Friday, September 11, 2015

a comment about Hassan and the other men released....

Perhaps it is to keep up the false pretense that all of the men that have been held at Guantanamo are "bad" but I have to mention this very disturbing fact which was highlighted in my last post: each and every man that has been released from Guantanamo under the Obama administration has been "cleared" by all of the government agencies. In other words, these men should not be treated as criminals when they are finally on the plane to be set free. Mr. Al-Ghizzawi was treated in the same fashion as Mr. Hassan.... as have all of the other men cleared and released.
This has been my country's last inhumane measure before these men are finally free and I am deeply ashamed.

A botched translation led to this man being held at Gitmo for 14 years....

One of the many incredible stories of the men at Guantanamo....

As for Hassan, on June 12, 2015, Gitmo guards came into his cell at night. Once again they took off his clothes and put him in a diaper. Once again they stripped him of his senses with a blindfold and earmuffs, and once again they led him onto a plane for a long journey. Only this time, when the plane landed,he was in Oman. The country had welcomed him on humanitarian grounds. Reprieve and the U.S. government wouldn’t comment on his exact whereabouts in Oman, and local reporters say the government in Muscat has warned them away from trying to interview former Gitmo detainees. But more than a decade after he arrived at Gitmo, Emad Hassan was finally free, and nothing seemed lost in translation.

Read the entire story here....

A policy no more....

A few months ago I reported about the loosening of some of the rules regarding the release of notes taken by attorneys with their clients. Under a new policy that was announced in January the government allowed notes to go uncensored that detailed the torture of Majid Khan as told by Mr. Khan to his attorney. (You can read that here.)
It was apparently a short lived policy. Abu Zubaydah's attorney tried to have declassified 116 pages that delayed the horrific torture that Abu Zubaydah was (and continues to be) subjected over his 14 years of "detention." My government does not want us to see those details and so we only know a small summary of those details-- for example--that Abu Zubaydah was water boarded 83 times in a single month- lost an eye, was kept in small coffin like boxes...--
So much for that policy. You can read more here.

From Roger Fitch and our friends down under at Justinian...

The American Psychological Association has decided to do the right thing and stop assisting US government interrogations, following a damning independent investigation. TheGuardian and Just Security have more.  
Only one person voted against the change - Larry James, a former member of the Behavioural Science Consultation Team (BSCT), military psychologists who collaborated in the brutal interrogation of helpless prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo. 
James: wants to keep psychologists on the interrogation teams
Many "Biscuits" have had ethics charges brought against them, and one of them took themilitary Fifth Amendment.  
Following cancellation of the CIA's contract with the firm of torture-architect psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, West Coast civil rights figure Stephen Yagman has filed suit under the False Claims Act for recovery of the $81 million Mitchell-Jessen were paid for their (dirty) work.  
READ THE REST HERE