theneighbourhoodsuperhero:

The anguish is clear on the face of Moazzam Begg, a former Guantanamo Bay detainee, who takes long pauses in an attempt to steady his tearful voice, as he recounts to the interviewer about how American interrogators repeatedly raped and tortured, or pretended to rape and torture, a woman in the cell next to him in an attempt to force him to falsely confess.

Begg’s eyes cloud over and he stares off into the distance as he relates how they manipulated his biggest fear, that his wife and children who were with him at the time of his arrest, were also imprisoned and in danger:

“I heard the cries of a woman (in the cell next to me) and an American voice shouting, ‘Spread your legs!’ and the woman is screaming and crying (as if she is being raped). Before I used to (always) ask the Americans about what happened to my wife and children since my arrest. They said ‘We don’t know,’ but at this time I didn’t ask because I was afraid of the answer. I thought my wife was in the cell.”

Begg was tortured and assaulted physically, mentally, psychologically, emotionally, and sexually as the American interrogators tried “breaking him down” in order to make him sign false confessions. Begg was released after three years spent in US custody without any charges held against him.

It is still not clear to this day whether the woman in the cell next to him was a fellow inmate also unjustly prisoned or an interrogator posing as a woman in distress.

It is known but hardly ever reported that the United States detains (Muslim) women who they “suspect” of being terrorists for no apparent reason, an example being Dr. Aafia Siddiqui (shown below in a picture of her taken while in US custody) who was abducted with her children by US intelligence.

After severe mistreatment in custody, during which she sustained a gunshot wound, Siddiqui was sentenced to 84 years in prison. Her young children who were with her when she was kidnapped and subsequently detained and interrogated have only recently been relocated. Siddiqui’s youngest son, who hadn’t even started walking yet, has disappeared since her kidnapping with no hint whatsoever of his whereabouts. Her older son has claimed that “the bloody body of his baby brother” was tossed to the side of the road by US soldiers when Siddiqui and her children were arrested. During her trial, Siddiqui was repeatedly removed from the court room for interrupting proceedings to scream out that her children had been tortured in front of her.

Four men who were imprisoned with Dr. Siddiqui in Bagram and who managed to escape reported in an interview:

“When they torture you, they threaten to sodomise you, they threaten to bring your wife and rape her in front of you and do other things to her. My words can never fully explain to you what happened during those interrogations.”

“Those American criminals think that they are the lords of human rights and that they are the callers for the freedom of the woman and her rescuers from oppression. There is a woman from Pakistan. She was put in solitary confinement for two full years in Bagram prison among more than 500 male prisoners and guards. She was treated the same way as the men were. This woman stayed there until she lost her mind, until she became insane, hitting the door and screaming day and night.” 

sparkamovement:

Women at work during WWII. Photos by Alfred T. Palmer via The Library of Congress

Children at the Tule Lake Relocation Center/Tule Lake Segregation Center in Newell, California, play with a scale model of their own barracks, September 1942. 

National Archives

unhistorical:

February 19, 1942: Franklin D. Roosevelt issues Executive Order 9066. 

The order provided for the designation of military areas (to be decided by the Secretary of War and commanders of the U.S. armed forces) from which “any or all persons” could be relocated. No specific ethnic groups or sections of the nation were singled out in the text of the order, but it stated that these new powers would serve as “protection against espionage and against sabotage”. In practice, it resulted in the internment of 120,000 Japanese-Americans, nearly two-thirds of whom were American-born citizens; smaller numbers of German- and Italian-Americans were interned as well, but no ethnic group was targeted by the government to the extent that the Japanese were. 

Virtually every Japanese-American living on the West Coast was interned, while a small fraction of those living in Hawaii - just over a thousand - suffered the same fate. The justification for the executive order was practical; it was believed that many Japanese, Issei and Sansei alike, could not possibly remain loyal to the United States if it went to war with Japan. It was outwardly practical (the Ni’ihau Incident seemed to prove American suspicions), and it was deeply rooted in racial prejudice. Many white farmers were glad to see their Japanese competition uprooted and displaced; several newspapers printed opinion pieces that supported wholeheartedly the internment based on their own personal feelings toward the Japanese; the American public (including even Theodore Geisel/Dr. Seuss) generally supported the move; and the Supreme Court, the ultimate defender and interpreter of the U.S. Constitution, upheld the constitutionality of the executive order in Korematsu v. U.S. (also see: Hirabayashi v. U.S.).  Camps were run by the Wartime Civil Control Administration and the War Relocation Authority; the largest of these by population were Tule Lake and Poston, but the most well-known today is Manzanar.

Some Japanese-Americans escaped internment by volunteering to serve in the U.S. Army, and many of them served in the famous 442nd Infantry Regiment, a unit that fought in Europe after 1944. Ironically, while many of its members’ families remained interned at home based on widespread racism and suspicions of disloyalty, this all-Japanese unit eventually became the most decorated infantry regiment in the history of the U.S. Army: twenty-one of its members were awarded the Medal of Honor. 

Executive Order 9066 was eventually rescinded in 1976, and surviving Japanese internees received payments and apologies from the U.S. government in the 1990s. But money paid four decades later could not compensate for the time lost in the camps; the businesses, homes, farms, and other property sold last-minute at ridiculously low prices by their owners or vandalized and destroyed in their absence; and the humiliation and disillusionment at having been denounced by their own countrymen and rounded up by their own government. 

Images compiled by The Atlantic

yukidama:

dapsandhugs:

this week on White People are Wild

is anybody even remotely surprised at this point

This is so fucking disgusting. But positive representation doesn’t matter, right? Fuck. I’m so angry.