US Military "Softened Up" Guantanamo Detainees for Chinese

Posted by Attaturk, Firedoglake at 2:19 PM on May 21, 2008.

The Chinese are apparently taking a supervisory role in overseeing their investment.

U.S. military personnel at Guantanamo Bay allegedly softened up detainees at the request of Chinese intelligence officials who had come to the island facility to interrogate the men -- or they allowed the Chinese to dole out the treatment themselves, according to claims in a new government report.

Buried in a Department of Justice report released Tuesday are new allegations about a 2002 arrangement between the United States and China, which allowed Chinese intelligence to visit Guantanamo and interrogate Chinese Uighurs held there.

According to the report by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine, an FBI agent reported a detainee belonging to China's ethnic Uighur minority and a Uighur translator told him Uighur detainees were kept awake for long periods, deprived of food and forced to endure cold for hours on end, just prior to questioning by Chinese interrogators.

Susan Manning, a lawyer who represents several Uighurs still held at Guantanamo, said Tuesday the allegations are all too familiar.

U.S. personnel "are engaging in abusive tactics on behalf of the Chinese," she said Tuesday. When Uighur detainees refused to talk to Chinese interrogators in 2002, U.S. military personnel put them in solitary confinement as punishment, she said.

"Why are we doing China's dirty work?" Manning said. "Surely we're better than that."

Ms. Manning are you forgetting who the President and Vice-President are? Sadly, it's par for the course.

This occurred during the period of time in which the Bush Administration was rife with people who took the belief that Muslim equaled possible terrorist. You know, like today.

But while Buddhist Tibet generates the headlines, the Uighur (or Uyghurs) are a less known, but no less repressed culture within China, located in a territory with the rather awkward "Mao-tastic" name of the "Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region" [which in fairness may just be chinese for "South Dakota"] in the far west of the country and bordering Afghanistan amongst other places. It is in Afghanistan where these individuals were swept up by American forces [along with many others who were not terrorists, but bounty-victims of various warlords taking advantage of American gullibility].

So via the Bush Administration and GITMO we've not only turned our back on the ideals we espouse for our own culture, but we've farmed ourselves out to be agents of another country's repression.

The Bush Administration, always the merde touch?

Tagged as: guantanamo, china, torture