A reported 103 of Guantanamo’s 166 prisoners are participating in the hunger strike, which has lasted for more than 100 days.Follow RT’s day-by-day timeline of the Gitmo hunger strike. Over the weekend, hacktivist group Anonymous marked the 100th day of the protest with “twitterstorms, email bombs and fax bombs” aimed at drawing worldwide attention to the hunger strikers. The US Military responded to ‘Operation Guantanamo’ by restricting wireless internet access at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. RT’s Marina Portnaya spoke with Ramzi Kassem, who represents Moath al Alawi, a prisoner held at Guantanamo without charge for 11 years.RT: Thank you for your time. When was you client shot and what were the circumstances of the shooting?Ramzi Kassem: On Saturday, April 13, 2013 the Guantanamo military prisoner administration decided to raid Camp 6, which is a prison facility at Guantanamo, where my client Mr. Alawi is being imprisoned. They conducted that raid in order to move all of the prisoners into solitary confinement. And that was just one additional way that the prison administration wanted to try to break the hunger strike. What happened on that day according to Mr. Alawi is that in that process he was shot without any warning for absolutely no good reason by one of the US Army guards at dangerously close range using rubber-coated steel bullets that are only safely used outside of a certain range. He was shot in five places: One shot was around the heart, another shot was in his elbow, another was in his shoulder, and there were a couple of impacts on his thighs. Particularly, the shot that went to his heart at that close of a range, even a rubber-coated steel bullet, can penetrate skin and can be fatal. The authorities of Guantanamo endangered Mr. Alawi’s life for no reason. They gave him no warning, fired at him repeatedly and then, following that fact, they delayed medical treatment that he should have received immediately.RT: Has the US government acknowledged that this shooting did take place?RK:Absolutely. I have received confirmation in writing by an email from the Department of Justice that Mr. Alawi sustained what they described as minor injuries. But when I heard the description from Mr. Alawi himself, it was very different from what I saw on the government’s email. We also received confirmation in writing from the US government via email that Mr. Alawi was force-fed. This is also a violation of international law.The fact that it is done in an unnecessarily painful and brutal way – prisoners are strapped down to these restraining chairs, that they have tubes forced down through their noses into their stomach. There are many other ways to tube-feed prisoners, even if these prisoners wished to be tube-fed, and the US government is again doing this in a deliberately violent way in order to break the hunger strikers.RT: Correct me if I am wrong: He is being held in Guantanamo without charges against him?RK:That’s correct. Mr. Alawi has never been charged with any crime. We have no reason to believe that the US government has any interest in charging him with an actual crime be it at a real court or at the military commission. The reality is that Mr. Alawi has been at Guantanamo for over 11 years without fair process and that is a reason he is on hunger strike today.RT: US President Barack Obama is expected to address the nation on Thursday speaking about Guantanamo detention center, and I assume he would address this hunger strike. What would you like to hear?RK:I can tell what I would not like to hear. I don’t want to hear the repetition of the promises that President Obama has been making for years. I don’t want to hear that he is going to appoint some official who will be responsible for closing Guantanamo. We’ve had an official like that for years, and Guantanamo was not closed. I don’t want to hear about the administrative review mechanisms, because we had many before that and they did not lead to any meaningful progress.The only official who is responsible for the existence of Guantanamo today as far as I am concerned and my client is concerned is President Obama himself. He need to take concrete steps towards closing that prison and I don’t believe the men in Guantanamo will interrupt their hunger strike unless President Obama take such concrete steps. One very obvious concrete step he can take is to begin by releasing some prisoners, who are approved for transfer, who can be repatriated or resettled in another country like another one of my clients Shaker Aamer, who has been approved for transfer for years. The UK has been asking for his release, that’s the US oldest and most trustful allies. He is a very natural first step if the president is about closing the Guantanamo. We need actions, deeds, not words. … Read More
‘Political football’: Gitmo detainees ‘abandoned’ by US government
