Results tagged “guantanamobay”

href="http://londonist.com/2008/01/6_years_on_amne.php">Amnesty International bringing Guantanamo Bay to the American embassy to raise the profile of the continuing campaign to close the detention center.

Museum of Fine Arts Boston and Peabody Essex Museum

Saturday was the third anniversary of the war in Iraq and was marked, as you might expect, by marches and vigils in the more liberal corners of our liberal Commonwealth. Today, the Globe reports that "a small but crucial number" of Guantanamo detainees - many of whom have been there since before the Iraq war began, make up a "hard-core group of firebrands" who have "called down the wrath of God on U.S. officials." And on Friday, Bostonist heard a story on NPR about how the U.S. is being forced to defend its treatment of the Guantanamo detainees, including force-feeding them to keep them alive.

Bostonist always has trouble deciding how we feel about well-intentioned but utterly useless projects. So it was with mixed feelings that we learned of House Bill 1881 in the Mass. Legislature, which proposes a statewide resolution supporting the Constitution and condemning the USA PATRIOT Act (which has to be in all capital letters because, annoyingly, it stands for "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools for Intercepting and Obstructing Terrorism"). It's not that we disagree with the message - we are huge fans of the Constitution, having sworn to protect it against all enemies foreign and domestic. But the news lately suggests to us that no amount of haughty scolding from the likes of Massachusetts will dissuade the current administration from its belief that certain constitutional rights (like, for example, being free from unreasonable detention, having a speedy, public trial with a lawyer to defend you, and having due process of law) are all like, totally five-minutes-ago. After all, despite revelations that many of the people being held without charges in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are not terrorists, Donald Rumsfeld reiterated last week the necessity to keep the facility up and running for years to come. (It's also not a good sign when government lawyers arguing in favor of indefinite detention have to rely on one of the most shameful and racist actions by the federal government in the last 100 years.)

Bostonist hates taking off our shoes at the airport when going through security. We have a special pair of particularly smelly shoes we wear hoping that the TSA people will have to touch them as we go through the detectors. But we don’t carry knives, bombs, or secret documents. Back in 2003 Ahmed Mehalba was arrested and charged with possessing secret documents when he was searched at Logan International Airport. Mehalba a former Boston taxi...