The commander of Guatanamo Bay was fired.
“His release and reassignment are in no way related to the detainee operations taking place in Guantanamo,” C. Patrick Dooling, spokesman for Navy Region Southeast, based in Jacksonville, Fla said.
Dick Cheney claimed yesterday that prisoners held at Guatanamo were: “living in the tropics,” and have “everything they could possibility want.”
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The UN said they have evidence of torture at Guatanamo and accused the US of ignoring their requests to inspect the detention center.
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Under fire from Republicans and some fellow Democrats, Sen. Dick Durbin apologized Tuesday for comparing American interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp to Nazis. “Some may believe that my remarks crossed the line,” the Illinois Democrat said. “To them I extend my heartfelt apologies.”
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The public war on the Iraqi insurgency has led to an atmosphere of hidden brutalities, including abuse and torture, carried out against detainees by the nation’s special security forces, according to defense lawyers, international organizations and Iraq’s Ministry of Human Rights.
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Clinton thinks Guatanamo should be “closed down or cleaned up.” Republican Senator John McCain said we should let detainees have trials.
In defense of Guatanamo, Rumsfeld pointed out that detainees get more expensive meals than US soldiers. “At Guatanamo the military spends more per meal for detainees…than it spends per rations for US troops,” he said.
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Mr. Cheney dismissed those who say the prison should be shut down. “My own personal view,” Cheney told America, “is that those who are most urgently advocating that we shut down Guantánamo probably don’t agree with our policies anyway.”
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“The important thing here to understand is that the people that are at Guantánamo are bad people. I mean, these are terrorists for the most part,” Dick Cheney explained, in response to allegations of human rights abuses at Guatanamo.
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Bush didn’t say for sure that they weren’t going to close Guatanamo.
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Rumsfeld said they weren’t going to close Guatanamo, despite Jimmy Carter’s opinion.
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The head of the Amnesty International USA said on Sunday the group doesn’t “know for sure” that the military is running a “gulag.”
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5 cases of Koran desecration were confirmed by the Pentagon. They included deliberate kicking, deliberate stepping, hitting it with water balloons, splashing it with urine, and writing obscenities in it. They also confirmed 15 occasions of Koran defilement by detainees. Guards spotted detainees using the Koran as a pillow and ripping out its pages, they saw one “urinating on the Koran,” and two were seen tossing their copies into toilets, according to the report.
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Rumsfeld and Amnesty International are exchanging press reports.
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In response to allegations made by Amnesty International in which the United States was accused of impeding the efforts to improve human efforts around the world by their treatment of detainees, Bush said the accusations were absurd. Cheney said he was offended.
Amid widespread accusations and documentation of US military desecration of the Koran, the Pentagon held a special news conference yesterday to address the allegations. The military says it has identified 13 incidents of alleged mishandling of the Koran by joint task force personnel, five of which it deteremined as “mishandling of a Koran” by U.S. personnel at Guantanamo Bay. Brigadier General Jay Hood refused to specify the nature of the mishandling of the Koran, other than to say it did not involve placing it in a toilet.
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The Pentagon has attacked as “irresponsible” an article in Newsweek magazine where US soldiers were accused of flushing the Koran down the toilet. Newsweek apologized, although they refused to admit any wrong-doing.
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Many of the accounts detailing abuse of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay by American military and civilian personnel don’t meet the definition of torture, U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said.
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The United States told the United Nations, “The United States is unequivocally opposed to the use and practice of torture,” adding that “no circumstance whatsoever, including war, the threat of war, internal political stability” or any other dire situation can justify torture.
Elisa Massimino, the Washington director of Human Rights First, formerly the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, said the report failed to address “ghost detainees,” people held incommunicado by the C.I.A. and kept isolated.
The World Organization for Human Rights U.S.A. also said the report fell short. It condemned the practice of sending suspected terrorists to countries where they are tortured.
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President Bush has approved the demotion of Army Reserve General Janis Karpinski, whose unit was in charge during the Abu Ghraib prisoner torture scandal. Karpinski is the only general to be disciplined. She has said publicly that she was not given full authority over Abu Ghraib and that responsibility lies much higher up the chain of command.
In an interview with CBS News last year, Karpinski denied shoplifting a cosmetic item from a shop at a domestic Air Force base while she held the rank of colonel and later lying about it.
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