Wednesday, June 23, 2004

About a month ago I posted a story about Sean Baker, a National Guardsman who was asked to portray a prisoner at Guantanamo for a training exercise and was beaten so severely (by U.S. soldiers who didn't know he wasn't a real detainee) that he was left with a seizure disorder. Well, last night ABC News ran a story about Baker with a detail I hadn't heard:

[Baker] said the four soldiers stopped beating him only when they saw he was wearing parts of an Army uniform beneath the prison jumpsuit. Then they realized he was one of them.

Baker said: "I could only grunt it out, you know, 'I'm a U.S. soldier. I'm a U.S. soldier.' And one of them said, you know, something like, 'Whoa, whoa, hold on. Stop. Stop.' "

But even then, Baker said he had to face the dogs outside the cell, which were apparently trained to attack anyone in an orange jumpsuit.

"I moved out into the causeway and the canine unit was going wild because I had the orange jumpsuit on," he said. "And someone screamed, yelled back and said, 'Cut the suit off of him! Cut that suit off of him! Get that suit off him!' "


I know what right-wingers would say about the soldiers who beat Baker, but what about the dogs? Were they "bad apples," too? Bad apple dogs?

*****

In addition, The Guardian has a story about prisoner abuse at Bagram in Afghanistan --

American soldiers stripped him naked and photographed him, set dogs on him, asked him which animal he would prefer to have sex with, and told him his wife was a prostitute. He will tell also of hoods being placed over his head, of being forced to roll over every 15 minutes while he tried to sleep, and of being kept on his knees with his hands tied behind his back in a narrow tunnel-like space, unable to move.

-- and there's a USA Today story about the "quick results" Major General Jeffrey Miller promised (i.e., better intelligence) if his Guantanamo methods were adopted at Abu Ghraib -- never mind the fact that Monday's New York Times told us that the intelligence coming from Guantanamo hasn't been all that great.

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