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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings & Torture |
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July 25th,
2009 - Guantánamo Bay: The Inside Story 1st feature article from the
Times |
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Guantánamo Bay: The Inside Story There’s a McDonald’s on the high street, suburban houses, rats the
size of dogs, and 229 of the world’s most high-profile prisoners. Six months
after President Obama declared that he would close it down, Naomi Wolf heads
to Guantánamo Bay to see whether anything has changed. By Naomi Wolf The Times July 25, 2009 Six months ago this week
President Obama, on his second day in office, promised to close the
Guantánamo detention camp within a year, and to undo the secretive and
coercive detention and interrogation policies of George W. Bush. But has
Obama been as good as his word? I went to Guantánamo last
month to see for myself what difference, if any, Obama’s election had made.
My trip was surreal from start to end. I was in line for the rotating junket
to the island, and had been given a date by a nervous-sounding and very young
Lieutenant Cody Starken. I signed papers that committed me to not reporting
classified information - on pain of prosecution. Then I got on a tiny
aircraft - unmarked on any announcement board - out of Fort Lauderdale
airport. On the aircraft were
bland-looking contractors, male and female, who deflected my small talk, and
two young staffers from the Centre for Constitutional Rights, the
organisation representing the detainees when no one else would touch the
work, and which now co-ordinates hundreds of lawyers from across the country
doing so: Pardis Kebriaei, a staff lawyer, and Jess Baen, a legal worker,
tried to answer all my questions until my military handler determinedly
parted us on our arrival. Lawyers are kept in a compound on one side of the
military base at Guantánamo, journalists housed on the other side; they may
never communicate with or run into one another. As a journalist, a handler
sticks within 18in of you at all times, standing outside when you go to the
bathroom and near by when you buy personal items at the commissary; your
phone calls and e-mail are monitored. Passport check was followed
by our descent over the glittering curve of the sea on to the edge of Cuba,
which was studded with lights. A tired, courtly Navy media specialist, MC1
Mapp, whisked me through security checks; I took in the heat, humidity,
mosquitoes and languid crowds of Filipino and Jamaican contractors. We
stepped into a ferry; then a young, chipper Sergeant Hillegass - in his other
life, a 911 dispatcher - met us in a van and drove us to a street of
identical townhouses. I was left alone in the house. My mobile phone could not
call out directly, my BlackBerry did not work, there was no internet access
for my computer. My press kit had a scene of a lush sunset on the cover, and
a speedboat. Breakfast - with a TV crew
from Poland and another from Russia, and our military handlers - was at a
lively mess hall that looked like something out of summer camp, except that
all the tired, strapping young people were in pressed fatigues. Then two
African American soldiers, Petty Officer Bennet, a genial woman in her
thirties who wanted to be a graphic designer, and a charming man a bit older,
Petty Officer Dwight, took us to our first stop, Camp X-Ray. As the military handlers
made pleasant jokes about the heat, I took in a low-tech vision of Hell. This
was the site of the first scenes from Guantánamo, where men sweltered in
kennel-like cages. These were the cages themselves: about 50, each about
8ftx12ft, an aisle down the centre for guards to move in, a slab of
corrugated iron on top of each cell, and a pipe with a funnel at groin level,
in which to urinate; open to the elements; no walls, no true shade. Concrete
floors. There had been buckets for defaecation, MC1 Dwight told us; but the
prisoners had thrown the faeces at the guards. There was a communal shower,
now crumbling - but the prisoners had not liked to shower in groups, naked. The scene was being
reclaimed by nature: vines and brambles were swallowing the wire, twisting
around the doors. At 10am the humidity was so intense that sweat was pouring
down our faces. The temperature was close to 40C. I went into a cell;
grinding heat, drenching humidity, pure exposure to the sun. It was as if you
were being cooked in a man-sized convection oven. “Look out!” shouted Petty
Officer Dwight. “Banana rats!” I looked up and shrieked,
staggering to my feet: climbing across the wire walls and on to the roof of
the cell was a 40lb rodent, with a long wiry tail, the size of a bulldog.
