What Are We Hiding and Why?

The heady days of "hope" are long gone and we are now faced with the dilema of supporting a president most  of us only supported in theory.  He was unknown, untested and now, it seems, untruthful.  A man of the law who runs for president must completely comprehend and accept his campaign promises of transparency in governance and justice for ALL (not JUST US).  What is Obama protecting by messing around with linguistics in policy?  What have we done to maintain our security?  Why are lies and obstructions more pallatable to some citizens than truth and setting things straight?

The question that's haunting me is what could a person possibly do to make them "untriable?"  The answer keeps coming back that it isn't the prisoner who is untriable, but the legal system which "dissappeared" law abiding citizens.  Which brings us back to the question of what our president is  doing to protect and maintain our democracy, because democracy HAS to be for all, or it just ain't democracy.

I hope you have sufficiently digested and recovered from yesterday's food fest to stomach this.  And get ready when the news breaks out of our new Afghani Gitmo in Bagram.

(Image: Lance Page / t r u t h o u t;
Adapted: christophe dune / Flickr)

Obama's Fifth Category: The "Untriable" 

Tuesday 24 November 2009

[...]  According to The Washington Post, quoting an unnamed official, there are some 75 prisoners in this "fifth category." And the administration's position is that these people are untriable because the evidence against them was obtained through torture or because public trials would involve and potentially expose an unacceptable volume of classified material.

[...]  The Obama administration gave the human rights community apoplexy when it referred to "preventive detention." Now, it is simply saying that it's not going to seek any additional authority from Congress for such preventive detention. Which perhaps gives us a clue to the approach the administration has in mind. In a study by the Obama-friendly Center for American Progress, analyst Ken Gude suggests that the Obama administration "incarcerate detainees convicted in US criminal courts in maximum-security US prisons and transfer those who will remain in military custody to Bagram prison in Afghanistan." (Emphasis mine.)

That latter group would presumably include the untriable. Which appears to create a neo-GITMO at Bagram in Afghanistan.

http://www.truthout.org/1124094

Cheney-Gonzales Bust Linked to Immigrant/Native American Abuse

After poking around the internet I've found up with a post which is more detailed and less "diplomatic" in describing the offenses committed by Dick Cheney and Alberto Gonzales:
Posted by Brenda Norrell - November 19, 2008 at 12:49 am
Cheney and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales indicted for criminal conspiracy in private prison profiteering, resulting in prisoner assaults
By Brenda Norrell
WILLACY COUNTY, Texas -- US Vice President Dick Cheney was indicted today for a prison profiteering scheme and charged with abuse of prisoners. Cheney invested millions in the Vanguard Group, an investment management company with interests in the prison companies in charge of detention centers. Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was also indicted in the prison profiteering scheme, resulting in ongoing prisoner assaults and at least one murder.
Human rights activists urged a probe into prison profiteering after the private prison corporations GEO Group and CCA (Corrections Corporation of America) [my bold] began receiving enormous federal contracts to build detention centers to imprison migrants. [my bold] GEO's new migrant prisons including prisons in Laredo, Texas and Jena, Louisiana. [my bold] [dear old Jena, home of the notorious lynching tree and the Jena 6 --click on "Jena 6" in tags for more posts on that story]
Human rights activists said the fever-pitched racism mounted toward immigrants at the US/Mexico border was induced for the purpose of prison profiteering by US officials reaping enormous profits. The increased arrests of migrants resulted in profits and a long list of new prison construction contracts for the GEO Group, formerly Wackenhut, [my bold] both with a long history of assaults and murders in prisons.
A Texas grand jury indicted Cheney today and accused him of at least misdemeanor assaults of inmates by allowing inmates to assault fellow inmates. Gonzales was charged with having used his position to stop investigations into assaults committed in a prison for profit in Willacy County, Texas. Both Cheney and Gonzales were charged with engaging in organized criminal activity.
Last month, a Willacy County grand jury indicted the GEO Group, on a murder charge in the death of a prisoner days before his release in 2001. The indictment alleged the GEO Group allowed other inmates to beat Gregorio de la Rosa Jr. to death with padlocks stuffed into socks. The death happened at the Raymondville facility. A jury ordered the company to pay de la Rosa's family $47.5 million in a civil judgment in 2006. The Cheney-Gonzales indictment refers to the de la Rosa case.
Human rights activists protested both Raymondville and Hutto prisons in southwestern Texas in recent years. At Hutto, migrant women and children were abused. ICE refused to allow a UN Rapporteur into Hutto. [my bold]
During the Bush-Cheney regime, prisons of torture and prisons for migrants became synonymous with the name GEO, from Guantanamo to migrant prisons in the south and along the southwest border.
Cheney said Guantanamo was vital in 2005 and detainees could expect to be treated better here than "by virtually any other government on the face of the earth." Geo was awarded a contract for the continued management of the Migrant Operations Center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in Nov. 2, 2006. Recently, GEO received a contract for a migrant prison in Jena, La. GEO also received a contract for housing "criminal aliens" in the US, as stated on the GEO website.
GEO's migrant prisons were not restricted to the US. GEO also assumed a management contract in the Campsfield House Immigration Removal Center in England.
GEO was not the only one profiteering. The Wackenhut Corp. was also profiteering from transporting migrants from the border after their arrests. The two companies split in 2003.
All along the border, while GEO was building prisons, GEO's other half, Wackenhut Corp., was profiteering from the arrest of migrants from the borders.
The United States Customs and Border Protection agency entered into the contract with Wackenhut Corp., to transport arrested migrants from the border. Wackenhut is now the domestic subsidiary of the U.K.-based security giant Group 4 Securicor. [my bold]
It comes as no surprise that the Vanguard Group is also currently a major shareholder in Halliburton, [my bold] the longtime war profiteer in Iraq. Cheney's investments in the Vanguard Group are estimated at between $25 and $86 million, since exact numbers have not been released.
While the US filled its prisons with migrants, with a price on their heads, the number of Native American prisoners soared.
The US Department of Justice recently released a study showing that Native American inmates in Indian country jails increased by 24 percent between 2004 and 2007. [my bold] The figures for Native Americans in all facilities -- tribal, federal and state -- increased 4.5 percent. Suicides, attempted suicides, deaths and escapes were cited as the result of deteriorating prison conditions.
Human rights activists hope the indictments of Cheney and Gonzales are the first of many indictments of the Bush-Cheney administration.
http://narcosphere.narconews.com/notebook/brenda-norrell/2008/11/cheney-indicted-prison-profiteering-texas

