Is Bowe Bergdahl worth five Taliban prisoners?

Why critics are cynical and mistaken to attack the Taliban prisoner exchange.

Last updated: 16 Jun 2014 08:03

By Andy Worthington

Sgt Bowe Bergdahl was freed in a swap for five Taliban detainees [AP]

Ever since US President Barack Obama announced that five Taliban prisoners in Guantanamo had been freed in Qatar in exchange for Sgt Bowe Bergdahl, the sole US prisoner of war in Afghanistan, lawmakers, with support from large parts of the media, have been waging a sustained attack on the Obama administration. They have been accusing both the president and defence secretary Chuck Hagel of recklessness, incompetence and breaking the law in relation to the exchange.The critics – almost entirely Republicans – suggested that Sgt Bergdahl, who was captured by the Taliban-affiliated Haqqani network five years ago, should have been abandoned, because of claims that he was a deserter. Whether or not there is any truth to these claims is something that the army will establish in due course, through recognised channels, and is not a matter to be dealt with by lawmakers and media pundits acting as judge and jury.

Ironically, the extra-judicial hounding of Bergdahl is a sign of how far standards have slipped in the US since the 9/11 attacks, as the only other place where men are routinely judged and condemned without having been charged or tried is Guantanamo.

Breaking the law?

Army General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, addressed these issues shortly after the prisoner exchange had taken place. “Like any American, he is innocent until proven guilty,” Gen. Dempseyexplained, adding, “Our army’s leaders will not look away from misconduct if it occurred.”

At an acrimonious congressional hearing about the prisoner swap before the House Armed Services Committee, Hagel defended the decision to secure Bergdahl’s release.

“America does not leave its soldiers behind,” he said, adding, “We made the right decision, and we did it for the right reasons – to bring home one of our own people.”

 

People and Power- Back to Guantanamo

The hearing also focused on lawmakers’ claims that the Obama administration had broken the law by failing to notify Congress 30 days before any planned release of prisoners, as stipulated in passages relating to prisoner releases that have been inserted into the annual National Defense Authorization Acts for the last few years. This is legislation that, it should be noted, has only one purpose – to try to prevent Obama from releasing prisoners from Guantanamo, for reasons that have more to do with political manoeuvring than with national security.

As soon as news of the prisoner swap was announced, the administration explained that the 30-day notice was impractical in this case. Hagel said that the prisoner exchange was swiftly undertaken after intelligence suggested Bergdahl’s “safety and health were both in jeopardy and in particular his health was deteriorating”.

At the congressional hearing, Hagel elaborated, describing “an extraordinary process of secret back-channel negotiations brokered by Qatar”, which culminated in an agreement on May 12, that the Qataris would take custody of the Taliban prisoners. However, Hagel added: “We did not know until the moment Sergeant Bergdahl was handed over safely to US special operations forces that the Taliban would hold up their end of the deal. So it wasn’t until we recovered Bergdahl on May 31 that we moved ahead with the transfer of the five Guantanamo detainees.”

Hagel also stated, “The exchange needed to take place quickly, efficiently and quietly”, pointing out that the “exceptional circumstances” of the prisoner swap provided justification for not notifying Congress.

In addition, writing for Slate, Peter M Slane noted that “presidential control of enemy detainees is what the Supreme Court has called a ‘fundamental and accepted … incident to war'” and that it “therefore should be deemed a form of authority granted to the president by the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force [AUMF] in Afghanistan”, the legislation passed by Congress immediately after 9/11, allowing the president to pursue those he regarded as responsible for the attacks.

The ‘worst of the worst’?

As for the five men released (who will be held in Qatar for a year and prevented from travelling abroad), critics of the Obama administration have made absurd claims about them from the moment that news of the prisoner release was announced. Senator John McCain, for example, described them as “hardened terrorists who have the blood of Americans and countless Afghans on their hands”.

 

Fault Lines – Life after Guantanamo

McCain’s statement was wrong on almost all counts. Firstly, the Taliban, though widely despised, had been the government of Afghanistan and not a terrorist organisation, and, in addition, there is no evidence that any of the five men have the “blood of Americans” on their hands.

Three of the five held positions as officials and two others were Taliban military commanders – and have been accused of war crimes relating to the killing of Hazara civilians prior to the US-led invasion.

The fault for not dealing with the two appropriately lies with the US. If the US was serious about wanting to deal with their alleged crimes, it should have delivered the men to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague – although the US, of course, has refused to sign up to the ICC.

Not only are the claims about the men generally exaggerated, but, in addition, their release only foreshadows what is to come in the not too distant future, as the war in Afghanistan winds down, and the justification for holding Taliban prisoners under the AUMF evaporates.

