gitmo

21st Century Wire says…
A review of all the Top Stories from this week – for your consideration.

“Apparently some of those ‘folks’ Obama referred to included Tintin and Snowy”
For more artwork from Porkins Policy Review contributor Emma Redmond, please check out  Red House.

For more than 100 days, detainees at American detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have been on hunger strike, drawing international attention back to the prison that U.S. President Barack Obama vowed during his first presidential campaign to close down. Ramzi Kassem, a lawyer who defends prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. Photo courtesy of Ramzi Kassem. [...]

There have been nine congressional hearings on the Benghazi controversy – with more to come – but almost no one in Congress dares put the spotlight on the unfolding scandal surrounding the Guantanamo Bay prison where most of the remaining 166 inmates have opted to “escape” from indefinite detention via the only way open to [...]

He disappeared more than a decade ago, just 18-years-old and teaching abroad, separated from his family for the first time in life. His mother and father, sick with worry, heard nothing. For all they knew he was dead. Then, one day they opened a newspaper and learned their son was being held in a military [...]

The September 18, 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), ostensibly a vehicle for the U.S. to go after the perpetrators of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, DC., turns out to have been a whole hell of a lot more than that nearly 12 years on. That simple joint resolution has been stretched very thin during the War on Terror.

IN THIS ISSUE

• Top News
• Opinion and analysis

This week’s top news:
Hagel: US Considering Arming Syria Rebels: Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel became the first US official to admit that the administration is "rethinking" its previous decision not to arm Syria’s rebels directly, though he insisted that no decision had been made and this was just one option being considered.

Press TV – May 4, 2013

Each inmate at the US’ notorious Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, dubbed as the most expensive jail on Earth, costs Washington some $900,000 annually, a report says.
According to the Pentagon’s estimate, it spends around $150 million every year to run the prison and military court system at the US Naval Base in Cuba, Reuters said in a report on Friday.

President Obama this week defended the US’s policy of force feeding detainees in Guantanamo Bay who are protesting their due process-free indefinite detention by going on a hunger strike.
On Wednesday, UN human rights officials declared that force feeding amounts to torture, saying “it is unjustifiable to engage in forced feeding of individuals contrary to their informed and voluntary refusal of such a measure.”

The hoopla over President Obama’s statements on the Guantanamo Bay prison yesterday have obscured the reality of the situation. Sometimes broad talk of policy questions get in the way of the truly revealing details.
Mohamedou Ould Slahi