Vol. 77/No. 16 April 29, 2013
Some 130 of the 166 detainees imprisoned indefinitely on the U.S. Navy base have declared they’re taking part in a hunger strike to protest prison conditions and press for their release.
At first prison officials denied the existence of the strike, which reportedly began Feb. 6. Now the U.S. government admits 43 are striking, 11 of whom are being force-fed through their nose. On April 13 guards used rubber bullets to subdue inmates as they moved dozens of hunger strikers into solitary confinement.
As the strike has gained publicity, protests against conditions in Guantánamo have grown, along with calls to shut the prison down, including from Navi Pillay, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, and the New York Times editorial board.
While the strike began as a protest over guards’ provocative desecration of prisoners’ Korans, it has been transformed into a challenge of the prison itself.
A vast majority of the 166 prisoners at Guantánamo have been held for 11 years without any charges, seized under the rubric of the “war on terror,” launched by President George W. Bush. Some 86 have been cleared by the government for transfer or release, but continue to be held with no prospect of release.
On the second day after his inauguration in 2009, President Barack Obama signed an executive order pledging to close the Guantánamo prison within a year and suspending use of military tribunals. In March 2011 he signed a new executive order keeping Guantánamo open, allowing prisoners to be held indefinitely, and restarting the tribunals conducted by a commission of Pentagon-appointed officers.
The six inmates who face charges are being tried by a military commission. Five are accused of involvement in organizing the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The sixth, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, is accused of organizing the attack on the USS Cole in Aden, Yemen, in 2000.
New rules for the tribunals Obama instituted blocked the prosecution from introducing evidence obtained from a defendant’s “confession” under torture. But statements of others who were tortured can be used, allowing the government to torture defendants into implicating others. Hearsay not permissible in military courts-martial is allowed and prosecutorial evidence can be kept from the defense.
The rules also bar defendants from discussing in court their treatment — including waterboarding and other forms of torture.
Al-Nashiri was previously held in a secret CIA prison, where he was interrogated under torture that included waterboarding and threats of execution.
The CIA has admitted that Mohammed was waterboarded at least 183 times.
U.S. Army Col. James Pohl, presiding over the tribunal of Mohammed and his co-defendants, issued a classified ruling Jan. 15 that there will be no presumption they are covered by the legal protections of the U.S. Constitution.
“At the beginning of this year … conditions at the Guantánamo Bay prison became much worse than they had been for years,” said Musa’ab al-Madhwani, a prisoner from Yemen, in a statement to his attorney March 28.
“The only means we have to express the utter hopelessness of our situation is by participating in a hunger strike,” he said.
Many other prisoners have gotten similar statements out to their attorneys. Meanwhile, the press has been denied entry to the complex.
Prisoners report that the prison has turned the air conditioning up to frigid temperatures and is denying them clean drinking water.
Dozens of family members of prisoners originally from Yemen organized a protest outside the U.S. Embassy in the capital Sanaa April 1, holding pictures of their incarcerated relatives.
The prisoners appear determined to continue their fight. “He is by no means a broken man,” Ramzi Kassem, attorney for Shaker Aamer, a legal resident of England whose government has requested his return, told CBS News. “He continues to struggle and hope and live.”