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'Scathing' Report From UN Expert's Historic Visit Revives Calls to Close Guantánamo
"It is well past time to demand the closure of the prison, accountability from U.S. officials, and reparations for the torture and other ill-treatment that the detainees have suffered at the hands of the U.S. government," said one campaigner.
Jun 26, 2023
Human rights advocates on Monday renewed their calls for the swift closure of the U.S. prison at Naval Station Guantánamo Bay in Cuba after a United Nations expert released the findings from her historic trip to the infamous facility.
The prison was established in 2002, after then-President George W. Bush launched the War on Terror in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks. On the campaign trail and since taking office, President Joe Biden—who is seeking reelection next year—has indicated he wants to close the facility. His administration was the first to allow a visit by a U.N. expert earlier this year.
Irish attorney and law professor Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, the U.N. special rapporteur (SR) on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, focused on three key topics: "the rights of victims of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the rights of detainees at the Guantánamo detention facility, and the rights of former detainees."
"The Biden administration needs to get out of its own way on Guantánamo closure."
Allowing U.N. access to the prison "is an important signal from the United States government to the international community that the Guantánamo detention facility is on a path to de-exceptionalism," her report states. "It opens the possibility to address the profound human rights violations that have occurred there and the irreparable harms to the lives and health of the 780 Muslim men who have been detained there, including 30 men who remain."
"For many of the detainees she spoke with, the dividing line between the past and the present is exceptionally thin—for some nonexistent—and their past experiences of torture live with them in the present, without any obvious end in sight including because they have received no torture rehabilitation to date," the publication continues, adding that despite improvements since 2002, current conditions amount to "ongoing cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment at the Guantánamo Bay detention facility, and may also meet the legal threshold for torture."
According to the report, which was released on the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture:
In every meeting she held with a detainee or former detainee, the SR was told with great regret that she had arrived "too late." She agrees. At the time of her visit only 34 detainees remained at the site. It is evident that the horror and harms of extraordinary rendition, arbitrary detention, and systematic torture, cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment or punishment inflicted over time occurred in part because of an exceptional and international law deficient legal and policy regime; the permeation of arbitrariness across subsequent detention practices; and the lack of international law compliant domestic oversight and accountability...
The SR reaffirms the right to remedy and reparations for victims of serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law, underscoring that such rights encompass preventive and investigative elements, as well as the right to access justice, remedy, and reparation. The U.S. government is under a continued obligation to ensure accountability, make full reparation for the injuries caused, and offer appropriate guarantees of nonrepetition for violations committed post-9/11. The world has and will not forget. Without accountability, there is no moving forward on Guantánamo.
The document also praises the U.S. government, saying that "it is a sign of a commitment to international law that the visit occurred, was highly cooperative, constructive, and engaged at all levels of government, and is reported upon."
In its formal response, the U.S. government said it provided Ní Aoláin with "unprecedented access" and her team with "detailed information both prior to her visit and in response to her questions." The statement notes the "significant progress" the Biden administration has made in reducing the Guantánamo population, highlights ongoing military commissions and transfer efforts, and reaffirms the president's intention to close the facility.
The statement also stresses that while the administration is reviewing the U.N. expert's recommendations, the government "disagrees in significant respects with many factual and legal assertions" in her report, and claims that the U.S. is committed to "safe and humane treatment" for Gitmo prisoners, who "receive specialized medical and psychiatric care."
Pointing to Ní Aoláin's report, Center for Victims of Torture policy analyst Yumna Rizvi said Monday that "the government is obligated to provide rehabilitation, and the detainees are entitled to it, but the government is continuing to choose not to meet its obligation."
"It has an opportunity to do so, and to lead as an example, especially as the largest contributor to the U.N. Voluntary Fund for the Victims of Torture," Rizvi added. "However, the U.S. continues to turn its back on what is right. The government's response to the report is a denial of the existing reality as it relates to medical care of detainees. The government must address these issues immediately before the worst possible outcome occurs, the responsibility of which will fall squarely on its shoulders."
Amnesty International secretary general Agnès Callamard—a former U.N. special rapporteur—said the "scathing" U.N. report highlights "the urgent need for President Biden to finally close the detention facility at the Guantánamo Bay military base, and to end the unlawful practice of indefinite detention without charge or trial."
