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: Never In Our Names

Renewal of Hope

By Alexa

President-Elect Obama on human rights, torture and Guantanamo.

91 pages of emails and documents produced through FOIA request have shed new light on the treatment of two American citizens and a legal U.S. resident in military jails within the United States.

The documents show that the men were treated the same way as prisoners at Guantanamo Bay: interrogated by the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency, repeatedly denied access to attorneys and mail from home, allowed no outside contact, deprived of natural light for months.

Yaser Esam Hamdi, Jose Padilla, and Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri were designated as by the White House as "illegal enemy combatants," and ordered to be held in military jails for years of interrogations without criminal charges, which would not have been allowed in civilian jails.

In the documents, it's striking that uniformed officers at the military jails grew increasingly uncomfortable and alarmed by orders to treat prisoners inhumanely. Here, "an officer was still raising alarms about Hamdi's mental state after 14 months behind bars with no contact with lawyers, family or other prisoners.

"I told him the last thing that I wanted to have happen was to send him anywhere from here as a 'basket case,' of use to no one, to include himself," the officer wrote in an e-mail to undisclosed government officials in June 2003. "I fear the rubber band is nearing its breaking point here and not totally confident I can keep his head in the game much longer."

As a nation, we have become subjects to a king who appealed not to our higher angels, but our darkest nightmares. Incremental thefts of our liberty and safety were accomplished for political gain, even as we watched, helpless to ourselves and to others, the bloodlust of our king for those of Arabic descent, to detain  indefinitely and torture in ways that most of us can't begin to imagine.

And what did King George II (h/t blueness-jan) say so often it could have been nothing but a warning?

You're either with us, or you're against us.

For those who have despaired that "our" America is lost, stolen by a mad dictator, the end is just 8 weeks away. Change won't be immediate. Our new president's work is a task unlike any other president-elect's in history. The closest similarity might be that of Abraham Lincoln's inauguration.

As we celebrate the victory of Mr. Obama, I want to take a moment to contemplate the road ahead. We have to keep our new leaders accountable. If we've learned nothing else from the past eight years, surely we have learned that we are America and we don't want to be ruled by tyrants who profit so well from our misery. Katrina is a symbol of "disaster capitalism" to me, as is Iraq.

Never again.

A brand new day is at hand.

Full post as published by Never In Our Names on November 06, 2008 (boomark / email).