The critics – wedded to dangerous notions of permanent war and a permanent prison at Guantanamo – are unwilling to recognise that, as war winds down, negotiations must take place between the various parties involved. As Al Jazeera America noted, Bergdahl’s release came “just days after Obama outlined a plan to withdraw all but 9,800 US troops from Afghanistan by the end of the year and the rest by 2016, ending more than a decade of US military engagement”.

Although a US official described the timing as coincidental, it is difficult not to conclude that the exchange also feeds into the more general need for negotiations to take place between the US and the Taliban.

Most importantly, however, the planned withdrawal of troops, and its significance for the ability to detain Taliban prisoners, was addressed by Jack Goldsmith, formerly a legal adviser to the Bush administration, in an article forLawfare. Goldsmith wrote: “It is likely that the US would be required, as a matter of international law, to release them shortly after the end of 2014, when US combat operations cease in Afghanistan. The Administration appears to have reached a defensible, hold-your-nose compromise by arranging, in exchange for the release of Sergeant Bergdahl, for the individuals to be held in Qatar for a year before they return to Afghanistan.”

What this means for the prisoners still held at Guantanamo has not been explained, but it is surely noteworthy that, of the 149 men still held, the majority are accused primarily of involvement with the Taliban – either as soldiers or in a supporting role. They are not accused, in any serious manner, of involvement with al-Qaeda, beyond, in some cases, having attended a military training camp where Osama bin Laden occasionally visited to make a speech.

As a result, the main conclusion of this whole sorry episode of cynical hysteria seems to be that, despot the bluster, time is running out for the US to maintain that it has the right to continue to hold prisoners at Guantanamo indefinitely, and that almost all the men still held – and not just the 78 who have already been approved for release – will need to be freed in the not too distant future.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist. He has been researching and writing about Guantanamo since 2006, and has worked with the United Nations, WikiLeaks, Reprieve and Cageprisoners. He is the co-founder of the Close Guantanamo campaign, and authored the book The Guantanamo Files.

Follow him on Twitter: @GuantanamoAndy

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.

