As a “War on Terror” prison, designed to hold prisoners — known as “detainees” — without charge or trial, and without access to the US court system, Guantanamo opened on January 11, 2002, as the first of nearly 800 detainees arrived by plane from the US prison at Kandahar airbase in Afghanistan.

The detainees were initially held in cages that were open to the elements — in Camp X-Ray — but the first phase of a more permanent structure, known as Camp Delta, opened in May 2002. It now contains seven prison blocks — Camps 1 to 7 — plus an isolation block, Camp Echo, and another block, Camp Iguana, which was once used to house juvenile detainees.

Press TV: Could you please tell us about Camp 6 at Guantanamo?

Andy Worthington:Camp 6, modeled on “supermax” prisons on the US mainland, opened in late 2006. Although communal areas were incorporated into the structure, these have never been used. After unrest following the apparent suicide of three detainees in June 2006, it was decided that it was unsafe to allow the detainees to mix freely.

Although detainees in Camp 4 share dormitories and are allowed some communal leisure facilities, they are in the minority, and Guantanamo’s general population is held in Camp 6, where the detainees remain in solitary confinement for 22 to 23 hours a day, and are not allowed any kind of social life, even though they include dozens of detainees who have been cleared for release, following decisions made by military review boards. These innocent men cannot be repatriated because of fears that they will be tortured on their return, and are from countries including China, Uzbekistan, Algeria, Libya and Tunisia.

Press TV: The Bush administration has claimed that the Third Geneva Convention does not apply to al-Qaeda or Taliban fighters even though it has become evident that many of the detainees at Guantanamo are being kept with no solid accusations against them. How can you interpret this?

Andy Worthington:The decision to deprive the detainees of the protections of the Geneva Conventions (GPW) was to facilitate their interrogation, which is otherwise prohibited. In the memo advising the President to remove GPW rights from the detainees (signed by his Chief Counsel Alberto Gonzales, but widely attributed to Vice President Dick Cheney and his close advisors), it was also stated that depriving the detainees of their GPW rights “substantially reduces the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act.”

Unfortunately, when the detainees failed to provide the intelligence that the administration had hoped for, the removal of GPW rights allowed the authorities to interrogate them coercively, using “enhanced interrogation techniques” that have been widely interpreted as constituting torture.

Over time, of course, as I demonstrate in The Guantanamo Files, it became apparent that the majority of the detainees had no intelligence to offer because they were either innocent men — charity workers, missionaries, religious students and economic migrants — or Taliban foot soldiers, recruited to fight an inter-Muslim civil war against the Northern Alliance, who had, for the most part, no knowledge of the workings of al-Qaeda. Although the administration claimed that the detainees were “captured on the battlefield,” the majority had in fact been handed over to US forces by their allies, both in Afghanistan and Pakistan, at a time when substantial bounty payments were being made for al-Qaeda or Taliban suspects, and others had been picked up on the basis of false intelligence.

Press TV: Could you please explain to our readers about the Tipton Three?

Andy Worthington:The Tipton Three are three young men from the West Midlands, in England, who were captured in Afghanistan, where they had strayed in search of adventure after traveling to Pakistan to arrange the wedding of one of the men.

Caught in the wrong place at the wrong time — the northern Afghan city of Kunduz, during its surrender in November 2001 — they survived a massacre en route to a prison run by one of the Alliance commanders, when hundreds of prisoners were suffocated in container trucks, and were held in Guantanamo until March 2004, when they were returned to the UK and freed without charge.

Under pressure in Guantanamo, they had falsely confessed that they were figures in the crowd in a poor-quality video that featured a meeting between Osama bin Laden and lead 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta, but their lawyers were able to demonstrate that, when the video was recorded, one of the three had been working at an electrical store in England. As a result, the British government was able to press for their release.

Press TV: One of the abuses at the camp is reportedly the abuse of religion while the US government claims they respect religious beliefs. If it is true, could you please give instances of religious abuses and elaborate more on the matter?

Andy Worthington:Religious abuse is something that has been widely reported in the statements of detainees released from Guantanamo. It was apparently widespread in the prisons in Afghanistan, where the detainees were “processed” for Guantanamo, and was also the trigger for the earliest hunger strikes in Guantanamo itself. It appears that abusing the Koran — by dropping it, treading on it, or otherwise treating it with disrespect — was an easy way to cause distress to detainees without having to lay a finger on them.

It has also been reported that the authorities in Guantanamo interfered with the call to prayer — by playing loud music, for example — and that in processing and interrogations they played on vulnerabilities caused by the detainees’ religious and cultural backgrounds; for example, in the use of enforced nudity, cavity searches and sexual humiliation.

Press TV: The appalling practices at the Guantanamo have been widely condemned by the international organizations? Can you think of any organization that defends the horrendous practices at the Guantanamo?

Andy Worthington:No, but it’s worth pointing out, I think, that repressive regimes around the world have been able to claim that their own brutal and lawless behavior is justified because it has been endorsed by the US administration’s flight from domestic and international laws.

If those captured are Prisoners of War, they should be treated according to the Geneva Conventions. If, on the other hand, they are criminals, they should be charged and tried as such, and not subjected to indefinite detention without charge or trial, and to treatment that contravenes the UN Convention Against Torture.

Andy Worthington’s book The Guantanamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison, is published by Pluto Press. Visit his website at: http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/

http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=45108§ionid=3510302

By Ross Tuttle

A damning new interview reveals that the Gitmo trials are only for show.

Secret evidence. Denial of habeas corpus. Evidence obtained by waterboarding. Indefinite detention. The litany of complaints about the legal treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay is long, disturbing and by now familiar. Nonetheless, a new wave of shock and criticism greeted the Pentagon’s announcement on February 11 that it was charging six Guantánamo detainees, including alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, with war crimes — and seeking the death penalty for all of them.

