Pentagon rejects Guantanamo shutdown call

[cal04]

The Pentagon has rejected a call to close the Guantanamo prison for foreign terrorism suspects and declined to express regret over five cases of US jailers "mishandling" the Koran there. US guards or interrogators kicked the Islamic holy book at the naval base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, stepped on it and soaked it in water, and in one case a guard's urine splashed through an air vent onto a prisoner and his Koran, US Southern Command said.

Bryan Whitman, a senior Pentagon spokesman, said the United States was not considering shutting the Guantanamo jail, as suggested by a senior Senate Democrat. The Pentagon opened the prison in January 2002 and it holds about 520 non-US citizens, including Australian David Hicks, with most caught in Afghanistan.

"Guantanamo serves a vital purpose in many ways." Mr Whitman said.
He said some prisoners are "very, very, very dangerous people".
"They want to do harm not only to Americans but to US interests overseas, to our friends and allies and these are people that if released would certainly be found back on the battlefield in the war on terror."

Mr Whitman declined to express regret over the five incidents of what the Southern Command inquiry labelled "mishandling" the Koran, although he said, "any time that our personnel do something that either violates our policy or procedures is unfortunate". The recent inquiry showed the vast majority of US personnel "understood the procedures for handling not only the Koran but other religious items, and have a great appreciation for the cultural as well as the religious aspects," he said.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200506/s1386055.htm

[stepnw1f]

1. Stop Using This War as An Excuse for your NEU GULAG! (nt)

[bemildred]

2. Gulags are important. They serve us in many ways.

How can we threaten and intimidate people without Gulags?
Due process would make it a fair fight, we can't have that.

Churchill has it right, "little Eichmanns".

[IndianaGreen]

3. Perhaps we can use Guantanamo to ship Bush & Cheney

The day will come when Bush & Co. will have to pay for their many crimes. They should get the same treated they gave to others!

[bpilgrim]

4. who the FUCK is the PENTAGON?!? do they mean rummy? then call him by NAME!

wtf

peace

[baby_bear]

5. definition of gulag

http://www.anneapplebaum.com/gulag/intro.html

<snip>
Literally, the word GULAG is an acronym, meaning Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei, or Main Camp Administration. Over time, the word "Gulag" has also come to signify not only the administration of the concentration camps but also the system of Soviet slave labor itself, in all its forms and varieties: labor camps, punishment camps, criminal and political camps, women's camps, children's camps, transit camps. Even more broadly, ";Gulag" has come to mean the Soviet repressive system itself, the set of procedures that prisoners once called the "meat-grinder": the arrests, the interrogations, the transport in unheated cattle cars, the forced labor, the destruction of families, the years spent in exile, the early and unnecessary deaths.
</snip>

Sounds like "gulag" was the right word to me.

b_b

[splat@14]

6. Never ceases to amaze me

that no one in this administration can ever admit any wrong doing, error, misjudgement, or not consider everything as being rosey.

[Jack Rabbit]

7. Maybe we should put Rummy and his aides in Guantanamo

That would put it to good use.

[Joey Liberal]

8. When did the Pentagon take over?

November, 2000.

[daleo]

9. Soviets reject call for Gulag shutdown.

"Solzhenitsyn can go to hell," says Brezhnev. "We have some dangerous counter-revolutionaries to deal with, and the Gulag serves a vital purpose. We respect their role in the dialectal process, though."

[Supersedeas]

10. another false dichotomy: either we operate Gitma as is or we have to

release the prisoners.


How about PROVE they are a danger, then confined them based on that PROOF.


No, having a BURDEN of PROOF is soooooooo unfortunate.

Inalienable rights dismissed, by the greatest democracy in the world.