The Geneva Convention on steroids?
"What is going on at Guantanamo Bay is called the Combat Status Review Tribunal, which is the Geneva Conventions protections on steroids. It is a process of determining who an enemy combatant is that not only applies with the Geneva Conventions and then some, it also is being modeled based on the O'Connor opinion in Hamdi, a Supreme Court case, where she suggested that Army regulation 190-8, sections 1 through 6, of 1997, would be the proper guide in detaining people as enemy prisoners, enemy combatants. That regulation is ``Enemy Prisoners of War, Retained Personnel, Civilian Internees, and other Detainees.'' We have taken her guidance. We have the Army regulation 190-8, and we have created an enemy combat status review that goes well beyond the Geneva Conventions requirements to detain someone as an enemy combatant."
On steroids, eh? So you'd think that the CSRT would be like a super-powerful version of the Geneva conventions and there'd be, contrary to the thousand or so well-sourced reports stating the contrary, absolutely no torture going on in the American Gulag (the gulag which Lindsey Graham (E-SC) is trying to put outside the law?)
A prisoner was injured by a bomb, and had five operations on his shattered leg while in Pakistani custody. He was about to recieve the main operation in which his bone would be fixed when he was taken into American custody and moved to Kandahar. There he was beaten and left naked, and did not receive medical care. On his transfer to Guantanamo:
"They gave me no medical care. They never changed the bandages. They gave me no pain-killers." He was in Camp X-Ray screaming in pain. He was afraid of infection. Every time he asked for new bandages, the US personnel said, "Tomorrow."
This went on for fifteen days without relief. Ultimately the wound swelled up alarmingly and the sin (sic) became discolored with a bad odor. The pain became much worse.
"One night I was crying in pain and I asked the guard to get a doctor. A translator came to me and said, 'You get no treatment until you admit to being a terrorist.' I said I need medication and pain killers. The translator held out some pain killers but said, 'I'll give you none of this until you confess.' I said, I bleed too much. 'Muslim blood is worth nothing', he said."
Eventually, he was told he would have to have his leg amputated, or else risk gangrene. He agreed, but the wound was infected, and so he had to have six more operations, cutting off a little more bone each time. A year later, the wound swelled up again; this time, the doctors discovered that they had left some cotton in the wound during the previous operations. He had three more operations as a result. A year and a half after that, "the leg got infected again with pus, and it took him six months to get medication. The doctor found that they had forgotten to take the wires out from the second round of operations. On May 27, 2004, they finally removed these. This was his eleventh operation in Guantanamo Bay."
Does this sound like the Geneva Conventions are being strengthened? It doesn't sound that way to me either.
The weblog Obsidian Wings has published a series of articles on the disgusting abuse of prisoners in the American Gulag and how Lindsey Graham (E-SC) is trying to strip those prisoners of every right they might have so that the "beautiful minds" of people who support the torturers back in Washington DC won't have second thoughts about supporting the Evil Party. Because, heavens, even thought they voted for Evil, we can't actually let them know the details of it, because then the big old campaign contributions might start slowing down.