The six freed Guantánamo detainees line up to hold a Uruguayan baby. In this picture, Tunisian Abdul Bin Mohammed Abis Ourgy holds up the infant while Syrian Ali Hussein Muhammed Shaaban watches. Credit: Diana Cariboni/IPS

By Diana Cariboni
MONTEVIDEO, Dec 31 2014 (IPS)

In the summery afternoon of a beachside neighbourhood not far from the Uruguayan capital, nothing could sound more unusual than the Muslim call to prayer chanted by Tunisian Abdul Bin Mohammed Ourgy, a few days after being freed from the United States military prison in Guantánamo, Cuba.

One of the first acts of Ourgy and the five others who arrived in Uruguay Dec. 7, after 12 years behind bars, was to figure out their new coordinates and find the orientation to Mecca, the Saudi city faced by the Muslim world during prayer.Political perversities have placed on their shoulders the burden of demonstrating that prisoners at Guantánamo can be freed without the risk of turning into what, according to Washington's latest version, they never were: terrorists.

It is not surprising that anybody subjected to Guantánamo’s living conditions would find a lifeline in religion, homeland traditions and family memories.

But religion has lost none of its relevance for these men since they were suddenly introduced to a strange culture – Western but not U.S. or European— with a language different from both their native Arabic and from the English they were forced to speak with their jailers in Guantánamo.

The group of four Syrians, a Tunisian and a Palestinian is still bound by the silence imposed by Washington regarding their experiences in the prison. IPS met with them for the second time Dec. 30 in the house where the Syrians are living in downtown Montevideo. A few are already speaking some Spanish and struggling to adjust to their new reality.

Contacts with relatives have been established and the men are now looking for ways to reunite with their families, with the support of the Uruguayan government.

Syrian Jihad Deyab – well known because he protested his detention for years through hunger strikes and litigated against the U.S. force-feedings— is gaining strength and hoping to join his wife and three children soon.

His lawyer, Cori Crider, told IPS that “we had appealed Judge Gladys Kessler’s decision denying us relief from various force-feeding practices, when he was released. We have now asked the Court of Appeals to vacate that judgment on the basis that the government ceased its illegal conduct by transferring him, but that request hasn’t been decided.”

Yet “Deyab is still part of the case in which we say the video-tapes of his force-feedings should be made public,” led by 16 media organisations under the First Amendment of the U.S. constitution, and “he very much supports what the media are trying to do,” she said.

After the shock of liberation, the six men are still struggling to fully understand where they are and to match as much as possible their beliefs and expectations for a new life with Uruguay’s social norms.

Difficult, but necessary, is to reconcile the diverse social and political expectations and interests surrounding the group since the government of José Mujica decided to host them as refugees on humanitarian grounds.

With just 3.3 million people, Uruguay is “almost empty,” Palestinian Mohammed Tahamatan told IPS. He finds this is a wonderful fact.

This country was made by successive migratory waves, but it didn’t receive many new immigrants for a long time. On the contrary, it has tended to lose its own population, particularly through young people chasing better opportunities abroad.

However, the economic prosperity of the last decade attracted a modest but constant influx of foreigners: Spaniards, Peruvians, Dominicans, Indians and Pakistanis. This is something new for a society which has become excessively homogenous and whose representations of the Middle East and the Muslim world are still heavy loaded with exoticism.

“Exoticism is not good… and it comes with a certain degree of fear of Islam,” Javier Miranda, human rights director for the Presidency of Uruguay, told IPS. Awareness of this “is part of our own development as a society,” he added.

Social expressions of solidarity with the 42 refugees from the Syrian civil war who arrived in Uruguay last October, and those shown to Guantánamo’s former inmates while they were visiting a street market, are genuine.

But it is yet to be seen how much of it is determined by this sense of exoticism or by the international attention this country has gained for adopting these policies. Furthermore, as the beneficiaries are a small group of people, such solidarity entails a very low economic and social cost.

Such a reception is absent for the Peruvian, Bolivian or Dominican immigrants who escape from poverty in their countries and are not flagged by any governmental campaign. Some of them have even been victims of labour exploitation and trafficking.

For the governing party, the centre-left coalition Frente Amplio, it is vital to ensure the success of the resettlement schemes of the Syrian conflict refugees and the former Guantánamo inmates.

In both cases, Mujica cited the goal of “setting an example” for neighbouring countries. A successful integration would silence critics and ease fears of perceived or real risks. Thus controlling developments and avoiding outbursts become crucial.

Since the release earlier this month of four inmates who were repatriated to Afghanistan, there are now 132 prisoners in Guantánamo, 63 of them cleared for release. Out of the remaining 69, 10 are currently or have been on trial and 59 are labelled as dangerous by authorities who, nevertheless, recognise there is inadequate evidence to prosecute them in court.

At least one of the six men transferred to Uruguay is willing to advocate for more South American countries hosting Guantánamo’s inmates, IPS learned.

The Uruguayan experiment is also subject to U.S. expectations. The most paradoxical is to avoid the outcome that persons unfairly imprisoned for many years become, once free, active enemies of the U.S.

The same government who produced their criminal files declared in 2009 there was no evidence against them and they could be released.

The same government which forced them to fly to Montevideo shackled and blindfolded sent to the Uruguayan authorities a letter ensuring that “there is no information that the above-mentioned individuals were involved in conducting or facilitating terrorist activities against the United States or its partners or allies.”

The same government campaigning for the hosting of further Guantánamo inmates by third countries has a Congress which has banned this possibility in its territory.

Some local analysts in Uruguay have questioned which of the two versions should be believed. If Washington lied in the files, it could be lying now again, they argue.

This analysis ignores a basic guarantee of the rule of law: that it is guilt, not innocence, which must be proven.

The “war against terror” led by the U.S. since 2001 is seriously discredited in Uruguay. But its narrative has coloured public opinion. People have not expressed outright rejection of the six freed men, but opinion polls carried out this year show support of just 20 per cent for their arrival.

Washington insisted on banning any image of the release. Yet the world has already seen the first pictures of these men in the street, at the beach or holding a baby, as featured in this story.

These photos counterbalance the only produced so far by the U.S. military apparatus: the exasperated faces of the inmates with shaved heads and long beards.

Dressed like any Uruguayan men, it would be so easy for them to just blend into the crowd and live their lives in privacy. But they are media celebrities and subjects of surveillance for the intelligence services of a number of countries.

Under all these circumstances, nobody should expect 100 per cent success, not the least because they are traumatised. However, political perversities have placed on their shoulders the burden of demonstrating that prisoners at Guantánamo can be freed without the risk of turning into what, according to Washington’s latest version, they never were: terrorists.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Zeid Ra’ad Al-Hussein, recently appointed UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, notes that few countries will admit their state apparatus has been practising torture, even when the scars are all too visible on the victims who manage to escape. Credit: UN Photo/Jean-Marc Ferré

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Dec 11 2014 (IPS)

The timing was inadvertently impeccable as two stinging reports on harsh interrogation techniques – by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the United States and former military regimes in Brazil – were released on the eve of the 30th anniversary of the U.N. Convention Against Torture.

Not surprisingly, U.N. spokesperson Stephane Dujarric was peppered – and metaphorically tortured – with a barrage of non-stop questions on Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s response to the charges."They knew they were outside the lines, they concealed it from their own people, and yet no one will be held accountable." -- Prof. Vijay Prashad

“The secretary-general believes the prohibition of torture [by the U.N. convention] was absolute and non-negotiable,” Dujarric told reporters at Wednesday’s noon briefing.

But the questions seemed never ending – even as he refused to be pinned down.

“No, I do not believe the secretary-general had direct communication with anyone in the U.S. administration [after the report was released Tuesday].”

“No, no one is taking the report as gospel. And it is not for the secretary-general to say it is a definitive report,” he shot back. “There is an open debate – and this is the start of a process,” he added.

The release of the two reports – by a U.S. Senate committee on the CIA’s interrogation tactics, and also the systematic human rights violations in Brazil as revealed in a report by the country’s National Truth Commission – also coincided with Human Rights Day, which the United Nations commemorates annually on Dec. 10.

“Strange coincidence indeed,” Vijay Prashad, professor of international studies at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, told IPS.

He said the report by the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee shows they were well aware the revelations “stink”.

“There is a very telling section [in the report] where they say that [then U.S. Secretary of State] Colin Powell must not be informed, because if he is, he would blow his stack,” said Prashad, who has written extensively on international politics and is the author of 15 books.

“They knew they were outside the lines, they concealed it from their own people, and yet no one will be held accountable,” he added.

The United States ratified the 1987 U.N. Convention Against Torture back in October 1994 and Brazil in September 1989.

Responding to the two reports, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Raad Al Hussein, urged the U.N.’s 193 member states to act unequivocally in their effort to stamp out torture.

He said the U.S. report shows torture is still taking place in quite a few of the 156 countries that have ratified the Convention and have domestic legislation making torture illegal.

“To have it so clearly confirmed that it was recently practised as a matter of policy by a country such as the United States is a very stark reminder that we need to do far, far more to stamp it out everywhere,” he continued.

This has been true at the best of times, he added.

It is particularly true during this period of rising international terrorism, when it has shown a tendency to slither back into practice, disguised by euphemisms, even in countries where it is clearly outlawed, said Zeid, a former permanent representative of Jordan to the United Nations.

However, he “warmly welcomed” the publication of the Senate Committee’s summary report on the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Programme, as well as the report of Brazil’s National Truth Commission which documents the extensive use of torture, among other gross and systematic human rights violations, over a 42-year period, including the 1964-85 military dictatorship.

The Brazilian Commission, which was established in May 2012, investigated the serious human rights violations that occurred between 1946 and 1988 – the period between the last two democratic constitutions in Brazil.

These violations include unlawful imprisonment and torture; sexual violence; executions and subsequent concealing of corpses; and enforced disappearances.

“When practiced massively and systematically against a population, these violations become a crime against humanity,” the report said.

