So if Zubaydah had already yielded all the information he had, why was there a need to turn to torture? The answer: There was a ticking clock, but not one attached to a bomb. The Bush administration wanted its war against Iraq and thought that the perfect justification would be a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq--a link that the Bush and Cheney White House had asserted, but couldn't prove because no such link existed.

Before he started interrogating insurgent prisoners in Iraq, he had been told that they were highly ideological and committed to establishing an Islamic caliphate in Iraq, Major Alexander says. In the course of the hundreds of interrogations carried out by himself, as well as more than 1,000 that he supervised, he found that the motives of both foreign fighters joining al-Qa'ida in Iraq and Iraqi-born members were very different from the official stereotype. In the case of foreign fighters – recruited mostly from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria, Yemen and North Africa – the reason cited by the great majority for coming to Iraq was what they had heard of the torture in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. These abuses, not fundamentalist Islam, had provoked so many of the foreign fighters volunteering to become suicide bombers.

The number of prisoners in these facilities has since risen to extraordinary levels. America now holds at least twenty-five thousand inmates in isolation in supermax prisons. An additional fifty to eighty thousand are kept in restrictive segregation units, many of them in isolation, too, although the government does not release these figures. By 1999, the practice had grown to the point that Arizona, Colorado, Maine, Nebraska, Nevada, Rhode Island, and Virginia kept between five and eight per cent of their prison population in isolation, and, by 2003, New York had joined them as well. Mississippi alone held eighteen hundred prisoners in supermax—twelve per cent of its prisoners over all. At the same time, other states had just a tiny fraction of their inmates in solitary confinement. In 1999, for example, Indiana had eighty-five supermax beds; Georgia had only ten. Neither of these two states can be described as being soft on crime.

Ultimately, the U.S. policy of extraordinary rendition relies on disingenuous diplomatic assurances and can result in the torture and prolonged detention of innocent individuals. It also tarnishes our reputation in the international community and undermines American national interests by alienating our allies and weakening counterterrorism efforts. Accordingly, the next administration needs to definitively and publicly end the extraordinary rendition program. In addition, there needs to be some level of accountability in terms of recognizing how and where erroneous renditions have occurred and providing appropriate compensation. One place to start would be with Maher Arar, who should immediately be removed from the U.S. terrorist watch-lists and appropriately compensated for his suffering.

Ultimately, the U.S. policy of extraordinary rendition relies on disingenuous diplomatic assurances and can result in the torture and prolonged detention of innocent individuals. It also tarnishes our reputation in the international community and undermines American national interests by alienating our allies and weakening counterterrorism efforts. Accordingly, the next administration needs to definitively and publicly end the extraordinary rendition program. In addition, there needs to be some level of accountability in terms of recognizing how and where erroneous renditions have occurred and providing appropriate compensation. One place to start would be with Maher Arar, who should immediately be removed from the U.S. terrorist watch-lists and appropriately compensated for his suffering.

fisk on blair and torture:
Sandwiched beneath a headline which read "Saudi reforms lose momentum" - surely one of the more extraordinarily unnecessary stories in the Arab press - it quoted our dear Prime Minister as saying that he was very angry that a review committee had prevented him from deporting two Algerians home because their government represented a "different political system". The "foregrounded" element, of course, is the word "different". This is the word that contains the lie. For the reason why the committee declined to return these men to their country was not - as Blair well knew - because Algeria possesses a "different" political system but because the Algerian "system" allows it to torture to death its prisoners. I have myself interviewed Algerian policemen and women who have become perverted by their witness of torture: one policewoman told me how she now loves horror films because they remind her of the repulsive torture she had to watch at the Chateauneuf police station in Algiers - where prisoners had water pumped into their anuses until they died
(...) Blair knows that the Algerian security forces rape women to death. He knows this. So how does he dare lie about the "different" political system which allows police officers to rape women? We Europeans now make a habit of lying about this. Take the Belgian government. It deported Bouasria Ben Othman to Algeria on 15 July 1996 on the grounds that he would not be in danger if he was returned to his country. He died in police custody at Moustaganem. A "different" political system indeed.
(...) But Blair is not a twerp. I very much fear he is a vicious little man. And I can only recall Cromwell's statement to the Rump Parliament in 1653, repeated - with such wisdom - by Leo Amery to Chamberlain in 1940: "You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go."

