Political Report # 1279 Obama's Guantánamo Legacy Lingers in Trump Era

By By Aisha Maniar, Truthout

While President Trump has quickly developed a more violent record than Obama on drone warfare, immigration and other policy areas, Trump has thus far not embraced Guantánamo and made it his own the way that Obama did in 2009. The 41 prisoners who remained at the Guantánamo Bay prison camp when Obama left office continue to be the only prisoners in the camp, and the arbitrary regime continues almost entirely as it did under Obama. Trump's odd tweets about Guantánamo, such as his tweet about the alleged recidivism rate of former prisoners, are about as meaningful and effective as his tweets about covfefe and the country needing to "heel." Many of the 197 men released from Guantánamo by the Obama administration continue to suffer the repercussions of their imprisonment every day. More than two-thirds of releases under Obama were of men resettled in third countries. Most were effectively rendered refugees who could not return to their country of origin, either due to the safety risk that resulted from their association with Guantánamo or due to the United States' foreign policy of war and hostility in states such as Yemen and Syria. The problems for prisoners transferred to third countries where they had no friends, family, job or connections, and often could not speak the local language, started almost immediately. Coupled with intrusive surveillance and restrictions, freedom remained elusive.

Political Report # 1264 My Visit With One of the Forgotten Prisoners of Guantánamo

15 years later, the detention camp has become a place where time has no meaning.    By Noor Zafar, Mother Jones

Last month, I took my first trip to the US military detention camp at Guantánamo Bay to visit Sufyian Barhoumi. As a military handler drove me and my colleagues from the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) down the winding road from the ferry landing to the camp, I marveled at the lush green hills and sparkling blue water around us. The serenely beautiful setting stands in stark contrast to the detention camp, which is jarringly ugly: Endless rolls of rusty barbed wire, layers of fencing enmeshed with opaque green cloth, cages with peeling paint, gravel pits where grass should be. A warehouse to store men we don’t know what to do with. Guantánamo is a sprawling network of several smaller detention camps. Many of the camps, such as Camp Iguana, where children were held, are no longer in use. Currently, detainees are housed in two different camps. Fourteen “high value detainees,” who were interrogated at the CIA’s notorious “black sites” prior to being shipped to Guantánamo, are held in Camp 7. The rest, like Sufyian, are held in Camp 6. At Camp Echo, the site designated for client meetings, my colleagues and I are ushered into a tiny office. We submit our papers to a member of the Privilege Review Team (PRT), who must approve and stamp them before we can bring them into our meeting. The detainees and anyone who interacts with them are subject to a gag order. Very little information is allowed in, and very little is allowed out. Attorneys must obtain security clearances to meet with their clients because everything the detainees say is presumptively classified, even now, a decade and a half after they were brought here. The PRT must ensure that their utterances don’t pose a threat to national security before they can be declassified and shared with the public. I applied for my clearance to see Sufyian a few months before I graduated from law school; it took nearly 10 months to process.

Political Report # 1113 Despite Pledge, US Still Not Letting Gitmo Detainees Tell Their Stories By Jenna McLaughlin, The Intercept

Camp Delta at Guantanamo Bay prison camp. (photo: NBC)                               By Jenna McLaughlin, The Intercept

Despite promises to allow Guantanamo prisoners to speak more freely about their experiences there, the U.S. government is still blocking the release of over 100 pages of notes and diaries from torture victim Abu Zubaydah. The U.S. had for many years taken the position that the prisoners could not describe their own experiences of torture and confinement because those activities were classified. But in January, after the release of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report, the government changed its classification rules. In a brief filed in a military commission case, the government wrote that “general allegations of torture” minus specific details about the CIA agents involved or the location, were now unclassified. The brief specifically lists 119 names of prisoners who could now discuss details about their treatment-and, according to Joe Margulies, a law professor at Cornell and lead defense attorney for Zubaydah, his client’s name is the first one the list. Zubaydah, who the Bush administration incorrectly alleged was a key Al Qaeda operative and who has never been charged with a crime, has sent his lawyers hand-written letters, declarations, and other materials describing his torture and confinement in CIA black sites and Guantanamo Bay. Amy Jacobsen, Margulies’s co-counsel, laid out the specific steps the team took in submitting the Zubaydah material for review by the government’s Privilege Review Team in an e-mail to the Intercept. “The bulk of the material I submitted was taken from letters that [our client] had written to us, in which he described his torture, but there were also some notes from meetings with him, and some written declarations that he had made to us,” she wrote. “Sometimes these included physical descriptions of his torturers and indications of where in the world he was imprisoned, but I removed any such identifying information, leaving ellipses, such as this [ . . .] in their place,” she explained. “If he said what they were asking him about in the interrogation, I also removed that. The only information that I submitted for review was information regarding his torture, treatment, and conditions of confinement and transfer.”

Political Report #1076, "Guantánamo Diary'' Reveals How US Empire Can Capture, Torture and Imprison With Impunity By Mark Karlin, Truthout

 

A detainee walks up the stairs in a cell block common area of Camp 5 at Guantanamo Bay US Naval Base in Cuba, August 20, 2014. (Photo: Damon Winter/The New York Times)

By Mark Karlin, Truthout

Mohamedou Ould Slahi has never been charged him with a crime by the United States government, yet he as been imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay since 2002. Three years into his captivity, Slahi began writing a diary, recounting life before and after this terrible miscarriage of justice befell him. Guantánamo Diary is a tremendously important book, and it can be yours to own by making a donation to Truthout today. Given that the author of Guantánamo Diary - Mohamedou Ould Slahi - is still imprisoned there and prohibited from talking with the media, Truthout interviewed human rights activist and writer Larry Siems, who is the editor of Mohamedou Ould Slahi's handwritten diary. Siems is the former Director of Freedom to Write and International Programs at PEN American Center. He is also the author of The Torture Report: What the Documents Say About America's Post-9/11 Torture Program.