Guantanamerica

prevSept. 22, 2005 - 3:22 p.m.next

Part of this past spring and into the summer, the current administration has been involved in the act of sending prisoners from Guantanamo to a number of different countries for further "questioning." These countries include Pakistan, Russia, Morocco and Saudi Arabia. Interestingly, these countries also make the State Department's list of countries that still practice torture. Senior officials claim that people are being sent back to their "country of origin" because local interrogators speak their language. Yeah, if we're talking the language of pain. I mean, seriously, are we to believe this crap? It's just a way for the U.S., who has come under closer scrutiny after Abu Graev, to side step the actual torture itself and let another country do it. The policy of "extraordinary rendition" could almost be understood until you get memos with plans to send a detainee to Jordan, Egypt or an undisclosed third country. Huh...last time I checked, you could really only have one country of origin.

Bush's administration has had long practiced policies based on the fact that the American people are too dumb or wrapped up in their own lives to care about the rest of the world. Oddly enough, this is probably Bush's smartest decision, because boy, was he right. Americans don't really seem to care about something like rendition. The media certainly doesn't help them to care, either. Torture isn't pretty enough to put as the main story of the hour. A pretty blonde who disappeared in Aruba will make the hourly news, though. I'm sorry, I seem to have forgotten how a single girl's disappearance applied to me or this country's policies. Whoops. I meant to say "white girl." When pregnant Latoyia Figueroa disappeared in Philadelphia, no one in the media seemed to notice. Hmmm...she was Hispanic and black. Wonder if that had anything to do with it? Laci Peterson was white. Ahhh, yes. Now I remember the way American media finds stories. Asha Degree has been missing from my home town for years now. YEARS. I think she made a 35 second blurb on CNN once. Did I mention she's black?

People go missing in America every day. Somehow, the media finds the pretty ones, and latches on to them. I have never seen weeks of CNN coverage for some tore-up mother of three from a trailer park, who is high on meth. Have you? No, we see people like Laci and the "runaway bride," pretty white women. CNN, NBC, CBS, all the news organizations focus on the pretty disappearances...and seem to forget all about the disappearances happening just 519 miles south of Florida.

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