The sun’s gone to hell.
Six years without eyes and feet…
Of course it isn’t literal, but it is the truth. He has no eyes, he has no feet. He has no oppurtunity to see the sun or the sky, to walk through the grass. To experience the simple pleasures of walking beneath the moon and glancing up at the starlight.
I’m probably a bit behind the times, but I stumbled upon this article for the first time today.
What an ego we have here in the western world, sitting in our ivory tower, patting ourselves on the back and talking about how we are “champions” of human rights. Whose rights are we championing again?
There are hot tears of anger pricking at the back of my eyes as I type this. I’m so infuriated, so livid, after reading this article, and a slew of others which cover the topic. So a boy of 15 is taken in to captivity, he’s put in a cage and over the next six years subjected to various forms of torture… Oh I’m sorry, we call it “enhanced interrogation” now don’t we? I wonder if that helps the interrogators sleep at night.
Lets have a good look at that word. Interrogator. Now I know not everyone sees the world in terms of semiotics but what is that I see there? Wait, it’s only missing one letter. Do you see what I see?
How can a nation, how can nations for that matter, supposedly engaged in a “War on terror” justify their detainment of individuals in a place like Gitmo and not appear hypocritical? It is impossible. Didn’t we fight a war, a World War, to protect the rights of every individual. Didn’t we see the error, the injustice, of separating an individual from the wider world, of wiping them from the map? I thought that was why we had Tokyo and Nuremberg. I thought that was why we put Tojo and Goering on a stand, I thought that was why we vehemently condemned the actions of Lenin, Stalin and Mao. I thought we’d learnt something from history. Am I misled? Is my line of thought really just naive idealism?
When the Bolshevik’s and Dzerzhinsky were rounding up the whites they put them into dungeons and kept them like animals, deprived them of sleep, then made them dig their own graves. And what did the Bolshevik’s have to say about these techniques? They were necessary to glean the infomation needed to protect the state. Can we really hide behind an excuse like “national security” and use it as justification to torture people?
Oh sure, no one at Gitmo is being made to Dig their own grave, no bamboo stakes are being driven underneath their fingernails. But does the percieved severity really matter? Simulated drowning, sleep deprivation, prolonged constraint, exposure to severe degrees of hot and cold… can we really pretend these aren’t forms of torture? These are the methods used by the CCP in the Korean War against American soldiers to illicit false confessions. Psychological studies have proven that these methods of “interrogation” have caused individuals to abandon reality as they understand it. Furthermore, in the 1950’s, when these techniques were used against American soldiers, the U.S. Government deemed them acts of torture.
He was a kid, now he’s 21. It’s alleged he threw a Grenade and killed a soldier, if he did or didn’t is irrelevant. He deserves his day in court, a fair trial, like every other citizen of a modern democracy.
He deserves a chance to speak with his Mother, to see her, to hear her tell him that she loves him, that she’s suffering with him.
Yet he’s been deprived of those basic rights for six years.
Barack Obama says he’ll close the doors of Guantanamo. I certainly hope he does. Because as long as a place like that still exists we’ll never have any hope of living in a world without hate and fear. How can we ever expect others to abandon their violent and inhumane actions when we have yet to abandon our own?
