Prisoners rebel against U.S. torture at Guantanamo

On May 19, just hours after prisoners fended off an attack by guards at the infamous U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the United Nations Committee on Torture issued a scathing report on Washington’s abuse of so-called terrorism suspects and called for that facility’s immediate closing.

According to U.S. military officials, 10-20 prisoners lured guards into an ambush on the night of May 18, using items from their common cell like surveillance cameras, fan blades and lighting tubes as weapons. The revolt was put down by troops from the reaction force,” firing rubber bullets and pepper spray.

However, several accounts, including an early report from NBC, conflicted with the official Pentagon story. These sources said the prisoners were responding to guards forcibly subduing fellow prisoners who was trying to commit suicide. (Granma International, May 20)

Army Col. Michael Bumgarner even admitted to the Associated Press that detainees had the upper hand in the fight, while officials scrambled to muster 100 more guards to regain control. “Frankly, we were losing the fight at that point,” Bumgarner said.

It was either the fourth or fifth attempted suicide at the Guantanamo facility that day. Prisoners reportedly used prescription anti-depressants they had saved up. Two men who overdosed earlier in the day remain in critical condition.

When word of the clash reached prisoners in another section of the camp, they staged a protest, which was also attacked by the “quick reaction force.” An elder prisoner was gassed, according to a May 21 report in the British newspaper The Independent. In all, at least six prisoners were injured.

British defense lawyers Clive Stafford Smith and Brent Mickum, who regularly visit clients held at Guantanamo, said the official U.S. account was “rubbish.” Others charged that the unusually detailed, immediate accounts amounted to a public-relations offensive by Washington to justify the camp’s existence on the eve of the UN report.

At least 460 prisoners are currently detained at Camp Delta in Guantanamo. Many have been held for over four years—since January 2002—without criminal charges or legal rights. Some have never seen a lawyer.

An unknown number have been extradited to their countries of origin—U.S. client states where, out of the spotlight, their fates are largely unknown.

Others, more fortunate, with legal representation, have successfully cleared their names and gone on to publicly denounce the trumped-up charges.

Fifteen detainees were transferred to Saudi Arabia on May 18. It is not clear if the suicide attempts that day were related.

There have been 41 reported suicide attempts since the facility opened, but this is widely believed to be the tip of the iceberg. Attorney Stafford Smith told AP that a client from Chad attempted suicide twice in January, but it was never officially reported.

When 23 detainees carried out a coordinated attempt to kill themselves in 2003, the U.S. military classified it as “injurious behavior” rather than suicide attempts. (The Guardian, May 20)

Last August, more than 120 prisoners staged a hunger strike to protest their indefinite imprisonment and the brutality of the “quick response force.”

Of course, the very existence of the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay has been an illegal infringement on the sovereign territory of socialist Cuba for the last 47 years.

U.S. guilty of torture

The UN Committee on Torture, composed of 10 independent human-rights experts, oversees implementation of the International Convention Against Torture, which the United States signed in 1994.

The committee specified May 19 that it possesses reliable documents showing that illegal U.S. prisons exist throughout the world, and that U.S. soldiers carry out cruel and inhuman treatment in those prisons.

Among the forms of torture cited in the committee’s 11-page preliminary report are: interrogation techniques such as the use of vicious dogs, sexual humiliation, a form of mock-drowning called “water-boarding,” and “short shackling,” which involves shackling a prisoner to a hook in the floor to limit movement. (IPS, May 19)

“After a lengthy review of U.S. policies, the panel dismissed several basic legal arguments the Bush administration had offered to justify such practices as the incommunicado detention of prisoners overseas and the secret transfer or ‘rendition’ of suspects for interrogation by the security forces of other governments,” reported the May 20 New York Times. The committee “also concluded that the CIA’s widely reported practice of holding detainees in secret prisons abroad violates the convention.

“The committee’s findings are not legally binding,” noted the Times. “But they are likely to be more influential than previous international reviews, in part because the Bush administration took the process seriously, sending a delegation of more than two dozen officials to Geneva this month to present its legal case.”

Bush has attempted to deflect criticism of the Guantanamo prison camp by saying he is waiting for the U.S. Supreme Court to rule on the prisoners’ legal standing. The White House wants to try detainees before secret military tribunals. A ruling is expected this summer.

U.S. officials said they were “disappointed” by the UN committee’s findings and denied that Camp Delta is illegal. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice asked, “If we do close down Guantanamo, what becomes of the hundreds of dangerous people who were picked up on the battlefields of Afghanistan?” (AFP, May 22)

As if to answer Rice’s overheated rhetoric, on May 21 five ex-Guantanamo detainees were cleared of all charges in a Kuwaiti criminal court. They had been arrested immediately after being returned to Kuwait last November, charged with raising funds for a charity that Washington alleges has links to al-Qaeda. (AP, May 21)