GTMO 2016: Special report

Brother of ‘Guantanamo Diary’ author denied entry to US

US authorities detained, interrogated and sent back a German citizen flying in to campaign for the release of his brother – author of the best-selling “Guantanamo Diary,” who has been imprisoned and tortured at the US camp since 2002.
Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s memoir, heavily redacted by government censors, was published in 2015 and quickly became a best-seller. The Mauritanian native was arrested in 2001 and rendered to Jordan for interrogation by the CIA. He was transferred to Guantanamo Bay the following year.

His younger brother Yahdih, a German citizen, has campaigned for Mohamedou’s release for years. Yahdih was supposed to attend a number of events in the US this week, seeking to persuade Guantanamo’s Periodic Review Board to set Mohamedou free at the June 2 hearing.

When Yahdih Slahi arrived at the John F. Kennedy airport in New York on Saturday, however, he was detained by US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents, questioned for hours, and sent back to Germany the following day, The Intercept reported.

“He was asked questions about his family, his brother, and what he knew about why his brother was in Guantánamo,” said Hina Shamsi of the American Civil Liberties Union. “It was a harrowing, stressful, and exhausting experience.”...

https://www.rt.com/usa/344248-gitmo-diary-brother-banned/

Female guard testimony illegally redacted in 9/11 hearing: lawyers

Lawyers for five men charged with plotting the Sept. 11 attacks argued on Monday that government officials illegally redacted testimony about treatment of Muslim prisoners made during a pre-trial hearing at Guantanamo Bay.

The dispute arose over blacked-out testimony by a female guard in October about whether women guards at the U.S. military base in Cuba should be barred for religious reasons from touching Muslim prisoners.

Lawyers for the accused say prisoners' objections to being touched must be respected on religious grounds while a U.S. military official in December said the protests were an attempt to stall proceedings in the slow-moving 9/11 death penalty trial.

The guard, who used the pseudonym Sergeant Jinx, spoke in open court in 2015 about contact between female guards and Guantanamo Bay detainees. She detailed how a guard team would handle prisoners.

Intelligence agencies later scrubbed Jinx’s statements from an online transcript that had been available to the public on a government website...

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-guantanamo-idUSKCN0VV2I1

...According to Nevin, the Eighth Amendment is implicated in one of two ways here, and both lead to the conclusion that the policy change may violate the detainees’ rights.

Either the Eighth Amendment flatly prohibits the intentional imposition of punishment on pretrial detainees, or it flatly prohibits the unnecessary and wanton infliction of pain on detainees. Whether the court analyzes female guard touching as intentional punishment or unnecessary and wanton infliction of pain, Nevin argues, the new policy meets this standard and therefore violates the Eighth Amendment. First, the record bears out the inference that the change in policy was made with an intent to punish—female guard touching was never a problem in the past, and the changed policy occurred amidst “remarks of political leaders that these men should be allowed to rot in hell, that we should return to waterboarding.” Second, Nevin argues, female guard touching is an unnecessary and wanton infliction of pain on these detainees (emphasis added).

To support this conclusion, Nevin explains that all five of these defendants have personal histories of sexualized torture that specifically involved extensive unwanted touching by women and forced nakedness, contrary to their religious beliefs. The torture programs they endured were specifically designed by psychologists to inflict pain based on the degradation of their religion. The forced touching by female guards revives the torture experience and generates intense physiological responses of pain. Nevin asks the court for the opportunity to conduct discovery into whether there is a valid penological purpose behind this policy change or whether the change was made to intentionally inflict punishment or pain on the defendants...

https://www.lawfareblog.com/222-session-transcript-touching-and-technology-woes

Former Guantánamo Chief Summoned by French Court Over Torture Allegations

A French judge has summoned the former chief of Guantánamo Bay, retired U.S. General Geoffrey Miller, to appear in court on March 1 to face allegations of torture against detainees.

Miller presided over the U.S. military prison in Cuba from 2002 to 2004, shortly after then-President George W. Bush approved the use of so-called “enhanced interrogation” tactics, including waterboarding, hooding, stress positions, sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, removal of clothing, and exposure to extreme heat or cold.

Former prisoners of the camp for years have urged international courts to subpoena Miller over his role in the torture and mistreatment of detainees during his time as Guantánamo commander.

The investigation against Miller began after two French citizens, Nizar Sassi and Mourad Benchellali, who were detained at Guantánamo from 2001 to 2004 and 2005 respectively, lodged a criminal complaint against Miller in a French court. The Paris Court of Appeals approved their request last April.

William Bourdon, an attorney who represents some of the detainees in the case, told France 24 on Thursday that it was unlikely Miller would show up because “top U.S. civilian and military officials refuse to be held to account by [foreign] judges.”...

http://disinfo.com/2016/02/former-guantanamo-chief-summoned-by-french-court-over-torture-allegations/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_D._Miller

‘They caused problems’: CIA involved with Gitmo inmates’ suicides – former guard to RT

A former Guantanamo guard, who says he witnessed hunger strike “leaders” being brought to a secret CIA “black site”, is accusing the agency of having staged their suicide to get rid of the “problem”. At the time, the US said the men hanged themselves.
TrendsGitmo hunger strike

On June 10, 2006, the Department of Defense reported that Saudi Arabians Mani al-Utaybi and Yasser al-Zahrani, and a Yemeni citizen, Ali Abdullah Ahmed, “killed themselves in an apparent suicide pact.”

