Is Guantanamo a concentration camp?

[Cleita]

It seems what DU'ers have been speculating about all along is true. I just read this article in the SF Chronicle.

Guantanamo workers detail abuse of detainees
Neil A. Lewis, New York Times

Sunday, October 17, 2004

<snip>

Washington -- Many detainees at Guantanamo Bay were regularly subjected to harsh and coercive treatment, several people who worked in the prison said in recent interviews, despite long-standing assertions by military officials that such treatment had not occurred except in isolated cases.

The people -- military guards, intelligence agents and others -- described in interviews with the New York Times a range of procedures that included treatment they said was highly abusive over a long period of time, as well as rewards for prisoners who cooperated with interrogators.

One regular procedure that was described by people who worked at Camp Delta, the main prison facility at the naval base in Cuba, was making uncooperative prisoners strip to their underpants, having them sit in a chair while shackled hand and foot to a bolt in the floor, and forcing them to endure strobe lights and screamingly loud rock and rap music played through two close loudspeakers, while the air conditioning was turned up to maximum levels, said one military official who witnessed the procedure. The official said it was designed to make the detainees uncomfortable, as they were accustomed to high temperatures both in their native countries and their cells.

Such sessions could last 14 hours with breaks, said the official, who described the treatment after being contacted by the Times. <snip> more

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/10/17/MNGQ89B9IO1.DTL

The original NYTimes article is here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/politics/17gitmo.html?hp&ex=1098072000&en=e29ccfe1afd6371a&ei=5094&partner=homepage

And an article in Third World Traveler about this:
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Torture/US_Torture_Central.html

If you had any doubts about our democracy now, we are beginning to resemble the Third Reich more and more everyday,

[ulysses]

1. jiacinto, please pick up

the house courtesy phone...

[bicentennial_baby]

6. Snarf

Discuss...

[Pastiche423]

7. Thank you for your small gift of laughter

My body and soul needed it.

[ulysses]

9. you're welcome

but the fact is that I really want to have Carlos back at this moment in order to demand his reaction to this kind of news about his beloved Camp X-Ray. :grr:

[Andy_Stephenson]

20. Please!

Don't ever wish for carlos back.

:puke:

[TahitiNut]

21. Amen.

[RaleighNCDUer]

2. In the first weeks of the Afghan war

when I heard the first descriptions of the camp I thought, 'That's not so bad. Open air cells and all, well, the weather isn't bad. Besides, IT'S JUST TEMPORARY.

Temporary, my ass. It was, and is, a concentration camp, maybe more on the Boer War model than the Nazi Germany model, but a concentration camp nonetheless. It was deliberately put in Gitmo to keep it out of reach of the American press and in judicial limbo. What do we really know about it?

How many 'detainees' there are? Only what the government tells us.

Fatalities in the camp? Only when the government tells us.

Origination and identities of the 'detainees'? Only the ones the government admits to.

Can we really know if they were all from Afghanistan? Were Iraqis also sent there? What about foreign nationals picked up in the states because of bad visas, 'connections with terrorists', or any other justification. How many transited through there to less than tender incarceration in Jordan, Morocco or Saudi Arabia?

At this point I don't think there is any story about the place I wouldn't believe.

[Lars39]

3. Can't put my hands on the link...

but quite a while back there was at least one article about a court system and crematorium to be added and built at Gitmo. Article probably went down the memory hole.

on edit: I'm trying to find my password to the old DU; I think it may be in my old bookmarks.

[ReadTomPaine]

4. Guantanamo is one of about 20 or so of these facilities.

Amnesty International and the Red Cross have been discussing this problem since it started. Since Guantanamo is so highly visible, it makes you wonder what is happening at the more secretive locations.

RTP

[RaleighNCDUer]

5. Have you heard any mention of Diego Garcia?

I vaguely remember one mention, in like Nov. 01, of the British base there where our B-2s flew out of, of a camp built there. Never heard another word about it.

[Cleita]

11. I googled these two links on Diego Garcia.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/06/12/60minutes/main558378.shtml

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3873291.stm

I am thoroughly disgusted with what Washington is doing in our name throughout the world.

[Media_Lies_Daily]

16. That would not be the first time we've moved native peoples off....

...their land. The first examples I can think of took place nearly four hundred years ago in the first American Colonies.

I know first-hand that Diego Garcia has been a major resupply base in the Indian Ocean. I first learned of it in 1980 while preparing for Operation Gallant Knight, the invasion of Iran. That was the forerunner of Desert Storm...just different targets.

[TahitiNut]

23. Amerika's Global Gulag

[seventhson]

8. Unequivocal Yes -- in 1940 my father did a survey of concentration camps

in Europe. He did a report for the refugee organizations (Quakers, FSC, HICEN, etc.) and Congress - Fascist ones under the Vichy regime.

There is no difference except that conditions in Guantanamo are WORSE in mnay respects. Torture and abuse was NOT the norm in Frwench camps but starvation and disease was.


This adminstration is guilty of crimes against humanity and a war crimes tribunal is merited like Nuremburg.

But SHHHH!

We have to win the elction first.

[ulysses]

10. that this hasn't been a campaign issue

is ridiculous.

[BUSHOUT]

12. "Concentration camp" has negative connotations.

Nome sayin'?

Better to say it's a prison that is operating largely outside of international law and scrutiny.

Given what has occurred at other such military prisons in recent history, it needs to become more transparent.

The "war on terror" does not require human rights abuses by us to win it.

[ulysses]

13. and god only knows

that we wouldn't want to associate something that this administration has done with any negative connotations.

Better to say it's a prison that is operating largely outside of international law and scrutiny.

You might as well say that it's an oatmeal cookie.

[Cleita]

14. Negative connotations?

I guess so. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, odds are it's a duck!

[BUSHOUT]

17. Yes, it equates it with Nazi Germany, and that won't resonate with voters.

I realize the place deserves loud protest...it's not right.

But it's not akin to a "concentration camp", given the images that term invokes.

[Cleita]

24. Excuse me? It very much should resonate with voters.

We need voters to know what their military and their leaders are doing to detainees who haven't had a trial or even charges brought up against them. They have no access to lawyers or even the Red Cross. I hope it resonnates with voters. We need impartial, neutral observers in those camps NOW!

[BUSHOUT]

25. I agree with everything you said. Why are you ignoring what I said? n/t

[Media_Lies_Daily]

15. The truth hurts, and it's been hurting me for quite some time....

...a concentration camp is a concentration camp is a concentration camp. Better to call it what it is, rather than try to believe it's not happening.

Nome sayin'?

[BUSHOUT]

19. No, I don't.

Are you so bereft of historical context that you REALLY think the Cuba prison is akin to a German concentration camp?

It's not a big deal, I was just making a comment about language.

Call it Auschwitz for all I care.

[Djinn]

26. depends what you call a concentration camp

in Nazi Germany there were concentration camps and there were concentration/death camps.

Not all of them had mass murder facilities - factories were also camps and the people in them were fed (poorly but fed needed to keep them healthy enough to work) and weren't shoved into the gas chambers.

Gitmo - no access to family and/or legal reps, not a single "terrorist" from non muslim background because apparently even though this is a war on terror NOT Islam ALL terrorists are Islamic?? torture, indefinite confinement without charge or conviction by a foreign power and unreported death.

Happy to call a spade a spade and Gitmo a concentration camp.

[Endangered Specie]

18. Bushenwald is what I call it.

[TahitiNut]

22. Perfect.