Super Moderator
Location: essex ma
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ranger: it'd be easiest if you just read the newspaper.
i still find the argument that the ny times--or any other american newspaper--is "out to get" cowboy george to be laughable.
following that logic, you would also argue that the rest of the world is too.
Quote:
The Guantanamo Debate Comes Home
By Jefferson Morley
washingtonpost.com Staff writer
Monday, June 20, 2005; 7:36 PM
The U.S.-run detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, needs "to be closed down or cleaned up," former president Bill Clinton told the Financial Times. It may be surprising that the former American president is quoted in a British newspaper. But then again the international online media has long been ahead of U.S. news outlets in airing debate about the detention facility.
The first full Senate hearings on Guantanamo, held last week, brought home to Capitol Hill an issue that has percolated in the foreign press for two years.
The "edifice of silence and acquiescence [around Guantanamo] is beginning to crack," said Gulf News, based in the United Arab Emirates. Sen. Joseph Biden's recent call for the closing of the facility known as Camp X-Ray was described as "a sign that the damage the lawless place does to the image of America was finally being recognised by politicians in the corridors of power."
"Debate on Guantanamo Heats Up Ahead of Senate Hearings," declared Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, based in Prague. RFE/RL noted high in its story that only four of the 500 Guantanamo prisoners have been formally charged with a crime.
"Even the solid support of majority Republicans in Congress, who have consistently viewed Guantanamo as necessary in the post-Sept 11 battle against terrorism, is eroding," said Dawn, the leading English language newspaper in Pakistan.
Still, there are distinct differences between the American and international debate.
In the U.S. media, the debate about Guantanamo often focuses on the propriety of the language used to describe the treatment of prisoners. The White House, conservative columnists and his Senate colleagues criticized Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) for saying U.S. interrogation techniques were reminiscent of Nazi Germany. The Post's Anne Applebaum, a Guantanamo critic, rebuked Amnesty International for likening the prison camp to the Soviet gulag.
In the foreign media, the debate is more likely to focus on the propriety of the treatment itself.
The Sydney Morning Herald picked up on Time magazine's report about the man now believed to be the so-called 20th hijacker in the September 11 attacks. Mohammad al-Kahtani was "forcibly injected with fluids, not allowed to go to the toilet until he gave information, threatened with military dogs and kept awake by Christina Aguilera pop songs.
"The revelations have left some congressmen aghast," the SMH said. "A Republican senator, Chuck Hagel, suggested there was 'a vacuum of leadership' at the Pentagon."
The Mail & Guardian in South Africa highlighted the testimony of a U.S. military lawyer who told a Senate hearing that the military tribunals at Guantanamo were a "tremendous failure." Navy Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift said that his client, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, Osama bin Laden's driver, had been left mentally disturbed after being held in solitary confinement for seven months.
"Swift said that Hamdan was offered the opportunity to see a defence lawyer only if he pleaded guilty to the charges made against him," the M&G reported.
The foreign press also devotes more coverage to the Guantanamo prisoners themselves.
Last month, the Daily Times in Pakistan reported that three men released from Guantanamo had told a team of Pakistani intelligence officers that their interrogators had desecrated the Koran. "They would stand on the Quran and throw it away, saying the book teaches you terrorism," the men said, according to documents cited by the Lahore-based news site.
Prisoners also reported that "women interrogators were particularly indecent with prisoners." Such allegations match those first reported by The Washington Post back in February that female interrogators "used sexually suggestive tactics" such as touching Muslim detainees provocatively and, using dye, pretended to smear menstrual blood on the men. "They would press their sensitive parts against prisoners' bodies and when a woman interrogator threw menstrual blood on the face of a prisoner, we resorted to a hunger strike," the former detainees said in the Daily Times article.
In Bahrain, the Gulf Daily News reports that members of parliament are pressing the government for more information about six Bahraini men held at Guantanamo.
The Yemen Times reports that an Amnesty International lawyer told families of prisoners about "legal measures they said were designed to pressure the U.S. administration to give detainees fair trials and release those who prove to be innocent of the charges of terrorism."
A columnist for the news site adds that the response of Bush administration officials to criticism about Guantanamo suggests those officials think they have a "God given hold on infallibility and their rights are only governed by the evil interests they serve rather than the desire to enhance and uphold the rights and welfare of people all over the world."
In his interview with the FT, Clinton struck a pragmatic note about the abuses, citing two huge problems that have nothing to do with morality.
Practical problem number one. "If we get the reputation for abusing people," Clinton said, "it puts our own soldiers much more at risk" when they are serving overseas.
The second problem is, "if you rough up somebody bad enough they'll eventually tell you whatever you want to hear to get you to stop doing it."
If only for practical reasons, Washington has now joined the global debate about Guantanamo.
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must be tough for supporters of bushwar, being the only correct people on earth.
anyway, i suspect at this point the thread really is veering away from its original point--up to now, i could see the drift as logical because, in the end, your position on this question hinges on prior position(s) on the war itself.
now it is about the absurd contention that the ny times is somehow a left newspaper.
granted, it is not as blinkered and intellectually bankrupt as the washington times--but then again, few papers are. without the reverend moon's backing it, i doubt seriously that paper would still exist.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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