After Five Years Of Guantánamo/US Torture Camp - Do You Feel Any Safer?

[kpete]

This is a US torture camp

Evidence of prisoner abuse at Guantánamo is overwhelming - and it hasn't made anyone safer

Vikram Dodd
Friday January 12, 2007
The Guardian


It would be the ideal spot for a beachside birthday party. Surrounded by a turquoise sea, palm trees and white sand, the US detention camp at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba was five years old yesterday. Tony Blair calls it an "anomaly", but the evidence is overwhelming. Camp Delta, which still houses 470 men never convicted of any crime, is a torture camp. That should be the starting point of any debate about what is acceptable in the west's fight with Islamist extremists. More than 750 men have passed through the camp, with nearly half being released. Many prisoners, past and present, have given consistent and repeated testimony of serious abuses and ill treatment. There is also significant evidence from US officials and government documents of widespread abuse at the camp.

The British detainees known as the Tipton Three allege they were repeatedly beaten, shackled in painful positions for long periods and subjected to sleep deprivation. They were also subjected to strobe lighting, loud music and extremes of hot and cold - all meant to break them psychologically. Other detainees have suffered beatings, sexual assaults and death threats. At least one man has been "water boarded" - tied to a board and placed under water so that he had the sensation of drowning.

According to the Red Cross, the regime at Guantánamo causes psychological suffering that has driven inmates mad, with scores of suicide attempts and three inmates killing themselves last year.

..............................

Human rights have been traded away in Guantánamo in the hope of gaining security, and it has not worked. One of the US's founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson, stated: "He who trades liberty for security deserves neither and will lose both." Adorned on the walls of the Guantánamo camp is its mission statement: "Honour-bound to defend freedom".

After five years of Guantánamo, do you feel any safer?

more at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1988677,00.html

The L.A. Times featured an Op-Ed assembled from letters written by a detainee held in the "darkness of the U.S. detention camp at Guantanamo."

"The purpose of Guantanamo is to destroy people, and I have been destroyed," al-Dossari writes.

Excerpts from Op-Ed:

In January 2002, I was picked up in Pakistan, blindfolded, shackled, drugged and loaded onto a plane flown to Cuba. When we got off the plane in Guantanamo, we did not know where we were. They took us to Camp X-Ray and locked us in cages with two buckets — one empty and one filled with water. We were to urinate in one and wash in the other.

http://www.rawstory.com/news/2007/Detainees_OpEd_Purpose_of_Guantanamo_to_0112.html

[shance]

1. No but Poppy Bush and his crew sure do.

n/t

[Amonester]

2. And they can fly away

To Paraguay
Anytime
They
Want
If The Going (ever) Gets tough
Question is will it (ever) get tough-E-nough?