One of our subscribers wrote recently that he already gets enough news and so doesn’t need to read what we have to say. Fair enough. We are all jolted by the barrage of dangerous lunacy coming out of the White House as Trump moves quickly to assert his dominance over U.S. and global institutions.
But World Can’t Wait isn’t a news service. We work to direct action to stop this fascist onslaught, focusing on the dangers the U.S. represents to the globe. People act on what they understand. For instance:
Trump just announced he plans to detain 30,000 immigrants in the U.S. torture camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Echoing Bush in 2001, he claims they will be “the worst of the worst.” To the MAGA fascists, immigrants are criminals, but there’s a history here. When a reactionary coup in Haiti overthrew Haiti’s president Aristide in 1991, thousands of Haitians fled into the ocean. Rather than providing refuge, the Clinton administration locked up thousands of them in Gauntanamo.
A sordid history: “The Defense Department claimed it ran Guantanamo as a ‘humanitarian mission,’ but the refugees were subjected to deplorable conditions. They slept in rudimentary barracks with garbage bags taped over the windows. They ate inedible food, at times spoiled, even infested with maggots.”
From the International Refugee Assistance Project:
Former staff at the GMOC (Guantanamo Migrant Operations Center) describe the dilapidated building with mold and sewage issues, where families with young children are housed alongside single adults. They are denied confidential phone calls, even with their attorneys, and punished if they dare share accounts of mistreatment. Refugees are regularly confined to their rooms for weeks at a time. And although the GMOC detains traumatized children, there are no educational services or pediatric psychiatric care provided to them.
15 men are still held in the torture camp Bush set up in 2002 in a section of the camp Trump has said he wants to fill with his political opponents.
All this is why we will renew and strengthen our monthly actions demanding:
CLOSE Guantanamo NOW – Wednesday February 5
Washington DC – NYC – Los Angeles – Detroit – Mexico City – London. More info here.
The process of deporting millions will depend on mobilizing the U.S. military. The new Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth can hardly move fast enough to “seig heil” Trump and said “We don’t want illegal criminals in the United States, not a minute longer than they have to be.”
We share Paul Street’s piece on what the media misses about Hegseth:
A longtime FOX/Fatherland News host and full-on white nationalist MAGA fascist, Hegseth proudly wears large tattoos representing his identity as a Christian Crusader. He wears a t-shirt that bears a picture of the US flag along with this clever expression: “A Pledge a Day Keeps the Commies Away.” He sees himself and his fellow “true Christians” as enlisted in a holy war against “domestic enemies” he accuses of trying to take down God and country: LGBT folks, non-Christians, leftists, liberals, feminists, and anti-racists.
The Christian Fascist theologian atop Hegseth’s religious order (Doug Wilson) preaches that women should have no authority in home or society and says that the years of Black chattel slavery were a time of welcome “harmony between the races.” The religious expert and pastor Brad Onishi told the “Public” Broadcasting System (“P”BS) five weeks ago that “If you want to be the kind of president who uses the Insurrection Act, to call in the military against uprisings in American cities, to use military force against protesters, Hegseth is the man for the job.”