Guantanamo suicides confirmed

I can tell you now that Bush allowing torture has done our troops no favours. If captured, how can we demand they be treated as POWs under the Geneva Conventions - the right of every soldier in war?

Torture has weakened us and empowered our enemies.

Our enemies have always tortured our soldiers upon capture.

Oralloy wrote:

Our enemies have always tortured our soldiers upon capture.

Not true

U.S. Army Specialist Shoshana Johnson spent 22 days as a prisoner of war - right at the beginning of the invasion of Iraq. She was not abused in any way and she was seen by an Iraqi doctor.

Of course, that was before the photographs of Iraqis being tortured and sexually abused swept the internet.

And in WWII, Japanese treatment of our POWs went way beyond torture.

oralloy wrote:

And in WWII, Japanese treatment of our POWs went way beyond torture.

What does this mean?

Yes, so why would we ever want to be like that? We know how we feel about past torture done to us and others... i mean, we know how we look upon those who have tortured...why would we want others to see us like that?

Torture is an abuse of humanity and if we pick up where the Japanese left off - how does that honour the men (and i'm thinking of the British in Burma) who were tortured back then?

If we condone torture now - don't we condone torture from the past?

Steve 41oo wrote:

oralloy wrote:

And in WWII, Japanese treatment of our POWs went way beyond torture.

What does this mean?

Some of them were tied down to tables and dissected alive (without anesthesia).

it was a scientific experiment, as was your dropping of atomic bombs on the Japanese.

Steve 41oo wrote:

it was a scientific experiment, as was your dropping of atomic bombs on the Japanese.

The point of the A-bombs was to make Japan surrender -- something they had steadfastly refused to do until after the second A-bomb had been dropped.

oralloy wrote:

Steve 41oo wrote:

it was a scientific experiment, as was your dropping of atomic bombs on the Japanese.

The point of the A-bombs was to make Japan surrender -- something they had steadfastly refused to do until after the second A-bomb had been dropped.

...something they had been trying to do for months but would never do without re-assurances about the fate of the Emperor.

After the second bomb Truman said "no more" and let it be known that Hirohito would be treated as a constitutional monarch,

(not a war criminal as he should have been).

Japan immediately surrendered.

I'm surprised you don't know these things oralloy.

msolga wrote:

An act of warfare?
Surely this has more to do with despair.

Nah. They did it because they hoped (in vain) that it would lead to pressure that would force us to close the camp, so we would then no longer be able to hold captured combatants.

oralloy wrote:

msolga wrote:

An act of warfare?
Surely this has more to do with despair.

Nah. They did it because they hoped (in vain) that it would lead to pressure that would force us to close the camp, so we would then no longer be able to hold captured combatants.

I apologize. Seems I couldn't have been more wrong. All three of them were tortured to death by Pentagon interrogators.

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2010/01/hbc-90006368

The commander at Guantánamo, Rear Admiral Harry Harris, then declared the deaths “suicides.” In an unusual move, he also used the announcement to attack the dead men. “I believe this was not an act of desperation,” he said, “but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.”

A friend of Hickman’s had nicknamed the compound “Camp No,” the idea being that anyone who asked if it existed would be told, “No, it doesn’t.” He and Davila made a point of stopping by whenever they had the chance; once, Hickman said, he heard a “series of screams” from within the compound.

Shortly after his shift began, Hickman noticed that someone had parked the paddy wagon near Camp 1, which houses Alpha Block. A moment later, two Navy guards emerged from Camp 1, escorting a prisoner. They put the prisoner into the back of the van and then left the camp through Sally Port 1, just below Hickman. He was under standing orders not to search the paddy wagon, so he just watched it as it headed east. He assumed the guards and their charge were bound for one of the other prison camps southeast of Camp Delta. But when the van reached the first intersection, instead of making a right, toward the other camps, it made the left, toward ACP Roosevelt and Camp No.

Twenty minutes later"about the amount of time needed for the trip to Camp No and back"the paddy wagon returned. This time Hickman paid closer attention. He couldn’t see the Navy guards’ faces, but from body size and uniform they appeared to be the same men.

The guards walked into Camp 1 and soon emerged with another prisoner. They departed Camp America, again in the direction of Camp No. Twenty minutes later, the van returned. Hickman, his curiosity piqued by the unusual flurry of activity and guessing that the guards might make another excursion, left Tower 1 and drove the three quarters of a mile to ACP Roosevelt to see exactly where the paddy wagon was headed. Shortly thereafter, the van passed through the checkpoint for the third time and then went another hundred yards, whereupon it turned toward Camp No, eliminating any question in Hickman’s mind about where it was going. All three prisoners would have reached their destination before 8 p.m.

