Tag: Guantanamo

cross posted from The Dream Antilles



Still Guantanamo

Every day it just gets worse.  Today (h/t to Smintheus at dKos), Prof Mark Denbeaux of Seton Hall University Law School (with assistance from many others) released a report (pdf format) on interrogations at Gitmo.  It’s a shocker.  Among other things it says that there have been 24,000 “interrogations” at Gitmo and that all of them have been videotaped.

Join me inside the wire.  

cross posted from The Dream Antilles

Guantanamo Detainee

Yesterday the US announced that 6 Gitmo detainees prisoners would face the death penalty after bogus  “trials” with unfair and untested procedures.  I wrote an essay explaining why this was an outrage and a disgrace.  Today, to my shock and surprise, I discovered an even greater outrage: that the US plans to conduct executions of these detainees prisoners at Gitmo so that the detainees prisoners will be denied any judicial review in the US Courts.  If yesterday’s news was dreadful, today’s is even more cynical and and even greater disgrace.

Join me behind the wire.

A Gitmo Detainee

Let the Gitmo show “trials” begin.  Let the Bushites promote fear of “terrorism” in behalf of McCain.  Let those who have been waterboarded be convicted on statements they made under torture.  Let the US show the entire world that it’s mired in its barbarianism and that it will kill to advance a partisan political agenda.  Let yet another national disgrace unfold.

Join me across the wire.

Kenneth S. Pope, Ph.D., a distinguished psychological researcher, and former Ethics chair for the American Psychological Association, as well as a recipient of the APA Distinguished Contribution to Psychology Award, has resigned from APA. He argues that in the post-9/11 environment, APA has changed its ethical stance in a way that distorts the principles of ethical psychological practice. In particular, he singles out APA’s stance toward the treatment of detainees in Bush’s “war on terror” prisons.

The letter is published at Counterpunch and at his own website, and is reproduced below, followed by another letter, from APA’s President and Chief Executive Officer to Attorney General Mukasey. Both are printed in juxtaposition here, as they offer an interesting contrast in emphases. First, Dr. Pope: Why I Resigned from the American Psychological Association.

“Whither I fly is Hell…”

Candace Gorman is reporting that her client, Guantanamo prisoner Abdul Hamid al-Ghizzawi, contracted AIDS at Guantanamo’s Camp Delta. He believes he was infected during a “routine blood test.”

Last October I wrote about Mr. al-Ghizzawi’s dire medical state, and the Amnesty International campaign to save him. At that time, all we knew is that he was seriously ill with hepatitis B and tuberculosis. While Guantanamo authorities deny it, he claims he is not receiving adequate medical care. Eyewitness accounts from the U.S. prison confirm his charges.

His attorney wrote the following at The Guantanamo Blog last Sunday:

Guards sit in a tower overlooking Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Base, Cuba. This image has been reviewed and approved by U.S. Department of Defense.

Canada puts U.S. on torture watch list: CTV

Omar Khadr’s lawyers say they can’t understand why Canada is not doing more to help their client in light of new evidence that Ottawa has put the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on a watch list for torture.

Khadr — a Canadian citizen who was just 15-years-old when he was captured in Afghanistan more than five years ago and taken to Guantanamo — has claimed that he has been tortured at the prison.

Last week the D.C. Court of Appeals threw out a suit by three British former prisoners at Gitmo, and in their ruling legitimated the use of torture at Guantanamo’s Camp Delta, saying that such “seriously criminal” actions by the government was “foreseen”, and that no one could be held responsible for following orders. It also stated that Guantanamo prisoners were not legally “persons.” Could I be making this up?

No chance. Here’s Scott Horton’s take at Harper’s:

Three British detainees held at Gitmo, who were seized for bounty payments for no good reason and who were pried free by the British Government, filed suit alleging that they had been tortured and denied their religious freedom. They sought redress from the authors of the Gitmo system, including former Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, who crafted a series of once-secret orders directing the Guantánamo torture system. Among the practices introduced and used were waterboarding, hypothermia, long-time standing, sleep deprivation in excess of two days and the use of psychotropic drugs-each of which constitutes torture under American law and under international standards. These orders and their implementation were criminal acts under United States law….

The judges hearing the case, all movement conservative Republicans appointed by a President named Bush- Karen LeCraft Henderson, Janice Rogers Brown and A. Raymond Randolph-concluded that the plaintiffs were not “persons” for purpose of the relevant statute protecting religious freedom. They further concluded that acts of torture and contempt and abuse targeting religious belief were within the legitimate scope of conduct of an American cabinet officer, so that official immunity blocked the suit.

