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Guards And Guantanamo Inmates Battle
A Camp Delta recreation and exercise area in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The detention block is shown with sunshades drawn on December 3, 2002
Guards and prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay prison clashed Saturday as the military attempted to move hunger strikers out of a communal section of the detention center on the U.S. base in Cuba, officials said.
The confrontation occurred after the commander decided to move prisoners into single, solid-walled cells so that prison authorities could monitor them more closely during a hunger strike, the military said in a statement. Read more
Guantanamo History
The Guantanamo Bay detention camp is a detainment and interrogation facility of the United States military located withinGuantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba. The facility was established in January 2002 by the Bush Administration to hold detainees it had determined to be connected with opponents in the Global War on Terror including Afghanistan and later Iraq, the Horn of Africa and Southeast Asia. It is operated by the Joint Task Force Guantanamo (JTF-GTMO) of the United States government in Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, which fronts on Guantánamo Bay in Cuba.[1]
The detainment areas consist of three camps: Camp Delta (which includes Camp Echo), Camp Iguana, and Camp X-Ray, but Camp X-Ray has been closed. The facility is often referred to as Guantánamo, G-Bay or Gitmo, after GTMO, the military abbreviation for the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base.[2][3]
After Bush political appointees at the US Office of Legal Counsel, Department of Justice advised the Bush administration that the Guantanamo Bay detention camp could be considered outside U.S. legal jurisdiction, military guards took the first twenty captives toGuantanamo on January 11, 2002. The Bush administration asserted that detainees were not entitled to any of the protections of theGeneva Conventions. Ensuing U.S. Supreme Court decisions since 2004 have determined otherwise and that the courts have jurisdiction: it ruled in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld on June 29, 2006, that detainees were entitled to the minimal protections listed under Common Article 3of the Geneva Conventions.[4] Following this, on July 7, 2006, the Department of Defense issued an internal memo stating that prisoners would in the future be entitled to protection under Common Article 3.[5][6][7]
Current and former prisoners have complained of abuse and torture, which the Bush administration denied. In a 2005 Amnesty International report the facility was called the “gulagof our times.”[8] In 2006 the United Nations called unsuccessfully for the Guantanamo Bay detention camp to be closed; one judge observed ‘America’s idea of what is torture … does not appear to coincide with that of most civilized nations’.[9] Susan J. Crawford, appointed by Bush to review DOD practices used at Guantanamo Bay and oversee the military trials, told Bob Woodward of the Washington Post in an interview in January 2009 that Mohammed al-Qahtani was tortured while being held prisoner at Guantanamo Bay, making her the first Bush administration official to concede that torture occurred there.[10]
On January 22, 2009, President Barack Obama signed an order to suspend the proceedings of the Guantanamo military commission for 120 days and to shut down the detention facility within the year.[11][12] On January 29, 2009, a military judge at Guantanamo rejected the White House request in the case of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, creating an unexpected challenge for the administration as it reviewed how the United States brings Guantanamo detainees to trial.[13] On May 20, 2009, the United States Senate passed an amendment to the Supplemental Appropriations Act of 2009 (H.R. 2346) by a 90-6 vote to block funds needed for the transfer or release of prisoners held at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.[14] President Obama issued a Presidential memorandum dated December 15, 2009, ordering Thomson Correctional Center, Thomson, Illinois to be prepared to accept transferred Guantanamo prisoners.[15]
The Final Report of the Guantanamo Review Task Force, dated January 22, 2010, published the results for the 240 detainees subject to the Review: 36 were the subject of active cases or investigations; 30 detainees from Yemen were designated for ‘conditional detention’ due to the poor security environment in Yemen; 126 detainees were approved for transfer; 48 detainees were determined ‘too dangerous to transfer but not feasible for prosecution’.[16]
On January 7, 2011, President Obama signed the 2011 Defense Authorization Bill, which, in part, placed restrictions on the transfer of Guantanamo prisoners to the mainland or to foreign countries, thus impeding the closure of the facility.[17] U.S. Secretary of Defense Gates said during testimony before the US Senate Armed Services Committee on February 17, 2011: “The prospects for closing Guantanamo as best I can tell are very, very low given very broad opposition to doing that here in the Congress.”[18] Congress particularly opposed moving prisoners to facilities in the United States for detention or trial.[18] In April 2011, Wikileaks began publishing 779 secret files relating to prisoners in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.[19] As of March 2013, 166 detainees remain at Guantanamo.[20][21] SOURCE
