FBI files detail Guantánamo torture tactics

Mark Tran
Wednesday January 3, 2007
Guardian Unlimited Excerpt

Captives at Guantánamo Bay were chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor for 18 hours or more, urinating and defecating on themselves, an FBI report has revealed.

The accounts of mistreatment were contained in FBI documents released yesterday (pdf) as part of a lawsuit involving the American Civil Liberties Union, a civil liberties group. (I have tried to open this file but it is blank.Ed.JB)

In the 2004 inquiry, the FBI asked nearly 500 employees who had served at Guantánamo Bay to report possible mistreatment by law enforcement or military personnel. Twenty-six incidents were reported, some of which had emerged in earlier document releases.

Besides being shackled to the floor, detainees were subjected to extremes of temperature. One witness said he saw a barefoot detainee shaking with cold because the air conditioning had bought the temperature close to freezing.

On another occasion, the air conditioning was off in an unventilated room, making the temperature over 38C (100F) and a detainee lay almost unconscious on the floor with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been pulling out his hair throughout the night.

In October 2002, one interrogator squatted over a copy of the Qur'an during intensive questioning of a Muslim prisoner, who was "incensed" by the tactic, according to an FBI agent. On another occasion, an agent was asked by a "civilian contractor" to come and see something. "There was an unknown bearded longhaired d (detainee) gagged w/duct tape that had covered much of his head," the FBI document said. When the FBI officer asked if the detainee had spit at interrogators, the "contractor laughingly replied that d had been chanting the Qur'an non-stop. No answer how they planned to remove the duct tape," the report said.

After an erroneous report of Qur'an abuse prompted deadly protests overseas in 2005, the US military conducted an investigation that confirmed five incidents of intentional and unintentional mishandling of the book at the detention facility. It acknowledged that soldiers and interrogators had kicked the Qur'an, had stood on it and, in one case, had inadvertently sprayed urine on a copy.An FBI agent called W also heard that female interrogators would sometimes wet their hands and touch detainees' faces in order to disrupt their prayers. Such actions would make some Muslims consider themselves unclean so they would stop praying.

Madonna Closes Off Adopted Child's Father?
Yohane Banda, the father of the one yr. old boy adopted by Madonna says he wants to know hpw his sone is getting on - but he is unable to contact the star. "I have no phone nor address for her - I don't know how I can find out how he is, I only talked to her once at the High Court and I want to talk to her now."

Seymour Martin Lipset, 84 Yrs. Dies on Dec.31st.2006:

As a young Trotskyist at City College, he became fascinated with the question of why the United States never had a major socialist party.

As he metamorphosed from political partisan to social scientist, his quest for an answer to that question — as well as the many others that logically followed — resulted in dozens of books and hundreds of articles. He became known for his argument that America’s ideology of individualism precluded socialism in the European form.

Francis Fukuyama, the political philosopher, wrote in 1997 in The New York Times Book Review that Mr. Lipset’s insights into ways that America was different from other nations made him “the most thoughtful contemporary authority on American exceptionalism.”He abandoned his socialist ideology in favor of rigorous intellectual methodology, much of which he developed.He became active in the conservative wing of the Democratic Party and was one of the first intellectuals to be called a neoconservative.

For the last years of his life, his wife said, Mr. Lipset was thought to be unable to speak because of the effects of an earlier stroke, at least until a visitor mispronounced the name of Jacques Derrida, the influential French philosopher. Astonishingly, Mr. Lipset corrected him.

Excerpts from Douglas Martin's Obituary.New York Times