"It is well past time to demand the closure of the prison, accountability from U.S. officials, and reparations for the torture and other ill-treatment that the detainees have suffered at the hands of the U.S. government," she argued. "There remains a shocking lack of access to justice for those currently or previously detained—and many have complex and untreated healthcare needs as a result of their ill-treatment."
"The military commissions created for Guantánamo Bay detainees, including those alleged to have planned or assisted the September 11 attacks, have been a complete failure through which the United States government has intentionally skirted U.S. and international law and abused the rights of those still imprisoned at the facility—jeopardizing the rights of survivors and families of victims of the attacks to receive justice," she added.
Wells Dixon, senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights and council to several Gitmo detainees, similarly declared that "the Biden administration needs to get out of its own way on Guantánamo closure."
"It makes no legal or policy sense for the government to continue to fight in court, to detain men it no longer wants to detain, in a prison it has said should be closed, in a war that has ended," said Dixon. "It also makes no sense to continue contested military trials that have failed to achieve justice or accountability for anyone."
September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows welcomed that "in issuing her report on Guantánamo, the special rapporteur stated unequivocally that, 'Torture was a betrayal of the rights of the victims of the 9/11 attacks.'"
"For families and survivors to ever receive a measure of judicial resolution, the fact that the 9/11 accused were tortured must be legally acknowledged," the organization asserted. "The U.S. government must now, more than two decades after the attacks, end the 9/11 military commission at Guantánamo, accept guilty pleas from the 9/11 defendants, and provide victims and survivors with the information and accountability they have so long sought."
Former Guantánamo prisoner Majid Khan, who was freed in February, said Monday that "I survived and have forgiven my torturers, and I am moving on with my life in Belize. But I still wait for an apology, medical care, and other compensation."
"I appreciate all the support that Belize has provided me, but responsibility lies with the U.S.," he said. "It would mean a lot to me. I also ask other countries to follow the example of Belize and offer safe refuge to other Guantánamo detainees approved for transfer, including men such as Guled Duran who was never charged with any wrongdoing. It is time to close Guantánamo."
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Negotiated Resolutions the 'Only Way' Guantánamo Prison Will Ever Close
"The military-commission system has failed to bring anyone to justice for anything through contested proceedings," said an attorney for Majid Khan, a tortured former prisoner recently released to Belize.
Feb 20, 2023
On February 2, U.S. prisoner and former al-Qaeda courier Majid Khan was released from the Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp in Cuba after more than 16 years of imprisonment. "We are very pleased with Majid's release," says J. Wells Dixon, a senior staff attorney at the New York City-based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR).
"Majid's transfer to Belize is the culmination of nearly 20 years of work by the CCR and the law firm Jenner & Block," Dixon tells The Progressive. "Our only regret is that he was not released sooner."
On October 7, 2001, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the United States, together with Great Britain, launched "Operation Enduring Freedom," the war in Afghanistan and the beginning of the "global war on terror." It was followed, in March 2003, by the U.S. invasion of Iraq ostensibly to end Saddam Hussein's dictatorship and to destroy his alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
On January 11, 2002, the first 20 detainees were delivered from CIA black sites to the Guantánamo military prison, known as Camp X-Ray, on the island of Cuba. Over the following two decades, approximately 780 detainees would be held there. Today, 34 detainees remain imprisoned in the detention facility. Most troubling, this prison held more than 150 innocent men for years. The Guantánamo prison and associated military courts currently cost U.S. taxpayers about $540 million a year (with about $13.5 million being spent on each detainee).
Khan was born in Pakistan, where he lived as a child, and later grew up in a suburb of Baltimore, Maryland. After 9/11, he returned to Pakistan and became a courier for al-Qaeda. He was arrested in Karachi in March 2003 and spent about three years in CIA black sites. He was then taken to Guantánamo in September 2006, which is when CCR began to represent him. He was charged by a military commission in 2012, pleaded guilty, and agreed to cooperate with U.S. authorities.
"I have a story that I have waited almost two decades to tell, so I want to start by thanking you for taking the time to listen to my statement," Khan begins in his October 2021 personal statement before his sentencing by a Guantánamo military commission. Khan said, "I want you to know what I did, what happened to me, and what I hope for the future."
Khan's testimony was also included in a report by the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. He was the first former prisoner of a CIA black site to openly describe the violent and cruel torture he suffered under what was infamously dubbed "enhanced interrogation." "The more I cooperated and told them, the more I was tortured," he said.
The committee's report was approved on December 13, 2012, but not declassified until 2014.
