Hunger strike at Guantanamo?

[chunksmediocrites]

Guantanamo Inmate Rejected by Supreme Court on 17-Year Detention

The U.S. Supreme Court turned away an appeal from one of the 40 inmates still being held at Guantanamo Bay, refusing to question the government’s power to continue to hold people there without criminal charges.

The inmate, Moath Hamza Ahmed al-Alwi, has been held at the U.S. naval base in Cuba for more than 17 years since he was captured in Pakistan, near the border of Afghanistan. He argued that the government’s power to detain people as enemy combatants has expired given that hostilities in the region have largely subsided.

The case centered on the reach of the 2001 law that authorized military force against al-Qaeda and its supporters after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The Supreme Court ruled in 2004 that the measure authorizes the president to detain enemy combatants as long as the conflict lasts.

Although the court as a whole made no comment Monday, Justice Stephen Breyer said in a statement accompanying the order that “it is past time” for the court to consider whether perpetual detention is permissible under federal law and the Constitution.

“Al-Alwi faces the real prospect that he will spend the rest of his life in detention based on his status as an enemy combatant a generation ago, even though today’s conflict may differ substantially from the one Congress anticipated” when it authorized the use of force, Breyer wrote.

Stephen Breyer apparently made this statement prior as he was away on travel when the court declined, and allowed this to stand, according to the ScotusBlog. Not sure why I thought this worth noting.

9/11 terror attacks are carried out by members of al Qaeda and half a million deaths, six trillion dollars, two failed primary wars and occupations later- one ongoing, in Afghanistan we still have 14,000 US military in warfare, plus an alarming growth in private contractor mercenaries.
We now own a long list of war crimes, including using torture, as signatories in the Torture Ban Treaty; and not limited to lying about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to justify war; we turn away International Criminal Court (ICC) personnel investigating war crimes and swear to never cooperate with their investigations; we now have drones, many of them armed, flying over eight nations.

It's not like the US needs more negative press in the world to make a lot of nations and peoples resent and hate what the US does in regards to the war on terror. Not trying to make militant groups out as heroes- mostly they are the grim outcomes of our previous cold war/ great war training programs and weapons disbursements. But holding people in prison with no legal recourse, no sentence, no trial, or unjust trials- holding people whose crimes are those admitted to under torture, through torture- this continues to be a stain and a means of plainly showing the US acting unjustly.