Guantánamo Bay
In the ongoing appeal case of Yemeni prisoner Abdulsalam Al-Hela, 55, who was cleared for release by the periodic review board in June 2021, in an opinion in the case, “the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit ruled that the authorities may not be allowed to keep a man imprisoned in Guantánamo Bay after he is no longer deemed a threat.” However, that does not mean that he will be released any time soon. He is one of 16 prisoners who have been cleared for release and remain at Guantánamo as the US has not found safe third countries to resettle them in; 10 of them are from Yemen and in spite of recent peace efforts in the country, the US has not made any efforts to repatriate or release any of these Yemeni prisoners. The outcome of this case will impact on all of the 16 men, some of whom have been cleared for release for many years.
Pre-trial hearings were held in April in the case of Abd Al-Nashiri. In the kind of “justice” that can only be found at Guantánamo and under US patronage, Al-Nashiri’s torturers and former FBI agents were invited to give evidence, not at their trial for war crimes, but for the prosecution in respect to whether certain torture evidence should or should not be included in his trial. Al-Nashiri’s torture has already been well documented and prosecuted successfully twice at the European Court of Human Rights. One of the prosecution witnesses was CIA torture programme architect and psychologist Dr Bruce Jessen, who gave a demonstration of some of the “approved” torture techniques used against the defendant and others “at a secret interrogation site in Thailand in late 2002”. The judge allowed the demonstration “to show practices that C.I.A. officials had destroyed video evidence of two decades ago”. According to Jessen’s testimony, these practices “including waterboarding, nudity and isolation — were not meant to rob a prisoner of his will but to gain his cooperation and disclose Al Qaeda’s secrets to the C.I.A.” “Prosecutors have already agreed that nothing Mr. Nashiri said at the so-called black sites can be used at trial because evidence derived from torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment is unlawful. But they defend as untainted his 2007 law enforcement interviews, which took place at Guantánamo at a former C.I.A. prison where Mr. Nashiri was held by the agency in 2003 and 2004.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/13/us/politics/cia-torture-guantanamo-saudi-detainee-nashiri.html
Another witness called by prosecutors was forensic psychiatrist Dr Michael Welner who claimed that Al-Nashiri “voluntarily confessed to having a role in the attack after four years in the C.I.A.’s secret [torture] prison network.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/20/us/politics/cia-prisoner-confession-uss-cole.html
“Abd al Rahim al Nashiri made incriminating statements to agents of the FBI and Naval Criminal Investigative Service in late January and early February 2007 about his alleged role in the bombing of the USS Cole in October 2000. The sessions took place in the detention center on the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base nearly five months after al Nashiri’s transfer from CIA black sites, where he endured waterboarding, threats of execution, nudity, stress positions, sleep deprivation, cramped confinement and other abuses. […]The government team hopes to introduce the incriminating statements at al Nashiri’s as-of-yet unscheduled death penalty trial for the attack that killed 17 sailors off the coast of Yemen. His defense team contends that al Nashiri’s years of torture and isolation at CIA black sites conditioned him to say whatever his interrogators wanted, rendering his subsequent statements to the FBI and NCIS in 2007 involuntary. They have asked the judge, Army Col. Lanny Acosta, to suppress the statements.”
The next hearing is scheduled for June.
Pre-trial hearings also took place in the trial of an Indonesian and two Malaysian prisoners accused of involvement in the 2002 Bali bombing. The hearing of the three men who were subject to extraordinary rendition in 2003 and have been in US detention since, although they have only been recently charged, saw prosecutors seek a 2025 trial for the case as much of the evidence is national security evidence (meaning it was probably obtained through the use of torture) and is secret. Lawyers for the defendants said that this timeline is too long, given that the defendants have been held by the US for over 20 years already and that prosecutors have yet to share the evidence they have almost two years after the case was first opened and the defendants brought to court. This hearing was their first since August 2021 when they were arraigned. The defendants protested about the use of interpreters, a persisting problem in the case with the wrong language being used, interpreters using English words – “For example, an interpreter could not remember how to say “interpreter” in Malaysian dialect” – which the defendants did not understand and could thus not follow the proceedings. “Separately, the judge declined to excuse an interpreter who had previously remarked that the U.S. government was “wasting so much money on these terrorists. They should have been killed a long time ago.” Instead, the judge cautioned the interpreters — who were working from a remote location — that he expected their translations to be “neutral, sanitized, surgical.””
According to the 2014 Senate Intelligence Committee on the CIA Torture Programme, in 2003, a CIA interrogator told one of the defendants “that he would never go to court, because “we can never let the world know what I have done to you”; the CIA is one of the agencies withholding the evidence in the case. One of the defendants’ lawyers “accused the U.S. government of misplaced priorities. It spent millions of dollars on “a systemic torture program,” she said. “But when it comes to administering justice, we want to penny pinch. We want to say, ‘We don’t have the resources. We don’t have the computers. It’s complex.’”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/24/us/politics/guantanamo-trial-bali-bombing.html
In rare and open criticism of prisoner conditions at Guantánamo, to whom it has access, a senior official at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said that prisoners are showing signed of “accelerated ageing” and that “physical and mental health needs are growing and becoming increasingly challenging” for current prisoners. The statement followed a visit in March by the ICRC to Guantanamo. The ICRC called for better healthcare provision and an improvement in “the quality of contact with families, most notably in terms of frequency and length of calls, while bearing in mind the total absence of in-person visits.” It stated that “the sooner the US can overcome the political and administrative deadlock to responsibly transfer out those detainees deemed eligible, and determine the fate of all other detainees, the better it can shape whatever plans are required.”
The last Algerian prisoner Said bin Brahim bin Umran Bakush was repatriated to Algeria just before the Islamic Eid holiday. His is the sixth release in six months and brings the prisoner population down to 30, over half of whom are eligible for release. He was detained in Pakistan in March 2002 and was never charged or tried. He was cleared for release by the periodic review board in April 2022. Release from Guantánamo is not freedom and involves ongoing US surveillance and restrictive measures on travel and contact with other persons.
On 24 April, MPs, peers, human rights activists and former prisoner Mohamedou Ould Slahi started a new all-party parliamentary group to close Guantánamo.
