Detainees, U.S. guards clash at Guantanamo Bay ... Details-emerge-of-guards-skirmish. GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba -- Military commanders Tuesday offered a description of a communal prison camp where the captives ruled inside their cellblocks for months, covering cameras, poking guards with sticks through fences, spraying U.S. forces with urine and refusing to lock themselves inside their cells for nightly sweeps. At Guantánamo’s communal camp, only if all the prisoners on a cellblock shut themselves in their cells, can guards step inside. The commander, Capt. John, an Army reservist who refused to provide his last name, said that the once-compliant captives commonly ignored soldiers’ orders for months, since before he took charge in January, a situation that left the American captors of the foreign men with “no control over whether their behavior was good or bad.”
“I’ve never been in a civilian prison that looked anything like communal here,” said Capt. Gone was satellite TV and being able to roam inside their blocks for meals, prayers or go outside for group soccer. 05-04 The Hunger Strikers of Guantanamo As Detailed in Files Released by WikiLeaks. Hundreds of detainees at Guantanamo Bay are known to have engaged in hunger strikes at the prison in protest of conditions and their prolonged confinement without trial. A recent report from Jason Leopold of Truthout.org details how, as of March, detainees continue to participate in hunger strikes with the hope that the conditions of their detention will improve or so they will no longer have their basic due process rights violated.
Detainees first began to engage in hunger strikes in 2002. The hunger strikes had a definite impact. The strikes from 2002 to 2005 effectively changed the dynamics in the prison. Former detainee Binyam Mohamed said there was no law and a colonel was saying, “’I do what I like’ but after the hunger strike – the big hunger strike of 2005 – they actually started implementing some kind of law that we knew about.” There are a number of detainees that are known to have engaged in hunger striking (thanks to the great investigative journalism of Andy Worthington). Hunger Striking at Guantánamo Bay. US Acknowledges 14 on Hunger Strike at Guantanamo Prison | Rights & Liberties. Letter from lawyers of detainees lays out a scenario of a “potentially life-threatening situation" - Guantánamo - MiamiHerald.com | Rights & Liberties.
Ahmed Errachidi: 'We shared one thing in Guantánamo Bay – pain' | Rights & Liberties. A Guantanamo Prisoner Is Buried as New Details About His Death Begin to Surface. Adnan Latif. (Photo: Wikipedia)The US military aircraft carrying the cargo is only used for missions like this. Muhammed Farhan Latif and other members of his family waited at a gatehouse at Al-Dailami Air Base in Sana'a, Yemen's capital, for the plane to arrive from Ramstein Air Base in Germany.
It touched down at around 9 PM on Saturday, December 15. The special security detail assigned to the mission unloaded the cargo - a plain aluminum box - from the aircraft. A man and a woman from the US Embassy entered the gatehouse. They had papers they wanted Muhammed to sign, but they were written in English and Muhammed doesn't speak the language. Muhammed requested that an interpreter who accompanied him to the air base translate the documents, but the embassy officials rebuffed him, so he declined to sign the paperwork.
The aluminum box was loaded into an ambulance destined for the police hospital. "The medical examiner concluded that the death was a suicide. "Soon," he replied. Dr. Navy Lt. Latif Letter About Guantanamo Speaks From the Grave: "I Am Being Pushed Toward Death Every Moment" Guards from Camp Five at Guantanamo escort a detainee from his cell to a recreational facility within the camp. (Photo: Petty Officer 2nd Class Kilho Park / DVIDSHUB / flickr)Explosive claims in a letter to his lawyers reveal a Gitmo detainee's fears about his captors' intentions, well in advance of his mysterious death. Meanwhile, the investigation into his apparent suicide centers on the protocols meant to prevent it.
