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Obama regime moves to suppress Gitmo force-feeding footage

Reprieve – January 21, 2015

foot-draggerThe U.S. Government has moved to suppress footage of a Guantanamo detainee being force-fed, appealing against a US federal judge’s order to release the tapes.

Solicitor General Donald Verrilli filed the appeal today, January 21st, just one day before the seven year anniversary of President Obama’s signing of the Executive Order to close Guantanamo. Judge Gladys Kessler ordered the tapes be released in October 2014, after sixteen major US media organizations, including the New York Times, AP, and McClatchy newspapers, asked for the tapes to be made public under the First Amendment of the US Constitution.

The tapes show the force-feeding and ‘forcible cell extraction’ of Abu Wa’el Dhiab, who has since been released. Mr Dhiab is represented by international human rights NGO Reprieve. Reprieve lawyers are virtually the only people outside government to have seen the footage and have described it as ‘disturbing’, but are forbidden under classification rules from revealing its contents.

Eric Lewis, attorney and Chair of Reprieve US, said: “It is wrong to hide behind national security concerns when the Government wants to hide its mistaken actions from public view. Our national security requires the release of these tapes, and accountability for the cruel treatment imposed on men trying to call attention to their endless and lawless detention without trial.”

Cori Crider, Reprieve attorney for Guantanamo detainees, said: Make no mistake – the force-feeding tapes would make your blood run cold. One assumes that is why they have fought so hard to keep it secret. We’ll keep pushing for the truth in the Court of Appeals.”

January 21, 2016 Posted by | Progressive Hypocrite, Subjugation - Torture | , , , | 1 Comment

Where’s the Rule of Law in Our War on ISIS?

By L. Michael Hager | CounterPunch | December 11, 2015

The San Bernardino massacre has elicited from politicians and others many calls for stronger military action and even demands for travel restrictions on Muslims and the closing of mosques.

In his oval office address to the nation on December 6, President Obama rightly called on Americans “to reject proposals that Muslim Americans should somehow be treated differently.” He assured the nation that our success in defeating terrorists “won’t depend on … abandoning our values.”

Yet in a seeming contradiction, he promised to hunt down terrorist plotters “in any country where it is necessary” and use air strikes to “take out ISIL leaders and their infrastructure in Iraq and Syria.”

Before 9/11 our “common values” included respect for the rule of law. Not any more, it would seem. Over the past decade and a half, we have witnessed increasing disrespect for the rule of law. Preemptive strikes, targeted drone killing and the torture, sexual humiliation and forced feeding of prisoners at Guantanamo violate basic legal norms for human rights and the conduct of war– norms which the U.S. helped establish in the wake of World War II.

The main obstacle to the rule of law today is Guantanamo. As a continuing monument to such prison abuses as torture, forced feeding and indefinite detention, Guantanamo is a valuable resource for ISIS in its radicalization and recruitment of young Americans.

Despite President Obama’s first day in office pledge to close it down, Guantanamo continues to confine many innocent prisoners, claim huge sums from taxpayers and shame all Americans by what it represents to the world.

According to the nonprofit organization Human Rights First, 107 prisoners remain in Guantanamo (down from the total number of 780). The current roster includes:

* Detainees approved for release: 48,

* Detainees convicted by military commission: 3,

* Detainees currently being tried by military commission: 7,

* Detainees being held without charge or trial: 49.

Of the current Guantanamo population, 90 (84% of the total) have been imprisoned for more than ten years.

It costs US taxpayers approximately $387 million a year to operate Guantanamo (an annual cost of more than $3 million per prisoner).

According to Andy Worthington (closeguantanamo.org), the group of prisoners recommended for prosecution includes Mohamedou Ould Slahi, author of the recent bestseller, Guantanamo Diary.

Given Slahi’s “extraordinary account of rendition, captivity and torture” and the apparent failure of his captors to elicit evidence of wrongdoing despite more than 15 years of interrogation and imprisonment, his continuing incarceration raises a serious question: are the CIA and DOD continuing to detain him in order to continue to block disclosure of the names of his torturers (redacted from his published account)?

Sadly, the ongoing affront to the rule of law has raised few eyebrows in the media or in government institutions charged with legal oversight. Rarely, do we hear reference to law or legal norms by our elected officials. Indeed, the Department of Justice appears complicit in the torture scandals of Bush/Cheney.

TV anchors and newspaper reporters blithely echo the demands of political candidates that the U.S. “carpet bomb” Islamist targets and “take out suspected terrorists” anywhere in the world. They ignore international laws and conventions that put a strict limit on preemptive strikes and prohibit the endangering of civilians.

