... Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

[struggle4progress]

the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me ... http://www.libertystatepark.com/emma.htm

You soon may hear a lot of chatter about Haiti and Guantanamo. To be ready to talk, first learn some history. The use of Guantanamo as an indefinite detention center originated with US policy towards Haitian refugees after the first overthrow of President Aristide during the GHW Bush presidency:

... America’s first detention camp on Guantánamo traces its origins to the September 1991 military coup that ousted Haiti’s first democratically elected president. In the wake of the coup, the US Coast Guard interdicted thousands of Haitian refugees who’d fled their country by boat and brought them to Guantánamo Bay

Some of the refugees were granted asylum in the United States based on a fear of political persecution in Haiti; almost all the rest were returned to Port-au-Prince. But 300 of the refugees found themselves in legal limbo. After proving they deserved safe haven in the US, they tested positive for HIV. Rather than allow them into the country, the first Bush administration detained the ill Haitians on a remote corner of Guantánamo – and seemed prepared to hold them there indefinitely

The justification for this measure should sound strikingly familiar. The justice department asserted that foreigners held by the US on Guantánamo have no legal rights. By this logic, the president and his subordinates were free to treat, or mistreat, the refugees however they pleased

The resulting record is an ugly one. The Haitians were denied access to lawyers and held in leaky barracks behind razor wire. Their protests were met with harsh military crackdowns. Some refugees were confined for months in tiny pens; others languished in the naval brig. And although Guantánamo lacked the medical facilities to treat the sickest of the Haitians, federal immigration authorities refused to release some refugees who badly needed better care. As government spokesman Duke Austin explained to the media: “They’re going to die anyway, aren’t they?” ...

Guantánamo: land without law
Brandt Goldstein, 20 September 2005
<forgot link:> http://www.opendemocracy.net/globalization-institutions_government/guantanamo_2854.jsp

[EFerrari]

1. Confronting what we have done to Haiti honestly will be very difficult

for those people who can achieve that.

[Solly Mack]

2. k/r

[leftstreet]

3. K&R

[gateley]

4. K&R

[Thothmes]

5. More like the "relocations centers" established

by the Roosevelt administration. Barbed wire pens, surrounded by armed guards with orders to shoot to kill. the crime of being Japanese in ancestory
was sufficient to get an indefinate term in an American concentration camp. These people had no legal rights. They were deniged access to lawyers,
confined for years in desolate hell holes like Manzanar.