Hickman says he saw nothing more of note until about 11:30 p.m, when he had returned to his preferred vantage at Tower 1. As he watched, the paddy wagon returned to Camp Delta. This time, however, the Navy guards did not get out of the van to enter Camp 1. Instead, they backed the vehicle up to the entrance of the medical clinic, as if to unload something.

At approximately 11:45 p.m."nearly an hour before the NCIS claims the first body was discovered"Army Specialist Christopher Penvose, preparing for a midnight shift in Tower 1, was approached by a senior Navy NCO. Penvose told me that the NCO"who, following standard operating procedures, wore no name tag"appeared to be extremely agitated. He instructed Penvose to go immediately to the Camp Delta chow hall, identify a female senior petty officer who would be dining there, and relay to her a specific code word. Penvose did as he was instructed. The officer leapt up from her seat and immediately ran out of the chow hall.

Another thirty minutes passed. Then, as Hickman and Penvose both recall, Camp Delta suddenly “lit up”"stadium-style flood lights were turned on, and the camp became the scene of frenzied activity, filling with personnel in and out of uniform. Hickman headed to the clinic, which appeared to be the center of activity, to learn the reason for the commotion. He asked a distraught medical corpsman what had happened. She said three dead prisoners had been delivered to the clinic. Hickman recalled her saying that they had died because they had rags stuffed down their throats, and that one of them was severely bruised. Davila told me he spoke to Navy guards who said the men had died as the result of having rags stuffed down their throats.

The fate of a fourth prisoner, a forty-two-year-old Saudi Arabian named Shaker Aamer, may be related to that of the three prisoners who died on June 9. Aamer is married to a British woman and was in the process of becoming a British subject when he was captured in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, in 2001. United States authorities insist that he carried a gun and served Osama bin Laden as an interpreter. Aamer denies this. At Guantánamo, Aamer’s fluency in English soon allowed him to play an important role in camp politics. According to both Aamer’s attorney and press accounts furnished by Army Colonel Michael Bumgarner, the Camp America commander, Aamer cooperated closely with Bumgarner in efforts to bring a 2005 hunger strike to an end. He persuaded several prisoners to break their strike for a while, but the settlement collapsed and soon afterward Aamer was sent to solitary confinement. Then, on the night the prisoners from Alpha Block died, Aamer says he himself was the victim of an act of striking brutality.

He described the events in detail to his lawyer, Zachary Katznelson, who was permitted to speak to him several weeks later. Katznelson recorded every detail of Aamer’s account and filed an affidavit with the federal district court in Washington, setting it out:

On June 9th, 2006, [Aamer] was beaten for two and a half hours straight. Seven naval military police participated in his beating. Mr. Aamer stated he had refused to provide a retina scan and fingerprints. He reported to me that he was strapped to a chair, fully restrained at the head, arms and legs. The MPs inflicted so much pain, Mr. Aamer said he thought he was going to die. The MPs pressed on pressure points all over his body: his temples, just under his jawline, in the hollow beneath his ears. They choked him. They bent his nose repeatedly so hard to the side he thought it would break. They pinched his thighs and feet constantly. They gouged his eyes. They held his eyes open and shined a mag-lite in them for minutes on end, generating intense heat. They bent his fingers until he screamed. When he screamed, they cut off his airway, then put a mask on him so he could not cry out.

The treatment Aamer describes is noteworthy because it produces excruciating pain without leaving lasting marks. Still, the fact that Aamer had his airway cut off and a mask put over his face “so he could not cry out” is alarming. This is the same technique that appears to have been used on the three deceased prisoners.

The United Kingdom has pressed aggressively for the return of British subjects and persons of interest. Every individual requested by the British has been turned over, with one exception: Shaker Aamer. In denying this request, U.S. authorities have cited unelaborated “security” concerns. There is no suggestion that the Americans intend to charge him before a military commission, or in a federal criminal court, and, indeed, they have no meaningful evidence linking him to any crime. American authorities may be concerned that Aamer, if released, could provide evidence against them in criminal investigations. This evidence would include what he experienced on June 9, 2006, and during his 2002 detention in Afghanistan at Bagram Airfield, where he was subjected to a procedure in which his head was smashed repeatedly against a wall. This torture technique, called “walling” in CIA documents, was expressly approved at a later date by the Department of Justice.