More distressing is the general failure of our religious institutions, universities and bar associations to speak out against the current degrading of the rule of law. Why has there been no strong outcry from the nation’s premier law schools as they witness military strikes that violate the UN Charter and international conventions? Why do they ignore the lack of due process, indefinite detention and the inadequacies of jerrybuilt “military commissions?”

Why have our churches, synagogues and mosques not questioned human rights violations (some detailed in the recent Senate report summary) including the now regular use of drones for targeted killing and the reliance on torture and force-feeding?

Bombing, drone strikes and internal restrictions on the freedom of religion and movement are more likely to breed terrorists than build security. If we should, as our President suggests, avoid abandoning our values—values that include respect for the rule of law– we should accelerate the Periodic Review Boards (PRB) process, free Guantanamo prisoners approved for release and try the remainder in U.S. courts.

Before his term of office ends, the President must fulfill his promise of 2009 and close Guantanamo, with or without Congressional support.

L. Michael Hager is cofounder and former Director General, International Development Law Organization, Rome.

December 11, 2015 Posted by | Progressive Hypocrite, Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Judge rejects Obama attempt to conceal Guantanamo force feeding tapes

Reprieve | October 27, 2015

A US District Court judge has rejected the Obama administration’s latest request to conceal tapes of detainees at Guantanamo Bay being force-fed.

Responding to the government’s request to reverse her order handed down in October last year – that the Guantanamo tapes should be released – Judge Gladys Kessler wrote that, “What the Government is really saying is that its classification system trumps the decisions of the federal courts as to the public’s access to official court records; in other words, the Executive Branch (in this case, the Military) purports to be a law unto itself.”

In her ruling today, Judge Kessler described the government’s request as ‘repetitive, speculative, and extremely vague.’ In August, the US government handed to the court censored versions of the tapes which show former detainee Abu Wa’el Dhiab being force-fed. These tapes have been redacted to conceal the identities of those military personnel carrying out the procedure. However, lawyers at international human rights NGO Reprieve – who have seen the redacted versions – have raised concerns that the redactions, especially of sound, are so heavy that they render the tapes nearly incomprehensible. Reprieve lawyers have filed a motion challenging the extent of censorship; that motion is pending.

Today’s judgement means that the US government must continue litigation if it is to successfully conceal the tapes from the American press and public. Alongside lawyers for Mr Dhiab, 16 news outlets – including the New York Times, Associated Press and Guardian – have joined the legal filing seeking release of the Guantanamo tapes to the public on First Amendment grounds.

Cori Crider, Reprieve’s Strategic Director and attorney for the Guantanamo detainees, said: “The Obama administration has dragged its feet for over a year to stop the American press and public seeing a single frame of these tapes. We’re glad the judge has denied the government’s request for a blanket cover-up, but a lot of problems persist – we expect the government to appeal this to the Supreme Court to stop people seeing the truth. Americans have a right to see what continues to be done in their name up to this day. The government should reduce its heavy-handed censorship of the footage, drop the appeals, and release the tapes immediately.”

October 27, 2015 Posted by | Deception, Progressive Hypocrite, Subjugation - Torture | , , , | Leave a comment

At Guantanamo, Sometimes Even the Judge Is In the Dark

By Dror Ladin | ACLU | October 23, 2015

I’m writing from Guantánamo Bay, where pre-trial proceedings in the military commissions prosecution of the 9/11 defendants have restarted after an 18-month delay. It has been a faltering start, to say the least: Within ten minutes of the first hearing, the agenda was derailed. Again.

One of the defendants, Walid Bin Attash, asked about the procedures that would allow him to represent himself because he could not trust the independence of the military commission, including his lawyers. All the parties then had to grapple with how self-representation would work in this novel context. But lurking behind these dilemmas is the real issue that has so often derailed the military commissions: the government’s use of secrecy in what it presents as a public death penalty trial.

As we have pointed out for years, the military commissions are unfair, unconstitutional, and plagued by excessive secrecy. These challenges make it extraordinarily difficult for the defense attorneys to do their job. And they make it even harder for defendants to exercise the right to represent themselves meaningfully.

There are straightforward logistical impossibilities for defendants if they attempt to represent themselves. They are held virtually incommunicado in “Camp 7” at Guantánamo, a secret prison within a secretive prison holding detainees who were tortured at the CIA’s secret black sites. Defendants cannot file motions, consult a law library, communicate with (or even learn the names of) witnesses, or compile confidential legal documents.

