Thoughts on the Gitmo hunger strike
How would you like to be imprisoned even though you had done nothing wrong? What if your imprisonment included torture? How would that make you feel, if you survived?
A hunger strike seems like a natural response for someone in that situation.
I believe there must be a special place in Hell for the apologists for torture — from screenwriters who like to suck up to authority by portraying torture as an unpleasant necessity in poorly written television melodramas, to the typical bigot on the street ready to go all “Rah! Rah!” as if he was at a high school footbal game at the prospect of someone, somewhere (even if not him) getting to hurt and humiliate people with different colored skin or different religious beliefs.
Over and over again, we always hear about the hypothetical “if there was a bomb and you had this terrorist in custody…”.
That’s not the way it works in real life. Most of the prisoners in Guantanamo are innocent, perhaps as many as eighty percent, according to one prisoner who managed to get released. Some may challenge that figure, but I say that number is generous to the government. Technically, since none of the Guantanamo prisoners have been proven guilty or even could be proven guilty (else they would have by now), they’re all innocent in that sense at the very least.
But let’s go with the eighty percent figure, rather than one hundred percent…
- You don’t have one figure that you know to be a bad guy.
- You don’t know that there’s a bomb somewhere.
- You have more than just 24 hours.
No. The truth is far different.
You have many people and at least 80 out of every 100 are innocent. Are you then willing to imprison all of them without trial indefinitely and torture them?
That’s what’s really going on. Innocent people are being tortured — and it’s not saving American lives but taking them, perhaps for years to come, as such injustice fuels the very miltancy the lying vermin in DC and Hollywood claim this is to protect us from.
In the aftermath of 9/11, the American people had an opportunity to confront the cause of the events of that dark day — US government intervention abroad. That opportunity was wasted. It was thrown away. It was pissed on and thrown out with the garbage, just like so many people’s lives would be.
Rather than honestly confront what the US government had done to bring this upon us, the American people in aggregate chose to murder women and children, to imprison the innocent and to torture the undeserving.
Imagine the despair of someone kidnapped and taken to a foreign land without trial after doing no wrong. Imagine suffering painful mistreatment, poor conditions and the uncertainty of what your fate will be. Imagine after two years of this, you went on a hunger strike, even though it meant possibly dying.
Now imagine they held you down to painfully shove a plastic tube up through your nose and down your throat to force food into your stomach. You will not even be allowed to die.
This is not American patriotism. This is not national security. This is an unholy abomination.
One Tabby Chase of Atlanta is a stripper (yes, an exotic dancer — and a lovely one, I might add), an 
