Recently I traveled to one of the most nefarious prisons in the world: Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Despite repeated government pledges to close the infamous detention facility down, 149 men remained indefinitely imprisoned there.
According to a top Bush administration official, the vast majority of prisoners are innocent, and were either swept up in a dragnet or handed over in exchange for US bounties.
It’s already hard enough traveling to Gitmo as a journalist, but upon arrival I realized the experience was going to be controlled 24/7 by military escorts preventing us from going anywhere near the detainees I had come to report on.
However, I was able to speak with several top brass defense attorneys for the military commissions, a corrupt system that grants alleged terrorists less rights than civilian courts. The fact that six men are facing formal charges at the prison in relation to 9/11 & the USS Cole bombing gives the world the false impression that even alleged terrorists get their day in court. In reality, the remaining 143 men never charged with a crime may never get that luxury.
Amazingly, according to their lawyers, the detainees watch RT and Breaking the Set regularly.
My brother Robbie interviewed me about my intense experience at Gitmo for Media Roots Radio, a much more personal account than presented on my show.
Watch my on-the-ground documentary special about Guantanamo Bay here.
Follow me @AbbyMartin, and my brother Robbie @fluorescentgrey
The topic is disturbing. But it is the root cause of, and social systems that exacerbate negative behavior: from sadism to mild callousness. Also who is more prone to such behavior and why.
It is a very big topic.
I have a great deal of respect for people who dig for the truth. Not only is it not rewarded, but often punished. So it takes people made of tough stuff, because some things follow you all your life. Upsetting powers is such a thing.
Take care, both of you, and hopefully Abby gets some extra unwinding time.
The book, The Arab Mind by Raphael Patai, was apparently used in the early days of the War on Terror, in designing treatment regimens for ‘detainees’-basically to come up with the most degrading and intolerably repugnant treatment to which Muslims could be subjected. This is why the focus on forced homosexuality/nudity. I have an image that shows about 100 naked prisoners all being forced to lay face down in vertical rows,, each with his face placed into the ass crack of the guy above him. It’s quite a striking image. And all right in line with what we saw from Abu Ghraib and your accounts presented here (and in the two-part BTS From Gitmo), i.e. the menstrual blood and prisoners being shown videos of forced homosexual acts between inmates, as tools to instill fear and apply coercion. They all share this same common thread of culturally-oriented torment and torture.
Thanks for an amazing job!
Deeply fascinating and disturbing. The highly disturbing facts of 9/11 and the contents and quality of FEMA’s, the 911 Comm’s & NIST’s’ “investigations,” speak for themselves.
They’re flawed cover-ups & shams, at best. There’s no way to explain the facts of 911 without preplanted explosives. The events have never been investigated by a regulatory agency.