The defendants also face the unique challenge of representing themselves when they have been tortured by the government that seeks to kill them, continue to be subjected to a “controlled chaos strategy of changing the rules all the time” that serves to retraumatize them, and are denied rehabilitation to help them cope with the effects of their torture. Conditions at Camp 7 reportedly exacerbate the continued effects of CIA torture. Bin Attash declared at the beginning of this week’s hearings that “we are still in the black sites” before the judge, Army Col. James Pohl, cut him off.

The results of torture are quite visible at the trial: As an observer, one of the most difficult aspects of these hearings is watching the guards place a particularly frail defendant, Mustafa al-Hawsawi, each morning on a chair equipped with a special pillow.  As the Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report documents, al-Hawsawi was subjected to “rectal exams conducted with ‘excessive force’” while detained at a secret CIA prison.  CIA records indicate that the result was “chronic hemorrhoids, an anal fissure, and symptomatic rectal prolapse.” He now weighs less than 100 pounds and sometimes bleeds on his clothing. His medical records, like so much else at Guantánamo, are kept secret even from his counsel.

But perhaps the single biggest obstacle to self-representation is government secrecy.  Defendants in the military commissions are not permitted to see classified evidence. That’s the case even if the government tries to use it to put them to death, and even if it could help their case. How can someone defend themselves when they can’t see the evidence?  This problem isn’t confined to the self-representation context; even security-cleared defense counsel at Guantánamo are sometimes kept in the dark about relevant evidence.

These difficulties could be left for another day, suggested the judge. Perhaps, if a defendant chooses to represent himself, the military commissions could muddle through whatever problems cropped up along the way. Maybe the most obviously unfair scenarios would never come to pass, he hypothesized. At that point, former Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld entered the frame:  Are concerns about the viability of self-representation in the military commissions merely a case of “unknown unknowns”?

So many questions arise when you try to invent justice as you go along.

The government has chosen to sidestep our tried and true federal courts and created a novel death penalty court here at Guantánamo. Without a doubt, there are a great number of unknown unknowns in this unprecedented proceeding. But as counsel for Ammar al-Baluchi observed, “there are huge known unknowns.” Given the government’s repeated and acknowledged efforts to rely on secret evidence and simultaneously hide that same evidence from the accused — and the public —  a wide array of problems for a defendant who seeks to represent himself are easily predictable.

As David Nevin, counsel for defendant Khalid Sheik Mohammad, has explained, secrecy is “the live wire of this case.” At some point, Nevin suggested, the court will have to decide if it wants this trial to be a “real case” or merely a fundamentally unfair exercise of government power. And whether it’s a “real case” depends in part on whether the government succeeds in hiding from the American public  the details of some of the most important trials in our history.

Perhaps the moment that most perfectly encapsulated the week of hearings so far happened at the end of the second day. Defense counsel had submitted a motion containing information that the government had decided was so secret that special permission was required to read it. But the government had not cleared the judge himself to know the information. After consulting with the court security officer, the judge refused to accept the defense’s submission.

“It’s hard for me to know what it is without knowing what it is,” he said. The same could be said for the military commission itself.

October 24, 2015 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Progressive Hypocrite, Subjugation - Torture | , , , , , | Leave a comment

US government publicly concedes case against ex-Gitmo prisoner collapsed in 2011

Reprieve | October 21, 2015

On the eve of a hearing in Morocco that will determine whether ex-Guantánamo prisoner Younous Chekkouri is to be set free, the US government has released a letter admitting that the central allegation against him in the US was withdrawn in 2011.

Younous Chekkouri was held without charge or trial in Guantanamo for 14 years before being transferred to his native Morocco on September 16, 2015. His transfer was subject to diplomatic assurances between Morocco and the US, which included agreements that there was no basis to charge him; that Morocco would not prosecute him; and that he would be detained no longer than 72 hours. However, after his arrival in Morocco Mr Chekkouri was taken to Salé prison near Rabat, where he continues to be held in violation of the assurances.

At a court hearing tomorrow (22nd), the investigating magistrate will determine whether Mr Chekkouri should be set free. It is believed that the Moroccan authorities are detaining Mr Chekkouri on the basis of the same allegations that the US government has now withdrawn against him.

In a letter released today, the US Justice Department concedes that several years ago the US “withdrew all reliance” on “all evidence identifying Mr. Chekkouri with the group known as Group Islamique Combatant Maroc [sic] “GICM””. The concession – made during a US habeas case brought by Mr Chekkouri with the help of human rights organization Reprieve – confirms that the evidence used to make the allegation was unreliable. During those proceedings, Mr Chekkouri explained in federal court that the information resulted from a mixture of the torture of himself and other prisoners, as well as stories fabricated by informers within Guantánamo who concocted false stories on hundreds of other prisoners in order to win better treatment in the prison.