Source: Al Jazeera

The Punitive Use of Medical Restraints on Guantanamo Hunger Strikers

By: Jeff Kaye Monday June 16, 2014 1:45 am A partially redacted set of medical records released in the aftermath of the 2006 deaths of three Guantanamo prisoners shows that the use of “medical restraints” in the use of forced feeding of hunger striking detainees was used as a threat on hunger striking prisoners. At least one detainee was told over and over that use of “medical restraints” was due to his voluntary refusal to eat.   While Guantanamo medical authorities said the need for restraints was due to “medical necessity,” such necessity was never documented. Instead, it was clear the use of restraints was punitive in nature. The use of medical restraints in forced feeding, for which DoD uses a restraint chair, is not a normal procedure at other penal institutions. In a letter nearly one year ago from the Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, to Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, Feinstein noted, “When force-feedings do occur within the Bureau of Prisons, we have been told that nearly 95% of the time they are conducted with a fully compliant inmate requiring no restraints. At Guantanamo Bay, on the other hand, all detainees being force-fed—regardless of their level of cooperation—are placed in chairs where they are forcibly restrained.” (Emphasis added.) In the medical records (PDF) for Ali Abdullah Ahmed (ISN 693) in March 2006, a “Gitmo Nurse” noted in Ahmed’s medical chart numerous discussions with the prisoner about his refusal to eat and the policy to feed him forcefully, a policy that insisted that the prisoner’s behavior “must change”: Detainee placed in [redacted] Reason for Restraint: Medical Necessity [last two words are circled] Detainee was advised by the Medical Staff that hunger striking is detrimental to his health. His behavior is due to his refusal to eat and not due to mental status change or illness. Medical Staff/Guards attempted to get the detainee to eat on his own. He is being offered food at every meal, yet he refuses to eat. Because the detainee refuses to eat, restraints were initiated for medical necessity for feeding. Detainee will be observed continually and he will be reminded of how his behavior must change (he must eat voluntarily) to avoid the use of medical restraints for present and future feedings. Detainee was told that he will remain in medical restraints until feed and post feed observation (60-120 minutes) GITMO Nurse Elsewhere in the medical notes (3/7/2006), the nurse states, “There is no evidence that medications or a medical process is causing this detainee’s refusal to eat.” Other notes show that while Ahmed was kept in restraints, he remained under “Line of Sight Observation.” Circulation checks were made every 15 minutes for the first hour, and then hourly thereafter. Vital signs were checked immediately after the restraints are attached, and every hour thereafter. The medical restraints order expired only after 12 hours. No reason why it is medically necessary to restrain the prisoner was ever given in the notes I saw. No evidence of opposition to the process of enteral feeding by Ahmed was ever described. The policy of keeping Ahmed in medical restraints through his “post feed observation” was not consistent with the SOP for hunger striking as later revealed in the March 3, 2013 Standard Operation Procedure for hunger strikes and forced feeding obtained by Jason Leopold for Al Jazeera last year. According to the portion of the policy titled “Chair Restraint System Clinical Protocol for the Intermittent Enteral Feeding of Detainees on Hunger Strike,” “Medical restraints chair restraint system) should be used for the safety of the detainee, medical staff, and guard force…. Upon completion of the nutrient infusion and removal of the feeding tube, the detainee is removed from the restraint chair and placed in a ‘dry cell’. The guard force will observe the detainee for 45-60 minutes for any indications of vomiting or attempts to induce vomiting.” But this is not what happened to Ahmed, who perhaps along with other detainees was kept as long as possible in a five point restraint chair, or possibly a restraint bed. The purpose of prolonging his restraints could only be punitive in nature, to teach him a lesson and get him to “change.” Only three months after the notes quoted above, Ahmed was one of three prisoners found supposedly hanged in their cells. The government maintains the three prisoners hanged themselves in an act of “asymmetrical warfare,” but recent revelations by researchers at Seton Hall Law School (and Scott Hortonat Harper’s) show that the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), charged with investigating the deaths, withheld crucial information from their report, hiding information about the deaths that came from witnesses and even the Senior Medical Officer on site which contradicted the government’s own narrative. The new information which has come to light argues that Ahmed and the two other men died with socks or rags stuffed down their throats, possibly part of an interrogation session meant to force the prisoners to turn informants for the CIA or the Department of Defense. The Senior Medical Officer (SMO) at Guantanamo who attended at least two of three high-profile “suicides” at Guantanamo concluded at the time that, contrary to the conclusions of the NCIS investigation, the detainees did not die by hanging but by “likely asphyxiation” from “obstruction” of the airway. His conclusion was never mentioned in the NCIS report, and later interventions by the Department of Justice prevented inquisitive congressional representatives from knowing that fact. “The Torture Chair” The secretive, abusive Guantanamo regime is under new scrutiny of its hunger striking procedures, thanks to a lawsuit by a Guantanamo prisoner. According to Ben Fox at AP, attorneys for Guantanamo prisoner Abu Wa’el Dhiab have been viewing almost three dozen videotapes a federal judge ordered government authorities to turn over to the defense in Dhiab’s appeal to stop his forced feeding. Dhiab is one of a number of hunger strikers currently refusing food at Guantanamo in protest of inhumane conditions and their indefinite detention. Dhiab himself has been cleared for transfer or release from the Cuba-sited prison since 2009. The next hearing in his case is on June 18. Due to a change in policy last December, DoD will not report the actual number of active strikers, or those refusing food, in what many believe was an attempt by authorities to reduce the political effectiveness of the prisoners’ strike technique. A lot has been written on the torture that is Guantanamo’s forced feeding policy, which includes brutal beatings — so-called Forced Cell Extractions (FCEs) — to bring the hunger striking prisoner to a restraint chair, where he is strapped down and has liquid food put down a tube forced down his nose and into his stomach. The speed at which the liquid is forced down a prisoner’s gullet is something defense attorneyshave likened to the ancient “water cure torture.” The UN high commissioner for human rights, the World Medical Association, and other medical and human rights organizations have said forced feeding of prisoners amounts to torture. In a June 3 filing by one of Dhiab’s attorneys, Jon Eisenberg, wrote, Dhiab “does not object to being force-fed in order to keep him alive, as long as the force-feeding is ‘civilized.’ He states: ‘I am willing to be force-fed in a humane manner.’ His recent force-feedings, however, have not been humane. He asks: ‘Is it necessary for them to torture me? Is it necessary for them to choke me every day with the tube? Is it necessary for them to make my throat so swollen every day? Do I have to suffer every day? Is it necessary for them to put me on the torture chair in order to feed me?’” A new version of the Guantanamo SOP for use on hunger strikers, who are now called “Detainees With Weight Loss” on “long-term non-religious fasts,” placed instructions on use of the restraint chair into its own new SOP. That document, like almost everything else at Guantanamo, is currently classified.  1 Comment  TAGS: TORTURE, GUANTANAMO, DIANNE FEINSTEIN, HUNGER STRIKES, NCIS, SUICIDE, ALI ABDULLAH AHMED, MEDICAL ETHICS, FORCED FEEDING, ABU WA’EL DHIAB

Guantanamo hunger strike under renewed scrutiny as lawyers get video of prisoner treatment

Published June 14, 2014

Associated Press

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba –  The U.S. military insists it employs only humane methods to keep hunger-striking prisoners alive at Guantanamo. That assertion is under new scrutiny this weekend due to a judicial order.

