Abuse led Navy to consider pulling Cuba interrogators

[Say_What]

<clips>

WASHINGTON -- Top US Navy officials were so outraged at abusive interrogation techniques being used at the Guantanamo Bay prison in late 2002 that they considered removing Navy interrogators from the operation, according to a portion of a recent Pentagon report that has not been made public.

A top Navy psychologist reported to his supervisor in December 2002 that interrogators at Guantanamo were starting to use ''abusive techniques." In a separate incident that same month, the Defense Department's joint investigative service, which includes Navy investigators, formally ''disassociated" itself from the interrogation of a detainee, after learning that he had been subjected to particularly abusive and degrading treatment.

The two events prompted Navy law enforcement officials to debate pulling out of the Guantanamo operation entirely unless the interrogation techniques were restricted. The Navy's general counsel, Alberto Mora, told colleagues that the techniques were ''unlawful and unworthy of the military services."

The previously undisclosed events were disclosed at a hearing of the Senate Armed Forces Committee yesterday. The disclosures shed new light on the military services' objections to the Bush administration's policies on how to interrogate prisoners from the Afghanistan war.

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2005/03/16/abuse_led_navy_to_consider_pulling_cuba_interrogators/

[Hand]

1. In years to come...

"Guantanamo" will join "Auschwitz", "Gulag", "brainwashing", and "Algeria" in the annals of shame of pioneering modern-day torture. That will be Chimpy's true legacy.

[Say_What]

2. That and all the other prisons around the planet that they "Gitmoized"

...In late August 2003, General Miller issued a report recommending that the Iraq prison system be “Gitmoized,” and geared to extracting intelligence from prisoners. The rising insurgency was taking an increasingly heavy toll in terms of American casualties and Bush’s political viability, and the pressure was on to produce results. At the Senate hearings on Abu Ghraib, General Sanchez —named by Hispanic magazine as 2004’s “Hispanic of the Year”—denied authorizing the unleashing of dogs on prisoners, but Hersh notes that two months later USA Today cited classified documents showing Sanchez had issued orders approving the use of dogs at the interrogators’ discretion. Sanchez, by the way, is up for a promotion. According to reports, Rumsfeld and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard Myers, are bound and determined to pin a fourth star on General Sanchez.

It is Cambone, however, who appears to be at the center of the Abu Ghraib-“Copper Green” morass. It was he, after all, who seized control of all special-access programs, and no one was closer to Rumsfeld: the secretary of defense left the details to his trusted accomplice. As one wag put it, “Whatever Rumsfeld whimsically says, Cambone will do ten times that much.”

Once legitimized torture was established at Guantanamo, the Gitmoization of the Iraqi and Afghan prisons was only a matter of time. Having set up the apparatus of catch, snatch, and summarily dispatch, in pursuit of the ever-morphing al-Qaeda, it wasn’t long before Rumsfeld’s international army of assassins was deployed against the Iraqi resistance. The gang that told us that the post-9/11 era meant that the old rules no longer applied had come up with a military doctrine of imperial pre-emption: a claim to absolute righteousness that implied the privilege of prosecuting a War on Terror by any means necessary.

http://www.amconmag.com/2004_11_22/review.html

[Judi Lynn]

3. My, my. How time flies.....

It seems only yesterday that Cuban "exile" (among other Cuban "exiles" working for the C.I.A.) Felix Rodriguez, whom you discussed in another thread for his claim the C.I.A. most definitely intends to murder Hugo Chavez, was, himself interrogating prisoners in Viet Nam for the U.S.!

In 1969 Rodriguez, by now a US citizen, was sent to Viet Nam. As part of the Phoenix programme he organised low-flying helicopters to machine-gun villages, a technique he was later to use against El Salvadorean guerrillas. Rodriguez also tortured and interrogated Vietnamese prisoners. In the Radio 4 programme, Rodriguez said he enjoyed his tour of duty in Viet Nam.
(snip/...)

http://www.ratb.org.uk/vc/vc_24_mafia.html



George H. W. Bush and Felix Rodriguez
Also Known As "Max Gomez"



He's the drunk lying on the stage, with _Bush operative,
Porter Goss, sitting immediately behind him. CIA guys in Mexico City.

