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Wikileaks Releases Sensitive Guantanamo Manual
James Hardine writes "Wired is reporting that a never-before-seen military manual detailing the day-to-day operations of the U.S. military's Guantánamo Bay detention facility has been leaked to the web, via the whistle-blowing site Wikileaks.org, affording a rare inside glimpse into the institution where the United States has imprisoned hundreds of suspected terrorists since 2002. The 238-page document, "Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedures," is dated March 28, 2003. The disclosure highlights the internet's usefulness to whistle-blowers in anonymously propagating documents the government and others would rather conceal. The Pentagon has been resisting — since October 2003 — a Freedom of Information Act request from the American Civil Liberties Union seeking the very same document. Anonymous open-government activists created Wikileaks in January, hoping to turn it into a clearinghouse for such disclosures. The site uses a Wikipedia-like system to enlist the public in authenticating and analyzing the documents it publishes. The Camp Delta document includes schematics of the camp, detailed checklists of what "comfort items" such as extra toilet paper can be given to detainees as rewards, six pages of instructions on how to process new detainees, instructions on how to psychologically manipulate prisoners, and rules for dealing with hunger strikes."
No matter what the ideological slant you may take, I strongly suspect that the truth is going to be a lot more mundane - again, assuming this thing is not a fabrication in either one direction or the other.
(speakin' of which, how do you tell for certain that it's not just a fabrication, either for or against? It's something I've always wondered when it comes to public wikis - unless you can verify who submitted it --or it can be independently verified-- you'll never be quite sure of its veracity.)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
The folks at wikileaks should be heralded as heroes, and given millions of dollars.
We've spent about half a trillion dollars on this 'war', and we have nothing to show for it except negative opinions from our allies, and a show of weakening ourselves in a vicious cycle to our enemies.
Hmmph, surely if the folks at Gitmo are doing nothing wrong then they should have nothing to hide? Only wrongdoers demand secrecy.
Three Squirrels
... I'm pretty sure I'd rather have publically-elected and appointed officials be the final arbiters of government secrecy, and not self-appointed anonymous individuals. Sometimes for true liberty and justice you need someone other then the government controlling the information. To really have liberty you need to know what your Publically-elected and appointed officials are doing. Democracy doesn't work when the information is controlled by the government. If the government is the sole arbiter of information then you in fact no longer live in a democracy."There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Negative opinion of your allies? What allies?
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Actually, when I went to Wikileaks, I found the entire order of battle and equipment register for all of our forces in Iraq. What exactly was the motivation for leaking that and what higher purpose was served?
There's a moral difference between releasing a document related to human rights (which are obviously being abused at Gitmo) and releasing a document that serves no useful purpose other then giving somebody a complete picture of our forces in Iraq. Leave it to the right-wing trolls on /. to ignore the difference. I applaud them for releasing this document but question the motivation behind the other one.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
No no no, see its only the general public who shouldn't have anything to hide.
Remember, if the Government wants to hide stuff, its "national security." If the Government also wants to illegally wiretap everybody, its "national security." If the Government wants to send you to Syria to be tortured or lock you up for years with no evidence, its "national security."
But if you question the Government, you're a threat to "national security."
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Allow me.
The justice system is a mockery of its own title. Where is the justice for the illegally detained? It is morally unconscionable to believe we have the authority to exert our power against the people of the world in the ways we are. The tacit approval of torture by the government is a key indicator of how far from grace we have fallen.
There are mountains of evidence and personal testimonies from people who have been unjustly caught up in this whole debacle in which we are involved. Yet people like you still ignore the pleas for help and evidence of the destruction of the core principles upon which America was founded. I equate your viewpoint to that of creationists. You live in a world of self delusion which spawns further ignorance. That ignorance is exploited by the people who are causing this catastrophe as they invoke your name as the people who "support" their actions, justifying these actions as if they were approved by the sincere majority of Americans.
I'm sure you are an intelligent and thoughtful individual, but you need to open your eyes to the truth of how the war on terrorism and the drug war (by the way these are actually one and the same) are tearing apart not only America, but the world as a whole.
Hell yeah ! And here's a few more:
+ No weapons of Mass Destruction ever found
+ No realistic plan at all to rebuild Iraq
+ More Iraqi deaths since occupation than under Saddam
+ Kurdish terrorists now attacking Turkey
+ The creation of huge Iraq sized terrorist training camp
+ American and UK forces too tied up in Iraq to effectively deal with problems in Afghanistan
+ American troops seen as evil due to their behaviour running various prisons
+ Trillions of dollars wasted to no good effect
+ Thousands of American deaths and countless more severely injured
+ Iraq poised for a civil war the second the US pulls out
+ Iran and other enemies of freedom reaping the benefits of an overstretched US military
+ Constantly rising oil prices
- Females were attending school anyway, perhaps you were thinking of Afghanistan ?
