• Inmates just need time to talk and pray, report says
- The Guardian, Saturday 21 February 2009
A Pentagon review ordered by President Barack Obama into conditions at Guantánamo Bay has concluded that prisoners are being treated in line with international standards demanded under the Geneva conventions, according to US officials.
Admiral Patrick Walsh, the vice-chief of naval operations who carried out the inquiry, is to hand over the 85-page report to Obama this weekend. Human rights groups said they feared the review ordered by Obama could turn out to be a whitewash.
The Pentagon report looked into various allegations of abuse. But Walsh’s report contains only two major recommendations for improving the prisoners’ lives: allowing them more opportunities to communicate with one another and to pray together.
Obama promised on the day of his inauguration to close the Guantánamo detention centre, which has become synonymous worldwide with human rights abuses, within a year. Since his announcement he has faced criticism, mainly from former members of the Bush administration, saying closure of the camp was not that easy. Walsh’s conclusions are basically the view espoused by the Pentagon over the last few years, which is that the international image of Guantánamo is based on the treatment and condition of prisoners when they first began to arrive seven years ago.
The camp since then has been well run, the Pentagon claims, insisting it is no worse and, in many ways, better than maximum security prisons on the US mainland. But defence lawyers for the 245 prisoners still held tell a different story: one of prisoners who have suffered severe psychological damage from force-feeding, beatings and being held in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day.
Walsh concludes, according to the official, that force-feeding, in which prisoners are strapped to a chair while a tube is pushed through a nostril into their stomach, is necessary to fulfil the Geneva conventions’ demand to preserve life.
Among recommendations, he suggests that prisoners be allowed to pray and spend recreation time together in groups of at least three.
Given that a prominent part of Obama’s campaign platform was to close Guantánamo, it is unlikely he will renege on that promise. The Pentagon report is only one of several that Obama has ordered. The Justice Department is conducting one of its own into evidence against each prisoner and the new attorney-general, Eric Holder, is to visit Guantánamo on Monday.
Gitanjali Gutierrez, a lawyer at the Centre for Constitutional Rights who represents many of the detainees, expressed concern that the review might turn into a whitewash, and that she had higher expectations of the new administration.
Tags: a Pentagon review, Gitanjali Gutierrez, Guantanamo Bay, human rights groups, President Barack Obama
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