Hi Andy, I diaried re the Guardian article on Clive’s letter [a letter to Obama from Clive Stafford Smith, director of the legal charity Reprieve, in which Clive’s account of Binyam’s torture was censored before it reached the President] and worked in your excellent column re Guantánamo. My thoughts, sometimes woven via questions asked, are that the Obama administration, which is trying to placate the right, is certainly not in control, or at least complete control, of the military and intelligence agencies. I can’t tell how weak he is, vs. how complacent, or how complicit. But something is going on. The diary at Daily Kos got huge play:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/2/11/171221/781/367/696296
And thank you for all your work. Should you speak to Binyam’s legal team, or to folks at Reprieve in general, please let them know how much many people over here in the U.S. appreciate their incredible work.

More Valtin on his blog: http://valtinsblog.blogspot.com/
Clive’s letter: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/feb/11/binyam-mohamed-release-torture-letter
Reprieve: http://www.reprieve.org.uk/

Perhaps, by some lucky chance, the President will actually happen to read it.

Again I ask–What have these innocent men ever done to us that we would allow this insanity to continue for another day? In the name of God, anything that’s decent, love (capital or small L) we, for our own sakes, if not theirs, must momentarily put aside our pleasure seeking, our technologically induced over stimulation, our ongoing and disastrous indifference to human life to immediately stop the hurt, harm, and damage.

We chant ohm, we listen to love songs, we watch sporting contests and bet on their outcomes (as if they actually mattered, even as we suspect the fix has long been in), we shop till we drop, we chase every kind of illusion of ego, while in reality, today, right now, as our hearts beat in our chests and the clock tick tocks in every time zone, these prisoners continue to suffer, and make no mistake about it, approach their own extinction.

Blithely–while clipping coupons, saving receipts, finding that perfect pair of shoes, and on and on in all of our mundane human pursuits–we, by our inertia, via our collective and willful unconsciousness, decimate their bodies and despoil the last shreds of belief we can ever hope to have in America. For me, this is too high a price to bear. I cannot live, much less hope to flourish, in an unjustifiable and permanent state of irony, a place where there is no there. “Hope,” “Change,” “Yes we can!,” “Yes we did!” What are these words going to even mean if we let this go on?

To my President, a brilliant man in whom I have placed my trust (no small matter) with my sacred vote, a man demonstrably eloquent in word and deed, I say this. There will come a day when Malia and Sasha will no longer be girls–innocent of life, trusting and adoring. They will take the excellent education they are now receiving from home, school and church, and hold it up against the silhouette of their father, the one man among all others, who could have actually turned the page on this squalid and immoral state of affairs, and who, in fact, promised in a thousand ways to do just that.

If we do not change course, eventually, by virtue of their own humanity, Malia and Sasha will be forced to ask, “Father, why? Why didn’t you do more for the hunger striking prisoners in your care, who you knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, had been wrongly captured, detained, tortured and ill treated, and who pursued American justice through all available legal and rational means, and when that failed, begged you, their ultimate protector, with their words and finally their bodies, to show mercy? How can we reconcile our experience of you, ordinarily so loving, wise and tender-hearted, with this foulness? We loved you, we trusted you, and believed in your fairness and goodness. We still do. Were we wrong? Even now, are we mistaken?”

Mr. Obama, in the name of everything you and Michelle hold dear, consider this carefully. When this moment inevitably comes, and it, the questioning, has already been written and foretold (just now by me) will you be able look in their shining eyes? What legal and historical record (scrupulously documented here by Andy) will you have to point to? And what, sir, will you be in a position to answer them?

I posit that this will be your life’s and your legacy’s defining moment. As a citizen of the country you are charged with leading, and as a fellow traveler in your own time and space, and as a woman who loves the shimmering dream of America that you embody, I ask you, no, I beg you, to define it with goodness and care, qualities I am certain you possess, live and breathe in every fiber of your being.