Curt Wechsler, The World Can't Wait: August 2015 Archives

"If a prosecutor can't put together a case against someone who has been sitting in prison for as long as 13 years, there is no reason that person should continue to sit in prison, whether in Guantánamo or someplace else." -- American Civil Liberties Union counsel Chris Anders

President Obama's plan to close Guantánamo does not entail shutting down the entire base or rejecting the policies of indefinite detention and military commissions. While marketed as "change," the United States' plan to shut down the Guantánamo prison - and even its new diplomatic rapprochement with Cuba - are a continuation of US hegemony in the region...

see US Imperial History in Guantánamo

Even to a layman, the Yoo opinion seems muddled and poorly argued, in several respects.

Debate over where to locate criminal enterprise of indefinite detention misses the point. Extrajudicial punishment represents a gross violation of human rights by politically repressive regimes -- and defies centuries old practice of habeas corpus. 

"There are decades when nothing happens; there are weeks when decades happen." -- V.I. Lenin

Despite demonization, criminalization, and murder sanctioned by American apartheid, black lives find power in protest.   

For the youth - excluded from the American economy by inferior, substandard education; targeted by the malevolence of the fake drug war and mass incarceration; stopped and frisked for Walking While Black - were given front-row seats to the national security state at Ferguson after a friend was murdered by police in their streets...

Ferguson is a wake-up call, writes Mumia Abu-Jamal. A call to build social, radical, revolutionary movements for change.

Let's talk about the prisoners who were killed - murdered - by CIA officers during questioning and why those officers were never brought to trial. Let's talk about the sexual assault perpetrated against prisoners by CIA officers, but described as "rectal rehydration." Let's talk about the CIA's secret prisons around the world. Let's talk about the CIA's doctors involved in the torture program who violated their Hippocratic oaths to "first do no harm." Let's talk about the targeting and murder of US citizens overseas without the benefit of trial...

Let's Talk About Torture

The United States Institute of Peace Chairman Stephen Hadley is a "relentless hawk whose advocacy for greater military intervention often dovetails closely with the interests of Raytheon, a major defense contractor that pays him handsomely as a member of its board of directors" writes U.S. journalist Lee Fang.

"The call to flood Ukraine with weapons not only contrasts sharply with the stated mission of the Institute, but many scholars believe doing so would provoke more conflict." Hadley has urged European governments to boost their military spending substantially...

U.S. Neocons Urge Washington to Flood Ukraine With Weapons