A year later,…

… Guantanamo prisoners still in limbo

A year after the first prisoners from the war in Afghanistan were sent to the U.S. Naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, their fate is no more certain than when they arrived.

By Jane Sutton

MIAMI, Jan 10 (Reuters) – A year after the first prisoners from the war in Afghanistan were sent to the U.S. Naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, their fate is no more certain than when they arrived.

And human rights groups are turning up the pressure on the United States to charge them, try them, or let them go.

“The longer the time passes, it becomes more important from a humanitarian prospective at least, that the fate of the people is clarified in Guantanamo,” said Amanda Williamson, spokeswoman for the International Committee of the Red Cross.

While the United States has pledged to respect the detainees’ rights under the Geneva Convention, it has refused to declare them prisoners of war, leaving them in a legal limbo in which foreign courts cannot interfere and U.S. courts have ruled they have no jurisdiction.

“This legal limbo is a continuing violation of human rights standards which the international community must not ignore”, Amnesty International said on Friday.

The first 20 prisoners arrived in Guantanamo on Jan. 11, 2002. Their numbers have grown to about 620, from 40 nations.

The United States will not publicly identify any of the detainees, but other governments and intelligence sources have. They include a 16-year-old Canadian captured in a clash with U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, the son of a sheik distantly related to the king of Bahrain and several of Osama bin Laden’s bodyguards. Saudi Arabians make up the biggest group.

President George W. Bush authorized military tribunals to try them last year, but defense officials have said repeatedly they have no time frame for any tribunals.

“The United States will keep the detainees there for as long as necessary,” Army Gen. James Hill, commander of the U.S. Southern Command, which oversees the Guantanamo prisoner operation, said on Thursday.

Their main goal is to get as much information out of the prisoners as possible to prevent further attacks on the United States, defense officials said.

LIARS FORGET

“The interrogation process is a very slow process. You ask questions and you ask questions and you ask more questions,” Col. Dennis Fink, a spokesman for the interrogation task force, told reporters visiting Guantanamo in September.

“We continue to ask questions and we follow leads, we compare answers from various detainees and we cross-check. Liars forget what they say.”

Defense officials said snippets of information — what they called “pocket lint” — from Guantanamo prisoners helped prevent planned attacks on the U.S. embassy in Singapore and on U.S. and British ships off Morocco last summer.

But the process has been hampered by a shortage of linguists, analysts, interrogators and intelligence officers, according to testimony before the U.S. Congress.

Only five prisoners have been freed. One severely mentally ill man was sent home to Afghanistan in April. Four others were flown home to Afghanistan and Pakistan in October, when U.S. officials said they were not dangerous and had no useful intelligence information.

Quoting unidentified U.S. sources, The Los Angeles Times reported last month that dozens more have “no meaningful links to al Qaeda or the Taliban.”

The arid, dust-blown base in southeastern Cuba was chosen because it is remote, easy to secure, and outside the United States, making it what Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called “the least worst place we could have selected.”

The prisoners spent their first three and a half months in chain-link cells at the hastily built Camp X-Ray, sleeping on mats on the concrete floor and summoning guards to escort them in shackles to use the portable toilets.

They were moved in April to Camp Delta, a more permanent prison made of solid cells. They have wash basins with running water, toilets, mattresses on metal beds, vents in the ceilings and metal-mesh windows to let in sunlight.

Work crews are building group housing inside Camp Delta for up to 200 of the best-behaved prisoners that will allow them more social interaction than in the single cells.

“The camp will be used to house those who’ve been cooperative during the interrogation process,” said SouthCom spokesman, Lt. Col Eduardo Villavicencio.

RED CROSS VISITS

Red Cross delegations have visited the camp four times for 33 weeks in all, meeting privately with each prisoner but declining to speak publicly about their findings.

“We decide when the visits take place. What we always require from detentions anywhere in the world is that we have unimpeded, unconditional access to all people held,” said the ICRC’s Williamson.

She would say only that those terms had been respected and that the Red Cross had “what I would qualify as a frank and unobstructed dialogue with U.S. authorities.”

The organization has delivered 3,300 letters between prisoners and their families, “from the hills of Afghanistan to inner-city Britain,” Williamson said.

Prisoners pass the time with five-times-a-day prayer and a selection of carefully screened books. They get three meals a day, prepared in keeping with Muslim dietary rules.

But as time drags, desperation shows.

One prisoner cut his wrist with a plastic razor and three tried to hang themselves last summer, but none were injured seriously enough to need medical attention, camp officials said. Several have talked about wanting to die and at one time, at least a dozen detainees were being given medication to combat mental disorders ranging from depression to psychosis.

Prisoners have spat or thrown water on the military police who guard them and one bit a guard. No guards have been seriously hurt.

U.S. authorities insist the captives are treated humanely, denying reports like the claim of one freed prisoner that interrogators beat them on the soles of their feet.

“No one lays a hand on them,” said Fink.

Rights groups say, however, it is the indefinite detention itself that raises the greatest concern and mocks U.S. claims to advance the cause of human rights around the world.

“No access to the courts, lawyers or relatives; the prospect of indefinite detention in small cells for up to 24 hours a day; the possibility of trials by executive military commissions with the power to hand down death sentences and no right of appeal?” said Amnesty. “Is this how the USA defends human rights and the rule of law?”

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N10183146