All Posts Tagged With: "Guantanamo Bay"

Running Time: 26 Minutes, 45 Seconds.

From CNN:

Closing the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility is necessary and President Barack Obama’s decision to set a one-year deadline on doing so was probably the only way to get it done, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Tuesday.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates says setting a deadline is the only way to ensure Guantanamo Bay is closed.

“I believe that if we did not have a deadline, we could kick that can down the road endlessly,” Gates said Tuesday afternoon before the House Armed Services Committee. “My experience in making anything work at the Department of Defense is, the only way I get anything done is by putting a deadline on it and making people understand that the deadline is meaningful.”

Obama has been criticized by Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, among others, for announcing a decision to close the detention facility before there were solid plans on what to do with those held there.

Gates said most of the detainees could either be tried or transferred elsewhere, leaving a small group whose circumstances are more difficult to figure out. But he said detainees would not be just let out.

“I can’t imagine a situation in which detainees at Guantanamo who were considered a danger to the people of the United States would simply be released here,” he said.

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The following video clip is an excerpt from the documentary Outlawed, a film produced by WITNESS, in partnership with more than a dozen other human rights groups around the world. You can read more here.

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From Bob Woodward:

The top Bush administration official in charge of deciding whether to bring Guantanamo Bay detainees to trial has concluded that the U.S. military tortured a Saudi national who allegedly planned to participate in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, interrogating him with techniques that included sustained isolation, sleep deprivation, nudity and prolonged exposure to cold, leaving him in a “life-threatening condition.”

“We tortured [Mohammed al-]Qahtani,” said Susan J. Crawford, in her first interview since being named convening authority of military commissions by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in February 2007. “His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that’s why I did not refer the case” for prosecution.

Crawford, a retired judge who served as general counsel for the Army during the Reagan administration and as Pentagon inspector general when Dick Cheney was secretary of defense, is the first senior Bush administration official responsible for reviewing practices at Guantanamo to publicly state that a detainee was tortured.

Eventually, the truth always comes out.

From Time’s Mark Thompson:

The incoming Obama Administration says it wants to shut down the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay. But even if Guantánamo closes, the controversial U.S. practice of jailing suspected al-Qaeda militants and other terrorists indefinitely won’t end, because such detentions continue on an even greater scale at the U.S. military base at Bagram, Afghanistan, 40 miles north of Kabul. Approximately 250 detainees are currently being held at Guantánamo; an estimated 670 are locked up under similar conditions at Bagram.

The original U.S. prison, established early in 2002, was the main screening site for those captured by Americans and their allies during initial fighting in Afghanistan. At least two detainees died there in December 2002 after being beaten by U.S. troops. While conditions are said to have improved since then, hundreds of prisoners remain in wire mesh pens edged with coils of razor wire, and earlier this year U.S. military officials revealed that a Bagram interrogator had been convicted of assaulting an Afghan detainee who later died. Just last month, the military issued a statement saying it would investigate whether a pair of U.S. soldiers had abused Afghan detainees.

[International Justice Network executive director Tina] Foster and a consortium of other human rights lawyers will be in Federal District Court in Washington on Jan. 7 to demand that those being held at Bagram get the same habeas corpus rights — the right to know the charges against them, and to be freed if a court deems those charges insufficient — that the Supreme Court gave Guantánamo detainees last summer. Their case centers on Redha al-Najar, a 43-year-old Tunisian national who has been held without charge in U.S. military custody since May 2002. Al-Najar was arrested in Karachi, Pakistan, where he had been living with his wife and child. According to his attorneys, al-Najar spent the next two years being shifted among various CIA “black sites” before ending up at Bagram. They argue he has been held for more than six years, virtually incommunicado and without charges or access to a fair means to challenge his imprisonment. The suit asks the court to order al-Najar’s release.

From BBC:

For Lt Col Darrel Vandeveld, a devout Catholic, the twin responsibilities of religious faith and military duty led to a profound moral crisis.

His resignation has led to charges against six inmates being dropped, at least for now, and called into question the possibility of a fair legal process at Guantanamo.

“I know so many fighting men and women who are stained by the taint of Guantanamo, so I’m here to tell the truth about Guantanamo and how a few people have sullied the American military and the constitution.”

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“I never suffered such anguish in my life about anything,” he says, looking back over the period.

“It took me too long to recognise that we had abandoned our American values and defiled our constitution.”

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Beginning tomorrow evening, HBO will be showing the 2008 Academy Award-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side. “a compelling and illuminating expose of the US-sponsored policy of torture which emerged after 9/11,” as described by the advocacy group Reject Torture. Here’s the program description from the HBO website:

Not long ago, the United States was viewed around much of the world as the good guys. But the appallingly inhumane tactics used by military prison guards changed all that. This is the story of how America lost its dignity in its zeal to win the War on Terror. This 2007 Oscar®-winning documentary takes a disturbing, in-depth look at the highly questionable interrogation practices used by the U.S. military on prisoners in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay in the years following 9/11. Beginning with the story of an innocent Afghan taxi driver who was killed while being held in a Bagram prison in 2002, the film tells the grim, cautionary saga of how the U.S. government–desperate to draw information from a top Al Qaeda leader–approved the use of cruel and unusual interrogation techniques that were later imported to U.S. prisons abroad.

Here’s the trailer.

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I encourage every American citizen to watch this documentary to better understand what our government does in our name. The first airing on HBO is Monday at 8pm our time. Here’s the complete schedule of its airing.

Speaking of vacations, Australia’s Sunday Herald Sun recently published a story about a little known vacation spot with a quite notorious “attraction”:

The sand is white, the sea laps gently and crowds of bronzed Americans laze in the Caribbean sunshine.

There is a cinema, a golf course and, naturally, a gift shop stocked with mugs, jaunty T-shirts and racks of postcards showing perfect sunsets and bright green iguanas.

Only the barbed wire decoration, a recurring motif, hints at anything unusual.

Welcome to “Taliban Towers” at Guantanamo Bay, the most ghoulish tourist destination on the planet.

Apparently, this resort is open to U.S. service personnel and Guantanamo’s 3,000 workers, the paper reports. And it only costs $42 per night “for a fully equipped, air conditioned unit.”

While there, visitors can buy souvenir T-shirts, including one decorated with a guard tower and barbed wire that reads “The Taliban Towers at Guantanamo Bay, the Caribbean’s Newest 5-star Resort”.

Says Zachary Katznelson, a lawyer representing 28 detainees, who exposed the “Guantanamo holiday trade”:

“Pretending that Guantanamo Bay is essentially a Caribbean resort is grossly offensive. The idea of relaxing in the sun while close by many individuals are robbed of their rights, tortured and abused is repugnant and ridiculous.”

How far we, as a nation, have sunk.