UK citizens uncover new Guantanamo scandals
9/22/2006 3:45:00 PM GMT
In a letter published in The Times newspaper earlier this week, a team of more than 100 medics slammed the Foreign Office for colluding in war crimes and refusing to respond to a request from the British Medical Association (BMA) to send a team of doctors to the U.S.-run detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and calling for an immediate investigation into the medical needs of the detainees held there.
"Our government's excuse is that it does not wish to set a precedent to act for British residents, rather than British citizens. We find this morally repugnant," said the letter, signed by 120 medical professionals.
"It is clear that an independent scrutiny is urgently required by physicians outside the U.S. military. The silence of the Foreign Office is shameful and reflects the collusion of this country in a war crime."
Medics also criticized the Foreign Office's medical and legal panels for failing to tackle the plight of the detainees simply because they don’t have British passports.
Nine British citizens have been released from Guantanamo jail since 2004. Another eight men, all with British residency rights, are still held there, and some are kept in solitary confinement, without being charged with any crime.
Also recently and for the first time, the extent of barbarity of Guantanamo prison guards and the extent of torture inflicted upon British residents held there was uncovered in a series of interviews with the detainees carried out by their human rights lawyers, according to UK’s The Independent.
In some cases detainees are strapped to a chair andbeaten and tortured till death, according to documents submitted to the American courts.
Among other inhuman methods used at Guantanamo as reported by The Independent is subjecting detainees to extreme temperatures, sleep deprivation and the confiscation of the most basic necessities, like lavatory paper and blankets.
Among torture cases was that of Shaker Aamer, a Saudi national who used to live in London with his family until he got arrested four years ago.
Aamer said that last year he was beaten and tortured by Guantanamo guards simply because he failed to provide a retina scan and fingerprints to the camp authorities.
According to the habeas corpus motion filed in the court of the District of Columbia, "The MPs [military police] inflicted so much pain; Mr Aamer said he thought he was going to die. The MPs pressed on pressure points all over his body: his temples, just under his jaw line, in the hollow beneath his ears. They choked him. They bent his nose so hard he thought it would break.
"They pinched his thighs and feet constantly. They gouged his eyes. They held his eyes open and shined a Maglite [torch] in them for minutes on end, generating intense heat. They bent his fingers until he screamed. When he screamed, they cut off his airway, and then put a mask on him so he could not cry out."
Aamer, who was used as a negotiator on behalf of the prisoners during recent incidents of detainees’ hunger strikes, was later sent to solitary confinement.
Lawyers from the human rights charity Reprieve visited Aamer who complained that he had not seen the sun for 79 days and was cut off from any contact with the outside world.
"At any moment, they can strip you naked. They will put your head in the toilet in the name of security. It is all about humiliation. They are trying to break me," Aamer told the lawyers.
In another detention centre known as Camp V, another British resident named Bisher al-Rawi, is being held in solitary confinement.
Among torture methods used against Al- Rawi was the use of extreme temperatures in the cells. Sometimes the guards let the temperatures reach 100 degrees in the morning and at night take away his sheet and use the air conditioning system to create freezing conditions.
Reprieve, the British based human rights charity representing Al Rawi and other British residents described their detention as a gross breach of international law and an infringement of the Geneva Conventions.
None of those British men held at Guantánamo has been independently examined, according to Amnesty International, which also stated that Omar Deghayes, one of the British residents held there, is believed to have been blinded in one eye by guards at the camp.
"It's shameful that in four and half years the government has not insisted on independent medical examinations for long-term residents of the UK held in the black hole of Guantánamo,” said Kate Allen, the director of Amnesty International UK.
"These men - some of whom are refugees that the UK has acknowledged to be vulnerable people - have essentially been left to rot in Guantánamo's cells. They're Guantánamo's forgotten prisoners."
The Pentagon has repeatedly claimed the absence of "credible evidence" physicians took part in derogatory and "inhumane treatment of detainees". However it admits that "behavioral science consultants" helped investigators exploit prisoners' weaknesses.
A Foreign Office spokesman had been quoted as saying that its policy doesn’t include providing non-British nationals with consular assistance or diplomatic protection, although it made an exception in the case of Al- Rawi.
Foreign secretary, Jack Straw, sent the U.S. Secretary of Sate Condoleezza Rice last April, asking the American government to release Al-Rawi, since he had provided assistance to the British intelligence agency MI5 and agreed to work for them in exchange for his release, according to a U.S. lawyer, George Brent Mickum IV.
About 460 detainees and what the Bush administration calls “terror suspects” are held at the U.S.-run Guantánamo jail, most of them without charges being filed against them, according to Amnesty International.