As the murky, quasi-legal staging of the Bush Administration’s military commissions unfolds, a key official has told The Nation that the trials are rigged from the start. According to Col. Morris Davis, former chief prosecutor for Guantánamo’s military commissions, the process has been manipulated by Administration appointees in an attempt to foreclose the possibility of acquittal.

Colonel Davis’s criticism of the commissions has been escalating since he resigned this past October, telling the

Washington Post that he had been pressured by politically appointed senior defense officials to pursue cases deemed “sexy” and of “high-interest” (such as the 9/11 cases now being pursued) in the run-up to the 2008 elections. Davis, once a staunch defender of the commissions process, elaborated on his reasons in a December 10, 2007, Los Angeles Times op-ed. “I concluded that full, fair and open trials were not possible under the current system,” he wrote. “I felt that the system had become deeply politicized and that I could no longer do my job effectively.”

Then, in an interview with The Nation in February after the six Guantánamo detainees were charged, Davis offered the most damning evidence of the military commissions’ bias — a revelation that speaks to fundamental flaws in the Bush Administration’s conduct of statecraft: its contempt for the rule of law and its pursuit of political objectives above all else.

When asked if he thought the men at Guantánamo could receive a fair trial, Davis provided the following account of an August 2005 meeting he had with Pentagon general counsel William Haynes — the man who now oversees the tribunal process for the Defense Department. “[Haynes] said these trials will be the Nuremberg of our time,” recalled Davis, referring to the Nazi tribunals in 1945, considered the model of procedural rights in the prosecution of war crimes. In response, Davis said he noted that at Nuremberg there had been some acquittals, something that had lent great credibility to the proceedings.

“I said to him that if we come up short and there are some acquittals in our cases, it will at least validate the process,” Davis continued. “At which point, [Haynes’s] eyes got wide and he said, ‘Wait a minute, we can’t have acquittals. If we’ve been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? We can’t have acquittals, we’ve got to have convictions.’”

Davis submitted his resignation on October 4, 2007, just hours after he was informed that Haynes had been put above him in the commissions’ chain of command. “Everyone has opinions,” Davis says. “But when he was put above me, his opinions became orders.”

(Reached for comment, Defense Department spokesperson Cynthia Smith said, “The Department of Defense disputes the assertions made by Colonel Davis in this statement regarding acquittals.”)

“That he said there can be no acquittals will stain the entire [tribunal] process,” says Scott Horton, who teaches law at Columbia University Law School and who has written extensively about Haynes’s conflicts with the Judge Advocate General’s (JAG) corps, the judicial arm of the Armed Forces, which is charged with implementing the military commissions. According to Horton, Haynes tried to cut the JAG corps out of internal debates over the detention and prosecution of detainees, knowing it was critical of the Administration’s views. In private memos and in public Senate testimony, high-ranking officers of the corps have repeatedly expressed concerns about the Administration’s advocacy of “extreme interrogation techniques.”

“The JAG corps consists of a group of rigorous professionals, but Haynes never trusted them to do their job,” says Horton. “His clashes have always had the same subtext — they want to be independent, he wants them to do political dirty-work.”

Haynes, a political appointee and chief legal adviser to Defense secretaries Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates, was nominated in 2006 by the Bush Administration for a lifetime seat as a judge in the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. But his nomination never got out of committee, primarily because of the opposition of Republican Senator (and former military lawyer) Lindsey Graham and other members alarmed over Haynes’s role in writing or supervising the writing of Pentagon memos advocating the use of harsh interrogation techniques the Geneva Conventions classify as torture.

Currently, in his capacity as Pentagon general counsel, Haynes oversees both the prosecution and the defense for the commissions. “You would think a person in that position wouldn’t be favoring one side,” says Colonel Davis.

Told of Davis’s story about Haynes, Clive Stafford Smith, a defense attorney who has represented more than seventy Guantánamo clients, said, “Hearing it makes me think I’m back in Mississippi representing a black man in front of an all-white jury.”

He adds, “It confirms what people close to the system have always said,” noting that when three prosecutors — Maj. Robert Preston, Capt. John Carr and Capt. Carrie Wolf — requested to be transferred out of the Office of Military Commissions in 2004, they claimed they’d been told the process was rigged. In an e-mail to his supervisors, Preston had said that there was thin evidence against the accused. “But they were told by the chief prosecutor at the time that they didn’t need evidence to get convictions,” says Stafford Smith.

At the time, the military wrote it off as “miscommunication” and “personality conflicts.” And then there were changes in personnel. “They told us that the system had been cleaned up … but I guess the more things change, the more they stay the same,” says Stafford Smith.

The terrible irony is that even if acquittals were possible, the government has declared that it can continue to detain anyone deemed an “enemy combatant” for the duration of hostilities–no matter the outcome of a trial. And most of the 275 men held at Guantánamo are classified as “enemy combatants” while the hostilities in the “war on terror” could be never-ending.

Says ACLU staff attorney Ben Wizner, “The trial doesn’t make a difference. They can hold you there forever until they decide to let you out.” The one person to be released from Guantánamo through the judicial process, Australian David Hicks, pleaded guilty. As Wizner wrote in the Los Angeles Times in April 2007, “In an ordinary justice system, the accused must be acquitted to be released. In Guantánamo, the accused must plead guilty to be released.”

Still, the trials serve a purpose for the government, in providing the semblance of a legitimate judicial process. According to defense attorneys involved — and many of the former prosecutors, like Davis — the process is political, not legal.

“If someone was acquitted, then it would suggest we did the wrong thing in the first place. That can’t happen,” says Horton sardonically. “When the government decides to clear someone, it calls the person ‘no-longer an enemy combatant’ instead of just saying they made a mistake.”

He adds, “For people like Haynes, justice is meant to serve the party.”

The US decision to bring death penalty charges against six men suspected of orchestrating 9/11 attacks could strain relations with UK.

UK authorities have raised their voices against US Gitmo detention camp and the legally flawed system of military tribunals.