republicans and torture:
In Tuesday’s Republican presidential primary debate, Fox News moderator Brit Hume — who appears to have been watching too much “24″ himself — raised what he described as “a fictional but we think plausible scenario involving terrorism and the response to it.” He then laid out the kind of “ticking-bomb” scenario on which virtually every episode of “24″ is premised — precisely the kind that most intelligence experts consider fictional and entirely implausible.
(...) As governor of the State That Dares Not Speak Its Name — at least not in GOP circles — Mitt Romney naturally had to up the ante. “You said the person’s going to be in Guantanamo. I’m glad they’re at Guantanamo…. Some people have said we ought to close Guantanamo. My view is, we ought to double Guantanamo.” I am politician, hear me roar! And, oh yeah: “Enhanced interrogation techniques have to be used.”
(...) Unlike Hunter and Tancredo, Giuliani and Romney took pains to insist that they didn’t favor torture, just … you know, “enhanced interrogation.” But water-boarding, which neither would disavow, is unquestionably a form of torture. It involves taking a bound, gagged and blindfolded prisoner and pouring water over him or holding him underwater to induce an unbearable sensation of drowning. It was used in the Spanish Inquisition and by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge — fellas who make Jack Bauer look like a softie.
(...) McCain’s chest-beating Republican rivals would do well to listen to him, and to read the letter Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, sent May 10 to all U.S. troops there: “Some may argue that we would be more effective if we sanctioned torture or other expedient methods to obtain information…. They would be wrong. Beyond the basic fact that such actions are illegal, history shows that they also are frequently neither useful nor necessary…. What sets us apart from our enemies in this fight … is how we behave. In everything we do, we must … treat noncombatants and detainees with dignity and respect.”

a book on guantanamo:
Leading human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith believes the hunger strikers at Guantanamo Bay, the United States prison camp in Cuba, are treated worse than the Irish hunger strikers during the conflict in Northern Ireland. The Guantanamo hunger strikes began in June 2005. They have now lasted nine times longer than the hunger strikes in Northern Ireland of the early 1980s.
(...) "In 1981, the British recognised that it was unethical to force feed a hunger striker. Twice a day my client, Shaker Aamer, is strapped into a torture chair and a 110 centimetre tube is forced up his nose. Occasionally, it goes into his lungs - which is excruciatingly painful and quite deliberate."
(...) However, some 42 men remain on hunger strike. The longest surviving has lasted 620 days with forced feeding. Stafford Smith's clients, Shaker Aamer and Al Jazeera journalist Sami al Haj, have been on hunger strike for 115 and 106 days respectively.
(...) The strikers are demanding a fair trial, for abuse of the Koran to cease and that juvenile prisoners should not be kept in solitary confinement. They want an end to violations of the Geneva Convention, such as the provision of yellow unsanitary water and inedible food. They also want different sorts of treatment - which depend upon how compliant prisoners are, to stop. Compliant prisoners wear white uniforms while others wear orange and brown uniforms.
(...) He admits to encountering some suspicion from prisoners who think those lawyers who do come into the camp are there to provide a veneer of respectability for the whole inhumane process of detention. But Stafford Smith stresses: "Some of the guys are crazy now, losing their minds. They are being horribly abused. Probably the worst abuse is the daily torture the hunger strikers undergo."
(...) Stafford Smith is keen to point out that Guantanamo is just one of an increasing number of US detention centres all over the world. "There are almost 14,000 people being held in secret prisons from Iraq to Afghanistan and Diego Garcia, to name but a few."
(...) "I think it was Sinn Fein's Martin McGuinness who said that the internment process created the greatest recruiting sergeant the IRA ever had. A CIA agent admitted as much in the present context in 2004, when he said that, for every person you put in Guantanamo, it would create 10 who want to blow up the US. Now that figure is more likely to be 1,000 for every new prisoner."
(...) A new threat had to be found to replace the Russians and it is Muslim fundamentalism. But Stafford Smith says: "The idea that the world today faces a greater threat than when the Germans were bombing London to oblivion or when the Russians held massive amounts of nuclear weapons just does not stand up to analysis. The suggestion international laws now need to be torn up because of the threat is foolish and amounts to incredible populism."