The letter has been released by the Justice Department as a partial summary of the US government position in the US case. While not a complete picture of the near-total collapse of the case against Younous in the US habeas process, the document is the only evidence relating to the habeas case that the Justice Department would agree to release to Mr Chekkouri’s lawyers in time to enable his defense on the same spurious charges in Morocco.

Mr Chekkouri’s attorneys at Reprieve – who are in Morocco seeking to see Mr Chekkouri and defend him in court – have raised concerns that he now faces potential prosecution for long-disproven allegations that the United States withdrew years ago. The lawyers will urgently seek to provide the letter to the investigating magistrate and to Moroccan government officials.

October 21, 2015 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

Britain’s Secret Widespread Use Of Torture

By Graham Vanbergen | TruePublica | October 6, 2015

The last British prisoner in Guantanamo Bay has claimed that Britain knew flawed evidence, used to justify the Iraq War, had been obtained under torture – and said his lengthy detention was a result of fears that he would go on the record if released.

Shaker Aamer, who is due to be freed from the US military prison after 13 years without charge, said he witnessed British agents at Bagram Air Base when a prisoner wrongly told interrogators that Iraqi forces had trained al-Qaeda in the use of weapons of mass destruction.

The evidence of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, which was later disproven, was used by George W Bush in 2002 during a hawkish speech calling for the removal of Saddam Hussein, in which he said: “We’ve learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases.”

Mr Aamer said that despite guarantees he would be released within days, he feared he would still die in the prison, adding: “I know there are people who, even now, are working hard to keep me here.”

A Foreign Office spokesman said: “The UK does not participate in, solicit, encourage or condone the use of torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment for any purpose.

Aamer gave statements to the Metropolitan police two years ago in which he detailed the alleged brutality he has faced, that included torture. He said he was interrogated by British agents at Bagram airbase, who knew he and others were being tortured there.

Britain has a long, dark history of torture and it has gone to extraordinary lengths to hide it. A normal functioning democracy would stand resolute that torture of any kind is not just illegal and immoral, it simply doesn’t work.

David Whyte’s recent book “How Corrupt is Britain” covers some pivotal moments in the UK’s history of torture.

In June 1975 an eminent Harley Street doctor flew to Dublin. The patient was suffering from severe angina, a condition which is ‘always associated with the risk of sudden death according to the doctor. The doctor was Dr Denis Leigh, a leading consultant psychiatrist at the Bethlem Royal and the Maudsley Hospitals in London, and more importantly, medical consultant to the British Army.

The patient, Sean McKenna, was a former member of the IRA who had been subjected to so-called ‘in-depth interrogation’ following the introduction of internment without trial in August 1971, He was one of the 14 ‘hooded men’ whose infamous treatment forced the lrish state to launch a case alleging torture against the UK government at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

Leigh’s medical examination was being carried out on behalf of the Crown to bolster the UK defence that the men had not suffered long-term physical or psychiatric damage as a result of their interrogation.

The ‘in-depth interrogation’ that McKenna and the others were subjected to consisted of five techniques that had been widely used by the British army in counter-insurgency campaigns in Aden, Cyprus, Malaya, Palestine and elsewhere – hooding, white noise, wall standing in a stress position and of course regular beatings.

Dr Leigh found that McKenna’s condition was known to British army doctors before the interrogation went ahead, and ‘it would be hard to show that it was wise to proceed with the interrogation, and that the interrogation did not have the effect of worsening his angina’.

In fact McKenna’s psychiatric condition was such that he had been released from Long Kesh internment camp in May 1972 directly into the care of a psychiatric unit. His daughter described ‘a very broken man, sitting crying, very shaky’. Four days after the June 1975 medical examination Sean McKenna died. He had suffered a massive heart attack.

In 1976 the European Human Rights Commission (EHRC) upheld a complaint by Ireland that the treatment of the ‘hooded men’ constituted torture, and referred the case to the European Court of Human Rights for judgement. The Commission had condemned the five techniques as a ‘modern system of torture’.

Britain was one of the original signatories to the European Convention on Human Rights, had been found to have sanctioned torture.

