ASPCA4EVER
Well-Known Member
Too Terrible To Be True?
Why aren't we talking about the new accusations of murder at Gitmo?
By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Wednesday, Jan. 20, 2010, at 7:02 PM ET
Some torture stories are just too horrible to contemplate, while others are too complicated to understand. But Scott Horton's devastating new expose of the possible murders of three prisoners at Guantanamo in 2006 is neither: It's simply too terrible to allow to be true. Which is why it has been mostly ignored this week in the mainstream American media and paid little attention by the usual crew of torture apologists on the right. The fact that three Guantanamo prisoners--none of whom had any links to terrorism and two of whom had already been cleared for release--may have been killed there and the deaths covered up, should be front-page news. That brand-new evidence of this possible atrocity from military guards was given only the most cursory investigation by the Obama administration should warrant some kind of blowback. But changing what we allow ourselves to believe about torture would change the way we have reconciled ourselves to torture. Nobody in this country is prepared to do that. So we have opted to ignore it.
If you haven't read Horton's piece, you should. Here is Andy Worthington's summary. Following up on a study released in December by Mark Denbeaux at Seton Hall, Horton chases down yet more evidence--much of it from four camp guards--that three "suicides" alleged to have happened in a single night at Gitmo in June 2006 were not actually suicides at all. As the Seton Hall study concluded, the U.S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service report on the incident that was issued in 2008 was quite literally beyond belief. Horton writes:
The NCIS report failed to question why it took two hours for these suicides to be discovered despite the fact that guards checked on prisoners at 10-minute intervals. Horton, reporting on interviews with four members of the military intelligence unit assigned to guard Camp Delta, suggests that the men died at "Camp No" (as in, "No, it doesn't exist"), an alleged black site at Gitmo, and were then moved to the clinic. A massive cover-up followed. Official stories hastily changed from claims that the three men had stuffed rags down their own throats to the elaborate hanging plot. Rear Adm. Harry Harris, then the commander at Guantanamo, not only declared the deaths "suicides," but blamed the victims for "an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us." And every piece of paper belonging to every last prisoner in Camp America was then seized, amounting to some 1,065 pounds of material, much of it privileged attorney-client correspondence. The bodies of the three alleged suicide victims were returned home to their families, who requested independent autopsies, which then revealed "the removal of the structure that would have been the natural focus of the autopsy: the throat."
<for the rest of this story & the source>
http://www.slate.com/id/2241948?wpisrc=newsletter
Just entirely to sad/thoughtless and so provides us with more 'BLACK EYES' for what we have done to these prisoners who have been held against their will without due process...just because they were unlucky enough to get caught by neerdowell-bounty hunters with an ax to grind...and then some wonder 'WHY, WHY WOULD THEY RETURN TO THEIR OWN COUNTRY AND BECOME A TERRORIST AND WANT TO DO US AMERICANS HARM'
Yep, that certainly doesn't make any kind of rational sense...not in the least!
Why aren't we talking about the new accusations of murder at Gitmo?
By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Wednesday, Jan. 20, 2010, at 7:02 PM ET
Some torture stories are just too horrible to contemplate, while others are too complicated to understand. But Scott Horton's devastating new expose of the possible murders of three prisoners at Guantanamo in 2006 is neither: It's simply too terrible to allow to be true. Which is why it has been mostly ignored this week in the mainstream American media and paid little attention by the usual crew of torture apologists on the right. The fact that three Guantanamo prisoners--none of whom had any links to terrorism and two of whom had already been cleared for release--may have been killed there and the deaths covered up, should be front-page news. That brand-new evidence of this possible atrocity from military guards was given only the most cursory investigation by the Obama administration should warrant some kind of blowback. But changing what we allow ourselves to believe about torture would change the way we have reconciled ourselves to torture. Nobody in this country is prepared to do that. So we have opted to ignore it.
If you haven't read Horton's piece, you should. Here is Andy Worthington's summary. Following up on a study released in December by Mark Denbeaux at Seton Hall, Horton chases down yet more evidence--much of it from four camp guards--that three "suicides" alleged to have happened in a single night at Gitmo in June 2006 were not actually suicides at all. As the Seton Hall study concluded, the U.S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service report on the incident that was issued in 2008 was quite literally beyond belief. Horton writes:
According to the NCIS, each prisoner had fashioned a noose from torn sheets and T-shirts and tied it to the top of his cell's eight-foot-high steel-mesh wall. Each prisoner was able somehow to bind his own hands, and, in at least one case, his own feet, then stuff more rags deep down into his own throat. We are then asked to believe that each prisoner, even as he was choking on those rags, climbed up on his washbasin, slipped his head through the noose, tightened it, and leapt from the washbasin to hang until he asphyxiated. The NCIS report also proposes that the three prisoners, who were held in non-adjoining cells, carried out each of these actions almost simultaneously.
The NCIS report failed to question why it took two hours for these suicides to be discovered despite the fact that guards checked on prisoners at 10-minute intervals. Horton, reporting on interviews with four members of the military intelligence unit assigned to guard Camp Delta, suggests that the men died at "Camp No" (as in, "No, it doesn't exist"), an alleged black site at Gitmo, and were then moved to the clinic. A massive cover-up followed. Official stories hastily changed from claims that the three men had stuffed rags down their own throats to the elaborate hanging plot. Rear Adm. Harry Harris, then the commander at Guantanamo, not only declared the deaths "suicides," but blamed the victims for "an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us." And every piece of paper belonging to every last prisoner in Camp America was then seized, amounting to some 1,065 pounds of material, much of it privileged attorney-client correspondence. The bodies of the three alleged suicide victims were returned home to their families, who requested independent autopsies, which then revealed "the removal of the structure that would have been the natural focus of the autopsy: the throat."
<for the rest of this story & the source>
http://www.slate.com/id/2241948?wpisrc=newsletter
Just entirely to sad/thoughtless and so provides us with more 'BLACK EYES' for what we have done to these prisoners who have been held against their will without due process...just because they were unlucky enough to get caught by neerdowell-bounty hunters with an ax to grind...and then some wonder 'WHY, WHY WOULD THEY RETURN TO THEIR OWN COUNTRY AND BECOME A TERRORIST AND WANT TO DO US AMERICANS HARM'
Yep, that certainly doesn't make any kind of rational sense...not in the least!