It's America's 6th Gitmoversary.

Today, Friday, January 11th is the sixth anniversary of the opening of the US prison at Guantánamo Bay. The ACLU and a number of other organizations asked members today to "wear orange to protest this stain on America's reputation." Snip:

Closing the prison and ending torture and indefinite detention without charge is a first step towards restoring our reputation in the world.

80 people in Gitmo-style orange jumpsuits were arrested today at the US Supreme Court, in a protest calling for the prison's closure: Link. Other similar protests organized by Amnesty International took place in other world capitals.

There were also protests in Second Life: Link to screengrab-set by Taran Rampersad.

(image: Matthew Good).

• [echolocator]

  JCD: You’ll pardon me if I don’t take a regular talking-point provider on the authority of his opinions.

  We’re talking about hundreds of human beings– NOT animals, NOT ‘dirtbags’ –kept in unjustifiable confinement for years, out of contact with their friends, families & even lawyers, with no sign of a trial date in a legitimate court of law.

  Imagine how you’d react if you were kept as a P.O.W. Sure, the guards don’t regularly bludgeon you or stick electrodes under your arms… (at least, not when anyone’s looking) …but you’re also kept in a veritable jar, isolated from a world that cares about your life & death. Your only companions are your captors, people who are trained to reject & despise you.

  A high percentage of these prisoners are on 24-7 suicide watch; an equally ridiculous number are kept alive via feeding tubes. Last year one made a pathetic, last-ditch attempt to cut his own throat with a sharpened fingernail. These are human beings who prefer self-destruction to another day’s interminable internment, human beings who have been systematically destroyed by being ignored & swept under the carpet of law– and YOU, you reprehensible ignoramus, have the unmitigated GALL to talk as though it’s hunky dory, that they’re getting what they deserve.

  “That is all.”

  That is NOT all. That can NEVER be all. You’re dismissing a painstakingly deliberate violation of U.S. & international law, undertaken by an administration that considers the Geneva conventions to be vague & outdated. Our actions during this phase of history cannot be Explained Away with a wave of your pompous hand anymore than they can be rhetorically justified by specious, hair-splitting arguments about ‘illegal combatants out of uniform’ and ‘acts of asymmetrical warfare’.

  Screechy? You’re god-damned right. The detainees at Gitmo aren’t getting legal representation at the military’s tribunals. They are being martyred, dying horrifically slowly, spiritually, to preserve the rights of war profiteers. We have to shriek on their behalf, to counter the bloviating of criminal politicians & armchair quarterbacks like yourself. Anything less would be to admit defeat.

• [peteprkr]

  Tres V for Vendetta!

• [jetsetsc]

  Gitmo sucks, but it is different only in degree, not in kind from the rest of the festering US prison system. Yes it violates the Geneva Conventions, the Constitution, and basic human rights, but so does a large part of our for-profit “corrections” industry. Throwing feces is not unique to Gitmo – happens all the time in your average penetentiary. We lock up a bigger percentage of our fellow citizens than most other countries. And there’s little to no focus on rehabilitation, with a market-driven incentive to expand the population and keep people locked up as long as possible so they can enjoy long years of rape, disease, mental illness and gang violence.
  Yaaay! Unicorn chaser please…

• [echolocator]

  JetsetSC: The principle (and in my estimation, most despicable) difference between Gitmo and the U.S. prison system is that the detainees are being used as hostages, whereas the average prisoner is being used as cheap labor. Both are exploited, but at least the prisoner has recourse to legal counsel. (In a biased system, admittedly, but it’s something.)

  Guantanamo Bay was picked in order to estrange the U.S. from the potential legal ramifications of keeping P.O.W.s for an indeterminate period of time, just as the detainees are referred to as ‘non-uniformed combatants’ to differentiate them from your average prisoner of war, thereby restricting their rights.

  In a nutshell, hostages. Substitute ‘kidnapping’ for ‘extraordinary rendition’ and you start to get an entirely different picture of the gang war we’re waging.

  Sorry if I’m harping on this, but even a death row inmate has resources to call upon & reasons to hope. The detainees are guaranteed nothing.

