Uighurs Released From Guantanamo!
June 12, 2009 by Big Fella · 2 Comments
Cue The Scary Music…
(Crank up the volume and right click on ScaryMusic and open in a new tab for the full effect: scarymusic )
Shortly after 6:00 A.M. Thursday, four Chinese Muslims (Uighurs) were released from detention in the U.S. prison facility at Guantanamo Bay and resettled as free men in Bermuda (roughly 500 miles due east of Charleston, South Carolina) with guest worker status. The four men released Thursday were among 17 Uighurs who had been captured and held by the United States since 2001, despite being determined to not be enemy combatants early on.
It was also announced that the remaining 13 Uighurs will be resettled in the island nation of Palau, in the South Pacific, with Palau President Johnson Toribiong claiming a U.S. aid payment had nothing to do with the decision.
As reported by the Associated Press report in Thursday’s New York Times:
Bermuda Premier Ewart Brown said the men will be allowed to live in Bermuda, a British territory in the Atlantic, initially as refugees but they would be permitted to pursue citizenship and would have the right to work, travel and ”potentially settle elsewhere.”
Brown said negotiations with Washington over settling the Uighurs began last month and he had no security concerns because the men had been cleared by U.S. courts…
[Paulau President]Toribiong said the Uighur detainees from China’s arid west would start their new lives in a halfway house to see how they acclimatize to his tropical archipelago west of the Philippines…
Beijing said Thursday that all 17 Uighurs are terrorists and should be handed back to China. Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said China ”opposes any country taking any of these terrorist suspects.”
Abdul Nasser, one of the four detainees who landed in Bermuda early Thursday morning, issued a statement through his lawyers, saying: ”Growing up under communism we always dreamed of living in peace and working in free society like this one. Today you have let freedom ring.”
Meanwhile scared, ignorant, paranoid, marginalized pawns of the conservative ideologues, from the back woods of Maine to the streets of Wasila, Alaska, are filling their larders, breaking out their ammunition, locking their doors, battening down their hatches, booby trapping their front doors, and hiding in their moldy, dark bedroom closets, with just the useless, cynical right wing racist screamers like Rush Limbaugh Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, or Michael Savage on their portable radios and portable TV’s to give them their daily dose of lies and twisted history, stoking their fears and paranoia, while keeping them ignorant of the truth.
What might happen next? Likely eventual adjudication and disposition of the remaining Guantanamo detainees, (despite any amount of political posturing or delaying tactics or fear mongering ginned up) some may end up in American federal penal custody, some may find themselves deported to other countries where they may be incarcerated there, or maybe not. What must happen, is that what ever form of adjudication and ultimate disposition results for each detainee, it must be done under the light of day, and according to the rule of law and the ethical values of our justice system.
Will those detainees removed from Guantanamo eventually find their way to Main Street, U.S.A, and wreck havoc and terror upon Americans? Only in the minds of Dick Cheney and those who perform as his stooges. What is probably statistically guaranteed is that another lunatic fanatic, such as Timothy McVeigh, Theodore Kaczynski, John Allen Muhammad, or James W. von Brunn will surface sooner or later, another domestic terrorist from within our borders, and strike against his or her peace loving, law abiding neighbors, before any foreign initiated threat may harm us at home.
Let us not succumb to fears based upon ignorance, ignorance caused by the withholding of all known facts by devious, dissembling, lying, criminal government officials (whether former or current officials). We must require our government to lay out everything it knows truthfully about the remaining detainees, in an open, transparent manner, and then follow the rule of law in dealing with each remaining detainee. Let the chips fall where they may.
And while we are at it, let us not overlook what the release of four former U.S. prisoners, four Uighurs who’s crime was that they tried to seek a better life, outside of China, have now been unleashed upon the Bermudian people:
When Law Enforcement Goes Wrong
January 9, 2009 by Big Fella · 2 Comments
A hat tip to legal scholar, constitutional champion and TV pundit and blogger, Jonathan Turley for putting us on to the greedy machinations of Morgan County, Alabama Sheriff Greg Bartlett. It seems that Sheriff Barlett has been jailed, held on contempt by U.S. District Judge U.W. Clemon after he learned that inmates incarcerated in Sheriff Bartlett’s jail went hungry, while the good sheriff pocketed their meal money.
It is not enirely clear from available reports whether the sheriff personally benefitted from this scheme, or if money not spent on food was used to pay for any other legitimate expenses of the county, but it seems, from a report by KPIX television in San Francisco, that the sherrif has, in fact been pocketing the money:
The sheriff, who showed no emotion when his arrest was ordered, had testified that he legally pocketed about $212,000 over three years with surplus meal money but denied that inmates were improperly fed. [They used to call this skimming when the mob did it in Las Vegas. -B.F.]
Clemon, however, said the sheriff would be jailed until he comes up with a plan to provide the 300 jail inmates with nutrionally adequate meals, as required by a 2001 court order. Rhea said a plan may be drawn up Wednesday night and sent to the judge.
Clemon said the Alabama law allowing sheriffs to take home surplus meal money is “probably unconstitutional,” but his ruling was limited to the finding that the court order was violated. It didn’t address whether the law should be overturned.
“He makes money by failing to spend the allocated funds for food for inmates,” Clemon said.
While the sheriff is making a bundle, the inmates are slowly starving:
At the hearing, 10 prisoners told Clemon meals are so small that they’re forced to buy snacks from a for-profit store the jailers operate. Most of the inmates appeared thin, with baggy jail coveralls hanging off their frames.
Some testified they spent hundreds of dollars a month at the store, which Bartlett said generates profits used for training and equipment.
Inmates told of getting half an egg, a spoonful of oatmeal and one piece of toast most days at their 3 a.m. daily breakfast. Lunch is usually a handful of chips and two sandwiches with barely enough peanut butter to taste.
“It looks like it was sprayed on with an aerosol can,” testified Demetrius Hines, adding he’s lost at least 35 pounds in five months since his arrest on drug charges.
According to Alabama law, Sheriff Bartlett receives $1.75 per day per inmate to feed his prisoners, yet Bartlett stated that he made $95,000.00 in profit on his food service operation last year. Shades of the Sheriff of Nottingham, apparently this is standard operating practice throughout Alabama. One has to wonder what else the sheriff might be doing using the backs of prisoners and whether or not it is within the law. Alabama reintroduced the chain gang in 1995 and then, as the result of law suit brought by the Southern Poverty Law Center, Alabama was forced to abandon chain gangs. But that was then, what could be the case now?
Sheriff Bartlett is not the first person in authority ever to scheme to profit from his position, and likely won’t be the last. But it seems, that this is a blossoming problem, another example being deposed Sheriff Mike Corona, of Orange County, California who is currently on trial for corruption and the taking of bribes. (More on ex-Sheriff Corona another time.)
Just wondering, that given the current catastropic economic problems plauging the entire country, do we as law abiding citizens have to keep a closer eye on our law enforcement offficials?
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