Scroll down to read SICKENING TORTURE TECHNIQUES
View slideshow on the issues affecting prisoners and torture techniques used against them>
Amnesty International welcomes today’s United Nations report calling for the closure of the US military detention centre at Guantánamo Bay and urges governments, human rights defenders and its members around the world to send a clear message to the US government that it is time for Guantánamo to go.
The UN experts also concluded that interrogation techniques authorized for use at the facility violate the Convention against Torture; that international human rights law is applicable to the facility and that the US is obliged to either bring the detainees to trial under US law or release them.
Susan Lee, Director of Amnesty International’s Americas Programme said: "The report confirms concerns which AI has repeatedly raised with the US government. We have consistently called for the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay to be closed. The US can no longer make the case, morally or legally, for keeping it open.”
Guantánamo Bay is just the tip of the iceberg. The United States also operates detention facilities at Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib and elsewhere in Iraq and has been implicated in the use of secret detention facilities in other countries, also known as 'black sites'.
All these facilities, including Guantánamo Bay, must be opened to independent scrutiny. All detainees should have access to the courts and should be treated humanely. These are basic principles that cannot be overridden even in time of war or national emergency.
To date the US has rejected any independent inquiry into its overseas detention facilities, nor has Washington been prepared to cooperate with a Council of Europe investigation into 'rendition' of terrorism suspects.
The selective disregard for international law by the United States in the context of the 'war on terror' has enormous influence over the rest of the world.
When the US commits serious human rights violations it sends a signal to abusive governments that these practices are permissible.
This is why Guantánamo Bay is so important: it tells other governments that they can commit human rights violations in the name of counter-terrorism too. [Amnesty]
SICKENING TORTURE TECHNIQUES
The Bush administration claims that prisoners of the U.S. “war on terror” are treated humanely. But sickening new revelations from the U.S. prison camp in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, reveal the truth.
Dozens, and sometimes hundreds, of the approximately 500 detainees at the prison camp have been on hunger strike at various times over the past several years, in protest against U.S. policies of indefinite detention and physical and psychological abuse from guards.
According to the New York Times, U.S. guards--fearing that prisoners engaging in the most recent hunger strike would succeed in committing suicide through starvation--recently begun strapping detainees into “restraint chairs” for force feedings.
The detainees have been left tied in an upright position for hours at a time to prevent them from vomiting food.
Riot-control soldiers violently force long plastic tubes down the noses and into the stomachs of hunger strikers.
Prisoners also say that guards have subjected them to extended periods of isolation, exposure to cold air and stripped them of "comfort items" like blankets and books in order to force them to end the hunger strike.
Thomas Wilner, a lawyer representing six Kuwaiti detainees, told the Times his client, Fawzi al-Odah, said in December that guards began confiscating shoes, towels and blankets from hunger strikers.
Odah said he heard “screams of pain” from a hunger striker in the next cell as a thick tube was inserted into his nose. He also said that guards mixed laxatives into the liquid formula they force-fed to about 40 prisoners, causing them to defecate on themselves.
Lawyer Joshua Colangelo-Bryan told the Times that his client, Jum’ah al-Dossari, said more than half of a group of 34 long-term hunger strikers had been forced to abandon their protest after being strapped in restraint chairs and force-fed through the plastic tubes.
The tubes were inserted and removed so violently that some prisoners bled or fainted, Dossari told his lawyer.
“He said that during these force feedings, too much food was given deliberately, which caused diarrhea, and in some cases caused detainees to defecate on themselves,” said Colangelo-Bryan.
“Jum’ah understands that officers told the hunger strikers that if they challenged the United States, the United States would challenge them back using these tactics.”
U.S. military officials claim that this treatment is humane. “There is a moral question,” Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs, Dr. William Winkenwerder Jr., told the New York Times. “Do you allow a person to commit suicide? Or do you take steps to protect their health and preserve their life?”
But as an 18-month investigation by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights recently concluded, violent force-feeding of hunger strikers, incidents of excessive violence and interrogation techniques at Guantánamo "must be assessed as amounting to torture.” “Protecting” health and “preserving” lives is the last thing on the Bush administration’s mind.
Lt. Col. Jeremy Martin, the chief military spokesman at Guantánamo, recently declared to the Times that “hunger striking is an al-Qaeda tactic used to elicit media attention and also to bring pressure on the U.S. government.”
But according to a new analysis of declassified Defense Department evaluations carried out by Seton Hall Law School professor Mark Denbeaux and attorney Joshua Denbeaux, 92 percent of the prisoners at Guantánamo aren’t even classified as al-Qaeda fighters.
And just over half of detainees at the prison camp are even accused of committing a “hostile” act against the U.S.--even though a “hostile” act is defined, in some instances, as nothing more serious than possessing rifles, using a guest house or wearing olive drab clothing.
“Now, for the first time, the military’s lies and misrepresentations about the prisoners in Guantánamo have been debunked through the military’s own documents,” Center for Constitutional Rights attorney Gita Gutierrez said in a statement.
“Yet these men remain in prison, while at every turn, the [Bush administration] seeks to avoid judicial scrutiny of its unlawful conduct.”
Nicole Colson @ Socialist Worker