Thousands around the world protest Guantánamo Bay

Amnesty International activists stage protests outside Shannon Airport in Galway city. © AI.

In the past 24 hours, thousands of Amnesty International supporters staged protests in over 30 countries spanning all five major continents, calling for an end to the unlawful detention centers at Guantánamo Bay.

Six years ago, the U.S. began detaining people at Guantánamo Bay, without charge, without trial, without end. Since then, conservatives and liberals, military officers and interrogators, Senators and Representatives have condemned the detention camps there as immoral and ineffective.

We believe the perpetrators of the heinous attacks of 9/11 must be brought to justice, and believe the U.S. has a duty to protect its citizens. But Guantánamo Bay helps us do neither. Justice only comes when governments uphold the rule of law and universally respect human rights. Those held at Guantanamo Bay must be brought to trial or released.

» Check out the images of our protests from around the world
» Take action at the new international version of tearitdown.org
» Tell your Senator to vote against torture

What Bush Won't See on His Trip

Reporter offers Bush a Gaza, West Bank misery tour

CNN's Ben Wedeman says Bush won't see the plight of Gaza and the West Bank

Video from CNN

From CNN

January 9, 2008

By Ben Wedeman
CNN

Editor's note: In our Behind the Scenes series, CNN correspondents share their experiences in covering news and analyze the stories behind the events.

JERUSALEM (CNN) -- Air Force One touched down in Tel Aviv on Wednesday. President Bush has come to the Holy Land for the first time as president of the United States.

But he's trapped inside his security bubble, his every step mapped out in great and precise detail by teams of security experts and handlers. In the end he'll see a side of this unhappy land that bears as much resemblance to reality as Hollywood does to real life.

I spend a lot of my time covering the West Bank and Gaza: here's what I see, and he won't.

He won't be going to Gaza, the Palestinian territory that is under the rule of Hamas. Hamas is considered a terrorist organization by Israel and the United States. Watch what Bush won't see »

Gaza today is a wasteland. Since Hamas took power, the Israeli government has made it extremely difficult for Gazans to travel outside their crowded strip of land along the Mediterranean. Israel has also severely restricted imports in Gaza to essential humanitarian goods. Four out of every five Palestinians depend on international food aid, according to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency. No one is starving, but the economy has come to a virtual standstill.

President Bush won't see the hospital wards where babies, just weeks old, are dying because their doctors can't get permission from Israeli authorities to go to Israel for treatment as they did in the past.

Earlier this week, I visited the intensive care unit in Gaza's Nasser Pediatric Hospital. Hospital director, Dr. Anwar Khalil, explained that a third of their incubators have broken down because of a lack of spare parts. The electricity goes out on a regular basis because the power is cut up to eight hours a day after Israel reduced fuel supplies.

Israeli leaders insist they're trying to pressure Hamas militants from firing locally made missiles into Israel, a near daily occurance. But to the vast majority of Gazans -- who have nothing to do with the missiles, who are powerless to stop the militants -- it amounts to collective punishment.

In Gaza, they blame Israel. They blame the United States, which supports Israel's policy toward Hamas. They also blame their own leaders.

"We are cursed," said Iyad Sarraj, a Gaza psychiatrist and a human rights activist. "Our leaders are either Israeli collaborators, asses, or mentally unstable."

Sarraj warns that what he describes as the siege of Gaza will blow up in the face of Israel in another intifada, or uprising. "From the first intifada, which was only stone throwing, to the second intifada, which brought suicide bombing, the third intifada will be much, much worse, and I suspect that it will be chemical weapons and chemical warfare."

But none of my sources who are intimately familiar with the weaponry available to militant groups has mentioned that as a possibility. There are indications that the militants in Gaza, left to their own devices, are up to no good. I was told by reliable sources that Hamas is busy developing new and more effective weapons -- rockets with propellant resistant to humidity, higher explosive payloads and longer ranges as well as roadside bombs and other explosive devices. Weapons are being stockpiled, and tunnels are being dug all over Gaza in anticipation of an Israeli invasion. Little in life in Gaza is inevitable, but death and destruction.

President Bush went to Muqata'a, the headquarters of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah in the West Bank.

But he didn't travel around the West Bank to see checkpoints like the one in Hawara, south of Nablus, where Palestinians wait, often for hours, in the winter cold, waiting to be allowed by young Israeli soldiers to go to their homes, universities, businesses, doctor's appointment, or to visit a relative or a friend.

