A chair used for force-feeding. (photo: Charles Dharapak/STF)
US
Escalates Battle to Keep Guantánamo Force-Feeding Tapes Hidden
By Cora Currier, The
Intercept
24 January 16
The
government has refused to meet the deadline for the release of videotapes that
show a detainee at Guantánamo being force-fed while on hunger strike.
A
federal judge had given the government until Friday, January 22, to release
around 11 hours of footage in which a Syrian detainee, Abu Wa’el Dhiab, is
forcibly removed from his cell, restrained, and force-fed. Dhiab’s lawyers have
called the footage “extremely disturbing.”
In a
notice filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., lawyers for
the Justice Department said that they would appeal the judge’s order to release
the tapes. The government has previously said that
the videos are properly classified, and that if released, they might “inflame
Muslim sensitivities overseas.”
The
lawsuit originated when Dhiab asked a judge to halt what he said was a painful
and punitive procedure of force-feeding. Dhiab was released to Uruguay in
December 2014, but a group of news organizations, including The
Intercept’s parent company, First Look Media,intervened in the case
to argue that the videos should be made public.
U.S.
District Judge Gladys Kessler originally ordered the videos released in October
2014, but the government has pushed back with appeals and delayed with arguments
over redactions.
“It’s
disappointing that — yet again — Obama’s lawyers have suppressed the evidence
that shows most eloquently why the president is right, and Guantánamo ought to
close,” Cori Crider, an attorney with the human rights group Reprieve, said in
a statement. Crider, who has seen the tapes, said they “would make your blood
run cold.”
In
an editorial published Wednesday,
the Miami Herald — whose reporter Carol Rosenberg is the most
stalwart observer of operations at the detention center — said that appealing
to prevent the release of the videos would be tantamount to “aiding, basically,
a government cover-up” of detainee abuse.
The
paper compared the tapes to the infamous photos of prisoners at Abu Ghraib,
writing that “disclosure of such horrors, though difficult to hear and to see,
is at the foundation of Americans’ right to know what it being done on their
behalf.”
Rosenberg
has been tracking the number of
Guantánamo detainees on hunger strike since a mass protest began in March 2013.
At one point, more than 100 detainees were refusing food, and nearly half of
them were being tube-fed. The Pentagon stopped publicly reporting the numbers
of detainees refusing food or being force-fed in December 2013, saying that it was
simply a way for the detainees to “draw attention to themselves, and so we’re
not going to help them do that.”
In
recent weeks, the Obama administration has transferred 16 men out of
Guantánamo, part of a final-year push to close the prison. Last week, 10
Yemeni prisoners were sent to Oman. Many of
Guantánamo’s so-called forever prisoners — men the Obama administration could
not charge with a crime, but whom it deems too dangerous to release — have been
alerted that they are eligible for hearings with interagency review boards,
which will evaluate their status (although how swiftly those reviews will
actually proceed is an open question).
The
Pentagon announced Thursday
that two men had been resettled in Balkan nations. A third man, Mohammed Bwazir
of Yemen, refused to go to the unnamed country that had agreed to take him.
“He’s
been in Guantánamo so long that he was terrified about going to a country other
than one where he had family,” Bwazir’s lawyer told the Miami
Herald.
With
today’s transfers, 91 detainees remain at Guantánamo.
C 2015 Reader Supported News
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has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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