Legion Leader Blasts U.N. Report on GITMO

INDIANAPOLIS, February 13, 2006 -

National Commander Thomas L. Bock visits a detention cell at Camp Delta. The commander toured Guantanamo Bay Feb. 6-9 and met with the troops working there.
The leader of the nation's largest veterans organization blasted a new U.N. report calling for the closing of the detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay as “incredibly inaccurate.”

A draft of the report that has not yet been released was reviewed by the Los Angeles Times. The paper said that the report concludes that violent force-feeding of hunger strikers, incidents of excessive violence used in transporting prisoners, and combinations of interrogation techniques “must be assessed as amounting to torture.”

“That’s not the Guantanamo Bay that I saw,” American Legion National Commander Thomas L. Bock said. Bock led a delegation of Legionnaires to Guantanamo Bay Feb. 6-9.

“We visited the detention centers at Camp Delta and toured the cells. We visited the medical clinics. We talked to the guards and ate the same food the detainees ate,” Bock said. “Their medical care is state-of-the-art, superior to what’s given to our veterans I might add, and as far as the food goes, well, I recommend the steak and eggs.”

“When detainees engage in a hunger strike,” Bock said, “each of them is placed in a hospital under full medical supervision. When I visited last week, only four detainees were refusing food and they were tube fed (enteral feeding). A nation that values life cannot sit back and watch people starve to death,” Bock said.

He pointed out that all detainees are offered 4,200 calories per day of culturally appropriate meals.

“The United States may be the only country whose captured enemy-combatants gain weight during their detention,” he said. “The members of Joint Task Force Guantanamo are absolute professionals. One guard had feces hurled on him just moments before we arrived. He calmly showered, changed his uniform and returned to work. The abuse at Guantanamo is coming from the detainees and it’s aimed at our military.”

The U.N. report relied heavily on accounts given by detainees, detainee attorneys and their families. The accounts are consistent with an al Qaeda training manual that first surfaced in Manchester, England, and instructs extremists to claim torture and mistreatment during detention by “infidels.”

The U.N. Commission on Human Rights includes Cuba, China, Sudan, Saudi Arabia and other nations not known for their compassionate treatment of prisoners.

“These accusations are a slap in the face to every dedicated military professional fighting the war on terror,” Bock said. “The U.N. researchers should have talked with survivors of the Hanoi Hilton, the German Stalags, North Korean prisons, or Japanese prison camps during those wars to understand the real definition of maltreatment. I have seen it with my own eyes -- the treatment given to these men who have vowed to destroy America is far better than what’s given to inmates at virtually any U.S. prison in America. It far exceeds the standards set forth by the Geneva Convention.”