BS: Gitmo torture victims speak out

Subject: BS: Gitmo torture victims speak out
From: Donuel
Date: 28 Apr 07 - 03:13 PM

This afternoon I listened to an NPR program on habeous corpus which featured a few released "detainees" talking about their experience in their own words.

The torture was explained in more graphic terms than what I heard of the barbarity at Abu Graibe.

I will attempt to find a listening link to the show.

The torturers were proud Christian soldiers. Some would exclaim that ...


no I can not write what was said or what happened. I will look for a link.

Subject: RE: BS: Gitmo torture victims speak out
From: Donuel
Date: 28 Apr 07 - 03:16 PM

http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=310


this is a time sensitive link and will only be available for a short time.

Subject: RE: BS: Gitmo torture victims speak out
From: Donuel
Date: 28 Apr 07 - 03:30 PM

small exerpt Ira Glass NPR


HITT: We tried out many of our new interrogation techniques on Jumah Al Dossari. Colangelo-Bryan met
with him many times and catalogued what was done to him. Al Dossari said that Americans forced him to
the ground and urinated on him. We put out our cigarettes on him. We shocked him with an electric device.
We spat on him. We poured a hot cup of tea on his head. We told him "We brought you here to kill you."
We beat him until he vomited blood. We threatened to have him raped. We dressed him in shorts and left
him in a frigid, air conditioned room. We abandoned him in another room with no water. We invited him to
drink from his toilet bowl, which he did. We wrapped him in an Israeli flag. We told him that we would hold
him forever, and that we would send him to Egypt to be tortured. On a different day, we chained him to the
floor and cut off his clothes while a female MP entered the room. We dripped what we said was menstrual
blood on his body.

When he spat at us, we smeared this blood on his face. We kissed the cross around our
neck and said "This is a gift from Christ for you Muslims." We videotaped the entire episode.


There's no way to confirm that all this happened to Al Dossari. But other prisoners and officials at
Guantanamo have described variations of every technique on the list, including the menstrual blood, the
Israeli flag, the references to Christianity, the beatings, the sexual humiliation. Al Dossari is interrogated
still, about once a month. During one visit last winter, he asked Colangelo-Bryan, "What can I do to keep
myself from going crazy?" A few months later, during a meeting, Al Dossari asked to go to the bathroom.
Colangelo-Bryan and the MP stepped outside the hut and waited. After five minutes, Colangelo-Bryan got
concerned. He cracked the door open.
COLANGELO-BRYAN: When I opened the door, the first thing I saw was a pool of blood on the floor in
front of me. I then looked up and saw a figure – hanging. I yelled to the MPs for help. They then began to
cut down the noose around Jumah's neck.
HITT: It wasn't Al Dossari's first suicide attempt.
COLANGELO-BRYAN: About three weeks later, I was back in Guantanamo. Jumah said to me that he
didn't want to kill himself without an outside witness. His fear was that if he died, and only the military knew,
nobody would've known what happened.
HITT: Of course, as we're so often told, this war is different. Who wants to be the one who lets somebody
go who then turns out to be the next 9/11 hijacker? So for the military, there's also this other new thing. A
terrifying calculation that there can be no margin of error. Joe Margulies of the University of Chicago
represents a few detainees, and has been trying to make sense out of what has been happening at
Guantanamo.
7
MARGULIES: If we give them the benefit of the doubt, it is possible – and there is a lot of evidence to
support this – they had no idea who they were going to be capturing. And they thought they might get more,
uh, serious people, people who were more seriously involved. The reality is, those people never came to
Guantanamo. The most serious folks are those in CIA custody, of which there are approximately 30; 27 to
30, something like that. Those are the people in black sites that we don't even know where they are. The
people who are of any significance never arrived at Guantanamo, but they didn't know that when the base
opened. And they said, at the time, that these were the worst of the worst, they were trained killers, they
would gnaw through hydraulic lines to bring down the plane that was flying them to Guantanamo… I mean,
they used the most inflammatory rhetoric, and it very quickly became apparent that they were just mistaken.
And then they were stuck with this PR nightmare. And at the same time, there was this sense, this nagging
sense,that maybe they are really bad and we just can't find out. Maybe they're not Afghan dirt farmers as all
appearances seem to be. How do we really know? Maybe we need to use more aggressive techniques to
find out. So they kept turning up the heat and using more and more coercive techniques on people who
were less and less significant.
HITT: In this new war, the plan was to build a prison so bleak that the detainees would give up hope and
talk. The military was given a mission, and they did a good job. But many prisoners are now moving into
year five. If they're Al Qaeda, detainment is perfectly justified. No one argues that. But think about what
these incarcerations are for men wrongfully and indefinitely detained. It's like being buried alive in a coffin.
Nobody knows how many of the prisoners are, in fact, the "worst of the worst" and how many are innocent.
But there is a way to find out. It's called habeas corpus.
* * * * *

