Camp of Guantanamo — Wikipedia

The Camp of Guantanamo is a high security military prison located on the American naval base of Guantánamo, southeast of Cuba. People who qualified as “illegal fighter” are detained there, captured by the American army in the various operations it conducts abroad (Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.) against Islamist activists and terrorists. The choice of this center located in Cuba on an American military base was justified by President George W. Bush in order to legally found the decision to refuse to submit detainees to the American federal judicial system, supporting the extraterritoriality of the base .

In the fall of 2001, there were around 750 detainees from around twenty different countries. From 2001 to 2004, more than 200 prisoners were released; Many have been tried in their countries of origin, such as the six prisoners of French nationality or those benefiting from amnesty, including several hundred Afghans. In April 2006, 560 people were imprisoned in Guantánamo ^{[ 2 ]} , number which had dropped to 275 in May 2008 ^{[ 3 ]} and at 192 in January 2010 ^{[ 4 ]} , one year after the deadline set by a presidential decree of President Barack Obama ordering the closure of the center. This figure had dropped to 171 detainees at the end of February 2012 ^{[ 5 ]} . A total of 779 people went through this establishment between 2002 and December 2008, five of which were committed suicide at the end of 2008 ^{[ 6 ]} . En Septembre 2012, Adnan Fahran Abdul Latf Fut 9 ^{It is} Base suicide.

In June 2006, the United States Supreme Court declared the exceptional legal proceedings implemented in Guantánamo illegal. In May 2006, the London -based human rights human rights group revealed in the newspaper The Independent that more than sixty detainees would have been captured when they were minors ^{[ 7 ]} .

A study by the American army says that at least thirty former Guantánamo detainees were captured during fighting in Afghanistan, Pakistan or Iraq, and that 95% of them were a threat to “American interests” in reason for their affiliation to the Islamist movement ^{[ 8 ]} .

This place of detention outside any legal framework attracts criticism from international public opinion, governments and human rights associations. Many testimonies and documents report degrading detention conditions and the use of torture techniques on prisoners ^{[ 9 ] , [ ten ] , [ 11 ]} .

The November 16, 2008 , President Barack Obama confirmed his intention to close the camp. However, he could not keep his promise in particular because he seems that such a closure creates legal problems ^{[not clear]} . In September 2015, the US defense secretary advised that some of Guantánamo prisoners had to remain detained indefinitely ^{[ twelfth ]} .

The February 23, 2016 , Barack Obama presents his plan for the closure of the Guantanamo camp, which will not succeed at the end of his mandate ^{[ 13 ]} .

In January 2018, President Donald Trump signed a decree ordering the Pentagon to maintain the opennamo facilities open ^{[ 14 ]} .

This detention center is located on a plot of 121 km ² , currently rented by the United States government to the Cuba government. This rental is effective since February 23, 1903 , under the chairmanship of Theodore Roosevelt, and is unreasonable except by consent of the two parties. A rent of 4,085 U.S. dollars is paid every year by check. Cuban chef Fidel Castro has always refused to take these payments (except that of the first year of the Revolution in 1959), because he did not accept that one of his greatest enemies has a military base on his territory.

It is from this base (whose acronym is JTF-GTMO for Joint Task Force Guantánamo , or simply ” Gitmo For the Americans), that in 1898, the United States (which had at the time at the height of the Hispanian-American war 17,000 men at its basis of Santiago) had conquered Puerto Rico with 500 men, S ‘ thus adding the sovereignty of this Caribbean island.

In 1994, the United States founded a detention camp to isolate Haitian prisoners mixed with the refugees of the coup. It is this same camp (which is today called Camp X-Ray) which will begin to welcome prisoners suspected of terrorism at the end of 2001. It is definitively replaced the April 28, 2002 by the Delta camp.

The June 9, 2006 , the day before the suicide of three detainees, the American president George W. Bush affirmed in a press conference in Denmark his desire to put an end to the Guantánamo camp and to work on the repatriation of certain prisoners, or to the judgment by courts of courts Americans for others ^{[ 15 ] , [ 16 ]} . At the end of the month, the United States Supreme Court announced that the military courts created to judge the prisoners of Guantánamo are illegal ^{[ 17 ]} . In July 2006, Deputy Secretary of Defense, Gordon R. England, told American soldiers that prisoners of war were protected by the Geneva conventions, which means that they are entitled to a fair and fair trial ^{[ 18 ]} .

Camp Delta [ modifier | Modifier and code ]

The Delta camp was created between the February 27, 2002 et la mi- April 2002 . It includes 612 cells under the responsibility of the American military police ^{[ 19 ]} .

The camp is subdivided into six parts where arrivals pass according to their degree of cooperation. From level four, prisoners have access to lawyers and can also discuss freely without a witness.

