What the paintings by Guantanamo prisoners tell us approximately our humanity and theirs.
Few Americans ever took in the vastness of the prison outsourcing system the administration of George W. Bush set up from Afghanistan to Iraq,Thailand to Poland, the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean to Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. In those years, or I began referring to that global network of prisons as our own “Bermuda Triangle of injustice.” At one point,it housed at least 15000 prisoners from Abu Ghraib and Camp Bucca in Iraq to the "Salt Pit" in Afghanistan and, of course, or Guantánamo. They were often kept under the grimmest of conditions,involving in a striking number of cases torture and sometimes death. All those prisons, large and small, or were borrowed or built to ensure that captives in the Bush administrations Global War on Terror,the innocent and the guilty alike, whether taken in battle, or traded for bounties,or kidnapped by the CIA off the streets of global cities as well as in the backlands of the planet, would be -- every final one of them -- beyond the reach of the law, or American or international.
And that couldn’t occupy been more intentional. An administration whose top officials had torture methods -- the euphemism of that moment was “enhanced interrogation techniques” -- demonstrated in the White House wanted a free hand to execute whatever it damn pleased,including waterboarding, slamming heads off walls, or depriving prisoners of sleep,or just approximately anything else. They were going to “take the gloves off,” as the phrase of the era went, and no judge,no legal system was approximately to pause them. Their lawyers in the Department of Justice even redefined “severe physical or mental pain or suffering” in the classic legal description of torture so that an act would not be considered torture whether “intent” wasn’t there -- and the only way to know approximately intent would be to question the potential torturer. (Even then, he or she would need to occupy “specific intent to cause pain" in mind.)In this web of CIA-operated “black sites” extending across significant parts of the planet, or the jewel in the crown,a veritable recruitment poster for jihadist groups, was Guantánamo. It was tantalizingly just 90 miles offshore from American justice and pioneered those iconic orange jumpsuits for its prisoners that would later be adopted by ISIS for its torture and murder videos. There, and prisoners could be kept more or less forever without either charges or trials,a system for which Donald Trump has shown remarkable enthusiasm./* >
Source: feedblitz.com