detainees

Abu Ghraib, Barack Obama, detainees, Gitmo, Guantanamo

Defense lawyers suspected to have inspired Gitmo detainees rampage since December

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Incidents of uncooperative and beligerent behavior by Gitmo detainees towards military personnel have risen sharply since December. Several defense lawyers are suspected to have suggested to their clients to “pass the word” to gradually increase assaults, verbal abuse, and hunger strikes in an effort to pressure President Barck Obama into making good on his campaign promise to close the detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay.

An investigation into this allegation is unlikely as lawyer-client conversations are not audibly monitored due to legal privilege.

A source close to a well-known legal defense group said, “They are hoping for one ‘Abu Ghraib’ moment, a single incident where a guard is charged after striking back. It is believed that is all it will take to seal the deal, for Gitmo to surely close.”

Recent press reports have been ripe with defense lawyers quoted as saying their clients had been assaulted by guards and medical personnel from as far back as seven years ago and, more recently, detainees beaten who resisted force feedings. So far, none of those reports has provided a single piece of evidence to back up their claims.

The source explained, “The world was an easy sell; ‘hate America’ campaigns overseas have been around for decades. The lawyers need only allege something and the press will report it. This is a battle for the hearts and minds of America that its military is nearing a state of open revolt.”

One news report today seems to bear out the source’s statements:

LONDON (Reuters) — Abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay has worsened sharply since President Barack Obama took office as prison guards “get their kicks in” before the camp is closed, according to a lawyer who represents detainees.

Abuses began to pick up in December after Obama was elected, human rights lawyer Ahmed Ghappour told Reuters. He cited beatings, the dislocation of limbs, spraying of pepper spray into closed cells, applying pepper spray to toilet paper and over-forcefeeding detainees who are on hunger strike.

The Pentagon said on Monday that it had received renewed reports of prisoner abuse during a recent review of conditions at Guantanamo, but had concluded that all prisoners were being kept in accordance with the Geneva Conventions.

“According to my clients, there has been a ramping up in abuse since President Obama was inaugurated,” said Ghappour, a British-American lawyer with Reprieve, a legal charity that represents 31 detainees at Guantanamo.

“If one was to use one’s imagination, (one) could say that these traumatized, and for lack of a better word barbaric, guards were just basically trying to get their kicks in right now for fear that they won’t be able to later,” he said.

“Certainly in my experience there have been many, many more reported incidents of abuse since the inauguration,” added Ghappour, who has visited Guantanamo six times since late September and based his comments on his own observations and conversations with both prisoners and guards.

He stressed the mistreatment did not appear to be directed from above, but was an initiative undertaken by frustrated U.S. army and navy jailers on the ground. It did not seem to be a reaction against the election of Obama, a Democrat who has pledged to close the prison camp within a year, but rather a realization that there was little time remaining before the last 241 detainees, all Muslim, are released.

The Leftists’ propaganda campaign continues.

9/11, al Qaeda, detainees, Gitmo, Guantanamo, New York Times, September 11, World Trade Center

Why Close Gitmo? Its critics will never be satisfied: Andrew C. McCarthy

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The National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy was the lead Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Landmark Bombings plot and first World Trade Center attack prosecutions. He writes this morning:

A much-anticipated report laments that prisoners “live under conditions, rules, and policies designed” for “incorrigibly violent” detainees. The security controls were found to be “extraordinary,” employing “isolation and lack of in-cell as well as out-of-cell programs and activities.” Even allowing that these measures were in fact designed for some of the most savage of killers, the report nonetheless asserted that the strictures imposed were “pointlessly harsh and degrading.” They included “extreme” measures such as “lack of windows, denial of reading material, a maximum of three hours a week out-of-cell time, [and] lack of outdoor recreation.”

In sum, the report concluded, the detention conditions imposed by the United States government “can only be explained as reflecting an unwillingness to acknowledge the inmates’ basic humanity.”

In short, the federal penitentiary at Florence, Colo., is no Guantanamo Bay.

On the contrary, Gitmo — despite being repeatedly condemned as a blight on America’s reputation by the Obama campaign, congressional Democrats, alleged human-rights activists, European solons, and the legion of lawyers who’ve volunteered their services to al-Qaeda — is a model facility. According to a Pentagon investigation to be presented at the White House this week — a study ordered with great fanfare by Barack Obama in the first hours of his presidency — the detention camp, where about 245 alien enemy combatants are held, is in full compliance with the humane-treatment requirements of the Geneva Conventions.

The Human Rights Watch report cited above was a study of conditions in American civilian prisons, including those maintained by the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Specifically, it addresses “supermax” prisons, such as the U.S. Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility in Colorado. In these prisons, the government houses convicted terrorists alongside some 20,000 of the most violent offenders in U.S. custody — many of whom are Americans, not foreign jihadists.

The HRW report was completed in February 2000, in the last days of pre-9/11 obliviousness. That fact should remind us of the danger we invite by allowing transnational progressives to define our national-security priorities — as the Left has been allowed to do with Gitmo.

It seems like ancient history but, since history is repeating itself, it’s worth revisiting: Before nearly 3,000 Americans were slaughtered on September 11, 2001, the great progressive crusade was against American incarceration practices. Putting criminals in jail and keeping them there for appropriate periods of time was the 1980s course-correction that led to dramatic declines in crime rates, which had skyrocketed after the criminal-rights revolution of the 1960s and 1970s.

The success of these reforms led to predictable caterwauling on the Left about root causes and rehabilitation, and to the claim that imprisonment causes more crime (in much the same way that we’re today told that defending ourselves against terrorists causes terrorism). This campaign against our effective anti-crime policies often took the form of maddening stories in the New York Times, which frequently and hilariously puzzled over the supposed paradox that crime rates had plummeted “and yet” prison populations were still high. The anti-incarceration campaign also was conducted through studies such as the HRW report, which posited that supermax prisons violated U.S. treaty obligations, that prison authorities were failing to “respect the inherent dignity of each inmate,” and that they were subjecting “prisoners to treatment that constitutes torture or that is cruel, inhuman, or degrading” — that they were, in short, operating prisons “in ways that violate basic human rights.”

It sounds familiar because, following 9/11, this litany was repackaged as the case against Gitmo … READ THE REST

I differ with McCarthy a bit; the extreme left’s lawyers could be satisfied. Yet they would only be satisfied if President Obama made a truce with the Taliban, Congress formally declared the WOT over, the DOJ released all the detainees with pardons and restitution, the Treasury paid their lawyers handsomely, and A.N.S.W.E.R got to perp-walk (in hood, orange jumpsuit, and shackles) the entire national security related G.W. Bush team on to the planes with those last 245 for al Qaeda to take home and play with.

That what we’ve come to, this nation divided and having forgotten the real enemy still out there and coming.