Speaking of Paine
Via Greenwald, powerful commentary and video of Lakhdar Boumediene, held without justification or trial at Guantanamo for 8 years, where he was tortured:
Those who voted for the Military Commissions Act of 2006 — all GOP Senators (except Chafee) and Democrats Jay Rockefeller, Ken Salazar, Tom Carper, Mark Pryor, Tim Johnson, Bob Menendez, Frank Lautenberg, Ben and Bill Nelson, Debbie Stabenow, and Joe Lieberman, plus 219 GOP and 34 Democratic House members — were in favor of keeping people like Boumediene at Guantanamo indefinitely without any right of judicial review. The only reason Boumediene was released is because the Supreme Court (by a 5-4 vote) ruled that law unconstitutional and he was thus able to have a court review the evidence (i.e., the lack thereof) against him.
Does anyone object to the term “moral depravity” being applied to those in Congress who voted to keep completely innocent people in cages for life without any opportunity to have a court review the accusations against them? If these members of Congress had their way, these completely innocent individuals would still be encaged at Guantanamo.
Paine is spinning in his grave fast enough to power the original 13 colonies well into the 25th Century. It’s very difficult for me to watch this. The story about the deep injusice visited upon this man (with the eager and gleeful permission of the walking stool samples we call “Congress”) is bad enough, but as a noncustodial parent, Boumedienne’s admission that…
“I just, I cry. Just I cry, because i don’t know my daughters
…cuts me to the quick. It literally hurts. I don’t know what it’s like to be waterboarded, and I don’t know what it’s like to be kept awake for 16 days straight, and I don’t know what it’s like to undergo any of the other depraved and perverse tortures the US put this innocent person through.
But I sure as fuck know what it’s like to miss your children and to be powerless to do anything about it. In an very basic sense, it’s emotional torture. My son is visiting right now, and it is always amazing to me how much he’s grown, both physically and intellectually, between visits. The fact that I miss out on his daily life drives me berzerk, and finally sent me to therapy a year or two ago. That therapy has made the depressive episodes fewer and less intense, but when i start missing him, it hits like a ton of bricks.
I’m free to make a trip to visit Sam whenever i want, and spend a LOT of my scarce money to do so. For example, thanks to some poor planning on his mom’s part, I’m not going to see him between July 12 and October 9, and even then it’s only for a long weekend, at a cost of about $500 round trip. So I’m planning to spend an additional $300 or so visiting him on histurf in mid-September. I simply cannot imagine missing out on 100% of my son’s first 8 years, and the emotional distance that would put between the two of us. He would be practically a stranger to me, as I’m sure Boumedienne’s children are to him (and he to them). It would kill me. I don’t doubt that Boumedienne cries: I know I have, and my circumstances are nothing compared to the medieval ordeal the Beacon of Freedom visited upon this poor guy.
For all the talk of “family values”, it is quite clear to me, and probably the world, that the United States government has no values whatsoever. we arrest, imprison, and torture innocent people for years on end, before dumping them in a foreign country without so much as an apology.
I hope Boumedienne sues the fuck out of the government, and I hope he wins big. i also hope that Hell exists, and that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, David Addington, John Yoo, and the rest of the gang end up there.
June 8th, 2009 at 3:14 pm
Unfortunately, he can’t sue the U.S. government. Governments have immunity from suit, except where they consent to be liable. Military and security functions aren’t one of those.
Any blood money we pay when we inadvertently bomb Afghani or Iraqi civilians is purely out of the goodness of our hearts.
Unfortunately, Hell for the torturers is like Santa Claus- nice to imagine but isn’t real.