MAY 17, 2009 4:27PM

Prisoner 345 (give obama time!)

Rate: 10 Flag
There are those who claim that we MUST give obama a chance.  They point out that it has only been a 100 days, then 110 days, soon 120 days.
 
The statement "End torture" does not contain any time disclaimers.  "Stop" is not like a yellow colored traffic light which means proceed with caution. 
 

"Less than two weeks later, on Jan. 22, newly inaugurated President Obama issued an executive order requiring the closure of Guantánamo within a year and also ordered a review of the status of the prisoners held there, requiring "humane standards of confinement" in accordance with the Geneva Conventions.

But one month later, the Center for Constitutional Rights released a report titled "Conditions of Confinement at Guantánamo: Still In Violation of the Law," which found that abuses continued. In fact, one Guantanamo lawyer, Ahmed Ghappour, said that his clients were reporting "a ramping up in abuse" since Obama was elected, including "beatings, the dislocation of limbs, spraying of pepper spray into closed cells, applying pepper spray to toilet paper and over-force feeding detainees who are on hunger strike," according to Reuters." 
 
http://original.antiwar.com/scahill/2009/05/16/obama-thug-squad-brutalizing-prisoners-at-gitmo/ 
 
 
 
 
 

"While the dominant media coverage of the U.S. torture apparatus has portrayed these tactics as part of a "Bush era" system that Obama has now ended, when it comes to the IRF teams, that is simply not true. "[D]etainees live in constant fear of physical violence. Frequent attacks by IRF teams heighten this anxiety and reinforce that violence can be inflicted by the guards at any moment for any perceived infraction, or sometimes without provocation or explanation," according to CCR.

In early February 2009, at least 16 men were on hunger strike at Guantanamo’s Camp 6 and refused to leave their cells for "force feeding." IRF teams violently extracted them from their cells with the "men being dragged, beaten and stepped on, and their arms and fingers twisted painfully." Tubes were then forced down their noses, which one prisoner described as "torture, torture, torture."

In April, Mohammad al-Qurani, a 21-year-old Guantánamo prisoner from Chad managed to call Al-Jazeera and described a recent beating: "This treatment started about 20 days before Obama came into power, and since then I’ve been subjected to it almost every day," he said. "Since Obama took charge, he has not shown us that anything will change."
 
http://original.antiwar.com/scahill/2009/05/16/obama-thug-squad-brutalizing-prisoners-at-gitmo/
 
Glenn  Greenwald writes today:
 
"Center for American Progress' Erica Williams . . . said:
 
The American people right now are actually not interested in this sideshow and this discussion.  The American people are interested in looking forward -NOBODY is concerned anymore with what the Bush administration was doing and did.  We decided it was torture.  Conservatives may or may not disagree.  None of that matters at this point and time. 
 
But Glenn points out, in alluding to a February poll:
 
"and while some subsequent polls have produced different results, all polls -- even the most recent ones with the most anti-investigation findings -- find that, at minumum, roughly 40% of Americans believe there must be some form of investigations in Bush crimes.  That's a lot of people to be dismissing away as "nobody."  And Democrats in particular -- the group ostensibly represented by CAP and which chose Barack Obama as their nominee -- overwhelmingly favor either criminal prosecutions or investigations." 
 
It is time for the defenders of this CONTINUING defiance of american constitutional law AND International law to shut up and allow justice to prevail. 
 
The German newspaper Die Tageszeitung writes:

"With his decision to prevent the publication of the photos, Obama is fighting increasingly intense pressure to prosecute the human rights crimes of the Bush administration. That's what the human rights activists with the American Civil Liberties Union are doggedly demanding -- and they are firing ferocious broadsides at a transformed Obama, who promised transparency but is practicing opacity."

"Obama, of course, is not operating in a vacuum. Rather, he is reacting to the intense attacks from Republicans who accused him of treason for making the torture memos public. Still, that the president is abdicating leadership on this question is a tragedy. Because cover-ups and a lack of punishment were never good starting points for a new beginning." 
 
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,625068,00.html 
 
What a shame that a country that likes to boast of its rule of law canNOT stop these abuses NOW (and many of us must depend on the Spanish to put a halt to these abhorrent and inhumane practices. 
 

"As the abuse continues at Guantánamo, and powerful congressional leaders from both parties and the White House fiercely resist the appointment of an independent special prosecutor, the sad fact is that the best chance for justice for the victims of U.S. Torture may well be an ocean away in Madrid, Spain.

""The Obama administration should not need pressure from abroad to uphold our own laws and initiate a criminal investigation in the U.S.," says Vince Warren, CCR’s executive director. "I hope the Spanish cases will impress on the president and Attorney General Eric Holder how seriously the rest of the world takes these crimes and show them the issue will not go away."

 http://original.antiwar.com/scahill/2009/05/16/obama-thug-squad-brutalizing-prisoners-at-gitmo/

 

IF YOU ARE NOT PART OF THE SOLUTION, THEN YOU ARE PART OF THE PROBLEM! 

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thank-you for putting together this information. rated and absorbed.
No one thinks of this from the prisoner's perspective. GWB was Hitler but Obama is his Neville Chamberlain. Obama wants to be "non-judgemental" by lacking any judgement at all, which allows the evil to continue unabated.
this information is important enough that I'm going to connect it with my post. I want to give obama a chance...but not at the expense of prisoner 345 or any others.
Greatly informative and powerful post. We must all work together to keep the pressure on Obushma.

And, lest we forget, O is still giving our treasury away to the banks, our health care to the insurance companies and our morality to the gods of war in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Monkey fingered this earlier, but wanted to drop back by and say you do good work.
Thank you ALL for coming here to express your comments upon what other cowardly types wouldn't even take the time to read.

Maybe, I should be glad they didn't come to read it, as they would not only find it incomprehensible, but would offer more of the same bat-sh*t canards they use to justify their distorted, delusionary fabrications.
Hi Mark

This post is right on the mark. We elect a Progressive (even called leftist) and get a NeoCon instead. What an insult he has become.