http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/military/jan-june05/gitmo_6-3.html6-3 Jim Lehrer NewsHour
RE: Amnesty International report and the conditions at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility
William Schulz, executive director of Amnesty International USA.
Neil Livingtstone, CEO of Global Options, an international risk management company that consults for private businesses and the U.S. government on security and terrorism matters (and domestic fear-mongering EDIT)
We invited Pentagon officials to send a representative, but they declined.
<snip> ("DISAPPEARED")
WILLIAM SCHULZ: ....The United States is maintaining an archipelago of prisons, many of them secret prisons in which people are being disappeared. They are being held in incommunicado detention without access to the judicial system. That is similar to the gulags. They are being held without access to their families; that is similar. And in many cases, they are being mistreated, abused, and even killed. In fact, there have been at least a hundred deaths of detainees, 27 of which have been ruled to be homicides by medical examiners. And finally, we also know that the United States is clearly in violation of the Geneva Conventions because the conventions require that if a captor does not want to label captives prisoners of war.
<snip> ("INNUENDO")
NEIL LIVINGSTONE: Well, I think that the hyperbole of calling it a gulag, the overstatement calls into question their whole report.... In this case, I think this is part of a very calculated effort to take
innuendo, unfounded accusations and so on and try to bash the United States. Let me give you one example. The Navy's inspector general looked at twenty-four thousand interrogations that were conducted by interrogators at Guantanamo and found that there were only five to seven cases of abuse and those were relatively minor.
<snip> (TARNISHED "GOLD STANDARD")
WILLIAM SCHULZ: ... I can acknowledge that for us Americans, this may well seem like hyperbole. But by focusing so much on the semantic debate the administration is attempting to continue the cover up of what has been a systematic policy of torture... The response of this government to Amnesty's criticisms is almost exactly the same response that the Chinese give, the Cubans give, and many other governments give whenever we hold up what we try to hold up as one universal gold standard of human rights respect: The same standard for every country.
<snip> (YOU'RE EITHER WITH US OR YOU'RE ONE OF THEM)
NEIL LIVINGSTONE: I'm not sure that the rest of the world in general sees this as some type of indictment of the United States. I think there are certainly people out there and supporters of anti-American efforts, even supporters of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden who are the same people cheering in the streets that say, you know, This is somehow, our self-defense mechanisms today are somehow illegal unwarranted, wringing of hands. Let me tell you about Guantanamo. For a lot of these people, they're having better treatment and care than they had when they were in the field in Afghanistan. They're getting healthcare for the first time...They're getting meals, three meals a day.
<snip> (THE ONES THAT GOT AWAY)
There are probably 100 hard-core terrorist there and twelve to seventeen of those already released, by the way, have gone back into the field and we think they are carrying out terrorist activities today.
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