Saturday 6 June 2009

Grit TV: The F Word: Deeds Not Words, President Obama!

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The F Word: Deeds Not Words, President Obama!:

"resident Obama said in Cairo this week that he sought a new beginning in US relations with the Muslim world -- are relationship based on mutual interest, respect, and common principles, including 'principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.'

Beautiful words, but deeds tend to speak louder and this week one spoke volumes. Just a few days before the president's historic address in Cairo, another prisoner at the US Detention center in Guantanamo committed suicide.

Mohammad Ahmed Abdullah Saleh Al-Hanashi, whose death was announced Tuesday, was the fifth inmate - and the second Yemeni - to die in an apparent suicide at the Guantanamo prison. Held without charge for seven years, Saleh was 31 years old. Information's is limited, but lawyers who visited in May said he was one of seven being held in a psychiatric ward where he was restrained in a chair and force-fed through a tube the size of a finger. It's an excruciating process. The attorney of another striker described it as a tube being inserted by one guard while another holds the prisoners chin and a third holds him back by his hair; 'No anesthesia or sedative'.

Pentagon medical records show Saleh weighed 124 pounds when he entered Guantanamo. A few years later he was down to just 87 pounds.

How a man in his shape might have managed to kill himself is hard to imagine. Why is far easier.

More than a dozen Yemenis have been cleared for return. The vast majority have never been charged, but so far the US has sent only 14 Yemenis home and only two in the past two years.

Those men should have been released already. They could be released tomorrow. Do that, Mr. President and then those words: “Justice, progress, tolerance, and respect for the dignity of all human beings” on an American president’s tongue might begin the long journey of actually gaining some meaning."
How a man in his shape might have manage"



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