Attorneys for a Syrian prisoner have begun studying hours of video showing him being removed from his cell, placed in a restraint chair and fed through a tube.

They are looking for evidence of what he has portrayed as abusive force-feeding, akin to torture during a hunger strike.

U.S. District Court Judge Gladys Kessler has ordered the military to turn over 34 videos of Dhiab being removed from his cell and fed. She has scheduled a hearing for Wednesday to discuss the status of the case.

Guantánamo Prosecutor Fights Handing Secrets Over to Defense

By CHARLIE SAVAGEMAY 3, 2014

WASHINGTON — The chief prosecutor at the Guantánamo Bay war-crimes court has asked a judge to set aside an order that requires the government to give defense lawyers sweeping amounts of classified details related to theCentral Intelligence Agency’s treatment of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Saudi detainee accused of orchestrating the 2000 bombing of the destroyer Cole.

In a pretrial motion declassified last week, the prosecutor, Brig. Gen. Mark S. Martins, cited Obama administration efforts to declassify information related to a Senate Intelligence Committee report about the detention and interrogation program. That process, he said, should be allowed to play out.

Richard Kammen, an Indianapolis defense lawyer representing Mr. Nashiri, said in a phone interview that he was drafting a motion to oppose any attempts to reverse the judge’s order. He noted that he had a security clearance, and said the information he was seeking was for his own investigations and was not necessarily going to be made public.

Mr. Kammen acknowledged that he had separately challenged restrictions on his ability to discuss with Mr. Nashiri the classified materials that have been turned over to him. He said he would like to contact C.I.A. officials involved in the program to ask them about his client’s treatment.

The sparring over the judge’s order underscores that years of pressure over what will be made public about the Bush-era program — which allowed interrogators to work around anti-torture laws — are coming to a head on a range of fronts.

The Senate Intelligence Committee voted on April 3 to ask the Obama administration to declassify a lengthy executive summary of its investigative report. General Martins also recently revealed that he had been pushing the C.I.A. for more than a year to declassify additional information about what interrogators did to Mr. Nashiri, allowing it to be discussed with the defendant and examined in open court.

General Martins’s motion last week also took the unusual step of appending a previously undisclosed letter sent on Feb. 10 from the White House counsel, Kathryn Ruemmler, to Senators Dianne Feinstein of California and Carl Levin of Michigan, the leaders of the Senate Intelligence and Armed Forces Committees. Ms. Ruemmler wrote that the C.I.A. director, John O. Brennan, was taking steps to declassify certain information about the program.

The core of Mr. Kammen’s strategy has been to find legal arguments that would prevent the government from executing his client. In February, he argued that he needed to be able to search C.I.A. files — and to have the ability to ask his client about that material to refresh his memory — to effectively make the case that the government should be barred from executing his client because the C.I.A. tortured him.

Mr. Nashiri was one of three detainees known to have been waterboarded, and the C.I.A. inspector general called his the “most significant” case of a detainee who was brutalized in ways that went beyond the tactics approved by the Bush administration, including being threatened with a power drill. Not all details have been made public; last month, a specialist in treating torture victimstestified that Mr. Nashiri had been subjected to “physical, psychological and sexual torture.”

On April 14, the judge overseeing Mr. Nashiri’s case, Col. James Pohl, ordered the government to provide 10 categories of information to the defense, including the identities of C.I.A. personnel who came in contact with Mr. Nashiri, and the names of the countries that had hosted “black site” prisons where he was held.

Prosecutors have argued that Mr. Kammen is seeking disclosure of classified details that are irrelevant and would not help Mr. Nashiri’s defense, the standard for what must be disclosed under a 1989 appeals court precedentconcerning classified evidence and criminal trials.

General Martins asked the judge to explain in greater detail why he believed each category of disclosure required by the order met that standard, saying the government may file an appeal if Colonel Pohl does not withdraw it.

In February, Mr. Kammen argued that he needed the information to investigate what happened to his client because neither he nor the prosecutorscould trust the C.I.A. to turn over a full and accurate set of materials.

But General Martins’s motion said the court must come up with a way to avoid “situations in which the people, through their government, are compelled to choose between protecting classified information necessary for national security and holding an accused accountable” for serious crimes.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/04/us/guantanamo-prosecutor-asks-judge-to-hold-off-declassification.html?_r=0

U.S. sends 2 Saudis home from Guantánamo

BY CAROL ROSENBERG

CROSENBERG@MIAMIHERALD.COM

 

Hamood Abdulla Hamood, a Saudi detainee at Guantánamo, was one of two sent home over the weekend. The military booking-style photo accompanied a May 2008 detention center report that recommended that the Pentagon not release Hamood from custody. The anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks provided the report to McClatchy Newspapers.
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/12/16/3821422/2-saudis-sent-home-from-guantanamo.html#storylink=cpy

The United States sent two long-ago cleared Guantánamo detainees to Saudi Arabia over the weekend, the latest move in renewed efforts to empty the prison camps that President Barack Obama ordered closed in 2009.

