Senator Dick Durbin spoke to the Senate on June 14 and quoted the following from a report written by an FBI agent:
On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold....
Senator Durbin then remarked:
If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime -- Pol Pot or others -- that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners.
Immediately, Bush's propagandists went into attack mode - almost as if they had received the same talking points memo simultaneously. The airwaves were filled with supporters of human degredation accusing Durbin of treason. Recovering drug addict Rush Limbaugh equated a stay at Guantanamo with a tropical vacation and seized the opportunity to sell humorous Club Gitmo T-Shirts from his website.
Limbaugh read the part of Durbin's speech (above) where Durbin quoted the FBI report about the unairconditioned room and omitted the part about detainees chained to the floor. Then, he played an audio segment of Durbin's remark that followed (see above). Limbaugh then feigned anger and reminded listeners that our troops are in Iraq where it is 130 degrees.
Some talking heads paraphrased Durbin's remarks and said he called American soldiers Nazis. Recovering alcoholic radio personality Glenn Beck implied that Durbin called American soldiers "baby killers". Dick Cheney informed Americans that the detainees were bad people. Senator Duncan Hunter held a press conference where he brought out plates of food to demonstrate how cushy the detainees had it.
Of course, Durbin's critics were more guilty of hyperbole than Durbin himself. Senators and pundits know that many of the interrogations at Guantanamo that have been criticized were conducted by the CIA. Much of the information known about detainee abuse has come from the FBI and the military. So, it was not American soldiers that Durbin was criticizing - it was "Americans".
Cheney's assertion that the detainees are bad people also falls flat. He should know that actual hearings to determine the culpability of detainees only began this year. Cheney should also explain why so many bad people have already been released from Guantanamo. If the detainees are all dangerous terrorists, why are they being released? Many of the accounts of abuse have come from the detainees who have been released.
The supposed outrage at Durbin's speech about Guantanamo followed on the heels of the Newsweek incident that started on May 9. Then, the battle cry of the propagandists was "Newsweek lied and people died". A more accurate slogan would have been: A senior government official lied and people died.
...sources tell NEWSWEEK: interrogators, in an attempt to rattle suspects, flushed a Qur'an down a toilet and led a detainee around with a collar and dog leash.
These findings, expected in an upcoming report by the U.S. Southern Command in Miami, could put former Gitmo commander Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller in the hot seat.
The Newsweek report was followed by protests in Afghanistan which were attributed to the Newsweek story. Apparently, Muslims in Afghanistan and Pakistan were made aware of the story after officials in Pakistan commented on it. According to a BBC report, at least four protesters were shot by the police.
In the world inhabited by Bush propagandists, Newsweek should have known that their story would provoke protests where police would have to kill people. Therefore, Newsweek lied and people died. In this bizarro propaganda world, hundreds of reports of everything from the torture of Muslims to the abuse of the Qur'an would not be enough to enrage Muslims, but the one sentence printed in Newsweek would certainly lead to global mayhem.
Administration officials immediately denied Qur'an abuse, despite many similar reports. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Richard Myers even told reporters that so far no allegations had been proven.
Newsweek then issued a retraction of sorts and a later Newsweek report addressed how the story came to be written. According to Newsweek, reporter Michael Isikoff had heard of a SouthCom report that dealt with an investigation of detainee abuse at Guantanamo. He then contacted a senior government official (who was deemed to be a reliable source) about the report. This official gave Isikoff the information about the Qur'an being flushed down a toilet.
Another Pentagon official then reviewed the Newsweek story before it went to press. It is unknown whether having the Pentagon review Newsweek stories before publication is ordinary procedure. The official had no objection about the Qur'an story and Newsweek went to press with it.
On Saturday, Isikoff spoke to his original source, the senior government official, who said that he clearly recalled reading investigative reports about mishandling the Qur'an, including a toilet incident. But the official, still speaking anonymously, could no longer be sure that these concerns had surfaced in the SouthCom report.
So, the original anonymous source didn't retract the story about the toilet incident, he merely told Isikoff that he could not be sure if the story was contained in the SouthCom report. Bush's propagandists wanted the public to believe that Newsweek had made the whole story up. They wanted the public to believe that the "false" Newsweek report had so enraged Muslims in Afghanistan that riots ensued.
