Wampum

What if you read Woolfe's Three Guineas and ... decided that girl's education was pretty damn important, and set about organizing and building one, for your own daughters and other girls living in the area?

What would happen if you came to this decision, and acted on it, in Afghanistan during the years 1996 to 2001?

Here's what one parent said:

The school would take girls -- my own daughter was to attend the school... the Taliban actually didn't allow education of females by what they believed to be non-Moslem groups... But the Taliban didn't stop us, they certainly knew what we were doing. There were quite a few Moslems doing humanitarian work and Moslem NGOs. There were also lots of non-Moslem organizations working in Afghanistan.

I will never forget what transpired in Bagram... this is the base that was bombed just the day before yesterday.. I was held there for a year. I was hog-tied -- left in painful positions or hours, interrogated, kicked, beaten,... but I remember the screaming of a woman in the next cell, and I was led to believe that she was my wife.

I witnessed the deaths (or the beatings that led to the deaths) of two detainees at Bagram... this will never go away.

I met a number of former Irish prisoners... they were interned for years without trial, held in hoods, subjected to white noise -- the commonality of their experience with mine was remarkable... just replace Northern Ireland with Guantanamo and it was almost virtually the same.

I recommend Seth's interview with Moazzam Begg, and not simply for the shock value of Read-Three-Guineas-go-to-Gitmo, but for the somber reasoning about the reality of legal process, with, and without the Military Commissions Act, which was passed with Sherrod Brown's vote.

via Avedon Carol's The Sideshow.

Update: Colonel Morris Davis, prosecuting David Hicks, is attempting to have Major Michael Mori, Mr. Hicks' defense counsel, charged under Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, for "contemptuous words" about the president, vice president, secretary of defense and other high-ranking officials. Marjor Mori has described the Military Commissions as "kangaroo courts".