The Pentagon identified the two men as Saad Muhammed Husayn Qahtani, 35, and Hamood Abdulla Hamood, 48. Neither had ever been charged with a crime, and both returned as Saudi nationals.

The transfer reduced the prison camps population to 160 as the White House presses forward with two death-penalty proceedings on the base. Five men accused of plotting the Sept. 11 terror attacks are due back at the Guantánamo war court Tuesday.

The transfer also followed by less than two weeks the Obama administration’s repatriation of two Algerian captives whose lawyers said they resisted return to their homeland for fear of persecution because they fled their country in the 1990s to escape a civil war between the military and Muslim militants.

In this instance, according to government sources, the Saudi repatriations, carried out in a secret operation Saturday night, were voluntary. Each man was deemed eligible for transfer, “subject to appropriate security measures,” by a federal task force that studied the captives’ files in 2009.

Separately, Sudan’s news agency reported the last two Sudaneses captives at Guantánamo should be repatriated later in the week.

Qahtani and Hamood were among the last 11 Saudi citizens at the prison from an all-time high of about 135, at one time the second-largest nationality of captives at the U.S. Navy base in southeast Cuba after Afghanistan, which had more than 220 nationals among the 779 captives.

Yemenis at one point accounted for more than 100 but the figure has fluctuated as some captives at times thought to be Yemeni turned out to have Saudi citizenship. Hamood, for example, was held for years as Yemeni prisoner 574. He got there in June 2002.

The Bush administration released most of the Saudis back to the kingdom between May 2006 and November 2007 in groups of 13 or more. They left aboard Saudi Airways jetliners that fetched them from the remote Navy base, rather than having them sent home hooded and shackled aboard U.S. military transport. The Saudi government sent an aircraft for Saturday night’s transfer too, according to a U.S. government official.

The Saudis sent home in 2006 and 2007 were put through a Saudi-designed rehabilitation program that sought to rid them of radical Islamic ideology and resettle them, with mixed results.

Some fled Saudi to Yemen, Osama bin Laden’s ancestral homeland, and joined with Al-Qaida of the Arabian Peninsula — the post 9/11 franchise blamed for a series of suicide bombings and attempts including thwarted underwear bomber’s bid to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas 2009.

This latest repatriation reflects the Obama administration approach of small-scale transfers with individual diplomatic deals designed to fashion specific solutions for a released detainee.

“The U.S. has made real progress in responsibly transferring Guantánamo detainees despite the burdensome legislative restrictions that have impeded our efforts,” Paul Lewis, the Defense Department special envoy assigned to close the Guantánamo prison camps, said in a prepared statement.

“The United States coordinated with the Government of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to ensure that these transfers took place with appropriate security assurances and in a way that is consistent with our humane treatment policy,” he added.

At the State Department, Lewis’ counterpart Clifford Sloan issued a statement early Monday calling the weekend transfer “an important step on the road to closing the Guantánamo Bay detention facility.”

Two of the Saudi citizens still at Guantánamo are charged as alleged war criminals facing death-penalty proceedings: USS Cole case defendant Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, born in Mecca, and 9/11 case defendant Mustafa al Hawsawi. And two other Saudi captives still at the Navy base prison are named Qahtani, both at one point considered for prosecution at the base’s military commissions but neither currently facing charges.

Source: Miami Herald

 

New Guantanamo commander supports closing facility

by Jason Leopold @JasonLeopold December 12, 2013 2:00PM ET

Admiral’s statement follows Obama’s public call to shutter the military detention center in Cuba

Guards at the Guantanamo Bay facility face significant daily challenges in their interactions with detaineesJohn Moore/Getty Images

 

GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba — The commander of the controversial Guantanamo Bay detention center has backed President Barack Obama’s public stance of closing the prison down.

Obama called the base “not in the best interests of the American people” in an April speech that came as scores of prisoners were on a hunger strike to protest their ongoing captivity, in many cases for more than a decade without charge.

The president said he would act to have the base closed, adding, “It is contrary to our interests and needs to stop.”

In an interview with Al Jazeera, Navy Rear Adm. Richard Butler, commander of Joint Task Force-Guantanamo, said he agreed with Obama’s pledge to shut down the detention facility, which in a month will mark 12 years since the first prisoners arrived, and has so far cost taxpayers $5 billion.