Petition for Justice for Uyghur Detainees

17 Uighur detainees still stuck in limbo at Guantanamo Bay:

Demand Justice for the Uighurs Now!

Online Action Center

17 Uighur detainees held at Guantánamo

In a landmark ruling on October 7, 2008, Judge Ricardo Urbina ordered the government to release into the USA the 17 Uighur detainees still held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The government had earlier conceded that the 17 men are not "enemy combatants", but the government appealed the order, arguing that it "directly conflicts with the basic principle that the decision whether to admit an alien into the United States rests exclusively with the Executive".

On October 8, the appeals court granted a temporary stay to allow the government time to file its appeal. As Judge Urbina noted, "the separation of powers does not trump the right to liberty." [my bold] Call on the U.S. government to comply with the order, drop its appeals, bring the Uighur detainees into the USA, and work to find lawful, fair, safe and durable solutions in all their cases.

Several ways to take action:
1) Send the prewitten email below as is or use our bullets to personalize it
2) Send a fax or mailed letter using our template or in your own words using our bullets
3) Share this action with your friends and family

See the full Urgent Action for bullets and target addresses

Print sample letter: PDF | RTF (Word)
http://takeaction.amnestyusa.org/c.jhKPIXPCIoE/b.2590179/k.C43E/Take_Action_Online/siteapps/advocacy/ActionItem.aspx?c=jhKPIXPCIoE&b=2590179&aid=11366&tr=y&auid=4106807

The Horrific Legacy of BushCo

Did this administration sincerely believe that by offering a bounty, the warring tribes of Afghanistan would unite against the “evil do-ers” and turn in known terrorists? Those people have suffered for so long, and they will see NATO as the enemy, too. This will not have a happy ending, I fear.
America's prison for terrorists often held the wrong men
By Tom Lasseter, Posted on Sunday, June 15, 2008
GARDEZ, Afghanistan — The militants crept up behind Mohammed Akhtiar as he squatted at the spigot to wash his hands before evening prayers at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.
They shouted "Allahu Akbar" — God is great — as one of them hefted a metal mop squeezer into the air, slammed it into Akhtiar's head and sent thick streams of blood running down his face.
Akhtiar was among the more than 770 terrorism suspects imprisoned at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. They are the men the Bush administration described as "the worst of the worst."
But Akhtiar was no terrorist. American troops had dragged him out of his Afghanistan home in 2003 and held him in Guantanamo for three years in the belief that he was an insurgent involved in rocket attacks on U.S. forces. The Islamic radicals in Guantanamo's Camp Four who hissed "infidel" and spat at Akhtiar, however, knew something his captors didn't: The U.S. government had the wrong guy.[...]
Please click the link to read on. I cannot edit an article so important to our national psyche. We must face the monster we have created, or let exist, and we must deal with it.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/259/story/38773.html

630 Indefinitely “Detained” by US in Afghanistan

Back to the real pain of daily life for people whose lives have been shattered by the war on terror.
Bagram detention centre now twice the size of Guantanamo
By Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles, Published: 08 January 2008

The United States has quietly expanded the number of "enemy combatants" being held in judicial limbo at its Bagram military base in Afghanistan, a facility which has now grown to more than twice the size of the controversial and much more widely discussed military prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
[...] The New York Times, which has seen confidential documents relating to the running of the Bagram prison, reported yesterday that the military base north of Kabul now contains around 630 prisoners, a far greater number than the 275 still being held at a rapidly emptying Guantanamo.
[...] US officials admitted that its guards beat two Afghan prisoners to death, [...]
[...] The agreement first broke down in 2006, soon after a high-security detention centre run by the Afghan military began its US-sponsored overhaul, when President Karzai refused to sign a decree establishing a legal framework for the prisoners based on the discredited Guantanamo model. [So the Afghan President cares more about human rights than our bastard-in-chief. What a world!]
The plan then hit crisis point last May when two US soldiers overseeing the project were shot dead by a suspected Taliban sympathiser who had infiltrated the guard corps. The killings led to two months of vetting of the other guards and the dismissal of almost two dozen trained recruits, according to The New York Times.
The first 12 Bagram detainees moved into the new facility at Pul-i-Charkhi prison in April 2006, and those numbers grew to 157 over the next nine months, including 32 transferred from Guantanamo. Despite initial American concerns that the Afghans could not be trusted to imprison such "enemy combatants", it now appears that some prisoners will remain at Bagram indefinitely.
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article3318028.ece