And Guantanamo?

Here is the story of Sean Baker, who was a soldier at Guantanamo, until the faithful day in January 2003, when he had to wear a prisoner overall as part of a training exercise in the camp.

He got handed over to four soldiers who did not know his identity and who immediately started to beat the crap out of him. To quote Sean Baker:

"They grabbed my arms, my legs, twisted me up and unfortunately one of the individuals got up on my back from behind and put pressure down on me while I was face down," said Baker. "Then he - the same individual - reached around and began to choke me and press my head down against the steel floor. After several seconds, 20 to 30 seconds, it seemed like an eternity because I couldn't breath. When I couldn't breath, I began to panic and I gave the code word I was supposed to give to stop the exercise, which was 'red.'"

But, Baker says, the beating didn't stop. "That individual slammed my head against the floor and continued to choke me," he said. "Somehow I got enough air, I muttered out, 'I'm a U.S. soldier, I'm a U.S. soldier.'"

Baker says it wasn't until one of the soldiers noticed what Baker was wearing did the exercise stop. "He saw that I had BDU's and boots on."

So while the US government still talks about "individual cases" of "abuse" in Iraq, we are now slowly getting the full picture. For several years now, torture and murder have been used as a standard practice in military prisons in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo.

It seems obvious that US Military Intelligence has been decending into a medieval mode of operations were violence and torture have a higher priority than actual intelligence work.

Torture taints us all. This is the complete self-destruction of American foreign policy and it will drag down all free democratic countries in their struggle to establish more democracies on this planet.

The terrorists must be laughing in their caves.