Another one scurried along the base of the wall, a baby on its back; a third
made itself at home in the undergrowth of the neighbouring cell - big,
grotesque creatures with no fear. I imagined what it must have been like to
try to sleep in that black heat, these animals slipping in and out of the
cages with their great claws and teeth. Behind the cages was the
interrogation hut - a plywood shack painted with a red cross. A one-man cage
stood near by. From Human Rights Watch reports and documents in Michael
Ratner’s book Guantánamo: What the World Should Know, I knew that this was
the notorious isolation cell. Prisoners in a detention camp are so cowed by
the sight of the isolation cell and those held in it that they become
compliant, since isolation is far more damaging psychologically to many
prisoners than anything else. “This is the isolation
cell?” I asked Petty Officer Dwight. “Yes,” he said. Then he advised us that
the detainees themselves had requested it. “They asked that other detainees
who were disruptive and disturbing them be taken here for a ‘time out’. This
was a ‘time-out’ area ... if someone was to act up and they needed a
‘time-out’.” It was the first of many
times I would look at PO Dwight - a decent guy whose true passion was
hairstyling - and wonder if he believed what he had been trained to say. But
he gave this, and other “facts”, with a kind of innocence. He took us into
the interrogation rooms. About 25 chairs were stacked in a corner - unusual
chairs for a military setting. The seats were padded; the structure itself
was made of a bamboo material; and, oddest of all, each of the arms of the
chairs curled into an elaborate spiral. I leant in more closely: on each
chair’s arms was a clear mark from what appeared to have been several layers
of gaffer tape. I looked at the legs of the chairs, where a prisoner’s ankles
would be: the same apparent gaffer-tape marks. I went into the
interrogation room. A table, two chairs. Gaffer tape remained in long strips
on the plywood walls, not holding anything together, but positioned near by
like an office supply; a pile of wadded-up grey gaffer tape remained on the
floor. PO Dwight reminded us of the
scenes we had witnessed on TV of prisoners at Camp X-Ray being transported
restrained, lying on stretchers - though no one had asked about it; the
stretchers were, he said, for the wellbeing of the prisoners; to move them
more easily. It was not, he was keen to assure us, that they had been sick,
or hurt. On to lunch at the mess
hall. After lunch, we were taken on a bizarre tour of a baking facility,
where an exuberant, smiling South Korean woman in a hairnet (“I love food
service! I love my job!”) showed off trays of hot, fragrant buns and baklava.
We heard for the third or fourth time from our military handlers that they,
too, wished that they could have that delicious baklava, but that it was
reserved for the prisoners’ discerning palates. The food-service employee
displayed a set table of detainees’ actual meals - meat, rice, sauce, salad,
and those tasty buns and pastries. She pressed us to try them: the ground
meat was spiced in a “culturally appropriate” Middle Eastern style and was
not bad. Then she showed off a dozen fridges filled with fresh produce -
strawberries, watermelon, maple syrup. She politely refused to
answer questions about what her role was, or who employed her. Private-sector
contractors take care of the manual, building, cleaning and service work: to
a casual observer, it is they, and not the military, who run Gauntánamo.
Military men and women have, if minimally, to answer reporters’ questions;
contractors do not even have to identify themselves. Contractors work in
medical facilities; clear journalists’ video; deal with classified material;
but they are answerable only to their employers. Their houses are far more
luxurious, on the island, than are those of the military. Military spokespeople must
give answers, but the answers are maddeningly evasive. Can detainees get mail
from their loved ones? I asked often. What if someone dies of natural causes,
who notifies the family? If a loved one calls, can prisoners take the call?
What happens to care packages from loved ones? What if a spouse asks to
visit? Can I see the letter that tells her that she can’t? I put these
questions “in writing” and asked them at least five times up the chain of
command, and followed up multiple times on my return. Most of my questions
were met - from higher-level “media specialists” such as Lieutenant-Commander
Brook DeWalt or Major Haynie - with non-answers. “I don’t know, but I can ask
for you.” “That is above my pay grade.” The detainee handlers and
the lawyers for detainees often flatly contradict each other. The handlers
and my press kit claim that “Detainees get a call every couple of months” or
quarterly, and that “they make phone calls on a regular basis - every few
weeks”. But Kebriaei says that her clients can make calls “every six months
if they are lucky”. “Detainees get mail all the time,” the handlers claim.
