What’s Next? A Television Sit-Com?

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Just get a load of this photo with the following NYTimes article:


January 11, 2010
Brandon Neely, center, was a Guantánamo Bay guard, and Ruhal Ahmed, left, and Shafiq Rasul were prisoners. Photo by Jeff Overs

CJ had posted a year ago on the curious case of Brandon Neely. Recently, he and Marcus were wondering why a year later, they were receiving comments on the post, mostly coming from the UK. Here’s the answer…

NYTimes:

New to Facebook, Brandon Neely was searching the site for acquaintances in 2008 when he typed in the names of some of the detainees he had guarded during his tenure as a prison guard at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Mr. Neely, an Army veteran who spent six months at the prison in 2002, sent messages to one of the freed men, Shafiq Rasul, and was astonished when Mr. Rasul replied. Their exchanges sparked a face-to-face meeting, arranged by the BBC, which will be shown on Tuesday. Mr. Neely, who has served as the president of the Houston chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War, says his time at Guantánamo now haunts him, and has granted confessional-style interviews about the abuses he says he witnessed there. In a message to Mr. Rasul, Mr. Neely apologized for his role in the imprisonment.

Gavin Lee, a BBC correspondent, learned about the Facebook messages from Mr. Rasul, who lives in Britain, and thought the situation was incredible. Mr. Lee tracked down Mr. Neely — on Facebook, naturally — and asked, “would you consider meeting face to face?”

“He thought about it and he said, ‘I would love to,’ ” Mr. Lee recalled last week. “I would love to apologize in person.”

Neely is being lauded by the anti-war crowd as a brave hero. Like fellow IVAW, Mike Prysner, he is anything but a hero. CJ:

Again, instead of turning himself in to the military, he waits until six years after the fact, three years after leaving active duty service, and after he’s been released from IRR status to come forward. Brandon Neely is a complete coward! He waited until he thought it was safe to speak up and couldn’t be sucked back into the Army system to answer for his war crimes.

He can’t speak in complete sentences and looks like he’s about to have a heart attack because that evil corporation, McDonald’s, stuffed too many Big Macs down his 30 inch, Samoan wanna-be neck! He apparently didn’t take any of the military focus on proper diet and exercise with him into the real world.

Here’s the point of my disrespectful attitude towards Neely: He got good men killed, period! The actions at Gitmo directly contributed to an insurgency with a new purpose to avenge those detainees who were abused at the camp. Just like Abu Ghraib, these Soldiers should have been charged with 2nd degree murder and hung publicly. At the very least, they should be imprisoned with a burly redneck named Bubba whose best friend was a goat on the outside. They got my friends killed because they weren’t men enough to stand up for what’s right when faced with a moral dilemma.

Read the rest of Marcus’ post as he and CJ make shish kabob out of the idiot commenters

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It’s kind a twisted version of, “My Three Sons”. Ruhal, Shafiq & Brandon. Maybe they could do a Vegas show like Siegfried & Roy, each taking turns playing the tiger.

But I thought there were no abuses that took place at Gitmo?

Ron, A liar telling lies doesn’t make them true.

Report: Exams reveal abuse, torture of detainees

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Former terrorist suspects detained by the United States were tortured, according to medical examinations detailed in a report released Wednesday by a human rights group.

The Massachusetts-based Physicians for Human Rights reached that conclusion after two-day clinical evaluations of 11 former detainees, who had been held at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and in Afghanistan.

The detainees were never charged with crimes.

“We found clear physical and psychological evidence of torture and abuse, often causing lasting suffering,” said Dr. Allen Keller, a medical evaluator for the study.

In a 121-page report, the doctors’ group said that it uncovered medical evidence of torture, including beatings, electric shock, sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation, sodomy and scores of other abuses.

The report is prefaced by retired U.S. Major Gen. Antonio Taguba, who led the Army’s investigation into the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal in 2003. Video Watch why a rights group says there’s evidence of torture »

“There is no longer any doubt that the current administration committed war crimes,” Taguba says. “The only question is whether those who ordered torture will be held to account.”

Over the years, reports of abuses at Abu Ghraib and allegations of torture at Guantanamo prompted the Bush administration to deny that the U.S. military tortures detainees.

Since only 11 detainees were examined “the findings of this assessment cannot be generalized to the treatment of all detainees in U.S. custody,” the report says.

However, the incidents documented are consistent with findings of other investigations into government treatment, “making it reasonable to conclude that these detainees were not the only ones abused, but are representative of a much larger number of detainees subjected to torture and ill treatment while in U.S. custody.”

Four of the men evaluated were arrested in or taken to Afghanistan between late 2001 and early 2003 and later were sent to Guantanamo Bay, where they were held for an average of three years before being released without charge, the report says. The other seven were detained in Iraq in 2003 and released within a year, the report says.

All the subjects told examiners that they were subjected to multiple forms of torture or ill treatment that “often occurred in combination over a long period of time,” the report says.

While the report presents synopses of the detainees’ backgrounds based on interviews with them, the authors did not have access to the detainees’ medical histories. Therefore, there’s no way to know whether any of the inmates may have had medical or mental problems before being detained.

Among the ex-detainees was an Iraqi in his mid-40s, identified only as Laith, whom U.S. soldiers took into custody in October 2003 and who was released from Abu Ghraib in June 2004. According to the report, Laith was subjected to sleep deprivation, electric shocks and threats of sexual abuse to himself and his family.

