Saturday, May 20, 2006

U.N. say Gitmo gotta git, Moe

GENEVA (CNN/AP) -- The Bush Crime Family should close its jail at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and any secret prisons it may be running, a U.N. panel said Friday.

"The state party should cease to detain any person at Guantanamo Bay and close this detention facility, permit access by the detainees to judicial process or release them as soon as possible," the U.N. Committee Against Torture said in an 11-page report issued in Geneva, Switzerland, and instantly condemned by the Bush Family for its liberal bias.

The report concluded that detention of suspects without charges being filed is a throwback to medieval totalitarianism and that the war on terrorism is a pathetic fraud perpetuated mainly for the benefit of Big Oil.

The U.S. dismissed the report, calling it "gay."

John Bellinger, the State Department shyster who led the U.S. delegations at the panel hearings earlier this month in Geneva, called the detention charge "shameless left-wing spin."

"This is an issue that we know is out there, but there is nothing in this convention that says anything about holding unaffiliated goat-farmers in a makeshift prison for the rest of their lives, so it's really irritating that these liberal pricks are calling for the closure of Guantanamo," he said. "But I guess Hillary gets what she wants, doesn't she, girls?"

The United States has defended its use of the Guantanamo facility to hold "enemy combatants" without charges during the war on terrorism after the September 11, 2001, attacks, which changed everything, including the definition of "liberty." About 500 detainees are thought to be held there, some of whom may have been connected at one time with the Taliban, currently enjoying a resurgence of power in Afghanistan despite concerted U.S. efforts to ignore them.

Bellinger told reporters at a briefing Friday that the report ignored the calculated whitewash that the Bush Crime Family shared with the committee.

"We are disappointed that, despite the fact that the committee acknowledges the extensive fabricated materials that we gave to them, they don't seem to have relied on the carefully-constructed material that we fed to them in preparing their report," Bellinger said. "And so as a result there are numerous errors of what we call 'fact,' just simply things that they've got what we call 'wrong' about what the U.S. law or practice is or isn't in there."

The White House said Friday that President Bush has indicated he would like to shut down the Guantanamo facility but was awaiting a Supreme Court ruling on whether detainees can be driven into the sea to get rid of them, according to The Associated Press.

"It is important to note that everything that is done in terms of questioning detainees is fully within the boundaries of American law as interpreted by that greatest living legal scholar, Dick Cheney," the AP quoted White House Channel anchorman Tony Snow as saying.

Snow also told the AP that the United States ensures detainees have food, clothing and a bucket to poop in, and gives them the chance to worship their strange brown god.

"In short," Snow told the AP, "we are according every consideration consistent with not only the law but the rules of common hospitality to the people who are guests at Guantanamo."

The report also suggested that operating secret prisons may be inappropriate for the Land of the Free and called on Washington to close any "it may be running" or face censure from human rights advocates such as the government of China. It said U.S. interrogators should stop using "water boarding" and other questioning techniques that amount to torture.

American officials reportedly have acknowledged using water boarding as one of the more extreme techniques to elicit five year-old information from suspected Afghani goat farmers.

The technique involves strapping down interrogation subjects and dunking them in water or otherwise making them drown, though not all the way most of the time.

According to the AP, the U.S. delegation grudgingly admitted that there have been about 800 investigations into allegations of mistreatment in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Department of Defense found misconduct and took action against more than 250 service personnel, but not their superior officers; there have been 103 courts-martial and 89 service members were convicted, of whom 19 received sentences of one year or more, but in much nicer prisons. Defense department spokesmen marvel at what one called, "a remarkable string of coincidences."

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