“Care packages are destroyed,” says Kebriaei, who described the
security-driven destruction of the orthopaedic shoes that her elderly client
needed for his swollen feet. And so, on we went in the
afternoon, to Camps 5 and 6 - hulking state-of-the-art maximum-security
prison edifices. But with a difference, as a smiling nameless blonde soldier
said to us (name tags are stripped from uniforms when soldiers are inside the
detention centres - the process is called “sterilising” - and the prisoners
themselves are addressed by number, never by name). These soldiers looked as
if they had been chosen from the coolest fraternity and sorority on campus.
They were unusually physically attractive. Our guide, Lieutenant Fulghum, was
a bright, charming Irishman with a twinkle in his eye and killer abs. When he
greeted the twentysomething blonde soldier with the phrase, “Honour bound,
Ma’am”, it was as good as a wink. (“Honor Bound to Defend Freedom” is the
motto). “Honour bound, Lieutenant,” she smiled back. As we moved down the
corridor the weird intimacy of the place - which had, according to many
detainees and reports such as Broken Laws, Broken Lives, a study by
Physicians for Human Rights, been the scene of so much abuse - hit me. There in front of me was a
shower stall fully fronted with glass, facing into a public central hallway
where military men and women passed regularly. It forced male prisoners daily
into a state of public nudity, which is illegal according to US and
international law. The guards showed us a
demonstration cell: it was spotless. Hooks folded down so that no one could
hang himself; there was a toilet in a corner, a plastic wedge of a bed, and
high-tech mechanical doors that shut of their own accord. No sun, no
sightlines, no natural light. I noted the guards’ use of facemasks.
“Facemasks are to help protect soldiers,” our tour guide said. “We do have
assaults - spitting, throwing faeces and urine.” Another diorama was set up
in another cell, of “comfort items”. It looked unchanged from photos of
Guantánamo that I had seen in the Bush era. Here was a Koran; toiletries; a
padded mattress the thickness of a yoga mat, for those who “co-operated”; a
thinner mattress, fewer “comforts”, for those who did not. Opposite this room was yet
another cell, which the military handlers were most proud of. “The TV room is
a big change,” one of the handlers said. There was a big blue squishy sofa
facing a nice big flat-screen TV. We were told that the detainees get to
watch TV three hours a day; that their favourite TV show is The Deadliest
Catch, about fishing; and that they also love Harry Potter. There was a tray
table where prisoners could eat baklava while watching Harry Potter - and
there, at the base of the sofa, were leg shackles, bolted to the concrete
floor. At the end of the hall I
opened a door. Before me was an unused cell, packed halfway to the ceiling
with hundreds of cans of Ensure, the liquid nutrient used in force-feeding.
(Jen Nessel, of the Centre for Constitutional Rights, had told me that 24
detainees were being force-fed daily, in restraining chairs, because they
were on hunger strike.) Lieutenant Fulghum came to get me, annoyed. “No one
is supposed to go this far down the hall,” he snapped. I asked if anybody was
on hunger strike. “We are not allowed to say. The medical staff handles
that,” Lieutenant Fulghum said. We were taken outside to
Camp 6: there was a modest-sized recreation area surrounded by wire; and
there they were, the causal heart of the whole monster. The detainees -
Pakistani, Afghan, Iraqi and Yemeni men in their twenties, thirties and
forties, wearing white T-shirts and khaki shorts - milled about; one or two
threw a basketball out of range. The journalists were moved back down the
hallway before they could see us, as if we were on safari. I asked if I could
speak to them. My handler smiled. “No way.” Our handlers took us out of
the first structure to the grassy area between the buildings. In the second
building, our handlers promised, we would see - since Obama had taken office -
art classes; English classes. A library. Outside, all around us, we
saw a facility - one scheduled to be closed by December 2009 - under massive
new construction: dozens of labourers were digging, surrounded by the
grinding noise of building. A facility that Congress thinks it is discussing
the “how” of closing - and that the President has claimed for six months is
already slated for closure - was metastasising under our very eyes. When I
asked about this I was told that the money had been allocated already and so
it would be more expensive to stop construction than to keep it going.
