For the first time in 22 years, an independent United Nations rapporteur has received permission from the authorities to visit a prison maintained by the United States at the Guantanamo Naval Base in Cuba. UN Spokesperson Fionnuala Ni Aolein, an Irish law professor, came to the same conclusion that prisoners and lawyers who managed to testify from inside: “The suffering of detainees is deep and continuous,” the speaker said in a report published last year. a week.
Of the 780 people who have passed through Guantanamo Bay since the start of the “global war on terrorism” unleashed by George W. Bush, there are 30 prisoners of various nationalities who survived torture, including water torture, sleep deprivation, sexual harassment, food for the hungry, and a long history of physical abuse. . Some were also tortured in CIA “black spots” before they ended up in this limbo, designed to bypass the justice system and accused of cruelty and savagery, comparable only to what the Nazis did in concentration camps.
The prisoners arrived wearing orange uniforms and hoods and entered the detention camp, which consisted of open-air cages, which were later replaced by cells surrounded by three meters of live barbed wire. Using the euphemism that detainees are “illegal enemy combatants” instead of “prisoners of war,” the United States has invented this place on Earth where suspects are unprotected. habeas corpus and judicial control of the constitutional order, nor the Geneva Prisoner of War Conventions in force in all civilized countries. By the way, the war that ended some time ago.
The military base, an enclave that has been illegally occupied by the United States in Cuba since 1904, is an aberration that has brought to hell old people with dementia, teenagers, seriously ill psychiatrists, school teachers or peasants not associated with terrorists. who attacked the Twin Towers in New York on September 11, 2001. According to secret reports leaked by Wikileaks many years ago and uncontested to this day, the main purpose of the prison was never to punish terrorists, but to “Use” denunciation of inmates and function as a huge police station with no seat limit.
“Cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, under international law, is permanent,” says a UN rapporteur who lived four days with some prisoners who cost US taxpayers $13 million a year per prisoner. Most of them have never been prosecuted. Ni Aoline also found that tortured prisoners suffered severe physical and psychological trauma and did not receive proper treatment or care at Guantanamo Bay.
Six administrations have maintained this horror, in some cases breaking campaign promises to close the prison. “Guantanamo,” said candidate Barack Obama back in 2008, “is the most serious threat to the credibility of the United States as a human rights democracy.” Biden was then a jovial vice president, hopeful for the United States, nodding enthusiastically as he adjusted his sunglasses. As soon as they both crossed the threshold of the White House, “they retreated, meeting opposition from Republicans and some Democratic lawmakers,” writes The New York Times. And that, in theory, was the good old days!
The enormity of the Guantanamo Bay prison, which has been held for so long and still without any oversight from the UN, shows that this is not black sheep or Bush’s paranoid delusions. It is a system that encourages vices and then tries to punish them. It is the jewel in the crown and the Bermuda Triangle system. offshore U.S. government injustice that is as ingrained in this world as the Department of Homeland Security expelling immigrants, the National Security Agency protecting billions of citizens, and the Global War on Terror (now call it what it’s called). (published in La Jornada)
Source: Juventud Rebelde