Mounting Tensions Escalate Into Violence During Raid at Guantánamo Prison

[alp227]

Source: New York Times

Weeks of mounting tensions between the military and detainees at the wartime prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, escalated into violence on Saturday during a raid in which guards forced prisoners living in communal housing to move to individual cells.

“Some detainees resisted with improvised weapons, and in response, four less-than-lethal rounds were fired,” the military said in a statement. “There were no serious injuries to guards or detainees.”

A military spokesman at the base did not immediately respond to a request for greater detail, including whether there were minor injuries, what kinds of improvised weapons were wielded by the prisoners, how the prisoners had resisted and why the decision was made to take this action now.

A hunger strike by some detainees has escalated tensions for weeks. As of last week, the military said 43 of the 166 detainees at the prison were deemed to be participating in the hunger strike; lawyers for the prisoners contend that the number is significantly higher.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/14/us/violence-at-guantanamo-as-guards-try-to-move-inmates.html

[FirstLight]

1. wasn't this supposed to be CLOSED DOWN?!

ya, i do believe that was a campaign promise from 2008...oh well....

[mtasselin]

2. Thank the repukicans

The repukicans fought the prez every step of the way because they were afraid of what those prisoners would do in American prisons. I wish he had some balls and would close it down.

[Ash_F]

13. What was the excuse when the Dems held both houses for 2 years?

Oh right Dems have to move farther right to beat Pubs. Worked really well by 2010.

[Lochloosa]

15. Dems never held both "houses" for 2 years.

They held the House for 2 years and had a majority in the Senate for 2 years at the same time.

They never could cross the 60 vote majority in the Senate.

So stop with the bullshit.

[Ash_F]

17. You know what I meant

I wasn't aware that the Dems pushed legislation and the Pubs filibustered it. Got a link?

Or do we only speak in bullshit here?

[Lochloosa]

18. Yes, I know exactly what you meant. Now give me something hard.

The number of actual or threatened filibusters has increased dramatically since 1970, and now dominates the business of the Senate. In 2009, there were a record 67 filibusters in the first half of the 111th Congress -- double the number that occurred in the entire 20-year period between 1950 and 1969.


By the time the 111th Congress adjourned in December 2010, the number of filibusters had swelled to 137 for the entire two-year term of the 111th Congress. During the 111th Congress, over 400 bills that had been passed by the House of Representatives -- many with broad bipartisan support -- died in the Senate without ever having been debated or voted on because of the inability to obtain the 60 votes required by Rule XXII.

These numbers ought to give anybody pause. The filibuster started life as a way to require the Senate majority to slow down; it has now become a way to make the entire Congress stop. What was once a rare and dramatic stopgap has now become a routine fact of legislative life. The filibuster against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the the heroic cloture vote that ended it, were high historical drama. The kind of filibuster we have today -- in which, for example, Senator Mitch McConnell introduced a bill and then immediately filibustered it to prevent it from passing -- barely qualifies as farce.
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/12/how-the-senate-filibuster-went-out-of-control-and-who-can-rein-it-in/266645/

We never had the 60 votes in the Senate. I we had, things would look much different right now.

[FiveGoodMen]

23. The GOP got their way plenty of times without even 50 votes

No excuse to throw in the towel just because we didn't have 60 for long.

[maxsolomon]

3. the reality is complicated and infuriating

congress (AKA the GOP) is blocking.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/01/09/135179/congress-rule-keep-obama-from.html

snip:
Congress has used its spending oversight authority both to forbid the White House from financing trials of Guantánamo captives on U.S. soil and to block the acquisition of a state prison in Illinois to hold captives currently held in Cuba who would not be put on trial — a sort of Guantánamo North.
The latest defense bill adopted by Congress moved to mandate military detention for most future al Qaida cases. The White House withdrew a veto threat on the eve of passage, and then Obama signed it into law with a “signing statement” that suggested he could lawfully ignore it.
unsnip:
snip:
But Congress has made it nearly impossible to transfer captives anywhere. Legislation passed since Obama took office has created a series of roadblocks that mean that only a federal court order or a national security waiver issued by Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta could trump Congress and permit the release of a detainee to another country.
unsnip:

