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The 9-11 bombings Are Not Acts of War

The 9-11 bombings Are Crimes Against Humanity


the focus is:

Guantánamo Bay Prison
Precursor of an America Gulag
Establishing the Precedent for Concentration Camps in America

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Did you ever wonder why the White House set up the Guantánamo prison and why they operate it the way they do? If any of the prisoners have any real connection with terrorism, then certainly it would be easy to prosecute them in a normal civil or military court. In today's climate of fear, any judge or jury would just love to get the chance to "hit back" at terrorism by handing down a stiff verdict. They probably would even accept thin evidence.
          My own suspicion is that there are several other reasons for Guantánamo . . . I imagine there are two immediate reasons for the secrecy and the shredding of judicial protections. First, most of the prisoners are probably not terrorists at all; they were rounded up simply to boost the numbers. The secrecy and isolation permit the treacherous charade to be continued without interference or outside knowledge. Second, there are probably a few prisoners who really were involved in the Al Qeada network. Those must be kept isolated because of the stories they could tell about CIA connections with Al Qeada leading right up to 9-11.
          But I believe the underlying fundamental reason for Guantánamo, and its flagrant brutality, is to establish a precedent to enable more concentration camps in the USA. The hyper-propaganda fear-mongering campaign has created a climate where the general public supports what's going in Guantánamo for the time being. The longer the Administration can preserve that climate of fear, the longer the mere existence of the prison causes it to become de facto "normal and acceptable". Meanwhile, the Pentagon is rushing together a phony kangaroo-court legal system so that concentration-camp practices can become part of the established legal framework. That will be useful in case public opinion becomes less accepting. . . .
          As capitalism plunges into its terminal crisis -- the global limits to growth -- our elite masters must employ ever-more desperate measures to keep the system going a bit longer. . . . "Globalization" is simply the name for one phase of this grip-tightening process. The anti-globalization movement represents a popular recognition that the tightening process is going too far, and that the fundamental assumptions behind how our society operates need to be examined. Meanwhile the tightening process continues apace, accelerates, expands in its dimensions. The danger to the regime is that larger segments of the population begin to connect the dots.
          9-11 and its aftermath enable the regime to deal with this threat at two different levels. On the one hand, with all the hysteria and warpath fanfare, attention is distracted from thinking about what the real ills of our society might be. On the other hand, if one of these days the propaganda hysteria war machine stops fooling most of the people, there will be concentration camps and phony courts ready to handle that scenario as well.
--Richard K. Moore, "Concentration Camp Guantánamo,"
cyberjournal.org, 5 Dec 2003




"By focusing on physical conditions, there is a risk of missing the unique aspect of Guantánamo -- the arbitrary, unprecedented and unfair way in which President Bush and his administration have confined hundreds of people without either any idea how long they are to be locked up, or any way to plead their case. . . . [T]he Guardian understands from a uniformed source with intimate knowledge of the mood among the current military defence team that there is deep unhappiness about the commission set up -- a disturbing situation when the death chamber may await those found guilty. "It's like you took military justice, gave it to a prosecutor and said: `Modify it any way you want,'" the source says. `The government would like to say we have done these commissions before. But what happened after [the Nazi cases] was that the military justice system changed . . . What we have done is stupid. It is, I would say, an insult to the military, to the evolution of the military justice system. They want to take us back to 1942.
          `What the Bush administration did was literally use as a model a set of rules Roosevelt signed for dealing with German saboteurs in the second world war, seven years before the Geneva Conventions. It baffles me how the government got into this position. We have an [appeals] court that's been around for 53 years and which has built up a huge body of law. To rely on this review panel instead of using that court, it's indefensible.' . . . `You kidnap people who may be totally innocent, you take them all the way around the world in hoods and shackles, you hold them incommunicado for two years, you don't give them a lawyer and you don't tell them what they're charged with. It's not a matter of what's wrong with it, it's a question of what's right with it. And it achieves nothing.' . . .
          Article 5 of the Third Geneva Convention is clear: any captured belligerent whose status is uncertain should be considered a PoW until their status is settled by a `competent tribunal'.
          [E]nemy combatant status, combined with the lack of Article 5 tribunals, means that the Guantánamo detainees are kept captive until the end of a potentially endless `war', without the opportunity to plead before a court that they had nothing to do with that `war.' The US does not consider itself obliged to put them on trial, so has no obligation to give them lawyers; even if they are put on trial, and are acquitted, under its own rules, the US might simply lock them up again. . . . Now, it appears, anyone, US citizen or not, can be declared an `enemy combatant', at any time, and thus be detained indefinitely at Bush's discretion.
          Enemy combatant status is leaking out of Guantánamo and into the mainland US. There are now three `enemy combatants' held in US military jails. One is a Qatari computer student living in Illinois, Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri. He was awaiting trial on low-grade criminal charges indirectly linked to terrorism when, immediately after the government's case against him looked to be in trouble, the Bush administration declared him an `enemy combatant' and moved him to a high-security naval prison, allowing a trial to be avoided, and the accused to be held for as long as the president likes.
--James Meek, "People the law forgot," The Guardian, 3 Dec 2003


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