Successive UK governments, rather than comply with their legal obligation to ‘search and try’ allegations of torture, adopted a policy more akin to ‘hide and lie’. This was to have consequences many years later. The inquiry into the 2003 murder of an Iraqi civilian, Baha Mousa, by British soldiers was told that the five techniques had again been used in Iraq by every single battle group in the field.

ln ‘Cruel Britannia: A Secret History of Torture,’ Guardian journalist Ian Cobain provides damning evidence that the UK government did in fact ‘do’ torture, and had been doing so for decades in counter-insurgency wars from Brunei to Aden, and from Ireland to lraq. In June 2013 UK foreign secretary William Hague apologised in Parliament for the torture of Mau Mau suspects in Kenya during the 1950s. Over £50 million was paid out in compensation to some 5,000 Kenyan victims. ln 1972 prime minister Edward Heath had promised Parliament that the ‘five techniques’ torture techniques would never be used again.

As declassified documents now show, prime ministers and cabinet colleagues over the decades actually went to great lengths to ensure that those responsible for torture would not face sanction or prosecution and actively covered up these crimes.

In another case in Afghanistan, among the Britons who were picked up was a man called Jamal al-Harith. Born Ronald Fiddler in Manchester in 1966, Harith had converted to Islam in his 20s and travelled widely in the Muslim world before arriving in Afghanistan. After 9/11, he had been imprisoned by the Taliban, who suspected him of being a British spy. A British journalist found Harith languishing in the prison in January 2002 and alerted British diplomats in Kabul, believing they would arrange his repatriation. Instead, they arranged for him to be detained by US forces, who took him straight to an interrogation centre at Kandahar.

Harith then spent two years at Guantánamo, being kicked, punched, slapped, shackled in painful positions, subjected to extreme temperatures and deprived of sleep. He was refused adequate water supplies and fed on food with date markings 10 or 12 years old. On one occasion, he says, he was chained and severely beaten for refusing an injection. He estimates he was interrogated about 80 times, usually by Americans but sometimes by British intelligence officers.

In all, nine British nationals were sent to the maximum-security prison at Guantánamo, along with at least nine former British residents. All were incarcerated for years, and from the moment they arrived they suffered torture including regular beatings, threats and sleep deprivation. All were interrogated by MI5 officers and some also by MI6.

In December 2005, the full truth about British complicity in rendition and torture was still such a deeply buried official secret that Jack Straw felt able to reassure MPs on the Commons foreign affairs committee about the allegations starting to surface in the media. “Unless we all start to believe in conspiracy theories,” he said, “there simply is no truth in the claims that the United Kingdom has been involved in rendition or that behind this there is some kind of secret state which is in league with some dark forces in the United States”. Straw was lying.

Over the next few years, men were rendered not only from the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, but from Kenya, Pakistan, Indonesia, Somalia, Bosnia, Croatia, Albania, Gambia, Zambia, Thailand and the US itself. The US was running a global kidnapping programme on the basis of agreements reached at a Nato meeting.

Quietly, Britain pledged logistics support for the rendition programme, which resulted in the CIA’s jets becoming frequent visitors to British airports en route to the agency’s secret prisons on at least 210 times.

It has since been discovered that throughout the postwar period, it seemed, there had been a network of secret British prisons, hidden from the Red Cross, where men thought to pose a threat to the state could be kept for years and systematically tormented, tortured and sometimes murdered.

It is now known that MI5 have a department called the “international terrorism-related agent running section”: the section routinely responsible for interviewing suspected terrorists. The MI5 officers who were interrogating al-Qaida suspects – men who were being tortured in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Guantánamo and elsewhere around the world – were agent handlers. It appeared that MI5 was seeking to recruit torture victims as double agents.

Within two months of the May 2010 general election, under pressure from his Liberal Democrat coalition partners, as well as some of his own backbenchers, the new prime minister, David Cameron, announced the establishment of a judge-led inquiry into the UK’s involvement in torture and rendition. The man appointed to head the inquiry was named as Sir Peter Gibson, a retired judge. It is possible that MI5 and MI6 had a hand in his selection; for the previous four years Gibson had served as the intelligence services commissioner. Rights groups suggested that Gibson should be appearing before the inquiry as a witness rather than presiding over it.

In July 2011, most major international and British human rights groups, including Amnesty International, said they would be boycotting the inquiry. The following month, lawyers representing victims of Britain’s torture operations announced that they, too, would have nothing to do with it. Six months later, the government announced that the Gibson inquiry was scrapped.

Cameron’s government then brought forward a green paper that suggested a need for greater courtroom secrecy. Britain’s complicity in torture was to continue to be a dirty dark state secret.

None of this squares with Britain’s reputation as a nation that prides itself on its love of fair play and respect for the rule of law. Successive British government’s continues to preach to other nations around the world of the importance of justice, transparency and democracy whilst disregarding essentials such as these back at home.

