Guantanamo: An Assessment and Reflection from Those Who Have Been There

Last updated on: August 17, 2012 at 11:42 am by Rachel Johnson

Guantanamo: An Assessment and Reflection from Those Who Have Been There 2012-08-17T11:42:00-06:00 Rachel Johnson

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Guantanamo: An Assessment and Reflection from Those Who
Have Been There

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Panelists: Thomas
Wilner, managing partner, International
Trade and Government

Relations Practice, Shearman &
Sterling LLP

Mark Dendeaux, Professor of law and Director, Center for
Policy and Research,

Seton Hall Law School

John Chandler, partner, Sutherland AsBill & Brennan LLP

Gita Gutierrez, attorney, Centre for Constitutional Rights

Dendeaux: My father used to say, "never write a letter
and never throw one away." Well the
government has written letters and its clear now that they knew they had the
wrong people and they didn't care. 8% of
the people at Guantanamo are alleged to be fighters. When Rumsfeld and the government are calling
these people the worst of the worst, they're talking about people conscripted
to be assistant cooks. 55% are not
alleged to have committed hostile acts. Guantanamo
is the equivalent of a perp walk so the public will believe we are acting on
the War on Terror. Bear in mind that no
court has ever released a detainee, but the government has been releasing lots
of them. If you believed your own
evidence and that you have Taliban fighters, who would you release first? We did a profile of those released and we
discovered that if you are an Al-Qaeda fighter you are released at the same
rates as a Taliban fighter, if you are alleged to have committed hostile acts
you are released at the same rates those not.
If you believed your own evidence you wouldn't do that. The release rates are political.

Chandler: Shergawi Ali Al-Haj is a citizen of Yemen who
was kidnapped by the Pakistani police and CIA and was imprisoned in
Karachi. When he asked to speak to his
embassy, the request was rejected.
Shergawi was shackled, diapered, blindfolded, covered head to
knees. He was flown to and imprisoned in
Amman Jordon for 9 months and was told he was being held for the US. He was shown pictures and asked if the men in
them were Taliban or Al-Qaeda. He didn't
know the answer and was subjected daily to foot whipping to provoke immense
pain. Shergawi began identifying every
other picture as being a member of Al-Qaeda and he was beaten. He then identified every picture as Al-Qaeda
and he was beaten more. He started
identifying random pictures and the Americans were happy. At the end of 9 months he signed an 80 page
confession that he had never been able to read and that the government has
never released. He was sent to
Guantanamo, which he prefers to Jordon.
January 4, 2004, after 2 years in Jordon, a CIA Gulf Stream Jet picked
up Shergawi in Amman and took him Afghanistan and from there he was sent to
Guantanamo. He has been held there since
2004. Of our six clients, the other five
are in their seventh year at Guantanamo.
In Nuremberg we could have shot the losers. Instead, we did the right thing, we tried
them. Another of our clients, Bwazir
went on a hunger strike. He was force
fed by a tube down his nose, which for a time was permanent. He was on the hunger strike for four months
when the government decided to break the hunger strikers by forcing them into
restraint chairs twice a day, force feeding them through a tube they would take
in and out of their noses each time. He
lasted 10 days before giving up his hunger strike. Six months later he resumed it and that time
lasted four months with the restraint chair.
Guantanamo is more than a place.
Guantanamo is about us and our beliefs.

Gutierrez: I'm a human rights attorney, but I want to
talk to you today about what the word ‘human' means in this phrase instead of
the word ‘rights'. I have met with over
40 men at Guantanamo since I have started going to the base. As an attorney we have pursued prosecutors in
other countries to bring war crimes charges against officials in this
country. But what I want to talk to you
about today is what ‘human' means. I am
grateful for the community we have created for these two days. Questions about faith and torture and our
nation's soul are ones I have struggled with since 2004 when I first went to
Guantanamo. Since that year, I go down
to the base often. I want to talk to you
about Muhammed Al-Kahtani who was subject to the first interrogation plan. Muhammed's elderly father traveled to Bahrain
to meet with human rights attorneys to get help for his son. We recruited a lawyer for him and they had
not filed his case in 2005 when Time magazine ran the article on Al-Kahtani as
the 20th hijacker and the interrogation he endured. The lawyers immediately dropped him and the
Centre decided to take his case itself because we believe that no one should be
tortured. Around August 2002 Muhammed's
finger prints were matched with those on file and the government became
concerned that he had been one of the ones trying to enter the country as a
hijacker. He was sleep deprived for 60
days, only allowed to sleep from 7 am to 11 am.
He would be over hydrated and then shackled down and not allowed to use
the bathroom and would have to urinate on himself. He would be held down and, in what I consider
to be sexual assault, a woman would straddle him and touch him. There is no dispute about what has happened
to him. When these methods were used against
U.S. soldiers by the North Koreans, sleep deprivation for example, we called it
torture. I can't convey to you what
Muhammed has felt and endured. I can
tell you about my experience in meeting him.
At first he refused to meet with me, and on the second day he had to be
tricked into meeting with me and he curled up in a corner and wouldn't look at
me and this went on for several days.
Often we would meet in the same room in which he was tortured. I realized that the system in Guantanamo is
designed for us to fail in our work with victims of torture. Too much time has passed for the legal system
to restore the loss of life and to me that is the limit of the law. Looking at our national soul, I am not here
to comfort the afflicted but to afflict the comforted. We have moved backwards, but with Guantanamo
we have looked at the underbelly of our country. We have two threads in our country, one is
that of democracy and freedom, but the other is a tradition of
dehumanization. We have a capacity in
this nation to see other human beings as less than human and that is part of
our history too. I leave you with an
invitation. The resisters are waiting
for you. We have been waiting for you. Our nation is once again in the long dark
night of the soul. I invite you into
this darkness. Reach out and touch the
hand of someone in the darkness. You may
touch the hand of a prisoner, you may touch my hand, you may touch the hand of
a torturer; you will touch the hand of God.

Wilner:
Al-Kahtani's torture was done four years ago; it was written up in Time
Magazine. The hunger strikes went on
four years ago. And people are still
surprised to hear about this. People
have an obligation to learn and to know about what is going on. It is extraordinary to me today that we are
having this discussion in the United States.
Growing up as a kid, torture is what the bad guys did in comic books,
it's what the enemy did to John McCain.
But we've tortured in this country and we've done it without any
debate. And we've held people without
any hearings, and for my guys down in Guantanamo that's more important than
torture. Mark Denbeaux's work shows
categorically that most of these guys are being held there and they haven't
done anything. The government knew they
were holding innocent people years ago and Gonzalez said "burry it, we've made
the decision, they are there." To me
that is evil. I've also asked, "Where
are the religious groups? How can they
go into their congregations knowing this is going on and bear it?" I was taught that someone who gives up his
principles in the face of a threat is not strong, but weak. This is a struggle for the soul of our
nation. I agree this nation has always
had a dark side, but in my mind we were always working against that and making
progress. Haebeus corpus, liberty, the
rule of law are the soul of our nation, they are the principles we are founded
on. This is a struggle we must continue
to fight as long as it takes. I don't
see this as a partisan issue, but I am disgusted that the people who have done
this are still in power and they may be in power again. We have an obligation to stand up now for
what this nation stands for, and what I think a true religion stands for.

From the Pulpit

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September 12, 2008

What the Torture Debate Reveals about American Christianity

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September 12, 2008 The Religious Roots of Human Rights

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