On Thursday the number of Guantanamo’s 166 prisoners now taking part in the mass hunger strike reached 102. Thirty of the detainees are being force-fed, and three are being observed in the detainee hospital.Follow RT’s day-by-day timeline of the Gitmo hunger strike.In the eleven and a half years that the prisoners have been held in the detention camp, some 90 per cent of them have not been charged with a crime. That, coupled with the fact that many of the detainees were already cleared for release but have faced stiff resistance from Congress and equivocation from the White House, has forced the prisoners to risk life and health to be heard, Worthington told RT.RT: You’ve been gathering information on the inmates – What can you tell us about the conditions for them now. Andy Worthington: Well the conditions for them are terrible in the sense that they have literally been abandoned by all three branches of the United States government. So since President Obama failed to keep his promise to close the prison within a year – that was in January 2010 – they have been unable to see any future for themselves apart from staying in Guantanamo forever. And what underpins the horror of all of this is that half of these men were cleared by an interagency task force which the president himself established. But he then imposed a ban on releasing two-thirds of them because they’re Yeminis after a failed bomb plot in Christmas 2009. And the rest of the men, in fact all of the men have had their release blocked or made extremely difficult by Congress. So it’s become a game of political football, cynically I think lawmakers are preventing prisoners from being released and the president himself has been unwilling to expend political capital on an issue that isn’t popular enough with the voters. So it’s taken the hunger strike for the prisoners to get noticed.RT: These men are now taking desperate measures, but we’ve seen hunger strikes there before. So will this one have any significant impact?AW: Well, I think it has to because it’s such a long time the prison has been open. It’s not as though anyone legitimately is claiming that there is any reason [for most of] these men to be held apart from the fact that it’s proven difficult to close the facility down and to release the majority of them. So I think the pressing question is: how is the administration going to go about particularly resolving the issue of the prisoners that its task force said the US no longer wanted to hold. Those men have to be released, and there have been good signs this week from [Attorney General] Eric Holder saying, following what President Obama said two weeks ago, that they are looking to appoint someone to oversee the Guantanamo issue and yesterday hinting that this ban on the Yeminis, which officials reinforced just a few weeks ago, by saying that maybe they are thinking of lifting the ban. They have to lift the ban. It’s absolutely critical that these 56 Yeminis are sent home.RT: And even Hillary Clinton said yesterday that the 86 who are being held without charge should be released, so in effect there could be a turn of the tide. At the same time, let’s concentrate on conditions for those prisoners at the moment, because it seems that they are getting worse and that the authorities there are really putting further pressure on them. That’s according to reports from the prisoners themselves.AW: Absolutely. I agree with all of the experts who find the force feeding of prisoners deplorable, but that said, there really is no way the United States government is going to allow prisoners to die at Guantanamo if they can help it, whether they should be allowing them to or not.RT: So what are the consequences if the prisoners die? Would that really be a turning point if that did happen? AW: Well, I think the turning point that needs to happen is the political turning point. You know, the reason the men are doing this is because they are in despair. The reason they are doing this is because half of them were told they are going home and haven’t gone anywhere. So it needs resolving on that basis. As soon as there is motion on that, I suspect that the repercussions in the prison will bring that issue down a little bit. At the moment it seems to be very much [that] the prison is a kind of terrible bubble within which the authorities have been trying to regain the upper hand over the prisoners and have resorted to isolating them, which is a terrible thing for these men who are already despairing, and having to force feed them in this manner. If the politics takes the lead, we’ll actually see some improvement.RT: If politics takes the lead and let’s say the prison is closed down, won’t we see another one opening up in its place?AW: I don’t think we’re close to seeing this one close down. We have to get the 86 cleared prisoners released. We then have 80 men left at Guantanamo. Some of these men are supposed to face trial, those of course have been very, very slow in happening and 46 of them were designated for indefinite detention without charge or trial by President Obama in an executive order two years ago. Now at the time, the only thing that made this notion even vaguely palatable to lawyers and human rights groups was that he promised there would be periodic reviews of these men’s cases to establish whether they remain a threat. Those reviews haven’t happened at all, so they need to happen, and there needs to be a genuine, objective analysis of quite how many really dangerous prisoners there are or ever have been in Guantanamo, and these people must be tried. Everything that we’ve seen over the years, and these are reports from the inside, suggest that this is no more than a few dozen of the 166 men who are still being held. … Read More
Guantanamo denying detainees lawyer contact without invasive body search
