Five New Reasons (and One Old One) Why We Must Close Guantanamo Now

By Liliana Segura, AlterNet. Posted June 6, 2009.

For Boudemiene, the torture continued right until he cleared for release. He told Rather that it seemed to be a chance for guards to "take their last shots.” This also echoes claims by another attorney who represents prisoners at Guatanamo, Ahmed Ghappour, who told reporters earlier this year that, rather than ending torture, his clients reported "a ramping up in abuse" after Obama was elected, including "beatings, the dislocation of limbs, spraying of pepper spray into closed cells, applying pepper spray to toilet paper and over-force-feeding detainees who are on hunger strike."

"If one was to use one's imagination, (one) could say that these traumatized, and for lack of a better word barbaric, guards were just basically trying to get their kicks in right now for fear that they won't be able to later," Ghappour said.

Reason #2: Prisoners Are Still Committing Suicide

This week brought news that a Yemeni prisoner, who once starved himself to 86 pounds to protest his detention, was found dead in his cell on Monday in an "apparent suicide," more than seven years after being brought to Guantánamo in February 2002.

According to the Associated Press, authorities found "31-year-old Muhammad Ahmad Abdallah Salih unresponsive and not breathing in his cell Monday night."

"In a Tuesday statement, the military says the detainee was pronounced dead by a doctor after 'extensive lifesaving measures had been exhausted.' "

"Like the other prisoners who died of 'apparent suicides' at Guantánamo," wrote Guantánamo expert Andy Worthington, "Salih had been a long-term hunger striker, refusing food as the only method available to protest his long imprisonment without charge or trial.

"According to weight records issued by the Pentagon in 2007, he weighed 124 pounds on his arrival at Guantánamo, but at one point in December 2005, during the largest hunger strike in the prison's history, his weight dropped to just 86 pounds."

Prisoner suicides at Guantánamo were treated as PR problems by the Bush administration -- a former camp commander, Rear Adm. Harry Harris, famously said in 2006 following the suicide of three prisoners, "I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of warfare waged against us." Will the Obama administration respond differently? Will it respond at all?

Reason #3: The Surreal Plight of Guantánamo's Uighurs

When the history of injustice at Guantánamo Bay is written, a whole section will be reserved for the truly unbelievable story of Guantánamo's Uighurs, 17 Chinese Muslims who have been held at Guantánamo since 2002.

Perhaps the most important thing to know about the Uighurs is that they are innocent -- and for a long time now, nobody has argued otherwise; not the Bush administration, not the Obama administration. So why do they remain imprisoned at Guantánamo? Officially, the reason is that if they were to be sent to China, they would likely face political persecution.

This might be a fine reason not to send the Uighurs to China. But it's hardly a good reason to keep them locked up when they have long been declared not guilty, which is exactly what the Obama administration is doing.

Things were looking up for the Uighurs last October, when a federal judge ordered that they be released from Guantánamo and resettled in the United States. Indeed, there are even communities here that have offered to take them in, outside Washington as well as in Tallahassee, Fla. But a federal court reversed that decision in February, and now the Obama administration is engaged in fresh attempts to block their release.

Last Friday, according to Worthington, the Obama Department of Justice delivered "33 pages of unconstitutional hogwash directed at the Supreme Court … in which no stone of dubious legality was left unturned in the administration's desperate and unprincipled attempts to mimic its predecessors by preventing 17 Uighurs at Guantánamo from being resettled in the United States."

Unbelievably, according to the government, the Uighurs "are not really being detained any longer." Their "continued presence at Guantánamo Bay is not unlawful detention, but rather the consequence of their lawful exclusion from the United States, under the constitutional exercise of authority by the political branches, coupled with the unavailability of another country willing to accept them."

See more stories tagged with: torture, guantanamo, barack obama, jeremy scahill, andy worthington, michael ratner, ahmed ghappour, lakhdar boumediene, force-feeding, muhammad ahmad abdallah s

Liliana Segura is an AlterNet staff writer.

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