“As a naval officer, I fully support whatever it is my commander in chief is going to tell me to do,” Butler said. “So I’m going to fully support that effort.”

But with only three prisoners transferred out of Guantanamo recently and just one appearing before the new parole-board-type hearings in the six months since Butler settled into his job, shuttering the facility is far off.

“In the meantime, we’re going to keep running the camps to the best of our ability,” he said.

Butler, who previously served as deputy director of the Navy’s Air Warfare Requirements division, arrived at Guantanamo during the height of the mass hunger strike at the prison and amid a controversy over the force-feeding of detainees that human rights groups said rose to the level of torture.

He said confronting those issues was challenging and complex. However, the well-being of the guard force came first.

“My No. 1 priority is their welfare,” Butler said. “That, quite frankly, is my biggest challenge. The second one is the welfare of the detainees and just making sure everything we do is consistent with their health and welfare.”

He would not discuss claims made in a recent report aired by “60 Minutes” and since retracted, in which Col. John Bogdan, the prison warden, said twice as many guards suffered post-traumatic stress disorder at Guantanamo compared with soldiers deployed to combat zones.

As a naval officer, I fully support whatever it is my commander in chief is going to tell me to do.

Rear Adm. Richard Butler

Commander of Joint Task Force-Guantanamo

During a tour of the facilities this week, Guantanamo officials emphasized that prisoners routinely hurl a “cocktail” of feces, semen and urine at guards, and that the assaults put the guard force under a great deal of stress. To underscore their point, several guards in Camp 5, the maximum-security facility where “noncompliant” prisoners are held, showed Al Jazeera America stains on foam padding on the ceiling in a prison block, which they said were feces.

“It’s a stressful environment,” said Butler. “But we provide the guard force with ways to vent.”

He was guarded in his response to questions about the prison’s operations, the politics and the thorny legal issues that have arisen and prevented it from being closed.

He said the new periodic review boards — official government panels that examine the cases of Guantanamo’s “indefinite” prisoners to decide who should leave — are “going well.”

Only one prisoner, however, has appeared before a panel since an announcement about the revamped process was made last summer.

“That number is still being worked out,” Butler said. “We’ve had a few notifications so far. The number will evolve as they finish looking at which detainees they want to review. The piece I’m tasked with supporting, the logistical task, is giving them facilities to operate from (and) facilitating the notification to the other detainees who have (reviews) coming up.”

Recently, the Pentagon and White House rejected a $195 million budget request from United States Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) to renovate Guantanamo. But Butler said he is not concerned, as “money is not an issue right now.”

“I have discretionary funds available to devote to specific areas where we’re having

problems,” he said. “A good example is air conditioners, which are getting older and breaking. So money needs to be spent on that. I have sufficient operating funds to be able to address the critical breakdowns. Now, if we’re talking entire buildings, then no, I don’t have the money to replace those. But I can address some improvements that need to be made.”

Deciding what to renovate is one of Butler’s priorities for 2014.

“We spent a lot of time figuring out how we’re going to spend the discretionary funding,” he said, declining to discuss specific projects.

                                                    The prison remains open, despite presidential promises to close it.

Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

Not long after he arrived at the prison, Butler said, he implemented some new protocols and updated standard operating procedures after an investigation by SOUTHCOM found that guards and medical staff failed to abide by military regulations and contributed to the death of a prisoner in September 2012.

“There were recommendations in that report, and we’ve implemented them, and we’re doing well with regard to all of the recommendations in there,” Butler said, declining to discuss specifics about the new measures.

However, he did say that some of the new procedures were poorly received by the prisoners.

“Any change with the detainees’ routine, we tend to have a period of transition,” he said. When asked to clarify “transition,” he responded, “Where, if something changes, they’re very attuned to it.”

“We will get resistance from the detainees if we change anything,” he added. “For good or for bad or for whatever reason.”

Butler said one policy change, enacted last week, in which his staff will no longer provide the media with an accounting of the number of prisoners on hunger strike was made because the announcements “attracted attention” and “facilitated the protest of the detainees.”

“I’m not interested in doing that,” he said. “When we would give out a hunger strike number based on a request, we weren’t necessarily pushing the number out. We would just respond to media. It was not an accurate picture of what was going on down here.

“It really distracted from — (in) my perspective as the commander — the welfare of the detainees. That number really distracted from what my focus was, and I just wanted to know who are the detainees that we really have to worry about medically.”

“The number (of hunger strikers), quite frankly, didn’t tell the story,” he said. “There are detainees down here, a relatively small number, and they’re going to hunger-strike probably until the day they leave here.”

