Fresh torture stories belie Pentagon's claims of progress.
With all due respect to Jim Hoagland of The Washington Post, there are now fresh torture stories coming out of Guantanamo upon the release of Mamdouh Habib. The BBC Reports Habib says that he was tortured in Guantanamo; this is on top of the revelations earlier this year that prison guards peed and defaced Qu'rans belonging to the prisoners.
Hoagland mistakenly thinks the Pentagon has cleaned up Guantanamo, while rightfully calling them out on judicial unfairness:
The Pentagon has, by and large, met the challenge of demonstrating that prisoners in Guantanamo are treated humanely. But it has not shown equal concern about the appearance of judicial fairness for the detainees.
Here is Habib's story:
On one occasion - the date was not specified - he claimed he was beaten by more than a dozen men, who stripped and sexually assaulted him before making him wear nappies. Mr Habib has insisted that such mistreatment was common.
The 48-year-old said that he endured electric shocks, long spells in isolation and had menstrual blood from a prostitute thrown into his face during questioning. He said he signed confessions to save himself from further abuse. The former taxi driver has categorically denied any involvement in terrorism.
Regardless of Habib's innocence or guilt, his story is consistent with the other stories of beatings and abuse we have learned about from Guantanamo.
Around the Blogs:
View from the Mountain is disgusted by the abuse of power that is exemplified by the Bush administration, a fact on which Hoagland rightly focuses on:
Just why any country, much less the US, would want to be known as the country where torture is legal is beyond me. Of course I also don't understand giving away for a pittance parts of our National Parks or holding those who might only have been in the wrong place at the wrong time for years without giving them a hearing. Those who support these kinds of abuse of power by the government should pray that those powers are never turned on them in error because as we have seen there is no escape from arbitrary power short of a war or a revolution.
This is why we need to vote those on either party who would support this abuse of power out of office next election. The longer we accept the status quo, the less likely it will be to extracate ourselves from this mess.
Effwit agrees with another part of Hoagland's piece when he discusses how Bush continues to harp on 9/11 like a broken record:
Heck, I had been under the impression that the constant flashing back to 9-11 was nothing more than an opportunistic exploitation of that event. Hoagland may have a point here. I will hasten to complete the thought. The policy excesses we have seen in the last few years, while horrifying to seasoned foreign relations types, can be viewed as rational coming from someone suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The dwindling number of citizens who approve of the bull in the china shop approach to international affairs can be viewed as similarly touched in the head.
Making policy from a psychologically disturbed world-view, however is not a way to further American interests anywhere in the world.
Either that, or the Bush administration is drunk with power and exploiting it for political purposes. His PTSD theory is interesting, but Bush and Rove were showing such signs of lust for power well before 9/11. In fact, Bush had already decided to go to war with Iraq in 1999.