Camp Iguana [ modifier | Modifier and code ]

This camp is smaller, less secure and is one kilometer from the main camp. Between 2002 and 2003, three teenagers under the age of 16 were detained there. After their release in January 2004 , it was closed and then reopened in mid-2005 to house some of the 38 detainees who had not been defined as illegal combatants by the Combatant Status Review Tribunals But who were not allowed to leave for security reasons.

Camp X-Ray [ modifier | Modifier and code ]

Detainees kneeling in the X-ray camp, in orange combination, handcuffed hands, headband, helmet on the ears, mask on the nose and mouth, mittens to annihilate any sensation ^{[ 20 ]} .

This camp was a pre -trial detention camp which was closed the April 29, 2002 , after which his prisoners were transferred to the Delta camp. The name of this camp is still sometimes used to name the entire detention complex.

Camp n ^O 7 [ modifier | Modifier and code ]

The camp n ^O 7 was a secret installation, guarded by the Task Force Platinum and revealed to the general public in 2008. It counted at least sixteen supposed prisoners of importance, including Khalid Sheik Mohammed ^{[ 21 ]} but also Abu Zoubaydah, who, although non-member of Al Qaida, had been taken for the n ^O 3 of the organization by the CIA ^{[ 22 ]} .

The legality of prisoners’ detention is an important subject of controversy.

A presidential decree of George W. Bush authorizes the detention without limits and without accusation, on a territory not (theoretically) of American legislation, of all the illegal fighters captured. The Bush administration justified extra-judicial detention by stating that the members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban were not regular combatants respecting the laws of war ^{[ 23 ]} . However, the fact that there is no charge of accusation can be considered to make the detentions abusive.

The April 8, 2003 , the US representative of the United Nations Human Rights Commission has reaffirmed the independence of judges, respect for international law and human dignity by his government. He also specified that the detainees, being terrorists, were not ordinary prisoners but combatants.

Challenge to the status of illegal fighter [ modifier | Modifier and code ]

The status of illegal fighter was immediately considered within the international community as the creation of an artificial legal vacuum, intended to deprive the prisoners of the rights provided for by the III ^{It is} Geneva Convention (prisoners of war) or IV ^{It is} Geneva Convention (civilians) ^{[ 24 ]} .

The November 10, 2003 , the United States Supreme Court has announced that it would law on the legality or not of the detention of illegal fighters in Guantánamo prison. His verdict was returned the June 28, 2004 . It authorizes the prisoners of Guantánamo to challenge their status as illegal fighters before the federal civil courts. But this decision does not rule on the legality of the status of illegal combatants, nor on the detention procedures applied in Guantánamo.

This is how the army created “tribunals for examining the status of a fighting enemy”. But the January 31, 2005 , an American federal judge, Joyce Hens Green, of the Washington Civil Court D.C., declares these examination courts unconstitutional. She judges that the fact that the army prevents suspects from being assisted by a lawyer and that the suspects cannot know the accusations which are brought against them is unconstitutional. A few days earlier, another federal judge had pronounced a verdict opposed to that of Joyce Hens Green. There is a good chance that the final verdict will be rendered again by the Supreme Court.

In July 2006 , Deputy Secretary of US Defense, Gordon England, announced that all prisoners of US military prisons should benefit from the protection of Geneva Conventions ^{[ 18 ]} . Article 3 of the 1949 conventions provides that prisoners captured on the front must be treated humanly and must be tried during a fair trial before “a regularly constituted court offering all legal guarantees”.

A contested detention center [ modifier | Modifier and code ]

The May 25, 2005 , Amnesty International publishes her annual report in which she describes Guantánamo as «Goulag modern» . The multitude of detention centers (are also mentioned ( black sites ), more or less of the same type, that the government of the United States has set up in Iraq and Afghanistan, among others ^{[ 25 ]} .

The Secretary of Defense of the United States of the time, Donald Rumsfeld, challenged the name of Goulag, deeming her extravagant. William Schultz, representative of Amnesty International in Washington, said that Guantánamo should not be considered as a Soviet gulag, but there are still some common features such as keeping the prisoners in secret and placing them in outside the civilian judicial system or the fact that some would have disappeared.

The June 5, 2005 , Democratic senator Joe Biden, member of the “Senate Foreign Affairs Committee”, asked the closure of Guantanamo, who, according to him, is a danger to the Americans in the world, because it stigmatizes and amplifies existing hatred of the world Muslim against the United States ^{[ 26 ]} .

The 15 mars 2006 , more than 400 intellectuals, artists and activists from around the world sign a petition requiring the closure of American detention centers in Guantánamo. “The Human Rights Committee [of the United Nations] or the Council which will replace it must require the immediate closure of these arbitrary detention centers created by the United States and the cessation of all the blatant violations of human dignity” , we read in this declaration. The document bears the signing of several Nobel Prize winners, including José Saramago, Portuguese writer, Harold Pineter, British playwright, Nadine Gordimer, South African Woman of Letters, Adolfo Perez Esquivel, Argentinian intellectual, Rigoberta Menchu, Guatémalteques Indians, Wole Soyinka , from Nigeria, Dario FO, Italian playwright.

