Thursday, June 21, 2007

Top-secret pictures recently smuggled out of Guantanamo

CONTENT WARNING: There are shocking and deeply disturbing images in this post. I'm very serious. The world has some very evil people in it and this post includes some pretty horrific documentary evidence thereof. You have been warned.

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I am reliably informed by a friend who enthusiastically detests Bush, that Guantanamo is "by definition" a concentration camp and a gulag outpost. Now, thanks to an unnamed source with access to the most secret Newsweek archives, I have the proof. No doubt thanks to the brutal tyranny that Bush has established in what used to be the land of the free, I take my freedom and perhaps my very life into my hands by daring to publish these truths. But better to die boldly than to live cowering in the shadows! Give me liberty or give me death! The evil reign of Bushy McHitler cannot hope to survive these revelations! Sic semper tyrannis!

Here we see the poor innocent, peaceful inmates of Guantanamo in the midst of their daily routine of forced manual labor in the bitter cold of the Cuban winter:



Welcome to the Guantanamo barracks! Here is where Bu$hitler keeps the fortunate ones who are relatively healthy and well-fed and suitable for work...



...as opposed to where he keeps the less useful inmates.



Perhaps the most heart-wrenching moment is that in which the military transports first pass through the gates of the Guantanamo hell. Here we have the hyper-efficient selection process in which perhaps three-fourths of the incoming detainees -- including all of the women who (like the doomed woman in the foreground) are accompanied by their demon-spawn Muslim children, and also the said demon-spawn (like the one she's carrying) -- are simply marched off to the Guantanamo gas chambers and disposed of immediately, at, one is forced in fairness to admit, a significant savings of cost to the American taxpayer.



But the days of Bu$hitler's vile reign of terror are coming to a close! Here we see a member of Human Rights Watch documenting the American brutality in preparation for testimony at the war crimes trial. Behold, All Is Revealed!



[whispering] Remember, children of the True Democratic Faith...The Truth Is Out There...

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PLEASE NOTE: I am perfectly well aware that not all persons who object to the American policies and procedures surrounding Guantanamo are asses of the monumental stature of Dick Durbin and the "nutroots." If you have never referred to Guantanamo as a "concentration camp" then I am not satirizing you in this post; so please don't be insulted.

If on the other hand you have called Guantanamo a concentration camp or a gulag, then you should be thoroughly ashamed of yourself. And I hope to God you're not stupid enough to do it in front of any of my friends back in Karaganda whose parents -- or perhaps they themselves -- survived the tender mercies of Peschanlag and its nearby sister camps.

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First image: Russian gulag slave laborers working on the infamous Byelomorsko-Baltiyski canal.

Second image: Slave laborers in their barracks on Liberation Day in Buchenwald.

Third image: Buchenwald corpses.

Fourth image: The selection process at Birkenau (Auschwitz). I'm not making up the 75% statistic.

Fifth image: Western investigators on the grounds at Buchenwald.

4 Comments:

At 12:51 PM, Blogger Jim r said...

ummm, how long ago was Durbin's particular comment made? Isn't this kind of old news?

I know you don't think guantanamo is anything like gulags and concentration camps, but that still doesn't make the place a good place.

 
At 3:00 PM, Blogger Ken Pierce said...

I know, Jim, I wasn't aiming that one at you. It is indeed old news; it comes out of a discussion I was having with somebody else about demonization. In trying to explain what I meant, I brought up Durbin's old quote, just because it's hard to find a more canonical example of the tactic -- not that you can't find conservatives pulling the same stunt; and indeed I also included in the discussion some of Linda Chavez's recent outrageous comments, if I'm not mistaken, as well as Sean Hannity. I wasn't really trying to open the topic of Guantanamo, and went out of my way to say that Guantanamo wasn't the subject of discussion, that it was just an illustration of a rhetorical tactic...but you know how conversations like that tend to go.

Well, she wouldn't leave it alone and kept getting more and more emphatic about saying that not only was Durbin not practicing demonization -- according to her, as far as I understand her, he was hardly even exaggerating. So eventually she honked me off enough for me to hop onto the blog and blow off some steam.

Obviously Guantanamo can be a bad thing that ought to be shut down (though I personally don't think it is) without being a death camp or a gulag or the headquarters of the Neighborhood Genocide Committee...but that's precisely why a responsible person ought to be able to argue for its closing without resorting to such obscenely slanderous comparisons.

Anyway, while you and I disagree about what qualifies as "torture," I don't think you've ever tried to pretend that Guantanamo is the equivalent of the dungeons and apparatuses of the Inquisition, or of the sorts of things the KGB used to do, and Islamofascists continue to do, to their victims; so you shouldn't feel affected by this particular satire in any way.

 
At 4:04 AM, Blogger Ghost Dansing said...

Guantanamo is an issue for this Republican administration because it is exemplary of the extra-legal (criminal) quality of its leadership.... only one example.... analogies to fascist and communist prisons are referring not only to the issue of torture, but also an overall attempt by this Republican administration to concentrate power in the Executive, undermine checks-and-balances, and pretty much slouch toward despotism.... yes Dubya's Attorney General is a touchstone.... an icon to this fact.

 
At 9:17 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

But then, if you took some pictures of the thousands upon thousands of dead and wounded Iraqis and pasted them inside Guantanamo, put the dead on the beds and in the yard, then it wouldn't look much better than the pictures you've posted here. Or worse, photoshop them into places around your house.

Motive is hard to pin down, granted. But wouldn't it be better to protect the laws that protect against fascism, rather than create piece by piece, the legal frameworks which foster it?

If Guantanamo is so benign, why risk the constitution on it?

 

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