putting somalia on the antiwar agenda:
The U.S. bombing of Somalia took place while the World Social Forum was underway in Kenya and three days before a large anti-war action in Washington, January 27. Nunu Kidane, network coordinator for Priority Africa Network (PAN) was present in Nairobi, and after returning home asked out loud how 'to explain the silence of the US peace movement on Somalia?'
(...) 'Perhaps US-based organizations don't have the proper analytical framework from which to understand the significance of the Horn of Africa region. Perhaps it is because Somalia is largely seen as a country with no government and in perpetual chaos, with 'fundamental Islamic' forces not deserving of defense against the military attacks by US in search of 'terrorists'.' To that I would add: the major U.S. media's role in the lead up to the invasion and the suffering now taking place in the Horn of Africa. 'The carnage and suffering in Somalia may be the worst in more than a decade -- but you'd hardly know it from your nightly news,' wrote Andrew Cawthorne from Nairobi for Reuters last week. Amy Goodman's Democracy Now recently examined ABC's, NBC's and CBS's coverage of Somalia in the evening newscasts since the invasion. ABC and NBC had not mentioned the war at all. CBS mentioned the war once, dedicating a whole three sentences to it. This, despite the fact that there have been more casualties in this war than in the recent fighting in Lebanon.
(...) As recently as last week, Reuters was still maintaining that Ethiopian troops had invaded its neighbor with the 'tacit' support of the United States. At least the New York Times has taken to describing it as 'covert American support.' Both characterizations obscure the truth. The attack on Somalia was preplanned and would never have taken place without being approved by the White House. We now know that the Bush Administration gave the Ethiopian government the go ahead to ignore its own imposed ban on weapons purchases from North Korea in order to gear up for the battle ahead. U.S. military forces took part in the assault.
(...) 'US political and military alliance with Ethiopia - which openly violated international law in its aggression towards Somalia, is destabilizing the Horn region and begins a new shift in the way the US plans to have permanent and active military presence in Africa,' wrote Kadane.
(...) The planning for the invasion actually began last summer when the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) took control of the Somali government. It, too, was supposed to be a slam dunk. The U.S.- Ethiopian version of shock and awe was to swiftly bring about the desired regime change, installing the Washington-favored, government- in-exile of President Abdullahi Yusuf. Only a few days after their troops entered the country, Ethiopian officials said their forces lacked the resources to stay in Somalia and they would be leaving soon. At one point, Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi declared - Bushlike - that the invaders' mission had been successfully accomplished and two-thirds of his troops were returning home. That turned out not to be true. Three months later the Ethiopians are still in Somalia committing what numerous observers are calling horrendous war crimes.
(...) The obviously indiscriminate use of heavy artillery in the capital has killed and wounded hundreds of civilians, and forced over 200,000 more to flee for their lives.' Walter Lindner, German Ambassador to Somalia, wrote to the country's acting president last week. Displaced persons are 'at great risk of being subjected to looting, extortion and rape - including by uniformed troops' at a various "checkpoints."
