Cuba's Black Hole

 

The Spaceship USS Cygnus in The Black Hole

If you have never seen the film The Black Hole, I shall let Wikipedia synopsize it for you:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Hole

The Black Hole is a 1979 American science fiction film directed by Gary Nelson for Walt Disney Productions...

Nearing the end of a long mission exploring deep space, the spacecraft USS Palomino is returning to Earth...

The Palomino crew discover a black hole in space with a spaceship nearby, somehow defying the hole's massive gravitational pull. The ship is identified as the long-lost USS Cygnus... The Palomino...  manages to move back to the Cygnus and finds itself able to dock to what initially appears to be an abandoned vessel.

The Palomino crew warily boards the Cygnus and soon encounter the ship's commander, Dr. Hans Reinhardt, a brilliant scientist. Aided by a crew of faceless, black-robed android drones and his sinister looking robot Maximilian, Reinhardt explains that he has lived all alone on the Cygnus for years....

 

 Dr. Reinhardt and his Robot, Maximilian

Reinhardt then reveals that he has spent the past 20 years studying the black hole and intends to fly the Cygnus through it...

The rest of the Palomino crew grow suspicious of the faceless drones' human-like behaviour: [one of the Palomino crew] sees a [drone] limping and [another] witnesses a [drone] funeral and discovers the Cygnus crew's personal items in the ship's living quarters...  a battered early model robot... explains that the faceless drones are in fact the human crew, who mutinied when Reinhardt refused to return to Earth and had been lobotomized and "reprogrammed" by Reinhardt to serve him...

 Dr. Reinhardt's "Drones"

When I first saw the film, I thought the drones were zombie-like creatures, who although dead, were kept functioning in some ghastly  science-techno-"there are things man was not meant to know"- manner,  which would have made the film even more gross. Not to say the film was entirely disturbing: Slim Pickens did the voice of the loveable little good robot, and there was an uncommon mixture of horror and slapstick.


Now we turn to this:

Al Jazeera America
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/americas/2014/05/us-stops-force-feeding-guantanamo-inmate-20145172313714654.html

A US judge has ordered the military to stop force-feeding a hunger-striking prisoner at Guantanamo Bay naval base.

The temporary order, issued on Friday by Judge Gladys Kessler, means that staff at the facility cannot feed Syrian prisoner Abu Wa'el Dhiab until a hearing next Wednesday.

"While the Department follows the law and only applies enteral feeding in order to preserve life, we will, of course, comply with the judge's order here," Defense Department spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Todd Breasseale said in response to the ruling.

Kessler also ordered the US military to stop taking Dhiab out his cell if he refused to go to feedings and said the government had to keep all videotape evidence of forcible cell removal and force-feeding until the hearing.

It is the first time a judge has ordered an end to force-feeding of a prisoner in Guantanamo...

It seems to me that the government does not know what to do with the people in Guantanamo, yet will not part with them, nor put them on trial.

It will not even let them die.

Perhaps we can look forward to zombie drones in Gitmo in the near future.

--

On Closing Guantanamo Prison

I reprint a poem I wrote in 2007 about Guantanamo. It was based on a garden I tended among the construction rubble of my new housing development. I dug water courses to irrigate my wild plants. Upon one, there was a colony of small creatures, looking like aphids, of a orange-red color huddled on the apex of the plant. To me, they looked for all the world like the prisoners I had seen in photos from Guantanamo - or Gitmo - prison in Cuba. They were there for most of the year; they huddled in the sun, in the rain, and maintained their perilous perch even in the strong winds that bent their domestic stalk close to the ground. Then - maybe late August, there were ladybugs there. Now maybe they became ladybugs, or maybe the ladybugs ate them. But..not knowing what else to do, I prayed. The name of the poem is Father Ghraib = Abu Ghraib, the literal meaning, and Mother Gitmo. I suppose I was thinking of Bertolt Brecht and Mother Courage, and maybe I thought of Kurt Weil, also. The ending is on a note of fatal fascination, for now as we will release the prisoners held for years, we justly fear they will hate us. Of course, many will. That is the price we must pay for what we have done. So we shall wait and see. (note: I somewhere refer to them as "juvenile aphids". I was not aware at the time that the US government admitted to holding at least 12 juveniles at Guantanamo: http://current.com/items/89536309/u_s_admits_it_held_12_juveniles_at_guantanamo.htm )

Father Ghraib and Mother Gitmo Behind the garage there is a garden, in the wastelands. The builders stole the soil; they sold it to pay the landscapers crew! Water channels dug into sand and stone, through broken concrete and asphalt, recycled crap from everywhere. Experiment to see what will grow… builders just throw trees into holes, toss flowers into trenches… no mindfulness, no husbandry no botany, no lasting beauty… trees…symbols on an architect’s sketch: seen from above pointillistic circles with bent branches twisting around a circle like swastikas deformed. But something grows in this waste land! A tree surrogate with leaves like elephant ears of a wide florescent green on a stem thinly veined in burgundy kermes; a desert spike with compounded eyes of saffron lids bepetalled; walking sticks with purple crowns, mille foil clouds, creeping parasols, great pendant hearts, explosions of the briar, Hemlocks where we hang our hearts; covert agents of desire, spies of reproduction, texting with chromo-semaphores. The fairies pippin, Mab’s nonpareil, spanish pearmain, grizzly muscadine, early Margaret and scarlet crofton; all fruits of rich imagination! In the midst of this, on the verge of a small isle in the streams, stands a vulgar hyssop unseen among the vibrant pageantry. United around its upper course juvenile aphids clutch and huddle in prison suits of blood-orange: silently there and nowhere else… and wait for the time of their fulfillment. A denumerable crowd sits as if in dreaming prayer, bidden to the masjid of stinging nettle and menthol, alone and stripped of their imam whose sermon they cannot ken. I watch in fatal fascination this epithalamion symbiotic, not knowing if we rise as ladybirds to dry our wings… or swarm to our demise.