Ian Bunn | Political & Popular Culture Arts

Pardiss Kebriaei the American Senior Staff Attorney at the Center Constitutional Rights focusing on challenging government abuses post-9/11, including in the areas of “targeted killing“ and unjust detentions at Guantanamo has been interviewed by Amy Goodman for Democracy Now in reference to the Guantanamo prisoner hunger strike. In the interview Kebriaei states “…there is a large-scale hunger strike in Camp 6, which is the largest of the facilities at Guantánamo. That prison holds about 130 men. He said that almost everyone, except for a few who are sick and elderly, are on strike. He himself [her client Ghaleb Al-Bihani] had lost over 20 pounds. He is a diabetic. His blood glucose levels are fluctuating wildly. He told me that medical staff at Guantánamo have told him his life is in danger. And he and others want us to get the word out about this. We [at] CCR and group of other habeas counsel, wrote a letter to the authorities at Guantánamo and to the Department of Justice reporting what we have heard and asking for a response. And to date, almost two weeks later, we have not heard anything, other than denials of the strike.  …They have downplayed the scale of the strikes and have said that there are only a handful on strike and only a handful being tube-fed. It may be a matter of semantics: The way that Guantánamo authorities define people on  hunger strike is largely discretionary. But what we have heard from every habeas counsel who has been down to the base or communicated with their clients since February is the same, which is that there is a large-scale strike, men are refusing food. …you start seeing things like loss of vision, loss of hearing, and eventually death. So this is—it’s an emergency situation. We view it as an emergency situation. And denials by the authorities, at this point, of the strike are dangerous and irresponsible.”

Inspired by Amy Goodman & Nermeen Shaikh, Democracy Now ow.ly/jBcHz Image source CFR ow.ly/jBcGy

Makes this counterterrorism tool so essential (May 18th 2012)

John O. Brennan the 56 year old USA the Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, the chief counterterrorism advisor to President Barack Obama, has officially acknowledged in a speech for the first time the administration’s targeted killing of Al Qaeda members abroad. Mother Jones in an article states ”But Brennan didn’t tell the whole story: He largely rehashed the legal rationale for targeted killings of specific Al Qaeda suspects, instead of defending the use of more controversial “signature strikes,” in which targets are selected based on a “pattern of behavior.” Brennan defended targeted killings as an effective tool against Al Qaeda that helps minimize civilian casualties and likened the use of drones to laser surgery, saying: “It’s this surgical precision—the ability, with laser-like focus, to eliminate the cancerous tumor called an al Qaeda terrorist while limiting damage to the tissue around it—that makes this counterterrorism tool so essential.” …To borrow Brennan’s cancer metaphor, if targeted strikes on particular suspected Al Qaeda militants help excise cancerous tumors, signature strikes sound a little like flicking a scalpel around inside a patient’s abdomen. I’m no medical expert, but that sounds to me like it would inevitably kill the patient.”

Inspired by Mother Jones http://ow.ly/aOTXR image source Pete Souza http://ow.ly/aOTLQ