(...) On April 3, the Associated Press reported that a senior European Union security official had sent an email to the head of the EU delegation for Somalia warning that 'Ethiopian and Somali military forces there may have committed war crimes and that donor countries could be considered complicit if they do nothing to stop them. I need to advise you that there are strong grounds to believe that the Ethiopian government and the transitional federal government of Somalia and the African Union (peacekeeping) Force Commander, possibly also including the African Union Head of Mission and other African Union officials have, through commission or omission, violated the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court," the e-mail said.
(...) "There is a massive tragedy unfolding in Mogadishu, but from the world's silence, you would think it's Christmas," the head of a Mogadishu political think- tank told Cawthorne. 'Somalis, caught up in Mogadishu's worst violence for 16 years, are painfully aware of their place on the global agenda.'
(...) "Nobody cares about Somalia, even if we die in our millions," Cawthorne was told by Abdirahman Ali, a 29- year-old father- of-two who works as a security guard in Mogadishu.
(...) Martin Fletcher wrote in the London Times, April 26, about five days he spent in Mogadishu, during which he canvassed many ordinary Somalis. 'Overwhelmingly, they loathed a government they consider a puppet of the hated Ethiopians.'
(...) Such cases are especially troubling because the U.S. government, a key Ethiopian ally, has acknowledged interrogating terrorism suspects in Ethiopian prisons, where some detainees were sent after being arrested in connection with Ethiopia's invasion of Somalia in December,' said the Post story. 'There have been no reports that those jailed have been tortured.' The following day, the paper reported, 'More than 200 FBI and CIA agents have set up camp in the Sheraton Hotel here in Ethiopia's capital and have been interrogating dozens of detainees -- including a U.S. citizen -- picked up in Somalia and held without charge and without attorneys in a secret prison somewhere in this city, according to Ethiopian and U.S. officials who say the interrogations are lawful.'
(...) Chatham House, a British think tank of the independent Royal Institute of International Affairs, has concluded, "In an uncomfortably familiar pattern, genuine multilateral concern to support the reconstruction and rehabilitation of Somalia has been hijacked by unilateral actions of other international actors -- especially Ethiopia and the United States -- following their own foreign policy agendas.'
(...) When I first visited this subject shortly after the invasion, I quoted a 10 percent figure for the proportion of petroleum our country takes in from Africa and noted that some experts were saying the U.S. will need to up that percentage to 25 by 2010. Wrong again. Last week came the news that the U.S. now imports more oil from Africa than the Middle East, with Nigeria, Angola and Algeria providing nearly one-fifth of it -- more than from Saudi Arabia. While the rulers in Addis Ababa claim the invasion was a preemptive attack on a threatening Somalia and the Bush Administration says giving a wink and a nod to the attack was only a chance to capture a few terrorist holed up in Somalia, for most of the media and diplomatic observers outside the U.S. it was another strategic move to secure positioning in the region where there is a lot of oil. On file are plans - put on hold amid continuing conflicts - for nearly two-thirds of Somalia's oil fields to be allocated to the U.S. oil companies Conoco, Amoco, Chevron and Phillips. It was recently reported that the U.S. - backed prime minister of Somalia has proposed enactment of a new oil law to encourage the return of foreign oil companies to the country.
(...) However, she said it is impossible to overlook the parallel with the situation in the Iraq. 'It's aggression, that is undeniable, and the same language is being used to justify it,' she said. Kidane is on target in insisting that the movements for peace and justice in the U.S. - and elsewhere - must take up the issue. The unlawful U.S.- Ethiopian invasion and occupation of that country and the accompanying human suffering and human rights abuses constitute a new - and still mostly hidden - war in many ways similar to that in Iraq. And, waged for the same reason.

