USA - США - SAD

% in US satisfied with the state of the nation

overall quality of life
2020: 84%
2022: 69%

system of government
2020: 43%
2022: 30%

economy
2020: 68%
2022: 33%

role in world
2020: 43%
2022: 37%

via Gallup

— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) February 2, 2022

On January 11, 2002, exactly four months after the September 11, 2001, attacks, the United States set up a high-security prison in its Guantanamo Bay base.

Since then, “Gitmo” has held up to 780 detainees, prisoners of the so-called “war on terror”. Today 38 remain.

To date, of the 780 detainees, 732 have been released without charge, many after being detained for more than a decade without legal means to challenge their detentions.

Detainees by nationality

Since January 11, 2002, at least 780 detainees from 48 countries have been held in Guantanamo Bay. Only 16 were ever charged with criminal offences, according to Human Rights Watch. Nine died in custody.

The countries with the highest number of detainees include: Afghanistan (219), Saudi Arabia (134), Yemen (115), Pakistan (72) and Algeria (23) according to the New York Times’ Guantanamo Docket tracker.

The youngest detainee was 15-year-old Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen who was released in 2015 after 13 years locked away.

In 2017, the Canadian government paid Khadr a 10.5 million Canadian dollar settlement ($8.1m) and formally apologised for any role the government played in the abuses he suffered as an inmate at Guantanamo Bay.

The oldest prisoner still being held is 73-year-old Saifullah Paracha, a Pakistani national who has spent the last 17 years in detention without charge.

In May, the US approved Paracha’s release concluding only that he was “not a continuing threat” to the US. Paracha could be returned home in the next several months according to his lawyer.

Of the 39 detainees remaining, 17 are being held indefinitely with no recommendation for transfer, 10 are eligible for transfer if security conditions are met, 10 have been charged by the US military, and two have been convicted.

Peter Thiel Is Finally Free to Go All-In on Far-Right Politics
The billionaire investor is giving up his long-held Facebook board seat to make a play for the Trumpist restoration.
Thiel is the largest donor to a political action committee supporting JD Vance, who previously worked at one of Thiel’s venture capital firms, and is now running for Senate in Ohio. Last summer the PAC aired a television ad in which Vance decried “a ruling class, an elite, who don’t actually care about the American nation,” as an image of Zuckerberg flashed across the screen. Thiel gave $10 million to the Vance PAC last March, according to Federal Election Commission filings.
A month after giving to Vance, Thiel wrote a second $10 million check for a new PAC supporting the Arizona senate candidacy of Republican Blake Masters, who is a longtime Thiel aide and served as the cowriter on his book, Zero to One.
Like Vance, Masters has portrayed the tech industry, and Facebook, as a key adversary. He’s claimed — without evidence — that Facebook “threw the election for Biden” and has sought to connect the company to false claims, propagated by Trump and his allies, that the 2020 election was stolen.
Thiel has also supported the campaign of Harriet Hageman, who is running to replace Wyoming representative Liz Cheney, one of a handful of Republicans to vote to impeach Trump after the failed insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021. Thiel donated $5,800 to Hageman in September, and last month hosted a fundraiser for Hageman in which he cast Cheney as “treasonous,” according to Politico’s Alex Isenstadt. “The way we’re going to defeat the left, the way we’re going to roll them back, it’s going to start in the Republican Party, that’s where we have some problems, we’ve got to clean house there first,” Thiel said, according to Isenstadt.

High-ranking communist officials in Cuba should be given an ultimatum now:

Either immediately assist in the transition of government away from communism or be prosecuted and executed thereafter #SOSCuba

— Rep. Anthony Sabatini (@AnthonySabatini) July 12, 2021

Erős Pista wrote:Sapleo se i pao na Okamovu ostricu.

The CIA’s new recruitment videos represent the totalizing effect of the new dialect of power. The Central Intelligence Agency, a cosmopolitan, professional-class institution if there ever was one, is a harbinger of what is to come. As warfare becomes increasingly asymmetrical and reliant on cyberattacks, drone strikes, and counterintelligence, the need for work­ing-class cannon fodder declines, and the military will increasingly speak the language of its potential recruits.

Летећи Полип wrote:

What the hell do you think spies are? Moral philosophers measuring everything they do against the word of God or Karl Marx? They're not. They're just a bunch of seedy squalid bastards like me, little men, drunkards, queers, henpecked husbands, civil servants playing "Cowboys and Indians" to brighten their rotten little lives. Do you think they sit like monks in a cell, balancing right against wrong? Yesterday I would have killed Mundt because I thought him evil and an enemy. But not today. Today he is evil and my friend.

Летећи Полип wrote:Mnogo stvari je ovde izreceno koje bi valjalo prokomentarisati. Prvo, na primer ovo kako ce rat u buducnosti biti sofisticiraniji i zahtevati manje prasinara. Mislim - goodbye, narativi iz dvehiljaditih. Napoleon je poveo 600k ljudu na Rusiju sa 35 miliona stanovnika. Danas Putko drzi 200k muzhika uz Ukraijinu, i svi se slazu da mu je to basta da drzi jedino Lugansk i Doneck. Da se ne zajebavamo, danasnji ratovi su nuzno totalni. Ako se budemo krljali, krljacemo se u milionima.

Летећи Полип wrote: Da se ne zajebavamo, danasnji ratovi su nuzno totalni. Ako se budemo krljali, krljacemo se u milionima.