[dixiegrrrrl]

4. See this: 4 yrs after Obama promised to close Gitmo, $195.7 million renovation in works

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel is instead considering a proposal from his top commanders to spend $195.7 million
renovating it and erecting a new prison building.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022561494

[Sunlei]

9. That is Cubas land, we should get off their land. Cuba is no longer a slave island.

[dixiegrrrrl]

12. Apaparently Cuba is happy with the long long lease we have over there.

[AnotherMcIntosh]

5. Amazing. Obama is so helpless that he can't close Gitmo and can't go after war criminals.

Apparently, he's also so helpless that he cannot call Mitch McConnell on the phone and say something along the lines of

"I'ld like your cooperation in closing Gitmo. If I can't get that, I'm going to go after some of the Republican war criminals who openly admitted their involvement in the water torture called water-boarding."

Who would have thought? Here's a guy who can have endless wars and occupations in the Middle-East, who can help push hundreds of billions of dollars to the banksters, who can have agencies to spy upon all of us, who can have an underling involved with the harvesting of public assets by privatizing public schools, who can have TSA employees feel-up whoever in the flying public that they want and call it a "pat-down," and yet he doesn't have the power to close Gitmo.

He's so smart and informed. He's so powerful. And yet he can't close Gitmo.

[Downwinder]

6. It is the duty of a POW to resist.

The Code of the U.S. Fighting Force

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_the_United_States_Fighting_Force

[Sunlei]

7. why is the military allowed to abuse and punish the prisoners?

That building should be shut down and everything returned to Cuba.

[Downwinder]

10. We don't follow Geneva. That is for other countries.

[lib2DaBone]

8. Obama promised he would close....

We are still doing torture...and have secret gulags all over the globe.

What is really scary..Homeland Security just purchased some 2000 armored vehicles and over a billion rounds of .40 cal hollow point.

Hey... Mr. Obama.. what you gonna due with tanks and hollow point ammo?

[riderinthestorm]

11. Horrifying. Maddening. Shameful. I don't have enough decent words for this!

Those poor prisoners need resolution to their cases. They need some sort of closure to their status. I am sickened.

[Paul E Ester]

14. bump..nt

[Solly Mack]

16. K/R

[Selatius]

19. They need to fucking bulldoze the complex and place a plaque testifying to the torture and abuse.

The prison has become a symbol of war crimes and oppression in the international community.

[sikofit3]

20. Agreed

This is exactly what needs to be done and NOW

[The Stranger]

21. I think we should keep pristine records of every single human being involved with this enterprise.

Then pursue them to the ends of their lives, if need be, to exact justice.

[Paul E Ester]

22. Troops forcibly move hunger strikers at Guantánamo into cells Read more here: http://www.miamiheral

U.S. forces raided Guantanamo’s showcase prison camp early Saturday, at times battling with detainees, to systematically empty communal cellblocks in an effort to end a three-month-old protest that prisoners said was sparked by mistreatment of the Quran, the military said.

“Some detainees resisted with improvised weapons and, in response, four less-than-lethal rounds were fired,” according to a statement issued by the prison camps at the U.S. Navy base in Cuba. “There were no serious injuries to guards or detainees.”

The pre-dawn operation took place hours after delegates of the International Committee of the Red Cross left the remote island prison and during a blackout of news media access to the crisis in the prison camps.

The worst injury involved a rubber pellet piercing a captive’s “flank,” said Army Col. Gregory Julian at the U.S. Southern Command, which has oversight of the prison camps operation. The captives resisted the assault with broom and mop handles as well as plastic water bottles that had been wrapped and modified into clubs, he said.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/04/13/v-fullstory/3342104/troops-forcibly-move-hunger-strikers.html