Gitmo Force-Feeding Continues Through Ramadan

Yasiin Bey (aka Mos Def)
image source

Stephen Lendman

Doing so constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. It inflicts excruciating pain and suffering. It's aggravated assault writ large. It's torture under international law provisions.

It violates human dignity. It reflects disdain for human suffering. It's Josef Mengele-style treatment. Nazi prisoners were coerced. They had no choice. Experiments constituted torture. Obama reflects the worst of cruel despots.

As president and commander-in-chief, he's empowered to stop what's unconscionable to allow. Dismissively he lets it continue. Doing so's a crime against humanity. It persists viciously. It does so extrajudicially.

On July 5, Guantanamo's hunger strike reached day 150. At least 106 of the facility's 166 prisoners refuse food. They do so for justice. They prefer death to indefinite detention uncharged. Around four dozen are force-fed.

They committed no crimes. They're lawlessly incarcerated. They're denied due process and judicial fairness. Rogue states operate that way. America's by far the worst.

Top US senator urges Guantanamo for Iraqi suspects

Gautanamo Bay Camp VI
© AFP/File Virginie Montet

AFP

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The US Senate's top Republican, Mitch McConnell, called Tuesday for two Iraqi nationals facing terrorism charges in his home state to be shipped to the controversial Guantanamo Bay detention facility.

"Get these men out of Kentucky. Send them to Guantanamo where they belong. Get these terrorists out of the civilian system and out of our backyards and give them the justice they deserve," said the Republican minority leader.

Waad Ramadan Alwan and his cousin Mohanad Shareef Hammadi have pleaded not guilty to 23 terrorism charges, but could face a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.

Supreme Court nixes suit against ex-attorney general

Former US Attorney General John Ashcroft
© AFP/Getty Images/File Mark Wilson

AFP

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The US Supreme Court has ruled that former attorney general John Ashcroft cannot be held responsible for police and judicial excesses committed in the period after the September 11 attacks.

In a unanimous decision on Monday, the court overturned an appeals court decision authorizing a lawsuit brought against Ashcroft by Abdullah Al-Kidd, an American convert to Islam.

Al-Kidd was detained in March 2003 and held without charges as a "material witness," a formulation widely used after the 2001 attacks on the United States to ensure suspects were available to testify in terrorism cases.

Guantanamo one of world's 'finest' prison: Rumsfeld

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The "war on terror" prison at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba is "one of the finest prison systems in the world," former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in an interview with Fox News on Tuesday.

Rumsfeld, who is promoting his autobiography titled "Known and Unknown," praised US military personnel that worked at the site in the interview on FOX News Channel’s Hannity show.

Rumsfeld was defense secretary 2001-2006 under former president George W. Bush. He was replaced as defense secretary by Robert Gates.


"The heart-breaking thing with respect to Guantanamo is not that there’s anything wrong with it, it’s one of the finest prison systems in the world," said Rumsfeld.

"What’s awkward is the fact that, for whatever reason, the administration was incapable of persuading people that that was a first-class operation, that they were not torturing people, that they were not hurting people," he said.

Rumsfeld described it as "a fine operation," and said US military personnel working there have "taken a lot of the heat unfairly" and "deserve a lot of credit" for their work.

Rumsfeld was also critical of President Barack Obama's attempt to close the site.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama "was critical of indefinite detention for unlawful combatants. He was critical of military commissions," he said.

"And here we are ... two-plus years later, and all of those things are there. Not because anyone wants them to be there, but because they were the best solutions."

The Guantanamo prison opened in January 2002 to hold prisoners captured in Afghanistan and swept up elsewhere in the US "war on terror."

Upon taking office in January 2009, Obama promised to close the prison in one year, but has not found a place to move the inmates and the US Congress has banned the transfer of Guantanamo detainees to US soil.

There are currently 173 inmates at the Guantanamo prison, of which only three have been convicted after a trial.
© AFP

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TRUTHOUT EXCLUSIVE: Controversial Drug Given to All Guantanamo Detainees Akin to "Pharmacologic Waterboarding"

image: Jared Rodriguez/Truthout 

Jason Leopold and Jeffrey Kaye
Truthout

The Defense Department forced all "war on terror" detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison to take a high dosage of a controversial antimalarial drug, mefloquine, an act that an Army public health physician called "pharmacologic waterboarding."

The US military administered the drug despite Pentagon knowledge that mefloquine caused severe neuropsychiatric side effects, including suicidal thoughts, hallucinations and anxiety. The drug was used on the prisoners whether they had malaria or not.

The revelation, which has not been previously reported, was buried in  documents publicly released by the Defense Department (DoD) two years ago as part of the government's  investigation into the June 2006 deaths of three Guantanamo detainees.