Human rights activists have also expressed concern over the US announcement to put the six men on trial.

The decision to use Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the others as guinea-pigs in a constitutionally dubious legal proceeding is likely to trigger a firestorm of anti-American sentiment in the Islamic world, according to The Independent.

Concerns were raised of political interference by the White House in the military’s decision to go to trial in the middle of an election campaign in which the Republican frontrunner, John McCain, has made the fight against al-Qaeda central to his election bid.

Vincent Warren, the executive director head of Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents many Guantanamo detainees said, “What we are looking at is a series of show trials by the Bush administration that are really devoid of any due process considerations.”

Britain’s former attorney general Lord Goldsmith criticized the legally flawed system of US military tribunals, set up to try non-US citizens and which one law lord likened to “kangaroo courts”.

Human rights lawyers regard the tribunals as an affront to natural justice because the evidence against the suspects has been secured through torture or unlawful detention.

Even Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have called for the closure of the Guantanamo prison camp which still holds 275 inmates, many of whom have been unlawfully detained for more than five years.

Britain is opposed to capital punishment and has censured the treatment of detainees held in Guantanamo Bay.

JM/BGH

WILLIAM GLABERSON
The New York Times

Military prosecutors have decided to seek the death penalty for six Guantanamo detainees who are to be charged with central roles in the Sept. 11 terror attacks, government officials who have been briefed on the charges said Sunday.

The officials said the charges would be announced at the Pentagon as soon as today and were likely to include numerous war-crimes charges against the six men, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the former al-Qaida operations chief who has described himself as the mastermind of the attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people.

A Defense Department official said prosecutors were seeking the death penalty because, “if any case warrants it, it would be for individuals who were parties to a crime of that scale.” The officials spoke anonymously because no one in the government was authorized to speak about the case.

NEW CHALLENGES

A decision to seek the death penalty would increase the international focus on the case and present new challenges to the troubled military commission system that has yet to begin a single trial.

“The system hasn’t been able to handle the less-complicated cases it has been presented with to date,” said David Glazier, a former Navy officer who is a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

In addition to Mohammed, the other five to be charged include detainees officials say were coordinators and intermediaries in the plot, among them a man labeled the “20th hijacker,” who was denied entry to the United States in the month before the attacks. Under the rules of the Guantanamo war-crimes system, the military prosecutors can designate charges as capital when they present them, and it is that first phase of the process that’s expected this week. The military official who then reviews them, Susan Crawford, a former military appeals court judge, has the authority to accept or reject a death-penalty request.

A Pentagon spokesman declined to comment Sunday.

QUESTION OF CARRYING OUT EXECUTION

But some of those briefed on the case have said the prosecutors view their task in seeking convictions for the Sept. 11 attacks as a historic challenge. A special group of military and Justice Department lawyers has been working on the case for several years.

Even if the detainees are convicted on capital charges, any execution would be many months or, perhaps years, from being carried out, lawyers said, in part because a death sentence would have to be scrutinized by civilian appeals courts.

Federal officials have said in recent months that there’s no death chamber at the detention camp at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and that they knew of no specific plans for how a death sentence would be carried out.

The last military execution was in 1961, when an Army private, John A. Bennett, was hanged after being convicted of rape and attempted murder.

By Colin Freeman | The Telegraph

US military prosecutors are putting the finishing touches to the first major case against Guantanamo Bay inmates suspected to have helped plot the September 11 attacks.

	Khalid Shaik Mohammed was subjected to “waterboarding” while in detention

The charges are expected to involve six detainees currently held at the Cuban detention camp, including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the former senior aide to Osama bin Laden, who claims to have been the main architect of the plot.

However, any trial will put the spotlight once again on claims of mistreatment and torture brought by some of the inmates, who as designated “enemy combatants” of the US were denied basic legal rights that would normally afforded to prisoners of war under the Geneva Convention.

Last week, for example, the CIA confirmed that Mr Mohammed had at times been subjected to the interrogation technique known as “waterboarding”, in which suspects have water poured into their breathing passages in order to simulate a sense of drowning.

The CIA claimed it was carried out on him in the belief that he had knowledge about further large-scale terrorist attacks. A second suspect thought to be among the six, Mohammed al-Qahtani, was subjected to sleep deprivation, forced to wear a bra, and led around Guantanamo Bay on a leash, according to a 2005 Pentagon investigation into claims of abusive treatment.

Al-Qahtani, who been held at Guantanamo since 2002, is said to have been the so-called “20th hijacker”, whose plans were thwarted when he was denied entry into the United States by an immigration official.

Gitanjali Gutierrez, a lawyer acting for Mr al-Qahtani, told The New York Times that she had no information about whether he would be charged.

“But if he is,” she added, “I can assure you that his well-documented torture and the controversy over secret trials will be the focus.”

Prosecutors are understood to be considering charges of murder, conspiracy and providing material support for terrorism against the defendants, although it is thought that any trial is still many months away.

The only person who has so far been tried in a US court over the September 11 plot is Zacarias Moussaoui, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy in 2005 and is serving a life jail term.

All the British inmates held in Guantanamo Bay have been released.

By Adam Zagorin | Time Magazine

Majid Khan is seen in 1999 during his senior year in high school in Baltimore, Maryland. Khan, 27, is now jailed at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The Khan Family / Center for Constitutional Rights / AP

 In 2005, CIA officials ordered the destruction of videotapes depicting the harsh interrogation of prisoners in the agency’s secret overseas prisons. CIA Director Michael Hayden admitted that in December 2007 amid a public debate over the use of “waterboarding” on detainees and whether or not the technique - which simulates drowning - constituted torture. At that time, Hayden said that only a few prisoners were ever subjected to “special interrogation techniques,” which can include waterboarding, and that nothing was recorded on video after 2002. That claim is now coming under additional scrutiny, in part due to a classified briefing that will be delivered to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence this Friday. Lawyers representing one current Guantanamo detainee tell TIME that they plan to present evidence that he was subjected to videotaped interrogation, in addition to unspecified “systematic torture” when he was held in secret CIA prisons. The lawyers, from the Center for Constitutional Rights, a New York-based legal non-profit with a long record of advocacy for prisoners at Guantanamo, note that their client has said the videotaping occurred after his arrest in 2003.

