Official: Pentagon report says Gitmo is humane

Official: Pentagon report says Gitmo is humane

news.yahoo.com

WASHINGTON – The Pentagon says the Guantanamo Bay prison meets the standard for humane treatment laid out in the Geneva Conventions, according to a report for President Barack Obama, who has ordered the terrorist detention center closed within a year.

The report recommended some changes, including an increase in group recreation for some of the camp's more dangerous or less compliant prisoners, according to a government official familiar with the study.

(visit the link for the full news article)

The report found the camp to be in compliance with the Geneva Conventions Common Article 3, the international rules that require the humane treatment of prisoners taken in unconventional armed conflicts, like the war on terrorism. The camp's controversial force-feeding of prisoners on hunger strikes was also found to be compliant with the Geneva guidelines, a second government official confirmed.

The article goes on to say that the judge who is in charge of deciding whether to charge detainees told The Washington Post that detainee Mohammed al-Qahtani alleged that at least one person was tortured. The wording on that particular paragraph is a bit confusing though so someone please correct me if I read it wrong.

So basically according to this report the detainees have been treated humanely according to the Geneva Conventions. I don't know how accurate that is, but that's the official word on it. What do you think? Would you agree or disagree with the official report based on the limited information available since it hasn't been released as of yet?

news.yahoo.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

That's their 'Official' version of what really went on inside Gitmo. I'd like to see a report from an 'external auditor' to prove if prisoners are treated humanely. Of course, if those prisoners of very violent (for whatever reasons), treat them not as humans but as animals.

I wonder how many US prisons are just as bad as Gitmo?

I feel the report is accurate. Ever since the light was shined on Gitmo they had no choice but to get their act straight. Bush should have never brought them to Gitmo in the first place. He should have just left them in some other country's prison.

reply to post by jam321


I agree. There has been a lot of attention on Gitmo for several years now so they have had no choice but to play things by the book even if they wanted to do otherwise.

The official report may not contain everything that has happened there since the beginning, but seeing as how they admitted to force-feeding people who were on hunger strikes and confining the violent ones for 23 hours a day, both of which are within the Geneva Conventions, then I doubt there was much they left out.

yep,

just like waterboarding is no torture

They seem to have updated the article since my OP. It now contains the following:

In a separate case involving legal challenges to imprisonment, the Obama administration, siding with the Bush White House, contended Friday that detainees in Afghanistan have no constitutional rights.

In a two-sentence court filing, the Justice Department said it agreed that detainees at Bagram Airfield cannot use U.S. courts to challenge their detention in a filing that angered human rights attorneys.

As angry as this may make some people, I'm glad to hear it. None of the detainees are US citizens, as far as I am aware, and they shouldn't be given our constitutional rights. They have been using our own judicial system against us to get access to their files during discovery so they an figure out why they were caught and who if anyone ratted them out.