U.S. its own archenemy at Guantanamo

[struggle4progress]

<snip> The way we will win is by demonstrating to the millions of undecided in the Islamic world that our talk about human rights, democracy and basic decency to our fellow man is not just words we fling about to make ourselves feel better, but principles that we live by even when it costs us. Which brings us to the question of Guantanamo Bay, the prison that sits on a little piece of Cuba under U.S. control.

There's a reason we stuck that prison at Guantanamo, and it has nothing to do with security. We put that facility at Guantanamo because the Bush administration believed that location would be out of reach not just of international law, but out of reach of American law as well, a claim it defended but later lost in court. It clearly sought an absolute free hand with the hundreds of prisoners held at that facility because it had no intention of abiding by the Geneva Convention or other norms of decent behavior. <snip>

Furthermore, FBI agents are presumably trained to tell the truth, and in memos to superiors they too have reported witnessing "torture techniques" at Guantanamo. Here's an excerpt from one such memo:

"On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold. . . . On another occasion, the had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor."

U.S. Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.), after reading that extract aloud on the Senate floor last week, said it did not sound like something out of an American-run prison. To his mind, it sounded more like something that Nazis or Soviets might have done. <snip>

http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/opinion/bookman/2005/062005.html

A bit of a mishmash -- but that's to be expected as opinions change ...