In the midst of researching the Hamdan v. Rumsfeld case, I came across a story about a Saudi man named Mohammad Mana Ahmed al-Qahtani, who is currently being held indefinitely in the United States Guantanamo Bay detention camp, in Cuba. The Guantanamo Bay detention camp is an extrajudicial and interrogation facility established by the Bush administration to hold detainees from the war, following the events of September 11th. You may have heard of al-Qahtani before, but under the name given to him by the Bush administration: “the 20th hijacker.” Continue reading »

I read a memoir recently from a child soldier (now adult) that fought alongside his country’s army in Sierra Leone that inspired me to write this piece and hopefully shed some light on the matter to those that are currently in the dark.

There is said to be an estimated 300,000-500,000 child soldiers in the world, with Africa being home to 200,000 of them–a number I feel to be much greater. Continue reading »

by ed2lib

I was on twitter a while back and a friend tweeted an interesting article.  The headline: “It’s Official: Gay is the New Black”.  As I read, I found myself nodding, not in agreement but in frustration.  Gay is not and will never BE the new black. ‘Blacks’ haven’t arrived.  We as a community are oppressed daily.  What IS happening is our real oppressor has created a machine that makes minority groups hate each other to the point where we don’t fight for our collective freedom. But, Gay is the new Black?! Nah, that’s not the way that this struggle works. Continue reading »

By The Intellectual Hoodrat