palestinian prisoners:
Palestinians detained by Israeli security forces are routinely tortured and ill-treated, according to a new report published by Israeli human rights groups yesterday. The ill-treatment, which includes beatings, sensory deprivation, back-bending, back-stretching and other forms of physical abuse, contravenes international law and Israeli law, the report says.
(...) The report found that almost 50% of detainees who were arrested in raids or at random were beaten by the army or police before they were handed over to the Shin Bet security agency for interrogation. The prisoners were interrogated for an average of 35 days and spent most of their time in tiny cells in solitary confinement. They were interrogated from five to 10 hours a day. More than half did not see a lawyer or representative of the Red Cross for the whole period of interrogation.

donald rumsfeld:
Rumsfeld was personally deciding on whether interrogators could use "stress positions" (an old CIA technique) like making prisoners stand for up to four hours, or exploit "individual phobias, such as fear of dogs, to induce stress," or strip them naked, or question them for 28 hours at a stretch, without sleep, or use "a wet towel and dripping water to induce the misperception of suffocation". These and other methods, euphemistically dubbed "counter-resistance techniques" in Pentagon documents that always avoided the word "torture," were outlined in an "action memo" submitted on November 27, 2002, for Rumsfeld's approval by Haynes. The lawyer noted that Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and Richard General Richard Myers (respectively deputy defense secretary, under-secretary for policy and chairman of the joint chiefs) had already agreed that Rumsfeld should approve all but the most severe options, such as the wet towel, without restriction. A week later, Rumsfeld scrawled his signature in the "approved" box but added, "However, I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?"
(...) Schmidt is adamant that Rumsfeld intended the techniques "for Mister Kahtani (sic) number one." And so Qahtani's jailers now began forcing him to stand for long periods, isolating him, stripping him, telling him to bark like a dog, and more. "There were no limits put on this and no boundaries", Schmidt reported. After a few days, the sessions had to be temporarily suspended when Qahtani's heartbeat slowed to 35 beats a minute. "Somewhere", General Schmidt observes, "there had to be a throttle on this", and the "throttle" controlling the interrogation was ultimately Rumsfeld, who was "personally involved", the general stresses, "in the interrogation of one person." Bypassing the normal chain of command, the secretary called the prison chief directly on a weekly basis for reports on progress with Qahtani.
(...) His principal complaint was that the reports were failing to confirm what he knew to be true ­ that hostile acts against U.S. forces in Iraq were entirely the work of FSLs ["Former Saddam Loyalists"] and dead-enders. Scathingly, he compared the quality of the Iraqi material with the excellent intelligence that was now, in his view, being extracted from the prisoners at Guantanamo, or "Gitmo," as the military termed it, under the able supervision of prison commander Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller. Rumsfeld concluded his diatribe with a forthright instruction to Stephen Cambone [under-secretary of defense for intel]ligence] that Miller be ordered immediately to the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad, where the unfortunate PUCs [Persons Under Confinement] were ending up, and "Gitmoise it." Cambone in turn dispatched the deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence, Lt. Gen. William Boykin, a fervent Christian fundamentalist given to deriding the Muslims' Allah as "an idol," to Cuba to brief Miller on his mission.
(...) First on his list of appointments was Lt. Ricardo Sanchez, who had succeeded McKiernan as the commander of all U.S. forces in Iraq. It must have been an instructive conversation, since within 36 hours Sanchez issued instructions on detainee interrogation that mirrored those authorized by Rumsfeld for use at Guantanamo in December the previous year that gave cover to techniques including hooding, nudity, stress positions, "fear of dogs," and "mild" physical contact with prisoners.
(...) When Rumsfeld first learned that there were pictures extant of naked, humiliated and terrified prisoners being abused by cheerful, he said, according to an aide who was present, "I didn't know you were allowed to bring cameras into a prison."
(...) However, when she went to look for herself, she found they had missed something, a piece of paper stuck on a pole outside a little office used by the interrogators. "It was a memorandum signed by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, authorizing a short list, maybe 6 or 8 techniques: use of dogs; stress positions; loud music; deprivation of food; keeping the lights on, those kinds of things," Karpinski said. Over to the side of the paper was a line of handwriting, which to her appeared to be in the same hand and with the same ink as the signature. The line read: "Make sure this happens!!"
(...) Responding to a question from Lou Dobbs that though there were six soldiers facing charges, "their superiors had to know what was going on here." Grange responded quickly: "Or they didn't know at all because they lacked the supervision of those soldiers or (were not) inspecting part of their command." In other words, the higher command's fault lay not in encouraging the torture at Abu Ghraib, but simply in failing to notice what the guards were up to. "These soldiers," continued Grange indignantly, "these few soldiers let down the rest of the force in Iraq and the United States, to include veterans like myself. It is unexcusable."
(...) Meanwhile, Rumsfeld accepted full responsibility without taking any blame, a standard response for high officials implicated in scandal.
(...) What Rumsfeld did not mention in all his public protestations of regret over Abu Ghraib was that in the same month of May 2004 he had on his desk a report prepared by the Navy inspector general's office detailing the interrogation methods, refined in their cruelty, being practiced on Jose Padilla and other inmates in the South Carolina naval brig. Padilla, a Puerto Rican former gang member, found himself incarcerated on the direct authority of the secretary of defense, one of three prisoners accused of terrorism held in the jail and subjected to a carefully designed regime of isolation and sensory deprivation. Padilla, according to his attorneys, would ultimately spend 1,307 days in a nine-by-seven-foot cell, often chained to the ground by his wrists and torso and kept awake at night by guards using bright lights and loud noises. In repeated legal arguments, administration lawyers maintained that Rumsfeld was entitled to hold anyone deemed 'an enemy combatant' in his rapidly excpanding prison system.

canada and afghanistan:
Canadian lawmakers have been caught up in the Afghanistan issue most of this week. The Conservative government narrowly blocked a motion calling for Canadian troops to return home by 2009. The New Democratic Party, which wants immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan and not to wait until 2009, voted with the Conservatives. The Liberals and Bloc Quebecois supported the motion. Some observers say that this issue could bring down the Conservative minority government.
(...) "This is totally appalling," Steven Staples, spokesman for the Canadian peace lobbying group Ceasefire.ca, told IPS. "Canadians are in shock that detainees were tortured after being in the custody of Afghan guards. The government seems to have known about it. This will be a real turning point for the Conservative government. The calls for resignation should be taken seriously. Legal experts are calling for complaints under international law."