The report on the CIA said terrorist suspects, after the Sep. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, were subjected to sleep deprivation (as long as a week), water-boarding, rectal-hydration, with some prisoners “literally hooked like a dog that had been kenneled.”

The CIA defended its techniques by arguing that its brutal treatment of suspects was aimed at protecting the country from further terrorist attacks.

Zeid said: “Although there are very significant differences between these two exceptionally important reports, not least in their scope and the periods they cover, I commend the governments of Brazil and the United States for enabling their release.”

Few countries, he pointed out, will admit their state apparatus has been practising torture, and many continue shamelessly to deny it – even when it is well documented by international human rights treaty bodies, and the scars are all too visible on the victims who manage to escape.

“While it will take time to fully analyse the contents of these two landmark reports – and I do not wish to pre-empt that analysis – we can still draw some stark conclusions about the failures to eradicate this serious international crime, for which there should be no statute of limitations and no impunity,” Zeid declared.

He also said one question neither report can answer on its own is how both countries will fulfil their obligation to ensure accountability for the crimes that have been committed.

In all countries, he pointed out, if someone commits murder, they are prosecuted and jailed. If they commit rape or armed robbery, they are prosecuted and jailed.

“If they order, enable or commit torture recognized as a serious international crime they cannot simply be granted impunity because of political expediency.”

When that happens, he said, “we undermine this exceptional Convention, and as a number of U.S. political leaders clearly acknowledged yesterday, we undermine our own claims to be civilized societies rooted in the rule of law.”

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@aol.com

Seven of 39 detainees who were subject to the most aggressive interrogation techniques provided no intelligence at all, while information obtained from the others preceded the harsh treatment, according to the report. Credit: Fahim Siddiqi/IPS

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Dec 10 2014 (IPS)

Tuesday’s release by the Senate Intelligence Committee of its long-awaited report on the torture by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of detainees in the so-called “war on terror” does not go far enough, according to major U.S. human rights groups.

While welcoming the report’s release, the subject of months of intensive negotiations and sometimes furious negotiations between the Senate Committee’s majority and both the CIA and the administration of President Barack Obama, the groups said additional steps were needed to ensure that U.S. officials never again engage in the kind of torture detailed in the report."Their actions destroyed trust in clinicians, undermined the integrity of their professions, and damaged the United States’ human rights record, which can only be corrected through accountability." -- Donna McKay of PHR

“This should be the beginning of a process, not the end,” said Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). “The report should shock President Obama and Congress into action, to make sure that torture and cruelty are never used again.”

He called, among other steps, for the appointment of a special prosecutor to hold the “architects and perpetrators” of what the George W. Bush administration called “enhanced interrogation techniques” (EITs) accountable and for Congress to assert its control over the CIA, “which in this report sounds more like a rogue paramilitary group than the intelligence gathering agency that it’s supposed to be.”

He was joined by London-based Amnesty International which noted that the declassified information provided in the report constituted “a reminder to the world of the utter failure of the USA to end the impunity enjoyed by those who authorised and used torture and other ill-treatment.

“This is a wake-up call to the USA; they must disclose the full truth about the human rights violations, hold perpetrators accountable and ensure justice for the victims,” said Amnesty’s Latin America director, Erika Guevara.

The Senate Committee’s report, actually a 524-page, partially-redacted summary of a still-classified 6,300-page report on the treatment of at least 119 terrorist suspects detained in secret locations overseas, accused the CIA not only of engaging in torture that was “brutal and far worse” than has previously been reported, but also of regularly misleading the White House and Congress both about what it was doing and the purported value of the intelligence it derived from those practices.

Water-boarding, for example, was used against detainees more often and in more of the CIA’s “black sites” than previously known; sleep deprivation was used for up to a week at a time against some suspects; others received “rectal feeding” or “hydration’; and still others were forced to stand on broken feet or legs.

In at least one case, a detainee was frozen to death; in the case of Abu Zubayda, an alleged “high-value” Al Qaeda detainee who was subject to dozens of water-boardings, the treatment was so brutal, several CIA officers asked to be transferred if it did not stop.

While the CIA officers and former Bush administration officials, notably former Vice President Dick Cheney, have long insisted that key information – including intelligence that eventually led to the killing of Osama bin Laden — was obtained from EITs, the report concluded that these techniques were ineffective.

Seven of 39 detainees who were subject to the most aggressive EITs provided no intelligence at all, while information obtained from the others preceded the harsh treatment, according to the report, which relied on the CIA’s own cables and reports.

In some cases, detainees subjected to EITs gave misinformation about “terrorist threats” which did not actually exist, the report found. Of the 119 known detainees subject to EITs, at least 26 should never have been held, it said.

Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, who fought hard for months to release the report over the CIA’s fierce objections, wrote in its Forward that, in the aftermath of the 9/11 Al Qaeda attacks, “she could understand the CIA’s impulse to consider the use of every possible tool to gather intelligence and remove terrorists from the battlefield, and CIA was encouraged by political leaders and the public to do whatever it could to prevent another attack.”

“Nevertheless, such pressure, fear and expectation of further terrorist plots do not justify, temper or excuse improper actions taken by individuals or organizations in the name of national security,” according to Feinstein.

For his part, CIA director John Brennan, a career CIA officer appointed by Obama whose role in the Bush administration’s detention programme remains cloudy, “acknowledge(d) that the detention and interrogation program had shortcomings and that the Agency made mistakes.”

“The most serious problems occurred early on and stemmed from the fact that the Agency was unprepared and lacked the core competencies required to carry out an unprecedented, worldwide program of detaining and interrogating suspected al-Qa’ida and affiliated terrorists.”

But he also defended the EITs, insisting that “interrogations of detainees on whom EITs were used did produce intelligence that helped thwart attack plans, capture terrorists, and save lives.” A fact sheet released by the CIA claimed, as an example, that one detainee, after undergoing EITs, identified bin Laden’s courier, which subsequently led the CIA to the Al Qaeda chief’s location.

With several notable exceptions, Republicans also defended the CIA and the Bush administration’s orders to permit EITs. Indeed, the Intelligence Committee’s Republican members released a minority report that noted that the majority of staff had not interviewed any CIA officers directly involved in the programme.

“There is no reason whatsoever for this report to ever be published,” said the Committee’s ranking Republican, Sen. Saxby Chambliss. “This is purely a partisan tactic” which he said was designed to attack the Bush administration. Republicans also warned that the report’s release would endanger U.S. service personnel and citizens abroad by fuelling anti-American sentiment, especially in the Muslim world.

But Sen. John McCain, who was himself tortured as a prisoner of war in the Vietnam war, defended the report, calling it “a thorough and thoughtful study of practices that I believe not only failed their purpose …but actually damaged our security interests, as well as our reputation as a force for good in the world.”

McCain has championed efforts to pass legislation outlawing torture, particularly because Obama’s 2009 executive orders prohibiting such practices could be reversed by a future president.

Passage of such a law – whose prospects appear virtually nil in light of Republican control of both houses of Congress for the next two years – is one of the demands, along with release of the full report, of most human-rights groups here.

“The Obama administration and Congress should work together to build a durable consensus against torture by pursuing legislation that demonstrates bipartisan unity and fidelity to our ideals,” said Elisa Massimino, director of Human Rights First.

Many groups, however, want Obama to go further by prosecuting those responsible for the EIT programme, a step that his administration made clear from the outset it was loathe to do.

“We renew our demand for accountability for those individuals responsible for the CIA torture programme,” said Baher Azmy, the legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has represented a number of detainees at Guantanamo, including Abu Zubaydah, in U.S. courts. “They should be prosecuted in U.S. courts; and, if our government continues to refuse to hold them accountable, they must be pursued internationally under principles of universal jurisdiction.”

“The report shows the repeated claims that harsh measures were needed to protect Americans are utter fiction,” according to Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth. “Unless this important truth-telling process leads to prosecution of the officials responsible, torture will remain a ‘policy option’ for future presidents.”

Noting that health professionals, including doctors and psychologists also played a role in the EITs, Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) also called for legal accountability. “For more than a decade, the U.S. government has been lying about its use of torture,” said Donna McKay, PHR’s executive director.

“The report confirms that health professionals used their skills to break the minds and bodies of detainees. Their actions destroyed trust in clinicians, undermined the integrity of their professions, and damaged the United States’ human rights record, which can only be corrected through accountability,” she said.

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com. He can be contacted at ipsnoram@ips.org

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Detainees in orange jumpsuits sit in a holding area under the watchful eyes of Military Police at Camp X-Ray at Naval Base Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, during in-processing to the temporary detention facility on Jan. 11, 2002. Credit: public domain

By Diana Cariboni
MONTEVIDEO, Oct 13 2014 (IPS)

Uruguayan President José Mujica bought time for his plan to host six prisoners of Guantánamo, handing over the decision to the winner of the incoming elections. But time is a scarce resource for the inmates of this United States military prison on Cuban soil.

The resettlement of a Palestinian, a Tunisian and four Syrian detainees in Guantánamo is a hot potato for Mujica while his party, the centre-left Broad Front, struggles to pull ahead in the final stretch to general elections set for Oct. 26.“The U.S. is letting them out because they pose no danger to the U.S. or Uruguay or any other country… They are accused of absolutely no wrongdoing and have never been charged with any crime.” -- Laura Pitter of HRW

Out of 149 inmates currently in Guantánamo, a prison established by George W. Bush (2001-2009) to function beyond the law, 79 are cleared for release at least since 2010, according to the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), which has gone to court on behalf of some of the detainees.

Mujica agreed in March to settle six inmates of this group – following a request by U.S. President Barack Obama — some of them suffering from very poor physical and mental health.

Mohammed Abdullah Taha Mattan, a 35-year-old Palestinian, is considered at high risk. Diagnosed with major depression, he has engaged in several hunger strikes in the last few years. Born in the West Bank, he was 23 when Pakistani security services arrested him and rendered him to the U.S. According to one of his attorneys, Lauren Carasik, there is not a single piece of evidence against him.

