June 15, 2006
Is Guantanamo Bay, and the system of prisons (Abu Ghraib and the CIA black sites) that it is a part, the gulag of our times? This is a world of brutal beatings, endless solitary confinement, psychological torture in the form of sensory deprivation, and mock trials; a world where torture is permitted up the point of death. The CIA system of torture is designed to break the will of the prisoner to resist and to extract a confession that they are terrorists who attacked America.
Martin Rowson, Guantanamo Bay Suicides
It is a system in which Presidential power is used to prevent the courts from having any judicial oversight of the administration's actions at Guantanamo.
Australia remains one of the few nations that still accepts the legality of Guantanamo 's conditions, methods and tribunals. It accepts the Bush administration's policy to make torture a weapon in the arsenal of US power and its application to Australian citizens who have been written out of the very status of humanity.
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