Recent defenders of the despicable prison camp at Guantanamo have:
1/ Criticised people who say that the camp is evil and a blot on the US’s reputation by stating that outside bodies and individuals have been permitted to visit.
or
2/ Criticised organizations or people who refuse to visit unless given full and unrestructed access.
Now we have inside information that such guided visits are a sham.
*Yee said journalists and congressmen who visit the camp can’t get a real picture of conditions there.
“They don’t actually get to see what is happening,” he said. “They get very much a sanitized view, you might say a dog and pony show.”
Yee himself had to rely on testimony from prisoners and from the translators who were with them when interrogation abuses occurred, and he said a chaplain is in no position to witness abuse on his daily rounds.
“The guard who opens the gate yells, ‘Chaplain on the block,’ ” Yee said.*
That being said, should prisoners be displayed to journalists like caged animals? Is that not a violation of the Laws of War? What would the ideal system look like?
I dunno. I look forward to reading a history of this in ten or twenty years. I bet it is not pleasant reading.
What we basicaly have is a chaplain retailing allegations by inmates. Speaking of “fundamental evil”, I am suspicious of this bit of self-congratulation from the chaplain:
"But Yee said he was able to get some amenities that the prisoners appreciated: Arrows on the ground pointed the way to Mecca for prayers. "
Given that prisoners (at Guantanamo or elsewhere?) have alleged that they were given inaccurate information by guards on the direction of Mecca, how can the chaplain be sure that the arrows on the ground weren’t actually pointing to Bismarck, North Dakota? He might be guilty of facilitating psychological torture his own self.
Never heard of these allegations. It could have been a joke, but it could have been a theological misunderstanding: there is more than one way to calculate the Qibla.
I dunno, some of this sounds less than innocent. From Amnesty International’s description of a so-called “black (detention) site”:
It was no makeshift military camp but a purpose-built facility, or at least one that had been extensively refurbished in an effort to make it as anonymous as possible. There were no pictures or ornaments on the walls, no floor coverings, no windows, no natural light. The only clue to its construction, according to Salah ‘Ali, was that it was not Arab-built, as the toilets faced the direction of Mecca."
I have no dog in this fight. I disagree with the whole Guantanamo situation and have for quite a long time now. And I can understand a distrust of the government.
However, why exactly should I believe these unsubstantiated allegations presented by the OP as if this were case closed? According to the article:
So, the guy is not exactly a completely detached and unbiased source with no ax to grind.
The OP seems to think this part is important:
So, the chaplain (who is, as I said, not exactly a detached source) is SUPPOSEDLY relating hearsay from a group of folks identified as ‘translators’…who are basically relating what they were told by prisoners (another not exactly unbiased source of information…they are PRISONERS after all, and probably not best pleased by being locked up as they have been).
I have no doubts that abuses happened at Gitmo in the past, and wouldn’t be completely surprised if some still went on, though my understanding is that our act has been substantially cleaned up. However, this isn’t exactly the smoking gun that the OP is breathlessly pushing…to me its more like the endless series of ‘WE FOUND WMD IN IRAQ SO THERE LIBERAL SCUM!’ announcements we had from the more rabid conservatives just after the invasion.
So, the most extreme case which substantiates “something fundamentally evil going on” is a female guard showing titty and touching the prisoner on his wee wee.
Oh Lord, let there be something fundamentally evil visited upon me! Please, Lord, tonight!
Do I think Gitmo guards should act in this way? No. Do I think this an indication of something fundamentally evil going on? No. Do I think that **Pjen **just read another article about Gitmo and just had to open a GD thread? Yes.
Good point…so instead of third hand its only (supposedly) second hand. If the chapline is to be belived, if he doesn’t have his own spin on what was said, if he actually understood correctly what he was told…and depending on what HE thought was serious torture (i.e. his own interperetation).
Except none of those alleged “psychological pain” abuses supposedly witnessed by translators (not identified or interviewed in the article) are described. Zero. The one specific reference is as follows:
"In the most extreme cases, Yee said, prisoners told him that female interrogators partially disrobed and sometimes touched them in offensive ways.
Read the article.
As prolonged detention without just cause is not sufficient for you in your zeal to manufacture U.S.-run gulags and concentration camps, I suggest acquainting yourself with the real thing as practiced on that island. Try perusing this site. This is one of many cases deserving of your attention.
Oddly my toilets face Meccah. (That is to say I face the Holy City when I use the toilet.) Never in my life have I heard of this being some sort of consideration.
Just because it’s no big deal to you doesn’t mean it’s no big deal to the prisoners, John. How would you feel if you were a prisoner and your jailers chose to defecate on the holy book of your faith, for instance?
The bit about the toilets makes me wonder: What do those who consider that an issue (bad puns abound) think of the toilets in Mecca, let alone taking a dump there?
