The Interior Ministry yesterday identified the two Saudi detainees who died Saturday in Guantanamo Bay as 29-year-old Manie ibn Shaman ibn Turki Al-Habardi Al-Utaibi and 22-year-old Yasser Talal Abdullah Yahya Al-Zahrani, who was detained at the age of 17.Twenty-two years old, imprisoned at age seventeen. I'm so disgusted and infuriated, I can hardly express my feelings.
This is truly America's eternal shame.
3 comments:
Vile as Bush's administration has been, they're pussy-cats compared to what they've let loose in Iraq:
Pack up or die, street vendors told
In a bizarre example of Iraq's creeping "Talibanisation", militants visited falafel vendors a fortnight ago, telling them to pack up their stalls by today or be killed.
The ultimatum seemed so odd that, at first, most laughed it off - until two of them were shot dead as they plied their trade.
"They came telling us, 'You have 14 days to end this job' and I asked them what was the problem," said Abu Zeinab, 32, who was packing up his stall for good yesterday in the suburb of al Dora, a hardline Sunni neighbourhood.
"I said I was just feeding the people, but they said there were no falafels in Mohammed the prophet's time, so we shouldn't have them either.
"I felt like telling them there were no Kalashnikovs in Mohammed's time either, but I wanted to keep my life."
This is why I never bought the "the people need guns to overthrow the government if it gets out of line" defense of the Second Ammendment. The guys who'd be overthrowing the government are the ones who'd be doing this sort of thing if they thought they could get away with it.
Here's the problem inherent in insisting on shuffling the deck. You never know for sure what cards you're going to get dealt. And this was a stacked deck, too!
Here's another benefit of neo-conservative political theory:
Another feather in the cap of the Bush administration. The new FBI crime numbers are out -- and for the first time in five years, violent crime is on the rise:
Murders, robberies and aggravated assaults in the United States increased last year, spurring an overall rise in violent crime for the first time since 2001, according to FBI data.
Murders rose 4.8 percent, meaning there were more than 16,900 victims in 2005. That would be the most since 1998 and the largest percentage increase in 15 years.
And Bush does have a role in this. He's cut federal funding for prevention programs:
Criminal justice experts said the statistics reflect the nation's complacency in fighting crime, a product of dramatic declines in the 1990s and the abandonment of effective programs that emphasized prevention, putting more police officers on the street and controlling the spread of guns.
"We see that budgets for policing are being slashed and the federal government has gotten out of that business," said James Alan Fox, a criminal justice professor at Northeastern University in Boston. "Funding for prevention at the federal level and many localities are down and the (National Rifle Association) has renewed strength."
You get what you pay for.
From AMERICAblog.
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