“The travesty of Guantanamo is that some of the men were rounded up not because of reasonable suspicions, but instead because areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan were blanketed with leaflets offering a bounty for ‘suspected terrorists’, sparking a frenzy of lucrative but wrongful accusations,” said Carasik in an op-ed published by Al Jazeera last year.

The CCR claims that 86 percent of the 789 men and teenagers once jailed in Guantánamo since January 2002 were essentially sold at times when the U.S. military offered bounties of around 5,000 dollars per capture.

Syrian Abu Wa’el Dhiab, a married father of four, has also been protesting via an intermittent hunger strike since February 2013. He suffers from extreme weakness and requires a wheelchair. With no charges against him, Washington cleared him for release in 2009.

Dhiab’s case gained notoriety this year when his attorneys challenged the force-feeding method applied by Guantanamo’s jailers against him and other hunger strikers. U.S. judge Gladys Kessler ordered the disclosure of 28 classified videotapes recording the forced cell extraction and forced feeding of Dhiab.

In a statement read by his lawyers in court, Dhiab claimed that he wanted the U.S. public “to see what is going on at the prison today, so they will understand why we are hunger-striking, and why the prison should be closed.” In August, one of his attorneys said he was “just a skeleton”.

Dhiab had lived with his family in Afghanistan, where he ran a business, but had to flee to Pakistan when the war began after 9/11, according to British human rights NGO Reprieve. A few months later, the Pakistani police arrested him and rendered him to the U.S., possibly in exchange for payment.

In a letter urging the U.S. government to proceed with the transfers to Uruguay, the lawyers of the six detainees said in June that a Uruguayan delegation had interviewed the inmates at Guantánamo and extended to them invitations to resettle, “which they gratefully accepted”.

Mujica, a former guerrilla who served 14 years in inhuman conditions, is one of the many critics of Guantánamo. In recent months, he has repeated that the detainees would move to Uruguay as “free men”.

But Washington usually requests that the receiving country monitor the transferred men and ban them from travelling abroad, measures which are beyond Uruguay’s refugee legislation.

In other words, the same fears which have prevented shutting Guantánamo for good, releasing the innocents and bringing evidence-based suspects to U.S. courts have also obstructed the transfers to Uruguay.

The U.S. “needs assistance from other countries in order to close Guantanamo because, as appears to be the case in Uruguay too, irrational fear about transferring detainees to the U.S. is being used for political gain in the U.S. elections,” said Laura Pitter, Human Rights Watch’s senior national security researcher.

“There is no reason whatsoever to fear letting these men come to Uruguay,” she told IPS by email. “The U.S. is letting them out because they pose no danger to the U.S. or Uruguay or any other country… They are accused of absolutely no wrongdoing and have never been charged with any crime.”

In an August interview with this reporter, the director of the Presidency’s Human Rights office, Javier Miranda, said Uruguayan society “harbours some fear of Muslims, and this is part of our growth. Some people have shown this assimilation of Islam and terrorism, which is an utterly false assumption.

“Those men who spent 12 years in a hole in Guantánamo, almost as disappeared persons, have the same right to a shelter as the Syrian refugees,” added Miranda, who successfully supervised the Oct. 9 arrival of a first group of 43 civilians who had fled the Syria civil war and were living in hard conditions in Lebanon.

But the Mujica administration’s failure to publicise the details of this second humanitarian operation and the legal plight and health of every one of the six inmates fuelled rather than assuaged public mistrust.

While 66 percent of one survey’s respondents supported the resettlement of Syrian refugees, the number who rejected the arrival of Guantánamo detainees rose from 50 percent in April to 58 percent in September.

Last month, The New York Times reported that Vice President Joe Biden had called Mujica, “pressing him to resettle the men”. Montevideo swiftly denied any pressure, and stated only Mujica had the authority to decide when the inmates should arrive. But the move paved the way for a heated electoral debate on this issue.

The centre-right opposition National Party, which is polling in second place, took advantage of this inconsistency and accused the government of acting “under pressure of imperialism”.

According to Pitter, Uruguay would do a great service “acknowledging that they recognise the human dignity and human rights of these men, and righting a grave injustice that the U.S. has perpetrated upon them for many years.”

The U.S. will hold elections in November. If the governing Democratic Party fails to retain a majority in the Senate, Republican opposition could add further obstacles to closing Guantánamo.

In the face of this political dysfunction, the best hopes to end the humanitarian crisis will continue to rest on the good will of third countries.

In Uruguay, the Broad Front is confronting its most competitive elections since it first came to power in 2004. After repeating that he alone would decide about Guantánamo, Mujica backtracked last week and announced he would hand over the decision to the incoming elected president.

If the Broad Front wins the election, a few inmates can still dream of travelling to South America before the end of the year. But if the winner is the National Party, Washington might have to re-open the agreement with the new government, no earlier than March 2015.

And for some of the prisoners, it could be too late.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Tarek Mehanna (right) poses for a photograph with his mother and brother at his PhD ceremony. Photo courtesy the Mehanne family.

By Kanya D'Almeida
NEW YORK, Apr 18 2014 (IPS)

Such stigma now surrounds the word ‘terrorist’ that most recoil from it, or anyone associated with it, as though from a thing contagious; as though, by simple association, one could land in that black hole where civil liberties are suspended in the name of national security.

For many Muslim citizens of the United States, such ostracism has become a matter of routine, forcing family members of terror suspects to double up as legal advocates and political supporters for their brothers, husbands and sons.“We are a very tight-knit family, and this has been hell for us." -- Tamer Mehanna

A budding nationwide movement to shed light on rights abuses in domestic terror cases is straining to turn that tide. One of its primary sites of congregation is the patch of concrete outside the New York Metropolitan Correction Center (MCC), where suspects deemed violent are held incommunicado.

But the families that gather at the monthly vigils held there, sponsored by a growing coalition known as the No Separate Justice Campaign, speak of a different side to the story: one that involves the government abusing post-9/11 laws to round up non-violent, law-abiding Muslims for exercising their rights to free speech and religion.

At a Mar. 10 vigil outside the MCC, IPS spoke with Tamer Mehanna, brother of Tarek Mehanna, a Pittsburgh-born pharmacist who is serving out a 17-year sentence in Terra Haute, Indiana.

Prior to his conviction on several counts including material support for terrorism, Tarek spent two years in 23-hour isolation, the MCC in New York being just one of the locations where he was all but prevented from communicating with the outside world.

Advocates say Mehanna’s case represents the ‘separate justice system’ for Muslims, in microcosm.

Tamer recounted how, between 2004 and 2008, the FBI courted his brother, using everything from polite requests to psychological intimidation to convince him to become an informant. When all failed, Tarek was arrested at an airport in New York City on his way to Saudi Arabia.

In addition to shelling out 1.3 million dollars in bail, Tarek’s family was shunned by their community in Massachusetts, spent endless hours in court and even gave up their jobs in order to advocate on his behalf.

“We are a very tight-knit family, and this has been hell for us,” Tamer told IPS. “When my brother was arrested, my mother had to watch her son, a respectable guy, being thrown on the ground and handcuffed like an animal in front of crowds of spectators – it was deeply traumatic.

“The second time he was arrested she was stronger, but it was my father’s turn to break down. Before this happened, I never even saw my father shed a tear,” he added. “But this just crushed him. He fell into a depression, into hopelessness, even lashed out at us for advocating on Tarek’s behalf.”

In their firm belief in Tarek’s innocence, the Mehanna family is not alone. An upcoming study co-authored by members of the National Coalition to Protect Civil Freedoms (NCPCF) and Project SALAM (Support And Legal Advocacy for Muslims) documents hundreds of cases of Muslims imprisoned on terror-related charges despite a lack of evidence linking them with any tangible crime.

Former NCPCF Executive Director Stephen Downs told IPS that family members of what he calls ‘political prisoners’ – Muslim citizens tried and sentenced for nothing more than political views or religious beliefs – are deeply traumatised and often isolated.

“They share commonalities,” he said, “of being made to feel unwelcome at their mosques, losing their jobs, having people slip into depression. These outcomes are entirely predictable, but to have them deliberately inflicted on you by your own government is kind of shocking.”

Bi-annual conferences hosted by NCPCF attract 30 or 40 family members, who Downs says cherish the opportunity to come together and be heard, as respectable citizens with genuine grievances.

“They get to talk to the few people in the world who understand what they’re going through,” he said, “because if you haven’t experienced it, you just don’t get it.”

Extreme isolation

Family members speaking to IPS on condition of anonymity said their isolation from the community is nothing compared to the extreme forms of solitary confinement imposed on their loved ones, most of whom are housed in what the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BoP) calls Communication Management Units (CMUs).

According to Alexis Agathocleous, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), CMUs came quietly into existence during the George W. Bush administration, the first in Terre Haute, Indiana in 2006 and the second in Marion, Illinois in 2008.

“These units are quite unparalleled within the federal prison system,” Agathocleous told IPS. “They segregate prisoners from the rest of the population and impose very strict restrictions on prisoners’ ability to communicate with the outside world – this translates to drastically reduced access to social telephone calls and visits, and when visits do occur they are strictly non-contact.”

Of the roughly 80 prisoners held in CMUs, Agathocleous estimates that between 66 and 72 percent are Muslims, despite the fact that Muslims make up just six percent of the federal prison population.

He referred to this significant over-representation as “troubling”, adding, “There seems to be the use of religious profiling to select prisoners for CMU designation.”

Speaking at a rain-soaked vigil outside the MCC in early April, Andy Stepanian – an animal rights activist who spent six months in the CMU at Marion – said the Muslim men he met there were “exceptionally generous and caring.”

“There has not been a single night in the four and a half years since I’ve gotten out that I’ve not either had a nightmare or stayed up for hours wondering, ‘Why was I the lucky one who got out? Is it just because of the pigment of my skin?’” Stepanian said.