Source: Al Jazeera

 

White House pushes to loosen Gitmo transfer rules

FILE – In this June 27, 2006 file photo, reviewed by a U.S. Department of Defense official, U.S. military guards walk within Camp Delta military-run prison, at the Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Base, Cuba. President Barack Obama is pushing to overcome obstacles to closing the Guantanamo Bay prison, an elusive goal which has frustrated him since he took office. That is setting the White House on a collision course with Congress in its bid to loosen restrictions for moving out detainees. BRENNAN LINSLEY, FILE / AP PHOTO
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/11/18/v-fullstory/3761720/white-house-pushes-to-loosen-gitmo.html#storylink=cpy

BY NEDRA PICKLER

ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama is pushing to overcome obstacles to closing the Guantanamo Bay prison, setting the White House on a collision course with Congress in its bid to loosen restrictions for moving out detainees.

Administration officials say a Senate defense policy bill coming up for debate within days would allow them to move out prisoners who have long been cleared for transfer overseas but are still held, in part because of a complicated Pentagon certification process. The bill would ease those restrictions and lift a ban on bringing suspected terrorist prisoners from Guantanamo to the United States for detention, trial or emergency medical treatment.

Obama has wanted to close Guantanamo since coming to office, but restrictions imposed by Congress have slowed movement out of the prison to a virtual standstill. The White House effort to lighten those barriers faces dogged resistance, with opponents pointing out that some former detainees have joined terrorist efforts after being released from the remote U.S. naval prison in Cuba.

“Why would you want to reduce the standard?” asked Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., who along with Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., is working on amendments to preserve the current high bar for transfers.

Even if the Senate passes the White House-backed legislation, the House earlier this year approved a measure that further restricts transfers, including an outright ban on sending detainees to Yemen. Yemen is a particular challenge since more than half of the 164 detainees are from there. It’s also home to the world’s most active al-Qaida branch.

Obama himself imposed a ban on Yemeni transfers from Guantanamo after a Nigerian man attempted to blow up a U.S.-bound flight on Christmas 2009 with explosives hidden in his underwear on instructions from al-Qaida operatives in Yemen. But Obama lifted that moratorium in his speech on May 23 at National Defense University in which he said Guantanamo “has become a symbol around the world for an America that flouts the rule of law.”

“I transferred 67 detainees to other countries before Congress imposed restrictions to effectively prevent us from either transferring detainees to other countries or imprisoning them here in the United States. These restrictions make no sense,” Obama said. He has vowed to close the prison.

“There is no justification beyond politics for Congress to prevent us from closing a facility that should never have been opened,” Obama said.

The intelligence community seems to agree. In a letter to Congress last week, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper listed examples of al-Qaida citing Guantanamo to justify its activities.

“Closing the Guantanamo Bay detention facility would deprive al-Qaida’s leaders of the ability to use the alleged ongoing mistreatment of detainees to further their global jihadist narrative,” Clapper wrote.

Purely from an economic point of view, the administration says Guantanamo is too costly. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel told Congress that annual spending on Guantanamo was $454 million — or about $2.7 million per detainee.

Obama has not said much publicly about Guantanamo in the nearly six months since the speech, but administration officials say he presses Hagel and Secretary of State John Kerry on the matter every week. Obama also has new special envoys for Guantanamo closure at the State Department and Pentagon working full-time on the matter.

“Our marching orders are very clear from the president, and in terms of what he wants to do, and that’s to close the facility,” said envoy Clifford Sloan at the State Department.

Sloan said achieving that goal requires three steps — transferring out those who have been approved, prosecuting others and making a plan for the remaining detainees accused of participating in dangerous plots who cannot be prosecuted because the evidence against them is inadmissible in a court of law. That’s a tall order on a three-year clock, but Sloan vowed, “Step by step, we will get there, and we will close it.”

Sloan has been holding meetings across Capitol Hill to push for more flexibility, while Lisa Monaco, Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser in the White House, has been calling moderate senators to encourage them to back the Senate bill.

The bill would allow the Pentagon to transfer any detainee the administration no longer considers a threat to the United States, as long as actions are taken to “substantially mitigate the risk” that the detainee would re-engage in terrorism and ensure that the transfer is in the U.S. national security interest.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops weighed in Monday in support of the Senate bill as keeping with tenets of their faith for swift justice and against torture. The group urged senators in a letter to back the looser restrictions on transfers to “help the United States regain its moral standing in the world as a defender of human rights.”

This summer, the administration sent home two Algerian detainees. Eighty-four others have long been cleared for transfer, and the U.S. government has begun a formal review process of about 45 others previously considered too dangerous to be released to determine if circumstances have changed.

Ayotte argued the Algerian transfers prove the current process is working, and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., agreed that the administration doesn’t need more flexibility. “All they have to do is assure us that they won’t re-enter the fight, as numerous ones have, in leadership positions. We can’t do that,” McCain said.