“They took off even my underwear. They asked me to do some movements that make me look in a very bad way so they can take photographs. … They were trying to make me look like an animal,” Laith told examiners, according to the report.

According to the report, Laith said the most “painful” experiences involved threats to his family: “And they asked me, ‘Have you ever heard voices of women in this prison?’ I answered, ‘Yes.’ They were saying, ‘Then you will hear your mothers and sisters when we are raping them.’ ”

The examiners concluded in the report that “Laith appears to have suffered severe and lasting physical and psychological injuries as a result of his arrest and incarceration at Abu Ghraib prison.”

Another detainee, Youssef, was detained by U.S. soldiers nearly seven years ago when he tried to enter Afghanistan from neighboring Pakistan without a passport, the report says. He initially was held in an Afghan prison, where he describes “being stripped naked, being intimidated by dogs, being hooded and being thrown against the wall on repeated occasions,” the report says.

A few months later, he was taken to the Guantanamo Bay facility, where he was subjected to interrogators who would enter his cell and force him to lie on the floor with his hands tied behind his back to his feet, the report says.

Youssef said the interrogators wanted him to confess of involvement with the Taliban, the report says.

Based on its investigation, the report calls on the U.S. government to issue a formal apology to detainees subject to torture and ill treatment by the military since fall 2001 in Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere.

Homicidal maniacs have always been sticklers for telling the truth, despite their instincts for the slaughter of innocents and their insane habits of bombing, rape, torture, mutilation and decapitation; they would never seek political advantage by misrepresenting themselves as to the conditions of their confinement. We should think of these fanatics as boy scout types who only slit throats on the odd occasion and then only for certain circumstances that warrant such behavior.

We are truly at fault for confining these men who we misrepresent as terrorists, we should consider them as misguided individuals who are frustrated with trying to impose the religion of peace on the rest of the world. We need to have more compassion and empathy for these maniacs, but for the grace of Allah, the world would be a lot better off if we didn’t take prisoners.

@Ron H.:

A date and link would have been great Ron H, but, will try to muddle along, the “human rights activists/doctors and whoever wrote this story, appear to have put this together……from info in the Tacuba report, read it just last week. Did you happen to note, except for the reports from our own investigations, they’re relying on the prisoners say so?

BTW, the Bush administration did not commit war crimes, in the Taguba report, all involved were listed by name, prisoners as well as those who perpetrated the abuse, they were imprisoned.

Also, some high ranking commanding officers were “held to account,” some releaved of duty, some demoted, and some had negative remarks put into their files. Others were commended for immediately(fall/03) coming forth with information of abuse which caused investigations to immediately be launched and then expanded a couple more times in January/04.

Since only 11 detainees were examined “the findings of this assessment cannot be generalized to the treatment of all detainees in U.S. custody,” the report says.

However, the incidents documented are consistent with findings of other investigations into government treatment, “making it reasonable to conclude that these detainees were not the only ones abused, but are representative of a much larger number of detainees subjected to torture and ill treatment while in U.S. custody.”

Of course the treatment can’t be generalized, but that doesn’t stop them from generalizing. “other investigations” were investigating the same thing. I think there were 4 or 5 investigations mentioned in the Taguba Report that were happening at the same time investigating the same incidents from different perspectives. Here they toss out “11 detainees” not informing anyone of when it happened, where it happened or what happened.

While the report presents synopses of the detainees’ backgrounds based on interviews with them, the authors did not have access to the detainees’ medical histories. Therefore, there’s no way to know whether any of the inmates may have had medical or mental problems before being detained.

Oh, my.

What Taguba and others found was the problems arose when miitary police were involved in intel gathering in the first couple of years of the WOT, and the report also said some of the abuse that happened there was similar to what happens occasionally in our own prisons. The remedy is military police only are involved in the day to day operations of the prisons. The CIA, FBI and other intel gatherers are responsible for interrogations.

Now, the detainees are brought to the interrogator and guarded, the interrogators are not allowed to touch a detainee, period. My nephew was one of Saddam’s guards, after his execution he then guarded the detainees, sat in on the interrogations and then returned them to their cell in abu Gharibe. The changes were made in 2004, six years ago.

As far as being imprisoned without charges, they’re war criminals picked up off the battlefield and many that have been released have gone back to kill. now, most won’t get a chance to go to GITMO or other prisons in Afghanistan or Iraq. They, and sometimes, their families are being slaughtered by predator drones, much better? Intell takes a hit, more of our troops will be harmed and the war will certainly last longer than 18 months.

BTW, the detainees don’t want to leave GITMO, they are lawyering up, that’s how bad it is down there.

Gee, I would think with all the lawyers and journalist that have been to Gitmo, they would have heard about all this stuff going on. Do they care about these poor mistreated innocents?

The missing link from Ron’s post.

Also, a couple of questions:

1) Where is the documented proof that these detainees were not abused prior to being placed in US custody?

2) Where is the documented proof that these supposed injuries were not self-inflicted?

3) Where is the documented proof that these detainees did not allow these supposed injuries to be inflicted upon them by others so that they could in turn blame the Great Satan?

That’s right…there’s no proof of any of those things.

The report is full of all sorts of vagaries, generalizations, and suppositions….it is very light, however, on proof.

Exit question:

Ron, did you click over and read the 121 page report in its’ entirety?