Hypocrisy: Guantanamo Torture Praised, North Korean “Labor Camp” For American Citizen Condemned

NOVANEWS

Apparently, the United States government is “outraged” at North Korea’s recent trial and sentencing of an American citizen to 15 years of “hard labor”.

by Chris & Sheree Geo

As The Intellihub recently reported, Kenneth Bae, or “Pae Jun-Ho” as the N. Korean government is calling him, “is standing trial for attempting to overthrow the local regime.”
According to Drudge Report, he was apparently trying to take pictures of emaciated children while leading a tour group through the “Rason Special Economic Zone”, which is kind of a “no-man’s-land” (meaning open to foreign companies) on the border of China and Russia. This story is credible because the North Koreans’ central planning has devastated the people of the country, causing mass starvation. It is no different from Mao Tse Tung’s “Great Leap Forward”, which had the same overall result: Genocide and further isolation from the rest of the world.
Reuters also cited an unnamed “South Korean newspaper published by an evangelical family” (Moonies) that says he may have been arrested after witnessing executions of dissenters and dissidents ; However, considering that the Moonies are in the league with the Bush family, that story is questionable.
It is important, however, to point out that it is horrible for a government to detain and imprison a citizen of ANY country for 15 years for trying to expose state-sponsored famine or genocide. We are not disagreeing with our own government officials when they demand his release. What we are a little wary of, however, are the stories of the labor camps themselves, which Anderson Cooper covered a few months ago.

I hate to have to ask, but if we learned anything from the “incubator babies” story from 1990, it is that governments (particularly our own and the corporate media outlets supporting them) lie to the public about the atrocities of their enemies when the war of public opinion is being waged.
There are no actual pictures, documents, or video evidence of the torture being committed. All the “evidence” in this case consists of a few satellite photos, a bunch of drawings, and a man who claims to have been tortured but won’t show his scars to the world to prove it. I’m not saying this man is lying ; He may not be, or he may just be embellishing the story on CNN or the CIA’s behalf. The point is, we can never truly be sure of what’s going on in there unless we actually see physical evidence of it. Just like the entire country shouldn’t have taken the word of a 14 year old girl when it came to invading a country in 1990.
 

Meanwhile, At Gitmo, We Are Openly Torturing People

As all the hooplah about the North Korea threat rages on, 23 people at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba are being tortured. Let us spell it out for you: Torture is openly being committed in our name at a prison camp that Obama signed an executive order to close over 4 years ago. Just to give you a little background on how we got here, and what exactly has been happening at Gitmo, here’s the rundown.
In January, The Miami Herald reported that a federal court had canceled the war crimes conviction of an al Qaida video-maker. This was also Guantánamo’s only convict serving a life sentence. This, we believe, jumpstarted the hopes of the other inmates, and gave them the tenacity they needed to try to protest against the system that, admittedly, is holding them illegally.
By the end of January, Sarah Flounders at Global Research wrote, “According to Center for Constitutional Rights92% of the prisoners held just at Guantanamo are not “Al-Qaeda fighters” by the U.S. government’s own records and 22 were under 18 years of age when captured.” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, one of the alleged “masterminds” of 9/11, had been waterboarded 183 times.

Also in January, Obama fired the “special envoy” he had committed to “closing Guantanamo”.  This, we believe, enraged the inmates, none of whom have been given a fair trial OR been convicted and about half of them “waiting to go home” for the past several years.

“They had great optimism that Guantanamo would be closed. They were devastated apparently … when the president backed off, at least (that’s) their perception, of closing the facility,”
–  General John Kelly to House of Representatives Armed Services Committee in Washington.

At the beginning of February, defense attorneys for the inmates began expressing their concerns of being wiretapped while visiting with the inmates and planning for their trials ;  This was later confirmed by the Gitmo commander himself. These human rights abuses only fuel Islamic extremism’s purpose byangering people of Muslim faith, of which virtually all prisoners at Guantanamo are. According to PressTV:

Almerindo Ojeda from the UC Davis Centre for Human Rights and lead investigator for the Guantanamo Testimonials Project has been documenting evidence of the abuse of these prisoners. On RT’s show Breaking The Set he recently commented,”Nobody speaks for them, there has been a conspiracy from all branches of US government to keep them there and they just languish. These 85 are not terrorists”.
The remaining prisoners are divided into two groups. Half are scheduled for trial and the other half will never be released. Almerindo Ojeda has stated that the US military will not release these 40 prisoners as they are,”considered too dangerous to release and impossible to try. Now why are they impossible to try? It’s because the evidence doesn’t bear trial or because the evidence [against them] is torture”.

These situations came to a head in mid-February, when suddenly, the mics were muted during the court proceedings without an order by the judge. According to the Miami Herald:

Nobody inside court did it. The judge erupted in anger, and appeared surprised that “some external body” had the power to prevent the public from listening to the proceedings — which are broadcast in the spectator’s gallery on a 40-second delay.
“This is the last time that will happen,” the judge said Thursday. “No third party can unilaterally cut off the broadcast.”

