( RED is Positave & Black is Neg).

Whether or not it's torture, it certainly is sadistic and not something we should be proud that US soldiers are doing. It also defeats the argument I've read most often here, which is anything goes if it means we get the info we need to keep us safe. How does burning a dead body get you more info?

90 senators becoming outraged about this I doubt that, maybe 90 senators hoping for reelection.

Please tell me how burning dead bodies is torture.  Maybe this is disrespectful but how is it torturing a dead body?????

BTW, torture is tattoomeb's description.  The word "torture" never appears in that article.

BTW, Frontline is well known to be a blatantly liberal propagandizer. They're a bit more high brow than most liberal mouthpieces, but they're far from balanced and objective. They're really just classic PBS =  FLAMING liberal.

Translation - They seldom agree with B's dumb-@ss opinions.

Published on Thursday, October 20, 2005 by the Associated Press 
Guantanamo Hunger Strikers Say Feeding Tubes Employed as Torture 

 
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico - Prisoners on hunger strike at the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, reported troops force-fed them with dirty feeding tubes that have been violently inserted and withdrawn as punishment, said declassified notes released Wednesday by defence lawyers.

The repeated removal and insertion of the tubes has caused striking prisoners to vomit blood and experience intense pain they have equated with torture, the lawyers reported to a U.S. federal judge after visiting their clients at the base in eastern Cuba.

Prisoners said they were taunted by troops who said the treatment was intended to persuade them to end the hunger strike that began Aug. 9, the lawyers wrote in affidavits filed as part of a lawsuit in federal court in Washington seeking greater access to prisoners at the high-security jail for terror suspects.

Lt.-Col. Jeremy Martin, a military spokesman for the Guantanamo detention centre, said all detainees in the hunger strike are closely monitored by medical personnel and mistreatment is not tolerated, though he did not know the specific procedures for handling the feeding tubes.

"Detainees...are treated humanely," Martin said.

"Claims to the contrary are wholly inaccurate and blatantly misrepresent the excellent work being done here by honourable military and civilian professionals."

Guantanamo officials have said this latest hunger strike began with 76 detainees protesting against their confinement. Defence lawyers have cited other reasons as well, including complaints about food and water, alleged abuse by guards and interrogators and their desire to either face trial or be released.

Yousef al Shehri, 21, of Saudi Arabia, told his lawyers guards removed a nasal feeding tube from one prisoner and reinserted it into another without cleaning it first.

"These large tubes...were viewed by the detainees as objects of torture," lawyer Julia Tarver, whose firm represents 10 Saudi detainees, said in an affidavit.

"They were forcibly shoved up the detainees' noses and down into their stomachs."

At Guantanamo Bay, the U.S. military holds about 500 detainees suspected of terrorist activities. Martin said 25 detainees are on hunger strike, including 22 who are being force-fed.

The number participating in the strike reached a high of 131 in mid-September when detainees refused meals to commemorate the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks in the United States, Martin said.

Most detainees participating in the hunger strike are not confined to hospital beds and are permitted to exercise, take showers, send and receive mail, visit the detainee library and practise their religion, he said.

Defence lawyers who have visited the prison in recent weeks said their clients have lost substantial weight, appeared listless and depressed - and have insisted they will maintain the protest until conditions improve or they are released. A judge has not yet ruled on their request for increased access to the detainees and their medical records.

Notes of meetings between lawyers and their clients at the detention centr eare classified until they have been reviewed by the military and cleared for release.

Joshua Colangelo-Ryan, a lawyer for six men from Bahrain, said one of his clients, Isa al Murbati, has lost about 50 pounds as a result of the hunger strike.

"There's nothing in my mind that he intends to stop the hunger strike," said Colangelo-Ryan, who returned from Guantanamo on Monday.

Tarver, who returned from the base Oct. 2, said two of her clients were being force-fed and unable to walk.

"It's quite a drastic situation," she said.

So now force feeding somebody so they won't die is torture.

Did the 90 senators include that form of torture in their amendment.

So he doesn't have to care about anyone who didn't vote for him, huh?

That explains a lot.

Hitler made no secret of his dislike of the Jews. Bush has made no secret of his dislike of a whole race of people. He hasn't spoken in front of the NAACP in 5 years in office. No other president in the last 45 years has completed a term in office without addressing this organization which represents a large section of the population.


I think he's a racists based on what I see. He writes off an entire race because "he can win without them", so why should he care about their problems.

tatoo's link takes me to a story of US soldiers burning the dead bodies of Taliban fighters and broadcasting taunts to a nearby village that harbours Taliban.

Well, Idiot, I see your foray into the literary world has done wonders for your vocabulary and debate skills.    From hijacking threads to saying another poster's opinions are "dumb-@ass" you're really elevating things here.  You represent your side well... 

