UPDATE: 7:22 PM, & 8:13 PM April 27, 2011.
So the takeaway in the US will remain “dangerous terrorists!” and Guantanamo will most likely remain open three years after the President vowed to close it, while overseas the rest of the world will continue to wonder why the country that claims to love freedom so much is continuing to imprison and torture innocent people. Laura Flanders , April 25, 2011. Gitmo Files & The Media
American media coverage of the Gitmo Files is at odds with British and European Media's Coverage .
US media appear uncomfortable with the use of the word "Torture" or references to the human rights violations and possible crimes committed by the USA and its treatment of POWs.
Most of the US media is concerned with defending either the Bush Regime or the Obama Regime.
Obama supporters want to put all the blame on the Bush Regime ignoring the role the Congress played and that of the US media which has redefined torture in a way which falls in line with the Bush Regimes characterization of torture as that which causes organ failure or death. So they include torture techniques such as waterboarding, electric shocks to the testicles or beating a prisoner until they are unconscious but they don't include torture techniques such as sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation,sensory overload,solitary confinement, insults, humiliation, threats , or even sodomy which the Americans characterize as harsh but as not qualifying as torture.
As John Yoo the legal architect for the use of torture by the Bush Regime appears to represent most Americans as he explains such notions as humiliation, attacks on someone's dignity or inhumane treatment are all too vague to be even taken seriously .
And yet the United Nations the International Criminal Court, human rights groups appear to use these terms and are agreed upon about their meaning.
This is why President Obama who outlawed Waterboarding and other cruder forms of torture at times appears to gloss over that the harsh techniques which are still being used are also forms of torture . Sleep deprivation will eventually lead to mental confusion, an inability to focus or accomplish simple tasks and can lead to delusional thinking, paranoia, hallucinations, a mental breakdown ie psychotic break and various psychological and physical symptoms which may become permanent.During prolongated sleep deprivation or solitary confinement and other techniques on their own or used along with a number of other such techniques.
The literature shows that in the vast majority of cases the Intel received is unreliable and does not produce actionable intelligence.
laura Flanders :Guantanamo Files Show Media Priorities
'Extraordinary' Guantanamo Documents Shed New Light on Detainees
PBS Newshour
"Some were guilty some were not" no big deal???
The intelligence agencies the US military and the CIA are shown to be rather careless , capricious or just incompetent in their rounding up and incarcerating suspects.
It almost seems as if they were under pressure to bring people in IE roundup the usual suspects but had not used a more rigorous vetting process to be able to categorize prisoners as being of little threat to those who ere of a high threat level or those for whom evidence was dubious and those for which there was solid reliable intel.
It was a matter arrest them all and sort out the guilty from the innocent later but this process failed abysmally.
Bill O'Reilly and Bernie Golberg
Goldberg defends Wikileaks as being a news agency which is protected by the freedom of the press.
Should U.S. Prosecute WikiLeaks?
" The Sting of the Scorpion... Egypt's Darkest Corner was the forerunner to Guantanamo" By Yvonne Ridley at Foreign Policy Journal.com via "Information Clearing House" April 26, 2011 --
...The Scorpion Prison is a hellish institution that former prisoners told me was the blueprint for America's Guantanamo, the world's most notorious jail. It is reasonable to say that this is Egypt's very own Guantanamo.
The maximum security jail is two kilometres from the main entrance to the official Tora cluster of prisons where former government ministers now reside in comparative comfort. Some of the monsters who served Mubarak and are now behind bars will even have authorised the torture endured by the Scorpion inmates whose daily routine is quite different to those such as Mubarak's sons.
Many of the detainees have been held for years without trial or charge - very like thousands of Palestinians held in Israeli jails - simply for being critical of Mubarak's regime in speeches or articles. Others were convicted of trying to overthrow Israel's good friend Mubarak; the irony is that they did far less than those who rallied bravely in Tahrir Square just weeks ago.