Through that open causeway of construction, the detainees in their central
cage caught sight of us. A sharp, sudden roar arose
from the knot of men who spotted us. One of the prisoners looked straight at
me and, his face twisted with an emotion that I could not read, screamed:
“Go! Go!” “Why are they saying ‘Go?’”
I asked. The handler looked at me.
The Muslim men in the cage were being managed by guards who were mostly
African American, and who shouted in colloquial English to get their
attention: “Yo! 289! Stop that!” “They learn English from the guards,” he
explained. “They aren’t saying ‘Go’.” What they had screamed out
to us - across the greatest possible distance - was: “Yo!” After these camps, our
handlers showed us Camp 4, part of Camp Delta, used to house “more compliant”
detainees. A dozen prisoners milled about in a bigger central space (“We call
this ‘The Patio’ or ‘The Lanai’,” our handler said; the new talking points
also refer to communal meals as “feast days”.) This cage, too, was surrounded
by mesh and guards. I asked a guard if he had
formed any personal opinions about the men he was guarding. He paused for a
moment. “They don’t complain. They are needy,” he said. I asked what he
meant. “Emotionally needy,” he said. “It comes out as asking for things all
the time - a certain brand of shampoo, extra blankets ... it is a kind of
dependency.” The guard was suddenly whisked away. We were then taken to a
medical bay. In the white-on-white bay was a military nurse - her name
removed from her uniform; she refused to identify herself. And a psychologist
stood ready to brief us, next to yet another diorama. Before us was a display
of Ensure fanned out across a medical tray table. The nurse, a pleasant,
pretty white middle-aged woman with a soft hairstyle and a rueful smile,
gestured at the display like a car showroom model. She gave us a rundown of
how they feed the prisoners who were on hunger strike. The nurse confirmed that
some detainees were on hunger strike and said that they were fed forcibly
“when they refuse to take feeding fluids”. But she didn’t call it
force-feeding: “We call it ‘enteral feeding’,” she corrected me. “It goes
down the nose and into the stomach.The patients are given a variety of
flavours,” she said, going back to her infomercial-style presentation and
gesturing at the cartons. “Strawberry, French vanilla, butter pecan - they
have a choice. Our admiral did this for a week and he gained four pounds,”
she said fondly. I turned to the
psychologist, a dark-haired man in his late forties, heavily muscled, with
the same featureless area on his chest where name tags ordinarily are. He,
too, refused to give me his name when I asked. I asked him what happens if a
detainee is depressed. “We will go see them. They can request the Behavioural
Health Unit.” He said that they get “talk therapy” if they need it. “I can
empathise,” he said. “I see it as being very similar to people who are
detained in any correctional facility.” I pointed out to the man
that perhaps his patients were “depressed and anxious” because of what they
had suffered in Guantánamo. (It is now well documented that detainees were
subjected to “stress positions”, sleep deprivation, waterboarding and
extremes of hot and cold. But for those working at Guantánamo, the talking
points on torture seem to be that “abuse may or may not have happened, there
is no way to know”: A Department of Defence spokesman, Joe Della Vedova, had
called the claim that prisoners had been tortured at Guantánamo, “a posture
of the defence”; Petty Officer Dwight called it “a matter of opinion”. And
Lieutenant-Commander DeWalt called it “an assertion” and “a point of view”.)
I would subsequently discover that the day before I met the psychologist and
the nurse, a detainee, Muhammad al-Hanashi, had died, in what the Joint Task
Force Guantánamo press office reported as an “alleged suicide”. Six weeks
later, that death still has not have been investigated by an independent
body. But Andrew Selsky, of
Associated Press, interviewed Binyam Mohamed, a former prisoner who knew the
young man; Mr Mohamed said that suicide was “totally out of character” for Mr
al-Hanashi. He was, according to Mr Mohamed, a positive person who had been
elected by the prisoners as their representative. Associated Press reported
that on January 17, 2009, Mr alHanashi had been summoned to a meeting with
Admiral David Thomas, Commander of JTF Guantánamo, and the head of the
Guantánamo guard force; Mr al-Hanashi never returned to his cell, but was
taken directly to the psychiatric ward. Elizabeth Gilson, a lawyer for a
detainee who was also in the ward, knows more about what happened; but she
can’t tell anyone; it is classified. The JTF Guantánamo press
release reporting the death would be terse; the details nonexistent; there
would be little follow-up in the media - because there was nothing the
Guantánamo press office would release that would give anything to go on. His
body would, presumably, go somewhere - but Mr al-Hanashi himself would,
during the days I was at Guantánamo, simply disappear. here was a final stop:
another trailer inside the same area as Camp Delta, where the Combat Status
Review Board takes place. There were security cameras in the corners of the
room covered with towels for, we were told, “classification reasons”. There
Captain Dan Bauer, another handsome, dark-haired, pleasant man, explained the
combat status review tribunal (CSRT) process. Twenty serious-looking
high-ranking military men sat to our right watching his presentation to us.
