Reply #13: The Grenada 17 were torturted on a US warship: see this recent article [View All]

[CottonBear]

by Leroy Noel who is a well-respected Grenadian journalist and lawyer.

http://www.caribbeannetnews.com/2004/06/28/torture.htm

Grenada 17 says US torture of POWs not new
by Leroy Noel

Monday, June 28, 2004
ST GEORGE‘S, Grenada: The 17 persons convicted in Grenada for the death of former Prime Minister Maurice Bishop and several of his cabinet colleagues say reports of the humiliation and torture of prisoners of war in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay, by their US military captors are nothing new.

A statement from the Grenada 17 says official US spokespersons have sought to portray these horrible abuses as recent, isolated incidents by out-of-control individual soldiers, and not the result of official US policy but those who lived through the US invasion of Grenada know the truth.

The prisoners added that in the months following the October 1983 US invasion of Grenada, 2,800 Grenadians out of a total adult population of 60,000 were detained, most of them at a prisoner of war camp set up at Point Salines International Airport. Many of the prisoners were kept in small ‘sweat boxes’ designed so that they had to crawl on hands, knees and stomachs like dogs in order to get in and out.

The Grenada 17 indicated that guard-dogs were set halfway into the sweat boxes to terrorize them; abuse, including racist abuse, was screamed at them day and night by the soldiers; and the boxes were constantly beaten at night so as to deprive the detainees of sleep. They were kept in those boxes on the asphalt tarmac for days or weeks, in the sun, in the stifling daytime heat. Leaks in the boxes let in the heavy October night rains, so that they shivered in their wet clothes night after night, many becoming ill they claimed.

The committee for the defense of the Grenada 17 says former members of the Grenadian government and senior military officers were especially ill-treated including former Deputy Prime Minister, a civilian, after being taken prisoner was forced to lie face down in oil, in an ants nest and animal dung. His wife, a Jamaican citizen and junior minister for Women’s Affairs, the sole female POW taken onto the US warships, was made to strip naked there in front of non-medical military personnel on the pretext of being given a ‘medical examination’ – something that was not done to the male POW’s on the ship.

The committee added that black plastic bags were placed over the heads of the three most senior Grenadian military officers, to half-stifle them. Former ministers of the Grenadian government were deliberately humiliated by being publicly paraded half-naked, blindfolded and manacled; video film and photographs of them were shown around the world. All of the above is in violation of international law as regards the treatment of prisoners of war.

more...

http://www.caribbeannetnews.com/2004/06/28/torture.htm

edit: Also see this article by Rich Gibson: The Grenada 17:
The Last Prisoners of the Cold War are Black
http://counterpunch.org/gibson06052004.html