Thursday, December 30, 2010

Dear Mr. President,

The State Department sent a report to Capitol Hill last month expressing concern over human rights abuses in Pakistan. It just got reported today in the New York Times and when I started reading it, I thought maybe it was about our illegal and immoral CIA drones or the secret operations our Special Forces carry out in Pakistan, but nope, they were talking about Pakistan’s police and security forces rounding people up and hauling them off to secret locations. “Disappearances” the report calls them, people held incommunicado without being charged with anything. Apparently many of those ‘disappeared’ have been tortured or killed, and human rights organizations have charged that the Pakistani military has killed unarmed civilians as well as Taliban.. The report concludes, “There continue to be gross violations of human rights by the Pakistani security forces.” That gave me a good guffaw. Maybe we should clean the camel dung out of our own tent before we tell the Pakistanis to clean theirs. Granted, they appear to be doing it on a pretty large scale but what about those guys locked up in Guantanamo, held incommunicado for years without any status as either a prisoner of war or a criminal? How’s that different than what Pakistan’s doing except in scale? And I wonder whether we’ve actually stopped renditions, stopped the waterboarding and other forms of toture. Before we go clucking our tongues at Pakistan for killing unarmed civilians, how many have we killed in Iraq and Afghanistan? Way more than them. And let’s talk about torture for minute, Mr. President. What about Pfc. Bradley Manning? Solitary confinement in a Marine brig for seven months without being convicted of a crime is pretty much torture in my book. Boy, talk about hypocrisy. Soon as you get back from vacation, I’d suggest you take a hard look at this and do what you promised back in 2008: shut down Guantanamo and stop torture - all forms and against all people. Remember that phrase you used: “We have these core ideals that we observe—even when it’s hard.” Remember that one? Just another sound bite or did you really mean it?

Free Bradley Manning!