Saturday, July 25, 2009

Guanatanamo Bay

26th june ,2009 it had been months since a new bollywood movie release and for a movie buff like me it was smthing which was irritating me to no end, but finally newyork hit theatres and with a sheer enthusiasm of watching a new movie after so much time and that too a one which featured pretty Katrina Kaif I went for first day first show.I never thought while entering the cinema hall that this movie will keep me busy searching all over the internet about a topic for weeks ....but yeah it did.I thought this feel good movie would be about three college going friends with all the bollywood masala of love triangle and scarifices and songs but believe me it was much more then that.It was about GUANTANAMO BAY ,undoubtebly the most dreaded prison on the planet located in Cuba.well everything written below is not just a crammed up story bt its an aggregation of facts provided by various american official websites of reputed newspapers like washington post,wall street journal etc.
TORTURES AT GUANTANAMO POST 9/11
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 themselvesBesides 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.itz 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.all this and much more like torturing the detaines by playing very loud music,depriving them from sleep for weeks,keeping a cloth on their face and then urinating on it..al these are part of routine torturing process at guantanamo bay.
the U.S. military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 had based an entire interrogation class on a chart copied directly from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist torture techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false. The chart showed the effects of "coercive management techniques" like "sleep deprivation," "prolonged constraint," and "exposure".The 1957 article from which the chart was copied, was entitled "Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War". Other techniques used by the Chinese Communists that were listed on the chart include "Semi-Starvation," "Exploitation of Wounds," and "Filthy, Infested Surroundings," along with their effects: "Makes Victim Dependent on Interrogator," "Weakens Mental and Physical Ability to Resist," and "Reduces Prisoner to 'Animal Level' Concerns." The only change made to the chart used at Guantánamo was an altered title.
BUSH GOVT'S TAKE ON GUANTANAMOThere isn't any other nation in the world that would treat people who were determined to kill Americans the way we're treating these people. They're living in the tropics. They're well fed. They've got everything they could possibly want.
according to the govt the protections of the third geneva convention (which otherwise was torned to pieces in this case)does not hold for AL-QAIEDA or Taliban fighters as this protection under geneva convention apllies only to uniformed soldiers and guirellas who abides by the rules of war.
now story of Abdallah Al-Ajmi a GUANTANAMO DETAINEEAccused of Being Little More Than a Low-Level Taliban Fighter, Abdallah al-Ajmi Was Held by the U.S. for Nearly Four Years.After His Release, HE BLEW UP AN IRAQI ARMY OUTPOST.A little more than two years after his release from the Guantanamo Bay military prison, Abdallah Saleh al-Ajmi knelt in front of a white wall, clutched the upturned barrel of an AK-47 rifle and delivered a message before a video camera.The untidy beard that his young son once loved to play with had been shaved off, leaving only a tiny moustache. His curly, shoulder-length locks had been clipped down to a crew cut. Gone, too, were the crisp, white headdress he often wore and any semblance of the good humor once familiar to his family. He was sullen and angry -- still bitter about being locked up for almost four years at the high-security U.S. detention center on the southeastern coast of Cuba."Praise be unto God, who evacuated me from Guantanamo prison and joined me with the Islamic State of Iraq," he said. As the camera's light cast an outsize shadow behind his head, he wagged his finger and issued a vow: "We are going, with permission from God, to God -- glory be unto him. We will enter the nests of apostasy." At 6:15 a.m. on March 23, 2008, not long after making the video, Ajmi drove a pickup truck filled with 5,000 to 10,000 pounds of explosives, hidden in what appeared to be white flour sacks, onto an Iraqi army base outside Mosul.
The Easter Sunday blast killed 13 Iraqi soldiers, wounded 42 others and left a 30-foot-wide crater in the ground. It remains the single most heinous act of violence committed by a former Guantanamo detainee.
WHY ABDALLAH AL-AJMI TURNED A JEHADI?
When Ajmi returned to Kuwait, "he was a ticking time bomb," said Mansur Saleh al-Ajmi, one of his younger brothers.
"Before he went to Afghanistan, he was a normal teenager. He spun the car around in circles. He smoked. People liked him," Mansur said. "After he came back from Guantanamo, he seemed like a completely different person. He stared all the time. You could not have a normal conversation with him. . . . It seemed as if his brain had been washed."
His case illuminates a key challenge facing the Obama administration as it considers how to close the U.S. military prison and resolve the futures of the approximately 245 imprisoned there. Once detainees are sent home, even to friendly nations, the United States has very little influence over what happens to them. Convictions are not guaranteed. And for those allowed to go free, assistance in resuming a normal life is rare.
Although the United States may never say so publicly, it is likely to want more explicit promises from the countries where detainees are repatriated, and the administration will seek the establishment of rehabilitation programs, along the lines of one in Saudi Arabia, that provide former jihadists with jobs, homes and money to pay for dowries.
But there is also a view in some quarters of the U.S. government that cases such as Ajmi's are the inevitable result of locking up 779 foreigners in an austere military prison, without access to courts or consular representation, and subjecting them to interrogation techniques that detainees say amount to torture. Some of them are bound to seek revenge, these officials believe. The challenge is figuring out which ones

1 comment:

  1. very in4mative..indeed very very in4mative..guantanamo bay n water boarding had obsessed me 4 quite a long time nd i think m quenched a bit..
    if u could tell me whr did u get the facts n info..
    also try writing smthing on waterboarding..nd liberty of media in the US..
    looking 4ward to more of such stff

    ReplyDelete