    Majid Khan, 27, a former suburban Baltimore high school student, was first seized by authorities in Pakistan, where he said he was visiting his brother. Khan then spent more than three years in a secret overseas CIA “black site” before President Bush ordered his transfer to Guantanamo along with 13 other high-value detainees. Also transferred was alleged 9/11 mastermind Khaled Sheik Mohammed, who had allegedly ordered Khan to research attacks on American water reservoirs and gas stations.

    Khan’s lawyers are armed with more than 500 pages of top-secret notes taken during recent sessions with their client at Guantanamo; they will use the material to describe his interrogation and detention to the Intelligence Committee. Though details are highly classified, his lawyers claim that he and others were tortured and videotaped, charges that Hayden and other CIA officials deny. On Feb. 5, Hayden admitted to Congress that the CIA had used waterboarding on Khaled Sheik Mohammed and two others. The CIA continues to assert that it does not engage in torture.

    Rising to Hayden’s defense, the White House this week made clear its view that waterboarding has saved American lives, is legal - and does not constitute torture, as critics insist. A spokesman for Bush said the President would authorize waterboarding for use on future terror suspects if certain standards are met, a spokesman said. Hayden himself banned the technique in 2006 for use in CIA interrogations, and the Pentagon and FBI have done likewise.

    A White House spokesman said the CIA could use waterboarding again if it had specific approval from the President. That authorization would depend on a variety of factors, such as the “belief that an attack might be imminent” the spokesman explained. “The President will listen to the considered judgment of the professionals in the intelligence community and the judgment of the attorney general in terms of the legal consequences of employing a particular technique,” he said.

    Khan is one of very few Guantanamo prisoners whose claim to U.S. residency has been legally established. He has close relatives in the Baltimore area who are American citizens; Khan’s lawyers have appealed to members of Congress on his behalf, including Sen. Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, who sits on the Intelligence Committee. After years of isolation in prison, Khan was recently allowed to mix with at least one other prisoner at Guantanamo, Abu Zubaydah, a top alleged terrorist who, Hayden has said, was one of those prisoners to be waterboarded.

    Khan’s lawyers have said their client has gone on a hunger strike to protest the conditions of his confinment, and appears pale and gaunt. In the course of meetings with counsel and the Red Cross, Khan also handed over neatly penned, handwritten letters. Several have been made public, after heavy redactions imposed by U.S. military censors. One of Khan’s messages begins: “In this letter I am going to mention some of the things I have been through.” Then the next 19 lines of text are blacked out.

    But Khan’s private declarations to his lawyers cannot be censored, and it is those that the Intelligence Committee will hear on Friday. His allegations come at a time when Congress is considering passage of a new intelligence bill that would effectively outlaw many of the CIA’s interrogation methods by forcing the Agency to use only those techniques permitted in the U.S. Army Field Manual.

    The bipartisan ban in the intelligence bill, put forward by Senators Dianne Feinstein of California and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, still faces Republican opposition, while the intelligence bill as a whole could face a presidential veto because if it does not grant amnesty to telephone companies who participated in possibly illegal wiretapping of Americans, as requested by the Bush Administration.

    ”The national debate over torture will end if this amendment to place the CIA under the Army Field Manual becomes law,” Senator Feinstein said. “At that point, all U.S. government interrogations - military and civilian - would be conducted under the same rules and regulations, and eight specific techniques, including waterboarding, would be prohibited.”

A new court at Guantánamo would allow the U.S. military to keep its secrets by cutting off terror suspects’ testimony from the ears of observers at the flick of a switch.

BY CAROL ROSENBERG

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba — On the eve of the resumption of its war crimes trials, the military on Sunday unveiled a new state-of-the-art court capable of trying six alleged terrorists simultaneously — and silencing them from the outside world, if they try to spill state secrets.

The military offered a comprehensive look at its new court, part of a $12 million razor-wire-ringed legal complex that arrived by cargo plane and barge in prefabricated parts. Unlike a more ambitious plan to build a $125 million compound on the site overlooking Guantánamo Bay, the new compound can be dismantled and shipped back stateside once trials are done.

”We got it up in six months at a fraction of the cost,” said Army Col. Wendy Kelly, director of operations at the Pentagon’s Office of Military Commissions.

Architecturally, the bunker-style building is a bland structure impenetrable to electronic eavesdropping.

Inside, it has an up-to 20-seat jury box for the U.S. military officers who will be assembled from around the world, case by case, to sit in judgment; typical judges and prosecution tables, plus a bank of defense tables where six captives can sit at computers on faux leather chairs, unshackled but guarded by soldiers.

KILLING THE SOUND

It also has a 30-seat adjacent room, behind a tempered-glass window, where observers can hear the proceedings on a broadcast basis — and a kill-switch where a security officer or the judge can cut the sound in case someone divulges a state secret.

There is no blackout capacity or curtain, meaning the media, legal observers, dignitaries and family members who might attend a trial could watch but not listen.

Such measures could be necessary if the Pentagon presses ahead with plans to try alleged 9/11 architect Khalid Sheik Mohammed or any of the other 14 high-value detainees who arrived at this base in September 2006 from three-plus years of secret CIA custody.

The agency has classified the interrogation techniques it used on the men — in secret sites, somewhere overseas — as national security secrets. Were one to blurt out his treatment at trial, the judge or security officer could simply stifle their voices.

It is inside razor wire along with five separate windowless cells where lawyers can meet clients who could some day include the alleged architects of the 9/11 attacks and other suspected senior al Qaeda leaders.

