dormouse said:

Hold on one second...they DON'T just quote or state "as fact the same source".  In the three or four articles I read, numerous military personnel were directly named and quoted as confirming the contents of the report.  I'm inclined to take them at their word, and they would be considered credible primary sources in the field of journalism.  Same goes for the named former detainee who also confirmed the attacks, and the senators from C-SPAN who served as secondary sources because they visited and spoke to troops. 

My disagreement with the proportion and scope of media coverage pertains to the relative quantities of attacks versus incidents of waterboarding.  Three detainees waterboarded should not result (as it has) in tens of thousands of stories, when there were only 400 or so reports concerning hundreds of physical attacks (sometimes 20 in a day) by detainees that were clearly made against far more than 3 U.S. MPs. 

I would be interested in finding out why your friends serving at Gitmo haven't had similar experiences.  Is it that they actually have, but a military gag order has been placed on them?  Is it because there has been a procedural change to the running of the prison that has eliminated most opportunities for such attacks? Are they stationed at a post where detainees are incapable of attacking them so?

I don't have the answers to those questions.  All I do know is that I first learned about the attacks on U.S. guards at Gitmo not through any of those articles I've referenced, but through interviews of military personnel on local St. Louis radio from 2006 all the way into 2008 (it is, of course, far harder to provide those for you to verify yourself).   Those interviews took place on radio stations 1120 AM and 97.1 PM.  A 2008 interview with Col. Gordon Cucullu led me to believe the attacks and cell phone threats were ongoing.   

 The 20 or so articles I went through all pretty much said the same thing in the same way and all references to names were the same. Which generally means they are all coming from the same source. I did not look at more than 22 or so articles and they were selected at random. I'm willing to believe that there were multiple sources and multiple reports and I just didn't see them. The time frame of the ones I read all appear to be 2.5-4 years ago.

This is admittedly the first I've heard of cell phone threats... I find it especially troubling if it is true, but very suspect. When you walk the line in Security Force you don't advertise anything about yourself, that is S.O.P. In the military you refer to each other by last name among peers and by rank and last name when in a heirarchical setting. For people who have been kept in medium to maximum security where all forms of communication are montired and greatly restricted identifying information shouldn't be available to them nor should it be able to be communicated to the outside.

The only way I can reconcile this report and military culture and protocol is that the families or soldiers talked outside of Gitmo, stateside. Which while not likely to be a direct violation is, in two words, terminally stupid. A phrase I don't relish using, but having delt with classified information and work (and so much in the military is, I'm not claiming to be special in this regard), this is precisely why we have operational security.

However all of that still doesn't address the hundreds of times waterboarding was used. The fact that we have police brutality and people torturing our own citizens, in clear violation of the law, here in the states does not excuse it. These are completely separate issues. Your having issues with the media about their lack of coverage of one and overabundance of the other is a personal objection, and completely irrelevant with the topic. As much as my charges of media complicity with our wholely unneccesary and poorly planned "war" in Iraq. A pet peeve of mine, but equally irrelevant.

"I am the Prince of Dorne. Men seek my favor."