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Dear President Trump, Close Guantanamo Bay and Give Us a Fair Trial |
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Friday, 13 October 2017 08:35 |
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Rabbani writes: "I'm a taxi driver from Karachi, in Pakistan. Fifteen years ago I was sold for a bounty and taken by the U.S. military to a secret prison in Afghanistan. They mistook me for someone called Hassan Gul, and I was tortured for over a year before they flew me to Guantanamo. There's no disputing this - it's in the U.S. Senate report on torture. I've been held here ever since then, without charge or trial."
Detainees in orange jumpsuits sit in a holding area under the watchful eyes of military police during in-processing to the temporary detention facility at Camp X-Ray of Naval Base Guantanamo Bay, January 11, 2002. (photo: Reuters)
Dear President Trump, Close Guantanamo Bay and Give Us a Fair Trial
By Ahmed Rabbani, Newsweek
13 October 17
 ’m a taxi driver from Karachi, in Pakistan. Fifteen years ago I was sold for a bounty and taken by the U.S. military to a secret prison in Afghanistan.
They mistook me for someone called Hassan Gul, and I was tortured for over a year before they flew me to Guantanamo. There’s no disputing this—it’s in the U.S. Senate report on torture. I’ve been held here ever since then, without charge or trial.
I’ve been through a lot—but a new punitive medical regime at this prison might finally kill me.
In May 2013, without any way of defending myself or securing my freedom, I resorted to peaceful protest, and began a hunger strike.
The authorities immediately instituted rules to deal with me and others. If you lost over a fifth of your weight, they would tube-feed you, by force and in a painful way. I weighed 135 pounds when I started, so when I reached 108 pounds I had to be tube-fed.
I have tried to keep my dignity, insisting on going to force-feedings by myself, rather than being dragged to the chair by the ‘forcible cell extraction’ team.
Now, on September 20, things abruptly changed. A new punitive regime has begun, one which deprives us of the proper medical surveillance we so badly need.
A new senior medical officer (SMO) arrived, bringing in a new Trump administration policy of refusing to tube-feed anyone on hunger strike. They apparently don’t mind if people die because of the injustice here, because they figure nobody cares about Guantanámo anymore, and nobody will notice.
I’ve lost more weight than ever before—I’m well under 100 pounds - but they have stopped bringing anyone to check my vitals, weigh me, or force-feed me. They want this peaceful protest over. So they refuse us access to medical care.
The doctors here do what the new medical boss tells them. He wants me to beg him for food, but I will not. He is like a dictator.
They tell me it’s my fault if I die. But all I am asking for is basic justice—a fair trial or freedom. I know I am innocent, but I’m not allowed to prove it. I don't want to die, but they will not succeed in breaking my strike. I will not stop demanding justice.
I have a message for President Trump. He is a businessman. The government doesn’t have a case against any of us. Instead of wasting $11 million a year on each prisoner they hold on this island by killing us, why not bring us to court where we can defend ourselves?
Then he can turn this place into a museum—a place for others to visit, to learn about the awful mistakes of the past. Trump could even charge for entry and make money.
Maybe I will die as a result of this hunger strike. Maybe I will lose my sight, and go blind—even so, in here I have nothing to see. One thing is clear: that one day, the authorities at Guantanamo will be held responsible for what they have done.
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Welcome to the Abyss |
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Thursday, 12 October 2017 13:31 |
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Keillor writes: "I am off lingonberries for the time being and Volvos and flat white furniture from Ikea. No meatballs, thank you."
The novelist Kazuo Ishiguro. (photo: Francesco Guidicini/The Times)
Welcome to the Abyss
By Garrison Keillor, The Washington Post
12 October 17
am off lingonberries for the time being and Volvos and flat white furniture from Ikea. No meatballs, thank you. Once again the humorless Swedes have chosen a writer of migraines for the Nobel Prize in literature, an author of twilight meditations on time and memory and mortality and cold toast by loners looking at bad wallpaper. It’s not a prize for literature, it’s a prize for nihilism. The Swedes said he’s like Jane Austen combined with Kafka with some of Proust, three other writers you’d never invite to a party. Well, at least they didn’t give it to Joni Mitchell.
