Nick Juliano, Raw Story
The US military was using the same procedures employed at the controversial Guantanamo Bay prison at other facilities inside the United States where US citizens and legal residents were detained, according to documents released Wednesday.
At least one Navy officer was concerned that a detainee was being slowly driven insane by the policies, which prohibited detainees from having items such as shoes or socks, according to 91 pages of e-mails between officers at military brigs in Virginia and South Carolina released Wednesday by the American Civil Liberties Union.
“These documents are the first clear confirmation of what we’ve suspected all along, that the brig was run as a prison beyond the law. There was an effort to create a Gitmo inside the United States,” Jonathan Hafetz of the ACLU’s National Security Project in New York told the Associated Press, using the slang word for the U.S. naval facility in Cuba.
A pdf of the heavily redacted e-mails can be downloaded here. The ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act request along with the Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic at Yale Law School to obtain the documents.
The obtained e-mails apparently were exchanged between brig officers and military higher-ups between 2002 and 2004. They discuss detentions of Yaser Esham Hamdi, Jose Padilla, both of whom were US citizens at the time, and Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, who was a legal resident in the country when he was detained.
“Guantánamo was designed as a law-free zone, a place where the government could do whatever it wanted without having to worry about whether it was legal,” said Jonathan Freiman, an attorney with the Lowenstein Clinic at Yale. “It didn’t take long for that sort of lawlessness to be brought home to our own country. Who knows how much further America would have gone if the Supreme Court hadn’t stepped in to stop incommunicado detentions in 2004?”
(Original Article)
Ramos, You are obviously completely biased through your worship of the Bush Administration that you can’t see the forest for the trees.
The plethora of witness accounts and records of the harsh interrogation methods employed by the U.S. against prisoners at Gitmo make very clear that they have been mistreated.
The only difference of opinion is whether to call it torture or not.
Andrew,
I commend you for publishing the link to Enemy Combatants E-Mail. I read all of them! As far as I could ascertain, these prisoners were treated very well. They, themselves, did not complain of bad treatment, not once! Truly, I was amazed at the compassion shown for the ECs. How can you, with a clear concience, maintain that they were treated with brutality or malice when the records are right in front of you? Perhaps, I think, you didn’t bother to read every e-mail (as I most certainly did before commenting), but only pulled out what you thought would support your false claims. Really, the government even allowed them TV, cards, and phone calls with family. Shame on you Andrew. Try to be more objective and see the whole story. It’s only fair.