In the room was his desk: and two chairs facing it. I turned on my little
Flip camera and started recording. Captain Bauer claimed in his talk that
witnesses were brought in from outside“whenever reasonable”. I looked at the
base of both chairs. Both chairs had shackles. The process had been “formed”,
Captain Bauer explained, “to afford the detainees the opportunity to attend
and provide witness statements that were relevant and readily available on
behalf of their own defence”. The system, he repeated several times, sorts
them into those who are “enemy combatants” and those who are “no longer enemy
combatants”. He explained that “about 520
detainees were designated as enemy combatants, the remaining 40 or so are no
longer enemy combatants”. Why, I wondered, was there no category for “never
been enemy combatants”? A Russian reporter with us asked if the detainees
have access to telephones or the internet, so that they can communicate with
people in their country, to get documents and witnesses.“No,” Captain Bauer
said. “In that case what would happen is that there was something that - if
there was a process by which if they felt made their case, then what the
board would do is the Dept of Defence works with the Department of State to
contact, er … the nations of detainees to try to make arrangements just to
get whatever information - er, that they need.” He said that detainees are
taken “in the heat of the battlefield” and that there they “put the pieces
together”. I asked if everyone in the
room with the detainee was employed by the US Government. Captain Bauer
confirmed that. “As I understand the
process,” the Polish reporter said, “it is the detainee alone against the US
Government?” “I don’t understand the
question,” Captain Bauer replied. I asked why there were two
different chairs with shackles. Captain Bauer explained that if the detainee
had another detainee as his witness, then he would be present. In sources
provided by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty and the American Civil Liberties
Union I had read that prisoners had been abused to provide false confessions
implicating other prisoners, in just this setting, and that their “enemy
combatant” status had been based on these false confessions. Testimony of
witnesses who were not from within the prison system, so not subjected to
coercion, was of course crucial for the review to be effective. Have there
ever been any, or were any witnesses there, on the island right now? “I can’t confirm whether
there have or not.” “Would you fly them here?” “The Department of Defence,
the Department of State, work with foreign agencies to make those
arrangements.” “Have they made those
arrangements - ever?” “Ummm ... we afford the
opportunity. Whether it’s been done or how often it’s been done, I don’t, I
don’t know the answer.” That afternoon we got to
Guantánamo’s main street, which was like a main street anywhere in the US -
McDonald’s, a Wal-Mart-style store: T-shirts for sale reading “It Don’t Gitmo
Better Than This”, “Guantánamo Resort and Spa” and “Guantáanamo, Pearl of the
Antilles”. You could get postcards of the banana rats. Dinner was more salad
displays; a pasta fiesta; a make-your-own sundae bar. It was like a food
court in a really good mall. I tried to watch the sunset, under the scrutiny
of my handler. t six the next morning we
awoke, dressed and convened outside, but - something was wrong. Petty
Officers Dwight and Bennet were looking sadly at a flat tyre on the white van
in the driveway that was to transport us. I tried my computer in the backyard
for the hell of it, and to my surprise found that I got a thin thread of
access to the outside world. A friend in Egypt had sent me a bombshell news
clipping about Mr al-Hashani’s alleged suicide. While we had been at the
medical bay, the Guantánamo press office had been scrambling to word a bland
press release. The whole world knew about this death. Only we, the journalists
actually present at the scene, had had no idea. Petty Officers Dwight and
Bennet eventually got us on wheels - taking us through the chic, upscale neighbourhoods
of the contractors, with their barbecues, playstructures and verandas,
through the boxy, hut-like quarters of the enlisted men and women - and back
to the site of the military commissions. There a new set of handlers
showed us another sterile portable cell where detainees conferred with their
lawyers. I asked our guide if there was lawyer-client privilege, or was the
