or an isolated incident? (we’ve had a lot of those lately)
Soldier Nearly Killed in Prison Training Exercise At Guantanamo
In Kentucky, a former member of a military police company assigned to Guantanamo Bay, has come forward to tell the press how he was almost killed by his fellow American troops during a training exercise where his colleagues thought he was an actual inmate at Guantanamo. Sean Baker’s story took place in 2003. He was stationed at the Cuban base where the military was holding hundreds of detainees captured in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Baker was ordered to play the role of a detainee in a training exercise. He says four U.S. soldiers who thought he was a detainee grabbed his arms, legs and twisted him. One soldier got on his back and then began to choke him while pressing his head against the steel floor. After 20 or 30 seconds Baker couldn’t breathe. He gave the code word – red – to stop the exercise. But the beating continued until one of the soldiers noticed Baker was wearing Army boots indicating he was not a detainee but one of them. Baker suffered a traumatic brain injury that has left him with a seizure disorder. The military hasn’t confirmed Baker’s story but a spokesperson for the Kentucky National Guard told the Associated Press “There was a training accident, after which he was medically discharged.”
democracynow.org/article…4/05/25/1422245
my heart swells with patriotism…
and here are more sources in case you want to cry propoganda.
https://www.kentucky.com/mld/kentucky/news/local/9044339.htm
https://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/jun2004/guan-j24.shtml
https://washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/20040623-114120-7762r.htm
https://news.google.com/news?hl=en&edition=us&ie=ascii&q=sean+baker&btnG=Search+News
Couple this with this:
Mon Jun 28,10:31 AM ET
By ANNE GEARAN, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court ruled narrowly Monday that Congress gave President Bush the power to hold an American citizen without charges or trial, but said the detainee can challenge his treatment in court.
The 6-3 ruling sided with the administration on an important legal point raised in the war on terrorism. At the same time, it left unanswered other hard questions raised by the case of Yaser Esam Hamdi, who has been detained more than two years and who was only recently allowed to see a lawyer.
The administration had fought any suggestion that Hamdi or another U.S.-born terrorism suspect could go to court, saying that such a legal fight posed a threat to the president’s power to wage war as he sees fit.
“We have no reason to doubt that courts, faced with these sensitive matters, will pay proper heed both to the matters of national security that might arise in an individual case and to the constitutional limitations safeguarding essential liberties that remain vibrant even in times of security concerns,” Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote for the court.
O’Connor said that Hamdi “unquestionably has the right to access to counsel.”
The court threw out a lower court ruling that supported the government’s position fully, and Hamdi’s case now returns to a lower court.
The careful opinion seemed deferential to the White House, but did not give the president everything he wanted.
The ruling is the largest test so far of executive power in the post-Sept. 11 assault on terrorism.
The court has yet to rule in the similar case of American-born detainee Jose Padilla and in another case testing the legal rights of detainees held as enemy combatants at a U.S. military prison facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
O’Connor said the court has “made clear that a state of war is not a blank check for the president when it comes to the rights of the nation’s citizens.”
She was joined by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and justices Stephen Breyer and Anthony Kennedy in her view that Congress had authorized detentions such as Hamdi’s in what she called very limited circumstances,
Congress voted shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks to give the president significant authority to pursue terrorists, but Hamdi’s lawyers said that authority did not extend to the indefinite detention of an American citizen without charges or trial.
Two other justices, David H. Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, would have gone further and declared Hamdi’s detention improper. Still, they joined O’Connor and the others to say that Hamdi, and by extension others who may be in his position, are entitled to their day in court.
Hamdi and Padilla are in military custody at a Navy brig in South Carolina. They have been interrogated repeatedly without lawyers present.
The Bush administration contends that as “enemy combatants,” the men are not entitled to the usual rights of prisoners of war set out in the Geneva Conventions. Enemy combatants are also outside the constitutional protections for ordinary criminal suspects, the government has claimed.
The administration argued that the president alone has authority to order their detention, and that courts have no business second-guessing that decision.
The case has additional resonance because of recent revelations that U.S. soldiers abused Iraqi prisoners and used harsh interrogation methods at a prison outside Baghdad. For some critics of the administration’s security measures, the pictures of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison illustrated what might go wrong if the military and White House have unchecked authority over prisoners.
At oral arguments in the Padilla case in April, an administration lawyer assured the court that Americans abide by international treaties against torture, and that the president or the military would not allow even mild torture as a means to get information.
story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=s … mbatants_5
I’m glad the courts are SOMEWHAT working though.
