An american hymn of liberation...

 

the international hymn of liberation from tyranny...

 

and let's not forget it...

 

Note scrawled across his guitar-- "this machine kills fascists"

SIGH...

 

musical interlude with actual music

 (still working on that last one.....)

musical interlude

 

New Years Eve of the plague year...

 The Talking Dog is his usual optimistic self:

It’s the end of a year that began with the sitting President of the United States staging a murderous attempted coup in a half-assed means to hold power (for which he had a powerpoint and everything), as we transitioned to a new President. The new President’s agenda was immediately thwarted by his own party in a stupid attempt to impeach the last idiot. But then the new guy managed to pass his super-duper COVID relief package (only stripped of the $15 minimum wage) BECAUSE THE SENATE PARLIAMENTARIAN (as if that’s really even a thing). BTW, the stimulus check in that bill was $1,400 and not the $2,000 promised on the campaign trail. Let’s just say that stupid $600 is going to be a yuuuge issue in coming elections. But now it’s DEMOCRATS who seem to object to free money for the peasants.

------

Maybe some miracle will happen and our adolescent billionaire betters will get public spirited somehow. I thought I would leave you with a laugh as I send you my best wishes for the coming new year.

read the whole post here.

Gitmo attorney discusses representing a man at Guantanano

Many years ago I wrote a piece for Huffington reflecting on my representation of men at Gitmo. Shepard takes this to a whole new level. 

What I've Learned as a Lawyer Representing Prisoners at Guantanamo

By Aaron Shepard

Lieutenant Commander Shepard is a military officer and attorney in the U.S. Navy Judge Advocate General’s Corps. He currently serves as a managing defense counsel with the Military Commissions Defense Organization.

In August 1944, Pvt. First Class Louis Cooperberg, a U.S. Army medic, wrote to his sister Eleanor in Brooklyn of his experience treating wounded Nazi soldiers on the front line. “I give them the same care, the same treatment I give our own boys,” Private Cooperberg wrote. “Yet all the while, I know these same men have killed my cousins and aunts and uncles in Poland, have tortured and killed without compunction, and despise me because I am a Jew. But I treat them.”

Jews under Nazi occupation were still being hunted down and murdered, yet Private Cooperberg ministered to all those in his care as equals. This ethos reflects the very best of American values: recognizing the humanity in everyone, even our enemies, and treating those in our custody with dignity and respect.

It’s worth reflecting on this ethos now 20 years after 9/11, one of the darkest days in our country’s history. Like Private Cooperberg, many Americans shone brightly after that darkness, unifying against horrendous acts of evil by coming together in ways that affirmed what our country stands for and, just as importantly, what it stands against.

But after 9/11, many others turned away from our values. Around the globe, American agents arrested men on thin allegations of terrorist activity, and secreted them away to clandestine black sites for years of torture or — to use the legally approved euphemism — enhanced interrogation. Many of those arrested eventually made their way to the detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, which was established 20 years ago, in January 2002.

American leaders have all too often excused our moral departures at these black sites, and in the prison at Guantánamo, as an end justifying the means. But even if one was to set aside the immorality or illegality of the means, the ends have proven both ineffective and counterproductive, pushing this country ever further down a path of forever war and incalculable loss.

And, as underscored at a recent hearing in Guantánamo, we cannot ignore the immorality. At that hearing a Pakistani man named Majid Khan, who went to high school in suburban Maryland, described the brutal beatings, forced sodomy, and other inhumane treatment he said he suffered at the hands of American interrogators: Tubes covered in hot sauce before being inserted into his nasal cavities. Repeated simulated drownings. Garden hoses forcibly inserted into his rectum.

• Did you know you can share 10 gift articles a month, even with nonsubscribers?

Share this article.

After hearing Mr. Khan, a jury of senior military officers condemned their government’s behavior. The handling of detainees, they wrote in a letter to the court, was a “stain on the moral fiber of America” and “should be a source of shame for the U.S. government.” They acknowledged Mr. Khan’s misdeeds — he served as a low-level operative for Al Qaeda — but found that our treatment of him was akin to the “torture performed by the most abusive regimes in modern history.”

Compare this horror with the grace of Private Cooperberg, who healed those who believed, he wrote, that he had “no right to breathe the same air as the rest of the world.” It would have been understandable had he made excuses to avoid treating wounded Nazis. Instead he saved their lives.

