Gitmo and the UN

From Guantanamo, Ammar al-Baluchi, one of 15 “high-value detainees”, known as HVDs, has written to Professor Juan Mendez, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, to ask him to visit him and fellow prisoners.

Baluchi, with four others, is charged with involvement in the 9/11 attacks, and was held in CIA “black sites” for three and a half years before his transfer to Guantanamo 10 years ago. Since then, he and the other HVDs have largely been held in silence, as the United States strives to prevent them discussing the torture to which they were subjected.

Every word uttered between a prisoner and their lawyer is presumptively classified, and notes of meetings have to be submitted to a Pentagon censorship board – the “privilege review team” – before anything anyone has said can be made public.

However, while the release of unclassified notes has been a fairly frequent occurrence within the general population at Guantanamo, almost every word uttered by the HVDs has remained classified.

Baluchi’s letter to Mendez, dated April 11, 2016, and recently unclassified, breaks through this silence.

He writes that his torture, dramatised in the movie Zero Dark Thirty and “including waterboarding and sleep deprivation”, led to him receiving “a traumatic brain injury” and suffering severe anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder to this day.

Baluchi’s claim of being waterboarded is actually a reference to “water dunking”, another form of controlled drowning, often involving total immersion in water.

The US government has      only ever admitted that three men  – all HVDs – were waterboarded, but        the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report into the CIA detention programme, published in December 2014, and subsequent investigations have established that at least 12 other CIA prisoners were subjected to “water dunking”,        as the Guardian        reported last October. Baluchi was not included in that list, but his lawyers confirmed to me that he, too, was subjected to the technique.

Various forms of water torture are not the only forms of torture that were used by the CIA.

The Senate report also revealed that the CIA had used “rectal feeding” on prisoners – in which food was pureed and then anally administered – and that one of the HVDs subjected to this, Mustafa al-Hawsawi, who was subjected to “rectal exams conducted with excessive force” in a “black site” in Afghanistan, was later “diagnosed with chronic haemorrhoids, an anal fissure, and symptomatic rectal prolapse”.

However, despite the fact that the use of torture on the HVDs is now well known, Baluchi notes in his letter to Mendez that the US authorities are not interested at all in addressing the prisoners’ psychological and medical issues arising from their torture.

In President Barack Obama’s last months in office, he is still working towards the closure of Guantanamo, although this is an effort that will probably remain stymied by Congress, which maintains a ban on using any funds to move men from Guantanamo to the US mainland. However, as this wrangling continues, the HVDs are not the only prisoners deprived of adequate treatment.

Because of its remote location, Guantanamo is hideously expensive to run, currently it costs over $7m a year to hold each prisoner, and personnel there will      struggle to meet the demands        placed on its facilities by an ageing population.

The recent decision to         close one notorious isolation block   at the prison, Camp 5, and replace it with a new clinic and psychiatric ward reflects this, but the most practical course of action would be for Congress to allow Obama to close the prison once and for all, as he promised when he first took office in January 2009.

This article has been excerpted from: ‘Guantanamo torture victims should be allowed UN visit’. Courtesy: Aljazeera.com