Guantanamo Bay Abuses

Someone alert Amnesty International!

There are reports of hundreds of abuses at the prison at Guantanamo Bay!

No, the guards aren't attacking the prisoners. The prisoners are attacking the guards.

Thank you Landmark Legal Foundation for bringing out this information.

The lib media and so-called human rights organizations have been obsessed with the supposedly routine torture of prisoners at Gitmo.

No one, until now, has bothered to document the treatment of guards at the facility.

It's about time.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay during the war on terror have attacked their military guards hundreds of times, turning broken toilet parts, utensils, radios and even a bloody lizard tail into makeshift weapons.

Pentagon incident reports reviewed by The Associated Press show Military Police guards are routinely head-butted, spat upon and doused by "cocktails" of feces, urine, vomit and sperm collected in meal cups by the prisoners.

They've been repeatedly grabbed, punched or assaulted by prisoners who reach through the small "bean holes" used to deliver food and blankets through cell doors, the reports say. Serious assaults requiring medical attention, however, are rare, the reports indicate.

The detainee "reached under the face mask of an IRF (Initial Reaction Force) team member's helmet and scratched his face, attempting to gouge his eyes," states a May 27, 2005, report on an effort to remove a recalcitrant prisoner from his cell.

"The IRF team member received scratches to his face and eye socket area," the report said.

It has to really bug the AP to put out this story.

Prisoners have engaged in abuses.

I thought the prisoners were actually tortured, helpless victims.

They sound like a pretty tough bunch of bad guys, not the meek and mild innocents that the lib media and lib lawyers and lib so-called "human rights" groups claim are being victimized and unjustly held.

Guards currently stationed at Guantanamo describe a tense atmosphere in which prisoners often orchestrate violence in hopes of unnerving their captors, especially with attacks using bodily fluids.

"I mean, seeing a human being act that way, it's terrifying. ... You are constantly watching before you take your next step to see if something is about to happen," Navy Senior Chief Petty Officer Mack D. Keen told AP in an interview from Guantanamo.

"You see little signs. They kind of show their hand every once in a while. They'll take their Quran and they'll cover it up," he said. "When you see a group of detainees taking their Quran and putting it away, you know something is about to happen."

Yes, protect that Quran before throwing bodily fluids around.

Moazamm Begg, 38, a prisoner for more than two years at Guantanamo before being released to Great Britain, said he was suspicious of the Pentagon's description of incidents, especially allegations that Muslim men tore their Qurans or used sperm in attacks. The Pentagon continues to publicly question Begg's claim of innocence.

"This just doesn't make sense _ especially since for Muslims this would be something that was disgusting, something that just wouldn't be done," he said. He added that some detainees told him they had mixed toothpaste and spit in the cocktails to make it look like semen.

Begg says that doesn't make sense, tearing up the Quran or using body fluids in attacks. Muslims wouldn't do that.

MUSLIMS HIJACKED PLANES FILLED WITH CIVILIANS AND FLEW THEM INTO BUILDINGS.

Does that make sense?

MUSLIMS ROUTINELY BLOW THEMSELVES UP TO KILL AS MANY CIVILIANS AS POSSIBLE.

Does that make sense?

MUSLIM MILITIAS HIDE AMONG WOMEN AND CHILDREN, IN SCHOOLS, HOSPITALS, AND MOSQUES, EXPLOITING THEM AS HUMAN SHIELDS.

Does that make sense?

Hey, Begg! Are those things disgusting to Muslims?

Are those things "something that just wouldn't be done" by Muslims?

Begg, who has written a book and spoken frequently about his experience, said most incidents he witnessed were spontaneous reactions "when word spread" among prisoners that a guard had done something wrong.

"I rarely saw lone prisoners acting out on their own for no reason except if they had some sort of mental illness or if they were on medication," he said.

Naturally, AP reporter John Solomon would seek out someone like Begg to comment on the incident reports.

Solomon is looking to discredit the reports and to make up excuses for the prisoners' behavior.

The lib media are not about to let go of the anti-American Guantanamo torture story.

Nonetheless, the incident reports released under the Freedom of Information Act to a conservative legal group and reviewed by AP, provide a rare chronicle of events inside the prison from the guards' perspective.

Why is it that the lib media never qualify their reports about abuses on Gitmo prisoners with phrases like "from the prisoners' perspective"?

Entire wings of prisoners were reported to become riotous after complaints emerged that guards mishandled a Quran or mistreated prisoners. On two occasions, however, prisoners themselves were reported to have destroyed their Muslim holy books, the reports state.

"Detainee residing in cell (redacted) block tore his Quran into small pieces," a guard reported in May 2003. A month later, a prisoner "did intentionally destroy his Quran and throw (it) out of his cell," another report stated.

Will Newsweek run a story about this?

No chance. Qurans are only destroyed and flushed down toilets by the Americans in their fictional world.

Read some more of the details of the reports.

It's a rare occasion that a lib media outlet would put out this sort of information.

Luckily for them, they have dead civilians in Lebanon to dwell on, so they can easily bury this story or ignore it altogether.

The reports detail more than 440 incidents between guards and prisoners from December 2002 through summer 2005 that resulted in recommendations of discipline, an average of about three per week. The names of guards and prisoners as well as the final discipline were blacked out by the Pentagon.

Often, guards went weeks without reporting problems; other times incidents were bunched together during times of frustration and tension.

For instance, nearly a quarter of the incidents occurred in July 2005, the month dozens of detainees started an extended hunger strike.

Tensions likewise flared during Christmas week 2004, with inmates frequently spitting on guards. On Christmas Eve, a prisoner who was angry that he couldn't finish his meal was said to have used a plastic fork-spoon utensil _ called a spork _ to attack a guard collecting his tray.