cell under surveillance? “I can’t answer that,” the guide said. (The defence
lawyer Wells Dixon said that he always assumed that his conversations with
his client were being listened in to.) We were taken in to the state-of-the
art “courtroom” itself, where the ill-starred military tribunals meet. It is
unbelievably expensive-looking: rows of gleaming wooden tables for the lawyers
of the detainees - and seats with shackles at the base for the detainees at
the end of each table; a raised dais where the “panel” - about 20 members of
the military - sits facing the tables; and a raised platform in the front of
the room, where the “judge” sits in the middle and on one side sits the
detainee and on the other, the witness for the defence. Two contractors
showed me around. One, “Mo”, showed me how you can put a $5 note under a
light on a desk and it shows up onscreen behind the judge’s chair much
magnified. I looked up: “In God We Trust”, the motto read. Then he showed me the
stop-motion button system on the audio feed that means that a censor can
redact any information that comes out that he wishes to cut - so the press in
the galley area behind glass at the back of the room, and down in the hangar,
will never know what was redacted. The button system is in the same area as
the “witness chair”, which seemed odd to me. I asked if the chair had
ever been used. “Well ... no,” he said. Not
to his knowledge. Then he showed me again with great pride the live feed that
was hooked up directly into the “courtroom” that could “transmit witness
testimony into the courtroom from anywhere in the world”. “Has it ever been used to
transmit actual witness testimony?” I asked. “No,” he replied. “But we
have the capability.” At the end of the trip, I
asked Deputy Press Officer Major Haynie to respond to the statement that no
witnesses had ever been called to the CSRT process. I did not get an answer.
Five weeks later I asked the Pentagon spokesman Vedova for a response - no
answer - and six weeks later I called Lieutenant-Commander DeWalt to confirm
or deny that external witnesses had never been called to the CSRT process. He said that the 9/11
families were coming down to witness motions at the military tribunals and
they would be housed in townhouses or officers’ quarters. I asked if the
families of defendants would be allowed to observe the motions as well. “I
don’t believe there are defendants’ families on this visit.” I asked him if
defendants’ families have ever been brought in. “Not to my knowledge,” he
conceded. I asked DeWalt if, in the rebranded military commissions under
Obama’s Administration, real witnesses will be flown in from outside the prison
system. “It’s a fair question - I’ll get back to you,” he said. So far, he
has not done so. The next morning I was due
to depart when word came that the one flight out was cancelled. Instead, I
was to fly out on military transport. On the aircraft I chatted with those
seated around me. To my right was a military doctor, who acknowledged that he
had been flown to the island to attend to the post-mortem of the dead
prisoner. “Will there be an
investigation?” I asked. That was the investigation,
he explained. When I later asked Lietenant-Commander DeWalt about the death
of Mr al-Hanashi, he said that there was an ongoing investigation, and that
he could not give “details of that situation - we are holding off on any
speculation - because it would get in the way of investigators doing their
job”. Sitting behind the doctor on
the aircraft was a genial young clergyman, Chaplain Mubarak, who turned out
to be one of four Muslim chaplains in the Navy. He, too, had been flown in
for the death - from Chicago. He had been tasked with “culturally sensitive”
treatment of the corpse. He explained that in Islam only another Muslim could
wash the dead man’s body. Had he been allowed to give spiritual support to Mr
al-Hanashi’s fellow prisoners? No. I made my way down the aisle
to join another lawyer, whom I had met in the waiting room: George Clarke, a
corporate lawyer with Miller and Chevalier, a big law firm in Washington. He
works pro bono for his clients who are detainees. “I represent two of the 17
Uighurs that are still here. They were all cleared to go - by the Department
of Defence, by the courts, by the military . . . innocent guys. But they have
been here for seven years.” To explain why the detainees
are not permitted to speak to reporters, Clarke says, the Department of
