A man who has been imprisoned by the U.S. at Guantanamo Bay for nearly 20 years, but never charged with a crime or brought to trial, is petitioning to be released on the grounds that Biden has declared the Afgahnistan War over.
His name is Abu Zubaydah, and he is Saudi, but ethnically, he is Palestinian. He undoubtedly and indisputably was tortured by us, although some of it was administered at secret CIA prisons in Poland and Thailand. He lost an eye. His left eye.
The Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution prohibits the U.S. government from committing such atrocities. However, on the technicality that he is not a U.S. citizen, those rights were abridged. But, we should remember that those rights were derived from inherent human rights to which every person is entitled. That the U.S. government would want to commit such atrocities against anyone shows you that they disregard the human rights of everyone. They don't respect anyone's right to life. During our illegal war in Afghanistan, we bombed 9 wedding parties. At the time we filmed My Stretch of Texas Ground, the number was 8, but then it became 9. And after each one, we apologized for killing innocent men, women, chldren, the aged, etc. But then, we went on and did it again.
Why? And how? I'll tell you. It's because the U.S. government will do ANYTHING to accomplish its military objectives. It would rather accomplish them without killing innocents, but if it has to kill innocents to accomplish them, it will. It sees its military objecties as sacrosanct; as worth sacrificing human lives for, including innocent ones.
And it isn't new. It's always been that way. If you study the real history of the Vietnam War and the Korean War, you'll discover the horrific war crimes, crimes against humanity, that we committed in those wars. And the same goes for World War I and World War II.
The criminal wars against Afghanistan and Iraq were started by George W. Bush, and there is no statue of limitations. He could still be arrested, charged, prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison for his crimes . But, his authorization to commit those crimes, and more, was supposedly derived form the Authorization to use Military Force Act of 2001, which passed almost unanimously by Congress. One lone Congresswoman, who is African-American, had the guts to stand alone and say no. Her name is Barbara Lee. Are you lacking in heroes? Well, here's one for you.
That is fodder for a screenplay, and I should write it.
But, the point is that the cowardice and the criminality goes beyond Bush. The spineless sissies in Congress are also responsible for turning the United States into a criminal, terrorist nation.
But, getting backing to Abu Zubaydah, he was never involved in 9/11, and the U.S. government has admitted all along that he wasn't. And the U.S. government also conceded all along that he wasn't and isn't a member of Al Qaeda. He was incarcerated for fighting against us in Afghanistan. But, we went to Afghanistan and started that war. We started bombing and killing. We're the ones who crossed an ocean and two seas to do that. We went to them; they didn't come to us.
And now that war is over. The side on which Zubayda was fighting won. We lost; they won. And after a war is over, even if you are the winning side, and we're not, you release your prisoners of war. There is absolutely no reason to continue detaining him.
Mark Denbeaux, Abu's lead attorney, described the Zubaydah case as “the perfect storm that exposed the evil behavior driving the global war on terror and the torture program in particular.”
For more than four years he was held in CIA black sites in Thailand and Poland and subjected to some of the most brutal torture ever carried out by the US state. Zubaydah became the guinea pig for a program devised by two psychologists under contract to the CIA euphemistically known as “enhanced interrogation” but widely denounced as torture.
He was waterboarded 83 times in one month, held for hours in the nude with his hands shackled above his head, deprived of sleep for days at a time, and stuffed into a closed box resembling a coffin.
Evil. The spiraling descent into evil has taken over the United States- lock, stock, and barrel, and really, it is no wonder that we have 15 year olds going on shooting rampages at high schools. The foul rot is systemic.
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