I’ve long discovered that many Americans don’t want to know what’s going on in Gitmo or elsewhere in the law-free, non-Geneva military prisons set up by Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bush and Gonzales. We know that many inmates at Gitmo have no credible evidence against them and no way to get a fair trial. We know that many are there because of evidence procured through torture. Yes, some are also the worst form of Jihadist murderers, and they deserve to be detained indefinitely. But many aren’t. And we have no sane procedures to distinguish between the two. We also know that some prisoners have been tortured and abused, and many are regularly assaulted, or "IRFed", for often minor infractions. If you don’t know much about the process of "IRFing," read this. Eric Umansky has another excellent post on the subject. A lawyer for one of the prisoners met with his client shortly after such an "IRFing":
One of our clients was a mess. He’d been IRF’d a couple of days before and he was sickening to behold. One eye was swollen shut, the other a deep black and blue. Contusions all over his body, cuts on his head and legs. He couldn’t swallow and could barely talk. The "offense" meriting his forcible extraction was that he stepped over a line that they painted in his isolation cell.
What are those cells like? Eric debriefs a lawyer who’s been there:
[T]he detainees who hanged themselves last week were in cells where "there’s nothing on the ceiling and the meshing is far too small to allow a sheet or anything to be tied to it. They would have had to slowly strangulate themselves by wrapping a sheet around the toilet bowl or something like that."
That, according to a military spokesman, was a "good P.R. move." Those with no hope of trial, release or Geneva POW protections have gone on hundreds of hunger-strikes. Here is an account of what one individual, who was a teenager when picked up in Afghanistan, has been put through:
According to medical records obtained by TIME, a 20-year-old named Yusuf al-Shehri, jailed since he was 16, was regularly strapped into a specially designed feeding chair that immobilizes the body at the legs, arms, shoulders and head. Then a plastic tube, sometimes as much as 50% bigger than the type commonly used for feeding incapacitated patients, was inserted through his nose and down his throat – a procedure that can trigger nausea, bleeding and diarrhea.
This is America in the era of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld. You can either look the other way or deal with it.
(Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty.)
The Dish 