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“If, in fact, we are treating prisoners this way, it's not only wrong, but dangerous, and very dumb, and very short-sighted,” said
Hagel.
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WASHINGTON, June 13, 2005 (IslamOnline.net
& News Agencies) – US Senators have censured the Pentagon after
more revelations that prisoners at Guantanamo were subjected to
shocking torture techniques to extract information.
“If there's a vacuum, something will fill
that vacuum. This kind of stuff fills a vacuum,” Sen. Chuck Hagel
said on CNN's “Late Edition” Sunday, June 12.
Hagel, a Vietnam War veteran, warned a
leadership vacuum at the top of the military hierarchy can end “in
disaster for us and humility for this country.”
“It's not appropriate. It's not at all
within the standards of who we are as a civilized people, what our
laws are,” he stressed.
“If, in fact, we are treating prisoners this
way, it's not only wrong, but dangerous, and very dumb, and very
short-sighted,” fumed Hagel.
The criticism followed the publication of a
classified Guantanamo logbook by Time magazine Sunday detailing
the torture and mistreatment of Saudi Mohammed Al-Qahtani, suspected
of being the 20th hijacker on September 11, 2001.
The document indicated Qahtani had his head
and beard shaved, was stripped naked, ordered to bark like a dog,
prevented from sleeping by loud music, had pictures of scantily clad
women hung around his neck and was straddled by a female interrogator.
At one point, when the detainee refused to
drink water, an IV tube was inserted into his arm, he was pumped with
three and a half bags of fluid and told that a bathroom visit will be
allowed only in exchange for information.
When his replies did not satisfy the
interrogators, Qahtani was told to relieve himself in his pants, which
he did, according to the magazine report.
His questioning spanned a three-month
period from November 2002 to January 2003.
Tarnishing US Image
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“I don't know why we didn't learn from Bagram and Abu Ghraib,” said
Feinstein.
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Hagel further said the reported techniques and
Guantanamo policies sully the reputation of the US in the eyes of the
world.
“This is not how you win the people of the
world over to our side, especially the Muslim world,” he told CNN.
Hagel said such treatment should offend the
sensibilities of “any straight-thinking American, any
straight-thinking citizen of the world.”
Senator Dianne Feinstein, a California
Democrat, told the same program that the treatment outlined in the
article presents “a kind of ludicrous view of the United States.”
“I don't know what tree we're barking up,”
she said. “It is a terrible mistake.”
“I don't know why we didn't learn from
Bagram
[prison in Afghanistan],” she added.
“I don't know why we didn't learn from
Abu
Ghraib
[prison in Iraq], but here we are in Guantanamo with many of the same
things surfacing.”
The US military on Sunday offered no excuses
for interrogation techniques used on Qahtani, saying in a statement
the interrogators used “approved and monitored interrogation
approach” through a “very detailed plan.”
The Pentagon insisted Qahtani, who was
captured on Afghan-Pakistani border in December 2001, had told US
authorities about his training at two Al-Qaeda camps as well as his
meetings with Osama bin Laden and other senior Al-Qaeda leaders.
No Closure
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“At present, there's no plan to close Gitmo,” said Cheney.
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US Vice President Dick Cheney reiterated in an
interview to be aired on Fox News Monday, June 13, that his
administration had no plans to close Guantanamo after the Time
revelation.
“At present, there's no plan to close Gitmo.
The president says we review all of our options on a continuous
basis,” Cheney told the American network, using a slang term for the
site.
“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. These are people that were captured
in the battlefield of Afghanistan or rounded up as part of the Al-Qaeda
network,” Cheney said.
US military sources had revealed to the Los
Angeles Times that the US was holding dozens of prisoners at
Guantanamo, who have no meaningful connection to Al-Qaeda or Taliban.
They said that at least 59 detainees, nearly
10% of the prisoners, were deemed to be of no intelligence value after
repeated interrogations in Afghanistan.
Cheney’s statements came after Rep. Duncan
Hunter, chairman of the House of Representatives Armed Services
Committee, told “Fox News Sunday” that some Bush administration
officials want to close the facility.
“I think they're divided. I think ... some
members of the White House have come to the conclusion that the legend
is different than the fact,” said Hunter, a California Republican.
“And when that's the case, you go with the
legend that somehow Guantanamo has been a place of abuse. And you
close it down and you shorten the stories, you shorten the heated
debate and you get if off the table and you move on,” he said.
On Wednesday, June 8, President George W. Bush
said he was ready to examine alternatives to the X-ray camp after
former president and Nobel laureate Jimmy Carter joined other voices
calling for its closure.
The Guantanamo detention camp has been at the
center of a political storm after a Newsweek report that
military interrogators at the camp flushed a Qur’an down a toilet to
rattle Muslim inmates.
The US military detailed on Friday, June 3,
five cases in which American jailers at Guantanamo had desecrated
copies of the Noble Qur’an, including one incident which occurred as
recently as March.
That report and others sparked angry protests
in the Muslim world and condemnation from human rights groups.
Amnesty International has recently described
Guantanamo as the “gulag of our times.”
