The Guantánamo “Suicides”: A Camp Delta sergeant blows the whistle
Journalism isn’t dead.
Late on the evening of June 9 that year, three prisoners at Guantánamo died suddenly and violently. Salah Ahmed Al-Salami, from Yemen, was thirty-seven. Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi, from Saudi Arabia, was thirty. Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani, also from Saudi Arabia, was twenty-two, and had been imprisoned at Guantánamo since he was captured at the age of seventeen. None of the men had been charged with a crime, though all three had been engaged in hunger strikes to protest the conditions of their imprisonment. […]
Army Staff Sergeant Joseph Hickman and men under his supervision have disclosed evidence in interviews with Harper’s Magazine that strongly suggests the three prisoners who died on June 9 had been transported to another location prior to their deaths. The guards’ accounts also reveal the existence of a previously unreported black site at Guantánamo where the deaths, or at least the events that led directly to the deaths, most likely occurred.
Words matter.
Why the hell didn’t we call it health insurance reform? We’re not reforming the way care is delivered, we’re reforming the companies that mete it out in tiny doses or not at all.* Red state, blue state — no one likes insurance companies! Especially in 2008, 2009, 2010.
I’ve been thinking about this for awhile and it really gets my goat. It astounds me that progressive leaders failed to learn from their opponents’ verbal reframing of any number of critical issues (“death tax” and “cap and tax” spring immediately to mind). Did it not occur to them that trying to change people’s health care is very different from trying to change that faceless, soulless company whose bills they dread seeing in their mailbox?
Grr.
But you know what? It’s not too late. Let’s all start calling it what it is.
* And then you expand Medicare coverage for those who fall in the “not at all” category but you keep the focus on insurance reform. Take a page from the GOP playbook — NEVER debate on your opponents’ terms.
Thank you for the recommendation, Chris….
….perhaps the most famous, and certainly the most historic, apartheid photo of all time. This is the death of Soweto schoolboy Hector Pieterson in 1976. That’s his sister, Antoinette Musi, running alongside him, and he’s being carried by another student, Mbuyisa Nkita Makhubu. Pieterson was 12 years old.
The students were protesting against the rule that they had to be taught in Afrikaans, which they considered the language of the oppressor. To prove that they were right, the police opened fire on them. This photo went around the world and was one of the first images to provoke international rumbling against the apartheid government.
There’s a memorial to Pieterson in Johannesburg. If you ever get a chance to see it, it’s very affecting. Like I said, 12 years old. It boggles the mind.
Copyright Sam Nzima
I had never seen this photograph until tonight.
I’d also like to take “recommendation Tuesday” into my own hands and encourage you to follow caille. The photos she posts are consistently surprising and soul-healthly.
In general, people who commit felonies avoid publicly confessing to having done so, and they especially avoid mocking the authorities who fail to act. One thing Dick Cheney is not is stupid, and yet he’s doing exactly that. Indeed, he’s gradually escalated his boasting about having done so throughout the year. Why? Because he knows there will never be any repercussions, that he will never be prosecuted no matter how blatantly he admits to these serious crimes. He’s taunting the Obama administration and the DOJ: not only will I not hide or apologize, but I will proudly tout and defend my role in these crimes, because I know you will do absolutely nothing about it, even though the Attorney General and the President themselves said that the act to which I’m confessing is a felony. Does anyone doubt that Cheney’s assessment is right? And isn’t that, rather obviously, a monumental indictment of most everything?
Glenn Greenwald (via azspot; mattlehrer)
Fair warning: there’s gonna be some dark stuff on ye olde blog today.
(via southpol)
Background: ‘Miss Me Yet?’ Billboard With Photo Of Bush Is Real; Not An Internet Trick
Oh you Internet tricksters!
Infographic: Obama’s 2011 Budget Proposal, Department by Department
I have highlighted the only part that’s going to matter in the long run. Squint:
Link via startmeup.
Obama as jovial national daddy
Jan’s analysis is, as always, spot on. She begins with criticism (spending freeze, “entitlement commission,” phantom Iranian nuclear threat), then moves to praise (financial aid for higher education, withdrawal from two wars, cracking down on lobbyists), and finishes with this:
The best of the speech was its informal authority. He talked to these Congresscritters (and the Supreme Court) like the fractious first graders they act like. And they took it. They have to — he’s not personally cowed by them; he’s willing to talk with them; it’s clear they can’t figure out how to handle him. He gave nice props to the House for passing the hard stuff it has tackled this year — and by implication told the Senators they sucked, all with a lovely smile.
It was a pleasure to watch Joe Biden enjoying himself. It was a pleasure to see Nancy Pelosi simply enjoying his takedown of her silly brood — I am often very critical of her as my Congresswoman, but she sure seems to be good at the role of Speaker that she so much sought.
I didn’t expect to come away from the SOTU anything but mad and discouraged, but I was wrong. Just maybe, with enough popular pressure, Obama’s presidency doesn’t have to be a complete flop.
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