Some light post-holiday reading from our friends at WikiLeaks: thousands of pages of documents dating from 2002 to 2008, memoranda from JTF-GTMO, the Joint Task Force at Guantánamo Bay, to US Southern Command in Miami, Florida — the cases of the majority of the prisoners held at Guantánamo, 758 out of 779 in total.
As the WikiLeaks precede outlines, what the Guantánamo files reveal, primarily, is “that only a few dozen prisoners are genuinely accused of involvement in terrorism”.
Concurrently, a report into the role of health providers assigned to the US Department of Defense at Guantánamo, who “should have been in a position to observe and document physical and psychological evidence of torture and ill treatment”, was released yesterday. The medical records, client affidavits, attorney-client notes and legal declarations of medical experts of nine GTMO detainees were reviewed. In all cases the allegations of torture and ill treatment were consistent with physical and psychological evidence of torture and ill treatment documented in the medical records and in evaluations by non-governmental experts. But the “medical personnel responsible for the detainees’ routine medical and mental health care failed to inquire about and/or document the causes of the physical injuries and psychological symptoms that they observed”. Instead, they attributed psychological symptoms to “personality disorders” and “routine stressors of confinement”.
Will any of these revelations come to anything? This is a facility that remains open, despite President Obama’s pledge to shut it down within his first year of office.
As The Atlantic‘s Andrew Sullivan points out today: “Either there is a rule of law or there isn’t. Either we are a civilized country or we are not.” The silence from the White House — save for again condemning the leaks “in the strongest possible terms” — speaks volumes.
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