NYTimes: Senators Laud Treatment of Detainees in Guantánamo

buried on page A16, wonder why? it's not like the times has an agenda, or credibility problems...

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/p...3d66d7556&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

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Senators Laud Treatment of Detainees in Guantánamo
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

WASHINGTON, June 27 - Senators from both sides of the aisle competed on Monday to extol the humane treatment of detainees whom they said they saw on a weekend trip to the military detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. All said they opposed closing the center.

"I feel very good" about the detainees' treatment, Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, said.

That feeling was also expressed by another Democrat, Ben Nelson of Nebraska.

On Monday, Senator Jim Bunning, Republican of Kentucky, said he learned while visiting Guantánamo that some detainees "even have air-conditioning and semiprivate showers."

Another Republican, Senator Michael D. Crapo of Idaho, said soldiers and sailors at the camp "get more abuse from the detainees than they give to the detainees."

In the last month, several senators, including some Republicans, have suggested that Congress should investigate reports of abuses at the detention center or that the military should close it to remove a blot on the country's image.

One senator, Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, has come under criticism and apologized repeatedly for comparing reported abuses at the camps to treatment in Soviet gulags or Nazi concentration camps.

Mr. Wyden and Mr. Nelson were in Cuba primarily to discuss new agricultural trade and visited Guantánamo on Sunday. They ran into Mr. Bunning, Mr. Crapo and Senator Johnny Isakson, Republican of Georgia, who traveled to Guantánamo for the day on Sunday "to see for ourselves what all the so-called fuss is about down there," as Mr. Bunning put it.

After the trip, Mr. Wyden argued that Congress should establish treatment standards for detainees like those at Guantánamo who are neither uniformed members of foreign military forces under the Geneva Conventions nor citizens under the United States justice system.

In contrast, Mr. Crapo praised the current military procedures, calling for a new international standard to cover terrorism suspects and other nonmilitary prisoners.

An official of Amnesty International, Jumana Musa, dismissed the visits as "this little Congressional show and tell." Ms. Musa said the statements did not address what she called the inadequate investigation of reported abuses.

"Whether or not people are being fed orange chicken," Ms. Musa said, "does not get at the heart of the issue."

 

if only we could detain certain senators...

 

more buried treasure:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/29/international/middleeast/29voices.html?

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Some Iraqis Optimistic About Sovereignty
By JOHN F. BURNS and EDWARD WONG

BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 28 - When Shaker Assal was approached in his butcher's shop on Tuesday and asked what he thought about life in Iraq a year after it resumed formal sovereignty, he responded with a blast of invective as heated as the sunbaked sidewalks in his Baghdad neighborhood of Ghazaliya.

"What sovereignty are you talking about?" he asked. "How can you even call it sovereignty? We have thousands of occupation troops in this country and you talk about sovereignty? Enough! Iraq is nothing but an American base."

And what about the two Iraqi governments that have taken office since the head of the American occupation authority, L. Paul Bremer III, handed a leather-bound folio marking the formal transfer of power to Iraqi leaders on June 28 last year?

"Both of those governments have been rubbish," Mr. Assal said. "How can you call them governments when they were imposed from abroad? Those governments and their ministers are just puppets. They are all spies, for Iran and the Kurds. I tell you, Saddam did the right thing when he used chemical weapons against the Kurds."

Mr. Assal, 44, is a Sunni Arab, from the community that ruled Iraq for centuries until the downfall of Saddam Hussein, and he does his business in a district, Ghazaliya, that American troops consider among the most dangerous in Baghdad. When Humvees pass through the neighborhood, they do so on notice that insurgents, overwhelmingly Sunni Arabs, are never far away.

If Mr. Assal's views were the norm, the Bush administration's hope of establishing a stable democracy here, sustained in time by Iraqi rather than American troops, would seem illusionary. But in an informal survey of opinions across Baghdad conducted on Tuesday by Iraqi reporters on the staff of The New York Times, the butcher's outburst was a relatively rare case of untempered hostility for the Americans and the Iraqi governments they have worked with in the past year.

The survey turned up plenty of people who bridled over the issues that have eroded support for the American presence in Iraq, from the relentless violence to doubts about the degree of authority vested in Iraqi ministers to faltering supplies of electricity and water and woeful inadequacies in hospitals and schools. There were many, too, especially among Sunni Arabs, who favored a withdrawal of American troops and the resumption of authority by an Iraqi government that is not dependent on foreign troops.