If Bush got through Hawara to Nablus, he'd find a city where the Palestinian Authority, which the United States and Israel are supposed to be supporting, is rapidly losing credibility every time Israeli forces close down the city to round up militants, as they did over the weekend. Israel may have valid security reasons for going in, but these operations do irreparable damage to the standing of Palestinian leaders such as U.S.-backed President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Sallam Fayyad, now often described here as Israeli collaborators.

Maybe when the U.S. president went to Bethlehem Thursday, he may have seen what Israel calls its security barrier -- a 24-foot-high concrete wall encircling most of the town. Israel put it up to stop suicide bombings, a measure that appears to be working when it come to cutting down on the number of attacks. But the Palestinians call it the "racist apartheid wall." The wall has all but destroyed the local economy, cutting Bethlehem off from much of its farmland and reducing the flood of tourists to a trickle.

If he had some spare time -- and a convincing disguise -- I'd be happy to take Bush on a tour of my beat. I'll do the driving.

Hijabs and High Heels

Pamela Windo | Young Muslim women torn between faith and fashion remind me of my own struggle of good girl versus bad girl, and how split in two these young women must feel in defending their religion and identity.




From the Washington Post

January 3, 2008

Hijabs and High Heels

By Pamela Windo

In the 1980s and 1990s, when I lived in Marrakech, the headscarf was a simple affair. In Gueliz, the New Town, few women wore either a headscarf or a djellaba—an ankle-length hooded robe. In the Medina, or the old town, where a more traditional lifestyle was practiced, most women still wore a djellaba and a loosely-tied headscarf; only a few wore the hijab. In the countryside, the Berber women wore colorful skirts and headscarves while weeding the fields.

I returned to the States in 1997, but I continue to pop back to Morocco for my yearly nostalgic pilgrimage. I've just been on one of those trips and was surprised, alarmed even, to see how many more women are now wearing headscarves, most noticeably in the modern cities of Casablanca and Rabat. Not older women, but young ones; the same age group as the young women who had so exuberantly discarded them a decade before. And instead of scarves tied under the chin, they have now adopted the hijab, which is swathed closely around the head in the stricter Middle Eastern way.

Although they are made of colorful fabrics with pretty clips at the back, what most struck me was the blatant dichotomy between the hijab and their other clothes. While a few women wear it with a subdued djellaba, and others with their everyday modern suits, skirts and coats, a startling number of young Moroccan women combine the hijab with figure-revealing blue or black jeans, elaborate glittering belts, modern sexy tops and designer sunglasses. Equally striking is the glossy-magazine-style make-up, heavy on the lipstick and black kohl eye-liner.


I was reminded of how, at fourteen, after a short-lived religious phase during which I sat in church alone pondering if I should become a nun, my friends and I all began to focus desperately on our looks, much to the alarm of our parents. Taking movie stars as our role models, we began to wear make-up and high heels, and when American actresses Grace Kelly and Audrey Hepburn copied our British Queen Elizabeth and wore silk headscarves tied under the chin, we copied them.

Soon after, French actresses Brigitte Bardot and Catherine Deneuve tied the ends of their headscarves at the back of their neck, and we copied that too. Not one of us knew anything about the Muslim headscarf. In imitating movie stars we were searching for our identity, and trying to be noticed as the stars were. Fashion for all women is one of the keys to their identity, bound to their desire to be independent and sexual human beings. It's not surprising then that at the same time as they express their adherence to Islam, young Moroccan women want to hold on to the freedoms they have so recently acquired. After all, the desire to be attractive is natural to young women the world over.

Today, in a global world of mixed cultures, identity is shifting, ever harder to come by. Where do we belong? Who are we? What do we believe? Whether it's the Muslim woman's hijab, or the African woman's tribal headscarf, or the Jewish woman's wig or hat, or even the Catholic's lacy black veil, they all represent the desire to be seen to belong as much as to be religious. For Muslim women, the hijab, worn for centuries by their forbears, is an essential part of their identity. Given that it is a symbol of modesty and sexual purity, and body-revealing clothes the hijab's opposite, the alarm I had at first felt was quickly followed by empathy.

With the Western and Islamic worlds looking on, criticizing in turn the wearing and non-wearing of the hijab, I realized that their discordant display of faith and fashion echoed my own less intense struggle of good girl versus bad girl, and made me understand how split in two these young women must feel in defending both their religion and identity.

A native of Brighton, England, author Pamela Windo lived in Tunisia from 1960-1963. She came to the United States in 1979. In 1989, she went to live in Morocco, where she spent seven years traveling, working and writing. A collection of her stories, "Zohra's Ladder & Other Moroccan Tales," was published in 2005.