Scott Horton reveals that the reported suicides of three Guantanamo detainees in June 2006 weren’t suicides at all:
This is the official story, adopted by NCIS and Guantánamo command and reiterated by the Justice Department in formal pleadings, by the Defense Department in briefings and press releases, and by the State Department. Now four members of the Military Intelligence unit assigned to guard Camp Delta, including a decorated non-commissioned Army officer who was on duty as sergeant of the guard the night of June 9–10, have furnished an account dramatically at odds with the NCIS report—a report for which they were neither interviewed nor approached.
All four soldiers say they were ordered by their commanding officer not to speak out, and all four soldiers provide evidence that authorities initiated a cover-up within hours of the prisoners’ deaths. Army Staff Sergeant Joseph Hickman and men under his supervision have disclosed evidence in interviews with Harper’s Magazine that strongly suggests that the three prisoners who died on June 9 had been transported to another location prior to their deaths. The guards’ accounts also reveal the existence of a previously unreported black site at Guantánamo where the deaths, or at least the events that led directly to the deaths, most likely occurred.
This is a giant story by any measure, but not a single major American newspaper has yet to print their own report on it. We often argue about media bias being liberal or conservative, but the bias in our traditional media is that they’re too chickenshit to take on powerful institutions.
UPDATE: It looks like it was covered on Countdown on MSNBC, but there’s still nothing on the MSNBC front page about this.
Nice catch Lee.
It helps to remind people what we were getting away from in 2008 and what we need to stay away from in 2012 and beyond.
Carrying more water for the enemy eh traitors?
@2
I wouldn’t go so far as to call the media traitors, but the fact that they’re so willing to bury their heads in the sand on this certainly doesn’t help this country in the long run.
The fact that folks in the military continued to sit on this even as a new Commander in Chief took over, implies Obams’s up against one hell of a lot bigger mess than he probably ever imagined.
Sorry to say, there have been more important things to attend to in the last year than picking away at the health care boulder. On the other hand, maybe there really isn’t enough left of the real America to to be worth the trouble of trying to save.
Peace out.
@2 How do you know they were “enemy”? The vast majority of detainees in Gitmo were innocent bystanders — “bycatch” if you will — scooped up by Bush’s gillnet. The proof of that is the fact Bush released hundreds of detainees. The odds of a given Gitmo detainee being an actual terrorist are about 3 in 100.
Of course, the moral inconvenience of killing innocents along with the guilty has never kept Republicans from killing.
@4 We’re already a third world country and there are enough people still voting for Republicans to ensure we remain one.
This is what happens when you let an oligarchy get control.
We have to start flipping the teabaggers to our side.
But, as inconvenient as the truth may be, the first thing that George Washington did after crushing Shay’s Rebellion was to build the biggest whiskey still in the newly ‘united’ states.
how many palestinians do you thnk the idf and the mossad have kiled?
AF @ 4: “there have been more important things to attend to in the last year than picking away at the health care boulder. On the other hand, maybe there really isn’t enough left of the real America to to be worth the trouble of trying to save.”
I disagree, in a sense, with the first part of what you say. We need to deal with healthcare, yet the trogolytes just won an election in Massachusetts campaigning against it. In my small employment situation, Regence is increasing our healthcare premium for our employees by 28%. We shopped around and can’t do better than that. So, what are our options as an employer? They are to either not provide healthcare or not give raises, or to lay someone off. The Republicans could give a rat’s ass about that.
Maybe, in answer to your other question, this country just is not worth saving.
Thanks for the linkage. It’s in the Countdown area of MSNBC. I posted Olbermann’s video in the article you linked, so you can see it there too.
@5 and 6: the specific detainees mentioned in Horton’s article were about to be released as they were in fact innocent bycatch.
This was murder, pure and simple. O et al (all of us as Americans for that matter) are more and more complicit the longer this is not prosecuted.
Who cares about jihadis? I certainly don’t, and neither do 89% of the American people. Go 11%ers!!!!
re 13: “Who cares about jihadis? I certainly don’t, and neither do 89% of the American people. Go 11%ers!!!!”
The point of the story is that the men killed were not jihadists.
Do you have a poll that says that 89% of the American voters are in favor of killing innocent people from the Middle East?
@14 Regrettably, half of all Americans will most likely never find out about this, and the rest probably don’t particularly care.