Rasul vs. Rumsfeld

Rasul v. Rumsfeld
Wow, have you heard about this? Why don't we hear this story in the mainstream media? I think I know why. Rumsfeld is GUILTY.
I read about it in this Common Dreams article released May 6. It is pertinent now, because it contains descriptions of Koran desecration that these (now-released) detainees sent to our government last fall.

My hero, Rep John Conyers is on to it though. He posted a letter on his blog page at dailykos ,which he just sent to the Whitehouse Press Secretary,Mr. Scott McClellan.
Here is a key excerpt from Conyers' letter:

"Third, the public deserves to know what precisely the White House is asserting with respect to the mistreatment of the Koran by interrogators: are such reports categorically false or are they, in the words of one publication, "manifold?" For example, a May1st New York Times report indicated that a Koran was thrown into a pile and stepped on at the Guantanamo detention facility and "[a] former interrogator at Guantanamo, in an interview with the Times, confirmed the accounts of the hunger strikes, including the public expression of regret over the treatment of the Korans." The incident where a Koran was allegedly thrown in a toilet was also recounted by a former detainee in a March 26, 2003 article in the Washington Post, and corroborated by another detainee in a August 4, 2003 report by the Center for Constitutional Rights. The question is: are you categorically denying that the mistreatment of the Koran occurred, or are you simply denying the Newsweek report is accurate on hyper technical grounds?" [my emphasis]

SYNOPSIS:
Rasul v. Rumsfeld represents four British citizens formerly detained at Guantánamo Bay: Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal, Rhuhel Ahmed and Jamal Al-Harith. Three of them wrote a 115-page document detailing the torture and abuse they suffered and witnessed while imprisoned at Guantánamo, and it can be downloaded from the Center for Constitutional Rights web site at www.ccr-ny.org. I read quite a bit of it and it is a fascinating and detailed personal account of life from the inside of a cell in Guantánamo.
I'll paste in a bit of it below,(not the most disgusting parts).
The beginning of the document describes their horrific journey from Afghanistan to Cuba, in freezing weather, shackled and packed into trucks, where many died, and then the cargo planes. I'm skipping that part.
Shafiq Rasul (age 27) lives in England. Before he went to Afghanistan, he worked at an electronics store, and was attending the University of Central England. The other two men who give this amazing first-hand account are now 22 years old.
Here is the the pdf file of their document, which includes paintings (oil or acrylic) of the prisoners. Worth a peek for the paintings alone.
The suit, filed last fall in conjunction with the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, seeks $10 million in damages for these detainees. It charges that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon chain of command authorized and condoned torture and other mistreatment in violation of the Alien Tort Statute, the U.S. Constitution, the Geneva Conventions and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
None of the detainees had ever been a member of any terrorist group or taken up arms against the United States.

"This is a case about torture,” said Eric Lewis, lead lawyer for the detainees. “The government tries to ignore this, but it is clear now beyond dispute that detainees were tortured at Guantánamo as part of a deliberate policy devised and implemented by Secretary Rumsfeld and senior generals. If the United States’ policy is against torture—and the President says it is—then senior officials must be held accountable."

For a copy of the filing, e-mail the attorney: Paul Hughes at Baach Robinson & Lewis
Paul.Hughes@baachrobinson.com
excerpts from the document by three of the four plaintiffs:
Detention in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay
Statement of Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal and Rhuhel Ahmed
26th July 2004