On Monday, lawyers return to the old court to argue, again, for dismissal of terror charges against Guantánamo’s youngest detainee, Toronto-born Omar Khadr, who was captured at age 15 in Afghanistan. Khadr’s Pentagon-appointed attorneys argue before an Army judge Monday that all war crimes charges should be dismissed against the Canadian man, now 21.

He is charged in the grenade killing of a U.S. Army medic, Sgt. 1st Class Christopher Speer, 28, of Albuquerque, N.M., who was part of a Special Forces unit that attacked a suspected al Qaeda compound in Khost, Afghanistan, in July 2002.

Khadr is from a fundamentalist Muslim family, which sometimes celebrated Muslim feasts with the bin Ladens in Afghanistan, and he is also accused of conspiring with and supporting al Qaeda, attempted murder of other members of Speer’s unit and spying by scouting on U.S. forces.

Conviction could carry life in prison because, in consideration of his youth, the Pentagon waived an option to seek the death penalty.

Khadr’s lawyers claim he should have been treated as a ”child soldier,” not equally responsible to an adult, in part because he was 15 at the time of his capture.

”If jurisdiction is exercised over Mr. Khadr, the military judge will be the first in Western history to preside over the trial of alleged war crimes committed by a child,” Navy Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler wrote in a 15-page motion.

Moreover, Kuebler argued that the United States failed his client — who has grown into beefy, bearded adulthood behind the razor wire here at Camp Delta.

But the chief prosecutor, Army Col. Larry Morris, disputes the defense characterization of the captive as a child soldier — saying Khadr did not meet the definition under international law.

”The conventions on child soldiers establish the minimum age for conscripting soldiers,” he said in a statement, adding, “They do not provide amnesty for war crime activities on the battlefield.”

DETAINED SINCE 16

Khadr arrived at this remote prison camp at age 16, saw his first attorneys two years later and has periodically fired the lawyers who have volunteered to work on his case.

He has spent long portions of detention in special segregation for war-court candidates but more recently was moved to a POW-style compound where about 60 of the 275 or so detainees live in communal bunkhouses.

Prosecutors from Spain’s National Court are seeking key witnesses in relation to alleged secret CIA flights in which dozens of Islamist prisoners were transported via Spain to Guantanamo Bay.

The National Court suspects that dozens of prisoners captured in Kandahar, Afghanistan by US forces were transported to Guantanamo via Spanish airports or using Spanish airspace between January 2002 and October 2006.

According to the Spanish daily El Pais, about 47 flights headed to or came from the US base at Guantanamo in Cuba and landed or flew over Spanish airports.

A document submitted to the court by the Spanish Airports and Air Navigation (AENA) authority, refers to eight flights in 2002, seven in 2003, twelve in 2004, nine in 2005, nine in 2006, and two in February 2007.

The National Court also wants to know why in 2002, just months after the deadly September 11 attacks against the twin towers, ex-premier Jose Maria Aznar and US president George W. Bush, updated a bilateral defence treaty, which had been in place in 1989.

The updated treaty made it more flexible for American planes to land at the US bases of Rota and Moron de la Frontera.

The court wants to know if these ‘more flexible’ terms were used to transfer the first 23 prisoners sent from the city of Kandahar in Afghanistan to Guantanamo.

Flight and airport officials as well as military and civilian air traffic controllers in the US bases located at Moron de la Frontera, Rota and Torrejon de Ardoz will be asked to give their testimony.

The flights took place under the leadership of former prime minister Jose Maria Aznar and the current prime minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero.

© GMC Group Ð all rights reserved

From CagePrisoners

US Attorney H. Candace Gorman has revealed that her client Abdul Hamid Al-Ghizzawi has been infected with the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). Al Ghizzawi believes the infection happened during medical procedures at Guantanamo in 2004 when he was given a blood test which resulted in alarm amongst the hospital staff. Al Ghizzawi was not given any explanation for the alarm at the time. As a result Al-Ghizzawi has now been told that he is suffering from Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). Having already been suffering from Hepatitis B and Tuberculosis (which he also acquired at Guantanamo) Al Ghizzawi has been held in severe isolation in Camp 6.

Gorman filed an emergency application with the US Supreme Court asking that the US military be ordered to treat Al-Ghizzawi’s medical problems and for medical records to be turned over to her. Chief Judge Roberts denied the motion despite it being stated by the chief medical doctor at Guantanamo, Dr Sollock, that Al-Ghizzawi did not suffer from any ill health on arrival to the base.

Al-Ghizzawi’s health has rapidly deteriorated and Cageprisoners calls for the immediate release of his medical records so that adequate medical treatment can be given to the detainee. Spokesman for Cageprisoners and former Guantanamo detainee, Moazzam Begg said,

“That a man who has endured more than half a decade in the world’s most infamous prison – without charge or trial – is now infected with the world’s most dreaded disease is preposterous. How will the US administration explain this one to his family? More ‘robust interrogation techniques’?”

With Al-Ghizzawi’s condition as it is, Candace Gorman made the following plea,

“Al-Ghizzawi is an innocent civilian turned over to the Americans in response to a bounty (cash American dollars for Arabs). Al-Ghizzawi has been taken from his wife and young daughter and he will die if he is not given immediate medical care, and yet the American military cannot be bothered… I ask that all of you please contact the American state department and ask them to release this innocent and very ill man.”

A double heart-attack of Saifullah Paracha, the death of an Afghan detainee due to cancer and the deaths of four other detainees in Guantanamo all highlight the serious medical difficulties of those being detained. The US administration must put pressure on the public to give full medical treatment to those under its control. However, the medical situation only reiterates the more pressing concern that these men must either be charged for crimes under a system that is recognised to be fair and open, or must be released expeditiously.

Cageprisoners is a human rights organisation that exists to raise awareness of the plight of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and other detainees held as part of the War on Terror. We aim to give a voice to the voiceless.