Defence is citing the Geneva Conventions. “Which is kind of interesting
because their position has been that the Geneva Conventions don’t apply to
these guys. If the Geneva Conventions applied they would be able to have a
canteen from which to buy things, tobacco that they could have, a right to
organise themselves and have a representative.” “Remember,” Clarke says,
“for a lot of these guys, there’s no evidence. The military said that of the
240 guys left here maybe 80 will eventually be ‘tried’ in some form. What
about the rest? A lot of these people have been held because they stayed at a
guest house or they had some supposed connections or affiliations [with
al-Qaeda]. ‘Connections’ are like ... someone’s brother was a member. Or
allegedly a member. The whole world has a misconception that these guys were
picked up on the battlefield. And a whole lot of them were not. “This country is based on
the rule of law,” Clarke continued quietly. “If you truly have no reason to
hold someone, you can’t hold them. National security cannot override freedom. “At the end of the day our
freedom is more important. If we lose our freedom - what are we trying to
secure?” What, indeed? We landed, the lights of
Washington now twinkling brightly below us, but the answer still unclear. External link: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article6725411.ece Moazzam Begg his experiences as a detainee and his hopes for the
future By Tim Reid The Times July 25, 2009 “I was living in Pakistan
with my wife and children. We were working on a project to build schools for
girls in Afghanistan. I was kidnapped at gunpoint in the middle of the night
by the Pakistani intelligence service and the CIA, on January 31, 2002. “I was taken to the US-run
jail at Bagram [air force base], in Afghanistan. I was held in a communal
cell. We weren’t allowed to walk, talk or get up without permission. If we
did we were hooded and suspended from the ceiling for hours. “I was held at Bagram until
February 2003. I saw two people killed there. I was stripped naked, kicked,
beaten, threatened with dogs. Interrogators would hold pictures of my wife
and children, and ask me what I thought had happened to them, while a woman
screamed near by. By the time I left I was actually looking forward to going
to Guantánamo Bay. “It was a 36-hour journey to
Guantánamo. I was hooded, shackled, ear-muffed and sedated. I was put into a
cell at the maximum security Camp Echo. I remained there most of the time. I
was in that cell 24 hours a day, except for 15 minutes out of it twice a
week. Guantánamo was more a psychological ordeal. I was released in January
2005. “It’s my life now, in terms
of what happened. I am getting accustomed to it. I now work getting justice
for other people held without charge. I’m not suffering from it - I’m
suffering for it. “One extraordinary thing
that has come out of it is that I am now in touch with American guards and
interrogators who dealt with me, [trying] to build bridges. All of them are
completely against what takes place there. All of them have spoken out
against what happened. One interrogator from Bagram now suffers from
post-traumatic stress disorder because of what he did to people there. “I welcome [President] Obama’s
decision to say he is going close Guantánamo. But saying it is one thing,
doing it is another. I don’t know how he is going to do it, especially since
he is restarting the military tribunals. In all honesty, not many have been
released since he came to power. President Bush released 520, and I am one of
them. President Obama says he does not want to prosecute those who tortured.
I would like to see them have to admit what they did and get prosecuted.” Held without charge: Abdul Rahim Abdul Razzak al-Ginco
- A Syrian Kurd captured by the Taleban in January 2000 and forced to work as
a labourer in a terror training camp. Tried to leave after 18 days. Accused
of being an Israeli spy. Sent to Kandahar jail. Beaten and tortured by
Taleban for nearly two years. When Taleban fled in January 2002, al-Ginco met
Tim Reid, Times reporter, at the Kandahar jail. Begged for help from the US.
The CIA came and he was sent to Guantánamo. He is still there. He has never
been charged. Last month a US judge ordered him to be released. Khaled Sheikh Mohammed - Mastermind
of the September 11 attacks. Captured in Pakistan on March 1, 2003. Held in
CIA prisons for more than three years. Waterboarded 183 times in March 2003.
