Earlier this week, Southern California Congressman Duncan Hunter offered irrefutable evidence that demonstrated the prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay by the United States are living large
Channeling the late Julia Child or maybe angling for a guest spot on The Food Network, Hunter provided not only the typical menus for the prisoners but actually had the various foods nestled on plates for the edification of the assembled reporters.
From a June 15, 2005, Liz Sidoti-written Associated Press article, comes this descriptive paragraph:
"...Rep. Duncan Hunter, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, displayed for reporters Guantanamo-like prison entrees of lemon-baked fish and oven-fried chicken with rice, fruit and vegetables 'purchased for them by American taxpayers' to illustrate conditions at the prison and to counter claims of mistreatment..."
Hunter also described other options as whole wheat pita, brown long-grain rice, canned peaches, steamed asparagus, northern beans, tea and margarine.
He failed to describe dessert possibilities but inside sources indicate that cat-o-nine tail jubilee, waterboarding brulee and plane-tickets-to-the-darkest-hole-in-Egypt tiramisu were options.
And there is absolutely no truth to the rumor that Hunter, in demonstrating responses to the Gitmo good life, peed on himself or dropped to all fours and barked like a dog to the roomful of reporters.
Rush Limbaugh, a valued contributor to the Partnership For A Drug Free America because he's secured far more than his share off the street and thus kept them away from addicts, added this caption on the subject to his web site:
Liberals Embarrass Nation with G'itmo Slander
RushLimbaugh.com - Jun 14, 2005
Limbaugh, the king of radio who has yet to conquer the television world due to his penchant for anal-probing himself with his own head, has demanded that prosecutors invoke Gitmo legal standards in his own court case involving doctor-shopping and illegal prescriptions.
This has not taken place as prosecutors demurred from barring Limbaugh's lawyer from representing him during legal proceedings while only allowing a military officer with no legal training to provide a defense, declined barring Limbaugh and his lawyer from seeing the prosecutor's evidence and decided it would be inappropriate to prevent Limbaugh and his lawyer from calling witnesses.
Unconfirmed reports have Limbaugh turning to anti-depressants to counter his grave disappointment.
In a June 16, 2005, Maeve Reston-written Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article, Joseph Margulies, a lawyer representing a former Guantanamo prisoner who is Australian, is highlighted:.
"...Joseph Margulies, who represented a Guantanamo Bay detainee in a case that went before the Supreme Court, told senators yesterday that the military commission review process is "a sham" that mocks the nation's commitment to due process.
He said the definition of who qualifies as an "enemy combatant" is far too broad, and noted that accused persons cannot review secret evidence that is held against them.
Margulies used the story of one of his clients to illustrate what he sees as flaws in the system. In a well-publicized case, his client, Mamdouh Habib, was taken into custody in Pakistan and held in Egypt where he was subjected to what his lawyer described as psychological torture. Margulies said the government planned to use the statements Habib had made during his detention in Egypt to continue holding him at Guantanamo Bay. The case was publicized by the press, and Habib has since been released.
"Any process that relies on information secured in this way is just not worthy of American justice. It's as simple as that," Margulies said..."
After three years in custody, the United States had yet to charge Habib with any crime.
According to Margulies, if the case had gone forward, information about rendition and those practicing it would have become public, so the U.S. government released Habib in lieu of having to explain his detention.
Jane Mayer, in the February 14 and 21 edition of the New Yorker, is quoted:
"...Habib's case, if his allegations are true, illustrates a disturbing change in the rendition program. Habib was suspected of training Al Qaeda operatives involved in 9/11. He was, like earlier suspects, a radical Muslim. But, unlike most of the pre-9/11 suspects, there appears to have been no warrant for his arrest when the U.S. government took custody of him in Pakistan, a few months after the World Trade Center attacks. Again, because the program is secret, it is difficult to know this with certainty. But, according to Habib's attorney, Joe Margulies, Pakistan turned Habib over to Egypt's custody at the urging of the United States, without any formal charges or arrest warrant against Habib. Once in Egypt, Margulies said, Habib made no appearances that he knew of in court, nor was there any record Margulies knew of showing that the U.S. had sought assurances that Habib would not be tortured.
Some of the allegations in Habib's case, and in others, seem to go beyond rendering: he says Americans were actually present during some of his interrogations. When we talk about renditions today, are we only talking about what we allow or encourage our allies to do-or also about how Americans treat prisoners outside of our borders?
Many legal and operational variations on the earlier form of renditions seem to have emerged since 9/11. The question of coöperation between foreign security officers and the U.S. comes up a couple of times in the Habib story. Habib said that he was first held for about three weeks in Pakistani custody, during which time he said he was tortured by being made to stand on a metal drum that was electrified, while he was suspended from hooks. During those three weeks, according to Habib, he was questioned by several American-accented English-speaking interrogators, who he said wore no military uniforms. Margulies said that the U.S. Department of Defense seemed to have access to the confessions that Habib made after he was rendered from Pakistan to Egypt, because they accused him of offenses he confessed to while, he claimed, he was being tortured. If this is the case, the lines between the U.S.'s conduct and that of allied intelligence agencies does appear to have been blurred. And, after his interrogation in Egypt, Habib ended up in American custody--as a prisoner in Guantánamo Bay..."
It's curious that Duncan Hunter didn't serve up a big helping of Mamdouh Habib.