Lost Innocence at Guantánamo

Rebuffing President Barack Obama’s latest plea, House Republicans last week proposed keeping open the military-run prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, barring the administration from transferring its terror suspects to the United States or foreign countries, and giving the Pentagon $247.4 million to upgrade Guantanamo.

Former Guantánamo guard Terry Holdbrooks, who worked at Camp Delta from June 2003 through July 2004 and wrote a book about his experiences entitled “Traitor,” said that the US military base in Cuba “was essentially chosen for the legal limbo that it posed so long ago, being that it was not under Geneva Convention soil. We have held people there in nearly every conflict, particularly, WW2, Cold War, Desert Storm, and now this. At any rate, there is no longer a concern for legal limbo, as with the War on T’error’ and the bills that have been passed, Bush, and now Obama can essentially do as they please, legal or not, and claim that it is in the best interest of the US.”

There are currently 166 men left at Guantánamo. They are indefinitely detained at a cost of $1 million a year per inmate, despite nearly all being cleared for release. The only men at Guantánamo who are still considered guilty of terrorism are the so-called “masterminds” of 9/11: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak Bin ‘Attash, Ramzi Binalshibh, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al Hawsawi.

“I was responsible for the 9/11 operation, from A to Z,” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is famous for confessing.

These five men are not being held with the general population, but housed in Camp 7, otherwise known as “Camp No.” Holdbrooks told TMO he has never seen them and has no idea who is in charge of guarding them. He has no doubt the men are being severely tortured, but also expressed certainty that there is nobody who cares.

“No one is coming for them. It would not matter if the men in Guantánamo were in the US, they would still be locked up, and no one would come for them.”

The U.S. Justice Department released a 2005 memo which states that Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003 alone. As a result of these interrogations, he confessed to 26 pages of terrorist acts around the globe.

The US government seriously charges him with “training hijackers to hide knives in carry-on bags before boarding the planes. Under Mohammed’s direction, the hijackers learned how to slit the throats of passengers by practicing on sheep, goats and camels.”

On May 5, 2012 CNN reported, “The five refused to co-operate with court proceedings in various ways. They are each charged with terrorism, hijacking aircraft, conspiracy, murder in violation of the law of war, attacking civilians, attacking civilian objects, intentionally causing serious bodily injury and destruction of property in violation of the law of war.”

The actual evidence against the five men ranges from wiring relatively small amounts of money to suspicious persons to repeatedly applying for US tourist visas after being rejected. They seem to be most guilty of not recognizing the US government’s authority to try them and using the trial as a platform to make political statements. 

During his pretrial hearing, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed stated that the U.S. government sanctioned torture in the name of national security and compared the plane hijackings that killed nearly 3,000 people to the millions who have been killed by America’s military. After Mohammed’s remarks, military judge Captain James Pohl refused to allow any other personal comments by the accused at trial.

“If martyrdom happens to me today, I welcome it. God is great! God is great! God is great!” Binalshibh told his trial judge, Marine Colonel Ralph Kohlmann.

While it appears that the five men are seeking execution as a way of escaping prison, many more men are starving themselves to death to protest their indefinite detention.

“Emaciated and frail, more than 100 men lie on concrete floors of freezing, solitary cells in Guantánamo, silently starving themselves to death,” reports Terri Judd in the Independent, UK.

“They’ve lost hope. They’ve decided it’s better to die,” Holdbrooks said. “One of them is down to 70 pounds… With nothing to do but read a book you have memorized, or pace in a 6 by 8 cell, there really isn’t much to be hopeful for.”

Terry Holdbrooks described their situation: “You are on an island, surrounded by a mine field, surrounded by fences with lookout towers, in a cage within a larger cage called a block in a larger cage called a camp in a larger cage known as Camp Delta. You have at a minimum 4 sally ports to make way out of, each requiring ID, keys, and searching of persons. The cells are guarded by people like me, who walk up and down a block all day and night… Guantánamo is not a place people can break out of, it is impossible, literally, impossible. 90 miles from land (Florida) surrounded by mine fields, men in towers, automatic weapons and grenade launchers and sniper rifles…”

Author David Hicks, an Australian man who was kidnapped in Afghanistan by the Northern Alliance and sold to the US for bounty wrote in a letter to his father that his confessions made at Guantánamo were false and made only to get released. Hicks told his father that he was pressured into pleading guilty to a wide-range of war crimes charges and he feared that if he didn’t comply he would be sent to “Camp 5,” a “very bad place with complete isolation…”

“Know that if I make a deal it will be against my will,” Hicks wrote. “I just couldn’t handle it any longer. I’m disappointed in our government. I’m an Australian citizen. If I’ve committed a crime I can be man enough to accept the consequences but I shouldn’t have to admit to things I haven’t done or listen to people falsely accuse me. We can’t let them get away with it.”

“I feel bad about the idea that Guantánamo is even in existence,” concludes Holdbrooks. “I would love to see Guantánamo given back to Cuba and for the facility and land to be free of US persons. None the less, what will happen with Guantánamo when these men go home is what worries me. It will get filled again, probably with Americans… Guantánamo is really, to me, nothing more than a blatant example of where we as a country are heading if citizens do not take back control of our own country.”