More than two years before he was found dead in his cell at Guantanamo Bay, Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif reported that the people who oversaw his every move were facilitating his demise. In a letter sent to his attorneys on May 28, 2010, the Yemeni detainee claimed he was given "contraband" items, such as a spoon and a "big pair of scissors ... by the person responsible for Camp 5," where uncooperative prisoners are sent. "I am being pushed toward death every moment," Latif wrote to human rights attorneys David Remes and Marc Falkoff. Unanswered Questions Lt. William K. Latif Autopsy Report Calls Gitmo Death a Suicide: Questions Remain. Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif. (Photo: JTF-GTMO)The manner of death has been ruled a suicide, the cause of death has not yet been disclosed. The list of unanswered questions grows. Truthout has obtained the results of the autopsy on Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif, but the long-awaited report on the mysterious September death of the Guantanamo Bay detainee raises more questions than answers.
Yemeni government officials, who have been briefed on the autopsy report, as well as a US military investigator close to the case, told Truthout this weekend that a military medical examiner has concluded the manner of death of the 36-year-old prisoner was suicide. However, the cause of death has not yet been disclosed and the autopsy's reported conclusions conflict with previous statements by US and Yemeni government officials that there was no sign of "self-harm" on his body when he was found "motionless and unresponsive" in his cell in a disciplinary wing of Camp 5 on the afternoon of September 8. Release Shaker Aamer from Guantanamo Bay. Name not displayed, CT Apr 15, 17:41 Ms. samiha el-kanj, SW Apr 15, 02:03 I think every person should stand for trial in their own country where they can still contact their families and no one should be locked up until proven guilty. send a green star Ms.
Chenae Meneely, CA Apr 14, 22:51 This is an immediate Human Rights issue.Amar needs to be released NOW. send a green star Name not displayed, IL Apr 14, 19:29 Dr. Apr 14, 10:28 "Please sign and share the international petition here, if you haven't already: send a green star Ms. Apr 14, 01:41 No father should been taken away from his wife and children. send a green star Name not displayed, CA Apr 13, 22:59 This man has never been charged with a crime. Name not displayed, Denmark Apr 13, 16:13 This is cruelty. Name not displayed, United Kingdom Apr 13, 01:11 Name not displayed, Jamaica Apr 11, 10:15 release our brother to his family and fear ALLAH Apr 08, 08:17 Name not displayed, QC Apr 08, 07:15 Mr. Life and Death at Guantánamo Bay | Rights & Liberties. Guantanamo documents name Pakistan ISI as al Qaeda associate | World. By Chris Allbritton ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - The U.S. military classified Pakistan's top spy agency as a terrorist support entity in 2007 and used association with it as a justification to detain prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, according to leaked documents published on Sunday that are sure to further alienate Pakistan.
One document (link.reuters.com/tyn29r), given to The New York Times, say detainees who associated with Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate "may have provided support to al-Qaida or the Taliban, or engaged in hostilities against U.S. or Coalition forces. " The ISI, along with al Qaeda, Hamas and Hezbollah and Iranian intelligence, are among 32 groups on the list of "associated forces," which also includes Egypt's Islamic Jihad, headed by al Qaeda deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri. The ISI said it had no comment. Guantánamo's Children: The Wikileaked Testimonies. On April 24, 2011, the transparency organization Wikileaks began to release Detainee Assessment Briefs and other classified documents for all 779 Guantánamo prisoners. This revealed that military authorities have acknowledged that Mr. Abdul Samad, Mr.
Ibrahim Umar al Umar, Mr. Khalil Rahman Hafez, and Mr. Abdullah R. Razzaq were all imprisoned at Guantánamo as children. As a consequence of the wikileaked releases, military documents in the public domain now acknowledge that fifteen children were imprisoned, at some time or another, at Guantánamo (see table below). In short, military documents recently wikileaked indicate that the number of children that have been imprisoned at Guantanamo is one-and-a-quarter times what the State Department has admitted to the public and almost twice as many as it reported to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child. The Cases of Shams Ullah, Mohammed Ismail, Abdul Quddus, Muhammed al Qarani And then there is the case of Mr.
