Guantanamo: the American Gulag

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Dreadsox said:



The shame here is that Amnesty International has long been one of the world's essential organizations. Its willingness to attack dictatorships of the left and the right and to go after human rights abuses everywhere has won it the gratitude of oppressed people of all ideologies. Applebaum notes that Amnesty was one of the great sources of information on Soviet dissidents in the 1970s and 1980s. The organization will certainly survive this "semantic argument."

But I hope the group learns a lesson that all of Bush's opponents should also take to heart. That lesson is not to pull back from criticism or to cower before administration attacks. It's outrageous that Bush tried to dismiss all questions about practices in Guantanamo as the work of "people who hate America."

On the contrary, it's people who love America and the liberties it espouses who are most vehement in insisting that we live up to our creed. Those who care about the fate of our men and women in uniform worry how the treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib might affect what happens to Americans taken prisoner in current and future wars.

Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) has introduced a bill to create a commission to study allegations of detainee abuse and point the way forward. The Senate Judiciary Committee is expected to hold hearings on the subject this month. These are not the actions of "absurd" people. They reflect the habits of truth-seekers and truth-tellers.

President Bush drives many people into a fury, and I empathize. But the negative passions the president inspires should not get in the way of the clarity, precision and tough-mindedness that effective opposition demands. Human rights are too important to be lost in bad metaphors.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/02/AR2005060201749.html



sounds about right
 
In the most recent confirmed case Hood said a detainee complained on March 25, 2005, of urine splashing on him and his Quran. An unidentified guard admitted at the time that "he was at fault," the Hood report said, although it did not say whether the act was deliberate. The guard's supervisor reprimanded him and assigned him to gate guard duty, where he had no contact with detainees for the remainder of his assignment at Guantanamo Bay.

As described in the Hood report, the guard had left his observation post and went outside to urinate. He urinated near an air vent and the wind blew his urine through the vent into the cell block. The incident was not further explained.



"Guantanamo's been operated, I think, in a very sane and sound fashion by the U.S. military. ... I think these people have been well treated, treated humanely and decently," Cheney said.
 
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Sorry I'm coming to the party late.
I must admit I gave up on page 15 when it waxed back into the Freaking resolution excuse again.

But through all the discussion I felt the real point about the gulags was missed.
The disappearing detainees (and undocumented) into our outsourced prison facilities like Eygpt and Ubekistan(?) are the gulag reference not Gitmo.

I think you will find that these secret facilities do fit AI's description.
 
deep said:

The news are full of how the American soldiers pee on the Koran.

What do you think is worse? Pee on the Koran or the burning of an American flag?

I think it´s peeing. For me it would be worse if someone pee´d on the Bible than if someone burned the flag of my country. Because one symbol is religious, the other one is national. I care for religious symbols more than for national ones.. so.

Scarletwine, interesting point. But what exactly are you talking about, I know nothing about Usbekistan.. more info, please?
 
Deep, I think it may be the best editorial I have found on the topic so far. And in my heart, I want these people to have a trial, but AI for example, drives me to the right.
 
Dreadsox said:
Deep, I think it may be the best editorial I have found on the topic so far. And in my heart, I want these people to have a trial, but AI for example, drives me to the right.



I regret that Khan used the word gulag.

The report could have been better produced -
stating that with all the good the US has done as a leader in human rights there is a danger that many incidents are occurring that are undermining efforts to hold Governments accountable for violations.


For anything to happen people within the Administration's power base must be influenced.
 
"There have been some convictions in which the sentences are amazingly light," said Gary D. Solis, a retired Marine who teaches law at the U.S. Military Academy.

Many of the deaths have been horrific. Prosecutors said one man drowned after Army soldiers forced him into the Tigris River as punishment for breaking a curfew. The lieutenant who allegedly ordered the action received 45 days on an assault conviction.

A prisoner died after being dragged out of his holding cell by the neck, stripped naked and left outside for seven hours. The Marine major who commanded the facility was convicted of dereliction of duty and maltreatment and dismissed from the service.

And at Fort Carson, Colo., three Army soldiers are awaiting courts-martial on murder charges in the death of an Iraqi general who was allegedly placed headfirst in a sleeping bag, tied up with electrical cord and crushed by soldiers who sat and stood on him during an interrogation.

Circumstances can make convictions hard to obtain. In the alleged drowning case, charges were downgraded after prosecutors were unable to produce the victim's body. In other cases, defendants have argued that they used lethal force in self-defense.


Wartime Prosecutions Come Under Scrutiny
 
I agree it could have been phrased better. This is what I meant about Ubekistan.

Amnesty official says US running " archipelago" of prisoners around the world

By Kuna

WASHINGTON, June 5 (KUNA) -- A top Amnesty official said on Sunday he was not sure about whether to approve the credibility of part of the recently made annual report of Amnesty that the US military is running a "gulag" in Guantanamo, but charged that the United States is running an "archipelago" of prisoners around the world.

Head of the Amnesty International-USA, William Schulz, made the remarks to FOX news television in an interview a week after Amnesty harshly criticized the US treatment of prisoners in Gauantanmo saying that Guantanamo has "become the gulag of our times", a charge that drew growing anger among top US Administration officials as untrue and "obsured".

