Never Again???

You have to look at this “slideshow” of 21 photos of Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo Bay (go to:  http://story.news.yahoo.com/newsdb?tmpl=ss and click on Camp X-Ray). It is the most disturbing thing I’ve seen in a long time (and as you can imagine, in the context of this current insanity, that’s a strong statement). It literally made me want to throw up.

Let me share with you some highlights:
#20 “Detainees are seen in their caged cells at Camp X-Ray.”
#21 “A truck sprays pesticides in the air outside Camp X-Ray.”
#26 “US Military Police escort a prisoner to a nighttime interrogation at Camp X-Ray.”
#34 “Marines keep watch as a new group of detainees arrive from Afghanistan for processing.”
#36 “Marines escort a newly arriving detainee into a processing tent after being showered.”
and my personal favorite: #37 “Military police look over a detainee after an interrogation.” [photo of prisoner on stretcher, surrounded by 4 soldiers]
… all interspersed with ads for Yahoo shopping. Is anyone else experiencing a palpable slippage of reality?

This “slide show” (as if we’re looking at snapshots of Uncle Bob’s vacation – well, there is that photo of the American soldier driving off with his girlfriend for a weekend of fishing – isn’t that nice?) is a shameless glorification of soldiers and weapons - featuring pornographic close-ups of shiny black guns against sunset backgrounds. Shameless propaganda for the “infinite war” agenda, the anti-Muslim/anti-Arab agenda, the keep-the-population-terrorized agenda.

And what it shows is that the US government has imprisoned human beings in cages and is torturing them (“nighttime interrogation”??). We have no idea who they are, we have no idea what they’re being accused of (besides the apparent offense of defending their country against foreign attack) - we only know that they’re mostly from Afghanistan and they’re mostly Muslim. Apparently these are solid enough reasons to imprison and torture people. Is anyone else having a problem with this? Makes me wonder what’s happening to the Middle Eastern men being “detained” within our own borders (another nameless and faceless group of “others”).

Have you ever seen pictures of Nazi concentration camps? Then these photos will look familiar. They say the Guantanamo Bay camp is going to house 2000 people – who do you think those people will be? Are you finding comfort in the fact that they’ll probably be people from another country, or people who somehow maybe “deserve” it, or people of another race or religion, or people who are more “radical” than you?

When I look at these pictures I think, I know who the terrorists are, and I know when I’m being lied to, and I know when something is really fucked-up.