It's called damage control.
"Amid hunger strike, after clash, Guantanamo tenser" by Ben Fox | Associated Press, April 20, 2013
GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba — The morning routine started before dawn with a prisoner chanting the Muslim call to prayer through a small opening in the door of his cell as soldiers with face shields quietly paced in the corridor. The calm did not last long.
Within minutes, troops began rushing about, the words ‘‘code yellow’’ echoing through their handheld radios. The emergency was a prisoner in another cellblock who did not appear to be moving, prompting the urgent call to the medics to come check him, something they have been called upon to do many times in recent weeks, said the Army captain in charge of the maximum-security section of the Guantanamo Bay prison known as Camp 5.
Officials later said the man who sparked the alarm Thursday was OK, merely faint and dizzy, and he did not have to be hospitalized as others have had amid a weeks-old hunger strike at the prison. Still, it was an illustration of just how tense Guantanamo has become of late, with more than a third of the prisoners refusing to eat and nearly everyone locked down for most of the day since a violent clash with guards on April 13.
That was last week, and it's the first I've seen or heard of it -- on a Slow Saturday!
Related: Guantanamo guards, detainees clash
I'm going to check my printed paper, but I'm sure I never saw it there.
At least two detainees have tried to kill themselves since that confrontation between guards in riot gear and prisoners with broomsticks and metal bars.
Officials opened the prison to journalists this week, portraying the atmosphere as tense but under control at this detention center that has been open for 11 years and now holds 166 men, most without charge.
Related:
"The Obama administration, which is considering plans to indefinitely detain dozens of Guantanamo Bay prisoners without civilian or military trials.... cannot face trial because the evidence is too weak to hold up in court"
Meaning they are INNOCENT! The reason they can't be released is because then the marks of torture and abuse would be visible and they could tell their stories.
Obama Retains Indefinite Imprisonment Policy
Obama the Neo-Con
I thought his presidency looked familiar. Puts the fraud to all that high talk when he came into office. What a disappointment.
Seven prisoners have killed themselves over the years at Guantanamo. ‘‘Are they done? No, they are not done yet. And there will be more than one death,’’ said an Arab-American Muslim cultural affairs adviser, who goes by “Zak’’ and has worked at the prison since September 2005.
It is the uncertainty over when, if ever, the men held at Guantanamo will be released that has caused widespread despair and frustration among prisoners, lawyers for the men say. President Obama ordered the detention center closed upon taking office, but Congress thwarted him and made it harder to move prisoners elsewhere.
‘‘Until such time as our government starts to do the right thing in connection with Guantanamo Bay, the frustration is only going to continue to build, and I can’t imagine what the outcome will be,’’ said Navy Lieutenant Commander Kevin Bogucki, a military lawyer visiting clients at the base this week.
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"As Obama, Congress move on, Guantanamo is still a problem" April 06, 2013
The hunger strike at Guantanamo Bay, which began in February, shows no sign of abating. Indeed, defense lawyers say more than 100 of the facility’s 166 detainees have joined in.
That's almost two-thirds, yet the news report above only said more than a third. Not technically a lie, but definitely a sleight-of-word distortion.
The strike was triggered when guards searched copies of the Koran for contraband.
How are they getting contraband in there of all places? This was just an excuse to abuse!
But the protest is also one of the few methods that detainees — many of whom have been cleared for release, but are being held because of a lack of stability in their home nations — have to remind the world that they still exist.
As you and I know from above, THAT is a LIE! What is worse is it is in an editorial.
The farther we get away from Sept. 11, 2001, the harder it is to justify this facility. The hunger strike should remind President Obama of his unkept promise to close it.
He's broken so many promises.
Detainees imprisoned for more than a decade had high hopes of being released, or at least put on trial, when Obama took office. But only a handful of trials have moved forward, at a glacial pace. Transfers out of the facility have ground to a halt.
In fact, the treatment has gotten worse.
Congress bears much of the blame, because lawmakers have included provisions in the annual defense authorization bill that make it harder to close the facility. They prohibit the use of funds to transfer detainees to the United States for trial in federal court and require the secretary of defense to certify that detainees cleared for release are sent to countries that have “agreed to take effective steps to ensure that the transferred person does not pose a future threat to the United States, its citizens or its allies.” That sweeping language has had a chilling effect. No one can give an absolute guarantee that detainees won’t go back to fighting, just as no one can ensure that criminals released from US prisons won’t go back to crime. As Charles Stimson, who headed detainee affairs under George W. Bush, points out: “You have to tolerate some kind of risk.”
Also see: One-Day Wonder: Presidential Power
That’s why Obama ultimately deserves the blame for the failure to make more progress at closing Guantanamo. He seems unwilling to tolerate any risk at all. Even Shaker Aamer, a British resident cleared for release years ago, remains at Guantanamo, despite the British government’s public and repeated requests that he be sent home.
Obama should muster the political courage to stand up to Congress on Guantanamo. If his secretary of defense is unable to certify a transfer under the tough provisions, Obama retains the ability to transfer prisoners with a “national security waiver” — a power he has never used.
He'll send enough of them out over gun laws though.
Obama himself has made transfers more difficult. After one terrorist plot, he issued a blanket moratorium on sending detainees to Yemen, where more than half of the detainees are from. It may be time for that moratorium to be lifted. A new, democratically elected government in Yemen is putting together a plan to take responsibility for its detainees. About a third of the 88 men from Yemen have already been cleared for release. Keeping them at Guantanamo just because of their nationality flies in the face of justice. The US government should support the democratic transition in Yemen by providing the financial, military, and intelligence support necessary to send them home and keep an eye on them.