See our timeline of the Guantanamo Bay hunger strike.Clive Stafford Smith, who currently represents several inmates at the US prison camp through the legal charity Reprieve, claims that guards at the facility are requiring invasive searches before detainees can conduct in-person interviews or even phone calls to lawyers.A copy of the letter was obtained by The Guardian, and states that as a direct result of the new policy two of Smith’s clients were recently barred from speaking with their legal representatives after refusing the searches.”The US military has started directly abusing prisoners who want to contact their lawyers to tell them what is happening. So anyone who wants to see a lawyer, or have a legal phone call, must have his fingers put up his anus and his genitals touched,” Smith writes.There are currently 100 inmates confirmed by US authorities as participating in the hunger strike at Guantanamo Bay since it began in earnest back in February, 29 of whom are being force-fed via tubes.Five of those prisoners are being observed in the detainee hospital, according to a statement by US Army spokesperson Lt. Col. Samuel House on Monday. The official numbers differ from those of human rights activists, who have put the number of strikers at up to 130.The claims by Smith coincide with failure by one of his clients, Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel, to speak with him via telephone last Friday, allegedly due to the new policy. Moqbel, who is participating in the hunger strike, was the recent author of a New York Times op-ed which detailed the pain and emotional impact of being force-fed by nasal tubes. Agence France-Presse (AFP) has independently reported that another lawyer, David Remes, had two detainees he currently represents decline calls due to the new search procedures.”Under the new search policy, a detainee who leaves his camp is subject to a search including his private parts and holding his private parts,” Remes said.He added that the “shocking” searches were “designed to deter many detainees from meeting with their [lawyers] … to make their life more miserable and put the detainees in front of an impossible choice.”In response to the allegations, Lt. Col. Samuel House has told The Guardian that the new search procedures do not represent anything beyond a pat down:”Full frisk searches are conducted in a professional manner to quickly locate and identify contraband hidden on the body. The searches are conducted with clothes on, similar to a pat-down search conducted by an airport security screener,” says House.According to House, the new procedures were enacted “in light of contraband discovered during recent cell searches.”For his part, Smith believes the allegedly invasive searches cannot be justified.”Any pretext given for these new rules is just that: a pretext. The prisoners do not need to be sexually assaulted in order to be taken to a telephone to talk to their lawyer,” he said. … Read More
Obama ‘prefers Guantanamo status quo’
Twenty-four hunger strikers are now receiving enteral feeds, with three people “being observed in the detainee hospital,” according to Guantanamo Bay Public Affairs Director Lieutenant Colonel Samuel E. House. His most recent report put the official number of hunger strikers at 100.Although Guantanamo Bay remains open over four years after Obama pledged to close it, the President continues to voice his disapproval of the detention center.In his first public response to the ongoing hunger strike, Obama said it was “not a surprise” that there are “problems in Guantanamo.”"It is critical for us to understand that Guantanamo is not necessary to keep America safe. It is expensive. It is inefficient. It hurts us in terms of our international standing. It lessens cooperation with our allies on counterterrorism efforts. It is a recruitment tool for extremists. It needs to be closed,” he said in an April 30 statement.The next day, Obama announced that he was considering hiring a new State Department official to oversee options for a future transfer of the prison’s detainees once it closes.Earlier this month it has been revealed that keeping Guantanamo Bay running is costing the US some $150 million a year.Medea Benjamin, author of the book “Drone Warfare,” shared her thoughts with RT on why the Obama never kept his promise to shut down the notorious detention facility.RT: President Obama pledged to close Guantanamo when he assumed office in 2009. But over four years later, it’s still open. Why?Medea Benjamin: People around the world are saying if the President of the United States says the prison should be closed, why is it still open? That’s a very logical question to ask. I think that the politics in the US is so partisan that the President is concerned already about who is going to be running in the next presidential election as the democratic candidate, the Congressional elections, wanting to make sure that as many democrats as possible win. The President doesn’t want to be seen as soft, and national security issues. He doesn’t think the American people care enough about this issue. And so he prefers to keep the status quo. The status quo means that desperate men are dying and are being tortured by being force-fed. That is not a status quo that we, the American people, should allow, if we want to continue to call ourselves a democracy.RT: The prisoners’ hunger strike has been going on for over two months now, but there’s very little information coming from most media outlets. So what’s really going on there now?MB: The prisoners who have had a chance to get messages out to their lawyers have described the terrible situation that they are in being strapped down for several hours having these tubes stuffed down the nose and into their stomach. They say it feels like a razor going down their bodies. This is another form of torture, and these prisoners have already endured years of torture in Guantanamo.RT: The hunger strike doesn’t seem to be obtaining the prisoners’ goals, especially since you mention they are being force-fed. So why are they continuing to starve themselves?MB: I think these inmates, or prisoners, as really what we should call them, are desperate and many of them are determined just to keep the hunger strike going. It’s difficult for them, because some of them are in isolation and they don’t know if other prisoners are continuing the hunger strike; are they being told that the