In 2010 CCR filed litigation representing several inmates housed in CMUs, challenging both the arbitrary and seemingly retaliatory nature of the designation, which is made worse by the fact that the BoP offers “no meaningful process through which [prisoners] can earn their way out – no hearing, no discernible limit on the amount of time someone can spend in a CMU and no meaningful criteria that a prisoner can work at in order to [gain] their release,” Agathocleous said.

Those fortunate enough to afford the monthly trips out to Indiana and Illinois have recorded their testimony of these tightly controlled visits, painful on both sides of the Plexiglas screens that separate loved ones.

At a recent NCPCF conference, Majida Salem, wife of Ghassan Elashi, recounted how her 12-year-old Down’s syndrome child refused to enter the visitation room at Marion.

“He cried and said, ‘It’s an ugly visit. Baba no touch… it’s bad,’” Salem said. “To me this is so merciless, keeping a man who did nothing but feed widows and orphans locked up in a CMU… for 65 years.”

Excerpt:

Participants at an April 7 candlelight vigil for Shifa Sadequee, a Bangladeshi-American serving a 17-year sentence in Terra Haute, Indiana, stand in the rain outside the New York Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC). Credit: Kanya D'Almeida/IPS

By Kanya D'Almeida
NEW YORK, Apr 17 2014 (IPS)

The sun is just setting as the group huddles closer together, their faces barely visible in the gathering dusk. Simple, hand-made signs read: ‘Stand for Justice’.

Above them, the fortified concrete tower of the Metropolitan Correctional Centre (MCC) of New York City rises into the darkening sky, fluorescent lights inside illuminating sturdy steel bars that cling to every window."There are things happening in their cases that are not happening in others, like the use of anonymous juries and secret evidence files." -- Sally Eberhardt

The vigil has drawn a mixed bag of supporters – some have their heads covered, a few are modestly concealed by hijabs, others are simply attired in jeans and T-shirts. Whatever their dress, they have gathered here for one reason – to protest the use of ‘lawfare’ on Muslim citizens accused of terror-related activity.

Sally Eberhardt, a researcher with Educators for Civil Liberties, tells IPS these monthly vigils began in 2009 to highlight legal irregularities in the case against Fahad Hashmi, a Pakistan-born U.S. citizen who was arrested at London’s Heathrow Airport in 2005 and became the first citizen to be extradited to the U.S. under new laws passed after 9/11.

Hashmi spent three years in solitary confinement at the MCC before ever being charged with a crime. He accepted a government plea bargain of one-count of conspiracy to provide material support to terrorist groups and, in 2010, began a 15-year sentence at the federal “supermax” prison in Florence, Colorado.

Weekly vigils held in the autumn of 2009 through Hashmi’s sentencing gradually attracted civil liberties groups, including Amnesty International, the Council on Arab-Islamic Relations and the Centre for Constitutional Rights (CCR), along with family members of other incarcerated Muslims, who have now coalesced into a movement known as the No Separate Justice (NSJ) campaign.

“NSJ was an attempt to bring four key issues under one umbrella: surveillance and entrapment; conditions of confinement; fair trial and due process concerns; and free speech and material support charges,” Eberhardt told IPS.

“We feel that when it comes to Muslim terror suspects, the federal government applies a separate level of justice: there are things happening in their cases that are not happening in others, like the use of anonymous juries and secret evidence files that they have no access to.”

Muslim prisoners and pre-trial detainees are also subject to Special Administrative Measures (SAMs), a Bill Clinton-era process designed to isolate potentially violent persons by severely restricting their ability to communicate with the outside world.

In 1996 SAMs were applied for a maximum of four months. Now, they can be designated for up to a year, and extended indefinitely at the discretion of the attorney general, a provision families say violate international laws on solitary confinement.

“SAMs are some of the worst things a human could be forced to endure,” Eberhadt said. “In Hashmi’s case, for example, he was only allowed to write letters on three pieces of paper, he could only receive news 30 days after it was published and could barely communicate with his family or lawyers.”

NSJ has red-flagged close to 20 cases of Muslim terror suspects, whose arrests, trials, sentencing and detention are at odds with constitutionally-protected rights of free speech, freedom of assembly and religious freedom.

Among those spotlighted are Ghassan Elashi, a Palestinian activist whose brainchild, the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, earned him a 65-year sentence for material support charges in 2009; Houston-born Ahmed Abu Ali, who was tortured for years in a Saudi prison before being handed a life sentence on nine terrorism counts; and the Duka Brothers, three New Jersey men sentenced to life following a costly FBI entrapment operation that is better known as the case of the Fort Dix Five.

‘Lawfare’: Use and abuse of ‘War on Terror’ tactics

Legal experts say the handful of individuals who have received media attention are just the tip of the iceberg of a vast operation to round up Muslims on fabricated or flimsy ‘terrorism’ charges in the name of national security.

Kathleen Manley, legal director of the advocacy group that calls itself the National Coalition to Protect Civil Freedoms (NCPCF), says the rise of ‘preemptive prosecutions’ as a weapon in the United States’ War on Terror arsenal is a dangerous development that enables law enforcers to hound anyone whose “beliefs, ideology, or religious affiliations raise security concerns for the government”, without any evidence of an actual crime.

In 2008 the Department of Justice (DOJ) made public a docket containing the names of nearly 400 ‘domestic terror suspects’ – most of them Muslims – compiled in the decade immediately following the bombing of the World Trade Center.

According to Manley, a good “72 or 73 percent of those cases were pure preemptive prosecution, where the defendants hadn’t done anything that could be considered a crime”, but had instead been targeted for their beliefs, religious practices or fears of what they “might” do.

“Another 20 percent of the cases,” she said, “had what we call elements of pre-emptive prosecution, with the accused committing a very minor crime, such as credit card fraud.”

The DOJ’s list is now the subject of a major study, the first of its kind, on domestic terror suspects and the use of laws implemented after Sep. 11, 2001 to prevent terrorist attacks.

Undertaken by volunteers from the NCPCF and Project SALAM (Support and Legal Advocacy for Muslims), the study, which will be published this summer, concludes that the “government has used preemptive prosecution to exaggerate the threat of Muslim extremism to the security of the country.”

As the sun finally slipped out of sight behind the wall of federal buildings, several people lit candles and held them up towards the windows of the MCC.

“We’ve come here to shine a light on injustice,” a family member speaking under condition of anonymity told IPS. “It’s only a flickering light now, but it will get stronger.”

Read Part Two here.

Excerpt:

Sen. Feinstein accused the CIA of trying to intimidate Committee staffers by asking the Justice Department to carry out a criminal investigation into how the staffers obtained an internal CIA report on the “enhanced interrogation” programme which U.S. and international human rights groups say amounted to torture. Credit: Sen. Rockefeller/cc by 2.0

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Mar 12 2014 (IPS)

An ongoing battle between the Democratic chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) over reports about the agency’s “enhanced interrogation” practices during the George W. Bush administration has escalated sharply.

The widely respected Committee chair, California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, took to the Senate floor here Tuesday to accuse the CIA of violating U.S. law and the Constitution by secretly removing documents from computers used by the Committee to investigate the agency’s torture and abuse of detainees during Bush’s “global war on terror.”"This is truly a defining moment, not only for congressional oversight of the intelligence community, but also for President Obama’s legacy on torture." -- Virginia Sloan

She also accused the agency of trying to intimidate Committee staffers by asking the Justice Department to carry out a criminal investigation into how the staffers obtained an internal CIA report on the “enhanced interrogation” programme which U.S. and international human rights groups say amounted to torture.

“(T)here is no legitimate reason to allege to the Justice Department that Senate staff may have committed a crime,” Feinstein declared in a lengthy recounting of her committee’s efforts to investigate the programme and declassify its 6,300-page report to make it available to the public.

“I view the [CIA’s] acting counsel general’s referral [to the Justice Department] as a potential effort to intimidate this staff, and I am not taking this lightly,” she said, noting that the counsel general, whom she did not name, had served as the chief lawyer in the CIA’s counter-terrorism centre which oversaw the controversial interrogation programme until its termination by incoming President Barack Obama in January 2009.

Speaking at a forum at the Council on Foreign Relations, CIA Director John Brennan strongly denied Feinstein’s allegations, insisting that “We wouldn’t do that. I mean it’s just beyond the scope of reason in terms of what we would do.”

But a number of groups that have themselves investigated the interrogation programme said they had no reason to doubt Feinstein’s account, particularly given the CIA’s past efforts to impede external investigations and the publication of the Senate committee’s report which Feinstein said she hoped to release by the end of the month.

“We are outraged by Sen. Feinstein’s description of repeated efforts by the CIA to thwart critical and legitimate congressional oversight through delays, attacks, intimidation and attempts to conceal,” said Virginia Sloan, president of the bipartisan legal watchdog group, the Constitution Project, which last year issued its own damning review of the Bush administration’s detention and interrogation practices.

“This is not a partisan issue. This is truly a defining moment, not only for congressional oversight of the intelligence community, but also for President Obama’s legacy on torture. The White House cannot allow the CIA to drive this process any longer,” she said, adding that the president should not only declassify the Senate report “to the fullest extent possible”, but also release the internal CIA report, which is said to confirm the Senate committee’s reportedly harsh conclusions about both the cruelty and ineffectiveness of the interrogation programme.

“Senators who have seen the Intelligence Committee report say it not only documents serious abuses by the CIA but also the agency’s false reporting about the programme’s value,” added Laura Pitter of Human Rights Watch. “If the CIA manages to block even a public accounting of these abuses, it suggests either that the Obama administration can’t control its own intelligence agency, or that it doesn’t want to.”

The Senate committee report, which was approved in December 2012 on a mainly party-line vote, took five years and more than 40 million dollars to complete.

While it remains classified, it includes a detailed chronology of the formulation and implementation of the “enhanced interrogation” techniques, including water-boarding, and other practices used to extract information from “high-value” terrorist suspects who were often subject to “rendition” and held for incommunicado at secret “black sites” in various countries around the world.