Subject: RE: BS: Gitmo torture victims speak out
From: Donuel
Date: 28 Apr 07 - 03:31 PM

I would not have posted this ugly truth but the ham sandwich thread needed balance.

Subject: RE: BS: Gitmo torture victims speak out
From: Alice
Date: 28 Apr 07 - 04:22 PM

It was on This American Life. I listened to it, too.

Subject: RE: BS: Gitmo torture victims speak out
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 28 Apr 07 - 06:47 PM

I hope that the next president will go after the people who were and are responsible for doing this, and even more important, for authorizing it and colluding in it. No matter how high in the military or the administration.

Subject: RE: BS: Gitmo torture victims speak out
From: Peace
Date: 28 Apr 07 - 06:50 PM

Generals die in bed . . . .

Subject: RE: BS: Gitmo torture victims speak out
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 28 Apr 07 - 06:58 PM

But anyway generals are just obeying orders.

Subject: RE: BS: Gitmo torture victims speak out
From: Don Firth
Date: 28 Apr 07 - 07:08 PM

I heard it this afternoon also.

Pretty sickening what this country is doing. This is medieval, and there is absolutely no excuse for this. War crime trials are definitely in order. And not just for the direct perpetrators, but for those who authorized it as well. Especially for those who authorized it.

Don Firth

Subject: RE: BS: Gitmo torture victims speak out
From: katlaughing
Date: 28 Apr 07 - 07:15 PM

Maybe the court of the world will finally bring the US to task for high crimes. Sickening...I would not want their karma.

Subject: RE: BS: Gitmo torture victims speak out
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 28 Apr 07 - 07:19 PM

This is a repeat, with some updates from last year when it was first broadcast. So little has changed, even with this program out there.

Every time I think I couldn't detest Bush more, something else comes along to make me see how much more awful he has been for the U.S. and the world than I originally thought. The fool not only was mistaken when he started these wars, he is single-handedly responsible for grooming a generation of people around the world who hate the U.S. so much they will now go out and do what Bush falsely accused them of in the first place. Ironic, isn't it?

SRS

Subject: RE: BS: Gitmo torture victims speak out
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 28 Apr 07 - 08:13 PM

"This is medieval,"

No it's not - it's very modern indeed, with all its refinements. State of the Art.

Subject: RE: BS: Gitmo torture victims speak out
From: Don Firth
Date: 28 Apr 07 - 08:44 PM

State of the Art, indeed. But what I mean, of course, is the self-righteous "moral certitude" that allows people to do this sort of thing. This is an abomination that I thought humankind had outgrown, but obviously there are people who are so morally corrupt that they find this perfectly acceptable.

And as far as I'm concerned, just as morally corrupt are those who approve of it, or who merely remain silent about it.

Don Firth

Subject: RE: BS: Gitmo torture victims speak out
From: Nickhere
Date: 28 Apr 07 - 09:16 PM

Donuel: good for you!! People need to know what is really being done in their name. The accounts you posted are shocking and very, very sad. It's hard to believe that such things are still being done in this day and age by man to his fellow man. Everyone is brutalised by these acts - the viticm, the torturer, the civilian population it is supposedly done to protect. It's doubly horrible that some of the soldiers apparently said "this is a gift from Christ to you muslims" -- I really detect the hand of satan in that. Those acts are not the acts of Christ. Those soldiers are not Christians, they are the agents and minions of satan.

I don't know how much people in the USA knew or suspected - but in Europe most people have long known or suspected that this kind of thing was happening at Gitmo.