As a Jewish American military attorney assigned to defend some of the men we have kept in Guantánamo, I feel a strong kinship with Private Cooperberg. After all, many of the individuals I represent are alleged to have been part of Al Qaeda, an organization dedicated to attacking both America and Jews.

To be clear, my clients have not expressed antisemitism or hatred toward me. My primary client isn’t alleged to have attacked America — he’s alleged to have been tangentially involved with an attack in Indonesia — yet he was brutally tortured and has been in prison for nearly two decades. Regardless, my colleagues and I assist these men not because we support the crimes they are alleged to have committed, but because we believe that our country should hold itself to the highest standard of basic decency and human rights.

As an attorney and military officer, I am duty bound to defend my clients, a mission which our country and Constitution demand. Likewise, as a Jew, I was taught the core value of seeing humanity in all people — even enemies. And as an American, I was taught that everyone has certain unalienable rights, and that the protections of fair trials, due process and a prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment apply regardless of the alleged crimes.

Those who seek to abrogate these rights, who take shortcuts, who bow to near-term political or ideological expediency, forget the basic tenets of what this country truly stands for, what once made us a beacon of light for those struggling around the world.

Private Cooperberg’s letter closed with a warning that the true enemy is “any people who proclaim themselves better than all other peoples, and then set out to prove it by murder and trickery and by the stupidity of those who never bothered to reason for themselves.”

As Americans, we are constantly presented with the choice of what our moral role in the world should be. We can pick a path of turpitude and compromise, choosing amoral, shortsighted means of attacking those who seek to harm us. But such choices come with consequences — they severely erode our relationships abroad, and weaken our moral core at home.

Alternatively we can choose to illuminate the many darknesses of the world with the power of our example, and reclaim the grace and humanity we find in the best efforts of the Americans who have come before us.

If we’re going to choose the latter path, we must acknowledge our mistakes, and show we can learn from them. What’s happened at Guantánamo is an example of one such error. Twenty years on it is time for us to choose how — or if — we can begin to repair the damage.

The choice is ours. But I think I know what Private Cooperberg would have us do.

Lt. Commander Aaron J. Shepard, Judge Advocate General’s Corps, United States Navy (@GTMOCatch22) is a military officer and attorney. He currently serves as a managing defense counsel with the Military Commissions Defense Organization. The views expressed do not reflect those of the Defense Department, the U.S. government or any of its agencies.[--this last part is of course unfortunate]

The Talking Dog looks back at our year.....

 

No one says it better than the dog...

...... What does this mean? Well, it ties in nicely with the overall theme of this blog, to wit, trying to fill some of the space left open by the mainstream media on some of the bigger issues of the day, one of which is the national security state and its war on terror, especially “Guantanamo Bay.” Obviously, one of the biggest sources of mainstream media information ever to come out about GTMO was the Wikileaks treasure trove of GTMO data. Among the curators of this data was our good friend Andy, (who testified at Assange’s hearing in London). Andy has been at the forefront of journalists throughout the world on matters GTMO, despite being an independent, not permanently attached to any major news organization. Although I am nowhere even near Andy’s league in terms of my own journalism, I have still compiled over 70 interviews on the subject (referenced here). While there are “mainstream journos” on the beat (Carol Rosenberg, now at the N.Y. Times being the first that comes to mind), for the most part, I have to say that not just GTMO, but treatment of our military’s prisoners everywhere (CIA black sites, Bagram/Kandahar, GTMO, etc.), or the drone wars, or frankly, just how wide the bloody war on terror actually is, has received a strangely limited amount of coverage from the main stream media, which as I note, has created some openings for “independents.”

Read the rest here.

Musical Interlude

 In memory: John Lennon murdered 12/8/1980

THE OTHER BIG LIE --- updated

 Lindsay Graham is so tiring. He gets on the same bandwagon every time Guantanamo gets mentioned. The return to the battlefield. For those not paying attention my great senator Dick Durbin has put language in the latest defense authorization bill to close Guantanamo. Read his speech here.  The senate is discussing it now.  watch here. (at least watch the first few minutes to see the powerful video).

