"Guantánamo Meets Geneva Rules, Study Finds."

[chill_wind]

Guantánamo Meets Geneva Rules, Study Finds


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By WILLIAM GLABERSON
Published: February 20, 2009

A Pentagon report requested by President Obama on the conditions at the Guantánamo Bay detention center concludes that the prison complies with the humanitarian requirements of the Geneva conventions, but it makes many recommendations for increasing human contact among the prisoners, according to two government officials who have read portions of it.


A report requested by President Obama determined that the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay meets the humanitarian standards of the Geneva Conventions.

The review, requested by President Obama on the second day of his administration, is due to be delivered to the White House this weekend.

The request, made as part of a plan to close the center within a year, was widely seen as an effort by the new administration to defuse the power of allegations during the Bush administration that there were widespread abuses at Guantánamo, and that many detainees were suffering severe psychological effects after years of isolation.

(...)

Gitanjali Gutierrez, a lawyer for Guantánamo detainees at the Center for Constitutional Rights, said that she and other lawyers found that conditions have remained bleak there even after the start of the new administration.

read more of her comments: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/21/us/21gitmo.html?hp


In other news..

White House Site Un-Slams Bush on Katrina
by Paul Kiel, ProPublica - February 20, 2009 2:30 pm EST

Direct criticism of the Bush Administration's handling of Hurricane Katrina was deleted from whitehouse.gov

ChangeTracker, our vigilant and all-seeing widget, is barely a day old, and already it’s netted a revealing tweak to the White House Web site.

If you’d dialed up the "Additional Issues" portion of the Web site’s "Agenda" section earlier this week, the entry on Hurricane Katrina would have left you with zero doubt about who was to blame for the governmental failure to respond to the storm: the Bush administration. "President Obama will keep the broken promises made by President Bush to rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast," the section read, continuing:

"President Obama swiftly responded to Hurricane Katrina. Citing the Bush Administration's ‘unconscionable ineptitude’ in responding to Hurricane Katrina, then-Senator Obama introduced legislation requiring disaster planners to take into account the specific needs of low-income hurricane victims." (Emphasis mine.)

see the old language and new language and more: http://www.propublica.org/article/white-house-site-un-slams-bush-on-katrina

Why the sanitizing so as to not offend George and Dick too much these days? What's wrong with calling things what they are?

[EFerrari]

1. If Obama hasn't seen that report yet, does this article ask us to slam him

for it anyway? What's happening here?

[chill_wind]

2. It points sharply to a behind the scenes struggle

between a Pentagon, some of which still want to keep the whitewash, and those rights advocates who will be coming out with their own report next week.

[LiberalFighter]

3. Who conducted the investigation? A military team?

Wouldn't a group that oversees the Geneva Convention be better qualified?