Obama administration bars torture inves tigators from Guant ánamo Bay

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Obama administration bars torture investigators from Guantánamo Bay
By Patrick Martin
25 July 2009

Adding to its six-month record of extending the Bush administration’s
attacks on democratic rights, the Obama administration is now blocking
efforts by human rights investigators from the United Nations to
interview detainees at the Guantánamo Bay prison.

According to a report Thursday in the Washington Post, two UN human
rights researchers, Martin Scheinin and Manfred Nowak, have sought to
visit Guantánamo and been turned down. In a particularly cynical
twist, US officials claimed that they were too busy implementing
Obama’s much publicized order to close down Guantánamo by next January
to answer questions about the ongoing abuse of prisoners still held in
the facility.

Last month, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton rejected a UN request
for a meeting in Washington to discuss the treatment of prisoners at
Guantánamo and at secret CIA detention centers, which Obama also
claims to have shut down. The US government has flatly refused to
provide any information about the locations of the secret prisons or
the identities of those who were held in them.

The UN investigators who spoke with the Post tried to put the best
possible face on the Obama administration’s conduct, accepting the
White House claim that the torture centers have been shut down and
suggesting that Obama was seeking to protect Bush administration
officials against prosecution for torture of prisoners carried out in
the past.

More likely, however, the torture and abuse are ongoing, and the White
House is seeking to protect itself as well as Bush administration
officials.

The German magazine Der Spiegel reported this week, citing interviews
with released Guantánamo prisoner Lakhdar Boumediene, that torture was
continuing at the prison. Boumediene was the lead plaintiff in the
case that went to the US Supreme Court, resulting in a ruling
invalidating an earlier process for handling the Guantánamo cases. He
was released outright in May.

According to an article by reporters John Goetz and Britta Sandberg,
“Boumediene is a free man who can talk about his years in prison. What
he has told Spiegel is likely to trigger controversy in the United
States: Boumediene claims that the abuse and humiliation of prisoners
continues in Guantánamo and that detainees there are still harassed
and tortured. According to Boumediene, a special guard unit continues
to beat prisoners to get them out of their cells, and any official
claims that such treatment has stopped are untrue.”

Another ex-detainee, Mohammed el Gharani, who was released in April
and returned to his native Chad, said that he was beaten and
pepper-sprayed by soldiers when he refused to leave his cell right up
to his final day in the prison.

The protection of torturers, whether past or current, is itself a
violation of the International Convention Against Torture, a treaty
signed by the Reagan administration in the 1980s and ratified by Congress.

US Attorney General Eric Holder, who is supervising an internal
administration review of the issue, has reportedly decided that only
“rogue” CIA agents who went beyond the torture methods specified by
Bush administration lawyers would be charged with any crimes. There
will be no prosecution of either the lawyers who drafted the torture
memos or the top officials, including President Bush and Vice
President Cheney, who approved and ordered the torture program.

Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties
Union, criticized Holder’s action as a case of “making low-level
officials take the fall while the big fish get away.”

“The evidence is abundantly clear that the crime of torture was
authorized at the highest levels of the Bush administration,” he
wrote. “A narrow investigation that fails from the outset to follow
the facts where they lead would only perpetuate the Bush
administration’s false claim that torture was the result of a ‘few bad
apples,’ rather than confront the reality that it was a widespread,
systemic and orchestrated policy set at the highest levels of government.”

Proven torture of Guantánamo prisoner Mohammed Jawad has forced the
Justice Department to drop its current prosecution on murder charges.
The action came Friday, compelled by a deadline set a federal district
court judge who declared the treatment of Jawad to be “an outrage.” An
adolescent when seized by US forces in Afghanistan seven years ago,
Jawad has been held ever since in violation of international
agreements on child soldiers, who are supposed to be treated as
victims and not criminals.

Jawad was able to secure a habeas corpus hearing in the civilian
courts. US District Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle ruled July 17 that all
of Jawad’s statements, including a confession, would be thrown out
because they had been obtained through torture during his initial
incarceration in Afghanistan. But Attorney General Holder said Jawad’s
case would continue to be investigated in an effort to prove charges
against him without any of his own coerced testimony.

Jawad is accused of throwing a grenade at an American military convoy,
something which under international law would be considered an act of
resistance against an invader, not “terrorism.” Moreover, there has
been no evidence presented except his own self-incriminating
statements, which the judge said were “the function of torture.”

The first prosecutor in the case under the military commission system
established by Bush and continued by Obama, Darrel Vandeveld, resigned
from the military in protest over the use of torture-generated
testimony and is now working with the defense.

At the July 17 hearing, Judge Huvelle declared, “I don’t understand
this case. I’m baffled. This guy has been there seven years, seven
years. He might have been taken there at the age of maybe twelve,
thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years old. I don’t know what he is doing
there... you should have figured this out months ago, years ago,
frankly.” She concluded, “Let him out. Send him back to Afghanistan.”

Jawad, then only 12 years old, was beaten and chained to a wall while
in US custody in Afghanistan, then subjected to extreme isolation at
Guantánamo, where he tried to hang himself in his cell.

Lawyers for other Guantánamo detainees publicly blasted the Obama
administration for failing to provide information, including
transcripts of interrogations, needed for their defense. Speaking to
Bloomberg News, Professor James Cohen of Fordham University School of
Law, who represents two prisoners, said the Justice Department “hasn’t
changed its stonewalling position” from the Bush administration.

Brent Mickum, attorney for Abu Zubaidah, who was waterboarded 83 times
according to a Justice Department report, said that many defense
attorneys for Guantánamo prisoners were frustrated with the Obama
administration’s approach. “There is certainly a large group of us who
has basically written” Obama off, he said.

In a further demonstration of the alignment of Obama and Bush, the
Justice Department argued before a federal judge Tuesday that an
interview by former Vice President Dick Cheney with prosecutors in the
case involving the leaking of the identity of then-CIA agent Valerie
Plame should remain secret for five to ten years.

Cheney’s chief of staff Lewis Libby was convicted of perjury and
sentenced to prison—a sentence commuted by Bush—for lying to
prosecutors about his role in the affair.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jul2009/guan-j25.shtml

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