Article: Compassionate Torturing?

[RBHam]

Alberto Gonzales will likely be confirmed. But that won't stop the widening scandal over Gitmo detainees

By Michael Isikoff
Newsweek
http://www.fpp.co.uk/online/05/01/Gonzales_2.html

Jan. 17 issue - Ibraham Al Qosi's stories seemed fairly outlandish when they first surfaced last fall. In a lawsuit, Al Qosi, a Sudanese accountant apprehended after 9/11 on suspicions of ties to Al Qaeda, charged that he and other detainees at Guantánamo Bay had been subjected to bizarre forms of humiliation and abuse by U.S. military inquisitors.

Al Qosi claimed they were strapped to the floor in an interrogations center known as the Hell Room, wrapped in Israeli flags, taunted by female interrogators who rubbed their bodies against them in sexually suggestive ways, and left alone in refrigerated cells for hours with deafening music blaring in their ears. Back then, Pentagon officials dismissed Al Qosi's allegations as the fictional rantings of a hard-core terrorist.

But in recent weeks a stack of declassified government documents has given new credence to many of the claims of abuse at Guantanamo. The documents are also raising fresh questions about the Bush administration's handling of detainees at a time when a prime architect of that policy, White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, right, is facing a Senate confirmation vote as the president's nominee to be attorney general.

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