As seems to be the trend with my articles, I cover a lot of now-old stories that somehow manage to pop back up into my erratic memory when I’m trying to think of a vehicle to base my random observations around. Usually the stories are ones that I know little information about, stories that I might have just saw a headline to and bypassed reading the article to instead come to my own, probably misguided, assumptions about what really went down. I’m sure this is something we all do from time to time (perhaps even everyday), so I figure I’m doing everybody a great service by going back to these stories and setting the story straight by writing articles on them (months after the fact). Better late than never, as they always say. And mind you, I’m not even getting paid to do this. (Though at this point, I’m sure all of us are aware of how low it pays to write for Medium.)

Much like Muhammad Ali, Mos Def is a black Muslim entertainer fond of spiting the powers that be and changing his name, so I don’t think it came as any surprise to anyone to hear that he had been banned from the U.S. It was almost like when back in the day the government tried to force Ali into the service, but he didn't want to, firstly for the obvious reasons that it’d take away from the prime of his boxing career, but also because no Viet Cong ever called him a dreaded n-word. (But who’s to say that they wouldn't if they ever came in contact with him? Perhaps he didn't want to find out.) So if the government couldn't get a black man to sacrifice his life in a meaningless war, the next best thing was to have him be imprisoned.

Another similarity Mos and Ali have, as you’ll find out with continued reading, is that they both seem to favor potentially dangerous Asians to white people, but I digress…

Since the beginning of his rap career, Mos Def has more or less positioned himself as a socially conscious artist. Alongside the equally (if not more) advocate Talib Kweli, together they formed the now legendary hip hop duo Black Star. They didn't quite come off as harmlessly conscious as say, a rapper like Common, but they also weren't as threatening as say, Public Enemy. Mainly they just promoted black pride in complicated ways and did covers of old BDP and Slick Rick songs.

Not long after that, Mos released his solo debut called Black on Both Sides (which sounds like a scraped title for a vintage Parliament album) to similar acclaim as the Black Star album. But to up the stakes, he started spouting some of the truths the government would rather people not know, like how they listen into people’s cellphones and sold loads of crack to the real Rick Ross to flip on the street, among other things.

Despite the fact that he posed very little threat to the powers that be, I think that this was at least enough to get him on their radar.

Then for a while Mos didn't release another album. He wasn't totally off the map or anything though like say, his hero MF DOOM, he largely seemed to sustain by making cameos in movies. By the time he finally came back to releasing an another album (a total of 5 years between Black on Both Sides and its follow-up), he wasn't making the music people liked him for in the first place.

Yet that didn't mean he wasn't still provocative. The appropriately titled The New Danger album is notable for the song that was taken off of it called “The Rape Over,” which talks about who’s really running this rap shit (i.e., tall Israelis and quasi-homosexuals). This was perhaps the most outspoken (and predictably controversial) moment of his career up until that point, a prelude to the authority questioning he would carry out in his Guantanamo Bay force feeding exhibition.

So essentially you get the idea that for a while Mos Def had been known as a rapper who wasn't afraid to speak his mind. A little more than a year ago he partook in the aforementioned procedure (displayed in the picture above) to show his support for the terrorists (or rather, his fellow Muslim brothers) as a way to not only increase awareness about what really goes down over there, but also as a way to piss people off.

According to the video, “there are currently 120 detainees on hunger strike in Guantanamo Bay” with 44 of which being force fed against their will. Being that the video can be kind of hard to watch, I’ll describe what they do for those who don’t want to see all that madness. Basically what they do is they strap the person down in their orange jumpsuit and proceed to insert a tube up their nose, which I’m inferring is meant to go down through their throat to their stomach. But before he could actually get any grub in his stomach, Mos stopped the procedure. What a wuss.

If Mos really wants to impress me with his advocacy, he would suffer the indignity of a cock meat sandwich, as famously demonstrated in the movie Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay. Though it’d probably be for the best if he didn't upload a video of that onto Youtube (or anywhere else on the Internet for that matter).

Even though I've already come to the conclusion that the people they do this to are indeed terrorists (or terrorists in the making), I still occasionally like to give people the benefit of the doubt. I’m a shoot first, ask questions later kind of guy.

How can we be so sure that these guys are actually bona fide terrorists?

We can’t be. There appears to be many instances of people being taken into GITMO without any trail or charge, with maybe the most well known instance being the case of this dude named Shaker Aamer. According to my Wikipedia research, he’s been in GITMO since Valentine’s Day, 2002. He’s also said to have participated in the hunger strikes that go on over there, so there’s a decent chance he’s one of the people they’re doing that force feeding procedure to.

Up until now, I've largely ignored the religious aspect of this. As we can infer, most of the reason why these detainees don’t want to eat is because they’re trying to adhere to the traditions of Ramadan. It doesn't seem right that a possibly innocent man wouldn't be able to observe his religion’s holiday because these GITMO officers need to keep the inmates nourished just enough to be able to withstand being waterboarded or having their nipples electrocuted. On the off chance that one of these detainees is actually innocent, shouldn't they hold off a little on the force feeding?

And can you really blame these GITMO detainees for not wanting to eat whatever slop they serve up to them there? We know that our regular everyday penitentiary inmates are getting served food with maggots and what have you, just imagine what they’re getting served up in Guantanamo! (cock meat sandwiches) They might actually prefer to be force fed than to eat that shitty prison food.