Documents Show Gitmo Inmates Defy U.S.

The press would have you believe that the Gitmo prisoners are docile and subservient victims being horribly brutalized by sadistic American soldiers. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Military authorities have previously disclosed some incidents of guard retaliation at Guantanamo Bay, which resulted in mostly minor disciplinary proceedings. What emerges from 278 pages of documents obtained by The Associated Press is the degree of defiance by the terrorism suspects at Guantanamo.

The prisoners banged on their cells to protest the heat. They doused guards with whatever liquid was handy — from spit to urine. Sometimes they struck their jailers, one swinging a steel chair at a military police officer.

Some prisoners at the U.S. base in eastern Cuba have gone on the attack, as in April 2003 when a detainee got out of his cell during a search for contraband food and knocked out a guard's tooth with a punch to the mouth and bit him before he was subdued by MPs. One soldier delivered two blows to the inmate's head with a handheld radio, the documents show.

In another case, an inmate threw a partially full urine bottle at an MP in May 2002, apparently because he believed the soldier had intentionally kicked his hospital bed. When the soldier threw the urinal back, the detainee grabbed a steel chair and swung it at guards before they subdued him.

Think about it, had these been American POWs in WWI, WWII, Korea, Viet Nam etc, they would have been shot or hanged. What's amazing and the real story here is the amount of restraint our boys have shown.