Bush's propagandists wanted to pretend that over two years worth of negative reports on Guantanamo did not exist (see below). They wanted the public to believe that the hamfisted approach taken by the United States in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo towards Muslims had no effect on Muslim perception, but one Newsweek story created chaos. Bush's political operatives are the most shameless liars in history or they are completely insane. Actually, maybe they are both.
THE GUANTANAMO CHRONOLOGY
09/18/02 - AP: Arab satellite television Al-Jazeera says one of its employees was arrested in Afghanistan and is now being held with Al Qaeda suspects at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo.
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11/07/02 - Joanne Mariner: Here is the New York Times' description of Faiz Muhammad, one of the just-released Afghan men that a reporter visited on October 27:
Babbling at times like a child, the partially deaf, shriveled old man was unable to answer simple questions. He struggled to complete sentences and strained to hear words that were shouted at him. His faded mind kept failing him.
Muhammad told journalists that he was 105 but he appeared to be in his late seventies. His advanced age, and obvious senility, vividly belied the "enemy combatant" label. A second released detainee, who walked with the aid of a cane and was also thought to be in his late seventies, was equally unmartial in appearance and demeanor.
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11/16/02 - Reuters: Former Taliban fighter Jan Mohammad, one of the first detainees to be released from the U.S.
prison at Cuba's Guantanamo Bay, says captives have been beaten on the soles of their feet and subjected to constant mental
torture.
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08/12/03 - Reuters: The US government said today it had neither an exact count nor all the names of hundreds of people captured in Afghanistan over a year ago and now detained at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba.
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10/10/03 - AP: The International Red Cross (ICRC) today said that many detainees being held by the US military in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, were suffering "a worrying deterioration" in mental health because Washington had ignored appeals to give them legal rights.
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10/14/03 - Elaine Cassel: At his press briefing yesterday, Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary who makes Ari Fleichser look like a genius, said that the President "rejects" the report of the Red Cross about the horrible treatment of people in Guantanamo.
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11/20/03 UPI: The U.S. government claims that the detainees are not covered by the Geneva Convention or U.S. law, and though the base is located in Cuba, the Department of Defense said Cuban courts have no authority. Several people have called it a "legal black hole."
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01/09/04 - Human Rights Watch: Guantanamo may also hold a significant number of civilians. Anti-Taliban forces in Afghanistan regularly cast a wide net, sweeping up non-combatants, and many of those they captured were delivered to U.S. officials, and in at least some cases in exchange for bounty payments. According to several sources, ranging from interviews with former detainees to press reports citing U.S. officials in Afghanistan, as many as several dozen detainees sent to Guantanamo were simply farmers, taxi drivers, and laborers with no meaningful ties to the Taliban or al-Qaeda - not the enemy combatants the Bush Administration claimed.
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01/16/04 - Reuters: The United States has held three child detainees at its military base in Guantanamo Bay for more than a year and the Pentagon said on Thursday it has no plans to move or free them, despite international pressure.
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01/20/04 - The Guardian: The families and supporters of the nine British terror suspects held in Guantanamo Bay launched a new effort today to pressurise the government into resolving the fate of the detainees.
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02/04/04 - UPI: Complicating the issue is the sporadic release of a number of detainees; in the wake of last week's release of three teenagers, another 87 detainees have been transferred pending release. In addition, four detained Saudis have been transferred to continue their imprisonment in Saudi Arabia.
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03/12/04 - The Guardian: Jamal al-Harith told how US soldiers brought in prostitutes to the camp, and paraded them naked in front of the many devout Muslims. The 37-year-old also claimed he was kicked, punched and assaulted with batons.
He told the Daily Mirror that detainees were shackled for up to 15 hours at a time in hand and leg cuffs with metal links to the skin. Mr Harith said punishment beatings were meted out by guards and prisoners were subjected to pyschological torture and mind games in an effort to break them.
Four of the Britons were arrested on arrival in the UK on Tuesday and held for more than a day at a high-security police station in London. The fifth was detained for just a few hours at the military airbase where their flight landed. They are now recovering with their families.
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05/16/04 - The Observer: Dozens of videotapes of American guards allegedly engaged in brutal attacks on Guantanamo Bay detainees have been stored and catalogued at the camp, an investigation by The Observer has revealed.
