by Tom Lasseter
The militants crept up behind Mohammed Akhtiar as he squatted at the spigot
to wash his hands before evening prayers at the Guantanamo Bay detention
camp.
They shouted "Allahu Akbar" - God is great - as one of them hefted a metal
mop squeezer into the air, slammed it into Akhtiar's head and sent thick
streams of blood running down his face.
American troops dragged Akhtiar out of his home in Gardez, Afghanistan, in
May 2003, flew him to Guantanamo in shackles that July and held him there
for more than three years. . . .
An eight-month McClatchy investigation in 11 countries on three continents
has found that Akhtiar was one of dozens and perhaps hundreds of men whom
the U.S. has wrongfully imprisoned in Afghanistan, Cuba and elsewhere on the
basis of flimsy or fabricated evidence, old personal scores or bounty
payments. . . .
From the moment that Guantanamo opened in early 2002, former Secretary of
the Army Thomas White said, it was obvious that at least a third of the
population didn't belong there. . . .
Bush suspended the legal protection for detainees spelled out in Common
Article Three of the 1949 Geneva Convention on prisoners of war, which
outlaws degrading treatment and torture. . . .
FULL TEXT
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Robert Dreyfuss, "Dirty War: Our
Monsters in Iraq," TomPaine.com, November 18, 2005
[Foreign suspects held in Guantanamo Bay have the right to challenge their
detention in US civilian courts, the US Supreme Court has ruled.--Thomas
Powers, "Major
Guantanamo setback for Bush," BBC News, June 12, 2008]
Pamela Hess, "AP: Exams prove abuse,
torture in Iraq, Gitmo," Associated Press, June 17, 2008
Marisa Taylor, "In a first, court
says military erred in a Guantanamo case," McClatchy Newspapers,
June 23, 2005
