This video is called US War Crimes In Mazar (Afghanistan) – Documentary reported by Jamie Doran.
From the Courier-Mail in Australia:
Sex abuse at Hicks prison camp
Exclusive by Stephanie Balogh in New York
February 06, 2007 11:00pm
A US military officer claims to have witnessed a guard sexually abusing a terror suspect at the same Afghanistan processing camp where Australian David Hicks was taken after his capture.
In a two page statement, seen by The Courier-Mail Online, the unnamed officer says they saw one of the MPs at the joint interrogation facility “perform the anal probe instead of the medical person’’.
“He pushed both his fingers into the EPW’s (enemy prisoner of war) anus. This caused the EPW to scream and fall to the ground violently,” the source wrote.
“His leg irons which, I suppose, were not locked, came open by the force of his reaction.”
The statement was sworn in February 2002 in Kandahar, Afghanistan.
Dear Kitty. Some blog 
Group: TV Torture Influencing Real Life
The Associated Press
By DAVID BAUDER
February 11, 2007
We’re not a primer on the war on terror. We’re a television show.
Demanding information, Jack Bauer faces a terrified man tied to a chair in front of him. Through a window over Bauer’s shoulder, the man sees his two children bound and gagged.
Tell me where the bomb is, Bauer orders, or we’ll kill your family. Silence. The prisoner watches as a thug kicks down the chair his son is tied to and fires a gun at point-blank range. He screams but still doesn’t relent _ until the gun is pointed at his second son. Having gotten what he needed, Bauer whispers that the execution was staged.
The scene from Fox’s ’24’ is haunting, but hardly unusual. The advocacy group Human Rights First says there’s been a startling increase in the number of torture scenes depicted on prime-time television in the post-2001 world.
Even more chilling, there are indications that real-life American interrogators in Iraq are taking cues from what they see on television, said Jill Savitt, the group’s director of public programs.
Human Rights First recently brought a West Point commander and retired military interrogators to Hollywood for meetings with producers of ’24’ and ABC’s ‘Lost’ to talk about their concerns about life imitating art.
One man in the meeting was Tony Lagouranis, a former U.S. Army specialist who questioned prisoners in Baghdad’s infamous Abu Ghraib prison and several other facilities around Iraq. He said he saw instances of mock executions like that in ’24.’ Once, some fellow interrogators asked an Iraqi translator to pretend he was being tortured to strike fear in a prisoner, after they had just watched a similar scene on a DVD.
Television is hardly the only factor at play; Lagouranis said many American interrogators are young, receive little training and are pressured by commanders to extract information from prisoners as quickly as they can.
But it’s enough of a concern that one professor at a military academy told Savitt that Jack Bauer represented one of his biggest training challenges.
Retired U.S. Army Col. Stu Herrington, who learned interrogation techniques in Vietnam and is an expert asked by the Army to consult on conditions at Guantanimo Bay, said that if Bauer worked for him, he’d be headed for a court-martial.
‘I am distressed by the fact that the good guys are depicted as successfully employing what I consider are illegal, immoral and stupid tactics, and they’re succeeding,’ Herrington said. ‘When the good guys are doing something evil and win, that bothers me.’
Prior to 2001, the few torture scenes on prime-time TV usually had the shows’ villains as the instigators, Savitt said. In both 1996 and 1997, there were no prime-time TV scenes containing torture, according to the Parents Television Council, which keeps a programming database. In 2003, there were 228 such scenes, the PTC said. The count was over 100 in both 2004 and 2005.
They found examples on ‘Alias,’ ‘The Wire,’ ‘Law & Order,’ ‘The Shield’ _ even ‘Star Trek: Voyager.’
In one ‘Lost’ scene, Sayid Jarrah was depicted holding a knife to the face of one adversary, suggesting that ‘perhaps losing an eye will loosen your tongue.’
Howard Gordon, an executive producer of ’24,’ suggested that a helpless feeling in the nation because of terrorism and the Iraq war may be what creators are reflecting in their shows. There’s been a surge in general in the level of violence tolerated in prime time.
‘Perhaps at some level it’s an expression of our anger and our helplessness,’ he said.
On ’24,’ which a week ago depicted Bauer torturing his own brother by sticking a bag over his head and injecting him with a fictional drug that causes intense pain, producers say they try not to glamorize such scenes. Gordon said they try to show the acts take a toll on Bauer, too.
But Herrington said he’s concerned that much of what’s on TV is misleading.
Television interrogation frequently works to a ticking clock: someone needs to find out the location of a bomb from a prisoner within the hour or it will explode. That’s so rare in real life that it’s essentially mythology, he said.
Herrington called prisoners his ‘guests.’ When taken into custody, the ‘guest’ would get medical treatment, a shower, a good meal. Herrington would tell him he’d be treated with respect. If it’s a military officer, Herrington would salute. It built a relationship far more likely to yield solid information, as opposed to lies told simply to stop torture.
One German officer in World War II was so meticulous that he found out the birthdays of his prisoners, and wished them happy ones, as happy as they could get in prison. The officer was brought to the United States after the war and honored by a veterans group, even as many acknowledged they had spilled their guts to him.
‘It seems to me dramatically much more powerful to actually use psychological approaches when you are interrogating,’ Lagouranis said. ‘It’s really a test of wills. He has information and he doesn’t want to give it to you. To me that’s much more interesting than an electricity sensor.’
Not necessarily to a television producer, though.
Television has a limited time and a need to keep viewers from changing the channel. As much as he learned from the interrogators and respects their point of view, ’24’s’ Gordon said their desires and his are going to naturally be at odds sometimes.
