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The u.s. involvement in the cuban revolution
The u.s. involvement in the cuban revolution
Guantanamo Bay and human rights abuses
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The Politics of the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp
Guantanamo Bay, also known as Gitmo, is a United States Detention Camp located in the Guantanamo Naval Base in South Eastern Cuba. The United States gained control of the Guantanamo Bay area in the 1903 Cuban-American treaty in which the United States gained the right to control the Cuban territory while at the same time recognizing the Cuban state sovereignty (Nofi, 112). In the year 1970, the United States began to use part of the Guantanamo Naval Base as a detention camp for Cubans and Haitians that were caught in the high sea trying to get into the United States illegally (Gott, 78). However, the detention camp later became a political tool, which politicians used for their selfish political agendas. This paper is a research paper on Guantanamo Bay; the paper explores the topic focusing on the political dimension of the detention camp.
Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp was established in the year 2002, when Donald Rumsfeld was the United States secretary of defense. Rumsfeld stated that the main intention of building the Guantanamo Bay Prison was to detain prisoners of war and to try criminals accused of odious crimes (Rose, 32-33). Moreover, was turned into a full-fledged ultra-modern detention camp for the criminals guilty of extra-ordinary crimes (Smith, 21). Although Rumsfeld had said during the opening of the Guantanamo Bay Camp that the aim of the detention camp would be to detain criminals convicted of crimes of very high magnitude, it later proved that the camp was actually just a political tool.
In the book titled Bad Men: Guantanamo Bay and the Secret Prison the author C.S. Smith argued that the Bush administration targeted prisoners of war from Iraq, Iran, an...
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...ic that his administration values fairness and change.
Works Cited
Bravin, J. The Terror Couts. USA: Yale University Press, 2013. Print.
Cucullu, G.Inside Gitmo LP: The True Story Behind the Myths of Guantanamo Bay. USA:
Haperluxe, 2009. Print.
Mugambi, E. Fighting Terrorism versus Justice. Nairobi, Catholic University press, 2008. Print.
Gott, R. Cuba: A New History. USA: Yale University Press, 2004. Print.
Hicks, D. Guantanamo: My Journey. Australia: Random House, 2010. Print.
Nofi, A. The Spanish American War. Pennsylvania: Combined Books, 1996. Print.
Rose, D. Guantanamo: The War on Human Rights. USA: New Press, 2006. Print.
Smith, C.S. Bad Men: Guantanamo Bay and The Secret Prisons. USA: Phoenix, 2008. Print.
Worthington, A. The Guantanamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s illegal Prison. USA: Pluto Press, 2007. Print.
Szegedy-Maszak, Marianne. "The Abu Ghraib Prison Scandal: Sources of Sadism." Writing and Reading for ACP Composition. Upper Saddle River: Pearson Custom, 2009. 210-12. Print.
Marianne Szegedy-Maszak, a senior writer at U.S. News and World, published her article, "The Abu Ghraib Prison Scandal: Sources of Sadism," in 2004. She uses the article to briefly overview the scandal as a whole before diving into what can trigger sadistic behavior. The Abu Ghraib Prison Scandal took place in 2004, wherein American troops humiliated and tortured Iraqi detainees (Szegedy-Maszak 75). The main objective of Szegedy-Maszak’s article is to investigate the causation behind sadistic behavior, exclusively in the Abu Ghraib Prison scandal. She effectively does so by gathering information and research from professional psychologists and professors of psychology, specifically Herbert Kelman and Robert Okin (Szegedy-Maszak 76). She finds
Cuba and the U.S.: The Tangled Relationship. New York: The Foreign Policy Association, 1971. Flaherty, Tom.
The U.S.’s relationship with Cuba has been arduous and stained with mutual suspicion and obstinateness, and the repeated U.S. interventions. The Platt agreement and Castro’s rise to power, served to introduce the years of difficulty to come, while, the embargo the U.S. placed on Cuba, enforced the harsh feelings. The two major events that caused the most problems were the Bays of Pigs and Cuban Missile Crisis.
Santos, Michael G. Inside: Life Behind Bars in America. New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 2006. Print.
The United States embargo of Cuba has its roots planted in 1960, 53 years ago, when “the United States Congress authorized President Eisenhower to cut off the yearly quota of sugar to be imported from Cuba under the Sugar act of 1948… by 95 percent” (Hass 1998, 37). This was done in response to a growing number of anti-American developments during the height of the cold war, including the “expropriation of United States-owned properties on the island… [and] the Soviet Union [agreeing] to purchase sugar from Cuba and to supply Cuba with crude oil” (Hass 1998, 37). Bad sentiments continued to pile up as Cuba imposed restrictions on the United States Embassy and especially when, after the United States “officially broke off diplomatic ties with Cuba, and travel by United States citizens to Cuba was forbidden ... Castro openly proclaimed his revolution to be ‘socialist’” (Hass 1998, 38). The day after this, the Bay of Pigs invasion occurred, but it failed in its job to topple Castro (Hass 1998, 38). Left with no diplomatic options and a failed military attempt, the United States decided that the only way to end Castro’s socialist regime was to sever all ties, and from 1961 to 1996, a series of acts were passed prohibiting the majority of trade and interaction with Cuba. (Hass 1998, 38).
