"Obama’s Guantanamo" [View all]

[Bucky]

and the question is....

[font size="4"]"What's an example of historical revisionism?"[/font]

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/05/10-0

[font face="times new roman"]Friday, May 10, 2013 | Common Dreams.org
[font size="5"]Death is Preferable to Life at Obama’s Guantanamo[/font]
by Marjorie Cohn [/font]

More than 100 of the 166 detainees at Guantanamo are starving themselves to death. Twenty-three of them are being force-fed. “They strap you to a chair, tie up your wrists, your legs, your forehead and tightly around the waist,” Fayiz Al-Kandari told his lawyer, Lt. Col. Barry Wingard. Al-Kandari, a Kuwaiti held at Guantanamo for 11 years, has never been charged with a crime.

“The tube makes his eyes water excessively and blood begins to trickle from the nose. Once the tube passes his throat the gag reflex kicks in. Warm liquid is poured into the body for 45 minutes to two hours. He feels like his body is going to convulse and often vomits,” Wingard added.

The United Nations Human Rights Council concluded that force-feeding amounts to torture. The American Medical Association says that force-feeding violates medical ethics. “Every competent patient has the right to refuse medical intervention, including life-sustaining interventions,” AMA President Jeremy Lazarus wrote to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel. Yet President Barack Obama continues the tortuous Bush policy of force-feeding hunger strikers.

Although a few days after his first inauguration, Obama promised to shutter Guantanamo, it remains open. “I continue to believe that we’ve got to close Guantanamo,” Obama declared in his April 30 press conference. But, he added, “Congress determined that they would not let us close it.” Obama signed a bill that Congress passed which erected barriers to closure. According to a Los Angeles Times editorial, “Obama has refused to expend political capital on closing Guantanamo. Rather than veto the defense authorization bills that have limited his ability to transfer inmates, he has signed them while raising questions about whether they intruded on his constitutional authority.”

continued at ==> http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/05/10-0

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It's a complicated situation. But calling Gitmo Obama's monster involves ignoring the Republicans in Congress who backed Obama into this corner and the Bush administration Frankensteins who actually brought this embarrassment to life. After slandering Obama in the headline, the author (Marjorie Cohn) acknowledges that Obama wants to and has tried to shut the prison down. Has he done enough? Obviously not. But to characterize him as anything other than hamstrung in his efforts to end this Republican-glurged insult to the Rule of Law is a horrible distortion.

This is still a democracy. If things go horribly wrong under the seal of government sanction, it's not just the president and it's not just the Congress who "didn't do enough." The blood, and the vomit spit up from the feeding tube, is on all of our hands.