NBC: Murtha may use the war spending measure to close Guantanamo

[sabra]

http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2007/02/08/52556.aspx

<snip>

House Democratic leaders say they'll use the power of purse to "change the direction of the war" and possibly close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, NBC's Mike Viqueira reports. At a press conference yesterday, Rep. John Murtha said his defense appropriations panel will pass a version of Bush's $100 billion war spending request for this year on March 15. Since March 15 comes well before May, when the last brigades will be deployed as part of the increase, Murtha says that would leave time for Congress to act. He also said he may use the war spending measure to close Guantanamo: "I would like to close it." Speaker Nancy Pelosi also called the forthcoming House Democratic resolution opposing a troop increase in Iraq "a first step."

[Greeby]

1. Call Murtha, tell him not to pass it at all! nt

[Skidmore]

2. Why did I think they had done that already and transferred

prisoners elsewhere? Wasn't there an article a couple of months ago about this and how they were trying to do some shell game so that the torturing of these prisoners would mess up their trying them somehow? I may be misremembering something.

[crickets]

3. Maybe you're thinking of Abu Ghraib

Accurate description of the situation, different prison.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=123690
Tomgram: Lost in a Bermuda Triangle of Injustice
The Facts on the Ground
Mini-Gulags, Hired Guns, Lobbyists, and a Reality Built on Fear
By Tom Engelhardt

This August, a site of shame, shared by Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush, was emptied. Abu Ghraib prison is the place where Saddam's functionaries tortured (and sometimes killed) many enemies of his regime, and where Bush's functionaries, as a series of notorious digital photos revealed, committed what the U.S. press still likes to refer to as "prisoner abuse." Now, there are no prisoners to abuse and the prison itself is to be turned over to the Iraqi government, perhaps to become a museum, perhaps to remain a jail for another regime whose handling of prisoners is grim indeed. The emptying was clearly meant as a redemptive moment or, as Nancy A. Youssef of the McClatchy Newspapers put it, "a milestone" for the huge structure. After all the bad media and the hit American "prestige" took around the world, Abu Ghraib was finally over.

Of course, its prisoners who remained generally uncharged and without access to Iraqi courts, weren't just released to the winds. Quite the opposite, over 3,000 of them were redistributed to two other U.S. prisons, Camp Bucca in Iraq's south and Camp Cropper at the huge U.S. base adjoining Baghdad International Airport, once dedicated to the holding of "high-value" detainees like Saddam Hussein and top officials of his regime.

Camp Cropper itself turns out to be an interesting story, but one with a problem: While the emptying of Abu Ghraib made the news everywhere, the filling of Camp Cropper made no news at all. And yet it turns out that Camp Cropper, which started out as a bunch of tents, has now become a $60 million "state-of-the-art" prison. The upgrade, on the drawing boards since 2004, was just completed and hardly a word has been written about it. We really have no idea what it consists of or what it looks like, even though it's in one of the few places in Iraq that an American reporter could safely visit, being on a vast American military base constructed, like the prison, with taxpayer dollars.
(more)

Goes into a lot more detail about CIA prisons (and the role of private contractors) around the world, and does mention Guantanamo, though only briefly. Unsettling, to say the least.

[OnyxCollie]

4. I believe those were prisoners transferred from black sites to Guantanamo Bay.

Done so under the guise of bringing them to "justice" by bushco, of course. Chimpy was going on about how restictions need to be removed so "professionals" can do their jobs. Namely, torturing people. If I can recall, there were questions at the time regarding CIA? FBI? involvement in torture and if they could be held accountable. It appeared that they could, so the FBI got the hell out of there, forcing Chimpy to call for more accomodations to satisfy his fascist appetite.

[shaniqua6392]

5. My nephew is an Army Guard at Guantanamo.

It is quite a joke and should be closed. But the Repukes are going to fight it tooth and nail, so to speak. Those prisoners are their "trophy's" to justify the "War on Terror". Most of them are just innocent and man are they pissed off. They just had Halliburton add on a huge new complex to house more "terrorists" so I think the Dems are going to run into a brick wall trying to close it. My nephew is there until September and then I don't know where they will send him. He enlisted about a year ago. We love him, but he was a naive idiot for joining against the wishes of his family. They were in his high school working on him for about two years and they conned him into enlisting and signing paperwork before we knew anything about it.