David Swanson, over at After Downing Street, has this up  Demanding the Closure of Guantanamo Prison Camp along with a pic of the group.

and, Washington DC January 11, 2008

By David Swanson, this link to more photos: 79 photos | 150 views

It was six years ago, January 11, 2002. Shackled, handcuffed, goggled and hooded, the men came shuffling off the big gray C-141 Starlifter cargo jet that had sped them from Afghanistan to the southeastern coast of Cuba, to Guantánamo Bay. Only 20 arrived that first day, but, eventually, some 800 prisoners wound up behind the razor wire at Camp X-Ray, Camp Delta, Camp Iguana, Camp Echo. They included gnarled old men with no teeth whose beards their captors had forcibly shaved. And boys too young for whiskers.

Designated “unlawful enemy combatants,” they were delivered to a bit of land permanently pried from Cuba a century earlier specifically because the Cheney-Bush administration wanted them held beyond the rule of law, confined incommunicado in a jurisdictionless no-man’s land and subject to the whims of a single person, the president of the United States of America. Out of reach of the Geneva Conventions, of the U.S. Constitution, of civilization itself, they were held in a military prison perched on the stolen land of a country that this same irony-challenged president would soon list as part of his “axis of evil.”

More than four years would pass before Washington officially made 558 of the prisoners’ names public. Not a single one was innocent, the camp boss, Rear Admiral Harry Harris, would tell ABC News in 2006.  

As anyone paying attention knows, torture is nothing new to American security agencies. It was meticulously studied and practiced, and its techniques were then taught to our puppets and allies abroad. And never mind that, besides being a moral outrage and a crime against humanity, torture simply doesn’t work. Our nation has engaged in it. A brief glint of sunshine may have temporarily tempered its usage, but it’s never gone away.

That the Bush Administration engages in torture should come as no surprise. What it really means may be.

Hina Shamsi is a human rights observer at the U.S. military tribunal hearing of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, in Guantánamo Bay. Hamdan was supposedly Osama bin Laden’s driver and bodyguard. Shamsi writes, in Salon:

At issue in Hamdan’s hearing was whether under the Military Commissions Act the government had the authority to try Hamdan as an “unlawful enemy combatant.” Congress passed the law in October 2006, under pressure from the Bush administration, on the eve of the midterm elections. The law circumvents due process safeguards that are a hallmark of American justice, in both the military’s own court-martial system and in the federal courts. For the more than 300 men held in Guantánamo for over six years, the Military Commissions Act stripped their right to challenge detention without charge through the ancient writ mechanism of habeas corpus. (The prisoners’ challenge to this provision was before the Supreme Court last Wednesday.

Hamdan’s defense wants to call three witnesses who are considered “high-value” detainees, whom they claim can refute the charge that Hamdan was part of a conspiracy to murder civilians. The judge refused to allow the three to testify, because the request was not timely. This is where it gets fun.

Government lawyers argued that the three were part of a highly classified special access program — a situation of the government’s own making, of course — and that only those with top secret clearance had access to them, which took time.

In other words, there was only one catch.

Furthermore, even though Hamdan’s military defense attorney has top secret clearance, the government says treatment of the three witnesses is highly classified, and cannot be revealed, as it would undermine national security. All three, of course, have been reported by the media to have been abused, if not tortured. So, Hamdan cannot get a fair trial because the government doesn’t want it known that witnesses for his defense may have been tortured. This dynamic will play out again, in the trials of “high-value detainees.”

But this is where Bush administration policies will come back to haunt us with a vengeance: Unlike the majority of Guantánamo detainees who appear to be low-level players or even innocent, Khalid Sheik Mohammed and others did likely engage in serious and heinous crimes. If so, they should be prosecuted and sentenced — but based on lawfully obtained evidence in full and fair proceedings that comport with the best traditions of American justice.

But they won’t be. To Bush, they can’t be. People have been tortured, and for it, justice will continue to be tortured.

(more)

GITMO: where are you?

You are not in Cuba. You are not in the U.S.

You are not in the law.

You are nothing but the law. Not the law as vehicle of justice, but law as the articulation of brute power.

People turn away from GITMO because it reveals the violence that ultimately grants the law its authority, its power.