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09/13/04 - The Guardian: Evidence of prisoner abuse and possible war crimes at Guantanamo Bay reached the highest levels of the Bush administration as early as autumn 2002, but Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, chose to do nothing about it, according to a new investigation published exclusively in the Guardian today.
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10/17/04 - NY Times: Many detainees at Guantánamo Bay were regularly subjected to harsh and coercive treatment, several people who worked in the prison said in recent interviews, despite longstanding assertions by military officials that such treatment had not occurred except in some isolated cases.
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10/18/04 - The Guardian: The abusive treatment of inmates at Guantánamo Bay was far more widespread than the Pentagon has admitted, according to a new report published yesterday.
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11/09/04 - Washington Post: The special trials established to determine the guilt or innocence of prisoners at the U.S. military prison in Cuba are unlawful and cannot continue in their current form, a federal judge ruled yesterday.
In a setback for the Bush administration, U.S. District Judge James Robertson found that detainees at the Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, may be prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions and therefore entitled to the protections of international and military law - which the government has declined to grant them.
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11/30/04 - NY Times: The International Committee of the Red Cross has charged in confidential reports to the United States government that the American military has intentionally used psychological and sometimes physical coercion "tantamount to torture" on prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
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12/17/04 - Washington Post: Within the heavily guarded perimeters of the Defense Department's much-discussed Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, the CIA has maintained a detention facility for valuable al Qaeda captives that has never been mentioned in public, according to military officials and several current and former intelligence officers.
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12/21/04 - LA Times: One FBI report said a Guantanamo Bay detainee in May 2002 was spat upon and then beaten when he tried to protect himself. At one point, soldiers apparently were "beating him and grabbed his head and beat it into the cell floor," knocking him unconscious, the report said.
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12/26/04 - Washington Post: Brent Mickum, a Washington attorney for one of the detainees, said that "now there's no question these guys have been tortured. When we first got involved in this case, I wondered whether this could all be true. But every allegation that I've heard has now come to pass and been confirmed by the government's own papers."
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12/27/04 - Reason: The FBI memos, which included more graphic descriptions of detainee abuse (including "strangulation, beatings, [and] placement of lit cigarettes into the detainees ear openings"), bore an uncanny resemblance to previous accusations made by 10 Gitmo prisoners.
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12/27/04 - Miami Herald: "This is a very big deal," said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who is a member of the Air Force Reserves and served as a prosecutor in the Judge Advocate General's Corps, the military's legal branch. "We need to bring some order out of legal chaos right now, because it's hurting the military and hurting us around the world."
Graham and other members of the Armed Services and Judiciary committees say they want to pin down top administration officials to clarify practices for interrogation and detention.
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12/27/04 - Boston Globe: The CIA is refusing to disclose any information about abuse of detainees in Afghanistan and at the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, invoking a legal precedent that involved a secret project by billionaire Howard Hughes to recover a sunken Soviet nuclear submarine in the 1970s.
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12/31/04 - AP: The Justice Department released a rewritten legal memo on what constitutes torture, backing away from its own assertions prior to the Iraqi prison abuse scandal that torture had to involve "excruciating and agonizing pain."
The 17-page memo omitted two of the most controversial assertions made in now-disavowed 2002 Justice Department documents: that President Bush, as commander in chief in wartime, had authority superseding U.S. anti-torture laws and that U.S. personnel had several legal defenses against criminal liability in such cases.
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01/01/05 - NY Times: While all the detainees were threatened with harsh tactics if they did not cooperate, about one in six were eventually subjected to those procedures, one former interrogator estimated. The interrogator said that when new interrogators arrived they were told they had great flexibility in extracting information from detainees because the Geneva Conventions did not apply at the base.
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01/07/05 - The Guardian: Doctors at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib used their medical knowledge to help devise coercive interrogation methods for detainees including sleep deprivation, stress positions and other abuse, it was reported yesterday.
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01/10/05 - IPS: The ACLU’s review of the documents also shows that other critical records have not been released. For instance, the FBI has withheld a copy of a May 30, 2003 "electronic communication" in which the FBI formally complained to the Defense Department about the treatment of detainees.
