Keep on promoting justice on Wall Street, but don't forget about people even more unfortunate than our 99%.
I'd like to see the people who stole, pilfered, chiseled, and lied to us investigated and face justice.
But, I hope that we also work to procure justice for the people who have been held without charges, tortured, and abused in prisons like Guantanamo that drain money from our treasury which could provide decent jobs and healthcare here at home.
I'm not trying to change the subject away from the banksters and fraudsters on Wall Street, but I would like to broaden the scope of this wonderful activism to include victims of our country's torturers.
Guantánamo: the most expensive prison on earth by Carol Rosenberg:
The Pentagon detention center that started out in January 2002 as a collection of crude open-air cells guarded by Marines in a muddy tent city is today arguably the most expensive prison on earth, costing taxpayers $800,000 annually for each of the 171 captives by Obama administration reckoning.
That’s more than 30 times the cost of keeping a captive on U.S. soil.
It's not just the price tag in dollars, but the cost to the soul of our country. The trail of abuse and torture is shockingly inhumane and devastating to our nation's core.
The story of Abu Zubaydah illustrates not only the depravity, but the incompetence of these hellish torture chambers.
Abu Zubaydah: Tortured for Nothing by Andrew Worthington.
The story of Abu Zubaydah — a Saudi-born Palestinian whose real name is Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn — has always been absolutely central to the “War on Terror.” Seized in a house raid in Faisalabad, Pakistan on March 28, 2002, he was immediately touted as “al-Qaeda’s chief of operations and top recruiter,” who would be able to “provide the names of terrorists around the world and which targets they planned to hit.” He then pretty much vanished off the face of the earth for four and a half years.
In September 2006, he resurfaced in Guantánamo, when President Bush announced that he was one of 14 “high-value detainees,” previously held in secret CIA prisons, whose existence had been resolutely denied by the administration until that point.
In a speech on September 6, 2006, Bush finally conceded that “a small number of suspected terrorist leaders and operatives captured during the war [on terror] have been held and questioned outside the United States, in a separate program operated by the Central Intelligence Agency,” and claimed that when Abu Zubaydah, who he described as “a senior terrorist leader and a trusted associate of Osama bin Laden,” became “defiant and evasive” after his capture, “the CIA used an alternative set of procedures. These procedures were designed to be safe, to comply with our laws, our Constitution, and our treaty obligations. The Department of Justice reviewed the authorized methods extensively and determined them to be lawful.”
Abu Zubaydah's suffering: Torture or not, a human being was shattered for life by actions that in no way reflect who we are as a people. by Joseph Margulies, assistant director of the Roderick MacArthur Justice Center at Northwestern University School of Law, is co-counsel for Abu Zubaydah.
First, they beat him. As authorized by the Justice Department and confirmed by the Red Cross, they wrapped a collar around his neck and smashed him over and over against a wall. They forced his body into a tiny, pitch-dark box and left him for hours. They stripped him naked and suspended him from hooks in the ceiling. They kept him awake for days.
And they strapped him to an inverted board and poured water over his covered nose and mouth to "produce the sensation of suffocation and incipient panic." Eighty-three times. I leave it to others to debate whether we should call this torture. I am content with the self-evident truth that it was wrong.
Abu Zubaydah, we now understand, was nothing like what the president believed. He was never Al Qaeda.
Today, he suffers blinding headaches and has permanent brain damage. He has an excruciating sensitivity to sounds, hearing what others do not. The slightest noise drives him nearly insane. In the last two years alone, he has experienced about 200 seizures.
Why Did US Medical Personnel Remove High-Value Detainee Abu Zubaydah's Eye? by Jason Leopold.
Zubaydah, who is wearing an eye patch in a photograph included in his Guantanamo threat assessment file released by WikiLeaks last month, apparently never consented to the medical procedure and to this day has no idea why it was done, according to one of Zubaydah's attorneys.
"I can tell you that Abu Zubaydah has no explanation for the loss of his eye," said Brent Mickum, who has represented Zubaydah since 2007. "He continually wants me to make inquiries to try and determine the circumstances for which he lost his eye, but no one has been forthcoming."
Zubaydah, the first high-value detainee captured in the "war on terror" whom the Bush administration had falsely claimed helped plan the 9/11 attacks and was the "No. 3" person in al-Qaeda, was shot in the leg, groin and stomach with an AK-47 during the March 28, 2002, raid. He allegedly attempted to evade capture by trying to jump from the rooftop of his safe house to the roof of a neighboring house. But the wounds he sustained did not include injuries to his eyes, face or head, according to intelligence officials and photographs of Zubaydah taken as he lay unconscious in a pool of blood, teetering on the brink of death, following the raid.
other detainees' claimed there were attempts to gouge out their eyes.
In a recent interview with The Guardian UK, Omar Deghayes said a Guantanamo guard "pushed his fingers inside my eyes" and blinded him in his right eye.
"I didn't realise what was going on until the guy had pushed his fingers inside my eyes and I could feel the coldness of his fingers," Deghayes told The Guardian UK, explaining that the incident took place when he protested a policy that called for detainees to walk around without pants. "Then I realised he was trying to gouge out my eyes."
A US counterterrorism official, responding to a query from Truthout, said, "Zubaydah had a preexisting eye condition when he was captured" and "American medical personnel treated the condition, [but] he ultimately lost the eye."
The revelation stands as the first piece of new medical information related to Zubaydah's case to surface in years.
But Mickum doesn't believe the government is being truthful.
"It is patently false to state Zubaydah lost his eye due to a preexisting condition and that is belied by the evidence that I have from [Zubaydah], which I can't discuss due to the government's protective order," said Mickum. "My client had two good eyes before he was seized. I'm aware of no information from my client, the government or any other source that he had a 'preexisting eye condition.'"
Who will speak for the tortured? Who will occupy torture?
As bad as 99% of us have it here in America, it pales in comparison to the victims of torture and wars based on lies.
Not only should we demand economic justice in our country, but we must demand that our country does not torture and does not drop bombs on innocent people to steal oil and other resources coveted by our country's rulers and our "allies."
Not only should the banksters and fraudsters be held accountable, but there should be investigations into who plunged their fingers in the eyes of prisoners, beat them, deprived them of sleep, and waterboarded them.
We are told not to look back at this horror, but that is exactly what we need to do.
We need to demand accountability.