A therapist friend - speaking of clients - calls January "the trough." I am
afraid this country, this USA is in it deep. I am not sure when disgust will
roar into rage and "Bush-As-Normal" is going to be history or what. But the
revelations - below in Newsweek - at so-called "Gitmo" & the Pentagon-White
House league of Perpetrators are off the hook. This ain't Poetry. Poe's Rats
are definitely running the Pit. And the Senate is going to confirm Gonzales!
This is sick, sickening. This sanctioned "internal terrorism", I am afraid,
will do nothing but destroy this country.
**
Alberto Gonzales will likely be confirmed. But that won't stop the widening
scandal over Gitmo detainees
By Michael Isikoff
Newsweek
Jan. 17 issue - Ibraham Al Qosi's stories seemed fairly outlandish when they
first surfaced last fall. In a lawsuit, Al Qosi, a Sudanese accountant
apprehended after 9/11 on suspicions of ties to Al Qaeda, charged that he
and other detainees at Guantanamo Bay had been subjected to bizarre forms of
humiliation and abuse by U.S. military inquisitors. Al Qosi claimed they
were strapped to the floor in an interrogations center known as the Hell
Room, wrapped in Israeli flags, taunted by female interrogators who rubbed
their bodies against them in sexually suggestive ways, and left alone in
refrigerated cells for hours with deafening music blaring in their ears.
Back then, Pentagon officials dismissed Al Qosi's allegations as the
fictional rantings of a hard-core terrorist.
But in recent weeks a stack of declassified government documents has given
new credence to many of the claims of abuse at Guantanamo. The documents are
also raising fresh questions about the Bush administration's handling of
detainees at a time when a prime architect of that policy, White House
counsel Alberto Gonzales, is facing a Senate confirmation vote as the
president's nominee to be attorney general.
Many of the documents come from an unexpected source: the FBI. As part of a
Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties
Union, the bureau has released internal e-mails and correspondence recording
what their own agents witnessed at Gitmo. Coupled with accounts from other
agencies such as the Defense Intelligence Agency‹also released as part of
the FOIA lawsuit‹the FBI reports amount to a powerful case that many of the
scenes alleged by Al Qosi and other Gitmo detainees may actually have
happened. (Al Qosi is still in Gitmo, facing charges before a military
tribunal.) And the reports suggest that the interrogation scandal is not
going away any time soon, even if Gonzales is confirmed, as expected.
Many of the FBI accounts came from conscience-stricken agents troubled by
what they had witnessed. One agent reported seeing a detainee sitting on the
floor of an interrogation cell with an Israeli flag draped around him while
he was bombarded by loud music and a strobe light‹almost exactly what Al
Qosi had alleged. Another reported seeing detainees chained hand and foot in
fetal positions, in barren cells with no chair, food or water.
Jan. 6: Alberto Gonzales blamed the abuses at Abu Ghraib on a lack of
training and renegade prison guards, not the legal memos he wrote. NBC¹s
Pete Williams reports.
In one account that seemed to parallel the sickening scenes from Abu Ghraib
Prison in Iraq, an FBI agent reported the way in which a female U.S. Army
sergeant sexually humiliated a shackled male prisoner during Ramadan and
even "grabbed his genitals."
Pentagon officials acknowledge that, frustrated by detainees' refusal to
talk, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had approved "aggressive"
interrogation techniques to be used at Gitmo. But last week, stunned by the
new disclosures, Gen. Bantz Craddock, chief of the U.S. Southern
Command‹which runs Gitmo‹ordered a full-scale inquiry into the FBI agents'
allegations, which appear to go far beyond anything authorized. Craddock
wants to know why allegations from seemingly credible government agents had
not come to the U.S. military's attention sooner.
After hearing of the FBI memos, NEWSWEEK has learned, Sens. Dianne Feinstein
and Patrick Leahy fired off angry letters to FBI Director Robert Mueller
demanding to know why he failed to disclose his own agents' complaints when
they questioned him about Gitmo in a hearing last May. Feinstein last week
called Mueller's evasive answers at the time "gobbledygook." When her
comment was reported on NEWSWEEK's Web site, Mueller called Feinstein to
express regret that he hadn't kept her better informed. As the inquiries
continue, he may not be the only U.S. government official who has further
explaining to do.
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.
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