By Ramzy Baroud

Guantanamo is a dark spot in U.S. history and shall go down in world history as a symbol of injustice and oppression

11 January marked the sixth year anniversary of the establishment of the Guantanamo detention camp. Mere months after the start of the 2001 United States invasion of Afghanistan, a large cargo plane landed in a U.S. military base in Cuba’s Guantanamo Bay, bringing in a group of hunchbacked, orange-clad, blindfolded, “terrorist” suspects, apparently representing the worst of the worst. They included children and aged men, charity workers, journalists and people who were sold to the U.S military in exchange for a large bounty.

The debate over this notorious prison has ever since been marred by easy reductionism. The fact is that Guantanamo is neither a warranted compound holding “bad people” — as explained by the ever straightforward President Bush — nor is it a dark spot in the otherwise luminous U.S. record for respecting human rights, rules of war and international treaties. If anything, Guantanamo is a mere extension of a long list of untold violations practised by the Bush administration, which condenses the camp to being a symbol of widespread policy predicated on nonchalantly undermining international law.

The prison is arguably one of the worst mockeries of international law, which was itself drafted partly by American legal experts. Past U.S. administrations may not have been devoted followers of the Geneva Conventions, but neither have they ever discarded international treaties as openly and as arrogantly as the current one. Former attorney-general Alberto Gonzales, a personal friend of President Bush, mastered this art in a way that allowed his bosses to adorn their gratuitous actions with the air of legitimacy. Guantanamo was his ultimate masterpiece.

Hundreds of Guantanamo prisoners have subsequently been released, some to the custody of their respective governments. Roughly 275 remain in the camp. Out of a total of about 1,000 only 10 have been charged.

The prisoners at Guantanamo are “among the most dangerous, best trained vicious killers on the face of the earth,” according to former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld. If that was the case, why wasn’t Rumsfeld prepared to try them in a court of law? After all his self-assured judgement shows that he possessed more evidence than needed by any court to convict and throw them into jail. But, of course, the subject of evidence or lack thereof was irrelevant.

Neither habeas corpus, due process, nor any set of laws, national or international, mattered much to an administration that prided itself on its ability to transcend all of that. Of course, such disregard was justified on the basis of national interests and a whole set of tired pretences. Time, however, showed that Guantanamo, and the overriding militancy it symbolised, has probably done more damage to U.S. national interest than any other event in U.S. history.

In the early years, prisoners at Guantanamo were held in open air cages, with nothing but a mat and a bucket for a toilet. Anthony D Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, wrote in Salon.com, “We now know that only a small percentage of the many hundreds of men and boys who have been held at Guantanamo were captured on a battlefield fighting against Americans; far more were sold into captivity by tribal warlords for substantial bounties.” Romero cites comments made by a former Guantanamo commander for several years, Brigadier General Jay Hood. The commander told the Wall Street Journal, “Sometimes, we just didn’t get the right folks.”

Moreover, both former secretary of state Colin Powell and current Secretary Condoleezza Rice called for the shutting down of Guantanamo, along with various international bodies and numerous rights groups in the U.S. and abroad. But the Bush administration still persists in maintaining Guantanamo. The chances are if the Guantanamo prisoners were of any value in Operation Enduring Freedom and in the so-called global war on terror, whatever information some of them might have possessed has already been extracted, violently or otherwise. Moreover, if overwhelming evidence against them was indeed at hand, the Bush administration would have tried them long ago. Neither scenario is convincing.

Leigh Sales, writing for the Sydney Morning Herald made the dubious assessment that the “the problem is what to do with the prisoners [if the detention camp is shutdown]. If they are moved to American jails, they will have to be charged and tried under U.S. law. Evidence gathered through coercive interrogations will not be admissible in regular courts and so Bush would risk watching the likes of Mohamed and Hambali walk free.” Such commentary, emulated by others, suggests that the underlying reason behind the preservation of Guantanamo is, more or less, national interests.

However, Guantanamo is staying in business, for the exact same reason that the Iraq war rages on, and for similar reasons to why the Bush administration’s failing global policy persists. Shutting down Guantanamo would be an admission of defeat, a declaration of failure, which is something that the patrons of the empire cannot afford, at least not now.

11 September was an opportune moment to turn a new doctrine into reality, as outlined by the Project for the New American Century, a desperate attempt to sustain an empire that is facing challenges. The tactics, utilised almost immediately after the terrorist attacks, pointed at a foreign and military policy style designed to free itself from accountability to anyone, including the American people, the United Nations and international law. Guantanamo is a grotesque representation of that tactic — and the failure of that tactic.

Indeed, Guantanamo is a dark spot in U.S. history and shall go down in world history as a symbol of injustice and oppression. And it will continue to be a jarring reminder of the inhumanity, the torture, and the extreme violence associated with the Bush administration’s so-called war on terror.

– Ramzy Baroud is a Palestinian-American author and editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His work has been published in numerous newspapers and journals worldwide, including the Washington Post, Japan Times, Al Ahram Weekly and Lemonde Diplomatique. His latest book is The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People’s Struggle (Pluto Press, London). Read more about him on his website: RamzyBaroud.net

US appellate court rejects British victims’ suit for Guantánamo torture damages

By John Burton

On January 11, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit dismissed a case brought by four British citizens seeking money damages to compensate them for having been tortured by the US government. The four individuals were held for more than two years at the United States Naval Base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

With an outlandish display of convoluted and specious logic, the three-judge panel issued a precedent establishing that non-US citizens outside US national borders cannot seek any redress in any US court for torture or other deprivations of constitutional and statutory rights inflicted by US government officials.

