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The Bush administration has maintained a low profile over the last month, as waves of indignation over the destruction of CIA videotapes showing the torture of two "high value" detainees have lapped ever closer to the White House. In the last few weeks, as coverage of the presidential primaries has consumed the media, both President Bush and Vice President Cheney must also have been hoping that they would be able to escape scrutiny on today's bleak anniversary. It is, however, imperative that they are not allowed to do so. Despite its claims that it "does not torture," this is an administration drenched in torture, which must one day be made answerable for its crimes.
Friday 11 January 2008
Washington - Eighty people were arrested at the Supreme Court Friday in a protest calling for the shutdown of the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Demonstrators wearing orange jump suits intended to simulate prison garb were arrested inside and outside the building in the early afternoon. "Shut it down," protesters chanted as others kneeled on the plaza in front of the court.
They were charged with violating an ordinance that prohibits demonstrations of any kind on court grounds. Those arrested inside the building also were charged under a provision that makes it a crime to give "a harangue or oration" in the Supreme Court building.
The maximum penalty is 60 days in jail, a fine or both.
The court is considering whether prisoners still detained at Guantanamo Bay have a right to challenge their confinement in U.S. courts.
Officials briefly closed the court building during the protest. It reopened around 2 p.m. EST.
Originally posted by khunmoon
Today it's six yrs ago a criminal and evil administration took the most American virtue of them all, the respect for the individual, down a dark alley to install her in a shady brothel.
Originally posted by 4thDoctorWhoFan
No crimes have been commited and your belief that the administration is evil is well........YOUR opinion and has no basis in fact.
Originally posted by khunmoon
Did I state otherwise?
That's why it's called an OP.. .. ...btw.
Plans to scale down the prison population also continued throughout 2007, and 492 detainees have now been released, 122 in the last year alone. The majority of those have been freed on their return home, but the gross injustices of Guantánamo have not come to an end. Two detainees died at the prison last year (to add to the four who died in 2006), and five more detainees were transferred to the facility, even while the president was claiming in public that he wanted to close the prison.
For the 281 detainees who remain, moreover, life is as hard as ever. Although a few are housed in Camp 4, which contains communal dorms, the majority are held in solitary confinement for up to 23 hours a day in the newest camps, Camps 5 and 6, and are deprived of the meager comforts - including access to TV and some sort of a social life - that are routinely enjoyed by the majority of convicted criminals on the U.S. mainland.
Others continue to be held in complete isolation, an unknown number are suffering from severe psychiatric disorders, and for the few dozen long-term hunger strikers, the prison remains a torture center. Prevented from exercising the only power they still hold - the right to starve themselves to death in protest at their endless detention without charge or trial - twice a day they are held in restraint chairs, using 18 separate straps, and are fed through a thick tube inserted into the stomach through the nose, which is removed after each feeding in a deliberate attempt to "break" their will.
Originally posted by tarichar
Guantanamo its self is illegal
the way the prisoners are treated is also illegal
if the prisoners were to be US citizens then both the prison and its inmates would be in violation of the bill of rights.
Calling people "enemy combatants" but then not treating them as POWs, is a clear breach of the geneva convention.
"It was foreseeable that conduct that would ordinarily be indisputably `seriously criminal' would be implemented by military officials responsible for detaining and interrogating suspected enemy combatants," Circuit Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson wrote in the court's main opinion.
Judge Janice Rogers Brown dissented with parts of the opinion, saying that "it leaves us with the unfortunate and quite dubious distinction of being the only court to declare those held at Guantanamo are not `person(s).'
"This is a most regrettable holding in a case where plaintiffs have alleged high-level U.S. government officials treated them as less than human," Brown wrote.
The three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that the detainees captured in Afghanistan aren't recognized as "persons" under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act because they were aliens held outside the United States. The Religious Freedom Act prohibits the government from "substantially burdening a person's religion."