Guantanamo desperation 'revealed'

THE Pentagon's own records showed inmates were desperate before three committed suicide at a US jail in Guantanamo, a US rights group said today, when the papers were made public.

"These documents are the latest evidence of the desperate and immoral conditions that exist at Guantanamo Bay," American Civil Liberties Union executive director Anthony Romero said.

"The injustices at Guantanamo (Cuba) need to be remedied before other lives are lost," he said.

About 1000 pages made public include a medical report from April 29, 2003, on a previous suicide attempt with a towel.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,19529897-1702,00.html

of psychotic idiots.

It'll be generations before America regains its prior reputation for decency.

H. Rap Brown, RIP)

THEN THERE'S THE OLD THUMBS UP SIGN

I wonder why no stateside outlets will touch this?

But you can bet that, come 2015 or so, there will be about a week's worth of shocking - shocking, I say -- reports about just what our government and our military did to these people in Guantanamo. People held for years without charge, without access to counsel, without contact with the outside world, and some of them will go (or have already gone) batshit crazy. And this psychosis will be used by the authorities that inflicted it as evidence that these same authorities were perfectly justified in locking up these dangerously crazy folks in the first place.

The principle architects will be dead by that time, naturally, and a couple of underlings who may or may not have been major implementers of these shameful policies will exonerate themselves while putting the blame on the long departed. Others complicit in this will make some appropriate clucking noises about how unfortunate it all was, and then others will take up the bloody banner of American imperialism and demand to know how we can dare to impugn this whole rotten military-industrial enterprise? Don't you support the troops?!

Criminal motherfuckers, every last one of them.

hating the Germans who put innocent people into concentration camps. I think they are not able to let alot of these people go because they haven't done anything wrong, they can't be charged, tried, nor convicted of terrorism. I watched those trailers on that new movie coming out on Gitmo. Harsh. The next thing that proves the conditions are horrible is the story of the American national Guard fellow they put into an orange detainee suit and was thrown into a cell for them to practice the interrogation techniques on. They kicked the shit out of him, mashed his head so hard, he still suffers uncontrollable seizures. Google soldier beaten at Guantanamo......cuz I can't link

Absolutely appalling:

~snip~
Sean Baker has seizures an average of four times a week. 60 Minutes Wednesday went to see him a few weeks ago in a New York hospital.

Baker, a National Guardsman, was working last year as a military policeman in the Guantanamo Bay prison when other MPs injured him during a training drill. It was a drill during which Baker was only obeying orders.

"I was assaulted by these individuals," says Baker. "Pure and simple."

It’s all the more bizarre because Baker was considered a model soldier and he had served as an MP in Saudi Arabia during the First Gulf War.
(snip)

His unit was on duty at 2 a.m. on Jan. 24, 2003, when his squad leader got a message. "'Someone needs to go for training,'" says Baker. "And I looked around the room. I couldn’t believe that everyone had not stood up, and said, 'I'll go.' But I said, 'Right here, Sarg.'"

Baker was always the first to volunteer. This time, it was to go to the block where the most dangerous detainees were kept in isolated cells. There, Baker was met by Second Lt. Shaw Locke of the 303rd Military Police Company from Michigan. Locke, who was in charge of an IRF (Immediate Reaction Force) team, briefed Baker about the training drill he was planning.

"'We’re going to put you in a cell and extract you, have their IRF team come in and extract you. And what I’d like you to do is go ahead and strip your uniform off and put on this orange suit,'" says Baker, who was ordered to wear an orange jumpsuit, just like the ones worn by the detainees at Guantanamo.
(snip)

Some days, he says, he was having 10 to 12 seizures per day.

What does he think would have happened if he had been a real detainee? "I think they would have busted him up," says Baker. "I've seen detainees come outta there with blood on 'em. …If there wasn't someone to say, 'I'm a U.S. soldier,' if you were speaking Arabic or Pashto or Urdu or some other language in the camp, we may never know what would have happened to that individual."
(snip/...)

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/11/02/60II/main652953.shtml

i want everyone to know.....

it's old but it says so much about the inhumane treatment of prisoners.