Serious charges indeed. And it appears he was treated the same way as many of the prisoners at Guantanemo complain they were handled. So was Lee a spy? Did he smuggle out maps of cells? Did he have ties to radical Muslims in the United States under investigation? Well in May of 2004, the allegations and the charges changed: http://edition.cnn.com/2004/LAW/03/22/yee/index.html
…so, from allegations of spying to accusations of downloading pornography, to the dismissal of all charges citing “security concerns.” Yee lost his job and lost his reputation while prosecutors chased their tails-very similar to the case of Ahmad al Halabi, the Senior Airman who was initially alleged to have planned to deliver 200 detainee documents to Syria, and faced a possible death sentence. Eventually, the charges were whittled from thirty down to four: including taking photos inside Camp Delta and mishandling a document. Some of the “evidence” against al Halabi, included:
…here’s an open question for everybody here: if two US servicemen have to jump through hoops to prove their innocence-even having to battle investigators who decide to “doctor” the crime scene: what chance does a baker who was captured on the Pakistani border for a bounty payment have of proving his innocence? As to whether or not Yee has an axe to grind, well, of course he has, and from all publicly released evidence it is a well desevered one. But nothing in his testimony hasn’t been heard before and hasn’t really been denied the the government: the sexual allegations have been made by many other people and never seriously denied by the government.
The newish allegation, and the one raised by the OP, is that “journalists and congressmen who visit the camp can’t get a real picture of conditions there.” Again, undoubtably, this statement is true, and disturbing. We know that FBI agents have witnessed detainees chained to the floor with no food and water and allowed to shit themselves, yet I’ve haven’t seen any journalists or congressmen report anything remotely close to this when they have had the opportunity to tour. So either the FBI are lying, or yes, Lee is right, and journalists and congressmen are getting a sanitized look at the detention facilities at Guantanemo Bay.
…good lord. Your normally a lot smarter than this. For some reason you seem to think this thread is about some female guard showing “titty and having his wee wee touched.” As I pointed out above, the thread is actually about guided visits to Guantanemo Bay and how they are a sham. While I don’t think that the OP makes an overly compelling case, (however I do believe that I did ), your triviallization of the issues at Guantanemo Bay are to be honest, repugnant.
When CK Dexter Haven came down to Wellington and had a few drinks with me and Mbossa, one of the questions I asked him was why nobody in America took what was happening at Guantanemo seriously. CK Dexter Haven suggested that because Guantanemo doesn’t impact on most American’s daily lives, they don’t take much interest in the fate of the detainees. Is that how you feel John Mace? Consider:
We now have publicly released transcripts that show the evidence against most of the detainees is circumstantial bollocks. We know that there are no high profile Taliban detainees at Guantanemo, in fact one Taliban government diplomat is attending Yale University, while people like the Badr brothers, who made a bad joke about Clinton, had a three year tour of Guantanemo. When some “secret” evidence regarding the German detainee Murat Kurnaz was accidentally released, it was found that there actually was no evidence against him at all, and that despite a practical declaration of innocence by a judge Kurnaz remains locked up at the US governments pleasure.
We have a thread about the Chinese Muslim Uighurs, who have convinced the CSIT that they are not enemy combatants, but remain locked up because the US don’t know what to do with them.
We’ve had the strawman arguements from the US administration and many dopers here about the Geneva Conventions and “they were caught not in uniform”, that these were the “baddest of the bad” and they were "caught on the battlefields of Afghanistan. The reality is that only 5% of the current detainees were acutally captured by US troops-the rest were “gifted,” from places as diverse as Ghana, Bosnia and Pakistan.
We know that people with mental illness, like “half head Bob”, who ate his own facaes and could hardly string a sentence together, was somehow a threat to US national security. We know that people got sent to Guantanemo Bay because Junior Officers didn’t want to upset Senior ones. Others got sent because in a red-tape-shuffle, names on the “don’t send” list gradually worked their way onto the “send now” list. Others were sent to Guantanemo because they pissed off the guards at various camps around Afghanistan.
Citations on attached links: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=243819&highlight=banquet+bear
…yet somehow, in a thread that argues guided tours of Guantanemo are a sham, you consider it appropriate to make fun of the sexual humilliation of a detainee. And while you hedge your post with disclaimers (Should the guards act this way? No.) the bottomline is that the fundemental evil is not the titties and the pee pee, as you seem to imply, but the apathy the the US administration, Republicans, Democrats, and the public alike, show towards the detanees. Guantanemo Bay is an international disgrace, built on a foundation of lies and deceit, with no saving graces at all. And the biggest problem of all, is not the human rights issues or the damage it does to America’s reputation, but my belief that the camp and the information recieved doesn’t help the Global War on Terror, but actually contributes to making it worse. While millions of dollars are poured into the Guantanemo “sinkhole” in the quest for actionable intelligence from “two-bit-flunkies”, the real terrorists are busy creating civil war in Iraq and plotting their next strike against the world. To any Guantanemo defenders out there, do you feel safer?
Yeah, you and me both.
), your triviallization of the issues at Guantanemo Bay are to be honest, repugnant.