Open Thread for Night Owls & Early Birds

From today's edition of Democracy Now!

^{After More than Six Years, Al Jazeera Cameraman Sami al-Haj Released from Guantánamo Bay}

Arrested in Pakistan in December 2001, Sami al-Haj spent nearly six-and-a-half years at Guantánamo without charge or trial. He had been on a more than a year-long hunger strike to protest his imprisonment. We hear al-Haj’s first public remarks from his hospital bed in Sudan ...

Al-Haj, who’s been on a hunger strike since January of 2007, was taken to a hospital immediately after landing in Khartoum. After a tearful reunion with his family, he spoke out against the treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo in an interview broadcast on Al Jazeera.

SAMI AL-HAJ: [translated] I’m very happy to be in Sudan, but I’m very sad because of the situation of our brothers who remain in Guantánamo. Conditions in Guantánamo are very, very bad, and they get worse by the day. Our human condition, our human dignity was violated, and the American administration went beyond all human values, all moral values, all religious values. In Guantánamo, you have animals that are called iguanas, rats that are treated with more humanity. But we have people from more than fifty countries that are completely deprived of all rights and privileges, and they will not give them the rights that they give to animals.

For more than seven years, I did not get a chance to be brought before a civil court. To defend their just case and to get the freedom that we’re deprived of, they ignored every kind of law, every kind of religion. But thank God. I was lucky, because God allowed that I be released. Although I’m happy, there is part of me that is not, because my brothers remain behind, and they are in the hands of people that claim to be champions of peace and protectors of rights and freedoms.

But the true just peace does not come through military force or threats to use smart or stupid bombs or to threaten with economic sanctions. Justice comes from lifting oppression and guaranteeing rights and freedoms and respecting the will of the people and not to interfere with a country’s internal politics.

See Avila's Diary on this subject here.

The Overnight News Digest has been posted.