October 11, 2015 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Subjugation - Torture | , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Guantánamo reinstates genital searching policy to prevent lawyer-client meetings

Reprieve | October 7, 2015

This week, two clients of international human rights NGO Reprieve chose not to meet their attorneys at Guantánamo due to reinstated genital searches, raising fears that the searches are being used in a deliberate attempt to stop detainees from meeting with their lawyers.

Staff at Guantánamo told Reprieve attorney Cori Crider during her visit this week, that cleared detainee Samir Moqbel refused their meeting because he didn’t want to submit to the genital search.

Guantánamo staff explained in prior filings that the search involved invasive searches of the prisoner’s groin “by placing the guard’s hand as a wedge between the [detainee’s] scrotum and thigh . . . and using [a] flat hand to press against the groin to detect anything foreign attached to the body,” after which a guard “uses a flat hand to frisk the detainee’s buttocks to ensure no contraband is hidden there.”

In 2013, during the height of a mass hunger strike at Guantánamo, the genital searches were the subject of litigation in US federal court, and were eventually discontinued by camp authorities. A judge who ordered the searches should be stopped wrote: “the choice between submitting to a search procedure that is religiously and culturally abhorrent or forgoing counsel effectively presents no choice for devout Muslims like petitioners.”

Both Samir Moqbel and Pakistani Ahmed Rabbani have refused their planned meetings with Reprieve attorneys visiting Guantanamo this week. Both are previous hunger-strikers. Mr Rabbani is currently thought to weigh less than 100 pounds and in recent letters has described his mental and physical deterioration. Because of the searches he is now unlikely to see an attorney. Reprieve lawyers have requested a meeting with the camp Commander to discuss the practice but have so far received no response.

Cori Crider, Reprieve director and counsel to a number of Guantánamo prisoners, said: “After fourteen years of indignity, it’s no surprise that many of my clients aren’t willing to put themselves through the further humiliation of being pointlessly groped by guard staff. This whole policy is plainly an effort to stop Gitmo prisoners meeting their lawyers. For months these men were searched normally and brought to sit with counsel without incident. Yet for no discernible reason the authorities have changed protocol and resumed grabbing my clients’ genitals – it’s degrading, it’s needless, and it unlawfully interferes with these people’s right to consult an attorney.”

October 7, 2015 Posted by | Subjugation - Torture | , , | 3 Comments

US must release files proving innocence of former Guantanamo detainee, say lawyers

Reprieve | September 25, 2015

Lawyers at human rights NGO Reprieve yesterday filed an emergency motion demanding the US government release information which could exonerate a former Guantanamo detainee facing the possibility of charges in Morocco.

Younous Chekkouri, 47, was transferred to his native Morocco last week. He has been detained ever since and the prosecution in Morocco announced on Wednesday that he is now facing the possibility of charges of ‘attempting to disrupt the internal security of the country.’

It is believed that these charges are based on allegations made years ago by the US – almost every one of which was dropped during Younous’ habeas corpus proceedings in federal court. Yet almost all the files from the case remain held under seal by a Washington D.C. court. Without the files being released, Younous’ lawyers will not be able to defend him against the possible Moroccan charges.

Reprieve first began asking the U.S. government to release the files in 2009, and in 2011 presented a “priority list” of thirteen documents. In the nearly four years since, the government has released only one of the requested files. In the rules governing Guantanamo proceedings, the US is obliged to produce public versions of all filings. The emergency motion filed yesterday demands that the government make available all remaining information by October 1st.

The US government cleared Younous for release from Guantanamo in 2010, a process involving unanimous agreement by six US federal agencies – including the CIA, FBI, and Departments of State and Defense – that he poses no threat to the US or anyone else.

Cori Crider, attorney for Younous and a director at human rights NGO Reprieve, said: “The Americans’ spurious allegations against Younous have already collapsed once when examined in US federal court and it is entirely unfair for him to face any further charges. Yet Younous is now living a Groundhog Day from hell where he may face yet more years of wrongful imprisonment because the US has failed to release information that I could use, this time in a Moroccan court, to prove his innocence yet again. So we are now forced to fight tooth and nail for information that should have been released years ago.”

September 25, 2015 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism | , , , | Leave a comment

Former Guantanamo detainee facing possibility of ‘utterly baseless’ charges in Morocco

Reprieve | September 23, 2015

Younous Chekkouri, who was released from Guantanamo last week, is facing the possibility of charges in Morocco that his lawyer has described as ‘utterly baseless’.