[Judi Lynn]

4. First hand account from a former captive at Guantanamo.....

Ex-Cuba inmate 'almost driven insane'
March 15, 2005


A Briton who spent nearly three years as a terror suspect at the US detention camp in Guantanamo Bay said American military personnel there tried to drive him insane.

Martin Mubanga, who was held without charge before being released from the camp in Cuba in January, said his jailers used "indirect torture" and that several other inmates went mad.

"I have seen beatings. I have seen humiliating treatment by American soldiers and I have heard of various examples as well, and of course I have experienced some of this myself," Mubanga told BBC radio.

Mubanga, 32, was arrested in Zambia in early 2002 and was handed over to US officials, who accused him of being an al-Qaeda operative. He still denies the allegation.
(snip)

"There are a number of other brothers who were detainees who have actually gone insane."
(snip/...)

http://www.theage.com.au/news/World/ExCuba-inmate-almost-driven-insanes/2005/03/15/1110649201194.html?oneclick=true
(Free registration is required)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Found an article on an interview he gave the Observer:

How I entered the hellish world of Guantanamo Bay

Martin Mubanga went on holiday to Zambia, but ended up spending 33 months in Guantanamo Bay, some of the time in the feared Camp Echo. Free at last and still protesting his innocence, he tells the full story to David Rose

Sunday February 6, 2005
The Observer

Martin Mubanga can date the low point of his 33 months at Guantánamo Bay: 15 June, 2004. That sweltering Cuban morning, he was taken from the cellblock he was sharing with speakers of the Afghan language Pashto, none of whom knew English, for what had become his almost daily interrogation. As usual, his hands were shackled in rigid, metal cuffs attached to a body belt; another set of chains ran to his ankles, severely restricting his ability to move his legs. Trussed in this fashion, he was lying on the interrogation booth floor.

The seemingly interminable questioning had already lasted for hours. 'I needed the toilet,' Mubanga said, 'and I asked the interrogator to let me go. But he just said, "you'll go when I say so". I told him he had five minutes to get me to the toilet or I was going to go on the floor. He left the room. Finally, I squirmed across the floor and did it in the corner, trying to minimise the mess. I suppose he was watching through a one-way mirror or the CCTV camera. He comes back with a mop and dips it in the pool of urine. Then he starts covering me with my own waste, like he's using a big paintbrush, working methodically, beginning with my feet and ankles and working his way up my legs. All the while he's racially abusing me, cussing me: "Oh, the poor little negro, the poor little nigger." He seemed to think it was funny.'

A few days later, Mubanga said, the same interrogator began to question him in one of the camp's 'hot rooms', where the heating was turned up to almost 100F. 'When you went for interrogation, you never knew whether they were going to take you to a booth where the air conditioning was turned up to the max, so it was really cold, or a hot room,' Mubanga said. 'This made life very difficult, because you only had two T-shirts in your cell, and if you wore just one in a cold room you'd be freezing, but wearing two in a hot room was almost unbearable. The thing was, once you were in there in your chains, it was impossible to take one off.'

After several hours of questioning, Mubanga felt severely dehydrated and begged for a bottle of water. Once again he was lying on the floor: the interrogation booth chair had been removed. As he tried to drink and cool himself by spraying a little water around his face and hair, Mubanga said, the interrogator turned violent: 'The guy started kneeling on me, and I was wriggling backwards to get away from him, trying to get in the line of sight of the CCTV camera so someone might see what was going on. Of course, he didn't want to let me do that, so he stood on my hair. It was painful, but I tried to keep moving. Then he stood on the leg chain, so my shackles dug in really deeply, cutting into my legs. But I just took the pain. I'm looking at him, the pain's getting worse but I wouldn't scream out. I just kept looking at him. From that day on, I refused to talk to any interrogator. I said nothing at all for the next seven months.'
(snip/...)

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,1406987,00.html