Journalist released from Guantánamo details abuse
submitted 3 months 24 days 14 hours ago by: sandyenglish : 4 commentsAfter six years of imprisonment without charge, a well-known
cameraman for Al Jazeera news was released May 1 by the US military.
The reporter, Sami al-Hajj, was captured in 2001 while covering
the US invasion of Afghanistan and subjected to the torture and
abuse that is routine at US military-run prison camps.
Without prior announcement, the military returned al-Hajj to
his home country of Sudan with two other prisoners who had also
been held for years at the US-run Guantánamo Bay prison.
Al-Hajj was gaunt and too weak to stand or speak as soldiers carried
him off the C-17 cargo plane and placed him, still shackled, on
a stretcher. He was transported immediately to a hospital in Khartoum.
His brother told reporters he did not immediately recognize al-Hajj,
who had been seized as a healthy 32-year-old and now resembled
a man in his eighties.
Al-Hajj spent the last 16 months of his imprisonment as a hunger
striker. Twice a day, soldiers strapped him into a restraint chair
and shoved a feeding tube through his nose to his stomach. Human
rights lawyers for al-Hajj—a survivor of throat cancer—have
said that the force-feedings scraped his throat raw. Over the
course of 480 days, the journalist lost 40 pounds.
by Naomi Spencer
Read the whole article on the World Socialist Web Site:
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/may2008/guan-m05.shtml
Comments
sad indeed...but how do we take the action that ought to be taken against it???
There are no quick answers. Amercan "democratic" imperialism has entered a period of terminal decline. In my opinon, we require a struggle for a new social system, nothing less.
Socialism is Utopia lets discuss something rational instead
There have been betrayals in the name of socialism, so it is quite natural for you to say this. But that doesn’t altar the facts of social development, which are lawful and objective.
Utopian thought is something entirely different than scientific socialism. The former seeks to impose a set of ideas on an uncooperative reality. The latter begins with a study of reality. And it was precisely "utopianism" of a certain kind (which had a maerial basis in the ruling elite of the USSR) *against* which Marxism developed in the 1920s and 1930s, that is, ias an opposition to the crimes of Stalinism by the persecuted minority that followed Trotsky.
The Stalinists, by their attempts to build socialism in one country, and a backward country at that, were the greatest “utopians”. Genuine Marxism understands that socialism begins from the highest developments of capitalism on the arena of world economy.
Stalinism lead to the greatest defeats of the working class: the defeat of the Shanghai insurrection in China, 1927, in the victory of Hitler in 1933, in the defeat of the Spanish Revolution by 1939, or of the genocide of rank-and-file communists in Indonesia 1965, and of course the abortion of socialism in the USSR and China. It collapsed as we said it would. This was the leading trend in the workers’ movement, (and still is to some extent in South Asia), This history effects everyone’s understanding of what socialism is.
But it doesn’t mean that reality stops developing and or giving rise to revolutionary situations in which the working class must play—will be forced to play -- the most creative role. That is our future.
The general trend of technological development in the postwar period too has had a progressive side, the obverse of the long-term decline of capitalism (which did temporarily stabilize after 1945).
Socialization and internationalization of production have made human society more ready for economic planning and democratic control by the masses of human beings on the planet than it was in Lenin’s time.
Sooner or later consciousness will fall into line with objective developments. These “objective” developments are exactly manifested in the price of rice, the collapse of the housing bubble, tensions between India and Pakistan, the Iraq War, and filthy decay of American deomcracy. They are radicalizing masses of people, even here in the US.
Why socialism was defeated in the last century has a concrete, specific, historical, and a rational explanation. It is no mystery! As Trotsky said, Edison’s first light bulb was a failure, too.
We can discuss that if you want to, here or elsewhere. I think that it is essential, in fact, for rearming masses or ordinary people to defend their rights.
A serious study of history is in order for anyone who is outraged at the savagery that is being parceled out to human beings at Guantanamo. Sorry to be long-winded about it, but as as I said, I don’t think there are any shortcuts.