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On Saturday, Americans took to the streets across the country to demand the closure of the Guantánamo prison, on the 12th anniversary of the notorious American-run prison’s opening. Exactly 12 years ago, on 11 January 2002, the USA airlifted the first prisoners into the prison complex at US Naval Station Guantánamo Bay in Cuba following then-US President George W Bush‘s 13 November 2001 executive order authorising the prison’s establishment to detain American-captured “terror suspects”. Out of 779 prisoners ever held at the camp, courts only convicted and sentenced seven of them. According to The Guardian, those charged and convicted of a war crime were lucky, as they might get out of Guantánamo, whilst most of the prisoners held there without charges could spend the rest of their lives in prison.
During his 2008 presidential campaign, US President Obama promised to close the prison as he acknowledged that the detention camp was a symbol of the US government‘s violation of human rights. Today, twelve years after the opening of the prison and almost five years after Obama promised to close it, Americans all across the country took to the streets to demand the shutting down of the prison. Protests occurred at the White House in Washington DC, and in a number of other American cities including Miami FL, Santa Monica CA, and Chicago IL.
In early February last year, Gitmo prisoners began a hunger strike to protest harsh conditions and indefinite detention without trial. The mass protest peaked in July as over 130 prisoners took part in the hunger strike. Images from the detention centre published in June showed how military guards force-fed prisoners, strapping them into a metal restraint chair, feeding them through plastic tubing forced up their noses. In December, the DoD said that it would no longer release reports of hunger strikes staged at the prison to the public since disclosing such news wouldn’t be in American interests.
11 January 2014
Voice of Russia World Service
Editor’s Note:
President Obama couldn’t close the Gitmo Gulag because Republicans in the US Senate used obstructionist tactics, using abuse of parliamentary procedure to bollix up the Prez. That means something, kids… it means that Republicans are ungovernable brats at heart, which means that they’re criminal in their very souls. They advocate a “deregulated” anarchic “libertarian” society where the rich run roughshod over all others, and they advocate a foreign policy of lawlessly arresting people in foreign parts, kidnapping them by force, and taking them to the USA for trial by kangaroo courts. That’s not right… US law has no force outside the borders of the USA… that is, it has no jurisdiction; you can’t apply it to actions that took place outside the USA. That makes such trials criminal farces… far worse than any Soviet troika (and here) or Freisler’s Volksgerichthof… at least, they DID have jurisdiction in their cases, like it or not. America arrogantly proclaims that its law spans the world… and that’s not right (it puts a new spin on the Cold War, doesn’t it?). Remember that on Election Day…
BMD
Voices from Russia 
5 November 2017. Dr Jill on the “War on Terror”
Tags: American aggression, American terrorism, global war on terror, global war on terrorism, Jill Stein, political commentary, politics, terror, terrorism, terrorist, terrorists, United States, USA, War on Terror, War on Terrorism
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Outrageous: the disastrous, counterproductive “War on Terror” has cost the USA 250 million USD (14.77 billion Roubles. 1.66 billion Renminbi. 16.18 billion INR. 319.16 million CAD. 326.8 million AUD. 215.16 million Euros. 191.15 million UK Pounds) per day for the last 16 years as communities across America crumbled.
Jill Stein