Amnesty International's UK campaigns director, Tim Hancock, said: "This appears to make a mockery of President Bush's statements about the need to close down Guantanamo Bay. In addition to strongly urging the President to step in to prevent any extension to this already notorious prison camp, we call on him to speed up the process of closing Guantanamo and of ensuring that all detainees are allowed fair trials or released to safe countries."
About 450 detainees remain at Guantanamo. Out of all the prisoners ever held there, only 10 have been charged with a crime.
As to Camps 1 - 5,
Other facilities at the US naval base on Cuba include Camps 1, 2, 3 and 5, which are maximum-security, single-cell blocks; Camp 4, which is a medium-security, communal living prison; and Camp Iguana, also medium security, which houses detainees cleared for release and awaiting transfer.
The Guantanamo reports by Seton Hall Law Professor Mark Denbeaux, Josh Denbeaux and others found:
....based on the military's own documents, 55 per cent of prisoners are not alleged to have committed any hostile acts against the US, and 40 per cent are not accused of affiliation with al-Qa'ida.
The same documents suggested only 8 per cent of prisoners are accused of fighting for a terrorist group, and that 86 per cent were captured by the Northern Alliance or Pakistani authorities "at a time when the US offered large bounties for the capture of suspected terrorists".
More on those reports is here. Seton Hall released an equally revealing third report on July 10, The Guantanamo Detainees During Detention (pdf).
The Government has, at various points, characterized the conduct of the detainees, both in terms of the threat they offer to their guards and the threat they offer to themselves. Analysis of the Government's own data strongly suggest that the former has been greatly over-stated and the latter greatly under-played. While some of the details of the detention are undeveloped because of the limitations of the data the Government has released, the overall picture of a cowed, unthreatening, depressed and suicidal detainee population emerges clearly.
Based on Government records of 759 detainees held at Guantanamo, the report finds:
Government records reflect that detainees committed acts defined by the Government as "manipulative self-injurious behavior" more often than they commit disciplinary violations:
From the Report's introductory section:
- Detainees committed 460 acts of "manipulative self-injurious behavior" in 2003 and 2004, an average of one such act every day and a half (one per every 1.59 days.)
- Detainees committed 499 disciplinary violations over 2 years and eight months, an average of one incident every two days (one per every 1.91 days.)
- There are more "hanging gestures" by detainees than there are physical assaults on guards, based upon 120 "hanging gestures" for 2003 and 95 assaults and 22 attempted assaults for the 2 years and 8 months of reported disciplinary violations.
- More than 70% of the disciplinary violations, including "assaults," are for relatively trivial offenses, and even the most serious are offensive but not dangerous.
- The disciplinary reports reveal that the most serious injuries sustained by guards as a result of prisoner misconduct are a handful of cuts and scratches.
- Assuming no recidivism (obviously, an unlikely assumption), at least one third of the detainees have never committed a Disciplinary Violation.
- Nearly half (43%) of the reported Disciplinary Violations were for spitting at staff.
- Almost half of all disciplinary violations (46%) occurred during a 92-day hunger strike that followed allegations of Koran abuse by guards.
- For 736 of the 952 days covered by the Incident Reports, or 77%, the Government has released no report of a disciplinary violation.
- No act of "asymmetrical warfare" (e.g., suicide or hunger strike) is included in any Incident Report.
Guantanamo should close. Those being held without criminal charges should be repatriated to their own countries and if those countries won't take them, the U.S. should find other countries that will accept them.