‘We’re not a documentary or a manual on interrogation,’ he said. ‘We’re not a primer on the war on terror. We’re a television show.’
Savitt said she understands. The goal is to educate people who are writing interrogation scenes without ever speaking to a real interrogator. She’s seeking Hollywood’s help in spreading that message, perhaps inviting Kiefer Sutherland to West Point to drive home the point that Jack Bauer is fiction.
Human Rights First’s ultimate desire is to drive home the idea that torture by Americans should never be tolerated.
‘We would never try to censor anybody,’ Savitt said. ‘We would never tell Hollywood what to do, but we are trying to tell them what legal interrogation looks like. If it makes them pause, that’s a bonus.’
___
On the Net:
http://www.humanrightsfirst.org
___
EDITOR’S NOTE _ David Bauder can be reached at dbauder’at’ap.org
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Kuwaiti Court Acquits 2 Ex-Gitmo Inmates
The Associated Press
March 03, 2007
A criminal court on Saturday acquitted two former Guantanamo Bay prisoners of joining al-Qaida or the Taliban.
Omar Rajab Amin and Abdullah Kamel al-Kundari denied any terror connections at the start of their trial. Their lawyers argued there was no evidence against them and the case was ‘political.’ Defense attorneys said the accused were in Afghanistan for charity work _ not to fight.
Details of the ruling, which was announced by a court clerk, were not immediately available. The two men were not in court Saturday, but one of their lawyers, Thikra al-Majdali, said she expected them to be released from custody by tomorrow.
The prosecution can appeal the ruling, but it was not clear Saturday if it would do so.
Amin, 41, and al-Kundari, 32, were released from the U.S. detention camp in September after spending nearly five years there. They were detained by authorities for questioning upon their return to Kuwait.
The prosecution claimed the pair had harmed Kuwait’s political image by becoming members of Osama bin Laden’s terror network and joining the ranks of Afghanistan’s ousted Taliban regime that hosted al-Qaida and fought U.S. forces.
Kuwait, a small oil-rich state, has been a major ally of Washington since the U.S.-led 1991 Gulf War that liberated it from a seven-month Iraqi occupation under Saddam Hussein.
Six other Kuwaitis formerly held in Guantanamo have been acquitted here of terror charges. Another four are still imprisoned there.
‘We call on the United States to either give our four sons a fair trial in America or any other place in the world, or to hand them to Kuwait so that they can be … given their legal right to defend themselves,’ said Khaled al-Odah, who heads a private group that lobbies for the release of the Kuwaiti prisoners _ including his son _ from the U.S. naval base in Cuba.
The U.S. military did not charge Amin or al-Kundari with any crimes. According to military documents and David Cynamon, their attorney in Guantanamo, the two had ties to charities which were linked to terror groups and their names had been found on the hard drive of a computer seized from a suspected al-Qaida member.
Scores of young Kuwaitis have fought alongside Muslim militants in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya and Iraq.
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Army Pastor’s “Sex Slave”
Posted by: “bigraccoon” bigraccoon@earthlink.net redwoodsaurus
Mon Mar 19, 2007 1:30 pm (PST)
ARMY CHAPLAIN’S ‘SEX SLAVE’
By ANDY SOLTIS
March 17, 2007 — A brazen upstate Army chaplain made a British
woman his sex toy to “spice” up his boring marriage and threatened to
kill her when she wanted to break away, officials said yesterday.
Capt. John Lau, 50, told a military court he took Amanda Tyler into his
Fort Drum home, turned her into his “second wife,” “married” her in a
mock Niagara Falls service, and took her to live with his real wife and
family.
But Tyler, 34, described the ordained Southern Baptist minister as a
sexual sadist who controlled and terrified her.
“The price for objections is severe. If you object, you pay, because he’s
‘The Master,’ “she told the Watertown Daily Times.
She charged he even wanted her to work as a prostitute to pay for
schooling.
Lau, who was jailed yesterday, admitted that he met Tyler in 2004 while
stationed in England and brought her to the United States.
“My wife and I were in a lull in our relationship and looking for
something to spice up our sexual relations,” Lau told the court.
Tyler lived at his home as his “second wife,” Lau said, and took
vacations with the family to Cyprus, the Caribbean and the Florida
Keys.
Lau routinely took both women to official functions and introduced Tyler
as his “wife’s friend,” he testified during a general court-martial at the
upstate base Thursday.
He said Tyler wanted to live with the couple indefinitely in an “exclusive
relationship.”
But in September, while Lau was deployed in Iraq with the 10th Marine
Division, Tyler told the rest of Lau’s family that she planned to move
out.
Lau admitted that he responded in three e-mails to Tyler, threatening to
kill her.
Tyler said the sex was consensual but took place “under duress.” She
said Lau lured her into the relationship with promises of emotional
stability and a life in the United States.
“It wasn’t like I just fell in love with them and decided to be ‘the second
wife,’ ” Tyler said. “What I thought they were doing was putting me on
the straight and narrow, restoring my confidence.”
She said she didn’t try to complain to the Army or civilian authorities
because she was “petrified.”
Ironically, Lau was featured in the base newspaper last June in an
article about the virtues of a marriage retreat arranged by the Army at
Lake Placid.
“It is important to help them ease marital issues so they can better
focus on the mission,” he told The Fort Drum Blizzard.
At his court-martial Thursday, Lau was convicted of adultery and
making a threat.
He was sentenced to 14 months in military prison, but under the terms
of his plea bargain, he will serve only five months.
Lau was also stripped of his rank and dismissed from the Army, with
all pay and allowances forfeited.
http://www.nypost.com/seven/03172007/news/nationalnews/army_chaplains_sex_slave_nationalnews_andy_soltis.htm
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