- Today, we take up the case of Murat Kurnaz, one of the
thousands of innocent captives held illegally in the belly of the new American
beast: U.S. President George W. Bush's deadly global gulag, where homicide
and torture are quite literally the order of the day.
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- Kurnaz, a German national of Turkish descent, was grabbed
from a bus of Muslim missionaries in Pakistan in October 2001, when Bush
was getting his first taste of unbridled blood-and-iron power. Although
Kurnaz was far from the battlefield in Afghanistan, he was of course guilty
of being one of those swarthy Koraniacs, so he was shoved through the beast's
guts before ending up in the concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay, The
Washington Post reported.
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- There he languished for more than two years until he
was hauled before one of Bush's "military tribunals" last fall.
The khaki kangaroo court duly ruled that Kurnaz was a heinous terrorist
who should be locked up forever -- despite the fact that both U.S. military
intelligence and German police had cleared him of any connection whatsoever
to terrorist activity anywhere in the world. Completely ignoring almost
100 pages of exculpatory evidence offered by these experts, the kangaroos
relied instead on a brief, uncorroborated memo submitted by an unidentified
Bush official just before the proceedings began.
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- The last-minute Bush memo -- clearly intended to keep
Kurnaz in chains without charges, without counsel, without appeal, for
the rest of his life -- "fails to provide significant details to support
its conclusory allegations, does not reveal the sources for its information
and is contradicted by other evidence in the record," said a federal
judge who examined the case. In other words, it was just lies and unfounded
assertions -- the same scam the Bushists used to "justify" their
war crime in Iraq.
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- The judge ruled that Kurnaz's imprisonment, indeed, Bush's
whole kangaroo pen, was illegal and unconstitutional. To which Bush --
a staunch defender of law, liberty and civilization -- answered: Who cares?
So Kurnaz, 23, remains in captivity: year after year of hellish limbo,
his youth sacrificed to the caprice of the prissy autocrat in the White
House. Meanwhile, Bush is appealing all of the pending judicial challenges
to his arbitrary power, while ignoring or skirting any ruling that goes
against him. As we first reported here in November 2001, he continues to
assert his right to capture, imprison or even assassinate anyone on earth
he designates a "terrorist," without any judicial review or congressional
oversight of his decision.
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- The Washington Post -- normally a willing handmaiden
of Bush's abuses of power, marshalling "bipartisan consensus"
behind his blood-soaked foreign policy and much of his morally deranged
domestic agenda -- seemed uncharacteristically troubled by the Kurnaz case.
Perhaps the tyranny was a touch too blatant for the paper's well-wadded
consensus-seekers. They brought in an expert on military law to "suggest"
that the tribunals might be -- gasp! -- "a sham," where "the
merest scintilla of evidence against someone would carry the day for the
government, even if there's a mountain of evidence on the other side."
Another lawyer wondered why the U.S. government would ever imprison a man
it knew was innocent.
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- Poor lambs. Now that the American Republic has been well
and truly lost -- seized by a band of extremist goons after decades of
slow rot from corporate and militarist corruption -- a few Establishment
worthies are bestirring themselves to express some mild perplexity at the
hideous reality that has arisen outside their comfortable cocoons. But
their questions come too late. The reality is already entrenched.
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- Each day brings new revelations of torture, murder and
government whitewash in Bush's gulag. At least 108 prisoners have died
in Bush's captivity so far; dozens of these have been listed as homicides,
CBS reported. But last week, the Pentagon declined to prosecute 17 soldiers
for brutal murders of prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq, despite the recommendation
of Army prosecutors. Army investigators also released 1,200 pages of new
evidence last week detailing widespread "systematic and intentional"
abuse of prisoners throughout Iraq, especially in Mosul; again, the Pentagon
declined to prosecute. A trial of low-ranking scapegoats who, under orders,
"pulpified" an Afghan prisoner's leg in a fatal beating revealed
that such "compliance blows" were taught by the Pentagon as an
"accepted way" of dealing with prisoners, Knight-Ridder reported.
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- Let's pause here to praise these military prosecutors.
Many of them are doing outstanding work in a thankless and dangerous mission:
investigating their fellow soldiers for crimes committed in a lawless system
established by their own superiors. The Bush Regime has not yet been able
to remove all of these honorable soldiers from the ranks, so fragments
of the truth are still getting out. But be assured: The Regime is relentlessly
bringing forward cadres of mindless zealots to replace them -- and everyone
else in government. Another term or two of Bushist Party rule, and there
won't be an officer, judge or civil servant left with any loyalty to the
old Constitutional Republic.
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- As for the cocooners' anxious questions -- "Why
imprison the innocent? Why the sham tribunals? What's with all this torture
stuff?" -- there is a simple answer. Bush's gulag has little to do
with "fighting terrorism"; it is itself an instrument of terror
-- state terror -- designed to strike "pre-emptive" fear into
the hearts of anyone, at home or abroad, who might oppose the Regime's
crusade to make the world safe for klepto-plutocracy. Such a system actually
requires innocent victims and lawlessness, in order to underscore its arbitrary
nature -- an essential element of terror. For Bush, Murat Kurnaz is a more
important prisoner than a genuine criminal like Osama bin Laden.
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- http://context.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2005/04/01/120.html
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