That Swedes give out the Nobel is like the Swiss deciding the Cy Young Award. We’re talking tone-deaf, people. The words “Swedish” and “comedy” seldom appear in the same sentence except as a joke. All the Swedes with a sense of humor came to America and so what the Nobel judges recognize is bleak, cramped, emotionally stunted, enigmatic, pretentious. Millions of people around the world understand the concept of reading books for pleasure, but the Swedes think of it as a form of colonoscopy. If they gave a Nobel Prize for food, they’d give it to quinoa. Of course all the book critics applauded the choice of Kazuo Ishiguro: Praising the dull and deadly is a time-tested way to demonstrate intellectual superiority. It’s like taking a ski vacation in North Dakota: It sets you apart from the crowd. And comedy is so utterly adolescent.
“He did not know where he was. It was midnight and the train seemed to be moving, he couldn’t be sure. There were voices nearby, or maybe he was only imagining them. He could smell creosote. He knew creosote from his years in Albertbad. He had been shipped there for crimes against the Directorate and had spent years driving truckloads of creosote to the canyon and dumping them in. Ever since then, his tea had tasted of creosote, his eggs, his morning muffin.”
Do not — I repeat, Do Not — begin with a paragraph like this:
“She sat at the table in the far corner of the cafe, waiting for him, and flashed a brilliant smile as he approached. He noticed the balloon on the cushion of the chair opposite her. A large semi-inflated orange balloon. Her eyes glittered, she was delighted to see him, and suddenly he knew what he needed to do. He pretended not to notice the balloon. He walked to the chair, took her pale hand and kissed it, sat down firmly and from beneath came a loud bubbly fluttery exclamation of flatulence, and from her came peals of laughter, like bells on Christmas morning. And that was where it all began. From that decision to sit on it.”
Meanwhile, it is a beautiful October day and I’m sitting in the kitchen, enjoying a hearty licorice tea and looking at my lovely wife. I don’t recall anyone doing anything like that in Mr. Ishiguro’s books. As the Nobel committee said, he “has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.” Beauty is an illusion, as are licorice tea and marriage and, of course, the kitchen, which sits on the edge of a cliff looking down at nothingness 100 miles deep.
The man who should’ve won the prize goes by the name Philip Roth and what disqualifies him are the many rich descriptive passages revealing a love of the physical world and the elements of storytelling such as conversation, some of which is, since the speakers are American, way too funny, way too connected to the world.
In their long-standing campaign against comedy, the Swedish Academy is doing almost as much damage as old man Nobel did with his hard work developing better rockets, cannon and explosives. They are leading young writers to aspire to vacuity. I say, let the Swedes give the prize for urban planning. Let the Jews give the Nobel Prize. They know from literature. Compare a list of great Jewish writers and a list of great Swedish writers. I rest my case. Swedish literature is made up of small dark stories in which people are very silent and then it starts snowing and a dog barks and someone reaches for the aquavit.
Poor Ishiguro. A week ago he was a writer struggling to put himself on paper and now he’s become a granite statue in the park, pigeons sitting on his shoulders. Write something funny, Ish. Astonish us. Go to the Nobel banquet in Stockholm in December and sit down on the balloon.
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Harvey Weinstein, Hillary Clinton, and Blaming Women for the Acts of Men |
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Thursday, 12 October 2017 13:29 |
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Solnit writes: "Harvey Weinstein is Hillary Clinton's fault, we have learned from many sources. So is eczema and the Civil War and the fact that your child refuses to learn to tie shoelaces and sticks to Velcro shoes."
Harvey Weinstein. (photo: AP)
Harvey Weinstein, Hillary Clinton, and Blaming Women for the Acts of Men
By Rebecca Solnit, Literary Hub
12 October 17
 arvey Weinstein is Hillary Clinton’s fault, we have learned from many sources. So is eczema and the Civil War and the fact that your child refuses to learn to tie shoelaces and sticks to Velcro shoes. The hairs and stuff that get caught in the Velcro are also Hillary Clinton’s fault, and she could have passed legislation against them if she cared instead of being uncaring. It is also the soon-to-be-divorced Mrs. Weinstein’s fault that her husband is an alleged rapist, except that it is Hillary Clinton’s fault, except that it is the fault of the victims for choosing to be small, young female victims looking for work at the outset of their cinematic careers instead of being Matt Damon, a choice open to us all.