Guantanamo Unrest Linked to Navy-Army Guard Switch

There are currently 166 people imprisoned in Guantanamo, the majority of whom are known to be innocent. 86 of them have already been cleared for release by the US government since many years. Yet their indefinite detention without trial continues. More than 130 of the prisoners are now embroiled in an agonizing hunger strike to draw attention to their plight. Shaker Aamer, the sole UK citizen still at Guantanamo, who has been locked up for 11 years despite being cleared for release 6 years ago, has already lost more than a quarter of his body weight.

“I barely notice all of my medical ailments any more – the back pain from the beatings I have taken, the rheumatism from the frigid air conditioning, the asthma exacerbated by the toxic sprays they use to abuse us. There is an endless list. And now 24/7, as the Americans say, I have the ache of hunger,” Aamer told the Observer, UK.

“I hope I do not die in this awful place. I want to hug my children and watch them as they grow. But if it is God’s will that I should die here, I want to die with dignity. I hope, if the worst comes to the worst, that my children will understand that I cared for the rights of those suffering around me almost as much as I care for them.”

Yemeni prisoner Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel wrote in a letter published in The New York Times, “The situation is desperate now. All of the detainees here are suffering deeply… And there is no end in sight to our imprisonment. Denying ourselves food and risking death every day is the choice we have made. I just hope that because of the pain we are suffering, the eyes of the world will once again look to Guantánamo before it is too late.”

The US Supreme Court ruled (Hamdan vs Rumsfeld) on June 29, 2006 that Guantanamo detainees were legally entitled to protection under the Geneva Convention and under US laws regarding prisoners’ rights during armed conflicts. In a speech on August 1, 2007, Obama, then a senator, said, “In the dark halls of Abu Ghraib and the detention cells of Guantanamo, we have compromised our most precious values.” On January 22, 2009, the new president Obama signed an executive order to close the Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility within one year, in order to “restore the standards of due process and the core constitutional values that have made this country great even in the midst of war, even in dealing with terrorism.”

Ramzy Baroud writes on antiwar.com, “While his second term is unlikely to deliver much of the “change” he had so industriously promised, skeletal men continue to sink into utter despair at the American gulag at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba.”

Attorney Carlos Warner, who represents 11 prisoners at Guantánamo, told Amy Goodman on Democracy Now, “The president has the authority to transfer individuals if he believes that it’s in the interests of the United States. He doesn’t have the political will to do so because 166 men in Guantánamo don’t have much pull in the United States. But the average American on the street does not understand that half of these men, 86 of the men, are cleared for release.”

Things had been improving at Guantanamo in terms of prison conditions. Torture had stopped. Once the prisoners were found to lack any useful information, the brutal interrogations stopped. Warner continues:

“There are about four years of détente between the guards and the men, where really, the guards were understanding of the men and the men were very respectful to the guards. And the guard force was changed in September. It went from the Navy to the Army. It was from that time, we started to have crisis…

“Basically, the Army made a decision: We want to take everything out of the camps and know what we’re dealing with. This all came to a head on February the 6th when the men’s cells were stripped and Muslim linguists were leafing through the Qur’ans with the Army looking on. And this was, as I’ve said, the spark that ignited this current strike. And from there, we’ve just devolved and devolved.”

Guantanamo prisoner Fayiz al-Kandry reported that he is being force-fed with a bigger tube than is required. This makes it difficult for him to breathe, and induces vomiting.

Sami al-Hajj, the al-Jazeera journalist who was held in Guantanamo for over 6 years, reported that while he was on the hunger strike that led to his release, guards forcibly shoved a large tube through his nose down into his stomach, and violently yanked it out after the feeding was done. They reused the same tube filled with blood and vomit to shove inside the hunger striking prisoners.

The new Army guards have attempted to break the hunger strikers’ resolve by placing them in solitary cells. This led to violent clashes, with guards firing “non-lethal” rounds on prisoners.

On March 21, 2013, al-Kandry sent a gift to Attorney Warner with a letter that reads: “I made this lantern with my brothers. It’s made with bits of paper and cardboard. We used a water bottle sanded on the floor as glass. We painted it with bits of paint and fruit juice. It’s held together by pressure only. We made this lantern for those in the world who remember and pray for us during this time of suffering. Let its light fill you. Use it to bring peace to your heart.” Attorney Warner said that it felt like a goodbye letter.

Without any serious pressure from concerned Americans to close Guantanamo, and without any heroic attempt by the Cuban people to rid themselves of the grotesque American occupation on their soil, it appears that an entire corporate industry has grown around the continuing injustice towards these men, most of whom were randomly kidnapped while traveling abroad, and sold to the US for a couple thousand dollars’ bounty. Releasing them would mean Americans admitting they were wrong. Something we are not used to doing.

Ryan J Reilly reports in the Huffington Post, “As Obama’s second term begins, Guantanamo seems to be putting down roots. Indeed, parts of the naval base have taken on the appearance of a new beach side housing development. Hundreds of homes are currently under construction in neighborhoods with names like Iguana Terrace and Marina Point, to house the growing population of military personnel, civilian contractors and their families, which currently stands at approximately 5,000… The base features a Starbucks, a Subway, a McDonald’s, a KFC/Taco Bell, a supermarket, a golf course, a restaurant serving Jamaican jerk chicken and an Irish pub. A gift shop sells stuffed iguanas and T-shirts emblazoned with Guantanamo Bay slogans like ‘Close, But No Cigar.’”