For those who find the NH primary (and the whole primary season) to be some mix of laughable, nightmarish and banal, consider this, as reported by today by Democracy Now!
Detainees at the U.S. military base at Guantánamo Bay launched a hunger strike today marking the prison’s 10th anniversary [which is tomorrow], inspired in part by U.S. activists who have called for a national day of action. “They will be staging a series of peaceful protests that will involve sit-ins with signs and banners in the part of the prison that has communal areas, as well as hunger strikes,” says Ramzi Kassem, counsel to a number of Guantánamo prisoners. He notes his clients pay “particularly close attention to any gestures of protest in the United States… And they’re always very moved by the fact that Americans stand in solidarity with what they’re going through and what their families are experiencing.”
On Wednesday, a major demonstration is planned in Washington, D.C., where organizers say they will form a human chain stretching from the White House to the Capitol, with participants wearing orange jumpsuits to represent the prisoners at Guantánamo and at the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan who are still held without charge or trial.
Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzales also interview Air Force Colonel Morris Davis, the former chief prosecutor at the military prison, and former Guantánamo prisoner Omar Deghayes. Davis resigned his position in 2007 in protest of what he called political interference in the military commissions of Guantánamo prisoners, an calls for Obama to close the facility. Deghayes, who was arrested in Pakistan as a terror suspect and held in U.S. custody from May 2002 until December 2007, describes the treatment (torture) and conditions he and others endured.
Michael Ratner, president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights, comments on President Obama’s recent approval of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which some legal experts say would authorize the military to indefinitely jail anyone it considers a terrorism suspect — without charge or trial.
Fascinating; thanks, Be.
I’ve been wondering how transiting Mars will manifest as it transits the degree of the U.S. natal Sibly chart Neptune and the President’s natal Mars. That will start tomorrow (Wednesday). Mars will transit one degree beyond and then station retrograde and pass over that degree again, verrry slowly through the first 5 days of February.
There also seems to be a connection to this story with transiting Ceres who will conjunct the progressed U.S. Ceres in a day or so. The “hunger strike” reminds me of when Ceres withheld the growing of crops in order to make her point. It worked.
The U.S. prog. Ceres is joined by U.S progressed Child and U.S. progressed Isis and these three are sextile the U.S. progressed Pluto, god of the underworld, who is conjunct the U.S. progressed Sisyphus who was forced to push a big rock up the hill over and over. I find it interesting that Isis too was considered a “great fertility/mother goddess (Demetra George in Asteroid Goddesses) who enters the realm of the dead, returns to the land of the living, and is associated with a resurrected vegetation god.” In Isis’ case that would be Osiris.
The U.S. progressed Osiris is one degree from a conjunction to the U.S. natal Saturn who represents containment and confinement.
We seem to be living a myth as old as civilization itself.
be
Guantanamo today makes me think of the the prisoners who had been thrown into the Bastille.