Skip to main content

Why wouldn't they try and discredit the US?

Not only bizarre, but an insight into the "thinking" of those incarcerating the detainees at Gitmo indefinitely, many without any charges having been levelled against them.   It is claimed the detainees protesting, and trying to get their message out there, are attempting to discredit the USA.    Er, why wouldn't they want to?   Al Jazeera reports - following obtaining documents in a FOI application.

"Guantánamo Bay military personnel have been instructed to inform visitors to the prison facility that the vast majority of detainees held there more than a decade without facing charges use their lawyers and the media to “discredit the U.S. government,” according to PowerPoint slides obtained by Al Jazeera.

The slides also advise military personnel to cast the ongoing hunger strikes waged by the prisoners not as a form of protest against their indefinite detention and treatment, but as one of six “offensive tactics” used by detainees to attack the U.S. government.

The presentation accuses the detainees of engaging in “Information Operations” that include using “media, lawyers and int’l organizations to spread a false message of: mental anguish, inhumane detention conditions, medical mistreatment, abuse,” according to a briefing slide titled “Adversary within the camps.”

More than half of the 149 prisoners at Guantánamo have been cleared for release or transfer by the Bush and Obama administrations, and in the years since 9/11, news reports have shown that some of the men sent to Guantánamo had been sold to the U.S. for bounties, and had never set foot on a battlefield. Last year, scores of detainees launched a hunger strike to protest against their continued detention without trial or charge in a move that attracted worldwide headlines."


 

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...

Palestinian children in irons. UK to investigate

Not for the first time does MPS wonder what sort of country it is when Israel so flagrently allows what can only be described as barbaric and inhuman behaviour to be undertaken by, amongst others, its IDF. No one has seemingly challenged Israel's actions. However, perhaps it's gone a bridge too far - as The Independent reports. The Foreign Office revealed last night that it would be challenging the Israelis over their treatment of Palestinian children after a report by a delegation of senior British lawyers revealed unconscionable practices, such as hooding and the use of leg irons. In the first investigation of its kind, a team of nine senior legal figures examined how Palestinians as young as 12 were treated when arrested. Their shocking report Children in Military Custody details claims that youngsters are dragged from their beds in the middle of the night, have their wrists bound behind their backs, and are blindfolded and made to kneel or lie face down in military vehi...

Wow!.....some "visitor" to Ferryland in Newfoundland