• [echolocator]

  Kevitivity: ‘Disgusting’ perhaps more appropriately describes the type of person who approves of treating human beings like cattle.

• [CountD]

  I never knew Buckethead felt so strongly about Guantanamo…

• [Takuan]

  Guantanamo Gulag has a point. Like the Soviet Gulags, it’s existence is a reminder to the general citizenry: BETTER THEM THAN YOU.

• [dragonfrog]

  Jetsetsc @8

  Actually, the US incarcerates more of its own citizens than any country in the world, not than more than most. That includes places like N. Korea, Syria, Singapore…

• [Takuan]

  hey, it’s a living.

• [Teresa Nielsen Hayden / Moderator]

  Kevitivity, drop me a note a week from now and I’ll turn your account back on.

  JCD, I’ve removed your comment. If people want to read a nauseating FOAF anecdote about Guantanamo that has no provenance beyond “it appeared on Michelle Malkin’s weblog,” they can go to Michelle Malkin’s weblog and read it there.

  For the record, I’ve read earlier versions of that anecdote that were set in other contexts, and blamed other deprecated populations. To the best of my knowledge, no one’s ever been able to track down real-world events to match those stories.

• [Takuan]

  Dear Teresa:

  How do you know how much to leave up and how much to delete? The story was shite to me, but isn’t it dangerous to only leave rational posts up?

  Do you have a percentage of tolerance or what? A forum of unanimous agreement is blind.

  Thanks and regards

  “Takuan”

• [Tom]

  Teresa @13, I lean toward Takuan’s position on this, although I never saw the original post. I appreciate the high quality of comments here, and the lack of counter-rants to obvious nut-jobs, but letting a few nutjobs through, particularly on questions of this kind, may also be a useful reminder to the rest of us that the gross epistemological errors that allow the Gitmos of the world to happen are all too common, and that people making those errors are reading this blog.

  Which is an excuse to indulge myself in re-iterating an argument that may give pause to any supporters of Gitmo reading this: it is a statistical certainty that innocent people are held there.

  Currently about 350 people are being held and the same source (Wikipedia) suggests that 20% are slated for release but the organs of the state don’t know where to put them. That leaves 280 who are still technically considered whatever the hell it is that gets you locked away indefinitely far from the madding Bill of Rights.

  Now, according to popular lore, police shoot the wrong person about 10% of the time when they arrive at a crime in progress. Upright arms-carrying citizens shoot the wrong person about 2% of the time. Ergo, a certain kind of person believes that the world is (relatively) safer with armed citizens about than armed police.

  Because I’m aiming this argument at those people, who generally support the suppression of the Constitution undertaken by the current administration (and quite probably continued by the next administration, regardless of party), I will take this statistic at face value. 10% of the time the cops are wrong, even without the “fog of war” to muddle the issue further.

  Ergo, we can say that 28 people in Guantanamo Bay are innocent. The cops–or rather the military–got the wrong guy. If on average there are 28 innocent people in Guantanmo Bay, the probability of there being none is as close to zero as you can imagine, something like one chance in a hundred billion.

  It is more certain that there are innocent people in Guantanmo Bay than that your car is still where you parked it. And the odds are that an entire classroom of innocent children have grown up to find themselves languishing without legal recourse in an American prison camp, guilty of nothing but being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

• [Takuan]

  please, don’t say “nut-job”. The hope is to persuade people to the point that they persuade themselves.

  Don’t get me wrong. I am an undisciplined monster and am more than capable of the unfortunate. I wish to change this.

• [Nelson.C]

  Darth @3: Pot. Kettle. Orange.

• [angelicapple]

  Closing the prison and ending torture and indefinite detention without charge is a first step towards restoring our reputation in the world.

  Yes, the prison definitely has to be closed, and the torture definitely has to stop. But not because that would restore the reputation of the US; it has to stop because what is going on in Guantanamo Bay is immoral, inhuman and inexcusable. Inexcusable not only for those who started it but also for the people who condone it “for the greater good”.