I know what you’re thinking to yourself, “What is this political garbage doing on rebelpeon.com?” Well, I’m here to tell you that this will not become the normal.
On my way to Erin’s place tonight I was listening to This American Life and was disturbed with what I heard about Guantanamo Bay. Currently it looks like you can only purchase the program, but give it a week and you too can listen to it, or you can listen to it tomorrow at 1 on Chicago Public Radio (for those in the area).
After listening to the whole program, I’m starting to realize why foreigners hate us so much. I’d hate to think what sorts of anti-American thoughts would be going through my head if I were held at Guantanamo Bay for, potentially, an indefinite amount of time, being interrogated in the most abusive ways.
I honestly can’t believe how calm the “PoWs” (I leave it in quotes because these people were innocent, and the gov’t seemed to know it) were on the air. I don’t think I’d be laughing like there were after spending as much time as they did there.
All I have to ask, is are the American people this dumb, that they can continually be lied to over and over? How do they justify this in their minds?
**Update 3/19/2006**
You can listen to the broadcast now for free. Plus there’s an extended version for the web only. Unfortuantely, they are in real player format, but I think it’s worth downloading just to listen to this one. You can get the Free version of realplayer here. Personally, though, I’d recommend the Real Player Enterprise version, as it has a lot less “crap” installed on it. Just put in some bogus information in the fields, and you’re on your way.
Comments
One response to “Guantanamo Bay”
I heard it too and thought the same things. It was very upsetting. If what’s going on doesn’t comprise impeachable offenses, it should.
I was talking to an 80yo cousin about her memories of WWII last weekend—I wanted to know if my sense of American fair play was a product of Hollywood fantasy, or if this kind of thing happened then too. From the stories she’d heard from her brother and boyfriends who served, American camps for German POWs *were* decent, although what happened on battlefields wasn’t always by the ‘rules’. (Oddly, internment camps for American citizens weren’t always as decent as German-POW camps.)
It seems to me that we can never again allow our governmental representatives to declare “war” on a vague enemy—it just gives the gov’t corrupting carte blanche.
Of course the Viet Nam ‘conflict’ taught us that the ‘rules of warfare’ are irrelvant in the face of guerrilla tactics—something I hope voters will remember the next time we are rallied to war.