Sen. John McCain, one of the handful of Republicans who had campaigned against those techniques, said the report “confirms for me what I have always believed and insisted to be true – that the cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of prisoners is not only wrong in principle and a stain on our country’s conscience, but also an ineffective and unreliable means of gathering intelligence.”

Feinstein called the CIA’s programme “terrible mistakes.”

Seven months later, the CIA completed its own classified rebuttal, insisting that the Committee’s methodology was flawed. But the rebuttal reportedly contradicted not only the Committee’s conclusions, but also the findings of another secret internal review that was conducted by then-CIA director Leon Panetta, drafts of which had been obtained by the Committee staff in 2010.

“Unlike the official response [by the CIA], these Panetta review documents were in agreement with the committee’s findings,” Feinstein, who insisted that the documents had been lawfully obtained, stressed Tuesday.

The Panetta documents lie at the heart of the current dispute. Published reports over the past week indicated that the CIA had gained access the Committee’s computer system in order to determine how the documents were obtained and removed other documents pertinent to the investigation.

Feinstein charged that, in so doing, the CIA, which is part of the executive branch of government, was essentially spying on the committee in violation of the Constitution’s doctrine of “separation of powers” doctrine, several federal laws, and a presidential order that bans the CIA from conducting domestic surveillance.

The CIA’s inspector general last week asked the Justice Department to investigate whether the agency had acted unlawfully.

But the Justice Department has also been asked by the CIA’s general counsel to open a criminal investigation into how the Panetta documents were obtained – a move that Feinstein and her supporters charged was aimed at intimidating the Committee staff.

While Obama ended the detention programme on taking office, he has repeatedly rebuffed demands by human rights groups to prosecute the Bush administration officials responsible for authorising the interrogation policies or for carrying them out.

Brennan, a career CIA officer who became Obama’s most influential counter-terrorism adviser until his appointment as the agency’s chief one year ago, also served in a top CIA post during the Bush administration but denied he played any role in the interrogation programme.

While during his confirmation hearings he expressed surprise by the findings of the Senate Committee and denounced the use of torture, he later personally delivered the CIA’s rebuttal of its report.

An 11-member Constitution Project task force, which included a number of prominent Republicans and former policy-makers from both parties, issued its own review of the interrogation and detention programme last April.

Among other findings, it concluded that “it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture” for which there was “no justification” and “no firm or persuasive evidence” that the information obtained by the programme could not have been gained through other means.

Feinstein’s denunciation of the CIA’s action was particularly remarkable because she has long been criticised by rights advocates for being too protective of the intelligence community.

But she was praised by those same groups Tuesday. “After so many years of congress being unable or unwilling to assert its authority over the CIA, Sen. Feinstein today began to reclaim the authority of Congress as a check on the Executive Branch,” said Christopher Anders, senior counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

“Public release of the Senate torture [report] will be the next step reining in a CIA that has tortured, destroyed evidence, spied on Congress, and lied to the American people,” he said.

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.

The U.S. government announced Monday it has repatriated two Saudi detainees held at the Guantanamo Bay prison, less than two weeks after two Algerian detainees were likewise sent back to their home country.

A female soldier observes the first 20 captives at Guantanamo being processed on Jan. 11, 2002. Credit: public domain

Saad Muhammad Husayn Qahtani and Hamood Abdulla Hamood have reportedly been transferred from the military prison to Saudi Arabia, even as U.S. lawmakers debate legislation that supporters say would ease the Barack Obama administration’s efforts to definitively close the detention centre.

“The U.S. has made real progress in responsibly transferring Guantanamo detainees despite the burdensome legislative restrictions that have impeded our efforts,” Paul Lewis, the Pentagon’s special envoy for Guantanamo’s closure, said Monday.

After the announcement a little over a week ago that two other inmates, the Algerians Belkacem Bensayah and Djamel Ameziane, had likewise been repatriated, there are now 160 detainees left at the base, of which 80 have been cleared for release. Rights groups and experts alike here have welcomed the moves.

“Amnesty International USA welcomes the Obama administration’s renewed commitment to closing the Guantanamo Bay detention facility and urges it to resolve all detentions in a manner fully compatible with human rights principles,” Naureen Shah, advocacy advisor at Amnesty International USA, told IPS.

The debate here has primarily focused on the implications for U.S. national security and the Obama administration’s longstanding promise to close the Guantanamo detention centre.

“I think it’s great news that the Obama administration is taking action for those who have been cleared for transfer,” Jennifer Daskal, an assistant professor of law at American University here and a former counsel at the U.S. Department of Justice, told IPS. “It’s consistent with what he said he was going to do.”

A legislative shift

During his 2008 presidential campaign, Obama famously vowed to close the military prison in order to improve the U.S. reputation abroad, a pledge he renewed earlier this year. That he still has not been able to do so has been attributed partially to his own timidity and partially to strong Congressional opposition.

However, recent weeks have seen an increasing momentum around the issue on Capitol Hill, where the National Defence Authorisation Act (NDAA), a major annual appropriations bill, was approved by a majority in the House of Representatives and is set for a vote this week in the Senate.

If passed, a provision within the NDAA would provide the executive branch with more discretion in granting transfers of detainees from the military prison, possibly facilitating the White House’s commitment to Guantanamo’s closure.

“The NDAA is a sign of a shift in the politics around Guantanamo, providing support for the administration to move the detainees that have been cleared out for transfer,” Daskal says.

But while the NDAA may provide the president with substantial support for the prison’s closure, primarily by barring detainees from being transferred to the United States, some experts warn that Obama will need to spend a lot of political capital to actually succeed.

“During the first two years of his administration, Obama’s party controlled both the House and the Senate, and that was the best time to get this done,” Charles Stimson, a former deputy assistant secretary of defence for detainee affairs under the administration of George W. Bush and currently manager of the National Security Law Programme at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank here, told IPS.

“Now, however, if you look at the vagaries of the election calendar, there are other issues, like [health care] and the economy. So, unless Obama spends real political capital on [the Guantanamo] issue, it may not be politically possible.”

At the same time, Stimson noted that the release of the Saudi and Algerian detainees may hint at a possible strategy the White House could consider if it truly wishes to close the prison by 2016.

“Another way the president could do this is by stepping up these transfers, which is also what [the Bush administration] did, and just keep sending these guys off the island,” he said. “Knowing, however, that some of them will come back to activity – there is no such a thing as a risk-free transfer when it comes to Guantanamo.”

Stimson also admits that Obama was handed a particularly complicated task in trying to close Guantanamo.

“I really think that the Obama administration has been doing a good job in evaluating the high risks posed by the detainees that are left at Guantanamo,” he says. “By the time the current administration came to power, there were only those detainees we had decided not to transfer. And those were the toughest cases.”

Yemen issue

One of the most significant problems faced by the Obama administration is the large percentage of Yemeni citizens currently held at Guantanamo. So far, the Yemeni government has been unable to provide the U.S. with guarantees that it will be able to control its ex-detainees.

Yet some warn that policymakers shouldn’t overstate the obstacle posed by the Yemeni government.

“There have actually been some assessments pointing to the possibility of guaranteeing appropriate safeguards” in transferring detainees to Yemen,” American University’s Daskal says, “and the U.S. and Yemeni governments have been discussing the issue.”

Still, she says, repatriating the Yemenis will be a critical part of closing the base, and notes that the Obama administration will ultimately do so only based on the “determination that it’s in the nation’s security interests and that the Yemeni government can in fact provide those assurances.”

“Bleeding”, “vomiting”, “a quarter or even a third” of bodyweight lost, “torture”. These are characteristic descriptions from testimony by hunger strikers at the detention centre at Guantanamo Bay of their experience being force-fed at the hands of U.S. officials, published in a report released Thursday.

The report, produced by Reprieve, a U.K.-based legal assistance and advocacy group that is representing more than a dozen of the Guantanamo prisoners, collates testimonies from the prisoners’ unclassified letters, calls and discussions with attorneys.“It diminishes the standing of the U.S. in the world that we don’t follow the established ethics of the medical profession." -- Dr. Scott Allen of Physicians for Human Rights

The views “from the inside” presented in these descriptions are extremely disturbing, and advocates say they raise serious questions concerning the United States’ commitment to human rights.

“From a medical standpoint, the force-feeding of a competent hunger striker is a serious violation of ethics,” Dr. Scott Allen, a medical advisor to the advocacy group Physicians for Human Rights, told IPS.

Allen spent seven years as a physician working within the U.S. prison system, during which time he dealt with hunger strikers. He points out that force-feeding is counter to the standards of the World Medical Association. Further, those standards have been accepted by the American Medical Association, which has expressed opposition to the practices at Guantanamo Bay.

There are currently some 140 U.S medical personnel tasked with carrying out the force-feedings that are being done to 45 hunger strikers at the detention centre. More than 100 detainees are currently on a hunger strike that has gone on since February, in protest of what they view as their indefinite detention.

The accounts from inmates in the Reprieve report indicate that U.S. practices go even beyond the concerns expressed by Allen and the associations he mentions.

Some of the accounts describe forcible cell extractions (FCEs), as the procedure of physically removing prisoners from their cells and subjecting them to force-feeding is officially known.

The U.S. military has claimed that strikers “present themselves daily, calmly, in a totally cooperative way, to be fed through a tube”. Prisoner accounts of FCEs contradict that claim, however.

“They wanted me to undergo tests and, when I refused, they called in the anti-riot [FCE] squad, who stormed into my hospital room,” Ahmed Belbacha, an Algerian detainee who was cleared for release in 2007, is cited in the report as saying. “They shackled my hands and feet to the bed and then force fed me intravenously for twenty-four hours.”

Of the 166 detainees in Guantanamo, 86 have been cleared to be let free, but they remain held in the prison because of complications that have arisen in facilitating their releases.  

Another prisoner quoted by the report, Abu Wa’el Dhiab, a Syrian national who was cleared for release in 2009, explains in graphic detail the pain he has experienced as a result of being force-fed.