Transferred in September 2006 and held in the top-secret Camp 7 at
Guantanamo, location unknown. Charged by military commission in February 2008
with war crimes. Probably too dangerous to release, but also too difficult to
try because he was tortured. Will probably end up being held indefinitely on
the US mainland. Mohammed El Gharani - Guantanamo’s
youngest detainee. Seized aged 14 in Pakistan in 2001 when a mosque he was
attending was raided by Pakistani security forces. He was ultimately turned
over to the US military in Afghanistan. Released to his native Chad in June,
without charge, after seven years at Guantánamo. Said Ali al-Shihri - A Saudi
citizen, he was captured on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border in December 2001
carrying $1,900 and suffering from an injured leg. He was held at Guantánamo
Bay for nearly six years before being released to his native country for a
rehabilitation and reintegration programme in 2007. In 2009, al-Shihri turned
up in several Yemeni jihadist videos posted on the internet, including one in
which he was identified as second-in-command of the al-Qaeda leadership in
Yemen. Salahidin Abdulahat - Captured
in Pakistan in October 2001, Salahidin Abdulahat was one of a number of
Chinese Muslim Uighurs taken into custody and detained by the US at
Guantánamo Bay. After being held there for more than seven years, Mr
Abdulahat and three fellow Uighurs were released on the island of Bermuda in
a secret deal that the British Government learnt about only after the men had
been released. Today, Mr Abdulahat, 32, is enjoying his new lifestyle and hoping
to one day become a Bermudian citizen. Abdallah Saleh al-Ajmi - “Praise
be unto God, who evacuated me from Guantánamo prison and joined me with the
Islamic State of Iraq” were the words spoken into a camera by Abdallah Saleh
al-Ajmi only hours before driving a lorry laden with explosives on to an
Iraqi military base near Mosul. Killing 13 soldiers and injuring 42 more,
al-Ajmi’s suicide attack in March 2008, less than two years after his
release, remains the most destructive action taken by a former Guantánamo
detainee to date. The Kuwaiti citizen, who deserted his country’s army to
take up jihad in Afghanistan, was captured in 2001 and detained for nearly
four years at Guantánamo. He was released to Kuwait for trial in November
2005 and acquitted and set free in July 2006. Guantánamo Timeline: 1898: US Navy base
established at Guantánamo Bay. 1903: Perpetual lease for
Guantánamo Bay offered to US. 2001: September 11 Series of
suicide attacks by al-Qaeda on the US. October 7: British and US
forces invade Afghanistan. 2002 January 11: First 20
detainees are moved to Camp X-Ray, a temporary detention facility. Prisoners
are kept in open-air cages. January 18: George W. Bush
asserts that the detainees are terrorists, not POWs, and so not entitled to
protection under the Geneva Conventions. January 21: Officials
confirm that three Britons are being held. March 22: It is announced
that detainees will be tried by special military commissions. April 29: Camp X-Ray closed.
All prisoners moved to Camp Delta. August 15: At least 30
detainees are alleged to have tried to commit suicide. 2003 March 11: US court
rules that detainees do not have right to hearings in US courts. May 9: Guantánamo population
hits peak of 680. 2004 February 13: US says it
will annually review detention of Camp Delta inmates to see if they still
pose a threat to US. 2005 May: Riots across the
world over allegations that Guantánamo guards had “desecrated” the Koran. July 22: US military reports
that 52 inmates are on a hunger strike. 2006 February 16: A UN
report calls for the closure of Camp Delta, saying that the treatment of some
prisoners amounts to torture. June 10: Three detainees
hang themselves. June 29: US Supreme Court
rules that military tribunals are “illegal”. 2007 May 30: A fourth
Guantánamo captive commits suicide. 2008 June 12: US Supreme
Court rules that all Guantánamo detainees have the right to challenge their
detention. 2009 January 20: President
Obama inaugurated. January 22: Obama orders the
closure of Guantánamo Bay prison camp within a year, bans harsh interrogation
techniques and orders a review of military trials. May 15: Obama says he will
revive the military tribunals created by Bush. July 20: Delay of key
reports raises questions over the pledged January 2010 closure of Guantánamo. There are currently 229
prisoners in Guantánamo. Fifty have been cleared for release. Between 30 and
80 are considered to be high-risk detainees (such as Khaled Sheikh Mohammed,
the alleged 9/11 mastermind) - of those about sixty could stand trial. It is
still unclear what will happen to the remaining detainees. External link: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article6725418.ece |