USS Cole case

 The fact that so many of the men still held at Guantanamo have been tortured by our government should make all of us ashamed... but alas. It seems the Judge in the USS Cole case doesn't really believe that this particular defendant/prisoner lacks competency because he answers "yes" when asked if he understands what is going on... but anyway.

....the judge has ordered a competency exam, called a 706 Sanity Board, for the defendant, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. The judge ordered a military medical panel that includes an Army psychiatrist to evaluate the prisoner and report back by Oct. 16, the day before the court travels to Guantanamo for panel selection, which is scheduled to begin on Oct. 19. 

Defense lawyers brought a forensic psychiatrist, Dr. Terry Kupers, to Guantanamo last month to evaluate al-Nashiri, who has been in U.S. custody since 2002, with the first four years spent in solitary confinement in CIA prisons. The previous judge in the case found al-Nashiri’s torture and abuse disqualified the use of his confessions to federal agents.

His lawyers have now gone further, arguing he is not competent to stand trial based on the expert opinion of Dr. Kupers, a civilian who spent eight hours with al-Nashiri in August and reviewed earlier medical reports. Dr. Kupers concluded that the prisoner has a traumatic brain injury, neurocognitive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and a major depressive disorder. Those last two findings were consistent with the conclusion of a military medical board that examined al-Nashiri by court order in 2013. Al-Nashiri’s attorneys have now filed an opinion by Dr. Kupers concluding that al-Nashiri “lacks capacity to stand trial because he is unable to understand the nature of the proceedings or to conduct or cooperate intelligently in the defense of the case.”

On Sept. 16 the judge, Army Col. Matthew Fitzgerald, disagreed in a ruling that cited “the weight of the evidence reflecting on the accused’s capacity, which spans a period of decades, indicates that he possesses the capacity to stand trial.” In the same ruling, however, he ordered “out of an abundance of caution” that a doctor conduct an inquiry on al-Nashiri’s capacity to stand trial.

 read the rest here.

and our awful history repeats itself ...

 For a time at Guantanamo we held detainees in cages.  You can go on line and find photos.

Now we know that people held by our current government in a detention facility in Florida were also held in cages. You can read/hear more

here.

I just want to point out one difference between the abhorrent treatment of the men at Guantanamo and the similarly abhorrent treatment of people in Florida at "alligator alcatraz." The people  in Florida supposedly had (I say Had because the place was closed down recently) constitutional protections because they were here in the U.S. of A.  Many of the arguments relating to Guantanamo had to do with the fact that the men were held offshore and not in the U.S.. We had to fight for whatever rights those men might be entitled to at the offshore gulag. The people held in Florida should have had the protection of our constitution.

Oh, and yesterday was "constitution day."

So much for that.

In other news...

 Individuals from Somali have been kidnapped by my government and instead of being sent back home, as they were told, they are being held at Guantanamo.

read more here.

Maybe a "detention" review for Abu Zubaydah

 

You can read more about this unfortunate man in this blog. He was tortured over a period of months. Water boarded countless times. Eventually the government acknowledged that he was a nobody in the "war on terror". Yet he is still held 25 years now. No charges have ever been lodged against him and never will. I doubt that the military will do the right thing. Especially during this awful time in my government.

That said:

After 20 years at Guantanamo without charges, alleged Bin Laden associate AbuZubaydah faces a rare detention review, exposing the secrecy surrounding post-9/11military justice.

Once portrayed as a senior Al Qaeda figure, Zubaydah was tortured at CIA black sites,left permanently injured and still never charged, raising questions about U.S.accountability.

His lawyers argue he no longer poses a threat and should be transferred under strictmonitoring, as a review board weighs whether indefinite detention can still be justified.

read more here. (sorry I do not have a free link!).

lest we forget

 September 12, 1977.

yes. 25 years and we still have not learned a damned thing....

 But the good news is that the Talking Dog (Unlike our f''in liar of a president, the Dog was in Manhattan close to the twin towers at the time of the attack) is back with his annual post. You can read the whole post here. Here is a snippet:

And we talked about the insane stupidity of it all. It was just impossible to believe that our country and the people in it could consistently learn every conceivable wrong lesson, and do the absolute stupidest and counter-productive thing at every single turn. And yet, here we are. The divisiveness of turning against the other just because they don’t look like us? Check. A pointlessly aggressive foreign policy almost calculated to create foreign enemies who might act against us? Check. A decision that we have to destroy our liberties to preserve our precious (and failing) “American way of life” to save it? Check. And that’s before we talk about the total surveillance state, or the normalization of torture or the use of concentration camps and dungeons, or of course, yet another “preemptive war” in the Middle East. This time without a “coalition of the willing.” Oh, and did I mention a weird decision (seemingly a matter of a personal bribe) to permit a certain Middle Eastern nation whose nationals constituted 15 of 19 highjack perpetrators to have the means to build nuclear weapons.

And yet. And yet people like us continue to take the time and trouble to attend these sort of events, even if it seems like hitting your heads against the wall. There are people of goodwill trying to live a life of meaning, and service to others. Even if the national (indeed, the global) “ethos” seems to be leaning ever more authoritarian, as aging failures (usually white and usually male) strike out at “the other” (often immigrants and invariably not white), and are willing to sacrifice democracy and freedom in the name of their hatreds. Sound familiar?

At the very moment that coalescing and cooperative action will be needed for challenges like, ahem, nuclear proliferation, climate change-for-the-worse), artificial stupidity (which the optimists suggest will kill us all in about three years… or are they just trying to talk up the stock price?), just to name a few… seems ever more out of reach, as parochial hatreds are propped up by the corporate media and, in the American context, “both parties” (by which I mean THE REPUBLICANS, even though Chuck Schumer and the Democrats do everything in their power to keep Republicans viable in the name of political fundraising).

And yet. It’s 25 years later, and many if not most of us are still here, and still not willing to completely give up, let alone lose hope. Indeed, some of us believe that the elections in less than two months time will brush back some of the excesses of the current President, and perhaps there will be serious change in 2028 when the entire Republican apparatus is likely thrown out. Or perhaps we are appropriately immune to this level of pollyannish talk and realize that the hope is in younger people who don’t have the hatreds and bigotries that got us to this point.

As Yogi Berra said, predictions are hard, especially about the future. I don’t know what will happen 25 years from now. I’m 63 now; the actuarial chart says that my making it to 88 is a less than even chance. You all find yourselves wherever you are on the chart. And hey… maybe that AI thing will kill us all, or climate change, or the nukes, or famine or preventable disease (in our present farcical dispensation where our national “health” minister is an anti-science vaccine denier and heroin addict) will finish us off.

I don’t know. This isn’t a day I have looked forward to, nor will it be next year, or the year after, and so forth. But maybe, just maybe… there is some hope for peaceful tomorrows?

Again, read the whole post here.

Vote and work the polls....as if our future depends on it...because it does.

 If you are a U.S. citizen the time to step up is now---(if you have not already done so). Our country needs all of us working on this election. Sitting back and watching is now acceptable.