Democracy for Vancouver

Ships that are understood to have held prisoners include the USS Bataan and USS Peleliu.

The Bataan? Are you kidding me? Committing war crimes on a ship named for the site of one of the biggest war crimes in the Pacific theater of World War II?

As Paul Harvey says, here’s the rest of the story:

The United States is operating “floating prisons” to house those arrested in its war on terror, according to human rights lawyers, who claim there has been an attempt to conceal the numbers and whereabouts of detainees.
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According to research carried out by Reprieve, the US may have used as many as 17 ships as “floating prisons” since 2001. Detainees are interrogated aboard the vessels and then rendered to other, often undisclosed, locations, it is claimed.

Ships that are understood to have held prisoners include the USS Bataan and USS Peleliu. A further 15 ships are suspected of having operated around the British territory of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, which has been used as a military base by the UK and the Americans.
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The Reprieve study includes the account of a prisoner released from Guantánamo Bay, who described a fellow inmate’s story of detention on an amphibious assault ship. “One of my fellow prisoners in Guantánamo was at sea on an American ship with about 50 others before coming to Guantánamo … he was in the cage next to me. He told me that there were about 50 other people on the ship. They were all closed off in the bottom of the ship. The prisoner commented to me that it was like something you see on TV. The people held on the ship were beaten even more severely than in Guantánamo.”

Clive Stafford Smith, Reprieve’s legal director, said: “They choose ships to try to keep their misconduct as far as possible from the prying eyes of the media and lawyers. We will eventually reunite these ghost prisoners with their legal rights.

“By its own admission, the US government is currently detaining at least 26,000 people without trial in secret prisons, and information suggests up to 80,000 have been ‘through the system’ since 2001. The US government must show a commitment to rights and basic humanity by immediately revealing who these people are, where they are, and what has been done to them.”

Land of the free, indeed.

Can someone please tell me how this is different from holding people hostage?

In the 1980s and 1990s we lived under the specter of long-term hostages held in the Middle East as a chit in the ongoing struggles for Lebanon and Palestine. The practice of hostage-taking was universally condemned, and it was not until the hostages were released that tensions in the region dissipated a bit.

Because, as all civilized people know, holding anyone without charge or trial is simply unacceptable.

Even if McCain is defeated in November, and even if Obama is elected president and follows through on his promise to route out the illegal and unconstitutional actions of his predecessors, it will be a decade or more before the U.S. can be looked at again as anything but a wanton bully.

And Georgie Stephanopoulos wants to know why someone would not wear a flag lapel pin?

To me, now, that flag represents repression, murder, and subversion of democracy. I would no more wear a swastika or Pinochet’s emblem.

I hope that will change in the next year, but only time will tell.