You know, during the D-Day celebrations we heard a lot about WW2 and how evil the nazis were, and how guilty the Germans of the time (1920s and 30s) were in not doing more to stop the nazis from gaining power. There are two points to be made here: the nazis indoctrinated children from a young age through the school system to the point these kids would even turn in their parents if they were deemed unpatriotic. The average German was lied to consistently to believe that his enemy was the Jew and that there was a conspiracy against them. Anyone who spoke out against the nazi regime (especially after 1933) was either harrassed (to the point of being physically attacked), bankrupt or simply 'disappeared'. It would take someone very foolish or brave to contniue speaking out against a regime like that. Hitler's first victims were communists, political opponents, university professors and free-thinkers. No wonder those who opposed it eventually fell silent and felt it couldn''t be stopped. Easy to judge people with hindsight, but we would we have acted so very differently?

My point is, that was all those years ago. Our leaders lie to us by telling us that when the nazis were vanquished, evil was eliminated from Western culture. As Donuel's posts show, evil is very much alive and well and perhaps even more slick, sophisticated and horrible than it was in nazi times.

Each of us has a duty to stop this evil. What have you done today to stop it? How did you cast your vote in the last elections? When was the last time you took part in an anti-war rally, or wrote to your representative demanding an end to this insane 'war on terror' (which is unwinnable the way the neo-cons are going about it, but very winnable by removing the root causes and creating a more just and equal world). If we don't do these things, are we any better than the Germans that didn't oppose the nazis? They had to worry about disappearing into a concentration camp. We at least don't have such an excuse - yet, but don't hang about waiting for it to get to that. If there isn't an anti-war group in your area, then start one up and get busy. Gitmo and the rest of it happens because we become bystanders.

Subject: RE: BS: Gitmo torture victims speak out
From: Nickhere
Date: 28 Apr 07 - 09:21 PM

Oh, and by the way, do whatever you can to have the "School of the Americas" shut down. This innocent sounding institution is where US agents are trained to torture people. I know, hard to believe that a school would actually be set up to teach such a useless and disgusting 'skill' but there it is all the same.

Subject: RE: BS: Gitmo torture victims speak out
From: Peace
Date: 28 Apr 07 - 10:50 PM

"The US Army School of Americas (SOA), based in Fort Benning, Georgia, trains Latin American security personnel in combat, counter-insurgency, and counter-narcotics. SOA graduates are responsible for some of the worst human rights abuses in Latin America. In 1996 the Pentagon was forced to release training manuals used at the school that advocated torture, extortion and execution. Among the SOA's nearly 60,000 graduates are notorious dictators Manuel Noriega and Omar Torrijos of Panama, Leopoldo Galtieri and Roberto Viola of Argentina, Juan Velasco Alvarado of Peru, Guillermo Rodriguez of Ecuador, and Hugo Banzer Suarez of Bolivia. Lower-level SOA graduates have participated in human rights abuses that include the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero and the El Mozote Massacre of 900 civilians."

Subject: RE: BS: Gitmo torture victims speak out
From: Dickey
Date: 29 Apr 07 - 12:24 AM

Released Detainees Rejoining The Fight
By John Mintz
Washington Post Staff Writer

Returned to Afghanistan in February, Ghafar resumed his post as a top Taliban commander, and his forces ambushed and killed a U.N. engineer and three Afghan soldiers, Afghan officials said, according to news accounts.

A third released Taliban commander died in an ambush this summer. Mullah Shahzada, who apparently convinced U.S. officials that he had sworn off violence, rejoined the Taliban as soon as he was freed in mid-2003, sources with knowledge of his situation said.

The Afghan teenager who was recaptured recently had been kidnapped and possibly abused by the Taliban before he was apprehended the first time in 2001. After almost three years living with other young detainees in a seaside house at Guantanamo Bay, he was returned in January of this year to his country, where he was to be monitored by Afghan officials and private contractors. But the program failed and he fell back in with the Taliban, one source said.

