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Cheers!

Stephen Colbert

Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert took on Attorney General Eric Holder's legal justification for killing American citizens abroad suspected of terrorism, particularly Holder's argument that "due process and judicial process are not one and the same."

"Trial by jury, trial by fire, rock, paper scissors, who cares? Due process just means that there is a process that you do," Colbert said. "The current process is apparently, first the president meets with his advisers and decides who he can kill. Then he kills them."

Pretty much.

WikiLeaks

Discover the truth

of the unjust, illegitimate war in Iraq and Afghanistan: WikiLeaks releases hundreds of thousands of military records revealing thousands of civilian deaths, execution squads,
other war crimes.

The Guantánamo Files

documenting torture, abuse, and years of unjust imprisonment.

Watch "Collateral Murder"

The military's own video documenting the killing of 12 Iraqis from a helicopter circling above

Help Stop these Crimes: Collateral Murder Video Showings and more...

Support Bradley Manning

The young soldier accused of releasing the US military records.
Find out more.

NATO Summit Protests

Chicago Spring:
Protest the War Criminal (NATO) Summit!

The "North Atlantic Treaty Organization" (NATO) promotes its mission as “security, cooperation among nations, and peace keeping.”
In fact,it is an organization led and dominated by the world's best-armed war criminals, led by the United States.
Join us in protesting NATO
in Chicago May 20/21!

Stop the Drones

Drone Wars

The use of Predator drones (unmanned flying vehicles
that are often armed with video-guided missiles) by the
US military and CIA is a largely untold story of the "Global
War on Terror / Global Contingency Operation" - yet has caused thousands of deaths in Pakistan and Afghanistan, many of whom are women and children.
Find out more and take action to stop the drones.

Guantanamo Turns 8 While More Lives Slip Away

Sunday, 10 January 2010 20:22

By Debra Sweet

Monday January 11 is the 8th anniversary of the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo. The emblematic symbol of the Bush regime’s “war on terror,” in which men have been openly tortured, kept in isolation, force-fed, and for years deprived of any legal respresentation or contact with the outside world, is still open.

It’s being called “Obama’s prison” now. On January 22, 2009, the new president announced that he would close Guantanamo in a year because it’s existence was a public relations nightmare for U.S. foreign policy makers. As of this week, there’s no closing date, but a vague indication it could be closed in 2011.

I learned when reading the new book The Guantanamo Lawyers; Inside a Prison Outside the Law, edited by Mark Denbeaux and Jonathan Hafetz, that the Bush regime opened it on the grounds of a former prison where Haitians and others fleeing poverty were kept in the 80’s and 90’s. The first detainees were kept in open cages, with almost no shelter from the elements. Building new structures allowed the jailers to keep some men in complete isolation.

Book TV is showing a talk by the authors twice on Sunday January 10.

Andy Worthington, in Guantánamo: The Definitive Prisoner List (Updated for 2010), called it “a prison in which the overwhelming majority of those held — at least 93 percent of the 779 men and boys imprisoned in total — were either completely innocent people, seized as a result of dubious intelligence or sold for bounty payments, or Taliban foot soldiers, recruited to fight an inter-Muslim civil war that began long before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and that had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden or international terrorism.”

Andy wrote this week about Attorney General Holder’s announcement that Obaidullah, an Afghan held in Guantanamo, will be tried by the Obama-style military commission for “war crimes” in Tortured Afghan Man Faces Trial by Military Commission.

Andy spoke with World Can’t Wait activists in early 2009, stating his hope, and some confidence, that the Obama administration would establish a process to release the innocent. But he ends the current column on this note

With the news that Obaidullah is to be charged again, when he is not actually accused of harming a single American, and when he may, in fact, have been tortured, through sleep deprivation and “Palestinian hanging,” to produce false confessions against himself and at least one other prisoner, leads me not only to repeat the question, but to actively call for the open mockery of Attorney General Eric Holder and the lawyers and bureaucrats in the Justice Department and the Pentagon who thought that reviving the charges against him was a good idea.

The administration is fighting in federal court on many fronts to continue the Bush detention policies, and j

just won a victory. According to Stephen Webster, the decision in al-Bihani v Obama “upholds the Bush administration’s broad claims of executive power to detain non-citizens. See D.C. Court of Appeals: Obama’s Detention Powers not Limited by Laws.

But we are not just complaining on this anniversary. There’s a Call to Action to Shut Down Guantanamo. I’ll be joining Witness Against Torture in protests outside the White House Monday. We will march to the National Press Club, where some of the lawyers defending detainees in Guantanamo will speak about their clients, organized by the Center for Constitutional Rights. That evening, we’ll have a public meeting at Georgetown Law School. I hope you’ll join in.

On a last note, the Obama administration has proposed the idea of relocating the detainees to an unused super-max federal prison in Thompson Illinois. World Can’t Wait is completely opposed to the indefinite detention of anyone without legal rights, no matter what the location. Prisoners are held in super-max American prisons already in complete isolation, and I can only imagine that the Guantanamo prisoners could disappear in plain sight along the Mississippi.

Margaret Kimberly, editor at the Black Agenda Report, went on a righteous rant, ending her piece called Guantanamo, Illinois with “In less than one year in office, Barack Obama has firmly established the continuation of Bush regime domestic, foreign and economic policy. While Guantanamo is unseen, Illinois is right in the middle of the United States. None of us can now claim absolution from our government sin. Obama and his supporters have made us all accomplices. The ongoing Guantanamo crime now belongs to the Nobel Peace Prize winner and to every American citizen.”