By GottaLaff
It seems like a daily occurrence now:
Someone comes forward to share his or her
vile revelations about the
Bush Crime Family's practice of repeatedly
using torture, and then covering it up:
Army Private Brandon Neely served as a prison guard at Guantánamo in the first years the facility was in operation. With the Bush Administration, and thus the threat of retaliation against him, now gone, Neely decided to step forward and tell his story. “The stuff I did and the stuff I saw was just wrong,” he told the Associated Press. Neely describes the arrival of detainees in full sensory-deprivation garb, he details their sexual abuse by medical personnel, torture by other medical personnel, brutal beatings out of frustration, fear, and retribution, the first hunger strike and its causes, torturous shackling, positional torture, interference with religious practices and beliefs, verbal abuse, restriction of recreation, the behavior of mentally ill detainees, an isolation regime that was put in place for child-detainees, and his conversations with prisoners David Hicks and Rhuhel Ahmed.
But we should look forward, not back, according to Team Obama. I'm a big fan, Prez O, but I'm a bigger fan of justice and the Constitution. My hope is that the president is waiting for things like this to turn up so that he can say that, clearly, he would be justified in nailing these thugs.
Neely:
- [The guards ] were put under great pressure to get rough with the prisoners and to violate the standards they learned.
- [There were] displays of contempt for Islam by the camp authorities, and also specific documentation of mistreatment of the Qu’ran. [...] Moreover, it is clear that the Pentagon Public Affairs office was fully aware, even as it went on the attack against Newsweek, that its claims were false and the weekly’s reporting was accurate.
- [H]ealth professionals are right in the thick of the torture and abuse of the prisoners—suggesting a systematic collapse of professional ethics driven by the Pentagon itself. He describes body searches undertaken for no legitimate security purpose, simply to sexually invade and humiliate the prisoners. [...] The Bush White House vehemently objected to provisions of the law dealing with rape by instrumentality. When House negotiators pressed to know why, they were met first with silence and then an embarrassed acknowledgment that a key part of the Bush program included invasion of the bodies of prisoners in a way that might be deemed rape by instrumentality under existing federal and state criminal statutes. While these techniques have long been known, the role of health care professionals in implementing them is shocking.
And in case all of that isn't obvious enough, here is the reason we need to conduct a full and thorough investigation... right here:
Neely’s account demonstrates once more how much the Bush team kept secret and how little we still know about their comprehensive program of official cruelty and torture.
You can find his entire account
here.
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