Guantanamo hunger
strikers out of bounds to
UN By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - Amid growing concern over the
fate and conditions of inmates engaged in a
lengthy hunger strike at the US detention facility
at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, US Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld said he would not permit United
Nations investigators to interview detainees
there.
Rumsfeld depicted the strike,
in which about half of the estimated 540 detainees
at the prison have so far reportedly taken part
since July, as a deliberate effort to attract
media attention. He stressed that the
International Committee of the Red Cross would
continue to have unlimited access to the
prisoners, some of whom have been held for four
years without trial.
"There are a number
of people who go on a diet where they don't eat
for a period and then go off of it at some point,
and then they rotate and other people do that,"
Rumsfeld told reporters during a
news
conference at the Pentagon. "So it's clearly a
technique to try to the get the attention of you
folks, and they're successful."
International pressure to open the camp to
UN investigators has intensified due to reports by
some detainees' lawyers of protracted hunger
strikes sparked by the failure of prison
authorities to follow through on alleged
commitments to improve camp conditions. These
include complying with Geneva Convention standards
and implementing a 16-month-old ruling by the US
Supreme Court to permit inmates to appeal their
status to an independent court that is not under
the Pentagon's control.
The prison
authorities have reportedly responded to the
strikes by force-feeding weakened inmates by
strapping them to tables and inserting long tubes
through their nasal passages. According to
recently declassified statements by detainees to
their attorneys, feeding procedures amount to
torture and are being carried out in a sadistic
manner.
A US federal judge, Gladys
Kessler, last week said the statements that had
been submitted to her were "deeply troubling" and
ordered the government to turn over the medical
records of those detainees who are being
force-fed.
On October 27, the Pentagon
invited three UN experts - special
rapporteurs on torture, religious freedom
and arbitrary detentions - to visit Guantanamo,
but added that they would not be permitted to meet
with detainees. The three experts, as well as
several other UN investigators, had repeatedly
sought access since early 2002.
On Monday, Manfred Nowak, the
special rapporteur on
torture, said he could not accept the invitation
under those circumstances. "It makes no sense [to
go]," he said. "You cannot do a fact-finding
mission without talking to the detainees."
"They said they have nothing to hide," he
told the Washington Post. "If they have nothing to
hide, why should we not be able to talk to the
detainees in private?"
That question was
echoed by human-rights activists here Tuesday.
"Denying international human-rights
experts visits with prisoners at Guantanamo Bay
continues the cloaking of detention practices in
secrecy, only begging more questions about what is
being hidden there and eroding the United States'
standing with much of the world community," noted
Avi Cover, a senior associate at Human Rights
First, a lawyers' human-rights organization.
"There's not much of a point
to the UN rapporteurs conducting an investigation
into treatment of detainees if they are simply
provided a Pentagon-censored tour without meeting
prisoners and hearing their accounts."
In
a letter to Attorney-General Alberto Gonzales, six
other religious and human-rights groups, including
Amnesty International, called on the Justice
Department and Pentagon to take specific steps,
including permitting access to the detainees by
independent investigators as well as to the
federal courts, "to bring torture, abuse and
inhumane treatment to an end at Guantanamo".
The groups announced a nationwide "Fast
for Justice", timed to coincide with the end of
the Muslim holy month of Ramadan and the ongoing
hunger strike, to press their demands. "There is a
desperate situation in Guantanamo," said Tina
Foster, an attorney with the Center for
Constitutional Rights (CCR), which represents a
large number of detainees. "Men are near death."
In June 2004, the Supreme Court ruled that
Guantanamo Bay was not outside the jurisdiction of
the US law, as the Bush administration had
contended, and that detainees held there, some of
whom arrived at the base almost four years ago,
were entitled to appeal their status to an
independent tribunal under a habeas corpus
(writ to bring a detained person before a court)
proceeding.
So far, however, the Pentagon
has only afforded the detainees review hearings
before a panel of military officers in proceedings
that denied them access to classified information
and representation at the hearings by a lawyer.
Nonetheless, dozens of detainees were returned to
their home countries after the hearings.
Meanwhile, a series of controversial
incidents - some involving reports of beatings and
the desecration of a Koran - sparked hunger
strikes in which, according to the detainees'
advocates, more than half the camp's total
population has participated to one degree or
another.
The Pentagon said Tuesday that 24
detainees are being force-fed and strongly denied
that any of them have suffered abuse.
But
the lawyers' accounts of interviews with their
clients paint a harrowing picture, with one
detainee named Abdul Rahman complaining that "one
navy doctor had put the tube in his nose and down
his throat and just kept moving the tube up and
down, until finally Abdul-Rahman started violently
throwing up blood."
Another account
described the feeding tubes - "the thickness of a
finger" - being "forcibly shoved up the detainees'
noses and down into the stomachs [without any]
anesthesia or sedative" provided.
Yet
another said that the tubes were used on different
detainees "with no sanitization whatsoever. When
these tubes were reinserted, the detainees could
see the blood and stomach bile from other
detainees remaining on the tubes."
Publication of these accounts by CCR
coincided on Tuesday with a harrowing front-page
story in the Washington Post of an eyewitness
account by his lawyer of a suicide attempt by
hanging two weeks ago by one of the detainees,
Jumah Dossari, who was arrested in Pakistan in
December 2001.
Dossari, who told his
attorney he had been beaten and threatened by US
personnel both in Afghanistan, where he was taken
after his arrest, and at Guantanamo, had tried to
commit suicide before.
The Pentagon has
said there have been 36 suicide attempts by 22
different detainees since suspected terrorists
first arrived at Guantanamo, but that none has
succeeded due to rapid intervention by the camp's
guards.