other prisoners had stopped the hunger strike? I’m sure it’s a tremendous dilemma for them. But a number of those who have been able to speak through their lawyers have said they would rather die than live in these terrible conditions without ever knowing if they are going to be released.RT: President Obama says he still believes the prison should be closed. Do you think he was sincere in his statement last month? Does he have the power to do more than he is?MB: Obama is lacking the moral courage, he’s lacking the political will, he blames Congress, but really he has the power to release those prisoners who have already been cleared for release; demand a speedy and fair trial for the other ones and bring them into the US and close down the shameful prison of Guantanamo. We just have to force him to do it. We, the American people, the global community.RT: What should be done with the prisoners in the unlikely event that Guantanamo is shut down sometime in the near future?MB: One is to take the majority of prisoners, 86 of them, who have already been cleared by the US government – that means they have been found not to be guilty, not to be harmful to anybody – they should be released. The majority of them are from Yemen. The government of Yemen says they are totally prepared to take them back. There are other prisoners from countries like the United Kingdom that could certainly handle the return of prisoners. So those cleared for release should be released. The others should be sent to a prison in the US and should be tried in US courts just as other criminals are tried, many of them convicted and sentenced to life in prison. … Read More
Anonymous – Operation Guantanamo Bay – #OpGTMO – Obama Crimes Against Humanity
http://www.youtube.com/v/XAYULgwKOQ0?version=3&f=videos&app=youtube_gdata Read this article: Anonymous – Operation Guantanamo Bay – #OpGTMO – Obama Crimes Against Humanity
‘Astronomical costs’: Gitmo consumes $900,000 per prisoner annually
Follow RT’s day-by-day timeline of the Gitmo hunger strike.The prison camp situated at the US naval base in Cuba costs over $900,000 annually per prisoner, placing it far above the country’s maximum security prisons, which in comparison, cost $60,000 to $70,000 per prisoner. With 166 detainees, Gitmo devours over $150 million each year.“That … may be what finally get us to actually close the prison. I mean the costs are astronomical, when you compare them to what it would cost to detain somebody in the United States,” Ken Gude, chief of staff and vice president at the liberal Center for American Progress think tank told Reuters.The expense of maintaining the camp has led Obama to reiterate the necessity to close the prison, instated during the Republican presidency of George W. Bush, after having failed to fulfill his initial election promise to close the prison within a year of taking office as he had promised.The cost of the camp is so astronomical because the offshore location of the detention center and weak international ties between Cuba and America, mean that food, construction materials and other goods have to be shipped in from outside. Debate over the prison’s expenses has peaked during the course of budget battles between Obama and the Republican-dominated House of Representatives. Broad-scale spending cuts and the ‘sequestration’ of $109 billion have been set in place.The $900,000 annual cost per prisoner equates to the pay that was allocated to nearly seven states to help serve home delivered meals to the elderly, reports Reuters. Some $129,497 per state has been cut through sequestration.“No one has any particular affection for Guantanamo Bay, but no one has come up with a practical solution that’s better,” a Republican aide with the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee observed.Out of 166 detainees, as many as 130 are now currently taking part in a mass hunger-strike, their lawyers say. Official reports state that one hundred have joined the action.The strike began around February 6 and was instigated by widespread searches of detainees’ Korans – perceived as religious desecration – as well as searches and confiscation of other personal items, according to the strikers’ lawyers. Later, it grew into a protest against indefinite detention.The weakened state of the inmates has led to the authorities force-feeding them through nasal tubes – a practice which was condemned by the UN’s human rights office as a form of torture earlier this week.“If it’s perceived as torture or inhuman treatment – and it’s the case, it’s painful – then it is prohibited by international law,” Rupert Coville, spokesman for the UN high commissioner for human rights told AFP on Wednesday.American officials themselves have spoken out against the way in which the prison is administered.“Our taskforce was unanimous – we just do not believe that it fits into the laws and the ethics and the values of America to have indefinite detention, and to not allow a court of law – an adjudication of the charges against a person – to go through an orderly process,” Ambassador James Jones told RT late on Friday.He later pointed out that officials in charge have no reason to be holding more than half of the detainees.“We have actually prosecuted similar cases against other countries who have not followed what we say we ought to do, and we’re not following and practicing what we are preaching,” he said. … Read More
Guantanamo Prisoners as ‘Reengaged’ Terrorists
If Guantanamo prisoners are being held without charge, and there is no available evidence to charge them with any terrorism-related offenses, why is the Washington Post talking about the possibility that they may “reengage in extremist activity”? … Read More
