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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
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October 7th, 2006 - Pentagon to
Probe Gitmo Beatings Claim News article by the Associated Press |
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Pentagon to Probe Gitmo
Beatings Claim By Thomas Watkins The Associated Press Saturday, October 7, 2006; 6:56 AM Camp Pendleton, Calif. - The
Pentagon said Friday that it will investigate a Marine's sworn statement that
guards at Guantanamo Bay bragged about beating detainees and described it as
a common practice. The Marine, a paralegal who
was at the U.S. Navy station in Cuba last month, alleges that several guards
she talked to at the base club said they routinely hit detainees. "From the whole
conversation, I understood that striking detainees was a common
practice," the sergeant wrote. "Everyone in the group laughed at
the others' stories of beating detainees." The woman's name was blacked
out of a copy of a two-page affidavit provided to The Associated Press by a
civilian defense attorney working with Lt. Col. Colby Vokey, the Marine
Corps' defense coordinator for the Western United States and based at Camp
Pendleton. Vokey, who sent the
statement Wednesday to the Inspector General at the Department of Defense,
called for an investigation, saying the abuse alleged in the affidavit
"is offensive and violates United States and international law." Pentagon spokesman Lt. Cmdr.
Chito Peppler said defense officials "are reviewing this affidavit and
will investigate these allegations fully." A call to the inspector
general's office was not immediately returned Navy Cmdr. Robert Durand,
spokesman for the Joint Task Force that oversees detention facilities at
Guantanamo, said the force "will participate fully with the inspector
general to learn the facts of the matter and will take action where
misconduct is discovered." "Abuse or harassment of
detainees in any form is not condoned or tolerated," Durand said. Guantanamo Bay houses about
450 suspected members of al-Qaida and the Taliban. Human-rights groups have
roundly criticized the Bush administration for detaining most without
criminal charges, but U.S. officials have defended the detentions as
necessary in the war on terrorism and say the detainees are treated humanely. The Marine said in the sworn
statement that she has been working at Marine Corps Base, Camp Pendleton in
Southern California on a Guantanamo-related case, and was in Guantanamo from
Sept. 20-27. She said some Marines had
invited her to the base club Sept. 23. She didn't see them but a group of at
least 15 sailors invited her to join them. She said she spoke with the
sailors for about an hour, during which she had one drink, and that the sailors
did not appear drunk. A 19-year-old sailor
referred to only as Bo "told the other guards and me about him beating
different detainees being held in the prison," the statement said. "One such story Bo told
involved him taking a detainee by the head and hitting the detainee's head
into the cell door. Bo said that his actions were known by others," the
statement said. The sailor said he was never punished. Other guards "also told
their own stories of abuse towards the detainees" that included hitting
them, denying them water and "removing privileges for no reason." "About 5 others in the
group admitted hitting detainees" and that included "punching in
the face," the affidavit said. Guantanamo was
internationally condemned shortly after it opened more than four years ago
when pictures captured prisoners kneeling, shackled and being herded into
wire cages. That was followed by reports of prisoner abuse, heavy-handed
interrogations, hunger strikes and suicides. Military investigators said
in July 2005 they confirmed abusive and degrading treatment of a suspected
terrorist at Guantanamo Bay that included forcing him to wear a bra, dance
with another man and behave like a dog. However, the chief
investigator, Air Force Lt. Gen. Randall M. Schmidt, said "no torture
occurred" during the interrogation of Mohamed al-Qahtani, a Saudi who
was captured in December 2001 along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Associated Press Writer
Robert Jablon in Los Angeles contributed to this report. © 2006 The Associated Press External link:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/07/AR2006100700142.html At Guantanamo: Hard Time and
a View of What Could Have Been Detainees at a new camp will see only a sliver of a common area;
isolation has become the norm. By Carol J. Williams Los Angeles Times October 7, 2006 Guantanamo Bay, Cuba - The
narrow windows in the 7-by-12 steel and concrete cells of Camp 6 will give
detainees a view of a common room designed to bring them together as brothers
in faith, language and customs. But looking is all they will
be able to do. The area will be off-limits. When the Guantanamo prison
complex's new camp was designed two years ago, the triangular communal area
was intended to let detainees mingle over meals, games and conversation. But virtually all time at
Guantanamo has become hard time, and when prisoners begin arriving at the
$38-million building in the next few weeks, they will be kept mostly in
isolation. A May riot in which dozens
of detainees attacked U.S. soldiers, the suicide of three prisoners in June,
and changes in the camp population - including the arrival of 14 "high
value detainees" - have transformed Guantanamo into a largely maximum
