Gitmo: Terror suspects' beards are safe now

[babylonsister]

Terror suspects' beards are safe now
In a practice that ended in May, guards at the prison camps cut Muslim captives' beards as a disciplinary measure. Captives said they saw it as an assault on Islam.
Posted on Mon, Nov. 05, 2007


BY CAROL ROSENBERG
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GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba -- Guards earlier this year stopped cutting the beards off unruly war-on-terror detainees, according to the military, confirming for the first time a practice that enraged Muslim captives and their American advocates.

Prison commanders withdrew the policy of ''beard trimming'' in May, said Army Col. Bill Costello, a spokesman for the U.S. Southern Command in Miami.

From 2005, he said, it had been an approved ``disciplinary action for severe physical assaults against the guard force, to include the throwing of feces, urine, semen, vomit, blood and/or saliva.''

But, he said, beard trimming ``was not designed as a religious punitive measure, nor was it ever carried out by interrogation personnel.''

The issue cast a spotlight on religious tensions behind the razor wire at the Pentagon's showcase detention and interrogation center: Detainees and attorneys have long protested policies they said were designed to humiliate Muslim captives. The U.S. says its respects Islam while providing safe and humane detention to allegedly dangerous al-Qaeda members and sympathizers.

`BEARD SHORTENING'

''Some of the beards are long -- you can hide a bazooka in there,'' Navy Capt. Patrick McCarthy told reporters during an October visit by reporters in which he defended what he called an earlier policy of ``beard shortening.''

Countered New York attorney Martha Rayner, who represents a Yemeni client named Sanad al Kazimi, 37, whose beard was cut in October 2006, allegedly for throwing urine and feces at the guards: ``They do it to humiliate. As punishment. It is how they truly can humiliate a Muslim man -- shave his beard.''

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