SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico – Army Pvt. Brandon Neely was scared when he took Guantanamo's first shackled detainees off a bus. Told to expect vicious terrorists, he grabbed a trembling, elderly detainee and ground his face into the cement — the first of a range of humiliations he says he participated in and witnessed as the prison was opening for business.http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090214/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/cb_guantanamo_prison_guard
Neely has now come forward in this final year of the detention center's existence, saying he wants to publicly air his feelings of guilt and shame about how some soldiers behaved as the military scrambled to handle the first alleged al-Qaida and Taliban members arriving at the isolated U.S. Navy base.
...He said detainees were forced to submit to take showers and defecate into buckets in full view of female soldiers, against Islamic customs. When a detainee yelled an expletive at a female guard, he said a crew of soldiers beat the man up and held him down so that the woman could repeatedly strike him in the face.
Neely says he feels personally ashamed for how he treated that elderly detainee the first day. As he recalls it, the man made a movement to resist on his way to his cage, and he responded by shoving the shackled man headfirst to the ground, bruising and scraping his face. Other soldiers hog-tied him and left him in the sun for hours.
Only later did Neely learn — from another detainee — that the man had jerked away thinking he was about to be executed.
And that's where the old man exercised poor judgment. He should have known --dealing with American servicemen as he was-- that a simple execution would have been the best he could hope for. (No jerking off involved.)
The military isn't anything like it was when I was in twenty years ago. Today you've got servicemen pimping out teenage detainees for ten bucks a lay and laughing when she hangs herself out of shame.
It's a different breed today. We're talking about animals for whom military discipline is a foreign concept. The military today is little more than a Mongol horde.
...and they can't even keep Dov Zakheim from providing the Flight Termination Systems necessary to fly planes into the World Trade Center.
Yes, Mister Galloway, standards have certainly slipped...