Where are we going to get all this money?
Instead, Obama appears to have thrown in the towel on Guantanamo.
Seems to be a pattern with him unless it is the New World Order agenda at work (or Israel wants something).
In January, he closed the office of the envoy who led the effort to close the facility. Now, the US military is investing in a fiber optic cable to the base and planning for specialized medical care for “aging detainees.”
They get better medical care than you, Americans.
That suggests that some will be held there for the rest of their natural lives.
And if that were any other nation -- except for you know who (rhymes with) -- the U.S would be criticizing them.
Even Republicans can understand that keeping Guantanamo open — at a cost of $800,000 per prisoner per year, compared with $35,000 in a federal prison — is not in our national interest.
It costs HOW MUCH?!!!??!!!
Every day it remains open is a drain on our resources and a challenge to our reputation around the world.
What do you mean OUR, Globe?
Six Zionist Companies Own 96% of the World's Media
Declassified: Massive Israeli manipulation of US media exposed
Operation Mockingbird
Why Am I No Longer Reading the Newspaper?
That's not me. I've opposed the torture policy since its inception.
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Related: Guantanamo is America’s moral failure
What started it all:
"Hunger strike grows to 25 detainees at Guantanamo" by Charlie Savage | New York Times, March 21, 2013
WASHINGTON — A hunger strike by detainees who have been held for years without trial at the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has grown to involve at least 25 prisoners, the Defense Department disclosed on Wednesday.
And within two weeks it would zoom to 100?
That number includes eight who are being force-fed a nutritional supplement through a hose snaked into their nose while they are restrained in a chair.
And the torture continues.
There have long been about half a dozen prisoners at Guantanamo who refuse to eat and have been kept alive by force-feeding. But the number refusing meals among the 166-inmate population has recently surged....
Lawyers representing some of the detainees in habeas corpus lawsuits, who communicate with them during visits to the island and by phone, said that the number is significantly higher than the official count. The military said it is using criteria developed by the civilian Bureau of Prisons, which generally counts a prisoner who refuses nine straight meals as a hunger striker.
The origins of the hunger strike are disputed. David H. Remes, a lawyer for several Yemeni detainees who were cleared for repatriation years ago but remain imprisoned because of poor security conditions in Yemen, said he was recently told by clients that prison officials had started searching Korans, which inmates considered to be religious desecration, in a way they had not done since 2006.
A group of lawyers representing detainees, including Remes, sent letters on March 4 and March 14 to military officials raising alarm about the strike and asking for attention to alleviate its underlying causes, citing the purported Koran searches and a wider set of ‘‘regressive practices at the prison taking place in recent months, which our clients have described as a return to an older regime at Guantanamo that was widely identified with the mistreatment of detainees.’’
Translation: Conditions have GOTTEN WORSE!
However, Captain Robert Durand, a spokesman for the prison, said that there had been no change to longstanding procedures for searching the Korans, in which prison translators, who are Muslims, touch the book. In a lengthy statement, he argued that the detainees were coordinating to ‘‘fabricate’’ claims of personal or Koran abuse as a tactic for garnering news media attention.
That is so out there is is almost impossible to respond.
Right, the agenda-pushing, war-promoting, lie-reinforcing Zionist Jew intelligence operation is carrying the torch for tortured detainees who are completely innocent. I suppose if anyone can recognize fabrication it's the US military. They do enough of it.
In phone interviews, Remes and Durand largely agreed, however, that a significant underlying condition for the recent unrest was the collapse of hopes that the US government would at some point let them go.
‘‘I think there was great hope that there would be fresh movement, and there was at the beginning’’ of the Obama administration four years ago, Durand said. ‘‘But the movement in the last year is not encouraging. I don’t dispute that there is frustration over that.’’
Oh, the audacity of hope.
In 2009, President Obama inherited about 240 detainees from the Bush administration and ordered that the prison be closed by the end of his first year in office. He also established a task force to review each prisoner’s case; about half of the remaining inmates were ultimately approved for transfer.
But the effort to wind down the prison collapsed in the face of concerns over the security conditions in the countries where the bulk of the remaining low-level prisoners are from — most notably Yemen — and concerns in Congress about some former detainees who were linked to terrorist activities. Lawmakers have imposed an increasingly steep set of obstacles to additional transfers.
As a result, in 2012 only four prisoners were allowed to leave the island — two as a result of a military commission trial, and two who were ordered freed by a federal judge. A fifth prisoner, who had been repeatedly cleared for repatriation under both the Bush and Obama administrations and was ordered freed by a federal district court judge, only to have that order overturned by an appeals court, apparently committed suicide.
More blood on their hands.
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Related: Wait continues for cleared Guantanamo detainees
Also see: The Boston Globe's Invisible Ink: Inside Gitmo
Canadian Landslide
That's what they need to be freed?
UPDATE:
"More prisoners join hunger strike
SAN JUAN — A hunger strike among prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay base in Cuba keeps growing, with 100 of 166 prisoners joining the strike, Lieutenant Colonel Samuel House said Saturday. He said 19 are receiving liquid nutrients through a nasal tube to prevent dangerous weight loss. Prisoners began the strike in February to protest conditions and indefinite confinement (AP)."
Really getting that media attention, huh?
