Amnesty International listed US indefinite detention of 166 prisoners at Guantanamo as the country’s primary human rights concern in its latest annual report,. The paper also denounced drone strikes and uninvestigated deaths from secret CIA detentions.
Guantanamo, where more than 100 inmates have been on hunger strike since February, is listed first among
Amnesty International’s human rights concerns in the US chapter of
its annual report, which covers the year 2012. It states that the
majority of Gitmo’s 166 detainees were kept at the facility without
charge or criminal trial, “nearly three years after President
Obama’s deadline for closure of the Guantanamo detention
facility.”
The human rights group also keeps count of the death toll at
Guantanamo: “Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif, a Yemeni national who repeatedly expressed
distress at his indefinite detention without charge or trial, died
during the year, bringing to nine the number of detainees known to
have died at Guantanamo since January 2002 ,” the report
said.
Latif was one of the first Gitmo prisoners, taken into
US custody in 2001. He was ordered to be released from prison by
the US District Court in Washington in July 2010, but the decision
was overruled a year later on the grounds that Latif was an
Al-Qaeda combatant.
The Amnesty International report recounts the 2012 trials — or
rather, “attempts at trials” — for the Gitmo detainees. Five Gitmo
prisoners accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks were arraigned
for a capital trial last year that did not take place.
The report states that before being sent to Guantanamo, those
five and another detainee “had been held incommunicado for up to
four years in secret US custody, during which time at least two of
them had been tortured.”
Another detainee who was allegedly tortured, Pakistani national
Majid Khan, pleaded guilty in December 2012. He became the seventh
prisoner convicted by a military commission at Guantanamo, and one
of the five who had pleaded guilty in return for the possibility of
early release from US custody.
The report also raised the issue of the 600 detainees in US custody
at the US Military base in Afghanistan’s Bagram. Fifty of the
inmates are non-Afghan nationals, some also held without charge or
trial.
Drones: ‘A violation of international law’
The ongoing US program of targeted killings of suspected
terrorists in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen —as well as the
questionable legal grounds of the practice — was the basis of
another lengthy entry.
“Available information, limited by secrecy, indicated the US
policy permitted extrajudicial executions in violation of
international human rights law under the USA’s theory of a ‘global
war’ against Al-Qaeda and associated groups,” the report
said
Drone strikes have increased sevenfold under Obama, Bloomberg
reported in April. The US covert program to target and kill
Al-Qaeda and Taliban commanders saw 35 strikes in Pakistan in 2008,
the last year President Bush was in office, the Long War Journal
reported. That figure grew in the following years, reaching a peak
of 117 attacks in 2010. Last year, 46 US drones strikes took place
in Pakistan.
A high court in Pakistan recently ruled that US drone strikes in
the country should be considered war crimes. It also recommended that the Pakistani
government address the issue in the United Nations, saying the
strikes violated the organization’s charter and the country’s laws,
but the growing uproar in Pakistan has done little to change
Washington’s drone war.
“Our researchers, when talking to people in Pakistan, find
that the people are living in constant fear in very remote areas.
You really cannot figure out, at the end of the day, who has been
injured or killed in a drone attack,” Amnesty International
Secretary General Salil Shetty said, according to AP.
The London-based group’s report was issued on Wednesday, the same
day Washington admitted to killing four US citizens
with drones.
In a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Attorney-General
Eric Holder revealed that Anwar Awlaki was the only US citizen
specifically targeted by a drone, while three others — Abdulrahman
Awlaki, Samir Khan and Jude Kenan Mohammed — were also casualties
in the drone war. President Obama is expected to address the issue
in his Thursday speech at the National Defense
University.
Bush administration still unaccountable for secret detention
deaths
The CIA’s program of secret detention is mentioned among other
US human rights violations. Amnesty International is concerned that
no one was held accountable for the deaths of two people, who are
believed to have perished in US custody abroad.
“On 30 August, the US Attorney General announced the closure of
criminal investigations into the death of two individuals in US
custody outside the USA. He stated that no one would face criminal
charges in relation to the deaths, believed to have occurred in
Afghanistan in 2002 and Iraq in 2003,” the report said.
The report described the deaths as “crimes under international
law committed under the administration of President George W.
Bush.”
Tasers: ‘Excessive use of force’
Forty-two people died in the US in 2012 after tasers were used
against them by police, according to Amnesty International.
“Most of those who died after being struck with a Taser were not
armed and did not appear to pose a serious threat when the Taser
was deployed,” the report said.
According to Amnesty International’s report, taser use has
caused 540 deaths since 2001. The report cites the American Heart
Association, which conducted a study on the use of Tasers that
concluded they can “cause cardiac arrest and death.”
The potential risks of tasers — electroshock pistol-like weapons
capable of jolting the target with 50,000 volts of electricity —
have long been a source of public concern.
A recent high-profile case of alleged Taser-induced death
involved Richard Metcalf, a 35-year-old from western New York.
Metcalf died in November after suffering a massive heart attack
while in the custody of the Erie County Sheriff’s Office.
This article originally appeared on : RT