.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of a new graphic novel about a journalist gone bad, “The Stringer.” Order one today. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