One former detainee who has not yet been able to take up arms is Slimane Hadj Abderrahmane, a Dane who also signed a promise to renounce violence. But in recent months he has told Danish media that he considers the written oath "toilet paper," stated his plans to join the war in Chechnya and said Denmark's prime minister is a valid target for terrorists.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A52670-2004Oct21.html

Subject: RE: BS: Gitmo torture victims speak out
From: Donuel
Date: 29 Apr 07 - 12:29 AM

These people walk amongst us
They smile at us on TV
just trust us and believe
We have nothing up our sleeve
They have nothing in their soul

The torture they learned
was just School practice
Thery're in the big time now
Now the sadist has status
Its sad sick and true


Gonzales is not gone
he can't recall so nothing is wrong
He smiles the smile of Goering
With grins they try to look strong
you have no need to know you don't belong

The have and the have mores
laugh at you yes they laugh at you
They toast your suffering with fine wine
and they laugh at you as if laughter
erases crime.

ITs called new interogation techniques
it used to be torture
but its something new, its something old
and something blue
and its waiting, waiting for you

3rd strike and you're in for life
you stole a box of Life
but its a private corporate prison with TV
You can watch war go from shock and awe
to medevil torture to building walls.

Will they let us watch the war crime trials
will the cheers break down these prison walls
will we see Marines hang dead presidents
like they did in Iraq or is that out of line
or will we only see it online.

Subject: RE: BS: Gitmo torture victims speak out
From: sapper82
Date: 29 Apr 07 - 07:35 AM

I think the thoughtfull comments and sentiments on This Link may be appropriate.

Subject: RE: BS: Gitmo torture victims speak out
From: artbrooks
Date: 29 Apr 07 - 11:15 AM

I see no more reason to accept the unsupported statements of detainees that torture occurred than I do to accept the unsupported statements of Guantanamo spokespersons that nothing of the sort ever happened.

By the way, the School of the Americas has been closed for years (since 2000, I think), and the allegations that "they taught torture" were investigated on a number of occasions but never sustained. Yes, graduates of SOA actively participated in some of the worst abuses of some of the most oppressive Latin American governments...and a graduate of a Virginia high school just murdered dozens of people at Virginia Tech. That doesn't meant that all graduates of Virginia high schools are murderers. SOA was the military school in the US where Central and South American military officers went, and far more of the 60,000 graduates it had over its 50+ year existence were never associated with any abuses. Also BTW, its successor institution has a civilian "watchdog" committee that has open access to everything that goes on there.

Subject: RE: BS: Gitmo torture victims speak out
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 29 Apr 07 - 11:57 AM

Released Detainees Rejoining The Fight
By John Mintz
Washington Post Staff Writer

Dickey, that's a three-year-old version of the party line, justifying the Guantanamo detentions. Fed to that writer by "Pentagon Officials." There probably isn't a word of truth in it.

SRS

Subject: RE: BS: Gitmo torture victims speak out
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 29 Apr 07 - 12:48 PM

After almost three years living with other young detainees in a seaside house at Guantanamo Bay, he was returned in January of this year to his country, where he was to be monitored by Afghan officials and private contractors. But the program failed and he fell back in with the Taliban.

After three years in Guantanamo Bay he didn't like Americans and their fruiends and "private contractors" very much. How incredible.

"In a seaside house at Guantanamo Bay" - that's a turn of phrase that should get some kind of award. A bit like calling a death squad a sanitation department.

Subject: RE: BS: Gitmo torture victims speak out
From: Don Firth
Date: 29 Apr 07 - 01:10 PM

". . . a seaside house. . . ."

Sounds idyllic.

Except for the waterboarding, of course. . . .

Don Firth

Subject: RE: BS: Gitmo torture victims speak out
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 29 Apr 07 - 02:15 PM

Actually "waterboarding" was probably intended as a euphemism - sounds like a kind of surfing, if you didn't know better. Good healthy fun for one and all. Cue Beach Boys soundtrack...

Subject: RE: BS: Gitmo torture victims speak out
From: Donuel
Date: 29 Apr 07 - 02:21 PM

unsupported statement

Subject: RE: BS: Gitmo torture victims speak out
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 29 Apr 07 - 02:36 PM

"But the program failed and he fell back in with the Taliban":

In our seaside house in Guantanamo Bay
We had such happy times each day
So long ago and far away
That seaside house in Guantanamo Bay

In our seaside house in Guantanamo Bay
Such happy sports we used to play
With the waterboard by night and day
In our seaside house in Guantanamo Bay

That seaside house in Guantanamo Bay
The memories never so far away.
Don't I owe a debt to the USA
For that seaside house in Guantanamo Bay.