guantanamo bay:
The real problem -- the conundrum wrapped in an enigma -- comes with another group. At present, there are in Gitmo perhaps 160 detainees (as the public affairs staff at the facility told me), who will most likely never be charged, never be tried, and may nonetheless never be sent home. It's a category without a name, or really any precedent -- a category that all too conveniently defies solution and so keeps Guantanamo in operation.
(...) How could a new president extricate us from this mess? The next occupant of the White House should start by accepting the following very American principle: Those who are not going to be charged with a crime should be returned to their home country, a third country, or the country where they were initially captured .
(...) The current Guantanamo debacle has little to do with the rule of law, the Geneva Conventions, or even, for that matter, a realistic assessment of the more pressing terrorist threats to the United States. At its heart of hearts lies a simple fear of political embarrassment.
(...) Privately, even Bush administration officials will acknowledge that the detainees were captured and sent to Gitmo capriciously. Rather than housing the "worst of the worst" (as the administration has regularly bragged), Gitmo penned up the easiest to grab, especially in Afghanistan. Often these were simply the individuals that local bounty hunters could provide or who were found on or near the battlefield. Many were put on planes to Guantanamo based on nothing but an American unwillingness to assert with confidence that they would never be a threat to the United States. Instead of masterminds, what the Bush administration netted were cooks, chauffeurs, wanderers, the mentally deranged, and -- sometimes -- children.
(...) The Bush administration is already releasing the wrongly detained. Detainee by detainee, it has been quietly whittling away at its mistakes, sending home 385 detainees who look no more or less guilty than those remaining in custody.
(...) Those at Gitmo convicted of crimes should serve their sentences in U.S. military prisons on U.S. soil. Opponents insist that this would "endanger" Americans. According to Senator Jim DeMint, "To bring known terrorists, many of whom have killed Americans, to our shores risks the lives of additional Americans and encourages more attacks on our soil." Does Senator DeMint actually believe this? Does he truly consider the U.S. military incapable of keeping convicted prisoners under lock and key? How would a future president weigh such doubts against the giant sigh of relief the world at large would heave when the last door opened on the last cell in Guantanamo.
(...) I assured them that, outside of the 14 high-value detainees, the Bush administration hasn't sent a single new prisoner to Guantanamo since late 2004. But, as it turned out, they knew something I didn't. Last month, a little story appeared in the back pages of some American newspapers. The United States had indeed moved its first new captive to Guantanamo in over two years -- and, according to the Washington buzz, more such detainees can be expected sooner or later, either from a war in Iran or some other "front" in the administration's global counterterrorism offensive.