The prosecution in Morocco today announced that Younous – who has been held in detention since his release last week – is facing the possibility of charges of ‘attempts to disrupt the security of the country’. A judge will decide in two weeks whether to formally charge him. Meanwhile he has been placed in ‘provisional detention’ in Salé without bail.

Younous, 47, was cleared by the US government in 2010 – a process involving unanimous agreement by six federal agencies including the Departments of State and Defense and the CIA and FBI. He was never charged with a crime. His petition for habeas corpus was litigated through to a hearing, and saw the US government drop almost every allegation it had originally made against Younous.

Cori Crider, Younous’ attorney and director at Reprieve, said: “Younous facing charges is nothing short of an absolute disgrace. The US government, responsible for his being in this position in the first place, saw fit to clear him for release from Guantanamo following an exhaustive review. They never charged him with a crime and indeed they dropped almost every one of the ridiculous allegations they ever made against him while his case was being litigated in federal court. Any charges the Moroccan prosecutors are attempting to lay at Younous’ door are utterly baseless and must be revoked at once. Younous Chekkouri must go free.”

September 23, 2015 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism | , , , | 1 Comment

Guantanamo prisoner tells of release trauma in first meeting with lawyer

Reprieve | September 21, 2015

A Guantanamo prisoner released to his native Morocco has spoken of the terror he felt at the way he was treated by US authorities on his flight home.

Younous Chekkouri — released from Guantanamo last week having been held in the US prison for more than a decade without charge or trial – was blindfolded, forced to wear ear-defenders, and had his arms shackled to his legs during the ten hour flight to Morocco. In a testimony given today to his local lawyer in Casablanca, where he remains detained, Younous described how the flight replicated the total sight and sound deprivation he experienced when he was first rendered to Guantanamo.

Lawyers for Younous at international human rights NGO Reprieve, have raised concerns about his ongoing detention in Morocco and the effect that the behaviour of the US authorities, during his transfer, would have had on his fragile mental state.

In 2010, Younous was cleared for release from Guantanamo – a process involving unanimous agreement by six US federal agencies including the CIA, FBI and Departments of State and Defense. He has never faced a trial or been charged with a crime.

Cori Crider, attorney for Younous and strategic director at Reprieve, said: “Younous was tortured and brutally mistreated for years during his Guantanamo ordeal. As if this weren’t enough for a man the US government would later declare should never have been imprisoned in the first place, he then spent the flight back to Morocco blindfolded and with his arms shackled to his legs. We are very concerned for Younous’ health during his ongoing detention in Morocco and urge the authorities to release him as soon as possible.”

September 21, 2015 Posted by | Subjugation - Torture | , , | Leave a comment

US ‘shamefully’ refuse to release Shaker Aamer from Guantanamo despite UK pressure

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Shaker Aamer © Wikipedia
RT | August 20, 2015

American authorities are “shamefully” refusing to release Shaker Aamer, the last British resident detained at Guantanamo Bay, despite calls from Prime Minister David Cameron for the prisoner to be freed, a lawyer has claimed.

Aamer’s legal counsel Ramzi Kassem called on the British government to pressure the White House further after President Barack Obama promised to “prioritize” his case in January.

Kassem also blasted the US government for refusing to allow Aamer access to independent doctors, despite concerns over the neutrality of army medical personnel.

The New York-based lawyer said the physical condition of Aamer, who has been imprisoned without trial for 14 years, “deteriorates with each passing day.”

Kassem filed a 26-page motion at a court in Washington calling for the British resident to be examined by two independent doctors and an army doctor to gauge how Aamer is coping with post-traumatic stress.

The Department of Defense has rejected the request, claiming it is too “difficult.”

Aamer’s last independent assessment took place in October 2013, when Californian psychiatrist Dr. Emily Keram described he had been mentally “destroyed” by interrogators, who allegedly subjected him to sleep deprivation and beatings.

Law professor Kassem expressed dismay at the reluctance of US authorities to release Aamer.

“It is truly shameful that we have to litigate every step of the way despite the prime minister’s demand and the president’s pledge to prioritize Shaker’s case,” he said.

“The UK government must press the White House to make good on its promise. The only thing more shameful are the arguments the US government is making in court to prevent Shaker’s examination.”

Cameron raised the issue with Obama on his official visit to the US earlier this year.

Obama promised to “prioritize” the case in January, but Aamer’s legal team claim nothing has been done to progress his case.

Writing in the Guardian last Friday, Aamer’s UK lawyer Clive Stafford Smith claimed the US military has deliberately ignored Obama’s order in breach of the constitution.

“President Obama, it seems, has personally ordered Aamer’s release, and his subordinates have ignored and thwarted his order,” Smith wrote.

