Why is Shaker Aamer heading for the Supermax treatment, despite pressure from London?
Not many human rights advocates are willing to take Rudy Giuliani's side in an argument. But the Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan is just plain wrong when he takes him to task for opining that "Guantanamo is better than half the Federal prisons."
There is little that compares with the horrors awaiting Guantanamo inmates in the Supermax system.
Just ask the International Committee of the Red Cross or Human Rights Watch what they think of the catacombs known as Supermaxes that American lifers are tossed into. Check out 60 Minutes "A Cean Version of Hell for a quick and dirty account.
Inmates spend 23 hours a day in their tiny cells, the small window is blocked off. Some like Ramzi Yusuf have never left their cell in the years they have been there. There have been force-feedings, as many as 900 of incarcerated terrorists since 1980.
Inside Supermax there is an Ultramax where Yusuf and other prisoners are not allowed to see guards or prisoners, day or night. So there's is a case that the human rights of those in Guantanamo would be far better protected in Gitmo than if transferred to the US "Homeland".
There are no ICRC visits to these US prisons, so we ton't know much about the brutality. Its worth recalling that virtually everything we know about the terrible abuses at Guantanamo came from leaked ICRC reports reported by Mark Danner in the New York Review of Books
The 60 Minutes Supermax broadcast
More disturbing revelations about the conditions in Gitmo have emerged in an epic report by Scott Horton in the March issue of Harpers Magazine. Analysing the heavily censored evidence of prison guards, Horton strongly suggests that the three prisoners did not
infact hang themselves. Here's his account:
Two years later, the U.S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service, ...issued a report supporting the account ...some 1,700 pages of documents so heavily redacted as to be nearly incomprehensible..(were)..deciphered by students and faculty at the law school of Seton Hall University in New Jersey, and their findings, released in November 2009, made clear why the Pentagon had been unwilling to make its conclusions public. The official story of the prisoners' deaths was full of unacknowledged contradictions, and the centerpiece of the report--a reconstruction of the events--was simply unbelievable.
According to the NCIS, each prisoner had fashioned a noose from torn sheets and T-shirts and tied it to the top of his cell's eight-foot-high steel-mesh wall. Each prisoner was able somehow to bind his own hands, and, in at least one case, his own feet, then stuff more rags deep down into his own throat. We are then asked to believe that each prisoner, even as he was choking on those rags, climbed up on his washbasin, slipped his head through the noose, tightened it, and leapt from the washbasin to hang until he asphyxiated. The NCIS report also proposes that the three prisoners, who were held in non-adjoining cells, carried out each of these actions almost simultaneously.
The fate of a fourth prisoner, a forty-two-year-old Saudi Arabian named Shaker Aamer, may be related to that of the three prisoners who died on June 9. Aamer is married to a British woman and was in the process of becoming a British subject when he was captured in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, in 2001. United States authorities insist that he carried a gun and served Osama bin Laden as an interpreter. Aamer denies this. At Guantánamo, Aamer's fluency in English soon allowed him to play an important role in camp politics. According to both Aamer's attorney and press accounts furnished by Army Colonel Michael Bumgarner, the Camp America commander, Aamer cooperated closely with Bumgarner in efforts to bring a 2005 hunger strike to an end. He persuaded several prisoners to break their strike for a while, but the settlement collapsed and soon afterward Aamer was sent to solitary confinement. Then, on the night of June 9, 2006, Aamer says he was the victim of an act of striking brutality.
He described the events in detail to his lawyer, Zachary Katznelson, who was permitted to speak to him several weeks later. Katznelson recorded every detail of Aamer's account and filed an affidavit with the federal district court in Washington, setting it out
On June 9th, 2006, [Aamer] was beaten for two and a half hours straight. Seven naval military police participated in his beating. Mr. Aamer stated he had refused to provide a retina scan and fingerprints. He reported to me that he was strapped to a chair, fully restrained at the head, arms and legs. The MPs 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 jawline, in the hollow beneath his ears. They choked him. They bent his nose repeatedly so hard to the side he thought it would break. They pinched his thighs and feet constantly. They gouged his eyes. They held his eyes open and shined a mag-lite in them for minutes on end, generating intense heat. They bent his fingers until he screamed. When he screamed, they cut off his airway, then put a mask on him so he could not cry out.
The United Kingdom has pressed aggressively for the return of British subjects and persons of interest. Every individual requested by the British has been turned over, with one exception: Shaker Aamer. In denying this request, U.S. authorities have cited unelaborated "security" concerns. There is no suggestion that the Americans intend to charge him before a military commission, or in a federal criminal court, and, indeed, they have no meaningful evidence linking him to any crime. American authorities may be concerned that Aamer, if released, could provide evidence against them in criminal investigations. This evidence would include what he experienced on June 9, 2006, and during his 2002 detention in Afghanistan at Bagram Airfield, where he was subjected to a procedure in which his head was smashed repeatedly against a wall. This torture technique, called "walling" in CIA documents, was expressly approved at a later date by the Department of Justice.<
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