Cross-Posted at Huffington Post
---I AM ANGRY---
The Bush administration has indeed accomplished a mission, intended or not, to recreate the United States into a super-power demon, a super-power monster, a super-power consuming itself and everything around it. A country that has secret prisons within secret prisons built on an island belonging to the very type of government we claim to be the opposite of is not a democracy.
For the commie fearing right-wingers, their collective silence about US funding of communist Cuba through a business arrangement in which they give us land to house our concentration camps on is astounding. It is, however, no surprise that nationalists see human rights abuses as a necessary fall-out of war. After all, Christian extremists, like their Muslim counterparts see war as a tool of God, and they see God in a single man giving them orders, not in anything divine:
'"You will go with General Boykin and Green Beret instructors to places
where no civilians and few soldiers ever go," the Rev. Bobby Welch told
pastors in a letter inviting them to attend the two-day Super FAITH
Force Multiplier session. "We must find a group of men who are warriors
of FAITH, pastors who have the guts to lead this nation to Christ and
revival!" Welch, a friend of Boykin's, told the invitees they would see
Boykin's headquarters, a demonstration of "today's war-fighting
weapons" and how "Special Forces attack the enemy inside buildings
(live fire/real bullets)" as well as hear a speech and get "informal
time" with Boykin."
Or as Boykin - one of the architects of the Abu Ghraib concentration camp model, which was based on the Gitmo model - once said about George W. Bush:
"Why is this man in the White House? The majority of Americans did not
vote for him. Why is he there? And I tell you this morning that he's in
the White House because God put him there for a time such as this." (NYT, 10-17-2003)
Never mind that one has to first have a soul in order to have a conscience through which something like real faith can be processed. Nationalists, religious or otherwise, don't have a soul. They have a flag and some other trinkets and they have bitter hate mixed with mortal fear of something out in the ether. Boykin has his uniform, his cross, and his torture chamber to help him justify the horrors of his actions as somehow all-American and Christian.
That is all Boykin has to measure his love of country by, his love of humanity by, if such obscene nationalism and need for supremacy can ever be measured by something as clean and selfless as love.
---WHY AM I ANGRY?---
Because I woke up to this:
"Somewhere amid the cactus-studded
hills on this sprawling Navy base, separate from the cells where
hundreds of men suspected of links to al-Qaida and the Taliban
have been locked up for years, is a place even more closely guarded — a
jailhouse so protected that its very location is top secret.
For the first time, the top commander of detention operations at
Guantanamo has confirmed the existence of the mysterious Camp 7. In an
interview with The Associated Press, Rear Adm. Mark Buzby also provided
a few details about the maximum-security lockup.
Guantanamo commanders said Camp 7 is for key alleged al-Qaida
members, who must be kept apart from other prisoners to prevent them
from retaliating against long-term detainees who have talked to
interrogators. They also want the location kept secret for fear of
terrorist attack."
---YOU SEE WHY I AM ANGRY?---
A concentration camp within a concentration camp that we pay a Communist nation to host. Sounds so simple, does it not? The problem is that there were never that many al Qaeda members to justify Gitmo's larger prison to begin with.
At their peak, before 9/11, al Qaeda numbered under 200. So just who is being hosted at Camp 7 and why is it so secret that no one knows - until now - that it even existed? Osama bin Laden, if I recall is vacationing in Pakistan, along with his major commanders. They too have guns and God, always a potent mixture. The Taliban's most dangerous leaders are mostly back in Afghanistan and some are along with bin Laden on vacation in Pakistan, also in possession of guns, justified by their God.
We have secret prisons all over the world, where secret "al Qaeda" and secret "Taliban" prisoners are being held. We have the larger camps at Gitmo too, where "al Qaeda" and "Taliban" secret prisoners are secretly being held. So I ask again, just who the hell - and how many - prisoners are being held at Camp 7? More importantly, what kind of prisoners would a man like Boykin select? That, my friends, is what scares me the most.
I know, the right-wing nationalists will argue something about security and something about 9/11, again to justify war on behalf of God or something of the sort. Nationalists always argue for an unseen, unheard, unreal threat existing somewhere in the shadows. Come to think of it, an unseen, unheard, unreal threat existing in the shadows sounds like their description of God. Interesting, is it not, that religious nationalists such as these define God the same way they define their enemy? And what of their followers, the lower rungs of the symbol-loving faithful?
You just need to look through the annals of history if you want examples of how the mindless drone swallows whole the lie of a threat and defends to the death that lie no matter all the evidence to the contrary.
Aside from the security propaganda and its flag-waving boot-marchers, however, I want a legitimate explanation as to why we need this many camps, this many secret camps within camps, and just who the hell is being held there in secret and why in secret. I demand this as a US citizen. Because if we have people secretly boxed within secret boxes, which house even more secret boxes filled with even more secret people, then we cannot continue calling ourselves a democracy.
---WHAT ELSE IS THERE TO SAY?---
Perhaps we can call ourselves a secret democracy, encased in a tesseract and planted on an island owned by a declared enemy, but that would be too long a description when there is a far shorter and more direct way to say what we are becoming: a fascist nation.
