Here’s our own Desi Doyen (of The BRAD BLOG’s Green News Report) on this week’s The Point, The Young Turks’ panel show, along with Dave Rubin, Kelly Carlin & Anna Kasparian, talking about rapper Yasiin Bey (formerly Mos Def) getting force-fed in solidarity with the Gitmo prisoners who have been on hunger strike protesting their captivity for months…
The force-feeding being carried out on the Gitmo prisoners is a human rights abuse decried as torture by organizations such as the Red Cross, the United Nations and the World Medical Association.
It’s all the more outrageous considering that more than 80 of the prisoners currently on hunger strike — and being force fed through a tube in their nose for months — have been cleared for release years ago by the U.S. government.
Yet, they still sit today, for years on end, as prisoners, never to face charges and with little hope of being released any time in the near future. That, despite President Obama’s claims that he wants to close Gitmo and, most importantly, the fact that he has the power and ability to send all of the cleared prisoners home tomorrow, with little more than a stroke of his pen.
And, by the way, the very popular Rightwing Republican hypocrite and idiot Glenn Beck is so clueless that he either doesn’t know the above, or simply doesn’t care. Instead of calling for these people to be treated humanely or have their rights and freedom (which he pretends to care about) restored, last week he made fun of them and expressed his preference that the U.S. government should just “shoot them in the head”.
Remember that, please, the next time the con-man Beck attempts to hoodwink you or anybody else into believing that he gives a tinker’s damn about “Big Government” tyranny, freedom, individual rights or anything other than disinforming America in order to line his own pockets with the hard-earned cash of his gullible, easily-conned fellow citizens.
Why is it that no one questions the right of an Arnold Schwarzenegger or a Ronald Reagan to parlay their celebrity status into the attainment of public office; yet, when someone, like rapper Yasiin Bey, uses his celebrity status to dramatized the horrific nature of force feeding, without any personal benefit to himself, we find it necessary to justify his benevolent use of his celebrity status?
The mere fact that the panel felt it necessary to address that question is troubling.