Robert Fisk: Government for and by the dead
…For as someone who has to look at the eviscerated corpses of Palestine and Israel, the murdered bodies in the garbage heaps of Iraq, the young women shot through the head in the Baghdad morgue, I can only shake my head in disbelief at the sheer, unadulterated, lazy bullshit – let’s call a spade a spade – which is currently emerging from our great leaders.
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When President Bush was confronted by reporters as he left the White House for Camp David following the announcement of the five indictments of, and the resignation of Vice President Dick Cheney chief of state I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, he offered up a lame comment, which at the same time exposed him as a grotesque hypocrite.
“In our system,” he said, “each individual is presumed innocent and entitled to a fair trial.”
Sure. That’s what will happen with Scooter, and with Karl Rove if he gets indicted when the other shoe drops.
But what about Jose Padilla? This U.S. citizen, picked up at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport back in 2001, has been held in a military brig without charge, without access to an attorney, and in solitary confinement without any contact with family members for four years because President Bush has claimed the right, on his sole authority, to declare any American citizen to be an “enemy combatant” and to revoke their Constitutional rights and rights of citizenship.
Most of the provisions of the USA Patriot Act, including access to library records, were supposed to “sunset” this month, five years after the law’s passing. Instead, both the House and the Senate have already voted to renew the entire act, with only minor revisions. While they’re at it, they’d like to add some decidedly unpatriotic amendments to expand the death penalty.
These new amendments would let prosecutors shop around for another jury if the one they have is deadlocked on the death penalty; triple the number of terrorism-related crimes eligible for the death penalty; and authorize the death penalty for a person who gives money to an organization whose members kill someone, even if the contributor did not know that the organization or its members were planning to kill.
AN SOS written in blood on a prison cell wall spelled out the desperation of Bahraini Guantanamo detainee Juma Al Dossary.
It was his last resort after being continuously denied medical treatment as he grew increasingly ill in appalling conditions, he says in his handwritten diary of despair.
He claims he has been savagely beaten, tortured, sexually humiliated, fed bug-infested, rotten food and denied medical treatment, in a systematic campaign of abuse meted out for over three years.
His weight has dropped 30kg to 55kg and he is so weak he can barely stand, he says in the diary, written in July and just released to his lawyers by US authorities.
Mr Al Dossary says he regularly vomits blood, has heart and blood pressure problems, has fainting fits and suffers pains in his head, stomach and left arm – but has been persistently denied proper medical treatment.
The abuse has gone on since his arrest on the
Afghanistan/Pakistan border in December 2001, but took a new form after he complained about the conditions to his lawyer during a visit in March this year.
“In March this year I met my lawyer to discuss my case and I told him about all the torture and abuse that I went through here, but I didn’t know that they were spying on us,” he says in the diary.
“After the lawyer had left, a military man came to me and told me to forget about all that had happened to me and not to remember it or mention it again to anyone, otherwise I will not live in peace.”