Close Coesfeld now!
More torture by Soldiers that you won't hear about: Eighteen Bundeswehr Soldiers have been charged with abusing recruits in the Coesfeld barracks.

According to this article from January, the soldiers were accused of torturing recruits with electrical charges, water and beatings and 296 witnesses to the events were interviewed. Eight of the 38 original suspects admitted to the acts but insisted they were only following orders.

The torturers took photos as trophies of the event. In case you were wondering, these photos will not be shown on your TV day and night, run on page 1 of the New York Times or be cited as proof that Gerhard Schroeder and everyone in his government are innately and uniquely evil.

As of now, searching for "german soldier" on Google News yields "German soldiers allowed to keep mullets" as the top hit. Nothing about torture anywhere in the first page.

To be fair, the events have been in reported in Germany (a report on SWR3 radio alerted me to the story), but they're greeted with approximately 1/10000th the interest and outrage of Guantanamo (as I type this, the front page of NetZeitung carries an article Clinton's call to close Guantanamo and absolutely nothing about Coesfeld).

This despite the twin facts that the victims at Coesfeld were draftees rather than battlefield captives and the abuses there were far worse than anything reported at Gitmo.