Ironically, the decision was issued on the sixth anniversary of the Guantánamo Bay’s opening, which was marked by protests and demonstrations around the world. About 200 demonstrators, many wearing orange jumpsuits, marched from the US Capitol to the Supreme Court building in Washington, DC. Others demonstrations took place in London, Sydney, Rome, Athens and Madrid. Terry Hicks, the father of freed Australian Guantánamo prisoner David Hicks, participated in a protest in the Australian city of Adelaide.

Incarcerating as many as 800 prisoners at its peak, the Guantánamo prison population today is reportedly around 275.

To reach its politically pre-determined result—ratifying the Bush administration’s creation of a legal “black hole” beyond both domestic and international law—the three-judge panel concluded that Guantánamo Bay prisoners: (1) cannot sue under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS) or the Geneva Conventions because their torturers acted within the scope of their federal employment; (2) have no rights under the US Constitution because they are neither US citizens nor within US territorial jurisdiction; and (3) are not “persons” protected by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA).

Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal, Rhuhel Ahmed and Jamal Al-Harith were captured in Afghanistan by General Rashid Dostum, a Northern Alliance warlord, on November 28, 2001. They were turned over to the US military and held in Guantánamo until their release in March 2004. (See “Britain: Freed Guantánamo Bay detainees detail beatings and abuse”)

The following October, attorneys from the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) in New York City filed a complaint for damages in federal district court, alleging that then secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, along with several high ranking military officers, expressly approved and promulgated policies to abuse and torture Guantánamo Bay prisoners.

The CCR complaint sets out in detail the “cruel, inhuman and degrading” conditions to which the plaintiffs were subjected. They were placed in “wire cages of about 2 meters by 2 meters” exposed to the elements, including scorching sunlight, and often were removed only once a week for a two-minute shower and again once a week for “five minutes recreation while their hands remained chained.”

Throughout their ordeal, the prisoners were repeatedly “beaten, shackled in painful stress positions, threatened by dogs, subjected to extreme temperatures and deprived of adequate sleep, food, sanitation, medical care and communication,” while being subjected to repeated, lengthy and coercive interrogations.

In addition to such physical and mental abuse, the plaintiffs allege “they were harassed while practicing their religion, including forced shaving of their beards, banning or interrupting their prayers, denying them copies of the Koran and prayer mats and throwing a copy of the Koran in a toilet bucket.”

The government and military defendants filed a motion to dismiss the complaint. Under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, the reviewing court must accept all the factual allegations of the complaint as true and deny the motion to dismiss unless established law absolutely precludes recovery under any reasonable interpretation of the facts. In March 2005 the trial judge dismissed parts of the case, but allowed the claim that the defendants interfered with the prisoners’ religious freedom to go forward. Both sides appealed. Last Friday’s decision followed almost three years later.

Circuit Judge Karen Lecraft Henderson—appointed by George H.W. Bush to fill the seat vacated by Kenneth W. Starr in 1990—issued a 43-page opinion disposing of each claim on the most reactionary grounds possible.

Henderson was joined by Judge A. Raymond Randolph, also appointed by the first president Bush. Randolph has previously authored two noxious decisions upholding the Bush administration’s assault on democratic rights. In Al Odah v. United States, he ruled that Guantánamo prisoners have no habeas corpus rights (See “US appeals court upholds denial of habeas corpus rights to Guantánamo detainees”), and in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld he ruled that Guantánamo prisoners can be tried before military commissions that do not comply with the Uniform Code of Military Justice (See “US court upholds military trials for Guantánamo prisoners”).

The Supreme Court later reversed both of these earlier decisions. Because of subsequent Congressional actions, however, the issues presented by them remain unresolved.

Henderson wrote that the four plaintiffs could not sue the defendants under the Alien Tort Statute or the Geneva Conventions because each defendant was acting “within the scope of his employment.”

Henderson made the extraordinary declaration, “Torture is a foreseeable consequence of the military’s detention of suspected enemy combatants.” On this basis, she rejected the plaintiffs’ argument that the immunity for federal employees acting within the scope of employment should not apply because the defendants torture policy “was never authorized,” was “seriously criminal,” “has long [been] condemned” by the United States and was a “substantial departure from the government’s ‘normal method’ of detaining and interrogating persons of interest.”

Henderson then dismissed the constitutional claims based on denial of due process and cruel and unusual punishment by claiming, “Guantánamo detainees lack constitutional rights because they are aliens without property or presence in the United States.”

The argument is absurd as the US government exercises complete jurisdiction over the military base at Guantánamo, which it occupies pursuant to a perpetual $1 lease extracted from the Cuban government in 1903. The opinion also defies recent Supreme Court precedent directly on point. Even if this were not the case, the Bill of Rights to the US Constitution constitutes a restriction on US governmental power, not a grant of rights or special privileges limited to US citizens or people within the national borders.

The appellate court’s position means that under the Constitution anyone in the executive branch of the US government can go anywhere outside the strict territorial boundaries of the United States itself, capture anyone not a US citizen, and then subject him or her to extreme physical, mental and emotional abuse without any concern for liability in any US court arising from violations of US or international law.

Finally, the appellate court rejected the plaintiffs’ claim that the defendants “inhibited and constrained religiously motivated conduct central to Plaintiffs’ religious beliefs,” when they “imposed a substantial burden on Plaintiffs’ abilities to exercise or express their religious beliefs” and “regularly and systematically engaged in practices specifically aimed at disrupting Plaintiffs’ religious practices.”

In the most patently offensive part of her opinion, Henderson wrote that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which provides that the “Government shall not substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion,” cannot be used by the British plaintiffs tortured at Guantánamo Bay because “persons”—as used in the statute—do not include “aliens … located outside sovereign United States territory.”

This argument was too much for the third member of the panel, Judge Janice Rogers Brown, a right-wing judge appointed by George W. Bush, who enjoys a well-deserved reputation as a judicial loose cannon. Brown attacked the majority’s reasoning, but not its result. “There is little mystery that a ‘person’ is an individual human being … as distinguished from an animal or thing,” Rogers wrote, adding that the opinion “leaves us with the unfortunate and quite dubious distinction of being the only court to declare those held at Guantánamo are not ‘person[s].’ This is a most regrettable holding in a case where plaintiffs have alleged high-level US government officials treated them as less than human.”