“Two Saudis and one Yemeni, each located in Camp 1, were found unresponsive and not breathing in their cells by guards,” Joint Task Force-Guantanamo said at that time, adding that “all lifesaving measures had been exhausted.”

The following day, the camp quickly went into lockdown.

Contrary to the official statement, unsubstantiated reports started to surface, accusing the Bush administration of hiding the truth behind what was described as a “planned event”.

Nearly 10 years on, former Guantanamo guard Joseph Hickman is stepping forward to unveil what he saw in the few hours leading up to the secretive deaths. Speaking to RT, Hickman shared why he thinks that the US government might have had an interest in silencing the prisoners who “caused a lot of problems for the command” of Guantanamo Bay.

‘CIA Black site’
“At around 5:30pm and 6:00pm on June 9, I went to the tower guards – I was visiting them to see how they were going to perform their duties that night,” the former sergeant of the guard recalled.

While there, Hickman noticed what he thought was an unusually suspicious commotion for a Friday evening.

“I witnessed a van – we used to call it paddy wagon – it was a detainee transport van,” he said. “The van came into the gate, backed up to Camp 1 and took a detainee out of Camp 1 Alpha Block and put him into the paddy wagon and drove [him away].”...
https://www.rt.com/usa/329882-guantanamo-prisoners-suicide-cia/

Shaker Aamer: Gitmo shrouded in lies, even ‘belongings’ are fake (EXCLUS...

Inside Gitmo: America's Shame

The 9/11 trial will, if it happens at all, take place on a patch of dust in the Caribbean, within a high-security facility you can enter only with a notebook and pen (and just one pen), and observe from behind a wall of triple-thick glass. Anyone who wishes to attend will have to first be approved by the Pentagon's Office of Military Commissions, the entity in charge of the offshore war court at Guantanamo Bay. It takes three hours and 20 minutes to fly to Guantanamo via military charter from Andrews Air Force Base. A 20-minute ferry ride then takes visitors from Gitmo's airport across the bay to Camp Justice, an almost $12 million tent city built on an abandoned airstrip and housing the heavily fortified maze of trailers, fences and concertina wire known as the "Expeditionary Legal Complex," or ELC, where proceedings are held in a prefab building known as Courtroom II. During proceedings, every word that is spoken is heard in the visitor's gallery after being filtered through speakers on a 40-second delay, which enables a judge to ensure nothing classified slips out. There are no laptops, phones or recording devices allowed in the ELC, and no cameras. Also: no sleeveless shirts or open-toed shoes.

This fortress, which will be disassembled and shipped back stateside if and when Guantanamo ever closes, was constructed in 2008 to try the military's "high-value prisoners," of which there are currently 14, only five of whom – accused 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his four co-plotters – arguably matter to most Americans. Hearings for the "9/11 Five" can be dramatic events, during which the accused have spontaneously knelt on the floor and prayed, and engaged in other acts of open defiance, requesting during their 2012 arraignment, for example, that the entire 87-page charge sheet be read aloud, a process that took almost three hours. At the start of this same hearing, defendant Walid bin Attash was wheeled into the court in restraints, minus his prosthetic leg. Only after bin Attash "promised to stay on his best behavior" was the fake leg reattached.

On September 21st, 2015, about 40 members of the mobile war court convened at Camp Justice for pretrial hearings in the case of Abd al Hadi al Iraqi, an alleged Taliban commander and Al Qaeda leader who virtually no one has ever heard of, and who had nothing to do with 9/11 or any other spectacular act of terrorism. This makes him far more representative of the majority of Guantanamo's inmates, all largely anonymous figures who may or may not have terrorist ties, but wound up at Gitmo after fighting with the Taliban, or simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. A former Iraqi Army soldier who fled to Afghanistan in 1991, Hadi is accused of traditional war crimes, leading attacks on U.S. troops in Afghanistan between 2002 and 2004, among them.

This January will begin the 15th year since the first prisoners of the War on Terror – who the U.S. government referred to then, as now, as "detainees" – began arriving at this scrubby and perpetually broiling U.S.-controlled naval base on the southeast coast of Cuba. Of the 780 original captives, 538 were released by President Bush before he left office. Though President Obama, who has released 135 men, has said he intends to close Guantanamo before he leaves office, as of this writing, 107 prisoners remain interned on the island, at an annual per-inmate cost of roughly $3.4 million. The annual cost of housing an inmate at a federal or military prison, by contrast, is about $78,000. Forty-eight men have been cleared for release, many of them during the Bush administration. Forty-nine are in the purgatorial state known as "indefinite detention," including roughly 30 men the government says cannot be tried but are too dangerous to release. Just 10 prisoners, all "high value," a euphemism for those formerly imprisoned by the CIA, are facing legal proceedings. Three have already been convicted, two with guilty pleas. Seven are currently on trial, though the prosecution of the alleged mastermind of the USS Cole bombing has been frozen indefinitely, and the 9/11 trial has been mired in delays since the men were arraigned in 2012...

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/inside-gitmo-americas-shame-20151230