security facility. The first new arrivals in
two years - the group including the self-proclaimed Sept. 11 plotter Khalid
Shaikh Mohammed and his alleged lieutenant Ramzi Binalshibh - were flown from
secret CIA prisons abroad over Labor Day weekend. But dozens have left in
recent months, too, having been cleared by annual review boards for release
or transfer to their native countries. Negotiations also are underway between
the State Department and foreign governments on the possible group
repatriations of more than 300 Afghans, Saudis and Yemenis. Washington is
trying to obtain assurances that the men will neither be tortured nor freed
to potentially threaten U.S. or allied forces. The 100 or so expected to
remain after the transfers will be the detainees considered the most
dangerous, those with little hope of release or reward for good behavior,
according to military jailers. That population is unlikely to elicit much
softening of the conditions. Near the same time of the
May and June incidents, officials discovered that prisoners with good
behavior records had been dismantling their faucets to fashion weapons,
officials said. That prompted jailers to reconsider whether prisoners should
be allowed to interact and possibly plot resistance. "We had to think about
whether there is such a thing as a medium-security terrorist,'' said Rear
Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr., commander of the prison and interrogation network
that houses 460 war-on-terror suspects. Col. Wade Dennis, who is
effectively Guantanamo's warden, echoed Harris' concern that although most
detainees cooperated with camp rules, the recent violence suggested some had
been hiding their true nature. "Detainees have already
demonstrated they have the will and the thought processes to do self-harm and
I facilitate that if I let them live in a communal-type environment,"
said Dennis. Shortly after the suicides,
the prison commanders decided to scrap the medium-security comforts, and will
keep inmates isolated behind steel doors for all but an hour or two of daily
exercise time. "Meals will be served
in their cells," said Naval Cmdr. Kris Winter, head of the force
staffing the prisons. Since the discovery of the
vandalized faucets, Camp 1 has been emptied and its detainees moved to
temporary metal-mesh cells pending repairs or relocation to Camp 6, which is
expected to be fully populated by the end of the year. Camp 4, which held about 175
prisoners before the riot, is a barracks-like compound where detainees slept
10 to a room, ate together and were free to congregate for as much as 14
hours daily. It has been cleared of all but about 30 Afghans who didn't take
part in the uprising - the only detainees not confined to solitary cells. Harris and Dennis say they
will invoke tougher screening before any prisoners are allowed back into
communal living. Where to hold the prisoners
among Guantanamo's eight detention facilities is an exercise in risk
assessment complicated by the shutdown of Camp 1 - previously the most
populous prison - and the virtual emptying of Camp 4 to modify fans and light
fixtures that the rioters used to make weapons. Unlike Camp 5, the reigning
hard-time housing, Camp 6 has no outside windows or natural light in the
cells. The prefabricated units are arrayed along two sides of a triangle.
Bare concrete walls, floors and metal furnishings make the common room an
echo chamber. In addition to mothballing
the tables, lockers and leg-stretching spaces in the new camp, the Navy's
construction force, or SeaBees, and the prison's Kellogg Brown and Root
contractors have erected chain-link partitions to make 10-by-30-foot exercise
pens in what was designed as an open sports court. Other retrofitting has
included shower doors that will prevent the detainees from communicating,
said Lt. Cmdr. Eileen D'Andrea, who was in charge of the prison's
construction and 11th-hour revisions. An expanded guard force also will be
needed to provide the manpower to shackle and escort each prisoner every time
he needs to leave his cell, said Lt. Col. Mike Nicolucci, Dennis' deputy. The hardening of Guantanamo
detention dispirits the detainees and their lawyers, who see it as part of
U.S. political posturing in an election year. "They've set this up as
a showcase and they feel they can't back down from it," Marine Maj.
Michael Mori, who represents Australian detainee David Hicks, said of the
Bush administration's Guantanamo operations. "Every day in Iraq and
Afghanistan they let people go who they know are far more dangerous than
these guys." Rank-and-file guards express
little concern or curiosity about the conditions of the prisoners'
confinement, noting that they are just doing their duty. "I don't know exactly
what they did but they must have done something wrong to be here," said
Master-at-Arms Seaman Leif Kreizenbeck, a 23-year-old Oregonian who arrived
barely a month ago. Construction chief D'Andrea
said the prison's design allows for future changes. Each of the eight
clusters of 22 cells around a common area is self-contained and could be
transformed to a medium-security, communal-living "pod" if that is
what detention authorities decide. That prospect seems distant. "Once we get Camp 4
repaired - and that is costing us a tremendous amount of money - we will be
very selective about who goes back to Camp 4," said Harris. External link:
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-na-gitmo7oct07,1,1844572.story |