The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement.

The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, according to current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents.

The hidden global internment network is a central element in the CIA's unconventional war on terrorism. It depends on the cooperation of foreign intelligence services, and on keeping even basic information about the system secret from the public, foreign officials and nearly all members of Congress charged with overseeing the CIA's covert actions.

How do you know the leaker was a Democrat or that they weren't thinking about the good of the nation? Remember "Deep Throat" was a Republican.

Obviously some things shouldn't be public knowledge but where do you draw the line? In the past it's been based on national security but even then congressional committees, Dems and Reps alike, were kept informed. That's why they have security clearances.  It's called checks and balances and it's worked for over 200 years.

Why should the names of CEOs who attended an energy task force meeting and what they discussed be a secret? It's absurd.

You don't need all this secrecy unless you have something to hide. Any Idiot can figure that out. 

Congress is also supposed to over see the White House too but they seem to have forgotten about that part of the job description.

But Mr Ingram admitted to the Labour MP Harry Cohen in a private letter obtained by The Independent that he had inadvertently misled Parliament because he had been misinformed by the US. "The US confirmed to my officials that they had not used MK77s in Iraq at any time and this was the basis of my response to you," he told Mr Cohen. "I regret to say that I have since discovered that this is not the case and must now correct the position."

Mr Ingram said 30 MK77 firebombs were used by the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force in the invasion of Iraq between 31 March and 2 April 2003. They were used against military targets "away from civilian targets", he said. This avoids breaching the 1980 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW), which permits their use only against military targets.

Shocking revelation RAI News 24.  Use of chemical weapons by the US military in Iraq. Veteran admits: Bodies melted away before us.

White phosphorous used on the civilian populace: This is how the US "took" Fallujah.

New napalm formula also used.

ROME. In soldier slang they call it Willy Pete. The technical name is white phosphorus. In theory its purpose is to illumine enemy positions in the dark. In practice, it was used as a chemical weapon in the rebel stronghold of Fallujah. And it was used not only against enemy combatants and guerrillas, but again innocent civilians. The Americans are responsible for a massacre using unconventional weapons, the identical charge for which Saddam Hussein stands accused. An investigation by RAI News 24, the all-news Italian satellite television channel, has pulled the veil from one of the most carefully concealed mysteries from the front in the entire US military campaign in Iraq.

A US veteran of the Iraq war told RAI New correspondent Sigfrido Ranucci this: I received the order use caution because we had used white phosphorus on Fallujah. In military slag it is called 'Willy Pete'. Phosphorus burns the human body on contact--it even melts it right down to the bone.

RAI News 24's investigative story, Fallujah, The Concealed Massacre, will be broadcast tomorrow on RAI-3 and will contain not only eye-witness accounts by US military personnel but those from Fallujah residents. A rain of fire descended on the city. People who were exposed to those multicolored substance began to burn. We found people with bizarre wounds-their bodies burned but their clothes intact, relates Mohamad Tareq al-Deraji, a biologist and Fallujah resident.

I gathered accounts of the use of phosphorus and napalm from a few Fallujah refugees whom I met before being kidnapped, says Manifesto reporter Giuliana Sgrena, who was kidnapped in Fallujah last February, in a recorded interview. I wanted to get the story out, but my kidnappers would not permit it.

RAI News 24 will broadcast video and photographs taken in the Iraqi city during and after the November 2004 bombardment which prove that the US military, contrary to statements in a December 9 communiqué from the US Department of State, did not use phosphorus to illuminate enemy positions (which would have been legitimate) but instend dropped white phosphorus indiscriminately and in massive quantities on the city's neighborhoods.

In the investigative story, produced by Maurizio Torrealta, dramatic footage is shown revealing the effects of the bombardment on civilians, women and children, some of whom were surprised in their sleep.

The investigation will also broadcast documentary proof of the use in Iraq of a new napalm formula called MK77. The use of the incendiary substance on civilians is forbidden by a 1980 UN treaty. The use of chemical weapons is forbidden by a treaty which the US signed in 1997

Fallujah. La strage nascosta [Fallujah, The Concealed Massacre] will be shown on RAI News tomorrow November 8th at 07:35 (via HOT BIRDTM statellite, Sky Channel 506 and RAI-3), and rebroadcast by HOT BIRDTM satellite and Sky Channel 506 at 17:00 [5 pm] and over the next two days.

Whatever it is why don't they just do it to all those people they've kidnapped from around the world and create some Bush-bots? You'd have a few more votes. You could move them around the country to Florida, or Ohio, or where ever you needed to squeak by. So they say they only have a few hundred    of them. So what? That's a mandate for them.