inhumanity reigns at guantanamo bay:
According to "Cruel and Inhuman: Conditions of Isolation for Detainees at Guantánamo Bay," a report released earlier this month by Amnesty International, the situation inside Guantánamo is actually becoming worse for detainees--particularly the approximately 160 (out of a total of 385) detainees who are thought to be housed at Camp 6. According to the report, Camp 6 "has created even harsher and apparently more permanent conditions of extreme isolation and sensory deprivation in which detainees are confined to almost completely sealed, individual cells, with minimal contact with any other human being."
(...) Prisoners in Camp 6 are confined to 8-by-10-foot cells for at least 22 hours a day, and are allowed out only infrequently to shower or to exercise in enclosed areas surrounded by high concrete-and-wire walls. They are not able to speak to each other except by shouting through a narrow gap at the bottom of their steel cell doors. There are no outside windows, and detainees have reported that air conditioning is left on high--making the metal cells intolerably cold.
(...) As 27-year-old Yemeni hunger striker Adnan Farhan Abdullatif reportedly told his lawyer in late February, "My wish is to die. We are living in a dying situation."
(...) Naval Cmdr. Robert Durand, a Guantánamo spokesman, dismissed the hunger strike and prisoners' complaints as "propaganda," telling reporters that hunger strikes are a tactic taught in the al-Qaeda training manual--and that the number of strikers has dropped in the past when the media stopped covering them. But Durand left out the main reason the U.S. was able to break down hunger strikers previously--brutal force feedings.
(...) There have been several hunger strikes at Guantánamo since the camp opened in 2001. The largest occurred in 2005, when at least 130 detainees were classified as hunger strikers--defined as having missed nine consecutive meals. Most detainees were eventually broken from their strike through force-feeding techniques--in which they were strapped into restraint chairs, had feeding tubes inserted and then were left strapped down for lengthy periods of time.
(...) Lawyers for some detainees described U.S. military personnel violently inserting feeding tubes to the point of drawing blood, and Physicians for Human Rights called the force feedings of inmates a "brutal and inhumane" tactic that violates international medical codes of ethics.
(...) Sudanese detainee Sami al-Hajj, a former cameraman for al-Jazeera, had been on hunger strike for more than 95 days as Socialist Worker went to press--and was being routinely force-fed. "At nine o'clock in the morning, they force feed him, and he is strapped to a chair," his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, recently told Reuters. "They force a tube up his nose. It is excruciatingly painful. That lasts about an hour...Three times so far, according to what Sami has told me, they have put the tube in his lung...and that is effectively drowning him."
(...) Additionally, though CSRTs are supposed to determine whether a detainee should be declared an "enemy combatant"--which means they then can be held indefinitely--the process is a kangaroo court. Defense lawyers and the media are barred from the proceedings, and prisoners aren't allowed to see "classified" evidence against them.
(...) Last month, after being held at Guantánamo for more than five years, David Hicks pleaded guilty to a single, relatively minor count in exchange for a plea bargain that will allow him to return to Australia to serve out the remaining nine months of a 7-year sentence. To get his plea deal, however, Hicks--who has grown his hair to waist length in order to block out the bright lights that shine 24 hours a day in his cell--had to agree to withdraw allegations that he had been abused during his detention, to a one-year ban on speaking to the media, and never to sue the U.S.
(...) Since the Bush administration doesn't allow prisoners to detail allegations of torture publicly, however, the following appears in the "transcript" of al-Nashiri's tribunal:

PRESIDENT [of the tribunal]: Please describe the methods that were used.

DETAINEE: [CENSORED] What else do I want to say? [CENSORED] There were doing so many things. What else did they do? [CENSORED] After that, another method of torture began. [CENSORED] They used to ask me questions, and the investigator after that used to laugh. And I used to answer the answer that I knew. And if I didn't replay what I heard, he used to [CENSORED].

congressional hearings on extraordinary rendition:
"I HOPE IT'S YOUR FAMILY MEMBERS THAT DIE" said US Representative Dana Rohrabacker to American citizens who questioned the Bush Administration’s unlawful extraordinary rendition policies.
(...) The European Parliamentary human rights committee had issued a report in January, 2007 sharply critical of the Bush administration’s extraordinary rendition program in which persons from all over the world were detained by either CIA or local police and then flown by CIA jet (torture taxi) to other countries where they were imprisoned (Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Libya, Djibouti, Morocco, Yemen. The report was equally critical of European governments for allowing the unlawful flights to take place.
(...) From 2001 through 2005, the governments of fourteen countries in Europe allowed at least 1,245 CIA flights with illegally abducted terrorist suspects to be flown through their airspace or to land on their territory. Germany, Britain, Ireland and Portugal allowed the highest numbers of covert flights. As well as at least 1,245 flights operated by the CIA, there were an unspecified number of US military flights for the same purpose.
(...) [guantanamo facts] Some who were kidnapped ended up in Guantanamo. Others were flown to prisons in other countries for interrogation and torture. Many of those who were subjected to extraordinary rendition are still in Guantanano. Many have been there for over 5 years. Over 400 of the 770 persons who have been imprisoned in Guantanamo over the 5 years it has been opened, have been released. Only 380 are left imprisoned in Guantanamo. Only 3 have been charged by the Military Commission and only one tried in Guantanamo. After five years of being held prisoner, Australian citizen David Hicks was convicted in March, 2007 of material support to terrorism and sentenced to only seven months further imprisonment which he is serving in Australia. The Bush administration has said it will try only 50-70 of the 380 remaining in Guantanamo. That means that of 770 who have been in Guantanamo, on 50-70 will be tried. The others eventually will be freed due to lack of evidence of a crime. Many will have spent five years or more in imprisonment.
(...) [!] Rohrabacher then attacked and belittled the European Community for outlawing the death penalty saying that “You in the European community won’t stand up to evil people, you won’t execute them. Eichmann deserved to be executed, just like these terrorists must be executed.”