Why are you not Matt Damon yourself? This is your fault. Perhaps you could also choose to be Jason Bourne, which would guarantee your safety every time? Take it from me: the Bourne option. After all I have read in Wikipedia that Bourne these days is “isolating himself from the world and making a living by taking part in savage, bareknuckle fighting bouts,” which is what everyone should have done if they saw Harvey Weinstein rising like a great scary potato over the horizon. It appears that Clinton was in Washington pushing to get the Children’s Health Insurance Program reauthorized while the reports broke about Weinstein’s alleged creepitude, but it’s her fault if she can’t multitask. Likewise it is the fault of young actresses for not speaking just because they were threatened by a terrifying bully, and it’s their fault that if they spoke up no one would have believed them, and of course you can now blame them for what happened, because in Shakespeare’s day there were no actresses, but these women insisted on entering the field, where there were men, and even entering the production facility, where there was this man.
Remember that every time a man commits a violent act it only takes one or two steps to figure out how it’s a woman’s fault, and that these dance steps are widely known and practiced and quite a bit of fun. There are things men do that are the fault of women who are too sexy, and other things men do that are the fault of women who are not sexy enough, but women only come in those two flavors: not enough, too much, and it is the fate of heterosexual men to endure this affliction. Wives are responsible for their husbands, especially if their husbands are supremely powerful and terrifying figures leading double lives and accountable to no one. But women are now also in the workforce, where they have so many opportunities to be responsible for other men as well.
It is Anita Hill’s fault that Clarence Thomas is a creep, and it’s also her fault that he’s on the Supreme Court, and it’s her fault she didn’t speak up about his sexual harassment, and also her fault that she did speak up about it, ruffling important waters when men were trying to fly-fish them, as women do when men try. To fly-fish that is, and the trout that are not biting are the fault of the woman who did not smile at you on the bus this morning, though it is a gospel truth that lady strangers owe you smiles. If we study up, it may be possible to figure out which parts of everything are Anita Hill’s fault. Mary Todd Lincoln: perhaps her faults linger on, and it would be fun to blame her for something, and why did Michelle Obama choose to exercise her right to bare arms? Perhaps that makes her responsible for some mass shootings, which tend to be carried out by men, but not their fault. Someone made them do it, and every time a man does something awful we can all pause for a moment of respectful silence while we figure out who to blame.
It is possible, as I study the situation, that I personally am responsible for the sack of Rome and for Attila the Hun and the Black Death (I wore a lot of black back in the day, still do), but more research is needed. It may also be that my friends Conchita and Amy are responsible for ebola and the holes in the socks of our great men that so afflict their heels when they would rather be thinking of how to serve our fatherland. If I were a man perhaps I would understand why a man just explained to me that Trump is Clinton’s fault and not be baffled about why no one ever said in my hearing that Bush II was Al Gore’s and then John Kerry’s fault or Ronald Reagan was Jimmy Carter’s fault for that matter.
Evidently it is the fault of Hillary Clinton that there is Donald Trump, and it was wrong of her to put Harvey Weinstein’s donation to work on to her attempt to beat Trump and protect reproductive rights and stuff, instead of donating the money to a cause that benefited women, and it’s her fault that a lot of Americans wanted to vote for, as Laurie Penny put it, the Hog-Emperor of Rape Culture who hunted her onstage in the second debate like Sherman going after Atlanta, only with snorting. After all the Civil War was her fault.
I have spoken. Which I do. Which is one of my faults; I am crafting an apology for that out of dynamite and backhoes which will be ready presently.
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Now We Know Why Rex Tillerson Called Donald Trump a Moron |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=37428"><span class="small">Fred Kaplan, Slate</span></a>
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Thursday, 12 October 2017 13:23 |
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Kaplan writes: "All presidents are ignorant of certain issues when they come into office. Most are aware of their shortcomings and take care to study up on what they need to know. The uniqueness of Trump is that he has almost no self-awareness, deals with his flaws by projecting them onto others, and seems allergic to study."
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. (photo: AP)
Now We Know Why Rex Tillerson Called Donald Trump a Moron
By Fred Kaplan, Slate
12 October 17
Only this president could think 4,000 nukes aren’t enough.
 ccording to NBC News, the secretary of state muttered the remark to colleagues on July 20 right after a meeting in the Pentagon—a review of U.S. military forces and operations worldwide—attended by Trump, his main advisers, and the top brass.
At one point in the meeting, a briefer showed the president a graph tracking the dramatic reduction in U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons over the past several decades. That reduction is widely interpreted as a success story about arms-control treaties, the end of the Cold War, and the declining dependence on weapons of catastrophic destruction. But Trump viewed it with alarm, telling the group that he wanted more nukes. Pointing to the graph’s peak year, 1969, when the U.S. had 32,000 nuclear weapons, Trump said he wanted that many nukes now.
