Poteet said two days before the boy was arrested, he had borrowed the van to transport his pregnant wife to the hospital. She went into labor on the way and delivered a girl in the van. Hence, the bloodstains were on the seat. Nazakat said the US military officials acknowledged that some prisoners were simply at the wrong place at the wrong time.
In the fog of war, many innocents became suspects and terrorists. Some were arrested for wearing the Casio FW watch, which was seen as a sign of al-Qaeda. The CIA officials concluded that bin Laden had trained recruits to use this watch as timers in bombs. At least 22 Uyghur detainees at Gitmo had also a similar story. They had fled their homes in Xinjiang province and crossed into Pakistan, where they were caught and sold for bounty.
Nineteen of them have been freed and given asylum in various countries, including Albania and Sweden. Gitmo was chosen by former US President George Bush because of its extra-judicial nature — as it is outside the US and its commonwealth, hence beyond the jurisdiction of any civilian court. He said the facility, a virtual fortress, ringed by barbed wire, watchtowers, and surveillance cameras, has several checkpoints, and even senior US officials require security clearance before arriving on the island.
To get there, one must first clear security in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, before boarding an aircraft to the Leeward military airfield in Guantanamo Bay. After clearing security, visitors are allowed to board a ferry to the Windward base across the bay, where they are allowed to enter the prison camps after a series of checks. In , Cuba leased this bay on its southeastern end to the US to be used as a naval coaling station.
In , it became a US enclave after a perpetual lease was signed. What is not guarded by the sea is guarded by steep hills on the Cuban side. Today, even if someone managed to evade the motion and sound sensors on the US side, he would run into mines on the Cuban side. Not to forget the Cactus Curtain, the 13 kilometer-long 8 mi paddle-cactus fence planted by Cuba. Gitmo was divided into four prison camps for different types of captives.
Camp Iguana, which once held juveniles as young as 12, also housed three Chinese prisoners. Most of the detainees in Gitmo were held in Camps five and six. Camps seven and 15 house high-value detainees. Many detainees are unaware that they are so close to the coast. They were flown in blindfolded, and are taken out only for medical care or to meet with their lawyers. Before they exit and enter the camp, they were subjected to a humiliating search.
At Camp six, Nazakat saw three prisoners — two were seated and quiet, and the third, a man in his 50s with a long beard, was wandering around and chanting loudly. The poem, which appeared under the pen name Al-Rubaish, was withdrawn later. With the departure of US troops from Afghanistan, civil rights groups have been urging Biden to fulfill his pledge to close the prison.
But he failed to keep his promise after the US Congress in imposed restrictions on the transfer of detainees. The Bush administration had transferred about detainees out of Guantanamo by the end of , and the Obama administration transferred nearly out of the facility by the beginning of Ten of the detainees do not face charges and have been approved by US agencies for release but are still being held.
Among them is Saifullah Paracha , a Pakistani man who at age 74 is the oldest detainee at Guantanamo and who has never been charged with a crime. Ten men face still face military commission proceedings. One is nearing the end of a military sentence and is due to be released in February. Others are being held indefinitely without trial. The Bush administration transferred about detainees out of Guantanamo by the end of , and the Obama administration transferred nearly out of the facility by the beginning of Among the challenges US authorities face in transferring detainees out of Guantanamo is obtaining agreements guaranteeing humane treatment from their home countries, or getting a third country to agree to resettle them and prevent their return to hostilities against the US.
Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, Slovakia and Albania have been among the largest recipients of nationals from other countries. In , five Taliban prisoners were transferred to Qatar in exchange for the release of American soldier Bowe Bergdahl, who was held captive for five years in Afghanistan and Pakistan after deserting the US Army.
Four of those five are now members of the new Taliban government in Afghanistan. Two men have been released since Obama left office in January Both were returned to their home countries. After more than 15 years at Guantanamo, Ahmed al-Darbi was returned to Saudi Arabia in to continue serving a prison sentence for a bomb attack on an oil tanker off the coast of Yemen.
On July 19, the Biden administration released its first detainee, Abdul Latif Nasser , a Moroccan, four years after he had been cleared for transfer in Held for 19 years, Nasser was never charged with any crime. The military commissions are tribunals organised outside the framework of US and international law by the US Department of Defense to bring charges against detainees at Guantanamo.
US constitutional protections of due process do not apply, allowing the government to maintain secret evidence derived from torture and to hold detainees indefinitely.
Detainees are required to use the lawyers assigned to them. They are not allowed to see all the evidence against them.
Only two-thirds of a jury is required to convict, and even in cases of acquittal, release is not guaranteed. Many of the detainees at Guantanamo were first held in black sites by the CIA or elsewhere by the US military and were tortured before being transferred to Guantanamo.
Those records are largely still secret and lawyers who represent detainees are required to enter non-disclosure agreements that prevent them from publicly describing the torture suffered by their clients. In June, a military judge for the first time publicly agreed to allow information obtained through torture to be used in a military case against Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri , a Saudi accused of planning the bomb attack on the USS Cole in that killed 17 US Navy sailors.
The US government has acknowledged torture took place in a number of cases, among them that of Abu Zubaydah , a Palestinian man captured by the US in Pakistan and tortured for years in a series of secret CIA prisons, as detailed in a US Senate report.
Another is Mohammed al-Qahtani, a Saudi whose military charges were dismissed because he had been tortured at Guantanamo but who remains imprisoned despite mental illness. Human rights advocates and lawyers for detainees say the Biden administration will be under increasing pressure to bring Guantanamo to a close.
The White House announced in February that it is conducting an internal review of how to close Guantanamo.
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