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01/12/05 - Harry Browne: In all the arguing over the presumed rights of a terrorist, one thing is being overlooked: no one knows for sure whether the person being tortured really is a terrorist.
There is a very good reason we have a 6th amendment in the Bill of Rights: Until the accused has had his day in court, until he has had the benefit of an attorney who can call attention to weaknesses in the case against him, until he has had the opportunity to confront and cross-examine those who have accused him, until his case can be judged by people who don't have a vested interest in convicting him, no one can be sure the accused is guilty.
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01/13/05 - NY Times: At the urging of the White House, Congressional leaders scrapped a legislative measure last month that would have imposed new restrictions on the use of extreme interrogation measures by American intelligence officers, Congressional officials say.
The Senate had approved the new restrictions, by a 96-to-2 vote, as part of the intelligence reform legislation. They would have explicitly extended to intelligence officers a prohibition against torture or inhumane treatment, and would have required the C.I.A. as well as the Pentagon to report to Congress about the methods they were using.
But in intense closed-door negotiations, Congressional officials said, four senior members from the House and Senate deleted the restrictions from the final bill after the White House expressed opposition.
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01/14/05 - The Guardian: A senior US official told the New York Times last week that three-quarters of the 550 prisoners at Guantánamo Bay no longer have any intelligence of value. But they will not be released out of concern that they pose a continuing threat to the US.
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01/15/05 - BBC: One FBI agent described in a memo seeing prisoners at Guantanamo shackled, hand and foot, in a foetal position for up to 24 hours at a time, and left to defecate on themselves.
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01/17/05 - Newsweek: Many of the FBI accounts came from conscience-stricken agents troubled by what they had witnessed. One agent reported seeing a detainee sitting on the floor of an interrogation cell with an Israeli flag draped around him while he was bombarded by loud music and a strobe light - almost exactly what Al Qosi had alleged. Another reported seeing detainees chained hand and foot in fetal positions, in barren cells with no chair, food or water.
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01/18/05 - Cathryn Prince: All the while, the government demands that American citizens take it on good faith that these prisoners are too dangerous to ever be freed. Of course, many of them might indeed be guilty of terrorist acts, or of aiding in terrorist acts. However, under the rules set forth, these prisoners are guilty first, and will never have an opportunity to prove otherwise.
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01/19/05 - International Herald Tribune: Officers of the Central Intelligence Agency and other nonmilitary personnel fall outside the bounds of a 2002 directive issued by President George W. Bush that pledged the humane treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody, Alberto Gonzales, the White House counsel, said in a document.
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01/23/05 - LA Times: The FBI has said that the aggressive techniques its agents witnessed at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and elsewhere were not effective in producing usable information.
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01/25/05 - The Independent: Twenty-three inmates at the US detention facility in Guantanamo Bay staged a mass suicide attempt in 2003 by trying to hang or strangle themselves.
The US Southern Command yesterday admitted that, between 18 and 26 August 2003, the detainees tried to hang or strangle themselves with pieces of clothing and other items in their cells.
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01/26/05 - Knight Ridder: In more than 200 pages of written responses to members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who plan to vote Wednesday on his nomination, Gonzales told senators that laws and treaties prohibit torture by any U.S. agent without exception.
But he said the Convention Against Torture treaty, as ratified by the Senate, doesn't prohibit the use of "cruel, inhuman or degrading" tactics on non-U.S. citizens who are captured abroad, in Iraq or elsewhere.
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01/27/05 - Sydney Morning Herald: Mamdouh Habib was the victim of atrocities fit for a concentration camp, including being tied to the ground while a prostitute menstruated on him, his lawyer said yesterday.
Interrogators at the US prison camp at Guantanamo Bay had also told the Sydney man they had killed his family and superimposed animal heads on photos of his wife and children, Steven Hopper said.
Mr Habib is due back in Sydney within a fortnight after the US said it would release him without charge despite holding him for more than three years on suspicion he knew about the September 11 attacks and had trained with al-Qaeda.
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02/10/05 - Washington Post: Female interrogators repeatedly used sexually suggestive tactics to try to humiliate and pry information from devout Muslim men held at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, according to a military investigation not yet public and newly declassified accounts from detainees.
