Skip to main content

The hell that is Gitmo

Most of us have little idea what Gitmo is like. Needless to say the Americans have denied most people any access to the facility or restricted what they can report on if they have been able to visit.

TimesOnLine has had access to Gitmo and reports in "Inside Guantánamo Bay: Desperate prisoners ask ‘where is freedom?’":

"These are strange, unnerving days inside this prison complex on the sweltering Cuban coast toured by The Times this week — a vast maze of chain-link fences topped by millions of feet of razor wire.

Spotlights blaze through the night while guards watch from towers emblazoned with the Stars and Stripes. Life inside the jail continues unchanged, because nobody here knows — from the guards to the 241 remaining inmates — just how President Obama is going to make good on his increasingly shaky promise to close this symbol of US brutality and extra-judicial excess by January.

The uncertainty has begun to take its toll. On Sunday one detainee, Adnan Latif, a Yemeni held without charge at Guantánamo since 2002, slashed his wrist and hurled a plastic cup full of blood at his lawyer. He had used a piece of veneer from the table to saw through a vein.

The lawyer, David Remes, said that his client was a “very sick man, physically and psychologically”. Prison officials said that he did not need stitches and returned him to his cell. Mr Latif alleged in a letter to his lawyer last month that since Mr Obama took office, “oppression has increased, torture has increased and insults have increased” — something officials at the jail deny fiercely."

AlterNet also has a piece on Gitmo "Little Known Military Thug Squad Still Brutalizing Prisoners at Gitmo Under Obama" which makes of sobre reading. Despite all the hype things haven't got better at Gitmo since Obama came into office. According to the article, a squad of little known thugs still operates at the facility.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Robert Fisk's predictions for the Middle East in 2013

There is no gain-saying that Robert Fisk, fiercely independent and feisty to boot, is the veteran journalist and author covering the Middle East. Who doesn't he know or hasn't he met over the years in reporting from Beirut - where he lives?  In his latest op-ed piece for The Independent he lays out his predictions for the Middle East for 2013. Read the piece in full, here - well worthwhile - but an extract... "Never make predictions in the Middle East. My crystal ball broke long ago. But predicting the region has an honourable pedigree. “An Arab movement, newly-risen, is looming in the distance,” a French traveller to the Gulf and Baghdad wrote in 1883, “and a race hitherto downtrodden will presently claim its due place in the destinies of Islam.” A year earlier, a British diplomat in Jeddah confided that “it is within my knowledge... that the idea of freedom does at present agitate some minds even in Mecca...” So let’s say this for 2013: the “Arab Awakening” (the t...

The NPT (Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) goes on hold.....because of one non-Treaty member (Israel)

Isn't there something radically wrong here?    Israel, a non-signatory to the NPT has, evidently, been the cause for those countries that are Treaty members, notably Canada, the US and the UK, after 4 weeks of negotiation, effectively blocking off any meaningful progress in ensuring the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons.    IPS reports ..... "After nearly four weeks of negotiations, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference ended in a predictable outcome: a text overwhelmingly reflecting the views and interests of the nuclear-armed states and some of their nuclear-dependent allies. “The process to develop the draft Review Conference outcome document was anti-democratic and nontransparent,” Ray Acheson, director, Reaching Critical Will, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), told IPS. “This Review Conference has demonstrated beyond any doubt that continuing to rely on the nuclear-armed states or their nuclear-de...

#1 Prize for a bizarre story.....and lying!

No comment called for in this piece from CommonDreams: Another young black man: The strange sad case of 21-year-old Chavis Carter. Police in Jonesboro, Arkansas  stopped  him and two friends, found some marijuana, searched put Carter, then put him handcuffed  behind his back  into their patrol car, where they say he  shot himself  in the head with a gun they failed to find. The FBI is investigating. Police Chief Michael Yates, who stands behind his officers' story,  says in an interview  that the death is "definitely bizarre and defies logic at first glance." You think?