Various officials talked him down, according to the NBC report, noting the legal and practical restrictions and the fact that the roughly 4,000 weapons in our current strategic arsenal are better able to carry out their missions than the much larger force of a half-century ago.
As the NBC report dryly put it, Trump’s “comments raised questions about his familiarity with the nuclear posture and other issues, officials said.” Those “other issues” included, well, nearly every issue and continent brought up, from Korea to Afghanistan and everywhere in between. Pentagon officials, the report continued, were “rattled” by the president’s lack of understanding on all fronts—though the meeting took place a full six months after he’d taken office.
This should have come as little surprise. Throughout the 2016 election campaign, Trump evinced both a thorough ignorance of national security policy and a cavalier boasting of his “good instinct for this stuff.” Hence his claims that he knew more than the generals about ISIS and that he knew a lot about “nuclear” because his uncle was a physicist at MIT. (This latter claim was particularly bizarre; my cousin is Argentina’s most celebrated choreographer, but that doesn’t mean I know a thing about modern dance or speak Spanish.)
All presidents are ignorant of certain issues when they come into office. Most are aware of their shortcomings and take care to study up on what they need to know. The uniqueness of Trump is that he has almost no self-awareness, deals with his flaws by projecting them onto others, and seems allergic to study. He has asked for his daily briefing to contain no more than three subjects, with no more than one page devoted to each, and containing only the consensus judgment with no space for dissenting views within the intelligence community. Presidents have easy access to the most highly classified information and, if they want, the most knowledgeable experts, in or out of government, on any subject. Yet Trump learns most of what he knows from Fox News and Breitbart.
The message is thus clearly sent out to all aides: This president is not interested in learning. To argue your case, find a way to align your views with his buttons, then push them unashamedly. Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, Trump’s national security adviser, reportedly persuaded him to send more troops to Afghanistan in part by showing him a photo from the 1970s of women in Kabul wearing miniskirts. (See, he seemed to suggest, Afghans can be just like us.) Maybe Tillerson, McMaster, and Secretary of Defense James Mattis are figuring out other paint-by-numbers games for keeping Trump in their lane on other matters, too.
But perhaps the most disturbing aspect of NBC’s story is what it reveals about Trump’s attitude toward military force. His idolatry of military officers is well-known, but less noted is his idolatry of big guns for their own sake. He wanted to hold a military parade in honor of his inauguration (until he was told it would tear up the streets of downtown Washington). He ordered a huge increase in the military’s budget but seems averse to defending allies or to fighting any sort of war, except for those that he thinks can be won by bombing terrorists or tyrants. The weapons used for fighting those kinds of wars—drones, smart bombs, small units of special forces, coastal patrol boats—don’t cost much. What costs a lot of money are aircraft carriers, planes, tanks, and personnel. What is Trump’s rationale for spending more on those? He hasn’t said because—this should be obvious—he doesn’t know.
He just wants bigger, shinier, costlier. He wants military parades as a show of strength. He told his aides he wanted 32,000 nuclear weapons because that was the largest number of nuclear weapons that a president ever had, and he wasn’t going to be outgunned by any other president. Forget about how the budget should be allocated, what America’s role in the world should be, or why on earth we need to build tens of thousands of nuclear weapons again. (U.S. Strategic Command officers already have a hard time explaining, when pressed, why they even need the 4,000 nukes they have.) Those things, in his mind, aren’t important.
Sen. Robert Corker said in his New York Times interview over the weekend that Trump views the White House as the set of a reality-TV show—not an original insight but a searing one, given that it came from the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. But what’s often overlooked in this observation is that Trump takes this view not only on the White House but on the whole world. It’s the only view he knows, after all—hence his obsession with Nielsen ratings, poll numbers, Twitter followers, and IQ scores (some of them fictitious) as the prime measures of value.
It is a hair-raising fact that though few Republicans have seconded Corker or Tillerson’s appraisals of Trump, still fewer have spoken out in their president’s defense. The day after Corker’s interview in the Times, CNN staffers phoned all 52 Republican senators to see if any of them would come on Wolf Blitzer’s show to discuss politics that day. Not one assented. They chose not to protest that one of the party’s leaders in the Senate likened Trump to a patient in an “adult day care center.” They don’t seem to mind that the nation’s top diplomat called Trump a “fucking moron.” And no one has as yet rebutted the latest report on Trump’s appalling cluelessness about nuclear weapons. The Republicans don’t deny any of these indictments, yet they do nothing about them; they do nothing to address the clear and present danger.
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