A wide-ranging Pentagon investigation, which has not yet been released, generally confirms the detainees' allegations, according to a senior Defense Department official familiar with the report.
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02/10/05 - BBC: Terror suspects held at the US military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are being subjected to routine religious humiliation, some detainees claim.
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02/17/05 - The Guardian: A British resident held by the US in Guantánamo Bay was directly threatened with murder by Libyan secret services while in captivity, it was claimed yesterday.
Omar Deghayes, 35, was born in Libya but fled to Britain as a child after his father was murdered by the Gadafy regime.
Mr Deghayes also alleges beatings and ill-treatment by the US that left him blinded in one eye after a soldier plunged his finger into it, and claims that he had human excrement smeared on his face.
Mr Deghayes grew up in Brighton and studied law at Wolverhampton University and then in Huddersfield. His family say he had given sermons in a mosque condemning terrorism and violence in the name of Islam.
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03/21/05 - The Australian: Video footage of the treatment of prisoners by the US military at Guantanamo Bay would reveal many cases of substantial abuse as "explosive as anything from Abu Ghraib", a lawyer said today.
Adelaide lawyer Stephen Kenny, who represented Australian David Hicks during the early part of his detention at the military prison in Cuba, told a law conference today 500 hours of videotape of prisoners at the US base existed.
But he said the Government was refusing to release the tapes because of "privacy concerns".
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03/22/05 - Washington Post: U.S. law enforcement agents working at the military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, concluded that controversial interrogation practices used there by the Defense Department produced intelligence information that was "suspect at best," an FBI agent told a superior in a memo in May last year.
But the Justice Department, which reviewed the memo for national security secrets before releasing it to a civil liberties group in December, redacted the FBI agent's conclusion.
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03/23/05 - Washington Post: A federal judge expressed skepticism yesterday about the legality of possible Bush administration plans to transfer dozens of men from the U.S. military prison in Cuba to the custody of foreign countries, saying that would remove detainees from the reach of U.S. courts and eliminate their legal claims for freedom.
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03/27/05 - Washington Post: A military tribunal determined last fall that Murat Kurnaz, a German national seized in Pakistan in 2001, was a member of al Qaeda and an enemy combatant whom the government could detain indefinitely at the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The three military officers on the panel, whose identities are kept secret, said in papers filed in federal court that they reached their conclusion based largely on classified evidence that was too sensitive to release to the public.
In fact, that evidence, recently declassified and obtained by The Washington Post, shows that US military intelligence and German law enforcement authorities had largely concluded there was no information that linked Kurnaz to al Qaeda, any other terrorist organization or terrorist activities.
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04/08/2005 - BBC: The Bush administration has argued that holding detainees without trial is imperative for national security, but lawyers for the Guantanamo Bay inmates argue that the detentions have no basis in law.
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04/19/05 - UPI: So far 232 detainees have left Guantanamo. In addition to the 18 announced Tuesday, 149 have been released outright and 65 transferred to the control of other governments: 29 to Pakistan, five to Morocco, nine to Breat Britain, seven to France, seven to Russia, four to Saudi Arabia, and one each to Spain, Sweden, Kuwait and Australia.
There are now approximately 520 prisoners at Guantanamo, which was created to house prisoners taken in the global war on terror. Some prisoners have been held since January 2002.
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04/29/05 - The Australian: Authorities at Guantanamo Bay staged interrogations of detainees for visiting politicians and generals to give the impression that valuable intelligence was regularly being gathered, says a former US Army translator at the camp.
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05/01/05 - NY Times: A high-level military investigation into accusations of detainee abuse at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has concluded that several prisoners were mistreated or humiliated, perhaps illegally, as a result of efforts to devise innovative methods to gain information, senior military and Pentagon officials say.
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05/01/05 - Physicians for Human Rights: The use of sleep deprivation was a common interrogation tactic in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantánamo. Detainees held at various locations in Afghanistan in 2002 and 2003 describe routinely being deprived of sleep. Similarly, at Guantánamo, sleep deprivation was regularly employed, and continued in 2004. Detainees held in January, March and April 2004 in Mosul and Tikrit, Iraq reported being subject to sleep deprivation.
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05/05/05 - Amy Goodman: Dogs were used on occasion, yes, ma'am.
