U.S. Rejects Church Leaders' Bid to Visit Guantanamo 

http://wireservice.wired.com/wired/story.asp?section=Breaking&storyId=816066&tw=wn_wire_story


just over the 12 hour limit, hope it's ok

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. church leaders said on Wednesday the Pentagon had rebuffed their plea to send a small interfaith delegation to minister to detainees at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The Rev. Bob Edgar, general secretary of the National Council of Churches and a former U.S. congressman, said his group would continue to press its case for a visit with U.S. officials.

Edgar, in a Dec. 8 letter to Secretary of State Colin Powell, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Attorney General John Ashcroft, asked to send an interdenominational delegation to the Guantanamo base prison to visit the detainees.

"This request stems from our religious conviction that all people -- regardless of religion, culture or status -- be treated with dignity, which translates to humanitarian concern for the detainees' physical and mental well being, and pastoral concern for their spiritual well being," he wrote.

'Cause they know that preachers are gonna tell the truth about what they find. Why in the world can't Bush be tried as a criminal for how he's treated the people detained at Gitmo?

The story is posted elsewhere in LBN

On edit: I guess you mean the Hicks story

From his attorney:

(snip) "The military commissions will not provide a full and fair trial," Mori told the news conference in a Washington suburb on Wednesday.

"The commission process has been created and controlled by those with a vested interest only in convictions."

He said that because Mr Hicks had not been charged with anything, it would be difficult to prepare his defence. (snip)

But Major Mori warned the tribunals could establish "a dangerous precedent.

"The reality is, we wouldn't tolerate these rules if they were applied to US citizens," he said.
(snip)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3418905.stm

Hope he gets to go home.

Hope the church organization gets a chance to visit the prisoners at Guantanamo, but it really doesn't look like it. _Bush can get REALLY resistant to Christians when they act in ways which offer solace and comfort to people he has harmed.

Isn't that a hoot.

Leading up to the Invasion, his church leader wanted to meet with him.

and has been censured by his own church for warmongering.

The Bible say that the AntiChrist will deceive the people into believing he is a Man of God.

I wonder which regime had a better visitation policy for concentration camps?

The Nazis had one model concentration camp, where they actually fed the inmates, a place where they sometimes would invite the Red Cross to visit and inspect.

I guess the Bush regime has decided that Hitler was too liberal on concentration camp inspections and visitations, and will ban everything at Gitmo. I think the GOP calls their policy 'tough-love.'

We are the high tech Nazis!

supermax prisons where prisoners spend their time in total isolation--designed to make them go insane.

<clips>

...Economic imperatives still dictate prison philosophy, and Pelican Bay inmates are frequently doubled up to save money. Family and friends are allowed to visit, but since the majority of Pelican Bay prisoners are from southern California, visits are infrequent—Pelican Bay sits near the Oregon border, as far from San Diego as Chicago is from New York. The Pelican Bay SHU houses prisoners who are not easily handled in the prison system, and those who are uncontrollable in the SHU stay in the SHU, often for years on end.

Dr. Stuart Grassian, a Harvard Medical School psychiatrist who was given access to SHU inmates to prepare for providing expert testimony in lawsuits against the California Department of Corrections, has concluded that the regimen in security housing units drives prisoners insane, and he estimates that one-third of all SHU inmates are psychotic. He writes of what he calls "the SHU syndrome," the symptoms of which include self-mutilation and throwing excrement.

Dr. Terry Kupers, a psychiatrist who has interviewed supermax inmates, writes that a majority of inmates "talk about their inability to concentrate, their heightened anxiety, their intermittent disorientation and confusion, their experience of unreality, and their tendency to strike out at the nearest person when they reach their 'breaking point.' " Even those inmates who don't become psychotic experience many of these symptoms. Those least likely to become mentally ill in solitary confinement are prisoners who can read, because reading prevents the boredom that can lead to insanity. (The human psyche appears not to have changed since the days of Eastern State, when an inmate told Alexis de Tocqueville that reading the Bible was his "greatest consolation.") Because roughly 40 percent of U.S. prisoners are functionally illiterate, however, reading can provide solace and sanity to only a fraction of those behind bars.

Forty-one states have supermax units that resemble Pelican Bay. But while experts agree that long-term solitary confinement drives prisoners insane, there are no international luminaries flocking to see American prisons today. Even if they did, it's not clear what they would be permitted to learn. On their visits to America, Dickens and Tocqueville were encouraged to interview Eastern State prisoners in their cells. Today, a number of states bar members of the media from interviewing prisoners. Among them are California and Pennsylvania.

<http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/January-February-2003/review_brook_janfeb2003.html>

Very foreward-thinking, eh?

The Busheviks are still new at this. They'll realize they need a Model Camp soon enough.

They can call it Bushenstadt...