Could there be more? Notes 1. 04-26 The Guantanamo Children: These Aren't What You'd Call 'Little League' Terrorists. *With research assistance from Heather Marsh Pakistani national Naqib Ullah (also Naqibullah) was 14 years old and out doing an errand for his father when he was kidnapped from his village in Khan, Afghanistan by 11 men that called themselves, “Samoud’s people.” The men, according to Ullah, “forcibly raped him at gunpoint”. He was taken back to the men’s village encampment and “forced to do manual work.” Ullah was in the camp for three days when, in December 2002, US forces raided the camp. The group had been forewarned. This teenager is just one of twenty-two juveniles who wound up in Guantanamo. Article 1 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child defines a child as “every human being below the age of eighteen years unless under the law applicable to the child, majority is attained earlier.”
UN officials have called on the US to “respect the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child,” which “aims to increase the protection of children during armed conflicts. U.S. kept Khadr at Gitmo to grill him: files - World. The U.S. military prolonged Omar Khadr's detention at its prison in Guantanamo Bay in part because the young Canadian continued "to provide valuable information" during interrogations, a secret 2004 document reveals. Khadr coughed up details about purported al-Qaeda training camps, "key" al-Qaeda and Taliban militants, and "non-governmental organizations that he worked with in supporting al-Qaeda," the file says.
"Detainee has been generally co-operative and forthcoming," reads the memo, addressed to the head of the U.S. military's Southern Command, which includes the naval base and prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The document was obtained by the whistleblower website WikiLeaks and released Sunday night. It lists the U.S. Defence Department's "reasons for continued detention" of Khadr, who was captured in Afghanistan in 2002, at age 15, following a firefight with American special forces. Leaked files Khadr is one of 172 remaining Guantanamo detainees and the last Western citizen there.
05-19 Omar Khadr Part 1 of 4: “Omar Khadr is a lovely young man” Omar Khadr (centre in the picture at left) was born in Toronto, Canada on September 19, 1986. His father was an Egyptian born Canadian who ran charities to provide food and education for orphans, and was an old friend of Osama Bin Laden. His mother was a Canadian of Palestinian descent. Omar spoke four languages fluently. When he was 15, his family sent him to accompany a group as a translator. The US military identified that group as Al Qaeda. In July 2002, US Special Forces attacked the camp where he was staying. When US military entered the site, Omar was buried face down under rubble, blinded by shrapnel and crippled.
During the attack on the camp, a US special forces soldier was wounded and later died. From Lawyers Rights Watch Canada: February also saw the accidental release of a five-page "OC-1" witness report to reporters, which revealed that Omar had not been the only survivor in the compound, as previously claimed, and that nobody had seen him throw the grenade. Omar Khadr Part 2 of 4: Canada, the entire world is still watching. "There would be virtually no political blowback domestically for the Conservative Party if the government chooses to pursue an appeal, making this a strong likelihood.” The above statement from US State cable #09OTTAWA629 sums up the last decade of Omar Khadr’s life. The Canadian government, under the last three prime ministers, two Liberal and one Conservative, have done nothing about the plight of a tortured fifteen year old Canadian boy imprisoned with no trial in the world’s most notorious torture camps.
They have contributed nothing to his education, nor to his emotional or psychological welfare. They have expressed no concern for his well being. In Omar’s affidavit statement, of February 22, 2008 he wrote of visits "on numerous occasions" from people claiming to be from the Canadian government who came to interview him in a special "more comfortable" room than the usual interrogation room. I was very hopeful that they would help me. Complicity, lies and endless lawsuits.
Omar Khadr Part 3 of 4: “The world doesn't get it” WikiLeaks and the 22 Children of Guantánamo. In May 2008, in a submission to the 48th Session of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (PDF), the Pentagon claimed that it had only held eight juveniles — those under the age of 18 when their alleged crimes took place — during the life of the Guantánamo Bay prison. This, however, was a lie, as its own documents providing the names and dates of birth of prisoners, released in May 2006 (PDF), showed that the true total was much higher.
