The University chapter of Amnesty International U.S.A. hosted two speakers last Thursday night to discuss human rights abuses at Guantanamo Bay – the U.S. naval base in Southeast Cuba where hundreds of men suspected of having a connection with al-Qaida have been imprisoned since the start of the War on Terror. The panel discussion featured Portland lawyer and Guantanamo detainee defense attorney Tom Johnson and Jeff Bachman, a member of Amnesty International U.S.A.’s Board of Directors.
Johnson said that Guantanamo detains approximately 400 Muslim men from 15 different countries. Of the 400 detainees, less than 8 percent have been accused of being al-Qaida fighters and less than 50 percent have been accused of committing hostile acts against the U.S. More than 95 percent of Guantanamo’s detainees were turned over to the United States by Pakistan and the Afghan Northern Alliance for a bounty of $5,000 each, a bounty that the U.S. government offered after the attack on the World Trade Center for anyone linked to the Taliban, he said.
The first detainees arrived at Guantanamo in 2001, shortly after American lawyers filed habeas petitions on behalf of them. Habeas corpus is a legal action where detainees seek release from unlawful imprisonment and Johnson said it’s “the one protection people have against being imprisoned by their government.”
Johnson and many others attest that the U.S. government has no lawful reason to hold many of the prisoners at Guantanamo and has stripped detainees of their right to enact habeas corpus. In 2004, the government created Combatant Status Review Tribunals as a substitute for formal habeas corpus trials. Johnson said the CSRTs are “one-time, non-adversarial reviews.”
He said detainees are not allowed to have lawyers at these proceedings, but are instead assigned a “personal representative” who Johnson called “functionless.”
As a personal representative, “You cannot advocate on behalf of the person you’re defending,” he said.
Johnson said that detainees have severely limited access to a fair trial and ability to prove their innocence.
CSRTs determine detainees to be either “enemy combatants” or not, and if deemed the former, they can be imprisoned until the “cessation of hostilities,” that is, until the War on Terror ends.
Bachman said the Military Commissions Act passed by Congress in 2006 legally allows the United States to deny those labeled “enemy combatants” the right to challenge in a court of law the conditions of their detention, even if they have been tortured.
Bachman called the MCA a “legal fig leaf” created by the government to permit the use of “interrogation techniques that basically amount to torture.”
He referenced a group of 40 retired military officers including former Secretary of State Colin Powell that wrote Congress, urging them not to pass the MCA. Bachman said that in the letter the retired officers said the MCA would put U.S. personnel in danger, for if caught by enemy powers, U.S. soldiers would certainly be treated as the United States treated its “enemy combatants.”
Bachman also said that a “multitude” of former military interrogators have said torture is not a good way of obtaining reliable information because “when you torture someone, they’re gonna tell you whatever you want to hear.”
Bachman later read selections from a letter written by 33-year-old Guantanamo detainee Jumah Al-Dossari to his U.S. attorneys.
“At Guantanamo,” Al-Dossari wrote, “soldiers have assaulted me, placed me in solitary confinement, threatened to kill me…they have beaten me unconscious.”
He wrote “al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden have done nothing but kill and denigrate a religion. I like the United States…I have lived in the United States, and I wanted to become a citizen.”
“The purpose of Guantanamo is to destroy people,” he concluded, “and I have been destroyed…If I die, please remember that there was a human being named Jumah at Guantanamo whose beliefs, dignity and humanity were abused.”
“Too many of us,” Bachman said, “have allowed our good sense and our morals to be overcome by fear.”
Bachman said that the abuse of human rights at Guantanamo is a “profound moral crisis” much like others the American people have faced before. In the past, he said, Americans seized the opportunity to act in support of human rights. He said he urges them to do so again now and work to repeal the MCA.
University AIUSA co-director Tracy Dowds said Amnesty International is a grassroots organization that seeks to “promote awareness for abuses taking place all around the world.”
Dowds said the University chapter is focusing its energy this term on ending human rights abuses at Guantanamo.