Guantanamo

On Thursday, January 11, the sixteenth anniversary of the opening of the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba was marked by a coalition of 15 human rights organizations gathered in Lafayette Park, across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House in Washington, DC. An interfaith prayer service was followed by a rally featuring song and poetry and addresses by activists from the sponsoring organizations, including attorneys for some of those detained at Guantanamo, few of these charged with any crime and some cleared for release years ago.

January 11, 2018 marked the 16th year that Guantanamo prison has exclusively imprisoned Muslim men, subjecting many of them to torture and arbitrary detention.
Witness Against Torture demonstrators marching to the White House (Credit: Justin Norman)

We spent the day at a beach in Brooklyn. Skyscrapers floated in the distance and my toddler kept handing me cigarette filters she had dug out of the sand. When we got home, I checked my email. I had been sent a picture of a very different beach: deserted, framed by distant headlands with unsullied sands and clear waters. As it happened, I was looking not at a photograph, but at a painting by a man imprisoned at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp.

The last two weeks of October 1962, 55 years ago, was the closest the world has come so far to a widespread nuclear exchange in what has become known as the “Cuban Missile Crisis.” 
The First Use of Nuclear Weapons

Impeachment hustle, phony mortgages and the USA Liberty Act + this day in history w/the Kissinger Peace Prize and our song of the day by Langhorne Slim on your Morning Monarchy for October 16, 2017.

(Author’s note: This is an updated, re-edited essay, based on a 2007 written for a Celebration of Ernesto Che Guevara’s life held in October 2007 in New York City in commemoration of the 40th anniversary of his execution, attended by 300 people.)
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The Coalition Against Foreign Military Bases is a new campaign focused on closing all US military bases abroad. This campaign strikes at the foundation of US empire, confronting its militarism, corporatism and imperialism.  We urge you to endorse this campaign.

By Robert Koehler | CounterPunch | July 28, 2017 To read Witnesses of the Unseen: Seven Years in Guantanamo is to run your mind along the contours of hell. The next step, if you’re an American, is to embrace it. Claim it. This is who we are: We are the proprietors of a cluster of human cages […]

Detainees in orange jumpsuits sit in a holding area under the watchful eyes of military police at Camp X-Ray at Naval Base Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. (AP Photo)

Former child soldier Omar Khadr was held by the U.S. for 10 years. (Photo: Canadian Press)
Toronto-born Omar Khadr—who was captured by the U.S. military in 2002 when he was just a teenager and held at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba—will receive an apology and reportedly $10.5 million ($8 million USD) from the Canadian government for failing to protect him from abuse while he was detained for more than a decade.