“The contravention of the president’s orders indicates that there is a profound problem with the state of democracy in America.”

Kassem slammed the US government for not taking Aamer’s physical and mental health seriously.

He condemned the United States’ “self-servingly attempts to dismiss Mr. Aamer’s reliably-diagnosed and grave ailments as only ‘minor long-term impairments.’”

Aamer has never been charged with a crime or faced trial since he arrived at the high security prison in Cuba.

In describing his treatment at Guantanamo Bay, Aamer said he was stripped of his pride.

“I was not a human being any more. I meant nothing to them. I lost my dignity, my pride,” he said.

“I had to take off my underwear and hand it to them. I had sleep deprivation for 11 days. That made me crazy. They poured cold water over me. They kept me standing for 20 hours a day. I had to hold my hands and arms out.

“All of the statements I made at Bagram were during the sleep deprivation. I would have said anything. I told them, ‘I will tell you I am Bin Laden if you want me to,’” he said.

Aamer was arrested in 2001 in Afghanistan and subsequently moved to Guantanamo Bay, where in 2007 the US military claimed he was a “close associate” of Osama Bin Laden and a “recruiter, financier, and facilitator” for Al-Qaeda.

The Saudi citizen has always insisted he was only in the country to perform charitable work and said he confessed to being a jihadist while being tortured at the hands of the CIA.

August 20, 2015 Posted by | Civil Liberties, False Flag Terrorism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite, Video | , , , , , | Leave a comment

US refuses to free ‘near death’ Gitmo hunger striker weighing 33 kg

RT | August 15, 2015

A prisoner of US military detention facility in Guantanamo Bay may soon starve to death, as after more than eight years of force-feeding his body is said to be unable to take the nutrients he is pumped with. The DoD opposed the ailing man’s release.

Tariq Ba Odah, a Saudi resident of Yemeni descent, was captured in Pakistan and held in Guantanamo facility since 2002. In 2009 he was cleared for release by the Obama administration, but remains in US custody. In 2007 he went on a hunger strike to protest his indefinite detention without charges. After more than eight years without taking food voluntarily, he weighs less than 34 kilograms and may soon die, his lawyer says.

“Common sense dictates that Mr. Ba Odah is starving because his body is failing to properly absorb and process the liquid calories and nutrients he is being force fed. No other conclusion is viable unless one presumes the government intends to maintain him at just 56 percent of his ideal body weight while he is on hunger strike,” Omar Farah, his lawyer provided by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), wrote in a legal memorandum.

The CCR sought to secure Ba Odah’s transfer on humanitarian grounds through a US federal court. But the habeas corpus petition has been opposed by the Department of Justice, which late on Friday submitted a filing opposing it. The filing was kept under seal, which is “rare and unnecessary,” as CCR’s Wells Dixon told the Guardian newspaper

Ba Odah’s lawyer Farah said the rights group was “deeply disappointed by this secret filing.”

“It is a transparent attempt to hide the fact that the Obama administration’s interagency process for closing Guantánamo is an incoherent mess, and it is plainly intended to conceal the inconsistency between the administration’s stated intention to close Guantánamo and the steps taken to transfer cleared men. The administration simply wants to avoid public criticism and accountability,” he said.

An anonymous US official confirmed the assessment to the British newspaper, saying the government wants to avoid embarrassment rather than protect classified information by sealing the motion. The source added that hardliners in the Pentagon, who consider hunger striking a form of warfare, would not allow Ba Odah’s struggle for release to be unchallenged. Otherwise it would encourage other hunger strikers and make the DoD appear suffering a substantive defeat, the reasoning goes.

The US mishandles the hunger strike issue at Guantanamo bay, a problem that is far from being unique to that facility, RT was told by Scott Allen, professor of medicine at the University of California, who was part of a task force that examined force feeding procedures that are carried out at detention centers.

“The key mistake that the Department of Defense has made in its approach to hunger strikes is that it thinks of them too often collectively,” he said. “If they are concerned about the life of this individual, which is what they had stated the goal was all along, they need to focus on his case and his case alone and develop a plan that would preserve his life and his dignity.”

President Barack Obama made shutting down Guantanamo Bay prison a campaign issue during his first campaign, but failed to deliver on the promise. The latest move by his administration is to speed up transfer of roughly half of the prison’s 116 inmate population to other countries and have the rest relocated into high security prisons on US soil.

The plan was criticized by rights groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, which said it fails to address the wider issue with keeping people detained for decades without charges in a denial of core western values.

August 15, 2015 Posted by | Progressive Hypocrite, Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes | , , , | 1 Comment

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