Tenth Anniversary of a Barbarity

Sustaining the infamous prision in Guantanamo, Cuba sends the United States farther down the path of barbarity. A sad situation for a country that championed human rights and promoted the people’s right to self determination.

Attempting to impose democracy through bombers with F-16 cruise missiles and depleted uranium bullets reveals a shameful ignorance of what democracy really is. The lack of knowledge as to what the basic principles of politics are has become a serious threat; some people have shown that they are prepared to exercise sovereignty without official tutelage.

George W. Bush and Barack Obama have demonstrated that constitutional principles can be used to promote lawful continuation of certain acts of the State, such as the brutal democratic evangelization of the Middle East. The Middle East conflict is explained and accepted as a fight for a people’s right to self-determination, and a struggle against human rights violations and crimes against humanity.

Nothing testifies more dramatically to the decadence of the superpower’s moral values than how they poison the roots of their own ethical foundations. The base was fortified in 1776 as the people of Virginia passed their first Declaration of Rights. This was the precedent to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen adopted in 1789 by the French Revolution and the Bill of Rights adopted in the United States in 1791. The declaration in Virginia was so cutting edge that it recognized “joy of life” and “happiness” as rights. Then in 1919 in Versailles, Woodrow Wilson became the first U.S. president to invoke the people’s right to self-determination.

Thus, it is a tragic regression to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Guantanamo prison, where prisoners are kept without being officially accused for an indefinite amount of time. At this point, 150 people, none of them linked with September 11 (almost all of the surviving terrorists from this event are in secret prisons). The majority of the prisoners were subjected to perverse torture, where the torturers themselves took photos and films. Those tortured range from a nine-year-old child to an 86-year-old man with dementia.

This return to barbarity was preceded in 2003 by the insanity perpetrated by the United States in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The events that took place there were also happily filmed and photographed by U.S. military, so that the images of Yankee soldiers urinating on dead bodies of the Taliban in Afghanistan will not be forgotten.

Indeed, a large part of the West and the Middle East can be considered an accomplice, as practically no country stepped forward to receive prisoners from Guantanamo that were about to be liberated. What were the two arguments of these countries? That it would put their own security at risk (but the nine-year-old child and the old sick man?) and that they were unwilling to make resources available for the ex-prisoners.