Press Needs to Update Story of U.S. Soldier Abused at Guantanamo

By: Greg Mitchell After denying for nearly two weeks that the medical discharge of an American soldier was caused by the beating he received at Guantamono in an interrogation exercise, the Army has admitted that it was related, in part, to the incident.

So far only The New York Times has caught up to this story, but in his Saturday column Nicholas Kristof reported that he had not been able to interview the former National Guardsmen, Spc. Sean Baker, despite "more than a week of coaxing." Kristof also revealed that the military "can't find a videotape that is believed to have been made of the incident."

Virtually no U.S. news outlets have updated a May 25 report from the Associated Press in which Maj. Laurie Arellano of the U.S. Southern Command in Miami, which oversees the detention center at Guantanomo, declared that Baker's discharge last month was completely unrelated to the head injury sustained during the exercise, in which he portrayed an uncooperative prisoner.

In his column today, Kristof revealed that the Physical Evaluation Board of the Army stated in a document dated Sept. 29, 2003: "The TBI [traumatic brain injury] was due to soldier playing role of detainee who was non-cooperative and was being extracted from detention cell in Guantanomo Bay, Cuba, during a training exercise."

According to Kristof, Maj. Arellano now acknowledges that she misstated the facts and claims she had been misinformed by medical personnel. Still, she continues to call the abuse an "accident" and says Baker's discharge was only partly due to the exercise.

Baker, 37, is now unemployed and still suffers frequent seizures. He is married, has a 14-year-old son and lives in Kentucky.

The incident occurred in January 2003 after Baker volunteered to play a detainee, dressed in an orange jump suit, and was set upon by five soldiers pretending to be interrogators.

When he reported the incident to a reporter in Kentucky last month, Baker said, among other things, that one of the soldiers "slammed my head against the floor and continued to choke me," before he finally convinced them he was one of them, and was taken to a hospital.

Maj. Arellano has said an investigation into the training incident concluded that Baker's injuries were a "foreseeable consequence" of the drill and no soldiers were disciplined.

Kristof concludes today's column: "If the U.S. military treats one of its own soldiers this way, allowing him to be battered, and lying to cover it up, then imagine what happens to Afghans and Iraqis."

Baker told a local television reporter, "All I wanted to be is a solider. I want to hold them accountable....I don't want this to happen to anyone else, what I'm living with daily."

On Friday, the Army announced that it had opened 85 criminal investigations involving detainee abuse in Afghanistan and Iraq since 2002. The new figures include probes into the deaths of 40 Iraqis, up from the 37 deaths reported previously.