“I vomited blood for three days. I had a very strong cough and felt that my throat was injured,” Dhiab recounts. “[A] while ago they broke a rib in my chest. After it healed, the FCE again broke the same rib. It happened over and over again and the injury gets worse.”

Adversarial approach

In a manual outlining standard operating procedure for 2013, which was leaked to the press, Guantanamo officials express their approach to hunger-striking patients using terminology reminiscent of war.

“Just as battlefield tactics must change throughout the course of a conflict, the medical responses to Guantanamo detainees who hunger strike has evolved with time,” the manual states.

As Dr. Allen notes, this adversarial approach would constitute a highly atypical stance for medical professionals to take toward their patients. Moreover, he says, it is not one which is likely to solve the issue.

“Handling the strike this way will lead the doctors to lose the trust of their patients,” he says. “And having no trust means there will be little chance of properly resolving the strike.”

The debate over force-feeding has rekindled talk of Guantanamo officials being engaged in torture, a public debate that seemingly ended after President Barack Obama banned the practice of water-boarding (a form of interrogation that simulates drowning) there in 2009.

Indeed, there are accounts in the Reprieve report which explicitly call force-feeding torture.

“The force-feeding itself is simple torture,” explains Shaker Aamer, a Saudi prisoner cleared for released in 2007 and again in 2009. “Now they are using the metal-tipped tubes, forcing them in and pulling them out twice a day, leaving people vomiting on themselves in the restraint chair, and so forth.”

Just as the controversy surrounding water-boarding was viewed by many as damaging to the United States’ international image, so the continuing subjection of inmates to force-feeding may degrade the country in the minds of citizens and governments around the globe, Dr. Allen explained to IPS.

“It diminishes the standing of the U.S. in the world that we don’t follow the established ethics of the medical profession,” he says.

There is currently political pressure building on the administration of President Obama to end the use of force-feeding.

Influential Senators Dianne Feinstein and Dick Durbin sent a letter to the administration on Wednesday imploring it to end the force-feeding and ultimately close the prison.

“The growing problem of hunger strikes is due to the fact that many detainees have remained in legal limbo for more than a decade and have given up hope,” the letter states. “This should be alarming to all of us, and it is imperative that the Administration outline a formal process to permanently close the Guantanamo facility as soon as possible.” 

Guantanamo captives in January 2002. Credit: US Navy/public domain

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Jul 9 2013 (IPS)

A federal judge here has taken the unusual step of formally calling on President Barack Obama to halt the forcible feeding of dozens of hunger-striking detainees at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba, warning that the practice appears to contravene international law.

But District Court Judge Gladys Kessler said the court system lacks jurisdiction to stop the force-feedings, which have been ongoing since February and currently affect around 45 inmates twice a day. The case had been brought on an emergency basis on behalf of a Syrian detainee, Abu Wa’el Dhiab, who wanted the force-feedings to be stopped for Ramadan.[Obama] has the power to address the hunger strike – he could end it tomorrow by starting to free prisoners his own government has cleared for release.” -- Cori Crider of Reprieve

During the month of Ramadan, which started Tuesday in much of the world, most practicing Muslims are required to fast during the daytime. Three similar motions by other detainees are still pending.

“It is important to stress that this is an issue now of life and death: people are being force-fed and their lives are on the line,” Jamil Dakwar, director of the Human Rights Program at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a watchdog and legal advocacy group, told IPS.

“Their continuous indefinite detention is a now matter of urgency and should not left to political wrangling. We do think the president has the authority to end not only the continuous indefinite detention but also the cruel, inhumane force-feeding at Guantanamo.”

On Monday, Judge Kessler noted that the courts are legally barred from considering the conditions of detention of anyone the United States has “properly detained as an enemy combatant”.

Yet “there is an individual who does have the authority to address the issue,” she wrote in her decision. “[T]he President of the United States, as Commander-in-Chief, has the authority – and power – to directly address the issue of force-feeding of the detainees at GuantanamoBay.”

In May, more than a dozen human rights groups wrote to U.S. Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel, requesting that he “order the immediate and permanent cessation of all force-feeding of Guantanamo prisoners … capable of forming a rational judgment as to the consequences of refusing food.”

Force-feeding factory

Judge Kessler also outlined a forceful legal and ethical case for why the president should intervene.

“[The] Petitioner has set out in great detail … what appears to be a consensus that force-feeding of prisoners violates Article 7 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which prohibits torture or cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment,” Judge Kessler noted, referencing an argument the United Nations and others have made.

“[I]t is perfectly clear … that force-feeding is a painful, humiliating, and degrading process.”

Also on Monday, the U.S. musician and activist Yasiim Bey (formerly known as Mos Def) released a graphic video of himself being force-fed. The clip, produced in conjunction with Reprieve, a legal rights organisation representing Abu Wa’el Dhiab, has since gone viral.

“The judge’s ruling leaves Obama with nowhere to hide,” Cori Crider, Guantanamo attorney and strategic director at Reprieve, said Tuesday. “He has the power to address the hunger strike – he could end it tomorrow by starting to free prisoners his own government has cleared for release.”

On Tuesday, U.S. military personnel at GuantanamoBay confirmed that Muslim detainees required to undergo force-feeding would be fed only when the sun is down, in accordance with religious diktat during Ramadan.

Yet the Pentagon has been careful to state that detainees are receiving such treatment as an “accommodation, not a right”, a reference to the fact that detainees continue to be legally exempt from U.S. protections that take into account religious belief.

“It is really outrageous that Guantanamo commanders are offering this supposedly religious gesture to accommodate Guantanamo detainees’ Ramadan fasting by rearranging the schedule of the force-feedings,” the ACLU’s Dakwar says.

“This adds insult to injury. It’s unacceptable to have the force-feedings in the first place, and therefore it’s beyond the pale to do so after the daily Ramadan fasting.”

Lawyers for Reprieve, meanwhile, have expressed concern that that the night-time force-feeding schedule could pose dangers to detainees’ health.

There will be “just 10 hours and 44 minutes [between sunset and sunrise] for respondents to implement two force-feedings of 45 detainees for up to an hour of feeding time and four hours of total observation time per detainee”, Crider and others warn in a brief filed on Jul. 5.

“[Even] if this can even be achieved, GuantanamoBay will become a veritable force-feeding factory.”

Obama legacy?

According to the U.S. military, 106 of the 166 detainees at Guantanamo are currently considered to be on hunger strike, protesting what they see as their indefinite detention after many have remained imprisoned without charge after a dozen years. Of these, military officials view 45 detainees to be so weak as to necessitate forceful feedings.

Importantly, nearly all of those receiving force-feedings – including Abu Wa’el Dhiab – have been cleared for release, many for several years. But they remain trapped in a legal limbo due to U.S. laws prohibiting the transfer of some detainees, particularly Yemenis, back to their homeland.

Still, many rights groups have increasingly noted that President Obama has powers available that could alleviate key issues in this process.

Indeed, President Obama himself has expressed sentiments similar to Judge Kessler’s, but has repeatedly insinuated that his hands are tied. In May, during a major national security speech in which he suggested that the U.S. government would begin winding down the “war on terror”, including reviving a push to close Guantanamo, the president directly criticised the force-feedings at the detention centre.

“Look at the current situation, where we are force-feeding detainees who are holding a hunger strike,” the president stated on May 23. “Is that who we are? Is that something that our founders foresaw? Is that the America we want to leave to our children? Our sense of justice is stronger than that.”

Yet on Monday, Obama’s Department of Justice refused to halt the Ramadan force-feedings. And on Tuesday, White House spokesperson Jay Carney was noncommittal on Judge Kessler’s verdict, again trying to spread responsibility for the situation to Congress.

“The president made clear in April, and I think it holds true today, that we don’t want these individuals to die, and the action being taken is to prevent that from happening,” Carney said.

“[H]e calls on Congress to work with him to ensure that we can lift the moratorium on detainee transfers to Yemen … But the long-term goal here has been … we need to close this facility because it’s in our [national security] interest to do so.”

By Johan Galtung
ALFAZ, Spain, Jun 18 2013 (IPS)

The United States and Colombia are the leaders in mental anxiety in the Americas.

Both have good reasons: Colombia has witnessed the longest lasting violence in any contemporary country: from 1949, with some interruptions, then on again from 1964 with the notorious guerilla group, the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia).

Johan Galtung, rector of the TRANSCEND Peace University. Credit: IPS

The U.S., with its conviction that evil is lurking around every corner, domestic and global, believes it better have the arms to handle those bad guys.

Both countries have among the highest rates of structural violence, and the most unequal distributions of economic wealth, in the world.

There is a difference, though: one country submits its problem to third party mediation, of all places in Havana, facilitated by Cuba and Norway; the other submits its problem to nobody, nor does anyone seem to offer their services.

Colombia admits openly to the world that it does not have sufficient capacity for self-regulation; from the U.S. no such admission has been forthcoming.

Recently there was news from Havana: a breakthrough in the peace negotiations about a rather basic economic issue: land, and land reform – a redistribution of land, and of better land, to small impoverished peasants.

There are four other problems on the agenda: political participation (the problem being real democracy), ceasefire, drugs, and the rights of the victims and the bereaved in a country where four million have been displaced and thousands kidnapped and killed.

Reasons to celebrate? Wait. The class differences in a country ruled by the triumvirate of landowners, the military and clerics (like three brothers in many families – the Iberian heritage) force upon us a sad prediction: there will be one more military coup in the chain of coups, supported by the Church.

Let us not pray. Let us hope for disarmament of the FARC and the other guerrillas (particularly the reactionary paramilitary) and control of the army, lest we end up with Nepal: disarmament to the left, not centre-right.

To produce food, not only land, but also water, seeds, manure and some technology are needed. Water and seeds may become privatised – by Monsanto – so where does the credit to buy these inputs come from? And at what price?

What’s needed is collective, cooperative farming on communal land with direct democracy for decisions, not corruptible multi-party national elections. And can farming compete with drug commissions when drugs change hands until finally traveling via submarines to the U.S.? Or on the long road to the Mexican border?