But while the revolutionaries are rewarded for their heroism with hard won freedoms and liberties, the Scorpion 100 continue to languish behind its high walls, fearing that they have been completely forgotten. Their voices remain unheard in the forbidding complex hidden behind an imposing seven-metre high wall that is protected by heavily fortified, armour-plated gates.
According to the Muslim Brotherhood website, Al'aqrab was the brainchild of a group of officers who spent five years training in the US with the FBI. On their return to Egypt, The Scorpion and its H blocks were built; they opened on 30 May 1993.
Prison staff have the power to cut off water, light and electricity, and close individual windows at the flick of a switch, as punishment. Twenty cells are used purely for solitary confinement. It seems that the 'American inspiration' behind Scorpion was so succesful that it was replicated in the spring of 2002 at the US military base of Guantanamo Bay in Occupied Cuba.
It seems the ‘American idea’ worked so well that the Scorpion model was replicated in the spring of 2002 at the US military base Guantanamo Bay in Occupied Cuba.
As I relayed the description of its interior to Moazzam Begg, Director of the London-based NGO Cageprisoners, he winced in recognition. The layout was, indeed, familiar to the former ex-Guantanamo detainee who spent three years in the American version of The Scorpion.
Mubarak’s Ministry of Interior moved detainees from Liman, Istekbal Tora, and Abu Zaabal to the new supermax jail, and it is thought at one point around 20,000 so-called enemies of the state were being held without trial or charge.
But there could be other political prisoners held elsewhere in the prison system in Egypt—at this stage, we simply don’t know.
But rumors abound of what has gone on behind the high walls of The Scorpion even today, and include harrowing tales of torture, abuse, and years of solitary confinement without sunlight.
While all of the Muslim Brotherhood’s political prisoners have now been released from across Egypt, the agony continues for the inmates of The Scorpion Prison that is so well hidden from the nearby Cairo-Alexandria desert highway, and which is about 20 kilometers south of the Egyptian capital.
Harrowing, firsthand accounts, of torture and abuse meted out in The Scorpion Prison against members of the Brotherhood can be found the Ikhwan website.
Most of the men still inside The Scorpion belong to the now defunct group Talae al-Fatah, Jihad, al-Gama’h Al Islamia, and other Islamic groups; and although the majority signed so-called “adoption of repentance papers” years ago, they are still held with little or no prospect of a trial.
Some have gone years without family visits, whipping, flogging, and electric shock treatments, as well as collective punishment; this has defined the “Scorpion Experience”. Of the 20,000 or so who have passed through its gates, around 15 percent are believed to have died.
also see Guantánamo Bay files: Al-Qaida assassin 'worked for MI6' • Leaked Guantánamo papers link UK to Algerian militant At least 123 prisoners incriminated by one informer " By Declan Walsh in Islamabad, David Leigh, Jason Burke and Ian Cobain The Guardian via Information Clearing house April 26, 2011
April 26, 2011 " The Guardian" -- An al-Qaida operative accused of bombing two Christian churches and a luxury hotel in Pakistan in 2002 was at the same time working for British intelligence, according to secret files on detainees who were shipped to the US military's Guantánamo Bay prison camp.
...The Guardian and the New York Times published a series of reports based on the leaked cache of documents which exposed the flimsy grounds on which many detainees were transferred to the camp and portrayed a system focused overwhelmingly on extracting intelligence from prisoners.
A further series of reports based on the files reveal:
• A single star informer at the base won his freedom by incriminating at least 123 other prisoners there. The US military source described Mohammed Basardah as an "invaluable" source who had shown "exceptional co-operation", but lawyers for other inmates claim his evidence is unreliable.
• US interrogators frequently clashed over the handling of detainees, with members of the Joint Task Force Guantánamo (JTF GTMO) in several cases overruling recommendations by the Criminal Investigative Task Force (CITF) that prisoners should be released. CITF investigators also disapproved of methods adopted by the JTF's military interrogators.
• New light on how Osama bin Laden escaped from Tora Bora as American and British special forces closed in on his mountain refuge in December 2001, including intelligence claiming that a local Pakistani warlord provided fighters to guide him to safety in the north-east of Afghanistan.
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