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05/30/05 - BBC: Speaking on the US television network Fox News, Gen Myers said the camp was "essentially a model facility".
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05/30/05 - NY Times: The increase in lawyers for Guantanamo detainees was set in motion last June when the Supreme Court ruled against the Bush administration and said the prisoners there were entitled to challenge their detentions in federal courts.
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05/31/05 - AP: But a wide variety of detainees at the U.S. lockup at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, alleged they were sold into capture. Their names and other identifying information were blacked out in the transcripts from the tribunals, which were held to determine whether prisoners were correctly classified as enemy combatants.
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05/31/05 - AP: One Guantanamo prisoner told a military panel that American troops beat him so badly he wets his pants now. Another detainee claimed U.S. troops stripped prisoners in Afghanistan and intimidated them with dogs so they would admit to militant activity.
Tales of alleged abuse and forced confessions are among some 1,000 pages of tribunal transcripts the U.S. government released to The Associated Press under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit
With only four men charged to date and military trials stalled because of appeals in U.S. courts, it may be even longer before the fate of the prisoners is sorted out.
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06/01/05 - IPS: Amnesty, however, has stood its ground. ''At Guantanamo, the U.S. has operated an isolated prison camp in which people are confined arbitrarily, held virtually incommunicado, without charge, trial or access to due process. Not a single Guantanamo detainee has had the legality of their detention reviewed by a court,'' despite a Supreme Court ruling last year that provided grounds to do so.
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06/01/05 - Amnesty International: Amnesty International first communicated its concerns at the treatment of prisoners to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld in January 2002 and continued to raise these concerns at the highest levels as allegations of abuse mounted from Afghanistan, Guantanamo and Iraq.
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06/02/05 - The News: Kuwait’s first Guantanamo returnee, who was injured during the US-led war on the former Taliban regime in Afghanistan, charged on Wednesday he was subjected to psychological torture at the US detention camp in Cuba.
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06/11/2005 - Charley Reese: Look, we have laws against terrorism. If there are prisoners in Guantanamo who are guilty of terrorism, charge them, bring them to trial, convict them and put them away. If they are just prisoners of war, then obey the Geneva Conventions. I fail to see how this could possibly threaten our national security.
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06/13/2005 - NY Times: Lawyers representing detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, say that there still may be as many as six prisoners who were captured before their 18th birthday and that the military has sought to conceal the precise number of juveniles at the prison camp.
One lawyer said that his client, a Saudi of Chadian descent, was not yet 15 when he was captured and has told him that he was beaten regularly in his early days at Guantánamo, hanged by his wrists for hours at a time and that an interrogator pressed a burning cigarette into his arm.
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06/13/2005 - The Guardian: Cheney defended the detention of hundreds of terror suspects at the camp.
"The important thing here to understand is that the people that are at Guantanamo are bad people. I mean, these are terrorists for the most part.
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06/15/2005 - Jim Lobe: The latest broadside was issued Tuesday by Republican Sen. John McCain, who said Washington should either try the 520 detainees currently held at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba or let them go home.
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06/23/2005 - AP: U.N. human rights experts said Thursday they have reliable accounts of detainees being tortured at the U.S. base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The experts also said Washington had not responded to their latest request to check on the conditions of terror suspects at the facility in eastern Cuba. That request was made in April.
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06/23/2005 - Toronto Star: Doctors, nurses and medics caring for the approximately 600 prisoners at the U.S. naval base in Cuba are required to provide health information to military and CIA interrogators, according to the report in the respected New England Journal of Medicine.
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06/24/05 - AFP: Washington has for the first time acknowledged to the United Nations that prisoners have been tortured at US detention centres in Guantanamo Bay, as well as Afghanistan and Iraq, a UN source said.
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06/24/05 - BBC: The Pentagon said no inquiry had produced "credible evidence" physicians had taken part in the "inhumane treatment of detainees".
But it admitted "behavioural science consultants" were helping interrogators exploit prisoners' weaknesses.
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06/29/05 - AP: A Muslim extremist who spent nearly three years imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay was acquitted Wednesday of all terrorism-related charges by a court in Kuwait. more
This article contributed by Tom Blanton of Richmond, Virginia.