Yes, “waterboarding” is torture…

“Waterboarding”, the interrogation technique – which simulates drowning – was approved by the White House to brake down Al Qaeda captives in 35 seconds. John Kiriakou, a former CIA agent, admitted that on December 2007.

Mr Kiriakou told the ABC network then: “This isn’t something done willy-nilly… This was a policy made at the White House, with concurrence from the National Security Council and Justice Department.”

Eric Holder, the US attorney-general choice nominated by Barack Obama, has recently said he believes “waterboarding” is torture. “No-one is above the law, the president has a constitutional obligation to faithfully execute the law of the United States,” he said in Washington DC, according to Al Jazeera.

Well, the next four years we the people will have plenty of time to see how strictly it applies to the Obama administration. Guantanamo is indeed not only a “sad chapter in American history” but also a dreadful chapter in the history of human kind. And History, that one written by historians and not by spin doctors or the embedded media, will certainly never absolve those accountable for the crimes committed behind Guantanamo’s walls.

Stockholm at -8º

Vi fryser

och kämpar med nästa steg

in i det kommande…

(Nelly Sachs)

Even a slaughterer deserves a prize

We live in a perverted world. A world where the more harm you do to the people, the more essential you become to your nation. A world where anyone can get at least five minutes of fame. Or a prize. Yes, in the twisted, mediatised and globalized world we live in nowadays, even President Alvaro Uribe of Colombia, the false-hearted crook who got powerful by the money and blessing of the cocaine cartels, and who was the political architect behind the creation of bloodthirsty paramilitary death squads, can get a prize for his fighting in favour of human freedom and against international terrorism!

No, I’m not joking. On January 9 it was announced that President Alvaro Uribe is the first winner of the freedom prize created by the City Council in Cádiz, Spain. The Spanish union Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT) as well as Amnesty International are against such an international recognition of one of Latin Americas’ biggest slaughterers.

I think they are wrong. They should just let Alvaro Uribe come to Andalucia and get his prize.

Let him do it and, while he is at the ceremony enjoying the sound of clapping hands, let Judge Baltasar Garzón Real at Spain’s criminal court, Audiencia Nacional, issue an international warrant for the arrest of Alvaro Uribe for the deaths, torture and forced displacement of Spanish citizens or their descendents in Colombia during the last ten years — surely there are some of them among the tens of thousands of people victimized by Alvaro Uribe as Commander in Chief of the Colombian Army and, in extension, of its paramilitary protégées.