On UN Torture Day, don’t forget the victims at Guantánamo

The 15 men still held at Guantánamo.

Today, I’m remembering the 15 men still held in the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, on the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, marked annually since 1998, and initiated to mark the date in 1987 when the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment came into force.

Read my article, On U.N. Torture Day, Don’t Forget the Victims at Guantánamo, on the website of the Close Guantánamo campaign, which I established in January 2012, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of the prison, with the US attorney Tom Wilner.

12 of the 15 men still held, identified as “high-value detainees”, were among the 119 men that the US Senate Intelligence Committee’s report into the CIA torture program, whose executive summary was published in 2014, identified as having been held and tortured in CIA “black sites.”

For nearly two decades, the US government has been seeking to prosecute six of these men, for their alleged involvement in crimes including the 9/11 attacks, but their efforts are consistently stymied because of the torture to which these men were subjected in CIA “black sites”, which is fundamentally incompatible with justice.

One other “high-value detainee”, Ramzi Bin Al-Shibh, a 9/11 co-defendant, is in legal limbo after a DoD Sanity Board ruled him mentally unfit to stand trial in 2023, because of his torture, another, Abd Al-Hadi Al-Iraqi, Guantánamo’s most physically disabled prisoner, agreed to a plea deal in 2022, and is supposed to be freed in 2032, while another, Guled Hassan Duran, a Somali, was approved for release by a high-level US government review process in 2021, but is still held.

Three others, the “forever prisoners”, who include Abu Zubaydah, the first victim of the CIA torture program, have never been charged, but have not been approved for release either.

All bear the taint of the torture that the US should never have embarked on, but for which, despite the revelations in the Senate torture report, not a single US official has been held accountable.

The other three men still imprisoned weren’t held in the “black sites”, but torture afflicts them too. One, Ali Hamza Al-Bahlul, a publicist for Al-Qaeda, is serving a life sentence in solitary confinement, after a one-sided trial in 2008, in which he refused to mount a defense, while the other two have been approved for release but have still not been freed.

Their plight, shared with that of the “high-value detainees.” was particularly highlighted three years ago, when, for the first time since Guantánamo opened, a UN Special Rapporteur, Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, visited and wrote a report about the conditions there.

Shocking the Biden administration, Ní Aoláin wrote that the rights violations at the prison, despite some improvements over the years, were such that “the totality of these factors, without doubt, amounts to ongoing cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment”, and “may also meet the legal threshold for torture.”

As I conclude in my article, “Under Trump, no one cares, but one day there will need to be a reckoning. The existence of Guantánamo, and the whole of the ‘war on terror’ detention program — including the ‘black sites’ and the military detention facilities operated in Afghanistan and Iraq during the US occupations of both countries — constitutes nothing less than the most indelible moral stain on any illusions the US has that it is a nation founded on the rule of law, and which respects the rule of law.”

As I add, “Guantánamo is, and always has been, a legal, moral and ethical abomination, and it remains so to this day.”

Read the whole article here.

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