Small farms cannot compete; cooperatives would do better. Well, let’s hope.

Expand the zones of peace, have them intersect, and aim at all of huge Colombia.

The U.S.: On May 23, President Barack Obama concluded that he should pull back the drones, and close the Guantanamo prison. Does he have the guts to do so, by executive orders, using vetoes?

There will be no military coup in the U.S. There are permanent, structural links between the Pentagon, Congress, the military industry and the media (owned by the former, and for whom news of peace is bad news) designed to keep the war industry going.

That industry has one major purpose: to stamp out any initiative to eliminate the special status of the dollar as the world’s “reserve currency” – like by Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, by Iran, now by BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) – so that the U.S. can pay by printing money, and even get the naive to buy U.S. bonds, meaning lending the U.S. petro-dollars or China dollars.

Alas, the U.S.’ efforts are self-defeating. The more wars against terror for U.S. security, the more insecurity and terrorism; the more wars to save the dollar, the closer the collapse of the currency of that bankrupt country: by inflation, by stock exchange crashes, by serving debts rather than people.

The synergy of these three factors will catch up with the economy. In the meantime Monsanto is at work, like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the National Rifle Association (NRA) and other lobbies threatening anyone whose voting is not to their liking that they will not be reelected.

The finance industry is at work forcing the administration to withdraw one step behind the other from the tiny measures introduced after the Grand Repression to control the finance industry.

The U.S. Supreme Court did its part of the job granting money to politicians under “freedom of expression.”

And Obama did his job, offering to cut Social Security entitlements in return for some compromise with Republicans, the average retirement package in the U.S. now being only 40 percent of a salary as opposed to 70 percent in developed countries.

Montesquieu’s plan of separating legislative, executive and judiciary power so that they check each other does not work. In the U.S. today all three powers are on the same course set by the finance industry, to which the dollar status is key.

Politicians are bought and cowed and the president once again betrays those who elected him. Democracy does not work. The U.S. blessing – the Occupy Movement – was itself occupied: by armies of FBI agents.

All of this and worse was Colombia’s fate; the answer was FARC, armed revolt. Will there be a similar armed revolt in the U.S., given that the guns are well distributed?

For Anglo-American global direct violence, yes. As the suspected Boston bombers said, an attack on one Muslim is an attack on all Muslims, an eye for an eye – except when it comes to domestic structural violence.

Let us hope for the revival of Montesquieu and democracy or, if not, submission to outside mediation.

Excerpt:

Members of the PTI party protest the U.S. operation in Abbottabad that killed Osama Bin Laden. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Pakistan , Jun 13 2013 (IPS)

Though the constant hum of unmanned aerial vehicles flying overhead makes a strong case for staying indoors, residents of Pakistan’s North Waziristan Agency are emerging in droves from their humble homes, some no bigger than huts constructed from mud and stones.

They have come out to protest the drone strikes on this devastated region, a hotbed of militant activity located on Pakistan’s northern border with Afghanistan, which is quickly becoming ground zero in the United States’ ‘War on Terror’.

"We watch the drones all day long in fear, even though we know that most attacks happen after sunset.” -- Rasool Bacha
Since 2004, 355 drone strikes have killed 3,336 people and injured scores more, according to a conservative estimate by the U.S.–based New America Foundation.

But while the U.S. government claims to be singling out militants and “Al Qaeda affiliates” for attack by remote-controlled aircraft capable of raining missiles down from a height of 10,000 feet, residents of this mountainous province say that civilians are taking a bigger hit.

Imad Ali, who has lived in North Waziristan his whole life, lost two sons in a drone attack. He told IPS that the pilotless planes appear unable to distinguish between civil and military targets, and called the strikes “indiscriminate and unacceptable.”

Now Ali, like many others in this Agency of 30,000, is joining mass rallies spearheaded by the Pakistan Tehreek Insaf (PTI), a major opposition party under the leadership of former cricket legend Imran Khan, to call for an end to strikes on unsuspecting non-combatants.

“I lost my wife and elder daughter to drone attacks in February,” Muhammad Rafiq, a schoolteacher in South Waziristan, told IPS, adding that civilian opposition to the attacks will keep growing as long as innocent people are losing their lives.

Victim of a drone strike lies in a hospital bed in Pakistan’s North Waziristan Agency. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

“We pass sleepless nights due to the looming threat of drone strikes. The situation is especially difficult for children who fear they could be killed at any minute,” he added.

With so many people busy counting the dead, the injured often get relegated to the footnotes of this story; like Rasool Bacha, who was fast asleep in his home in Dattakhlel, a small village close to the Afghan border, when he was struck by shrapnel from a drone attack this past January.

“Later in the morning I discovered that the strike had also killed four of my neighbours,” Bacha told IPS in the hospital where he is currently undergoing physiotherapy after surgery.

“All the victims were poor farmers,” he added, “and had no relation to the militants. It is simply not true that the drones kill only militants – when they rain down they destroy everything that comes in their way.”

Every day, eight to 12 unmanned aircrafts hover in the sky, he said. “We watch them all day long in fear, even though we know that most attacks happen after sunset.”

Enter the politicians

While residents are mainly concerned with the immediate threat to their daily lives, political parties have seized on widespread discontent to advance their position that the attacks constitute an assault on national sovereignty.

Following the latest series of strikes – that killed the deputy chief of the outlawed Tehreek Taliban Pakistan (TTP), Waliur Rehman, on May 29 in North Waziristan – Pakistan’s newly elected Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif labeled the attack “a violation of international law” and urged the United States to “respect the sovereignty of other countries.”

On Jun. 4, the PTI – which formed a coalition in Pakistan’s northern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province after winning a landslide victory in the May 11 general elections here – submitted a resolution to the KP assembly condemning, and calling for an immediate cessation of, the attacks.

Echoing Sharif’s words on sovereignty, PTI Spokesperson Shaukat Ali Yousafzai was quick to point out that his party was the first to take up the issue as far back as May 21, 2011 following a strike that halted a NATO convoy heading for Afghanistan through the KP.

He told IPS his party also held a rally in Waziristan, whose population has borne the lion’s share of the attacks.

As elections draw nearer, other parties keen to “exploit anti-American sentiments and muster electoral support” are also stepping up opposition to the U.S. strikes and a planned operation to cleanse border areas of militants, according to Muhammad Azeem, former mayor of Mardan, one of 25 districts that comprise the troubled KP province.

He told IPS that the political grouping Muttahida Majlis e-Amal (MMA), which gathered various religious parties under one banner to win a sweeping victory in the 2003 elections, governed the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the southeastern Balochistan province until it fell out of favour with the Taliban in 2008.

Now, parties like the Jamaat Islam (JI) and Jamiat Ulemai Islam (JUI) have taken up the cudgels on behalf of civilians living in terror of drone strikes, and have promised to guard tribal populations from a military offensive by the government.

But as political analyst Javid Hussain pointed out, this military operation against which parties are now crying foul has been ongoing in all seven agencies of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) since 2005, leaving 300,000 of the region’s 5.8 million people homeless.

“None of the political leaders bothered about it until now,” he told IPS, adding that politicians are only interested in the issue of drones insofar as they pay dividends in the election.

Earlier this month, the Peshawar High Court declared drone strikes illegal and asked the government to move a resolution against the use of drones in the United Nations, Muhammad Arif, political science lecturer at the Abdul Wali Khan University Mardan, told IPS.

The court made its announcement in response to a legal petition filed last year by the Foundation for Fundamental Rights, an Islamabad-based legal charity, on behalf of the families of up to 50 people killed when missiles stuck a tribal gathering, or jirga, in March 2011.

“The National Assembly has passed several resolutions terming these aerial attacks unlawful, and demanding that they be stopped, but they continue unabated,” Wali Khan said.

On May 23, the tribal population was further disappointed when U.S. President Barack Obama made it categorically clear that drones will continue to target “Al Qaeda and its affiliates” because they killed U.S. citizens.

President Barack Obama prepares to take the stage as he is introduced at the National Defense University at Fort McNair in Washington, D.C., May 23, 2013. Credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, May 24 2013 (IPS)

Responding to growing criticism by human rights groups and foreign governments, U.S. President Barack Obama Thursday announced potentially significant shifts in what his predecessor called the “global war on terror”.

In a major policy address at the National Defense University here, Obama said drone strikes against terrorist suspects abroad will be carried out under substantially more limited conditions than during his first term in office.

He also renewed his drive to close the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which currently only holds 166 prisoners.

In particular, he announced the lifting of a three-year-old moratorium on repatriating Yemeni detainees to their homeland and the appointment in the near future of senior officials at both the State Department and the Pentagon to expedite the transfer the 30 other prisoners who have been cleared for release to third countries.

In addition, he said he will press Congress to amend and ultimately repeal its 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) against Al-Qaeda and others deemed responsible for the 9/11 attacks “(in order) to determine how we can continue to fight terrorists without keeping America on a perpetual war-time footing.”

The AUMF created the legal basis for most of the actions – and alleged excesses — by U.S. military and intelligence agencies against alleged terrorists and their supporters since 9/11.

“The AUMF is now nearly 12 years old. The Afghan War is coming to an end. Core Al-Qaeda is a shell of its former self,” he declared. “Groups like AQAP (Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) must be dealt with, but in the years to come, not every collection of thugs that labels themselves Al-Qaeda will pose a credible threat to the United States.”

“Unless we discipline our thinking and our actions, we may be drawn into more wars we don’t need to fight, or continue to grant presidents unbound powers more suited for traditional armed conflicts between nation states,” he warned.

His remarks gained a cautious – if somewhat sceptical and impatient – welcome from some of the groups that have harshly criticised Obama’s for his failure to make a more decisive break with some of former President George W. Bush’s policies and to close Guantanamo, and his heavy first-term reliance on drone strikes against Al-Qaeda and other terrorist suspects.