Eric Lewis, a law partner in Washington, DC’s Baach Robinson & Lewis, who argued the appeal for the plaintiffs, called it “an awful day for the rule of law and common decency when a court finds that torture is all in a day’s work for the Secretary of Defense and senior generals…. It is an awful day for our tradition of respect for religious freedom and for our moral standing in the world when a court finds that these detainees are not ‘persons’ whose rights to observe their religion with dignity and without harassment are worthy of protection.”

The Center for Constitutional Rights announced that it will be filing a petition for review in the Supreme Court.

The highest US military officer says he would like to see the detention centre at Guantanamo Bay closed because its image has damaged America’s international standing.

“I would like to see it shut down,” Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the US military’s joint chiefs of staff, said on Sunday.

On his first visit to the jail in Cuba since taking up his post in October, Mullen toured Guantanamo facilities including the construction site of a new high-security courtroom that US officials say should speed up inmate trials.

He said: “I believe that from the standpoint of how it reflects on us that it’s been pretty damaging.”

But he acknowledged closing the prison posed major legal problems.

Legal issues

“There are enormous challenges associated with that,” Mullen said.

“There are enormously complex, complicating legal issues that are way out of my purview.”

He said there were some “really, really bad people” detained at Guantanamo who had committed “extraordinary crimes”.
 
Among those detained is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-confessed mastermind of the September 11, 2001, attacks in New York and Washington DC.
 
Mullen also said steps had been taken to reduce the population at the camp, which now stood at 277.

Waterboarding ‘torture’

Earlier, Mike McConnell, the chief of US national intelligence, was quoted as saying he believed the US interrogation practice known as “waterboarding” could be described as torture.

“Whether it’s torture by anybody else’s definition, for me it would be torture,” he told The New Yorker magazine on Sunday.

Protesters enact ‘waterboarding’ in one of the many rallies held against its practice [Reuters]

The comments came as the US House Intelligence Committee continues an investigation into the CIA’s destruction of videotapes that are reported to have shown the use of the interrogation technique on suspects.

McConnel also said that should waterboarding ever be determined as torture, “there will be a huge penalty to be paid for anyone engaging in it”.

“If I had water draining into my nose, oh God, I just can’t imagine how painful!” he said.

“Waterboarding”, involves pouring water over subjects who are bound, gagged and hooded in order to terrify them by stimulating the feeling that they are drowning.

McConnell stopped short of categorically describing the interrogation process as torture and declined to say whether he believed it should be formally labelled as such.

No dispute

A spokesman for McConnell later said he did not dispute the quotes attributed to him in the story the Associated Press reported.

Kevin Lanigan, from Human Rights First, told Al Jazeera: “It’s a very important step for such a senior official in this [US] administration for the first time to admit that - with some caveats on his admission - that this technique is torture.”

Michael Mukasey, the US attorney general, has declined to rule on whether “waterboarding” is torture.

A ruling that the technique does constitute torture would put at risk the CIA interrogators who were given permission by the White House in 2002 to use the technique on three prisoners who were considered resistant to conventional interrogation.

‘Excruciatingly painful’

McConnell said in his interview that the legal test for torture should be “pretty simple”, suggesting: “Is it excruciatingly painful to the point of forcing someone to say something because of the pain?”

The CIA has said it has not used the technique since 2003 and Michael Hayden, the agency’s director, prohibited it in 2005.

Tony Fratto, a White House spokesman, refused to comment on the issue on Saturday.

He said: “We don’t talk about interrogation techniques. And we are not going to respond to every little thing that shows up in the press.

“We think it’s vitally important he and the intelligence community have all the tools they need.”

On the sixth anniversary of the Guantanamo Bay, protesters took to the street worldwide, with over 80 people arrested in the US capital.

On Friday, around 200 demonstrators in prisoner-style orange jumpsuit marched from Congress in Washington DC to the nearby Supreme Court building, calling for the shutdown of the prison where the US military put terrorist suspects in detention.

In addition, a petition signed by 1,100 parliamentarians from across the world, and 100,000 other signatures from US citizens, was to be handed in to the White House.

People also staged protests in the Philippines, Sweden, Paraguay, Bahrain, Ireland, the United Kingdom and Greece.

The US Supreme Court is to rule in the coming months on whether prisoners at Guantanamo Bay can challenge their detention in civilian courts. Currently they face special military tribunals at the base, outside the US soil.

According to the U.S. Department of Defense, despite hundreds who have been released from Guantanamo to various countries, there are still 275 remaining in the prison.

SG/GM

By Mary Shaw 

January 11, 2008, will mark the sixth anniversary of the first arrival of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

While some of Gitmo’s residents probably are terrorists who want to kill Americans, we have reason to believe that many others are actually innocent of any ties to terrorism and were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, or were arrested due to an unfortunate language misinterpretation, or were arbitrarily sold to U.S. troops by bounty hunters.

And, as of this writing, only 10 Gitmo detainees have ever been charged with any crime.

US Secretary of State has urged countries that have nationals in Guantanamo Bay to help Washington close the detention center.

“We need some help in closing Guantanamo,” said Condoleezza Rice.

Rice added that since the freed inmates could go on to jeopardize international security, the countries should guarantee the “bad people” in custody would not be a danger when released.

She said the camp contained dangerous men who had been plotting against capitals in the US, Europe and South East Asia and had been caught during the US invasion of Afghanistan.

Hundreds of people are currently being held in US prisons at Guantanamo Bay, in Cuba after the invasion of Afghanistan in early 2002.

UN officials have strongly criticized the human rights violations at the US prison and have expressed concern at US treatment of the detainees, US military courts, and its interrogation techniques.

SBB/RA