Guantanamo detainees speak in rare interviews for 10-year anniversary

Guantanamo Bay Prison 10-year anniversary of U.S. war crimes

On Jan. 11, 2001, ten years ago today, hooded, shackled and caged, from freezing nights in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the first prisoners arrived at Guantanamo Bay Prison. They spent years of abuse and detention without trial, as they explained in their interviews released today by the international human rights organization, Reprieve. Instead of closing the illegal prison, as Barack Obama promised when campaigning, he expanded its use to include Americans, to be subjected to the same abuse, and made it more difficult to get anyone out when he signed the National Defence Authorization Act on New Year's Eve.

Since January 11, 2011, the Gunatanamo detention facility "has made the world's news headlines for the shocking human rights concerns associated with it - including arbitrary detention, secret detention, torture and other ill-treatment, renditions, and unfair trials," stated Amnesty International on Monday.

Reprieve reported in a written statement on the 10-year anniversary, "A total of 779 men have been held at this notorious prison camp," and "today, two years after President Obama’s closure deadline passed without action, 171 prisoners remain in illegal detention."

Since Guantánamo opened, Reprieve has been at the forefront of the human rights battle for the prisoners there.

Eighty-nine of those still at Guantanamo have been cleared of any wrondoing for release, but there they remain, most in indefinite detention without charge or trial.

Amnesty International stated, "Those who have been charged face unfair trial by military commission and some can face the death penalty if convicted.

"The government claims that even those found not guilty can be returned to indefinite detention. There has been essentially no accountability or redress for the human rights violations to which they and other detainees have been subjected."

The first Guantanamo prisoners arrived at Guantanamo's Camp X-Ray, housed in open-air cages with concrete floors, as recounted by some of the former prisoners in moving interviews conducted by Reprieve for the 10-year mark of U.S. human rights abuses at the prison.

CNN reports on the 10th anniversary Wednesday, "In those early days, Human Rights Watch says, detainees were subject to 'painful stress positions, extended solitary confinement, threatening military dogs, threats of torture and death' and other abuses."

(Watch Reprieve's YouTube on this page left showing former detainees and family members speak movingly about their memories of those still imprisoned at Guantanamo, the impact of the prison on their own lives, and hopes for the future.)

"Human rights groups have consistently criticized Guantanamo's very existence, the mistreatment of detainees and their lack of access to legal recourse. Attorneys specializing in human rights issues have devoted thousands of hours to petitions in federal court to win the release of detainees. But the Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., has invariably ruled in the government's favor. The latest case reached the U.S. Supreme Court this week." (CNN)

Among those in Guantanamo is British resident and Reprieve client Shaker Aamer, still held by the U.S. authorities despite long being cleared for release, a story that could become that of any American due to President Obama signing the NDAA 2012.

Aamer, like many Guantánamo prisoners, has never received a trial or been charged with a crime, but has been held since 2002 and has suffered terrible abuse. His wife and four children await his return in London.

When the military police beat up a prisoner while he was praying, Aamer initiated the first hunger strike at Guantánamo. Over three hundred prisoners began refusing meals.

"The Americans negotiated with Shaker, promising changes in the camp conditions. But the promises were broken," Reprieve reports.

When the Guantanamo hunger strike began again in September 2005, in retaliation, as also experienced by California prisoners who peacefully protest by hunger striking, Aamer was placed in solitary confinement as punishment.

"He has remained alone in a six foot by eight foot windowless cell ever since and is one of a number of prisoners to have written about the conditions in Guantánamo," Reprieve reported Wednesday.

(Learn how to take action to help the human rights abuses against Shaker Aamer here.)

After Reprieve Director Clive Stafford Smith visited Shaker in November 2011, Stafford Smith immediately penned a letter to British Foreign Secretary William Hague, listing the numerous physical ailments Aamer suffers, a list that had just been cleared through the US censorship process.

The letter calls for Aamer's release.

Meanwhile, Aamer "waits alone in his cell, officially cleared of wrongdoing, but still paying the cruellest of costs for his kindness to others," Reprieve says.

CNN's comment today is that the ongoing Gunatanamo injustices are "a far cry from the executive order Obama signed two days after taking office that pledged to close Guantanamo by January 2010, as he declared that the 'existence of Guantanamo Bay likely created more terrorists around the world than it detained.'"

Instead, the question remains, as Amnesty International asked today, "How long before the U.S. government closes the book on Guantánamo and meets its human rights obligations?"