After that, we heard almost nothing from Gitmo until late March, when it was revealed that inmates who had gone on a hunger strike had been denied drinking water and been subjected to frigid temperatures, both extremely dangerous moves while a person is fasting. According to Raw Story:

Thirty-one detainees out of a total population of 166 are participating in the hunger strike…Among the hunger strikers, 11 are being fed using a feeding tube.
Prison authorities have denied Madhwani and other detainees access to potable water for at least three days, according to his complaint.
“When Musaab and his fellow prisoners requested drinking water, the guards told them to drink from the faucets,” it added, noting that tap water at Guantanamo is not potable and residents there only drink bottled water.
“The lack of potable water has already caused some prisoners kidney, urinary and stomach problems.”
In addition, for the 10 days that preceded the filing, “prison authorities have maintained the air conditioning at extremely frigid temperatures, much colder than ever before,” Madhwani’s lawyers wrote to the court.
“The cotton clothing provided to Musaab is insufficient to keep him warm under these super-cooled conditions.”
The lawyers express concern that the lack of potable water could cause the prisoner “serious and potentially life-threatening physical harm,” and accused the jailers of imposing the harsher conditions “in an attempt to break the hunger strike.”

The jailers’ attempts to break the hunger strike seemed to have backfired: From that moment forward, the hunger strike grew and grew. According to Reuters, “The prison has 166 inmates. Nearly all have been held for 11 years without charge, and about half have been cleared for transfer or release. Many are Yemenis who the United States will not repatriate at this time because of instability in that country.” These are not terrorists we’re dealing with, here: these are people we’re holding illegally, and our government and military even admit they’re holding them illegally.
The force-feeding part of the unfolding story at Guantanamo is the most disturbing part. The UN calls it “torture”, the ACLU calls it “torture”, and most Americans, if faced with the facts behind the ongoing operations at Guantanomo, would call it “torture”, too. As prisoner Fawzi al-Odah told the BBC in 2006:

“First they took my comfort items away from me. You know, my blanket, my towel, my long pants, then my shoes. I was put in isolation for 10 days.
“They came in and read out an order. It said if you refuse to eat, we will put you on the chair [for force feeding].”
He told how detainees were given “formulas” to force them to empty their bowels and were strapped to a metal chair three times a day, where a tube was inserted to administer food.
“One guy, a Saudi, told me that he had once been tortured in Saudi Arabia and that this metal chair treatment was worse than any torture he had ever endured or could imagine,”

(Also in 2006, the UN Human Rights Commission ruled that force-feeding is absolutely a form of torture.)

“It can be extremely painful. One of my clients said that it’s like having a razor blade go down through your nose and into your throat,” Remes said.
– Attorney David Remes, who was notified by the military that his Yemeni client, Yasin Ismael, was being tube-fed

As JG Vibes pointed out in an article in March, “In this particular hunger strike guards have already admitted to using this method, although it has been denied in previous years.” So, not only are they openly torturing people now, they also lied repeatedly throughout the last 11 years about doing so. This means that literally nothing they say can be trusted or believed without very hard evidence at this point.

Omar Farah, an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) representing a number of the detainees, said in an email that the strike is about these violations as well as the “normalization of Guantanamo,” which he explains as the lack of plan or political will on the part of the President “to live up to his promise to close the prison.”

On April 14, the guards shot some of the prisoners with rubber bullets, which did nothing except escalate the strike even further.According to KUHF-Houston:

According to The Miami Herald, a recent visit to the camp showed that the guards “had lost a measure of control” over the inmates.
“The captives could be seen systematically disobeying communal camp rules. They covered surveillance cameras in individual cells with cereal boxes,” writes Carol Rosenberg. “They refused to admit food carts to the cellblocks. Commanders said they were concerned that, out of view of the guard force, there were stealth hunger strikers who could suddenly die.”

Which brings us to today, where 100 of the 166 prisoners are now on hunger strike (60%), and 23 of them are being tortured via feeding tube. The UN has reiterated its’ ruling, insisting that force-feeding is torture.  The American Medical Association’s president has even written to the Department of Defense, condemning the practice:

“The AMA has long endorsed the World Medical Association Declaration of Tokyo, which is unequivocal on the point: Where a prisoner refuses nourishment and is considered by a physician as capable of forming an unimpaired and rational judgment concerning the consequences of such as voluntary refusal of nourishment, he or she shall not be fed artificially.”

On April 25, it was revealed that 4 of the hunger strikers were in critical condition. As of April 29, Lieutenant Colonel Samuel House was trying to dispel these rumors, while also admitting that 5 hunger strikers have now been hospitalized.

“unless President Obama acts soon, I believe it is likely one or more of the detainees will die.”
– Air Force Colonel Morris Davis

Now, Obama is acting like he never fired the last envoy who was supposed to “close Guantanamo Bay”, and is looking to hire someone to put in his place. We presume this is a last-ditch effort at breaking the hunger strike before the prisoners start dropping like flies.
According to the BBC, The UN Human Rights chief, Navi Pillay, has urged the US to close Guantanamo Bay, saying the indefinite detention of many inmates there without charge or trial violates international law. Even the former chief prosecutor at Gitmo has launched an online petition to close Guantanamo for good, which received over 60,000 signatures in less than 24 hours. Afederal judge has even recently ruled that it’s not “too much work” for the Obama Administration to declassify the Gitmo documents. See? Normal people don’t like torture, they don’t support it, and they don’t want it done in their name. In fact, it makes us extremely angry that our country would even have the audacity to bring up human rights abuses coming out of Russia or North Korea or Iran while we are consistently running over 100 “black sites” around the world that are far worse than just imprisonment or “hard labor”.
Now do you see the hypocrisy? Remember, these prisoners have not been proven guilty or even charged with a crime. Even N. Korea had a show trial for Mr. Bae.