“President Obama is right to say that we cannot be on a war footing forever – but the time to take our country off the global warpath and fully restore the rule of law is now, not at some indeterminate future point,” said Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

Romero especially praised Obama’s initial moves to transfer detainees at Guantanamo but noted that he had failed to offer a plan to deal with those prisoners who are considered too dangerous to release but who cannot be tried in U.S. courts for lack of admissible evidence. He also called the new curbs on drone strikes “promising” but criticised Obama’s continued defence of targeted killings.

Obama’s speech came amidst growing controversy over his use of drone strikes in countries – particularly Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia – with which the U.S. is not at war. Since 9/11, the U.S. has conducted more than 400 strikes in the three countries with a total death toll estimated to range between 3,300 and nearly 5,000, depending on the source. The vast majority of these strikes were carried out during Obama’s first term.

While top administration officials have claimed that almost all of the victims were suspected high-level terrorists, human rights groups, as well as local sources, have insisted that many civilian non-combatants – as well as low-level members of militant groups — have also been killed.

In a letter sent to Obama last month, some of the country’s leading human rights groups, including the ACLU, Amnesty International, and Human Rights First, questioned the legality of the criteria used by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) to select targets.

Earlier this month, the legal adviser to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Harold Koh, also criticised the administration for the lack of transparency and discipline surrounding the drone programme.

In his speech Thursday, Obama acknowledged the “wide gap” between his government and independent assessments of casualties, but he strongly defended the programme as effective, particularly in crippling Al-Qaeda’s Pakistan-based leadership, legal under the AUMF, and more humane than the alternative in that “(c)onventional airpower or missiles are far less precise than drones, and likely to cause more civilian casualties and local outrage.”

“To do nothing in the face of terrorist networks would invite far more civilian casualties – not just in our cities at home and facilities abroad, but also in the very places – like Sana’a and Kabul and Mogadishu – where terrorists seek a foothold,” he said.

According to a “Fact Sheet” released by the White House, lethal force can be used outside of areas of active hostilities when there is a “near certainty that a terrorist target who poses a continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons” is present and that non-combatants will not be injured or killed. In addition, U.S. officials must determine that capture is not feasible and that local authorities cannot or will not effectively address the threat.

The fact sheet appeared to signal an end to so-called “signature strikes” that have been used against groups of men whose precise is identity is unknown but who, based on surveillance, are believed to be members of Al-Qaeda or affiliated groups.

If the target is a U.S. citizen, such as Anwar Awlaki, a U.S.-born cleric who the administration alleged had become an operational leader of AQAP and was killed in a 2011 drone strike in Yemen, Obama said there would be an additional layer of review and that he would engage Congress on the possibility of establishing a secret court or an independent oversight board in the executive branch.

On Wednesday, the Justice Department disclosed that three other U.S. citizens – none of whom were specifically targeted – have been killed in drone strikes outside Afghanistan.

On Guantanamo, where 102 of the 166 remaining detainees are participating in a three-month-old hunger strike, Obama said he would permit the 56 Yemenis there whose have been cleared for release to return home “on a case-by-case basis”. He also re-affirmed his determination to transfer all remaining detainees to super-max or military prisons on U.S. territory – a move that Congress has so far strongly resisted. He also said he would insist that every detainee have access to the courts to review their case.

In addition to addressing the festering drone issue and Guantanamo, however, the main thrust of Thursday’s speech appeared designed to mark what Obama called a “crossroads” in the struggle against Al-Qaeda and its affiliates and how the threat from them has changed.

“Lethal yet less capable Al-Qaeda affiliates. Threats to diplomatic facilities and businesses abroad. Homegrown extremists. This is the future of terrorism,” he said. “We must take these threats seriously, and do all we can to confront them. But as we shape our response, we have to recognise that the scale of this threat closely resembles the types of attacks we faced before 9/11.”

“Beyond Afghanistan,” he said later, “we must define our effort not as a boundless ‘global war on terror’ – but rather as a series of persistent, targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent extremists that threaten America.”

Obama also disclosed he had signed a Presidential Policy Guidance Wednesday to codify the more restrictive guidelines governing the use of force.

White House officials who brief reporters before the speech suggested that, among other provisions, the Guidance called for gradually shifting responsibility for drone strikes and targeted killings from the CIA to the Pentagon – a reform long sought by human-rights groups.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

By Robert Stefanicki
WARSAW, May 21 2013 (IPS)

For more than 100 days, detainees at American detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have been on hunger strike, drawing international attention back to the prison that U.S. President Barack Obama vowed during his first presidential campaign to close down.

Ramzi Kassem, a lawyer who defends prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. Photo courtesy of Ramzi Kassem.

Ramzi Kassem, associate professor of law at the City University of New York, is one of the lawyers who voluntarily defend prisoners of the “war on terror” being held at Guantanamo Bay. He currently represents seven detainees of various nationalities at Guantanamo and one at Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan.

The facility was established in January 2002 by the administration of former U.S. President George W. Bush to hold alleged enemies in the so-called global war on terror.

As pressure from the strike grew, Obama said on Apr. 30 that he would try again to close Guantanamo, despite persistent congressional opposition. “I think it is critical for us to understand that Guantanamo is not necessary to keep America safe,” the president said. “It is expensive. It is inefficient. It hurts us in terms of our international standing.”

In an interview with IPS correspondent Robert Stefanicki, Kassem described the brutal manner in which detainees are force-fed, the legal situation of the prisoners, and how the experience has been unique for him.

Q: What is the current scope of the hunger strike?

A: I was at Guantanamo on Feb. 6 this year, and on that day my client told me that the hunger strike had begun. Now even the U.S. government admits that more than 100 prisoners out of 166 are protesting.

But based on information from my clients, in reality, all of them are on strike, with the exception of those who are sick, old and “high value” detainees kept in complete isolation. The discrepancy comes from the fact that the U.S. government has a narrow definition of a hunger strike, just like it has a narrow definition of torture.

Q: Why are they protesting?

A: My client Moaz al-Alawi told me he is refusing food and drink to protest his indefinite imprisonment without charge and without fair process. This is the only way for prisoners to exercise their autonomy and dignity.

Those people were taken from their families over a decade ago. Very few have been tried or charged. Over half of Guantanamo’s current population has been approved for release by various U.S. security agencies: the CIA, FBI, and the Department of Defence."The U.S. government has a narrow definition of a hunger strike, just like it has a narrow definition of torture."
-- Ramzi Kassem

Yet they are still in prison. One of my clients, Shaker Aamer, was cleared for release by the Bush and Obama administrations, and the UK government has been demanding his freedom for years, but he is still there, now on hunger strike.

Q: Do the prisoners have concrete demands?

A: The prisoners want Barack Obama to deliver on his promise to close the prison and send them home. Until the government takes some concrete steps in that direction, I think the hunger strike will continue. It may stop when some people are released, beginning with those cleared for release long ago.

Q: What are U.S. authorities doing to stop the protest?

A: Several prisoners are being force-fed. Force-feeding someone against his or her will is a violation of medical ethics and international law. Other prisoners in Guantanamo refuse food from their captors but accept feeding; they protest by making the U.S. military feed them by tube.

Although it is legal to feed those men, it is still illegal to do it in such a brutal way – sending five guards to take the prisoner violently, beat him up, restrain him in a chair, and tie down his arms, legs and head, so he cannot move. Then they put the tube through his nose down to the stomach. No anesthetic or lubricant.

Q: Do your clients claim innocence?

A: The fundamental concept in any legal system is that one is innocent until proven guilty. In this case you have people who have not even been charged.

At its peak, Guantanamo had 800 inmates. Now it has 166. The majority was released unilaterally by the U.S. government, not by court order.

I’ve seen several cases where the evidence did not support the accusation. When those cases were moved forward to trial level, federal judges ruled in favour of the prisoners in over 75 percent of the cases.

I am not saying that there aren’t any criminals at Guantanamo. If they are suspected criminals, they should be charged in a court of law that recognises the basic principles of fair process: presumption of innocence, no secret evidence, reliable evidence not extracted under torture.

Some families of my clients told me, “If my son or my husband did anything wrong, charge him. If he is convicted by a fair court, we would not have any objections. If you are not going to charge him, then release him.”

Q: Why is the U.S. government reluctant to bring Guantanamo detainees to court?

A: The U.S. government is reluctant because if you have torture, the case does not fly in court. All the prisoners of Guantanamo have been tortured one way or another.

Q: Are the concerns that released prisoners could return to terrorist activities justified?

A: When we say “return”, we assume that they were there. There is no proof of that. Also, there is no empirical evidence for the concern that they may engage in something wrong after release.

Even if you believe in U.S. government numbers – and I don’t – 77 percent of prisoners from Guantanamo have gone back to normal peaceful life.

Q: How is working at Guantanamo unique for a lawyer?

A: First, we have to fight for access to our clients. Then we stumble over numerous other restrictions: requirements of being a U.S. citizen, security clearance by the FBI, traveling to Cuba to meet the client.

In a normal criminal case, when given a report that the government wants to use against my client, first I would review this report with him. In Guantanamo such a report is classified, not to be shared with the client, so I have to develop the defence on my own—a big handicap.

Q: Were you surprised by recent revelations that authorities in Guantanamo listen to the conversations between prisoners and their lawyers?

A: For us it was confirmation, not a revelation. In 2005, when I first met with my clients in Guantanamo, I did not believe them when they said conversations were being recorded. But now I know my clients have always been right.

The prosecution at the military commission admitted that smoke detectors are in fact cameras and microphones. The government may not use these recordings in court against my clients, but the intelligence services are using them for whatever purposes they want.

Q: Do the lawyers at Guantanamo feel helpless?

A: We try to change the situation as much as we can. Our role is not necessarily to win in court. We have to amplify the voices of our clients to ensure they are heard by the media, NGOs and the public.

News from Guantanamo pressured the U.S. government to release prisoners. I hope this time pressure from the hunger strike will bring real change: closing Guantanamo, a place that has no right to exist.

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