A new report describes Canadian teen Omar Khadr being carried into Guantanamo Bay interrogations on a stretcher, dangling from a door frame for hours and used as a human floor mop to clean his own urine.
The Center for Constitutional Rights in New York released the first major overview Monday of alleged abuses and torture at the U.S. prison camp for terror suspects, including rape, sexual harassment and vicious beatings.
From the center's press release:
This report authoritatively documents the Bush Administration’s systematic human rights abuses at Guantánamo. I think the torture and abuse detailed here will shock Congress and the American public because it reveals a lawless, immoral and ineffective detention facility and undermines the administration’s increasingly desperate attempts to lie about what is happening down there,” said CCR Legal Director Bill Goodman. “This report tells a story of abuse and the betrayal of our laws at the highest levels of government, which is why the Supreme Court just had to step in and order the President to treat detainees humanely and provide due process. Before Congress rushes to give the President cover with unnecessary new legislation, I hope it will review the record and provide real oversight, starting with an independent investigation of the base,” he added.
The full report can be found here (.pdf file)
Canada hasn't moved to seek Khadr's extradition and has been silent amid world condemnation of the prison camp.
"We are not going to move them into places on American soil and to the civil justice system," White House spokesman Tony Snow said Monday.
"What we do not want is what amounts to a catch-and-release program for terrorists." (CBC
On Tuesday, the Pentagon released a memo (.pdf file) announcing that detainees will now be protected by the Geneva Conventions.
Neither the White House nor the Pentagon provided any immediate details as to what would be done differently or how the decision would effect the controversial policies on interrogation, which have provoked an international outcry as well as considerable domestic controversy.
[...]
The relevant provisions of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions prohibits violence to prisoners, cruel treatment, torture and "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment."
It also provides for sentences only as "pronounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples."
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