by William Fisher

Here is a sure-fire nomination for the most outrageous quote of the week: “Accusations that we are torturing people tend to be mythology.” These are the words an un-named Egyptian official questioned by The Washington Post about prisoner abuse. Here are the facts of the case The Post was enquiring about. The reader can decide who was doing what to whom. An Egyptian-born Australian citizen, currently a prisoner at the U.S. Naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, charges that the US Government forcibly transferred him to Egypt, where he was tortured for six months. He has petitioned a US Federal Court to block plans to send him back to an Egyptian prison a second time....

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Jan05/Fisher0114.htm

I worked in the radio headquarters of Abu Ghraib for a while. They were once again trying to punish me by putting me in an undesirable job. While I was there, I ended up reviewing the prisoner records and looking over the offenses of the people who were in Abu Ghraib prison. I found out that most of them were actually not there for anti-coalition offenses. They weren't insurgents. Most of them were there for petty theft, drunkenness, forged documents, really minor crimes....The command was extremely hostile to me, and there were all kinds of punitive measures. They wouldn't let me go on leave. They took my ballistic armor away – they told me that I didn't need the hard plate that goes inside your flak jacket, the part that actually protects you against bullets. They said that because I was an objector and I wasn't going to fight, I wouldn't need it. This proved not to be the case; when we got to Abu Ghraib, there was continuous mortar shelling. I did the whole year's deployment without that plate. I really feel that was more maliciously motivated than anything else.

Also, I was socially ostracized. A lot of my fellow soldiers didn't want to eat with me or hang out with me or go on missions with me. They felt I was untrustworthy because I was critical of the war and I was a Buddhist. My command "lost" my CO [Conscientious Objector] paperwork or misdirected it. They'd say, "We lost your copy, you'll have to do it again."

http://mparent7777.blog-city.com/read/999475.htm


Aftermath News
Top Stories - January 14th, 2005

Anne Applebaum exposes the neo-conservative pro-torture ideology with brilliant essay, writing, "Just for a moment, let's pretend that there is no moral, legal or constitutional problem with torture."

http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org/?Page=Article&ID=2670

The four Britons soon to be released from Guantánamo Bay after up to three years in detention may need months of care when they arrive back home, experts in treating torture victims warned...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/guantanamo/story/0,13743,1388398,00.html
http://snipurl.com/byo2


Tortured, humiliated and crying out for some justice:

Four Guantánamo Britons are coming home. Don't forget those left behind...
http://207.44.245.159/article7671.htm


Three Years of Lawlessness:

Three years after it was created, the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo remains an enclave outside the law, Human Rights Watch said today.

http://snipurl.com/byoz


From Information Clearing House

by Angie Pratt

For all of their piousness, the Right just doesn't get it. Their new tactic for making the prisoner torture scandal go away is to say that it wasn't really torture. Torture by any other name is still torture.

http://207.44.245.159/article7661.htm

Navy SEAL: C.I.A., SEALs Beat Iraq Prisoners
http://www.truthout.org/docs_05/011205Y.shtml

by William Fisher

Though it received thousands of pages of documents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) regarding prisoner abuse by the Defense Department (DOD) at the US Naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) charges that the FBI investigation was “sharply scaled back”, records related to the FBI’s investigation are still being withheld, and those it has received are so heavily redacted (blacked out) that they “raise more questions than they answer.”....

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Jan05/Fisher0111.htm