Saturday 20th of April 2024
Home » Blogs » John Richardson's blog

trashing geneva ......

Prisoners at the US detention centre at Guantanamo Bay
have been subjected to “systematic physical, psychological, sexual, medical
& religious abuse”, according to a report released this week by the US
Centre for Constitutional Rights (CCR).

The report - Report
On Torture & Cruel, Inhuman & Degrading Treatment Of Prisoners At
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba - is the most comprehensive primary-source account
of abuse at the facility. The report cites declassified statements from
detainees still at Guantanamo & from their lawyers. According to the
report, Guantanamo detainees have been:

- held in solitary confinement
for periods exceeding a year;
- deprived of sleep for days and
weeks and, in at least one case, months;
- exposed to prolonged
temperature extremes;
- beaten;
- threatened with transfer to a
foreign country, for torture;
- tortured in foreign countries
or at U.S. military bases abroad before transfer to Guantanamo;
- sexually harassed and raped or
threatened with rape;
- deprived of medical treatment
for serious conditions, or allowed treatment only on the condition that
  they
"cooperate" with interrogators; &
- routinely
"short-shackled" (wrists and ankles bound together and to the floor)
for hours and even days
  during interrogations.

The report concluded that the
Bush administration's designation of Guantanamo prisoners as "enemy
combatants" allowed the US Department of Defense to avoid not only the
guarantees for prisoners of war under the Third Geneva Convention but also the
US Army Field Manual’s restrictions on interrogation techniques.

Hair, or teeth?

Please review The Ministry and elect the visage that most resembles the grinning subject of the cartoon by Mr.Fish. 

I nominate number three from the top. The eyes give it away. In Costello's case, they are limpid pools of doom.

But do scan the rest of the list of contenders, boosters and aspirationals. Some are crooks and liars. Some look reasonably honest.

How do you tell, in a room half-full of double-dealing hypocrites, which ones can be trusted? Good teeth and hair are distractions, and punters in the loungerooms of the nation should remember that. Ask a first-rate detective about the subtle cues that give away the attempts to deceive.

After 10 years in the sewer, Costello's last words will be "trust me on this", before he sinks beneath the slime and paddles off to his job with MacBank. He is as much responsible for the Gitmo disgrace as are Howard, Downer, Bush and Rice. Didn't his parents tell him to speak up when wrong has been done?

update from the amerikan gulag .....

David Hicks, imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay for four and a half years, had his first contact with family for seven months. In a phone call to his father, Terry and other family members last Friday he detailed some of his harsh prison conditions.

He is kept in a “concrete cell lying on the floor with no mattress, partially clothed and with the air conditioning and lights on full, twenty four hours a day, seven days a week” he said.  Imagine “Mr Bean” huddled in ball like at the start of the program, “that’s what it’s like.” He has just been given a mattress after three months and it’s only “half a centimetre thick.”

There have been times when he has “not been given toilet paper” and is expected to use his “hands” to wipe himself.  There are no washing facilities in his cell. He must request toilet paper daily and is only given “thirty sheets” a day. 

“It has been much worse since the suicides,” he said.  “They keep pushing, pushing and pushing us. I didn’t eat for twenty eight days,” he said, “and lost twenty five pounds.”

David has been told that if he pleaded “guilty” to crimes he would be moved out of solitary confinement and given “privileges.” He reiterated to family that he was not guilty of any crimes.

“I asked for a cat,” he said, and was told a cat couldn’t be kept in those “conditions.”  It would be too cruel.

He said he could not “last much longer” in these conditions.