Tag: Guantanamo

Colorado's newest U.S. Senator, Republican Cory Gardner, has a joke about Hillary Clinton and Colorado's Supermax prison. He's told it at least once on the presidential...

John Tomasic: Hi again readers, debaters, tweeters. It's nearly high noon, which means the air is soon to become thick with rhetorical gunsmoke. Independence...

A 37-year-old Afghan prisoner known only as Inayatullah held at Guantanamo Bay committed suicide yesterday according to the U.S. military Southern Command. Inayatullah is the eighth prisoner reported dead at Guantanamo. He had been held since 2007 without being charged with a crime although he reportedly admitted to being an al Qaeda planner.

The Centennial Institute conservative think tank at Colorado Christian University is hosting a "Tribute to the Troops" Monday, where the featured speakers will be Sarah Palin and General William "Jerry" Boykin. Although both figures in the past have been associated with an aggressive Christian politics known as Dominionism, Boykin is one of the people at the heart of post-9/11 U.S. religious militarism. For years he has been giving talks in which he conjures a Christian America targeted by hundreds of millions of violent Islamic jihadists, rallying support for the most hawkish variety of anti-terror U.S. foreign and domestic policies. If Boykin's past presentations are any measure, attendees at Monday's rally are in for tough talk peppered with statistics that sound official and scary but that fail to stand up to the kind of mathematical fact checking you can do in your head as you listen to him speak.

U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., spoke at the conservative Take Back America conference this weekend in St Louis. She told attendees it would be...

It was a blind quote hitting the civil-libertarian solar plexus. Bad enough that, as ProPublica’s Dafna Linzner and The Washington Post’s Peter Finn reported late on Friday afternoon, the Obama administration was readying an executive order that would establish a system of preventive detention in terrorism cases. President Obama himself had indicated in a May speech at the National Archives that he wanted to seek legislation toward the same idea. But now an administration official had told reporters that those same opponents of preventive detention had given the president cover to pursue it: “Civil liberties groups have encouraged the administration, that if a prolonged detention system were to be sought, to do it through executive order.”

The New York Times and Sunday morning political talk shows are contorting themselves into linguistically-torturous positions in a feeble attempt to avoid using the word "torture" to describe the immoral and criminal techniques employed at Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib and CIA black sites against suspected al Qaeda-linked prisoners. Now, Foreign Policy magazine has produced the euphemism-free "ultimate guide to the Bush Administration's journey to the dark side."

^{© Copyright 2009 Patrick Chappatte - All Rights Reserved} Click the image to see the full-size cartoon.

Even as Barack Obama has vowed one of the first acts of his presidency will be to shut down Guantanamo, and even as the topic has been raging in Congress, many Americans will have to wait until the day after George W. Bush leaves office to watch a documentary detailing the horrific policies of his regime.