But perhaps more striking, considering the huge gap between the hopes stirred when American troops captured Baghdad in April 2003 and the grim realities now, were the number of Iraqis who expressed a more patient view. Among those people, the disappointments and privations have been offset by an appreciation of both the progress toward supplanting the dictatorship of Mr. Hussein with a nascent democratic system and the need for American troops to remain here in sufficient numbers to allow the system to mature.

"There was a peaceful handover of power between Allawi's government and Jaafari's, and that is unique in our history," said Haydar Farman, a 34-year-old engineer. It was one that saw Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite favored by the Central Intelligence Agency, head an appointed government that ruled for 10 months before handing over in May to Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a religious Shiite chosen as prime minister by the Shiite coalition that won January's elections.

Mr. Farman was similarly sanguine about the violence that continues to rack the country, with nearly 1,400 civilians killed in the seven weeks since the Jaafari government took office. "We have to hope things will work out in the end," Mr. Farman said. "It's the price that all countries have to pay during periods of transition."

The violence continued Tuesday with at least 35 deaths, including a suicide car bombing in a northern suburb of Baghdad that killed the oldest member of the national assembly, Dhari al-Fayadh, a Shiite tribal leader in his late 80's. His son and two bodyguards also died. Mr. Fayadh is the second of the 275 assembly members who won seats in January to be killed by insurgents.

The American military command said two soldiers were killed in two separate suicide car bombings in Tikrit and Balad, and another suicide car bomb killed five Iraqis and wounded nine near the headquarters of Iraqi security forces in Baquba. In Kirkuk, a suicide car bomb aimed at a police chief killed a bodyguard and a civilian. In Baghdad, a city council member and two policemen were killed in separate shooting attacks. In Musayyib, south of the capital, a suicide-belt bomber exploded in front of the main hospital, killing one policeman and wounding 17 others.

Even among Sunni Arabs, the community that has generated the insurgency, there were conflicting views about the need for American troops to withdraw, the demand that often comes first when Sunni Arab leaders set terms for joining the political process. "We haven't seen anything change" since Iraq resumed sovereignty, said Muhammad al-Nuaimi, a 34-year-old barber standing in his empty shop in Adhamiya, a mostly Sunni Arab neighborhood in northern Baghdad that has been the site of frequent fighting.

But Mr. Nuaimi said he did not favor an American troop pullout yet. "For the time being, if the American forces withdraw, this will not be good for the country because political and religious parties will work against each other, and the government is still unstable," he said.

Elsewhere in Adhamiya, other Sunni Arabs took a more positive view. Waseem Haitham Najeeb, a 19-year-old employee in an appliance store, was one. "The general situation after the handover of sovereignty is better than before," he said. "What Iraqis need is an improvement in security, whether it is done by American or Iraqi forces. Once that happens, we won't see a single American in the street."

Back in Ghazaliya, Thamir Muhammad, 41, a computer operator, said the most pressing need was for Americans to allow Iraqis to take real control of the country's affairs. "With the changes that have come in the past year so small and so slow, I don't feel there is an Iraqi government," he said.

The most positive views, not surprisingly, came from Shiites, who in January saw political power pass to the country's Shiite majority. Abdul Hussein al-Jasim, 37, a painter in the Karada district, said he preferred Dr. Jaafari's government to Dr. Allawi's - a widespread opinion among Shiites, many of whom said they believed Dr. Allawi's government to have been corrupt. "The situation now is better than before," he said.

Ali Adeeb, Khalid al-Ansary, Thaier Aldaami and Fouad al-Sheikhly contributed reporting for this article.

 

it is predictable...

 

as i said, predictable...Vakhitov was singing a different tune back in 2003...and remember, it's SOP for al-queda detainees to alledge abuse. why do you further distribute al-queda propaganda wnes?

http://www.globalsecurity.org/security/library/news/2003/08/sec-030805-rfel-150254.htm

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Hasanova [Vakhitov's mother] said she learned of his fate after receiving a letter from him last November. She said her son is feeling well and is satisfied with the conditions of his detention at Guantanamo.

"He writes that he is treated kindly and with respect, that he has good food, cleanliness, and as he says in his letter, he feels better than if he was at the best Russian sanatoriums," Hasanova said.

Vakhitov's mother said he also writes that his fellow detainees are friendly toward him, and that they often lend each other copies of the Koran and pray together.

 

at least when the AP ran the same story they had the decency to include the pentagon's response:

"A statement from Pentagon spokesman Lt. Cmdr. Flex Plexico also did not address Vakhitov's specific allegations but said "it is important to note that al-Qaida training manuals emphasize the tactic of making false abuse allegations."