Much of the public could rightly be confused about the status of Guantanamo Bay. After all, didn’t President Obama announce immediately upon taking office that it will be closed by January 2010? What about some recent controversy over trials of the detainees? And didn’t the U.S. Senate recently vote to reject funding to bring any of the detainees into this country?
Confusion is understandable. President Obama has been inconsistent on his treatment of this important issue, and his recent reversal of articulated policy on Military Commission trials throws all prior understandings aside.
My law firm represents five Guantanamo detainees from Yemen, men who have been imprisoned for seven years. Yet none of them has been charged with anything. One man has even been cleared for release by our government for three years. Each has been deprived of a neutral forum to challenge his imprisonment or to produce evidence of his innocence.
And all the while, they sit, separated from their families, having been brutally tortured both while en route to Guantanamo Bay and while imprisoned there. The torture they have endured is unimaginable.
I believed that the arrival of the new administration signaled an end to such reprehensible, abusive and unconstitutional practices. Indeed, in a trip to the prison the week after President Obama’s inauguration, we assured our clients that they had reason for real hope. The Obama administration, we believed, would reverse the unconstitutional and inhumane policies of its predecessor.
Four months later, I fear I was naïve. Despite President Obama’s creation of a team to review the files of all 240 of the remaining detainees, only two men have been released since he took office. The U.S. has abdicated its responsibility to lead on the issue, refusing to accept any detainees into this country while at the same time trying to persuade its allies that they should accept some.
The U.S. has refused to take even demonstrably innocent detainees, such as the Uighers from western China, who are recognized to have been wrongfully captured but who cannot be repatriated for fear that they would be subjected to torture or death. No credible source still suggests that these men are terrorists.
Under Obama, the treatment of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay has not improved. In some cases, it has gotten worse. We recently received two letters from a client, Suhail Abdu Anam, detailing the treatment they are suffering:
“I am sending you this letter from this environment of torture I am being subjected to along with my brothers who are on a hunger strike. I don’t believe the situation is going to improve with this new administration . . . . Obama and Bush are both the same but with different faces.
“[The guards] come to me while I am lying on my bed and even though I am not resisting, they violently pull me down from the bed and throw me on my back . . . . They twist my arms behind my back and tie me up very hard with steel or plastic handcuffs and they do the same to my feet. And when they pull me up from the floor, I find myself surrounded by five or six people and I feel serious pain in my arms because the handcuffs are very tight. . . . They carry me into a chair and they tie me up with all kinds of straps. . . .
“They force feed me without paying any attention to my suffering. The strap is very tight around my belly and when the feeding goes down into my stomach, I feel like I am going to vomit and in fact I have vomited several times as a result of this procedure.
“[Then] they carry me back to my room and they lie me down on my belly and the six of them start pressing over my back. Imagine having six people . . . pressing over the back of an individual that weighs no more than 119 pounds.
“One of hunger strikers had a fracture on his back the same way while he was being fed.
“[Signed,] Suhail Abdu Anam.”
Unfortunately, this treatment has not been limited to our client. Nor has Suhail been determined to be a “difficult” detainee. His hunger strike is designed to call attention to the brutal and inhumane treatment being inflicted upon the detainees at Guantanamo Bay.
But our leaders are not listening. And it is not improving.
Darold W. Killmer (dkillmer@kln-law.com) is a partner in the civil rights firm of Killmer, Lane & Newman in Denver.