- Mass graves are still being filled from the daily death toll of suicide bombs and terrorist attacks
It seemed to me like sarcasm.
Chances are the comment had a lot to do with how the current government says that extra surveillance on Americans is necessary to fight terrorism, and that we should trust them to not misuse the information they get. He's just using their own flawed argument against them.
Sorry, this will sound cold, but so what? Last time I checked we had a military to protect the United States "against all enemies, foreign and domestic", not to intervene in the internal affairs of other states. And if our intention was that noble, then why haven't we intervened in any of the African genocides?
Females are attending SchoolThat would make a better point in an argument about Afghanistan and not Iraq as it's my understanding that women were treated fairly well (by the standards of the Arab world) in Iraq. In any case, why the hell is it up to us to impose our moral viewpoint on other cultures?
The Rape Rooms Are Shut DownAnd exactly how were the rape rooms a threat to our national security?
Saddam isn't paying $25,000 to families of Palestinian Suicide BombersSounds like that's a problem for the Israelis. How are Palestinian suicide bombers a threat to the United States, again?
Uday and Qusay Hussien are deadAnd they were a threat to the United States, why?
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed - CapturedSorry, but this is where I lose my cool. STOP FUCKING TRYING TO LINK IRAQ TO 9/11 AND al-Qaeda. He was captured in Pakistan. What the fuck does that have to do with the Iraq war?
Chemical Ali - CapturedAnd he did what to the United States, exactly?
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi: DEAD.And he was a threat to us (prior to the invasion), how exactly?
I'm sorry, but I don't buy into this theory of an interventionist foreign policy. Iraq posed zero threat to the United States. You can't even use the argument that everybody thought he had WMDs, because he allowed the inspectors back in prior to the war and they would have eventually discovered that he didn't. There was no reason for us not to give them time to do their work unless we already decided to invade before Saddam agreed to allow them back in.
Beyond that, ever stop to think about what we could have done with the troops in Iraq if we had deployed them to Afghanistan? Perhaps we could have used our own forces during Tora Bora instead of outsourcing the job to the local strongmen? Perhaps our own forces would have managed to capture Bin Ladin instead of letting him slip away?
Funny how the defenders of the Iraq war are so quick to forget about Bush's "dead or alive" promise. I want the motherfucker that killed three thousand American civilians in cold blood. I could have given two shits about Saddam.
a liberal talking point.Look, another person throwing the word "liberal" out there, as if it should be some sort of insult. *sigh*
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
While I'm not a fan of this current administration or many of the things it has done and continues to do daily, who in their right mind would consider it SMART to release schematics to a fucking military installation?
Yeah this just happens to be a prison but how are you going to feel when someone releases the schematics to the air conditioning system at jrandom fort in your town and proceeds to gas and entire base of people?
I'm as big an opponent of fearmongering as there is. I hate the war on "terrorism" but for god's sake people, have some common sense.
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
Jane Fonda was a fucking treasonous cunt that deserved to be sent to Federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison for what she did
I'm sorry, but *no one* deserves to be raped, and the very idea of using such a thing as punishment is disgusting and abhorent. But, I would like to believe you didn't actually intend to advocate such a thing.
Of course comparisons with the IRA don't fit 100% with the current spate of terrorism because on the one hand the IRA were much more organised and effective than the current jokers and on the other the current terrorists don't have seem to have a political wing or any sensible demands they want met or anyone to meet with to discuss them.
In my opinion we should take reasonable steps to prevent terrorism, use the current police powers to deal with those we catch and chalk up any actual terrorist "successes" to being an unvoidable fact of life and not get ourselves worked up into a foaming lather over what seem to be at the most a hundred or so deaths. This might sound heartless and disrespectful to the victims but at least as many people seem to die in train crashes as die from terrorism which compared to Europes annual number of deaths is a completely insignificant figure.
First of all, the 650 thousand number you claim is discredited.
Just because whatever talking head you listen to said so doesn't make it true. The Lancet Medical Journal in which the survey was published is a highly respected peer-reviewed journal. It's going to take more to discredit the study than your sincere wish that it wasn't true.
The enemies of Democracy are
I find this topic and the arguments around it fascinating. My grandfather was imprisoned in Poland under false pretenses for five years. He had to negotiate for toilet paper. He performed many hunger strikes to win things like reading material, one time starving himself for 28 days. Seeing this manual is fairly chilling for me.
Many times over the years when I'd talk with people about his experiences, they would reassure me that such a thing wouldn't happen in a healthy constitutional democracy like the US. The cruelty and Kafkaesque behavior of his captors was relegated to the sickness of communism to be sure.
At some point long ago I realized that wasn't the case, and that we were very much capable of similar evils. Some people wouldn't agree with me, but here we have the plain as day proof.
