Medical abuse at Guantanamo

On June 2 last year, the Pentagon announced that a Yemeni prisoner at Guantánamo, Mohammed al-Hanashi (also known as Muhammad Salih) had died, reportedly by committing suicide. He was the fifth reported suicide at Guantánamo, following three deaths on June 9, 2006 and another on May 30, 2007, and he was the sixth man to [...]

On April 30, 2010, The UC Davis Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas organized an event to mark the fifth anniversary of its excellent Guantánamo Testimonials Project. Entitled “Guantánamo: A conversation this side of the wire,” the event enabled, for the first time, a discussion to take place, before an American [...]

For a crucial update to this article, please see “A Truly Shocking Guantánamo Story: Judge Confirms That An Innocent Man Was Tortured To Make False Confessions.” Yesterday, US District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly struck another decisive blow to the credibility of the Bush administration’s detention policies at Guantánamo (and the continuation of those same policies [...]

On January 13, in a declaration submitted to a Washington D.C. District Court in the case of Guantánamo prisoner Mohamed Jawad, Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, a former prosecutor in the Military Commission trial system, delivered perhaps the most blistering attack on the US military’s detention program by a former member of the Pentagon’s team to [...]

Sami al-Haj is a journalist, but one unlike any other. For over six years, since December 15, 2001, when he was seized by Pakistani soldiers on the Afghan border, while on assignment as a cameraman for the Qatar-based broadcaster al-Jazeera, he has been in a disturbing but unique position: a trained journalist held as an [...]

It really doesn’t get any worse than this. Candace Gorman, lawyer for Abdul Hamid al-Ghizzawi, a Libyan detainee at Guantánamo, reports that her client has been infected with AIDS. Mr. al-Ghizzawi explained to his lawyer in a letter that he was told about his infection by a doctor at Guantánamo, adding that he believes that [...]

From the website Ferghana.ru comes news of a former Guantánamo detainee, Abdul-Karim Ergashev, who was sold to gullible US forces by an unscrupulous Afghan official, and who “intends to slap US President George W Bush and the Pentagon with an injury claim.” 42-year old Ergashev (also known as Abdulrahmon Rajabov) travelled to Afghanistan in 2001 [...]