Center for Constitutional Rights. Report on torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Center for Constitutional Rights, July, 2006.

Summary: Now that many of the prisoners in our concentration camps at Guantánamo have had a chance to meet with their lawyers, their pathetic stories and their accounts of conditions in the camps have begun to appear. The authors of this report have collected some of them.

Prisoners being interrogated at Guantánamo have been:

• held in solitary confinement for periods exceeding a year;
• deprived of sleep for days and weeks and, in at least one case, months;
• exposed to prolonged temperature extremes;
• beaten;
• threatened with transfer to a foreign country, for torture;
• tortured in foreign countries or at U.S. military bases abroad before transfer to Guantánamo;
• sexually harassed and raped or threatened with rape;
• deprived of medical treatment for serious conditions, or allowed treatment only on the condition that they “cooperate” with interrogators; and
• routinely “short-shackled” (wrists and ankles bound together and to the floor) for hours and even days during interrogations.

The authors explain how, precisely, such treatment violates the Geneva Conventions, and point out that the current Republican regime flouted them deliberately and with vicious intent. They then proceed to observe that these conventions are implemented in American law:

The War Crimes Act makes it a war crime to commit a “grave” break of the Conventions. “Grave breaches” of the Third Geneva Convention are defined as:

Willful killing, torture, or inhuman treatment, including biological experiments, willfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, compelling a prisoner of war to serve in the forces of the hostile Power, or willfully depriving a prisoner of war of the rights of fair and regular trial prescribed in this Convention.

Although the current Republican regime has played semantic games with the term “enemy combatant”, many of the prisoners are neither enemies nor combatants in any recognized sense of the word. Many were sold into imprisonment by Afghanis, in exchange for cash bounties paid by Rumsfeld's Waffen-Schutzstaffel.