McClatchy yesterday kicked off a series of reports on the people held at the US Guantánamo Bay military prison and elsewhere, saying:

An eight-month McClatchy investigation of the detention system created after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks has found that the U.S. imprisoned innocent men, subjected them to abuse, stripped them of their legal rights and allowed Islamic militants to turn the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba into a school for jihad.

"Guantamo Graffiti" by burge5000 @ flickr.com

From Sunday’s article, We got the wrong guys: America’s prison for terrorists often held the wrong men,

Akhtiar was no terrorist. American troops had dragged him out of his Afghanistan home in 2003 and held him in Guantanamo for three years in the belief that he was an insurgent involved in rocket attacks on U.S. forces. The Islamic radicals in Guantanamo’s Camp Four who hissed “infidel” and spat at Akhtiar, however, knew something his captors didn’t: The U.S. government had the wrong guy.

And from today’s, ‘I guess you can call it torture’: U.S. abuse of detainees was routine at Afghanistan bases:

American soldiers herded the detainees into holding pens of razor-sharp concertina wire, the kind that’s used to corral livestock.

The guards kicked, kneed and punched many of the men until they collapsed in pain. U.S. troops shackled and dragged other detainees to small isolation rooms, then hung them by their wrists from chains dangling from the wire mesh ceiling.

[...]

The brutality at Bagram peaked in December 2002, when U.S. soldiers beat two Afghan detainees, Habibullah and Dilawar, to death as they hung by their wrists.

Dilawar died on Dec. 10, seven days after Habibullah died. He’d been hit in his leg so many times that the tissue was “falling apart” and had “basically been pulpified,” said then-Lt. Col. Elizabeth Rouse, the Air Force medical examiner who performed the autopsy on him.

Had Dilawar lived, Rouse said in sworn testimony, “I believe the injury to the legs are so extensive that it would have required amputation.”

From The New York Times:

Argentina Pays Belated Homage to “Che” Guevara

14 June 2008

ROSARIO, Argentina (Reuters) – A towering bronze statue of Ernesto “Che” Guevara will be unveiled on Saturday in the Argentine city where he was born exactly 80 years ago, the first such monument to the revolutionary icon in his homeland.

Che Guevara was a murderer and your t-shirt is not cool

[...]

But for Che’s childhood friends, the 2.7 tonne, 12-foot (4-metre) statue made out of thousands of melted-down keys, marks a welcome turning point in attitudes.

Skeptics suggest Rosario’s leaders just want to cash in on the lucrative Che brand by attracting tourists to the city in which he did not grow up. Guevara spent most of his childhood in neighboring Cordoba province.

And many Argentines say Guevara did nothing for his country, leaving at an early age to fight battles elsewhere and eventually becoming a citizen of Cuba.

For some, he remains a threatening figure.

“He was a terrorist. There are a lot of other people who deserve to have statues. It’s not right to give killers monuments,” said taxi driver Diego Benitez. “To cap it off they use public money. We all pay whether we like it or not.”

There’s a Facebook group to join called “Che Guevara was a murderer and your t-shirt is not cool“. Check it out. Good collection of articles there.

From the New York Times:

Justices Rule Terror Suspects Can Appeal in Civilian Courts

WASHINGTON — Foreign terrorism suspects held at the Guantánamo Bay naval base in Cuba have constitutional rights to challenge their detention there in United States courts, the Supreme Court ruled, 5 to 4, on Thursday in a historic decision on the balance between personal liberties and national security.

5 to 4. 5 to 4.

How very far we have fallen.