In November 2008, the UC Davis Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas published a report, “Guantánamo’s Children: Military and Diplomatic Testimonies,” presenting evidence that 12 juveniles had been held, and this was then officially acknowledged by the Pentagon. Two and a half years later, I stand by that report, and am only prepared to concede that up to three of the prisoners I identified as juveniles may have been 18 at the time of their capture. I would say, despite their age, these are very, very dangerous people. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. What the Guantanamo leaks won't reveal. In the coming days, many will pore over the Guantánamo files released by Wikileaks to find startling revelations or to justify pre-existing positions. But before diving in, it may help to reflect on a few things that may not be explicit in the documents but are crucial to understanding their significance. These include: 1.
“Threat assessment” is a game with no winners: If the initial document dump is any guide, most of what Wikileaks has obtained are “detainee assessments” that reveal more about the inner fantasy world of the US intelligence apparatus than who the detainees really are. The fantasy is not some elaborate conspiracy to fabricate stories from whole cloth; rather, it is the result of an intense desire for “useful” intelligence, coupled with an astounding lack of safeguards or quality control.
Journalists and bloggers are already hard at work cataloging the contradictions, omissions, and simple failures of logic in these files. 2. 3. 4. 5. WikiLeaks files prove I was tortured: Habib. Updated Tue 26 Apr 2011, 11:26am AEST Former Australian terrorism suspect Mamdouh Habib says just-released secret documents from the Guantanamo Bay prison camp prove he was tortured by Egyptian authorities. The WikiLeaks website has released what it says are secret US intelligence files on Guantanamo inmates, including Mr Habib and Australian David Hicks.
Mr Habib's file says he spent six months being questioned by Egyptian interrogators before being sent to Guantanamo. It says that while under extreme duress from Egyptian interrogators he admitted planning to hijack a Qantas plane, training six of the 9/11 hijackers in martial arts, and having information on his home computer on how to poison a US river. The document states Mr Habib later retracted all these statements, but nevertheless they are cited as reasons for continuing his detention. Mr Habib, who was released from Guantanamo Bay without charge in 2005, has strongly denied making any of the alleged admissions. 'Combat-hardened' Andy Worthington on Democracy Now! -- WikiLeaks Documents Reveal U.S. Knowingly Imprisoned 150 Innocent Men at Guantánamo. WikiLeaks And The 14 Missing Guantanamo Files. WikiLeaks: The Unknown Prisoners Of Guantanamo (Part One of Five) The unknown prisoners of Guantánamo (Part 2 of 5)
The unknown prisoners of Guantánamo (Part 3 of 5) WikiLeaks: The Unknown Prisoners of Guantánamo (Part Four of Five) | Andy Worthington - WikiLeaks: The Unknown Prisoners of Guantánamo (Part Five of Five) | Andy Worthington - The Guantánamo Files. The Guantanamo Files: What Can Be Found in a File. The Guantanamo Files. Guantánamo Files - Lives in an American Limbo. Guantánamo Files - Suicide as Act of War or Despair. The Guantánamo Docket – The New York Times. WikiLeaks: Guantanamo Bay terrorist secrets revealed. Guantanamo Bay Wikileaks Cables - Telegraph - The Guantánamo files | World news.
Guantánamo files paint Aafia Siddiqui as top al-Qaida operative | World news. New Head Of CIA National Clandestine Service Featured In Wikileaks Cables On Torture Case. Guantánamo Bay files: 'The vast majority were not extremists' - video | World news. Guantánamo files: US agencies fought internal war over handling of detainees | World news. Guantánamo Bay files: Torture gets results, US military insists | World news. Guantánamo Bay files: Grim toll on mental health of prisoners | World news. Guantánamo Bay files: Shaker Aamer, inmate from Britain the US won't let go | World news. Guantánamo Bay files: Star informer freed after implicating 123 prisoners | World news.
Guantánamo Bay files: Al-Qaida assassin 'worked for MI6' | World news. WikiLeaks detail Guantánamo's prison camp secrets - Guantánamo. WikiLeaks: Just 8 at Gitmo gave evidence against 255 others.