Kahn admitted to helping finance the 2003 bombing of a Marriott hotel in Jakarta, Indonesia, that killed eleven people. The Senate report notes that he was "an operative who could enter the United States easily and was tasked to research attacks against U.S. water reservoirs." And, according to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is considered to be the principal architect of the 9/11 attacks, Khan was "to deliver $50,000 to individuals working for a suspected terrorist leader named Hambali, the leader of al-Qaida's Southeast Asian affiliate known as 'J-I.'... Khan confirmed that the money had been delivered to an operative named Zubair..."
According to Khan, the CIA black site had dungeon-like conditions in which he was kept naked with a hood on his head, his arms chained in ways that made sleep impossible. The report chronicles that at the "[b]eginning in March 2004, and continuing until his rendition to U.S. military custody at Guantanamo Bay in September 2006, Majid Khan engaged in a series of hunger strikes and attempts at self-mutilation that required significant attention from CIA detention site personnel."
Most alarming was how the CIA responded to these actions:
Majid Khan was then subjected to involuntary rectal feeding and rectal hydration, which included two bottles of Ensure. Later that same day, Majid Khan's "lunch tray," consisting of hummus, pasta with sauce, nuts, and raisins, was "pureed" and rectally infused. Additional sessions of rectal feeding and hydration followed. In addition to his hunger strikes, Majid Khan engaged in acts of self-harm that included attempting to cut his wrist on two occasions, an attempt to chew into his arm at the inner elbow, an attempt to cut a vein in the top of his foot, and an attempt to cut into his skin at the elbow joint using a filed toothbrush.
Majid also said during his sentencing that he was raped with a garden hose: "While I was hanging for these three days, I recall one instance where I saw a guard or interrogator's face," he said. "This man sexually assaulted me while I was hanging naked. He touched my private parts while we were alone. I told this man to stop and that I wanted to see a lawyer. He responded, ‘Are you kidding, a lawyer? You are in no man's land. No one even knows where you are.'"
"Belize's offer of humanitarian resettlement [for Khan] is a model for other countries to offer [resettlement to] the remaining men."
"Let me be very clear, enhanced interrogation techniques are torture. And torture is—and always has been in modern times—illegal," insists Majid's attorney, Dixon. "There is no exception under U.S. and international law for torture. And the torture that was inflicted on Majid was a war crime that should have been—and should in the future be—prosecuted as a criminal act."
Colonel Douglas K. Watkins, a judge at the Guantánamo military court, considered Khan's treatment "shocking." In his June 2020 ruling on Khan's case, he wrote, "there is no serious dispute that Mr. Khan was tortured and suffered other illegal pretrial punishment both in CIA detention and at Guantanamo."
Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, in November 2001, President George W. Bush issued an executive order establishing military commissions in Guantánamo. They had no legal obligation to grant basic U.S. Constitutional protections to prisoners because the prison was outside of the United States. In addition, they did have to adhere to the Geneva Conventions because these treaties did not apply to "unlawful enemy combatants."
In 2006 the U.S. Supreme Court found that the system of military commissions that was to be used to try selected prisoners held at Guantánamo was in violation of the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
Dixon points out that "when Majid Khan was brought to Guantánamo in September 2006, the assumption by the Bush Administration was that the U.S. military would go along with what the CIA had done, and would help to cover up what the CIA had done." He then adds, "But when push came to shove when Majid got in front of a military judge and a military jury, that military judge said this was torture—and the military jury condemned it."
"There are 34 men who remain, and the overwhelming majority of those men have been approved for transfer," Dixon adds. "Belize's offer of humanitarian resettlement [for Khan] is a model for other countries to offer [resettlement to] the remaining men."
Going further, he notes that "there [are] a small number of men who are still involved in the military commission system including the so-called 9/11 defendants—i.e., the five men who are accused of plotting the 9/11 attacks. So, what do we do about those men?"
"I'm not involved in those cases but having been through the military-commission system with Mr. Khan," Dixon argues. "I can say this, the military-commission system has failed to bring anyone to justice for anything through contested proceedings. The only success the military commission system has seen is through guilty pleas like that of Mr. Khan."
Dixon adds, "My point is that we will never have accountability for 9/11 if those cases continue toward trial because they will never get to trial, and if they get to trial, they will be overturned on appeal because of issue of the torture." He goes further, pointing out, "negotiated resolutions of the remaining military commission cases is the only way to obtain any modicum of justice and accountability. And it's the only way Guantánamo is going to close."
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