When asked whether he approved the finding of the Amnesty report on treatment of prisoners in Guntanamo, Cuba, Schulz said "It would be fascinating to find out. I have no idea".

"We don't know for sure what all is happening at Guantanamo and our whole point is that the United States ought to allow independent human rights organizations to investigate," he said.

The United States has come under increasing criticism over report of mistreatment of prisoners in Guantanamo, the latest of Which the desecration of the holy book of Quran.

But Schulz said despite the fact that the report would need further verification, the United States maintained an archipelago of prisoners around the world.

"The United States is maintaining an archipelago of prisons around the world, many of them secret prisons into which people are being literally disappeared and in some cases, at least, we know that they are being mistreated, abused, tortured and even killed," he said.

Schulz also charged that the United States is holding the prisoners in "indefinite incommunicado detention without access to lawyers". (end) sa.
 
There re better quotes from the interview where he severly backpedals from the "gulag" statement.
 
deep said:




I regret that Khan used the word gulag.

The report could have been better produced -
stating that with all the good the US has done as a leader in human rights there is a danger that many incidents are occurring that are undermining efforts to hold Governments accountable for violations.


For anything to happen people within the Administration's power base must be influenced.

:up:
 
perhaps Bush could learn something from the Communist Chinese

China to curb torture confession

www.chinaview.cn 2005-06-07 11:12:00

BEIJING, June 7 -- China's top prosecution office has demanded that the interrogation of criminal suspects be filmed, in order to stop police from using torture to force confessions.

Legal experts view the move as a key step to improving human rights.

China has been launching a pilot project allowing suspects to be interrogated at the presence of lawyers, or by recording and videotaping the whole process. It aims at curbing suspects from forced confessions and protecting their rights and interests.

The pilot project was jointly initiated by China's three provincial public security sectors and the University of Political Science and Law.

Although China has outlawed torture decades ago, there have still been complaints about its usage.

In a recent high profile case, a Chinese man who served 11 years in jail for the murder of his wife was declared innocent in April, after the victim reappeared.
 
Boston Globe editorial-btw, it's hardly a conservative Bush backing newspaper

GLOBE EDITORIAL
Gulag or not

June 7, 2005

By calling the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, ''the gulag of our times" in the foreword to its annual human rights report, Amnesty International has garbled its own justified criticism of the Bush administration's extralegal detentions of terrorist suspects and its complicity in torture.

Amnesty's false comparison drains credibility from an organization that played a heroic role in teaching the world to hold governments to a universal standard for human rights. What's worse, Amnesty leaders who refuse to retract their analogy make it too easy for administration officials to deflect attention from their role in countenancing torture and incommunicado detentions.

Precisely because Amnesty once led the way in forging bonds of solidarity between free people everywhere and prisoners of conscience held without legal rights in the Soviet Union and other despotic regimes around the world, there is no excusing Amnesty's resort to the headline-grabbing gulag analogy. Some 18 million people were cast into the Soviet system of forced labor camps. They were not terrorist suspects. They were citizens branded by a police state as class enemies, traitors, criminals, and enemies of the state. Millions died in the gulag. They died from starvation, exposure to extreme cold, exhaustion from forced labor, and violence at the hands of their guardians.

An unfortunate effect of Amnesty's rhetoric is that it may diminish the horror Americans ought to feel at the actions perpetrated in their name by officials of the Bush administration. Someone who might otherwise be inclined to heed Amnesty's well-founded critique of the administration's systematic flouting of the Geneva Conventions might very well react to the gulag diversion by asking: Aren't the findings of administration human rights abuses in the actual report bad enough? Do they need to be distorted into something utterly different?

Those abuses include holding more than 500 people at Guantanamo and trying to deny them legal representation, visits from family and human rights organizations, and the rights accorded either to defendants under the US legal system or to prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions. They also include the incommunicado detention of thousands of people who were rounded up in often indiscriminate dragnets in Afghanistan and Iraq and are held in harsh conditions in those countries. And then there is the terrible stain of torture.

These things done in the name of Americans must be denounced because they are unjust in themselves and because they will inevitably endanger Americans. False analogies are of no help to anyone.
 
Regardless, the continual statements about them being denied geneva convention POW rights overlook the basic fact that they are not POW's and they lack entitlement to those rights. They should not be afforded the full set of legal protections that are enjoyed by uniformed soldiers who fight in accordance with those rules. They are granted rights and given fair treatment, they should be, the US is a moral country ~ but they are not entitled nor should they recieve a status reserved for those who obey the rules of war when they violate them.
 
I disagree, the Taliban should be considered POW's. They fit all the descriptions in the Geneva. They don't have to have a set uniform to be so and were the sovereign entity in Afganistan, which Bush recognized trying to negotiate the gas lines.
 
A_Wanderer said:
I find it absurd to compare things like: a woman showing her breasts, continuous playing of crappy music, having detainees sit or stand for hours at a time, flushing a Koran down a toilet or exploiting the cultural aspects of a detainee during interrogation to find out exactly what they were doing when captured and information regarding Islamist terror organisations

no it may not be the same, but it kind of gives the rest of the world an image of the US that is disgusting if they allow these methods to be used as form of torture and whatnot
 
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