Chris Anders, senior legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, which wants to close Guantanamo, acknowledges the issue is always a tough vote for lawmakers. But he argues there’s a growing recognition that Guantanamo can’t stay open forever and harms national security.

“What’s different this year compared to past years is that the president is ready and willing to use whatever authority Congress gives him to start closing Guantanamo,” Anders said, “and particularly to start sending home the majority of detainees who were long ago cleared to be sent back home.”

Source: The Miami Herald

 

 

Urge Your Senators to Support Closing Guantanamo

Any day now, Senators will have a chance to vote on legislation that gives President Obama greater flexibility to transfer people out of Guantanamo. The bill’s improved provisions, introduced earlier this year by Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee Carl Levin (D-MI), would help ensure that Guantanamo closes as soon as possible-and that each detainee is either safely and fairly tried in US federal court, or transferred to other countries.

The vote is expected to be tight – but we can get the provisions passed with your support! Make sure your elected officials vote the right way on Guantanamo. Urge your two Senators to support Senator Levin’s transfer provisions.

Sign the petition

A debrief with the 60 Minutes team who went to Gitmo

By60 Minutes Overtime Staff

For their two-part report on “Gitmo,” correspondent Lesley Stahl and producer Rich Bonin were granted rare access to film the detention camp, detainees, and guards who all unhappily coexist at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba.

Many of the accused terrorists and al Qaeda fighters detained at Gitmo have been stuck there without charge or trial since Camp X-Ray, the first detention facility at the base, opened after 9/11–it’s a state of affairs Stahl and Bonin say can only be described as “limbo.”

“Limbo is on the border of hell and Guantanamo Bay in many ways feels like the border of hell,” said Bonin. “Everybody is trapped to some degree.”

Bonin said he and Stahl began to notice that a feeling of being trapped pervades the entire base: “It’s a tremendous amount of moral pressure, political pressure, it tests your own values and it tests your country’s values.”

Watch this week’s 60 Minutes Overtime feature to hear Stahl and Bonin describe their trip to Gitmo and show more of their footage, not seen in the 60 Minutes broadcast.

Ever wonder what the U.S. naval base at Gitmo was like before 9/11? Mike Wallace took 60 Minutes cameras there in 1972 and found it to be “strangely tranquil.” Have a look in this week’s 60 Minutes Rewind.

Source: CBS News

Esperanza Spalding song, video call for Gitmo closure

Edna Gundersen, USA TODAY12:10 a.m. EST November 18, 2013

‘We Are America’ rails against the injustice of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp days before a Senate vote on the prison’s future.

Esperanza Spalding sings ‘We Are America,’ protesting the continued operation of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.
(Photo: Courtesy of ESPLLC)

“Time to find a new solution, justice for the men who should be free,” Esperanza Spalding sings in the new We Are America, which calls for closing the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.

In the song’s five-minute video, out today, the jazz artist raises legal and moral questions about the military prison, established in 2002 primarily to detain suspected terrorists. Of nearly 800 cycled through Gitmo, seven have been convicted; 164 remain, including 84 cleared for transfer.

Spalding bolsters her message with data, celebrity cameos and a chorus of supporting statements from current and former government officials (Colin Powell: “If it were up to me, I would close Guantanamo not tomorrow but this afternoon”).

Spalding, 29, says she was motivated by nagging concerns that grew as she toured the world.

“It’s embarrassing for America, and it’s not in line with our values,” she says by phone from Zaragoza, Spain, a stop on her European tour. “It scares me and it hurts that my country is doing this. We don’t need to sacrifice human rights and the Constitution for the sake of security. It’s counterproductive. We’re better than this. We have the intelligence, creativity and resources to do better.”

Spalding aimed for a defiant, rather than preachy, song that celebrates taking a stand. Against a backdrop of slinky funk-jazz, she belts the chorus, “We are America, in our America, we take a stand for this.”

Joining her in the video are Stevie Wonder, Janelle Monáe, Savion Glover and Harry Belafonte (who hoists the placard “Guantanamo = immoral”). Arriving days before an expected Senate vote on the camp’s closure, the video urges viewers to call legislators and get informed through such We Are America partners as Amnesty International and Human Rights First.

That’s how Spalding initially responded.

“When the hunger strikes started, I felt even more upset that this place existed,” she says. “I did research. I called my senators. I wanted to do more.”

We Are America may not turn the tide, “but I don’t want to sit by quietly when injustice is perpetuated,” Spalding says. “This isn’t a make-or-break piece of the puzzle. My hope is it will be contagious and move people to go, ‘Yeah, this is wack.’ It’s worth a try.”

Source: USA Today

Esperanza Spalding – We Are America from ESP Media on Vimeo.