political nonsense

It was reported that the Pentagon has decided to remove a reference to Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions from a new edition of the Army Field Manual on interrogation. That article bans torture and cruel treatment as well as “outrages on personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment.” The change, which would reverse decades of military policy, follows President Bush’s declaration in 2002 that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to “unlawful combatants” such as terrorists.
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Court martial proceedings have begun for an Army sergeant accused of using military dogs to threaten detainees at Abu Ghraib. The trial of Sgt. Santos Cardona may expose who within the Pentagon’s chain of command ordered soliders to abuse and torture detainees at the Iraqi prison.
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Prisoners at Guantanamo Bay lured American guards to an ambush with a fake suicide attempt, then attacked them with broken light fixtures, fan blades and pieces of metal, U.S. officials said.
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The Red Cross criticized the United States for refusing access to prisoners in secret detention. “We know that some people, we don’t know how many and we don’t know where,” said a Red Cross spokeswoman, “are held in places where we don’t have access.”
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The U.S. Army will prohibit “water-boarding” - the controversial practice of submerging a prisoner’s head in water in an effort to make him talk - when it issues its new interrogation manual, the State Department’s legal adviser told the U.N. Committee Against Torture on Monday.

John B. Bellinger III said banning water-boarding wasn’t an admission that American interrogators had used the technique on detainees during the war on terrorism.
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U.S. officials defended the United States on Friday against allegations that it’s allowed the torture of prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan and the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, saying the United States has an “absolute commitment” to eradicating torture and preventing abuse.
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The Pentagon plans to release nearly a third of those held at the prison for terrorism suspects here because they pose no threat to U.S. security, an official of the war crimes tribunal said.
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Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld allowed an “abusive and degrading” interrogation of an al Qaeda detainee in 2002, the online magazine Salon reported on Friday, citing an Army document.
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Oral arguments began Tuesday in a case that will decide whether the Bush administration can use military tribunals to try detainees at the Guantanamo Bay military prison. Salim Ahmed Hamdan, who worked as Osama bin Laden’s driver in Afghanistan, is challenging the tribunals. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia took part in Tuesday’s hearing despite growing calls for his recusal. In a recent speech, Scalia dismissed the idea detainees have rights under the U.S. Constitution or international conventions.
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A federal judge today sentenced a Falls Church man convicted of conspiring to kill President Bush in an al-Qaeda conspiracy to 30 years in prison with 30 additional years of supervised release. U.S. District Judge Gerald Bruce Lee denied the government’s request to impose a life sentence on 25-year-old Ahmed Omar Abu Ali.

His mother, Faten Abu Ali, said in an interview after her son’s sentencing:

“I think it’s a sad day not only for me as a mother but for the whole country. America is all about justice and democracy. Before we export democracy to the outside, we have to have it in our own land. My son didn’t have a fair trial.”

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Officials have insisted that detention rules for terror suspects already prohibit torture, but the military may create a formal rule to “elimidate any doubt from people’s minds.”
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A US soldier convicted of abusing detainees with his guard dog at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq was sentenced to six months in prison by a court martial, a military spokeswoman said. Pentagon officials said Smith’s conviction was evidence of the military’s commitment to punish violations of military law.
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As the Iraqi insurgency intensified in early 2004, an elite Special Operations forces unit converted one of Saddam Hussein’s former military bases near Baghdad into a top-secret detention center. There, American soldiers made one of the former Iraqi government’s torture chambers into their own interrogation cell. They named it the Black Room.

Placards posted by soldiers at the detention area advised, “NO BLOOD, NO FOUL.” The slogan, as one Defense Department official explained, reflected an adage adopted by Task Force 6-26:

“If you don’t make them bleed, they can’t prosecute for it.”

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Details from recently released Guantanamo Bay transcripts continued to emerge. “We lost our goats,” explained one prisoner. “That’s why we were looking through binoculars.”
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The U.S. State Department issued a report criticizing human rights abuses in China, North Korea, Iran, and Cuba. It also criticized the rights records of Jordan and Egypt, two countries where the United States has sent detainees to be interrogated. The report noted that the United States’ “own journey towards liberty and justice for all has been long and difficult,” and is “far from complete.”
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The Pentagon is denying reports that it is preparing to soon close the notorious Abu Ghraib prison.
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A US army officer was found guilty of negligent homicide in the death of an Iraqi general during an interrogation.
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New details were reported of the covert CIA program enacted shortly after 9/11 by the Bush administration. The program, known by its initials GST, marks the largest CIA covert initiative since the height of the Cold War. It includes a range of controversial programs that have been recently uncovered or subjected to public scrutiny — including the kidnapping of terror suspects abroad, the maintenance of secret prisons in at least eight foreign countries, the use of interrogation techniques considered illegal under international law, and the operation of a fleet of aircraft to move detainees around the globe.
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hunger strikers at guatanamo bay have accused their captors of force-feeding them violently with large, dirty feeding tubes.
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89 detainees at guatanamo bay stopped eating.
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