I'm sure a percentage of the people reading this post think "who cares if they're mistreating suspected terrorists?". To each of you that feel that way, I would say this: if we had this conversation about my grandfather and communism before 9/11, or perhaps if you read his book, you'd have condemned his captors to hell for being so awful.
I love this country dearly but I'm ashamed of much of what we're doing right now.
Also: if the manual reads to you as being "not so bad" remember that it is very different when you're on the other side of it. And remember that it's just a manual: the real day to day life there is bound to be far more questionable.
We can apply your depth of reasoning to anything that's happened between 9/11 and today, and it's all equally valid. Let's have fun with it:
You can't really prove these things. But then again, you can't really disprove them, so it's about time the liberals finally accepted that they're all true.
Eerie....
I think trouble is...we all overestimated the intelligence and abilities of the American people. Most people, I guess, figured once they were rid of <president>, that they'd jump at the chance to unite, and form a rational, somewhat freedom enbracing government. I mean, considering the dictatorship they'd endured, you'd think, eh?
But, it turned out not to be the case. Apparently they are pretty much all fscked in the head over there....can't get past racial/religious differences (and for God's sake how can even they tell the difference between Democrat and Republican?, they really do all look like one people on tv)....so, they constantly bicker and have apparently NO leaders in the group that the country can rally around.
Given this, I really don't hold up much hope for them to get their act together no matter how long we stay and support them. I think at some point, we're gonna have to withdraw...step back, throw a couple of knives in the center....and then, after it is over with...we just have to deal with the 'winner'....
Stop being such a politically correct left-wing flower child and reading shit into my post that wasn't there.
/.
Well, first off, no, I don't have fucking Office Space memorized. I have better things to do with my time than memorize lines from shitty movies.
Second off, whether you meant it or not, there *are* those who think that prison rape is perfectly fine, and I'm fucking sick of people tacitly condoning it by casually referring to "pound me in the ass" prisons, as if it's something justifiable, or in this case, funny. It's not. Find another goddamned joke. You're part of the fucking problem, whether you realize it or not.
How finding prison rape objectionable equates to "being such a politically correct left-wing flower child", I'll never know. I find that shit offensive, and frankly, you should too.
You have completely glossed over/missed the point of my post in favor of picking on a specific line that happens to be quite popular on
Actually, no, I misunderstood because I don't have that god damned movie memorized. In fact, for all the times I've seen that statement, this is first time (and I've been here a long time) that it's been pointed out that it is, in fact, a movie quote.
Besides, if I said "she should be sent to a prison and raped repeatedly", would you find that funny (well, you might, but perhaps that's the problem)? I doubt it. But, apparently a change of phrasing makes all the difference...
Normally I don't use expletives on the Internets but Fuck you! I am a muslim and I find your suggestions barbaric to the extreme. Did you know that most of the detainees in Gitmo were randomly or falsely accused. Did you know that they have no chance of finding out what the accusation were and even if they did, they couldn't do anything about it? Would you agree to muslims forcing non-muslims to follow our own practices, since this is similar to what you are proposing? Praying and reading the Koran is the most BASIC requirement to a muslim, not as you say a reinforcement to fundamentalism. I had hoped that Slashdot is populated by brother geeks who are above making such hate comments. If you are an American, than good luck to you when your government decides that you are a threat to national safety. Sure you say, they won't go after you. But maybe you download porn and as we know, porn is immoral. Maybe you pirate music and as we know, piracy is hurting the economy. Maybe you smoke weed and as we know, the war on drugs is still on. Maybe you buy products not made by American companies and thus you are not patriotic. We no longer view your country as a beacon of democracy and equal opportunity. Your country is no longer the good guys and no longer have the moral authority to chastise third world dictatorships if people like you condone torture and imprisonment without trial.
Oh, I'm sorry. I thought you were talking about the USA. Clearly not.
Our economy is in the tank right now; the US dollar is dropping like a rock relative to other foreign currency. Hell, the USD is worth less than 1 CAD for the first time I can remember. We're so deep in debt to other countries that my grandkid's grandkids will probably still be paying it off, all to fund this retarded "war". At the end of the Clinton administration, we had not only a balanced budget, but a yearly surpluss that could (in theory, though I guess I'm not naieve enough to believe it would ever happen) be used to pay down our debt. That's long gone. And you may not have heard, but millions of people just lost their houses because they couldn't afford their mortgage payments.
Our military is stretched so thin we couldn't fend off an invasion from Bermuda, let alone an actual serious military threat. And our government knows it, so much so that they're coddling North Korea and Iran, two countries that are infinitely more dangerous a threat to us than Iraq could ever have been if Saddam had even wanted to.
And the rest of the world hates us. Not that this is new, but our "word" doesn't mean dick to anyone but us after that whole WMD/uranium/etc. fiasco.
--Mike
Not if what they're saying is true.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.