Read Full Article

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Who's to blame for torture? Lawyers probe Wikileaks logs

Paisley Dodds and Raphael G. Satter
Associated Press

LONDON — It has been one of the most bitter legal debates during the so-called war on terror – who's to blame for torture and how many degrees of separation does it take to dodge a lawsuit?

Lawyers say the answer may lie in recently leaked documents, which human rights groups and some Iraqi civilians hope will be a treasure trove of evidence that could prove U.S. and other coalition forces broke a cardinal rule of international law – handing over terror suspects when they had good reason to believe the detainees would be tortured.

The Pentagon has criticized the whistleblowing organization WikiLeaks for publishing nearly 400,000 U.S. military logs detailing daily carnage in Iraq since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. In July, the same group published 77,000 secret documents on the war in Afghanistan.
The classified logs on Iraq describe detainees abused by Iraqi forces, insurgent bombings, sectarian executions and civilians shot at checkpoints by U.S. troops. They also chart how coalition troops handed Iraqis back to security forces after suspicions that the Iraqis were abusing or torturing detainees.

Lawyers say the once-secret logs are different from other leaks because of the vast amount of material presented and the number of potential breaches of international law.

"If a state knows that there's a real risk that a person will be tortured by another state, they simply cannot transfer that person to the other country's custody," said Phil Shiner of U.K.-based Public Interest Lawyers, which represents some 130 Iraqi civilians who allege ill-treatment by Britain's armed forces.

But not everyone agrees that torture is avoidable during war, let alone just how far an occupying power should go to make sure terror suspects aren't tortured and abused – especially in the case of Iraq, which is a sovereign state.

Read Full Article

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Wolfowitz Directive Gave Legal Cover to Detainee Experimentation Program

Jason Leopold and Jeffrey Kaye
TruthOut

In 2002, as the Bush administration was turning to torture and other brutal techniques for interrogating "war on terror" detainees, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz loosened rules against human experimentation, an apparent recognition of legal problems regarding the novel strategies for extracting and evaluating information from the prisoners.

Wolfowitz issued his directive on March 25, 2002, about a month after President George W. Bush stripped the detainees of traditional prisoner-of-war protections under the Geneva Conventions. Bush labeled them "unlawful enemy combatants" and authorized the CIA and the Department of Defense (DoD) to undertake brutal interrogations.

Despite its title - "Protection of Human Subjects and Adherence to Ethical Standards in DoD-Supported Research" - the Wolfowitz directive weakened protections that had been in place for decades by limiting the safeguards to "prisoners of war."

"We're dealing with a special breed of person here," Wolfowitz said about the war on terror detainees only four days before signing the new directive.

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Can We Try a Man We Tortured?

Will accused major terrorists like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed ever end up in a federal courtroom? The answer is yes—starting right now. 

FBI/Zumapress.com

Karen Greenberg  -- Mother Jones 

Today is a day that many Americans thought would never arrive: At 9:30 a.m., in the courtroom of Judge Lewis Kaplan of the Southern District of New York, the first-ever trial of a Guantanamo detainee in a federal court is scheduled to begin. It is the case civil libertarians like me have been waiting for, the first real chance to prove that the civilian court system can work in trying Guantanamo terrorists. And yet, on the eve of the trial's opening, many of us are still wondering what the rules of the game will be—and even whether this was such a good idea after all.

It's not, of course, that terrorists aren't commonly tried in US courts: The federal courthouse in Manhattan, within walking distance from the World Trade Center site, is a veritable cineplex of terrorism cases. In the past few weeks alone, it has been the site of three other high-profile proceedings: Aafia Siddiqui, who had been convicted of taking up arms against officers of the FBI and the Army in Afghanistan, was sentenced to 86 years on September 23rd; Faisal Shahzad, the would-be Times Square bomber, was sentenced to life in prison yesterday; also yesterday, attorneys finished their summation arguments in the case of four men accused of plotting to blow up synagogues in the Bronx.

But the trial scheduled to begin this morning is by far the most important in terms of symbolism—and potential repercussions. It is the case of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, and on its outcome rest the prospects for other Guantanamo detainee trials, including that of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, believed to be the mastermind of 9/11.

Ghailani's is the perfect test case. The 30-something Tanzanian (no one seems to know precisely how old he is) stands accused of being involved in the attack on the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998, bombings that resulted in hundreds of deaths. This is a crime the American judicial system knows how to try. Three of those accused in the embassy bombings were tried and convicted in this same federal court district and are now serving life sentences in a supermax prison in Colorado.

But, ironically, there is another reason that the Ghailani case is a test case for Mohammed and the other "high value detainees" in Guantanamo—those accused of major attacks or of holding high-level positions in the Al Qaeda network. Ghailani, like Mohammed, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, and others, was subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques, more commonly known as torture. Presumably, if it proves possible nonetheless to try his case in civilian courts, the same would be true for Mohammed and others. 

Read Full Article 

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