STILL DON'T BUY THE TORTURE STORIES?
Soldier Sues Over Guantanamo Beating

From the Los Angeles Times courtesy of the Daily Kos:

Spc. Sean D. Baker, 38, was assaulted in January 2003 after he volunteered to wear an orange jumpsuit and portray an uncooperative detainee. Baker said the MPs, who were told that he was an unruly detainee who had assaulted an American sergeant, inflicted a beating that resulted in a traumatic brain injury.

And

As he was being choked and beaten, Baker said, he screamed a code word, "red," and shouted: "I'm a U.S. soldier! I'm a U.S. soldier!" He said the beating continued until the jumpsuit was yanked down during the struggle, revealing his military uniform.

The lawsuit says of the extraction team: "Armed with the highly inflammatory, false, incendiary and misleading information that had been loaded into their psyches by their platoon leader, these perceptions and fears … became their operative reality, and they acted upon these fears, all to the detriment of Sean Baker."

No one has been disciplined or punished for the assault, said Baker's lawyer, T. Bruce Simpson Jr.

Last June, a military spokesman said an internal investigation in February 2003 had concluded that no one was liable for Baker's injuries. He said training procedures at Guantanamo had been reviewed after the incident.

Click here for the rest.

Uh..."no one was liable?" That's a crock of shit. It's pretty clear that these soldiers were doing exactly what they were trained to do, beat the crap out of prisoners: that means that ultimate liability lies with their superiors.

What's really damning about this is that we learn from as trusted a source as you can get in this situation, a loyal and obedient longtime US soldier, that vicious beatings are business as usual at Guantanamo. "Fraternity pranks," "isolated incidents," "bad people," all these right-wing excuses and flimsy explanations are shown to be the bullshit that they are. The US tortures people, and that is, quite simply, intolerable--they weren't even trying to get any information from this guy; they were just beating his head on the floor for fun.

Meanwhile politicians and the press are mired in endless discussions about whether such behavior is like or unlike the Nazis. Here's an Alexandrian solution to this Gordian Knot of a "debate:" Nazis tortured; the US tortures. Period. What don't they understand about that?

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