Guantanamo's fifth anniversary

WASHINGTON: The fifth anniversary of the first arrivals at the Guantanamo naval base on January 11, 2002 "is a sad day for us here in America," said Wells Dixon, a lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is coordinating the legal defense of detainees. "After five years, Guantanamo is a complete and absolute failure," he added.

Several human rights groups have planned rallies this week, including a protest in Cuba on the opposite side of the fence that marks the limits of the US enclave. The US government had established the secure facility to interrogate prisoners far from prying eyes. But the army found that most detainees had little useful intelligence and were not blood-thirsty killers, as they were described.
 
Of more than 700 detainees from some 40 countries, about 380 have been repatriated, in most cases released without charges. Scholars analysing military documents last year concluded that only eight percent of the prisoners were likely Al-Qaeda fighters and that most of the rest had been handed over to US forces by reward-seekers.

Nearly 395 people remain in the prison, according to the US Department of Defense. Washington hopes to prosecute 60 to 80 before military tribunals, while another 86 more could soon be repatriated, while 230 will be held indefinitely and without charges.

According to FBI and military documents, the detainees were placed in solitary confinement for months at a time, interrogated 20 hours per day for several weeks, humiliated, assaulted, and left handcuffed to the ground for hours in brutal temperatures.

After images of open-air cages at Guantanamo circulated the globe early on, the military quickly transferred prisoners into indoor facilities that somewhat resembled kennels. In December, a new modern high-security prison was opened. But that did not improve the camp's image as a legally dubious dead-end for prisoners, some of them possibly not guilty of anything.

Following countless hunger strikes, stymied by painful and humiliating force-feedings, and dozens of attempted suicides, three detainees were discovered hanged in their cells in June 2006.

"They are smart, they are creative, and they are committed. They have no regard to life, neither ours nor their own. And I believe this was not an act of desperation, rather an act of asymmetric warfare waged against us," had said Rear Admiral Harry Harris, commander of the naval base.    But the international community was unconvinced.

From the pope to the United Nations, there have been repeated calls to close Guantanamo. Even President George W. Bush's closest ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, has deemed the prison "an anomaly."

In the United States, judges have slowly chipped away at the jurisprudence established by the White House to justify the prison's existence. But in the new legislation, the Congress reversed key Supreme Court decisions on handling detainees in recent months, and so the legal battle continues. 

The US President George W Bush formally acknowledged for the first time in September that to extract as much information as possible from "war on terror" detainees, Guantanamo alone did not suffice -- the CIA had to create a network of secret prisons. Bush insisted the prisoners were never tortured, but were instead subjected to "alternative procedures" of interrogation, which he called legal and necessary.
 
In October 2005, a detainee from Bahrain, Jumah al-Dossari, told his attorney in a suicide note, "The detainees are suffering from the bitterness of despair, the detention humiliation and the anquish of slavery and suppression ... Until when this tragedy will continue?"

To human rights groups, the secret Central Intelligence Agency prisons are just one aspect of operations that they call "extraordinary renditions". The existence of the secret CIA prisons, revealed in 2005 by the US newspaper The Washington Post, triggered emotional outcries around the world, particularly in Europe, where according to two investigations some 20 countries were found to have cooperated with the program.