05-30-2009, 12:42 AM
Quote:Unfortunately, we will probably never get to see the *real* evidence, and all I've seen are allegations, which might be true, or might be propaganda to convince those who want to believe the worst. Me? I'd like to see an investigation into any possible misconduct.
Well, I certainly agree that we''ll probably never get to see a proper accounting of what went on at Guantanamo, but even now it is not a matter of just "allegations," and there is plenty of corroborating evidence that the accounts of the people released from Guantanamo are not made up.
The FBI agents at Guantanamo (who actually were professional interrogators) complained early on about the things they saw the military intelligence officers doing, prompting the FBI to launch an enquiry among it's own agents. Here is one report from an FBI agent:
Quote:I am responding to your request for feedback on aggressive treatment and improper interview techniques used on detainees at GTMO. I did observe treatment that was not only aggressive, but personally very upsetting, although I canât say that this treatment was perpetrated by Bureau employees. It seemed that these techniques were being employed by the military, government contract employees and [redacted].â Reply asked for more details. Response: âHere is a brief summary of what I observed at GTMO. On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand a foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food, or water. Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves and had been left there for 18 24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold. . . . On another occasion, the A/C had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room probably well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night. . . .â
This lead to the Schmidt report by the Army which concluded that "only three interrogation acts" were "in violation of interrogation techniques authorized by Army Field Manual 34-52 and DoD guidance". In sum, the report "found no evidence of torture or inhumane treatment at JTF-GTMO". Well, perhaps you are happy to have this investigation (even if it was not within its scope to examine the techniques that the DoD had authorized, only to see if they'd been followed) and will find the conclusion persuasive; I can't say I do. The report did, incidentally, confirm that a female interrogator smeared "faux" menstrual blood on a prisoner.
Among other possible propagandists is Judge Susan Crawford, who concluded that Mohammed al-Qahtani could not be prosecuted since he had been tortured at Guantanamo. Interestingly enough, the Spanish judge who has been probing the use of torture at Guantanamo did so because he had to drop charges against former detainees whom he was trying to prosecute for terrorism after he also concluded they had been tortured.
Now Qahtani was a real terrorist, and I dare say the the four suspects in Spain were also (I don't know anything about them). But I'll point out that that there is no conclusion of guilt by imprisonment, or even by confession in the case of Guantanamo. Most people incarcerated in Guantanamo were not terrorists (how many were innocent we'll probably never really know either) so they have no reason to produce propaganda, (unless, I suppose, for some strange reason, they somehow fail to understand the necessity of locking them up for however many years with no effective means of protesting their innocence, and hold an entirely unjustified sense of bitterness against the US).