Sadly, this sort of thing does not come as a surprise anymore. The American military has so far killed about a hundred people in its custody. In a recent article, Scott Horton reports how some military people have finally come clean. In Guantanamo in 2006 (yes, that late), three prisoners were tortured to death, and these murders were dressed up as suicides. The military had the gall to call it “an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us”. Here is how Horton describes it:
“According to the NCIS documents, each prisoner had fashioned a noose from torn sheets and T-shirts and tied it to the top of his cell’s eight-foot-high steel-mesh wall. Each prisoner was able somehow to bind his own hands, and, in at least one case, his own feet, then stuff more rags deep down into his own throat. We are then asked to believe that each prisoner, even as he was choking on those rags, climbed up on his washbasin, slipped his head through the noose, tightened it, and leapt from the washbasin to hang until he asphyxiated. The NCIS report also proposes that the three prisoners, who were held in non-adjoining cells, carried out each of these actions almost simultaneously.”
The military went to great lengths to conceal these murders. Dubbing the deaths suicide by hanging, they surgically removed the victim’s neck organs, “that would have been essential to determining whether death occurred from hanging, from strangulation, or from choking”. The military personnel were under strict instructions to keep quiet.
A fourth prisoner lived to tell the tale. Here is what he went through:
“On June 9th, 2006, [Aamer] was beaten for two and a half hours straight. Seven naval military police participated in his beating. Mr. Aamer stated he had refused to provide a retina scan and fingerprints. He reported to me that he was strapped to a chair, fully restrained at the head, arms and legs. The MPs inflicted so much pain, Mr. Aamer said he thought he was going to die. The MPs pressed on pressure points all over his body: his temples, just under his jawline, in the hollow beneath his ears. They choked him. They bent his nose repeatedly so hard to the side he thought it would break. They pinched his thighs and feet constantly. They gouged his eyes. They held his eyes open and shined a mag-lite in them for minutes on end, generating intense heat. They bent his fingers until he screamed. When he screamed, they cut off his airway, then put a mask on him so he could not cry out.”
This happened a few years ago, long after the torture revelations came out in public. The military covered it up. The Bush administration put in place the policies that led to these deaths. They still defend these policies. The Obama administration remains complicit in the cover up. The American media refused to touch it, and still will not touch it. Only the foreign media is giving it any play. What kind of society turns a blind eye to these abuses? What kind of society is more offended by attempts to provide subsidized healthcare than in torturing people to death? And where are the moral voices of the bishops on this issue?
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