"Detainee stabbed the MP guard ... in the hand with his spork from chow meal," the report said, adding the prisoner later "made a slicing motion across his neck" and vowed to kill the guard.

With many nearing five years in U.S. captivity, the prisoners "have a Ph.D. in being a detainee" and "know our procedures and they try to turn them against us and try to make us question what we are doing," said Army Lt. Col. Michael J. Nicolucci, the prison's executive officer.

"They'll take the smallest things, be it a piece of rust," he said. "They told us they are going to take that piece of rust and they are going for the jugular, they are going for the eye. They know what our vulnerabilities are, anatomically speaking."

Meal plates, shower flip-flops, cleaning brushes and other items deemed harmless in civilian life also are commonly turned into weapons, the reports said. For instance:

_"Detainee in cell (redacted) grabbed the radio from an MP and then threw the radio at the MP. The detainee then threw rocks at the MP," a Dec. 23, 2003, incident report stated.

_A detainee "reached out of his bean hole and attacked MP (name redacted) with a piece of metal foot pad from toilet striking him on the left hip area," a July 15, 2005, report said.

_"Detainee broke off the top of his sink, subsequently broke out the window then began throwing the sink and pieces of pipes at the Block Guard," a March 25, 2005, report said.

One of the most unusual incidents detailed in the four-inch stack of incident reports occurred when a detainee in the prison recreation yard assaulted a guard with a bloody tail torn from a lizard.

The detainee "caught the iguana by the tail at which time the tail detached," the May 2005 report described. When the guard turned to talk to a commanding officer, "he felt something strike him in the lower right back" and then "saw the tail on the ground at his feet and blood was in the same area of his uniform." The detainee said he was "just playing."

These are just a few of the incidents of abuse.

There are over four hundred!

Can you imagine how the lib media would react if they had four hundred prisoner abuse incident reports to splash?

They would be positively giddy.

Nicolucci said one of the most serious incidents occurred this May, too recent to be recorded in the Pentagon's released reports. A prisoner staged an apparent suicide attempt while his inmates slicked the floors with human waste, seeking to overpower guards when they slipped, he said.

"We provide fans in order to keep them cool," Nicolucci recalled. "And they were using the basket, or the grate of the fan as a shield, the blades as machetes, the pole as a battering ram."

That disturbance was turned back in a few minutes with some guards and prisoners sustaining minor injuries, he said.

Take note Amnesty International: The prisoners get fans to keep them cool. And what was done with the fan in this case?

It was used by the prisoners in a carefully planned attack against the guards.

The Landmark Legal Foundation, a conservative legal group that fought to force the Pentagon to release the reports under the Freedom of Information Act, said it hopes the information brings balance to the Guantanamo debate.

"Lawyers for the detainees have done a great job painting their clients as innocent victims of U.S. abuse when the fact is that these detainees, as a group, are barbaric and extremely dangerous," Landmark President Mark Levin said. "They are using their terrorist training on the battlefield to abuse our guards and manipulate our Congress and our court system."

It should not have taken a legal fight under the Freedom of Information Act for these reports to be made public.

There most definitely needs to be balance.

These latest revelations provide crucial context, necessary to understanding the situation at Gitmo.

Though all detainees are foreigners, many are clearly Americanized when it comes to their insults and gestures. Male guards are frequently derided as "donkeys" while female guards are routinely called "bitches" or harassed by references to their breasts or genitalia, the reports said.

In all, nearly a quarter of incidents involved female guards, the reports show.

"They absolutely target female guards," Nicolucci said. "They have a lot of cultural biases about females, and we let them know in our culture that females do everything males do in a professional job environment, and we just hold firm."

Is this appropriate behavior by Muslims?

Perhaps Moazamm Begg could comment.

This is interesting--

The bodily fluid attacks are so numerous that guards now frequently wear specialized shields to protect their faces.

This certainly runs counter to the impression of Guantanamo that the lib media give.

The attacks are so common that our guards need special gear to protect them from the violent prisoners.

The incident reports also are noteworthy for information that is missing. With redacted names, it is impossible to tell whether bad behavior is widespread or the work of a few repeat offenders. Likewise, the documents don't tell whether certain guards are prone to confrontation.

Prisoners' hunger strikes, suicide attempts and threats to injure themselves aren't considered disciplinary matters and thus aren't recorded in the incident reports. Yet the Pentagon acknowledges there have been scores of such incidents.

Again, Solomon is clearly lending support to the prisoners. He plants doubts and suggests that "certain guards" may bring the attacks on themselves -- classic blaming the victim stuff.

Classic "blame America" stuff.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a prisoner of war during Vietnam, said the treatment of the guards has been overshadowed by the legal and political debates surrounding the detainees, but he has been impressed with the guards' professionalism.

"Our personnel there have perhaps the most difficult task you can have in the military outside of being in a combat zone. ... These are bad guys and some of the most hardened of hardened criminals. And some I think will need to be kept permanently," he said.

No kidding. The treatment of our guards has been overshadowed.

More accurately, it's been virtually ignored.

We can thank Dick Durbin and those of his ilk.

McCain said the detainees' behavior and the likelihood of permanent confinement only hastens the need for the administration and Congress to finalize detention and trial policies consistent with the Supreme Court's direction.

While Washington addresses those questions, the guards look to stay one step ahead of the detainees.

"Yes, you do get upset but you get somebody to take your place," Keen said in explaining how he survives the tensions of the cell block. "You go outside. You walk it off and you come back and (say) I want to be back in the fight."

God bless our military, for the sacrifices they make and the dangers they face to keep us safe.