At the United Nations, torture investigator, Manfred Nowak, warned that inmates eventually freed from Guantanamo should be allowed to sue the United States if they were mistreated.
"Justice also means to look into the past," said Nowak, an Austrian law professor. He contends there are reliable accounts that Guantanamo detainees have been tortured.
Pierre Kraehenbuehl, head of operations for the International Committee of the Red Cross, said the organization would closely monitor the Guantanamo closure.
"Indeed the question now will be how it will be closed down and what it will mean for the detainees that are in there," he said.
Obama won kudos from the European Union, which had been highly critical of Guantanamo and the treatment of prisoners.Living the life at Gitmo
At Guantanamo there are about 520 prisoners, the vast majority, if not all, of whom have been rounded up in anti-terror warfare.
They were non-uniformed terrorists who are not subject to Geneva Convention rules on prisoners.
But even if they did wear uniforms, they would await release at the end of hostilities. They are,provided with medical care and a fine diet that honors their religious codes, and they are allowed to practice their religion.
Now compare the estimated 20-30 million prisoners sent to the string of camps across the Soviet Union.
They obtained no medical care, were served portions of food inadequate to human survival, and were frozen and worked to death by the millions.
Moreover, virtually every Man, woman and child sent there was entirely innocent of any crime.
They where sent to places like this
Where they woke up in the morningsAnd worked
And workedWorked in freezing fog
And when the day was finished they went to sleep,where many never woke up, because they froze to death in their sleep
Not lay on their backs all day reading religous crap And being fed with special food,so as not too offend their religious beliefs
So much for our mainstream news media,and left wing politicians, I am certain the average journalist/politicians has little idea about how many people Stalin murdered in the Gulag.
So, for the record, here are some comparisons between the Gulag and Guantanamo, courtesy of David Bosco and published in The New Republic:
Individuals detained: Gulag -- 20 million. Guantanamo -- 750 total.
Number of camps: Gulag -- 476 separate camp complexes comprising thousands of individual camps.
Guantanamo -- five small camps on the U.S. military base in Cuba.
Reasons for Imprisonment: Gulag -- Hiding grain; owning too many cows; need for slave labor; being Jewish; being Finnish; being religious; being middle class; having had contact with foreigners; refusing to sleep with the head of Soviet counterintelligence; telling a joke about Stalin.
Guantanamo -- Fighting for the Taliban in Afghanistan; being suspected of links to Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups.
Red Cross Visits: Gulag -- none that Bosco could find. Guantanamo -- regular visits since January 2002.
Deaths as a Result of Poor Treatment: Gulag -- at least two to three million (Bosco understates).
Guantanamo -- no reports of prisoner deaths.
Now lets take a look at what the Germans did
These people died,not because they took up weapons
or planned to kill civiliansThey died because of an evil ideology
An ideology that has all the hall-marks of Islam
Here is what Pol Pot did
4 comments:
where did you get these horrible pictures?
Very sad.
THIS POST SHOULD BE PLASTERED ON EVERY SINGLE HUMAN RIGHTS, ANTI-ISLAMIST, BLOG OUT THERE,
it says it all. You can, for those of you who may know leftists, there IS a museum/group in Russia that has numerous archives of both testimonies and photos of Stalin's gulags,
Hitler killed by fire, Stalin by ice.
Of all the posts you have written here, this one, I vote as the best, because these pictures [and testimonies] say it all,
this is Exactly the banality of evil we are at war with today, that humanity has been at war with since the beginning of time.
These testimonies are the evidence of why we can NEVER, NEVER, be soft on human right abuses, why we can NEVER be silent to those or in the presence of those who hate and who spew hate/desire to slaughter.
I do want to add though, there has been those Same prisons and graves all over South America too, we just don't hear about them as much,
God is no respecter of persons, we have to uphold human rights [not being weak or complacent or tolerant to intolerance in like how those who 'claim' human rights are doing so today, to clarify] because once these crimes become 'normalized' or justified as some form of political necessity, even in theory,
they become the reality.
I will close with this, when seeing these photographs [and I've seen thousands like these in my years of human rights advocacy] there is no way,
I can't understand or fathom, how any could look upon these and not believe, that there isn't a Satan or a God,
or that there isn't evil. Animals don't even commit these atrocities,
and with all the so called 'wise' dialectics and wisdom of materialists and philosophers, in 2009,
we still have these abuses in our world, humanity has not evolved, hardly, even with all the progress. Humanity has devolved, become so debased,
and proof of this is in the fact, that we have a generation that pays money to see films that glorify violence and torture, kids see these films.
I am convinced, we are in the age of the anti-christ, there just is no other explanation that makes sense to me. Not because these killing fields are just in the modern age, hardly,
but because, we live in a world where so many, don't even think its wrong. In the left and in the right, doesn't matter,
and it is the reason, why I went back to the Cross,
because I am convinced, those who commit these horrors, do so, because they have absolutely NO FEAR of God, none,
but they'll have to answer, the entire world will.
Good post Infidel's Blogger's Alliance, I hope to see this post everywhere, the message needs to be out there and at that, very loudly. Loud as a trumpet...
Natasha
Shiva,
You said,
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Every prisoner of the Gulag, the Nazi camps, or Pot Pol,s Tuol Sleng would have given anything to be a prisoner in Guantanamo
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I couldn't agree more, and it is ironic that some have compared Gitmo to a gulag or a concentration camp. In fact from what I hear, the prisoners at Gitmo had it better than in many US prisons. We really need to put things in perspective.
Excellent post, Shiva.
L. Venkata -- a;; available on the web. Search Pol Pot, Cambodia, gulags etc and any number of Holocaust references.
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