Amy Goodman: A Cry From Argentina: ‘Close Guantanamo’

[marmar]

from truthdig:




A Cry From Argentina: ‘Close Guantanamo’

Posted on Nov 16, 2010
By Amy Goodman


“Gitmo is going to remain open for the foreseeable future,” said an unnamed White House official to The Washington Post this week. For guidance on the notorious U.S. Navy base in Cuba, President Barack Obama should look to an old naval facility in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

When Ana Maria Careaga was 16 years old and pregnant, Argentine military thugs snatched her off the street, dragged her to a clandestine detention center and tortured her for four months. It was 1977, and a military dictatorship had just staged a coup in Argentina. Thirty thousand people were “disappeared” between 1976 and 1983 under the brutal junta. The junta enjoyed the enthusiastic support of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who is credited with authorizing a multigovernment terror network called “Operation Condor” that killed upward of 60,000 people across South America.

Decades later, Argentina has emerged from the dictatorship and risen from economic collapse as one of the new, progressive democracies of Latin America. Careaga, now 50 years old, is the director of the Instituto Espacio para la Memoria, the Institute of the Space for Memory, at the old Navy Mechanics School in the middle of Buenos Aires, where 5,000 prisoners were imprisoned, tortured and most later killed. The institute is committed to maintaining the memory of this dark chapter of Argentine history.

Ana feared she would lose her baby. Among the horrors she endured were repeated electric shocks with a cattle prod inside her vagina. While she was imprisoned, her mother, Esther Careaga, met with other mothers of children who had been disappeared. They gathered in the Plaza de Mayo, holding pictures of their missing children and walking in a circle to raise awareness, to protest and to gain international support against the violence and terror of the Argentine state. ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/a_cry_from_argentina_close_guantanamo_20101116/

[midnight]

1. Yes... It is time to move forward-close that hell hole.

[zipplewrath]

2. And not just give it a change of address

He campaigned on closing it, that some how morphed into changing the address to Illinois.

[whistler162]

3. Well convince Congress to provide the needed funds!

[zipplewrath]

4. To move it?

No thank you. Part of the reason the Obama had trouble closing Gitmo is because he wanted to move them to Illinois. He could get the funding to close it if he would commit to either conducting trials, or returning them to where they were collected. He has so far refused to do either, wanting to hold some of them indefinitely, on American soil, without trial.

[bemildred]

5. No offense, but that is a dodge.

The reason they are not closing it is not because they can't find the money. It's because they don't want to let some of those prisoners free to tell their story, to sue, to testify at The Hague, and they cannot keep them in jail if they bring them here, because then they will have to try them in non-kangaroo courts.

[RaleighNCDUer]

6. Yep. Their greatest success so far has been in getting the Brits who

were released to settle out of court. No court means no testimony means no evidence for war crimes charges against the US. And that is the key, IMO, to Obama's vacillation - it is less that he is defending Bush than he has been convinced that he is defending the reputation of the US by keeping it all under wraps.

He is wrong, of course, but that's the only explanation I can come up with.