Ego is that which constitutes the essential identity of a human being. It is defined as the “I” or self of any person; a person that is able to think, feel, will, but perhaps most importantly- reason. The Palace of Corrective Detention has no guards and the locks are old. The convicted, or lack, thereof, do not ever try to escape. From the beginning, the government of Anthem perpetuates its ideology to its citizens. Because of this fact, the citizens never learn of what the Council forbids them to know. In essence, these criminals in the Palace of Corrective Detention are never able to conceive the notion or concept of escape. The people in the totalitarian world of Anthem have no ego- they cannot begin to fathom escape, for the true prison they are trapped in is their own mind. The prisoners are a manifestation of the fact that in the collectivist society, one cannot accomplish anything without the permission of another. The prisoners have been brought up by the system that controls them in the broadest sense. Hence, the prisoners are trapped within themselves. The Palace of Corrective Detention, to a certain extent, represents the mind of the prisoners. The binds that hold down the prisoners at the Palace of Corrective Detention are not physical restraints, but psychological ones.
Gresham M. Sykes describes the society of captives from the inmates’ point of view. Sykes acknowledges the fact that his observations are generalizations but he feels that most inmates can agree on feelings of deprivation and frustration. As he sketches the development of physical punishment towards psychological punishment, Sykes follows that both have an enormous effect on the inmate and do not differ greatly in their cruelty.
26. Glover Julian, “Guantanamo piled lie upon lie through the momentum of its own existence” in The Guardian, April 25, 2011
On September 11, 2001, this country was under attack and thousands of Americans died at the hands of terrorists. This action caused the U.S. Military to invade Iraq because of the idea that this country was involved in harboring terrorist and were believed to have weapons of mass destruction. This was an executive order that came down from our government, for us to go in and attack Iraq while searching for those who were responsible for the death of American lives. This war brought in many prisoners whom were part of the terrorist group Al-Qaeda, whom the military took into custody many of its lower level members to get tips in capturing higher level members. During the detainees stay at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, many of these prisoners
The prison and asylum reform was the attempt to improve conditions inside prisons, establish a more effective penal system, and implement an alternative to incarceration, because the prison system wasn’t working as effectively as it could for example prisoners committing the same offense after released and being incarcerated again, and also the fact that the only prisons considered “good” at this time were in Pennsylvania and Europe.
A Writ of Habeas Corpus is an authoritative order forcing governments to provide the “body” of the detainee in which the legality of their detention and individual liberties will be challenged. Historically associated with civil liberty violation and the injustice of illegally detaining potentially enemies of the state, jurisdictional issues regarding their detaining location have made justice difficult to administer and deliver. Detaining enemies for their participation, involvement, and/or ties to threats of terror towards the United States will result the confinement of combatants, as solidified by the US Constitution, however, to what extent will they be forced to stay?. Residents of Guantanamo Bay are just; enemies of the state, accused individual that have been arrested and detain with minimal civil human rights to our jurisdictional due process that we American’s hold dear; with only a Writ of Habeas Corpus as their life line to legality and freedom. Although controversial in its conception and implementation by US presidential administration, judiciary members have cordially interpreted cases of questionable detention and the legality of doing so. It is truly unfortunate when individuals are tossed into confinement illegally with no help and/or the promise of their restorative freedoms (ACLU, 2014).
Wilson, Rick. "The Growing Problems of the Prison System." American Friends Service Committee. American Friends Service Committee, 27 Nov. 2012. Web. 11 Apr. 2014. .
The book’s title, with its dry allusion to the separation of powers, does not do it justice. “Guantánamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power” represents the best account yet of what Mr. Margulies calls “a human rights debacle that will eventually take its place alongside other wartime misadventures, including the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, the prosecutions under the Espionage and Sedition Acts during World War I, and the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus during the Civil War.”
What has our society classified as a prisoner of war? A prisoner of war is someone who is a member of regular or irregular armed forces of a nation at war held by the enemy. After two years of war with the Middle East our society wonders what happens to the prisoners in jail. The other conflicts of prisoners of war is how they are treated in jail, also what did they do to be detained as a prisoner of war? In most situations, there is a legitimate reason why these people are taken captive. So many might ask what is happening to the Iraqis detained under Coalition forces custody, and do the prisons comply with standards set fourth in the Geneva Conventions? This subject is very controversial to the U.S and other nations. The controversial part of this subject is the alleged abuse of prisoners in jail in custody of U.S soldiers. There are many cases of prisoners dying in prison but is it because of abuse by American soldiers. This subject of abuse upon prisoners of war has reach all over the world especially to the United States. Our president George W. Bush, along with Congress, has arranged investigations on the events that happen inside the prisons. He has addressed to the nation that such things have not occurred, but what a U.S soldier knows may be a little different. This kind of action toward prisoners of war is illegal according to US law, which is dictated by the Geneva Conventions. If a soldier is found guilty of abuse, or other forms of mistreatment, that soldier will be recommended for court-martial. The other issue about this subject is that there are so many different opinions on this matter. One opinion is that U.S personnel really did cause the death of many prisoners of war. The other question i...