Greetings from Guantanamo Bay ... and the sickest souvenir shop in the world
By ANGELA LEVIN - More by this author »
Last updated at 00:06am on 4th May 2008
Mockery: A child's T-shirt proclaiming the camp a tourist spot
The sands are white, the sea laps gently and crowds of bronzed Americans laze in the Caribbean sunshine.
They have a cinema, a golf course and, naturally, a gift shop stocked with mugs, jaunty T-shirts and racks of postcards showing perfect sunsets and bright green iguanas.
Only the barbed wire decoration, a recurring motif, hints at anything wrong.
Welcome to "Taliban Towers" at Guantanamo Bay, the most ghoulishly distasteful tourist destination on the planet.
As these astonishing mementoes show, the US authorities are promoting the world's most notorious prison camp as a cheap hideaway for American sunseekers – a revelation that has drawn international anger and condemnation.
Just yards from the shelves of specially branded mugs and cuddly toys, nearly 300 "enemy combatants" lie sweltering in a waking nightmare.
It is six years since foreign prisoners, many captured in Afghanistan, were first taken to this US-occupied corner of Cuba. Yet even now, no charges have been brought against them.
While the detainees lie incarcerated, visitors can windsurf, take boat trips and go fishing for grouper, tuna, red snapper and swordfish.
The United States' 1.5million service personnel and Guantanamo's 3,000 construction workers are eligible to visit the "resort", which boasts a McDonald's, KFC and a bowling alley.
They even have a Wal-Mart supermarket.
each man thinks of his own fleas as gazelles
question authority
Just because it's "military personell" doing it, doesn't dismiss the fact that it's insanely stupid and pointless. Why would you even bother doing it. If it was an ordinary giftshop, it wouldn't have been a problem. But a joke or even a giftshop about anything like this is what you call "ludicrous." It's low and pathetic.
Exactly, it's not the gift shop that's the problem - it's the nature of what's being sold there, in relation to the environment in which it's being sold.
i see abolutely nothing humorous about this - to say it is in poor taste is an understatement. these men are being held for years without trial - often without even being charged. we blatantly endorse torture.
this vacation spa for 1.5 million military personnel - what message does this send out to them?
to say there is nothing political about it is ludicrous.
each man thinks of his own fleas as gazelles
question authority
i see abolutely nothing humorous about this - to say it is in poor taste is an understatement. these men are being held for years without trial - often without even being charged. we blatantly endorse torture.
this vacation spa for 1.5 million military personnel - what message does this send out to them?
to say there is nothing political about it is ludicrous.
What message is it supposed to send and to whom? The majority of the military and civilian personel who work at Gitmo don't care about politics. It is a job, a job that keeps them away from home for extended periods of time. Is it the fact that these little t-shirts and coffee mugs don't show compassion and buy into the poor innocent victim line in regards to those kept at Gitmo? Is it because(ready yourself)....soldiers are actually proud of being soldiers? Oh, the humanity!
"Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not, and a sense of humor was provided to console him for what he is."
it is not just for the staff that work there. it is a resort for 1.5 million servicemen.
first we detain people without charges or trials. then we say that torture isn't torture and now we make a joke of it!
each man thinks of his own fleas as gazelles
question authority
"They lie sweltering in a waking nightmare", in airconditioned cells.
Occupation: The term of control of a territory by foreign military forces: Iraq 2003-2005 Liberation:when something or someone is freed: Operation Telic 2003
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