Mismatched Socks

His hunger strike is approaching its seventieth day. He is beyond the point where experts say “irreversible cognitive impairment and psychological damage” can result yet British prisoner Shaker Aamer, who has been detained without charge or trial in the Guantanamo Bay prison camps for eleven years, remains committed to resistance.

The Observer in the United Kingdom has published an op-ed he wrote from prison. He writes, “I’ve never been charged with any crime. I’ve never been allowed to see the evidence that the US once pretended they had against me. It’s all secret, even the statements they tortured out of me.”

He describes:

Every day in Guantánamo is torture – as was the time they held me before that, in Bagram and Kandahar air force bases, in Afghanistan. It’s not really the individual acts of abuse (the strappado – that’s the process refined by the Spanish Inquisition where they hang you from your wrists so your shoulders begin to dislocate, the sleep deprivation, and the kicks and punches); it’s the combined experience. My favourite book here (I’ve read it over and over) has been Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell: torture is for torture, and the system is for the system.

His political consciousness, however, prevents him from being willing to beg for mercy, end his hunger strike and accept what the system is doing to him.

“More than a decade of my life has been stolen from me, for no good reason,” Aamer declares. “I resent that; of course I do. I have missed the birth of my youngest son, and some of the most wonderful years with all my four children. I love being a father, and I always worked to do it as best I can.”

He wants to go home to London, but states, “I am never going to beg. If I have to die here, I want my children to know that I died for a principle, without bowing to my abusers.”

Clive Stafford Smith, lawyer and executive director for the UK-based legal charity, Reprieve, shares that Aamer, who is “widely regarded as a robust and resourceful character, has started to raise the possibility that he might die inside Guantánamo Bay.” He has asked Smith to “brief” his wife “that he might not make it out alive after all.” [READ]

(via randomactsofchaos)

mehreenkasana:

If I had to sum the viewing of this up, I’d use one word: Chilling. If I had to talk about America’s knowledge and consensus on these attacks in Pakistan, I’d use one word: Typical.

Initially when I would discuss drone strikes within Pakistan, I would often receive very angry emails and messages highlighting (wrongly) how America “cares” about these lives but later on as polls showed: The American public not only has very little authentic knowledge of these drone strikes in Pakistan as well as Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia but the majority supports what is being supposedly done in the name of US drone strikes in these countries. You are told that actual terrorists are being targeted, that USA is being protected from a very prominent threat to its security and freedom(s), ad nauseum, ad infinitum. But most of you do not realize that since 2004, more than 3000 Pakistanis have been killed by US drone strikes. Less than 2% of Pakistani victims under US drone strikes are high-profile targets. The remaining are children, civilians and alleged combatants.

In October 2006, 69 Pakistani children were killed in a drone attack. No word from the US government or local government was heard on such mindless bloodshed.

This interactive map will show you the commencement of the drone strikes under George W. Bush’s regime and the aggressive, reckless increase of strikes under Barack Obama’s government. Please spare a few minutes of your routine to see the mayhem these drone strikes cause in Pakistan.

This is a terrific, terrifying representation of our drone campaign in Pakistan. I would love to see one for Yemen, Somalia, and all the other places we’ve been terrorizing for the past decade or so.

(via randomactsofchaos)

Three senators went to see “Zero Dark Thirty,” and they recoiled from it. The problem was torture. Senator John McCain, Dianne Feinstein, and Carl Levin—a Republican and two Democrats, respectively—have now sent a letter to Sony Pictures about their “deep disappointment,” with the movie: “We believe the film is grossly inaccurate and misleading in its suggestion that torture resulted in information that led to the location of Usama bin Laden.” They also called it “factually inaccurate,” “false,” and “perpetuating a myth that torture is effective.” According to the AP, after watching the movie McCain, who was tortured himself as a prisoner in Vietnam, felt sick.

For a sense of how wrong the movie is about torture, read Jane Mayer’s definitive post. Like the Senators, she was taken aback when the movie showed men who were being or had already been “broken” by torture giving the C.I.A. precious, if scattered, clues—for example, about the identity of bin Laden’s courier. That is not how it happened: as the Senators wrote, “We have reviewed CIA records and know that this is incorrect.” The breakthrough about the courier came “through means unrelated to the CIA detention and interrogation program”; the prisoner who came closest to giving us the information did so before he was tortured, not after. The senators asked for a correction, or, rather, a clarification: “We believe that you have an obligation to state that the role of torture in the hunt for Usama Bin Laden is not based on the facts, but rather part of the film’s fictional narrative.”

We are fans of many of your movies, and we understand the special role that movies play in our lives, but the fundamental problem is that people who see Zero Dark Thirty will believe that the events it portrays are facts…

The use of torture in the fight against terrorism did severe damage to America’s values and standing that cannot be justified or expunged. It remains a stain on our national conscience. We cannot afford to go back to these dark times, and with the release of Zero Dark Thirty, the filmmakers and your production studio are perpetuating the myth that torture is effective. You have a social and moral obligation to get the facts right.

What are senators doing asking a movie company to present its film one way or the other? Is that their role? Is it there a “social and moral obligation”—or any obligation—for a filmmaker to “get the facts right”? The debate on torture, it should be noted, in no way hinges on whether it yielded any one fact—especially when there are unanswerable questions about whether the information could have been gained otherwise, the problem of false leads, and whether it is morally wrong—the senators may be making a mistake in acting like it does. And no one wants a censorship board, or only worthy movies, or ones that don’t play with history.

But that’s not what’s happening. The two problems are the claims that the filmmakers have made and the vacuum of classification that they are making them in.

The senators’ letter notes that “there has been significant media coverage of the CIA’s cooperation with the screenwriters.” It’s not bad that the filmmakers talked to the government; reporters do it all the time. What’s troubling is that the government hasn’t talked more. We are meant to understand that the filmmakers heard things we can’t, at a time when cases brought by torture victims are thrown out of court because the government has invoked the state-secrets privilege. That’s not how our political discourse should work, either. So much about our recent history as torturers has been left unexamined, with no accountability, with details of events marked secret and shoved away, and the lines between the parts we do know left open to the imagination. The next time we are asked to make a judgment about whether our country should engage in torture, we should be able to look at more than a single movie. That is the value in the senators’ statement. Feinstein and Levin have access to classified information, too, as part of a review of this history, and they cite it in their letter. The senators shouldn’t edit the movie; they can, and should, increase transparency about torture. [++]

Literally just had this conversation with my parents. I struck down the movie as a propaganda film that would mislead the public about what happened and they got all pissy and said “It’s just a movie, why you gotta be so cynical?!” 

Ha. Def just linked this article to their Facebooks.

(via randomactsofchaos)