Were Gitmo Murders Covered Up As Suicides?

What really happened at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility on the night of June 9, 2006.

Gitmo Lawyer Speaks Out

David H. Remes is an American lawyer who has served as a pro bono attorney for several of the prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay prison. He was involved in litigation surrounding the Detainees Treatment Act of 2005, which denied prisoners the ability to submit habeas corpus petitions. In this interview with WeAreChange, Remes gives us a look at the current situation in gitmo, the start of the hunger strike and some of the personal stories of the detainees he represented.

WeAreChange

Horrifying Revelations About Force-Feeding at Guantanamo

The practice of force-feeding prisoners at Guantanamo Bay as a response to the mass hunger strike there has been increasingly criticized. But the military has continued to carry it out. Now, Al Jazeera has revealed in detail how the practice is takes place--and it’s not pretty.

The document states that prisoners who are force-fed are restrained by being shackled to a chair. Prisoners are also required to wear masks over their mouths to “prevent spitting and biting.” In some cases, Guantanamo prisoners are shackled for two hours. The masking and shackling of the prisoners is done to facilitate the tube that is snaked through prisoners’ nostrils until an X-ray or test dose of water confirms that the nutritional supplement reached their stomach.

Once the forced feeding process is over, a prisoner is placed in a cell that does not have running water. A guard then observes the prisoner to make sure he does not vomit up the nutritional supplement that was forced inside him. If the prisoner does vomit, he is punished. “Participation in the dry cell will be revoked and he will remain in the restraint chair for the entire observation time period during subsequent feedings,” the document reads.

More on Alternet - UN calls force-feeding at Guantanamo 'torture' (RT) - Gitmo hunger strike: Timeline

Guards shoot at Gitmo inmates forcing them to solitary cells

Inmates at the Guantanamo Bay prison have clashed with guards during an attempt to end a two-month long hunger strike there. Officers tried to forcibly remove detainees from communal living quarters and isolate them in individual cells. Non-lethal rounds were fired at the prisoners as they resisted with improvised weapons. More on RT

Guantanamo Detainees Brutally Force Fed During Hunger Strike

Up to 130 of the 166 detainees left in Guantanamo are reported to be taking part in a hunger strike with at least 11 being force fed (see also this piece by Chris Hayes at MSNBC). What is not widely reported is the brutal way that detainees have been force fed by the Guantanamo medical staff, a protocol that appears to be in use now.

As detainee lawyer Ramzi Kassen explains in Doctors of the Dark Side, detainees are strapped in a 5-point restraint chair–dubbed by some detainees the “torture” chair–and large tubes that may be left in for days are jammed down their noses without anesthesia or lubricants. When detainees resist the brutal procedure, they are forcibly extracted from their cells by soldiers in full riot gear at the direction of the medical staff.

Lawyers for the despairing detainees, of whom 86 were approved for release over two years ago, are very worried that their clients will die or be permanently injured in the hunger strike.

More on Disinformation

US Supreme Court Rejects ALL Guantanamo Detainee Torture Suits

Jose Padilla, a United States citizen, was incarcerated for four years without trial for an alleged 2002 "dirty bomb" plot and has been trying to sue U.S. officials for his mistreatment while detained in a military brig in South Carolina.
Despite Padilla receiving direct support by the ACLU, he has been unsuccessful at attempting to hold accountable those who have been responsible for his horrendous treatment.  Padilla's case has come to represent the overall demand by Guantanamo detainees that their cases be objectively considered. 

Yesterday, June 11, all cases filed by detainees were rejected by the United States Supreme Court, leaving little doubt as to the path this country is heading toward with its conclusion that American citizen or not, your rights end where the U.S. government says they end, regardless of Constitutional principles or legal review.
Jose Padilla has been dealt legal blow after legal blow; first having Atlanta's 11 Circuit Court of Appeals rule against U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke in September 2011, who noted that Padilla had been confined under harsh conditions and had not injured anyone, among other considerations. The majority issued their opinion in vague language that alluded to "an impermissible comparison to sentences imposed in other terrorism cases, and was based in part on inappropriate factors," as well as his suspected Al Qaeda training. (Source)

In January of this year, Padilla was then denied by the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Virgina as having any right to even file suit for his claims of illegal detention and torture. 

Activist Post

Inquiry into MI6 role in abduction and torture of Libyans

Scotland Yard has opened a criminal investigation into secret MI6 rendition operations that resulted in leading Libyan dissidents being abducted and flown to Tripoli, where they were subsequently tortured in Muammar Gaddafi's prisons.

The announcement came as the Metropolitan police and the director of public prosecutions, Keir Starmer, said there was insufficient evidence to prosecute individual MI5 or MI6 agents following lengthy investigations into allegations of British complicity in the torture of terrorism suspects in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The new investigation is to focus on Abdul Hakim Belhaj, a military commander of forces that opposed Gaddafi's rule, and Sami al-Saadi, who lodged complaints with the police last November after the chance discovery of a cache of classified documents in an abandoned Libyan government office laid bare the role MI6 played in their rendition.

Saadi was detained in Hong Kong in 2004 and then forced on to a plane to Tripoli with his wife and four children in an operation that MI6 mounted in co-operation with Gaddafi's intelligence chief, Moussa Koussa.

Belhaj was detained in Bangkok after an MI6 tip-off and allegedly tortured by US agents for several days before being flown to Tripoli, where he was imprisoned for several years and tortured.

The Guardian

But:

British spies escaped immediate criminal charges over torture complicity Thursday, but the country's top prosecutor ordered a new investigation into claims that intelligence shared with Moammar Gadhafi's regime led to the torture or rendition of Libyans.

Prosecutors have been investigating claims of mistreatment by detainees who were eventually sent to the United States prison in Guantanamo, Cuba. Most of the torture allegations come from terror suspects who were either initially held in Pakistan and Afghanistan, or sent to other countries such as Morocco for interrogation.

AP

Gitmo 10 years on: So much for closure

The US's Guantanamo Bay is marking its 10th anniversary, despite Obama’s repeated promises to close the infamous prison. The president even signed a new law authorizing the indefinite detention of terror suspects. ­Human-rights groups are organizing events to mark the occasion and respond to the broken promises. Obama has been criticized for not having a plan on how to close the detention facility, or at least for what to do with terror suspects.

Many believe the prospect of closing Guantanamo Bay has now become much more difficult, thanks to the passage of the National Defense Authorization Act by Congress (NDAA), signed by President Obama on December 31. Within that bill lie provisions that allow for the military to jail indefinitely anyone it considers a terrorism suspect – without charge or trial.  With that increased leniency, increased space to hold those prisoners will no doubt be needed.

Suspect Murat Kurnaz, one of seven hundred suspects who have passed through during 10 years, was captured in Pakistan in 2001 while working for an NGO that helped young people quit drugs. He was sent to Guantanamo and tortured – for five years – like many others allegedly being abused, never getting a trial.

“I got waterboarded after I had seen a couple things. A couple of people got killed in front of me. Some of them, they got just kicked on the head until he died and the other one he was hanging on chain until he died,” former Guantanamo Bay detainee Kurnaz says. He was forced to confess he was a member of Al-Qaeda, though he told them again and again he was not. “It was freezing cold.  It was winter time and I had no clothes on, so I was hanging there for many days,” Kurnaz remembers. “When the interrogator came they pulled me back down and he asked me are you going to sign or not and every time I said no, he just made like this and pulled me back up.”

It is stories like this that draw fierce condemnation. (RT)

Gitmo Files: WikiLeaks Reveals Secret Files on All Guantánamo Prisoners