Tag Archives: Guantanamo

Celebrating a little early this time.

January 14, 2022 Joseph

Man, it has been a long time. But not THAT long. Still, I forgot how the hell that last song ended. And track number seven I don’t remember doing at all! My head is like a cotton swab. Mother of pearl.

Hi, everybody. Now, I don’t want to create the impression that Big Green is one of those old man groups that just reflects back on their own sorry history. That said, I was archiving some old recordings this week. As it happens, that’s what bands sometimes do when they … I don’t know … reach a certain age. I DON’T WANT TO DISCUSS IT.

Whoops – sorry. Anyway, got the chance to listen back to some stuff and it occurred to me that our second album, International House, is nearing a kind of significant anniversary. Quite a coincidence, that.

What’s the coincidence, Joe?

Well, I’m gonna tell you. As you will see in my Political Rant this week, this is also the twentieth anniversary of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. Who can forget those heady days back in the early 2000s, when the ground was still smoking from 9/11 and W. Bush was heating up the pork and beans, getting ready to watch some good bomb-dropping? I know I can’t (though fuck knows I’ve tried).

The coincidence is this: it is also the 14th anniversary of International House, which included a number of songs that bear on the early war on terror. The one I kept thinking of today was Enter the Mind, a song Matt wrote about the CIA black sites. Now, some might say that 14 is not a significant anniversary. I beg to differ! I’ll have you know that 14 is the ivory anniversary … or is it the one when you give your spouse the box set of Electric Light Orchestra’s greatest hits? Always get those mixed up. (They’re both the same color, you see.)

A fitting observance. Or not.

There are a lot of ways we could observe this ivory anniversary of International House. We might, for instance, move into a house and out of this drafty abandoned mill. We might throw stones into the middle of the street and hope that passing baptist ministers happen upon them. Or we could, I don’t know, put the whole damn album on YouTube. Either way, we could do something other than talk about it.

Frankly, I’m not a big fan of promoting old product. International House was our album-length retrospective on the W. Bush years. Some of the shit we were complaining about back then is still in effect today. But it’s still a period piece, if you will. We wanted an exclamation point on that sucker, not a period, but there you go.

There’s a place in time

Hey, look – we all have history. We all came from somewhere and are headed somewhere else. Maybe those two somewheres are the same-wheres – who knows? The way I see it, if we concentrate on the present long enough, it will be the past. And if we turn our eyes to the future, that future will soon be the present. It makes me dizzy just thinking about it.

And so, I’ll listen to more old recordings this week. You gotta know where you’ve been before you work out where you’re going. Had enough of cliches? There’s more where that came from!

Political Rants

Twenty Years and Counting … And Counting.

January 14, 2022 Joseph

This week marked the 20th anniversary of our illegal and profoundly immoral post-9/11 prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. (Lord knows I’ve been posting about it long enough.) And though the Afghan war is over, there’s no end in sight for the remaining 39 prisoners captured following our invasion of that unhappy country.

At a time when we should be following through on multiple presidents’ pledge to shut the place down, we’re doing the exact opposite. Biden’s Pentagon is planning another $4 million secret court room in the island compound. Looks like we’re planning on prosecuting some detainees, though under what auspices it’s not clear.

Never the less, let’s look at some of what is clear about Gitmo.

Where the hell is it, again?

Okay, so … the United States has hundreds of military installations around the world, including a significant number in Central and South America. But typically those facilities operate in what we consider to be friendly countries. The reason is simple – our military is an imposing presence, so much so that only a friend could tolerate their presence.

But Guantanamo is located in Cuba, a country that has been under unrelenting attack from the United States since the very early 1960s. You would think we might have packed that place up long ago, but it’s too valuable an instrument of intimidation. Does anyone think Cuba willingly accepts the presence of a U.S. base on their territory, occupying their principal eastern-facing port? It’s a little hard for us to credibly criticize Russia for leaning on Ukraine when we do this kind of shit.

The remaining victims of GWOT

Thirty-nine detainees remain at Guantanamo, of whom 27 have not been charged with a crime. The remaining detainees are basically un-prosecutable by any reasonable standard, as they have been subjected to torture and forced interrogations. The Biden Administration has recently approved five detainees for release, but this means next to nothing. The prison at Guantanamo is a Kafkaesque trap, holding men whose lives mean nothing to their captors.

The fact is, they won’t be released because to do so would have negative political consequences. No president wants to take the heat for releasing “jihadists”, even if none of the detainees cleared for release has ever raised a hand against the U.S. When Obama lost his nerve on this issue back in 2009-10, that was our last chance to shut this dump down. Now the only thing that can kill Guantanamo is us.

What the hell do we do about it?

So glad you asked. We can call our representatives, our senators, our president, and tell them that twenty years is more than enough. Shut that atrocity down now and release the remaining detainees. Recompense them in some measure for the harm we caused them. Represented by a moron? I know the feeling! Call him/her anyway.

luv u,

P.S. just posted an new episode of Strange Sound – the first one in several months. Give it a listen at Anchor.fm or wherever you get your podcasts.

*Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.*

Political Rants

The year in advance.

January 31, 2015 Joseph

Okay, I promised domestic policy this week, but I’m going to have to go back on that for a paragraph or two. It’s the product of swallowing so much crap news over the course of the week. Just a few minutes of Latin America coverage by NPR is enough to make me want to pull my own head off. So I just want to dwell on that topic for a few minutes … don’t mind me.

One that got away Obama’s shift on Cuba is instructive in a lot of ways. For one, it is wildly popular, with something like 60% of the country in support. That has been reflected in polls for quite a long time. Second, it does help to lay bare the true nature of the relationship. Just listening to our diplomats lecture Cuba on human rights issues is enough irony to last a decade in and of itself. For chrissake, we can’t even claim to hold to a high standard on human rights even within the confines of Cuba itself!

Raul Castro has said that reestablishing normal relations would require our return of Guantanamo Bay – the only eastern-facing harbor on the island, which would be kind of useful for trade with Europe. The Obama administration has rejected that out of hand. Again … does any news organization in the United States ever examine the issue of our dubious claim on Guantanamo Bay? Nope. Too busy reporting on Russia’s heinous seizure of Crimea.

It goes deeper than that. Why have we targeted Cuba for five decades? Dictatorship? That can’t be it. We cozy up to dictators in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and elsewhere without a problem. Human rights? Please! Here’s a more plausible explanation. We “owned” Cuba, like a master owns a slave. Cuba broke away, setting a “bad” example for the other slaves. We have never accepted its disobedience, and we have punished it grievously ever since. We’ve invaded it, attacked its people, attempted to assassinate its leaders, strangled it economically as only a superpower can, vilified it in every imaginable way.

So … the nation that innovated the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 pursues the same principle on the national stage. That is the context of this new detente with Cuba.