I did several studies of this particular issue over the years. The numbers of who went back to the battlefield were all over the place- one day 100 the next day 7 - etc. And then what qualifies as a battlefield is of course interesting - Seems writing articles criticizing the US is a battlefield.

Here is one of those articles.

and here is another.

I guess I am on the battlefield too!

THE FOREVER PRISONER

 

“THE PLACE WHERE THE RULE OF LAW GOES TO DIE”: ALEX GIBNEY’S NEW DOCUMENTARY ILLUMINATES THE PLIGHT OF GUANTANAMO’S FOREVER PRISONER

DECEMBER 6TH ON HBO

From Roger Fitch and our friends down under at Justinian....

 After dithering for weeks, the Justice Department has indicted Trump's mate Steve Bannon for contempt of congress. Some had worried that the ever-cautious attorney general, Merrick Garland, would delay charging Bannon, or not charge him at all; after all, in October, Garland let the five-year statute of limitations run against Michael Cohen's unindicted co-conspirator in the Stormy Daniels hush-money payments: "Individual-l", one Donald Trump.

It was another Houdini escape for El Caudillo de Mar-a-Lago. The payments, clear violations of election law, were under investigation by the Federal Election Commission as Trump's term ended, but holdover Republican appointees on the evenly-divided commission engineered a case closure on technical grounds.

If scandal and disgrace fail to sink Trump or his Republican caucus, there's still a faint prospect that the  congressional insurrectionists could be expelled, as they were in 1866, and Trump himself could be disqualified (or "lustrated") from office. 

It's essential that Trump be stopped from standing again, as all the indications are that he's planning a coup in 2024; that's why so much depends upon the work of the House Select Committee that is currently investigating the unsuccessful 2020 coup attempt. 

Even as the committee was sitting, shocking new evidence emerged of Trump's efforts to cling to power, e.g, the Eastman memos, and now, the Ellis and McEntee memos. Jenna Ellis was a Trump campaign lawyer; Johnny McEntee was the 29-year-old White House personnel director who forced out Defence Secretary Mark Esper for (among other things) resisting Trump's efforts to involve the Pentagon in his Putsch.

Even with the overwhelming evidence of wrongdoing, there's little time left for house Democrats to deal with Trump. The recent Virginia state elections exposed the continuing credulity of Republican voters, a softening of Democrat support and most worryingly, 2020 Biden voters with a short memory.

In November 2022 there will be congressional elections. Inflamed by the ceaseless Stolen-Election lie and powered by gerrymanders that would make Bjelke-Petersen blush, Trump's Fox-fed Lumpenproletariat will regain control of the House of Reps and put an end to its inquiries into Trump's malefactions. 

Yet there's no lack of ongoing litigation (here's the latest list), with a fresh grand jury inquiry into the Trump Organisation. Trump remains in personal legal peril with the January 6th jailings: his aiding and abetting the Capitol occupation would be one of the easiest cases for prosecutors to prove. As well, there's the incriminating Hatch Act violations of underlings in which he's implicated.

READ THE REST HERE....

When the FBI is claiming to be the good guy...

ALWAYS QUESTION IT.... GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — In the torturous history of the U.S. government’s black sites, the F.B.I. has long been portrayed as acting with a strong moral compass. Its agents, disgusted with the violence they saw at a secret C.I.A. prison in Thailand, walked out, enabling the bureau to later deploy “clean teams” untainted by torture to interrogate the five men accused of conspiring in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But new information that emerged this week in the Sept. 11 case undermines that F.B.I. narrative. The two intelligence agencies secretly arranged for nine F.B.I. agents to temporarily become C.I.A. operatives in the overseas prison network where the spy agency used torture to interrogate its prisoners. The once-secret program came to light in pretrial proceedings in the death penalty case. The proceedings are currently examining whether the accused mastermind of the Sept. 11 plot, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and his four co-defendants voluntarily confessed after years in the black site network, where detainees were waterboarded, beaten, deprived of sleep and isolated to train them to comply with their captors’ wishes. At issue is whether the military judge will exclude from the eventual trial the testimony of F.B.I. agents who questioned the defendants in 2007 at Guantánamo and also forbid the use of reports that the agents wrote about each man’s account of his role in the hijacking conspiracy. READ THE REST HERE....

Musical Interlude