Worse Than You Think

If I were to ask you, where and what is Guantanamo Bay, could you tell me?

If the answer is no, don't sweat it, most Americans don't know anyways, and that's the way the Bush administration wants it.

For starters, Guantanamo Bay is a US-controlled military base/prison in Cuba. Often called Gitmo, the prison has appeared on the news off and on for torture claims. The prison has about 520 prisoners in detainment, and most if not all are being held under the terms of an "enemy combatant", a title invented by the Bush administration. Nobody really knows what an enemy combatant is, and that's the exact intent of the Bush administration. If nobody knows what an enemy combatant is, there are no codes of conduct for them. Technically, this allows the Bush administration to do whatever it wants. When I say anything it wants, I really mean it. Let me give you an idea of what is going on:

Juma Al Dossary, the 30-year-old Bahraini detainee at Guantanamo Naval Base, which the US occupies illegally in Cuba, is just one of hundreds- no one except the Pentagon knows exactly how many- listed by US authorities as an "enemy combatant". At the insistence of his lawyers, he wrote his memoirs of what he has been subjected to at the hands of US soldiers and other representatives of our country.

Included in his account, which he said he could barely bring himself to write because of the "shame" he feels, Al Dossary says in three years he has been interrogated some 600 times, fed rotten food, beaten many times (by up to eight guards at once), made to walk on broken glass and pushed so that his face hit the glass shards, made to walk on barbed wire, and has had cigarettes put out on his body. This is in a US prison by US personnel.

A religious Muslim, with strict sexual codes -similar to those of Orthodox Jews- Al Dossary says, "The worst part was the psychological torture. Physical torture will only bring me closer to God, but psychological torture devastated my soul."

Al Dossary relates being urinated on by GIs, made to watch a man and woman having sex and then offered the woman if he "cooperated", and tells of being stripped and chained to the floor where a naked woman squatted over him and smeared her menstrual blood on his body.

The list of abuses goes on and on, and Al Dossary, who is believed to have attempted suicide more than once, says "What I have seen is far greater than what can be written on paper and just remembering what I have seen of the atrocities, which continue to this day, my grief and pain is renewed."

-CAROLINA COSITORE

And depressingly enough, that's not all. These prisoners aren't being charged with crimes, which means that they don't get any due process protections. This means no right to a trial, nothing at all. Although without doubt many if not most have some sort of terrorist connection, many of the others don't, and if we deny them the right to a fair trial, we will never know for sure whether or not the person is innocent. And the innocent by no means should be detained indefinetely, without any prospect of being released.

People like you and I cannot even dream of being detained indefinetely. And on top of that, if I had to endure torture like that, suicide would be a very appealing option.