IT'S PAST TIME TO WAKE UP - AMERICA!
Earl J. Prignitz
November 11, 2005
The fact that the CIA has been holding terror suspects in secret prisons all over the world is alarming enough, but now we learn that there is even a debate going on within the agency about the legality and morality of the overseas system that was set up after 9/11. If you have lived during the horrible years of the Gulag prisons that the Soviet Union inaugurated you are reminded how much this abominable practice resembles those terrible times. The Gulag prison system was under the control of the secret police, OGPU (later, the NKVD and the KGB). Who did they incarcerate? Persons sent to the Gulag included purged Communist Party members and military officers, German and other Axis prisoners of war (during World War II), members of ethnic groups suspected of disloyalty, Soviet soldiers and other citizens who had been taken prisoner or used as slave labourers by the Germans during the war, suspected saboteurs and traitors, dissident intellectuals, ordinary criminals, and many utterly innocent people who were hapless victims of Stalin's purges. In other words anyone who disagreed with their plans!
Do you see any similarities? I certainly do! These secret facilities are part and parcel of a covert prison system set up by our own CIA nearly four years ago that has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan as well as several democracies in Eastern Europe, and a small center in the Guantanamo Bay prison. The concerns escalated last month, when Vice President Cheney and CIA director Porter Goss asked Congress to exempt CIA employees from legislation already endorsed by 90 senators that would ban cruel and degrading treatment of any prisoner in U.S. custody.
This secret detention system was conceived in the first anxious months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when the assumption seemed to be that further attacks would follow. That hasn't happened, but in spite of that we keep picking people up and sending them into a netherworld and don't consider what we are going to do with them afterwards. Since it is illegal for the government to hold prisoners in such isolation is secret prisons in the United States, the CIA simply very conveintly placed them overseas.
Once upon a time a very wise man, Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, "But I venture the challenging statement that if American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, then Fascism and Communism, aided, unconsciously perhaps, by old-line Tory Republicanism, will grow in strength in our land." He made this observation in 1938 –nearly 70 years ago.
Just because you don't think or feel like you're living under fascism doesn't mean you aren't. What if your 'white privilege' and affluent lifestyle, plus mass media compliance with, and covering-up of, fascistic policies, are cushioning you from what is an everyday reality and nightmare in the lives of many others? Does that absolve you of responsibility for what your government and your elected and appointed officials are doing in your name, and with your tax money?
Do you see any similarities? I certainly do! These secret facilities are part and parcel of a covert prison system set up by our own CIA nearly four years ago that has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan as well as several democracies in Eastern Europe, and a small center in the Guantanamo Bay prison. The concerns escalated last month, when Vice President Cheney and CIA director Porter Goss asked Congress to exempt CIA employees from legislation already endorsed by 90 senators that would ban cruel and degrading treatment of any prisoner in U.S. custody.
This secret detention system was conceived in the first anxious months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when the assumption seemed to be that further attacks would follow. That hasn't happened, but in spite of that we keep picking people up and sending them into a netherworld and don't consider what we are going to do with them afterwards. Since it is illegal for the government to hold prisoners in such isolation is secret prisons in the United States, the CIA simply very conveintly placed them overseas.
Once upon a time a very wise man, Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, "But I venture the challenging statement that if American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, then Fascism and Communism, aided, unconsciously perhaps, by old-line Tory Republicanism, will grow in strength in our land." He made this observation in 1938 –nearly 70 years ago.
Just because you don't think or feel like you're living under fascism doesn't mean you aren't. What if your 'white privilege' and affluent lifestyle, plus mass media compliance with, and covering-up of, fascistic policies, are cushioning you from what is an everyday reality and nightmare in the lives of many others? Does that absolve you of responsibility for what your government and your elected and appointed officials are doing in your name, and with your tax money?
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