1. All three men come from Tipton in West Midlands, a poor area with a small
community of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin. The school all three attended is
considered one of the worst in England. Rhuhel Ahmed and Asif Iqbal who are now
both aged 22 were friends from school, although one year apart. Neither was
brought up religiously but each was drawn towards Islam.
2. This statement jointly made by them constitutes an attempt to set out details of their treatment at the hands of UK and US military personnel and civilian authorities during the time of their detention in Kandahar in Afghanistan in late December 2001 and throughout their time in American custody in Guantanamo Bay Cuba. This statement is a composite of the experiences of all 3. They are referred to throughout by their first names for brevity.
72. They were never given prayer mats and initially they didn’t get a Koran. When the Korans were provided, they were kicked and thrown about by the guards and on occasion thrown in the buckets used for the toilets. This kept happening. When it
happened it was always said to be an accident but it was a recurrent theme.
73. Eventually the prisoners went on hunger strike because of the way that they were treated and in particular the way their religion was treated.
74. Asif says that ‘it was impossible to pray because initially we did not know the
direction to pray, but also given that we couldn’t move and the harassment
from the guards, it was simply not feasible. The behaviour of the guards
towards our religious practices as well as the Koran was also, in my view,
designed to cause us as much distress as possible. They would kick the
Koran, throw it into the toilet and generally disrespect it.’
129. Delta was placed very close to the sea and as such, the salt air would cause the
containers to rust. This meant that there was constant reconstruction work and
therefore large electric generators were running 24 hours a day. This made it
difficult to sleep. There was also constant noise from the 48 or so other men all
detained in the same “block”. An unusual, but foreseeable problem that emerged in
Delta was that the cages and the entire area around the containers were infested
with rats. These were huge “banana” rats which would climb over the containers or
around the cages. Every morning, the men would wake up to find rat droppings on
their blankets or on the floor. There were also snakes in Delta but less than Camp
X-Ray.
130. In normal circumstances such conditions would be difficult to endure. In
Guantanamo Bay however we were deliberately kept hungry the whole time.
We were constantly in a state of anxiety about our future and totally at the
mercy of the guards’.
133. Shafiq comments “while we were in Guantanamo each of us was
interrogated for hundreds and hundreds of hours by the Americans. The same
questions were repeated over and over and over again.
134. During the whole time that we were in Guantanamo, we were at a high level
of fear. When we first got there the level was sky-high. At the beginning we
were terrified that we might be killed at any minute. The guards would say to
us ‘we could kill you at any time’. They would say ‘the world doesn’t know
you’re here, nobody knows you’re here, all they know is that you’re missing
and we could kill you and no one would know’.
139. (In the first few months, they were allowed a one minute shower per week. Later
this increased to 5 minutes per week and after 7 or 8 months in Delta, they were
allowed 2 showers a week. This was still not enough because as a result of the
heat and the humidity they would be constantly sweating and feel dirty.
1. Medical – I said that I together with others were suffering with infections on
our ankles as a result of the scraping by the shackles. The officials would
tell us that we simply needed to wash our ankles with soap and water, but
this was impossible as we only had a one minute shower per week. Often,
when we were in the shower, we had barely put the soap on when they
would turn the water off and take us away.

Why the fuss?

Bush holding hands with Saudi Prince Abdullah

as shown on CBS news
At "the political junkies.net" Jay Greene comments about why there isn't more fuss about this. I agree it is likely that the cons would have lambasted Clinton, had he done the same thing.
Personally I don't think there should be a fuss because men hold hands, the fuss should be over WHO he's holding hands with... leader from the country that privately condones the insurgent attacks, the country which is allowing men on their death row to go to Iraq as suicide bombers, country which has not reprimanded their 2nd top cleric for preaching in his mosque that Arabs should go to Iraq now to fight with the insurgents, country that spawned most of the 911 terrorists, including Osama bin Laden, country that doesn't allow women to vote, and only recently had any election at all.
imho our country engages in total hypocrisy in being so chummy with Saudi Arabia and dozens of other countries with the worst human rights records in the world. If they have oil to sell us or money to buy up US bonds, then we'll support them, send weapons and technological secrets, which could be used against us at a future date, whatever.
The world must laugh at how STUPID our foreign policy is. But since these policies (including our total disregard/denial of global warming) will bring down the whole planet with us, it is no laughing matter.

Letter from Congress makes news

Here is a little mention on CNN about the letter concerning leaked memo. Too bad they call the London Times "a tabloid", thus casting doubt on the source.
Video in Real Media format (1 minute)

btw next Think Tank on Sunday, May 22 will be about the media. Two of our members are going to the National Conference for Media Reform in St Louis next week. Here are just a few of the many top liberal presenters: George Lakoff, Al Franken, Amy Goodman, Naomi Klein, Jim Hightower, Robert Greenwald. The conference is sold out, so come to the Think Tank to hear about it first-hand.

Memo proves Bush faked our way into Iraq

The democratic underground is a buzz with this leaked memo story, and now my hero, John Conyers, has brought it up in Congress, and gotten 88 other members of Congress to join him in questioning the President.
See their letter, complete with 88 signatures here.
John Conyers is so cool he posted the story on dailykos. He said hundreds of Progressive Democrats of America and Daily Kos readers contacted their congress people about this.
According alternet, the memo is the official minutes of a briefing by Richard Dearlove, (then head of Britain's CIA equivalent, MI-6) on July 23, 2002 to Tony Blair and a few other top officials about a meeting in Washington with Bush.
Dearlove tells Blair and the others that President Bush has decided to remove Saddam Hussein by launching a war that is to be "justified by the conjunction of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction."
"The intelligence and facts are being fixed around the policy."
Here is the memo, as printed in the London Times.
I liked Ken Sanders article,
"Smoking Gun Memo appears, but where's the outrage?"
in the Dissident Voice on May 5. He mentions John Conyer's letter and the subsequent lack of interest by the media, concluding, "If only the memo had a semen stain .... "
So let's pummel congress, newspapers, and radio with questions about this!