In June 2006 , the United States Supreme Court considers Hamdan v. Rumsfeld  (in) , that George W. Bush has exceeded his rights by establishing exceptional military courts and thus violating the Geneva conventions ^{[ 27 ]} .

The January 22, 2009 , or two days after his inauguration as a new president of the United States, Barack Obama signed a presidential decree ordering the closure of the camp. This measure was supposed to be effective within one year. But this closure poses in particular problems of a legal nature such as the fact that confessions were obtained “under constraint”, thus creating a procedural defect, which could lead the American justice to release condemned, including Khalid Cheikh Mohammed who been tried responsible for the attacks of September 11, 2001 ^{[ 28 ]} . The high security prison of the small town of Thomson in Illinois, built in 2001, but whose 2,800 cells are not all filled, will be purchased by the federal state. Many difficulties, both political and administent and legal, hinder the creation of the closure of the Guantanamo camp ^{[ 29 ] , [ 4 ]} which still has 171 prisoners in January 2012, 10 years after its opening ^{[ 30 ]} . Congress indeed blocks any transfer from extra-judicial detainees to the American federal judicial system, Ahmed Khalfan Gailani having been the only one to be judged by a courtyard ^{[ 5 ]} ; It remains then, as possibility of judgment, that the military commissions established by the Bush administration, but only six cases have been tried ^{[ 5 ]} .

Nevertheless, end January 2009 , a military judge sitting on one of the military commissions of Guantanamo, established by the Military Commission Act of 2002 in order to be able to judge the federal judicial system the prisoners of Guantanamo, refused to comply with the directives of the Obama administration, which require the suspension of military trials until further notice. Also, the chief military judge in Guantanamo, Colonel James Pohl (in) , decided that the trial of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, accused of having organized the October 2000 attack-suicide in Yemen, against the USS warship Cole , would continue ^{[ thirty first ]} .

Al-Nashiri is one of the three detainees, with Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Abu Zoubaydah, who were recognized to have been subjected to water torture ( waterboarding ), by the director of the CIA, Michael Hayden, the February 6, 2008 ^{[ 32 ] , [ 33 ] , [ 34 ]} . Al-Nashiri was transferred to Guantanamo At the end of 2006 , then accused in December 2008 by a military commission ^{[ thirty first ] , [ 35 ]} .

Faced with the opposition of the Congress, dominated by the Republicans, that the extra-judicial detainees of Guantanamo are tried before federal jurisdictions, in part because of the possibility that the latter declares null and not avenue the “proofs” obtained under Torture and therefore releases prisoners, Obama was faced with the impossibility of closing Guantanamo. Ahmed Khalfan Gailani was thus the only one to be transferred to federal justice, who condemned him to life for having participated in the organization of the Nairobi and Dar-Salaam attacks in 1998. Consequently, President Obama tried to liberate The detainees deemed the least “dangerous” by passing agreements with other countries, notably European, where they obtained the strange status of asylum under surveillance. In addition, trials before the military commissions were restored. Only six detainees were however judged before them. In February 2012, Majid Khan, the only detainee to have an American residence permit, agreed to plead guilty to such a commission, saying that he had met Karachi Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

The first ^is September 2015, Ashton Carter, the Secretary of Defense of the United States (Presidency of Barack Obama), said that “the reason why it is complicated to close Guantánamo is as follows: some of the prisoners who are there must be detained indefinitely , they must simply be locked up “, even if” [his] point of view is that it would be good, if possible, to close Guantánamo, if it can be done in complete safety ” ^{[ twelfth ]} .

Some European deputies have described the Guantánamo camp as “lawlessness” ^{[ 36 ]} .

According to the little information available, it is possible to argue that:

• The prisoners, during the opening of the prison, spent most of their time in individual cells of 2 by 2 meters, continuously lit. Since then, hard buildings have been built;
• Inmates may be questioned at any time of the day or night;
• When they are moved, the prisoners have handcuffed hands and feet and a canvas bag is placed on their heads to prevent them from seeing;
• Visits are limited (including those of families and lawyers);
• The dialogue between prisoners is restricted;
• Suspicions of acts of torture (psychological and physical) weigh on prison (non -governmental organizations such as Amnesty International regularly echoes) ^{[ 37 ]} ;

In mars 2005 , Anne-Marie Lizin, president of the Belgian Senate acting for the Osce, visited the site. She then declared that “The conditions of detention of prisoners are better there than in Belgium” ^{[ 38 ]} .

But she also clarified that this prison “Continue to seriously harm the reputation of the United States” and that the country should dismantle this prison before 2008. The Belgian senator described the living conditions by indicating in particular that “An arrow painted on the ground indicates the direction of Mecca” and “Each detainee receives a copy of the Koran in his own language, a prayer mat, a misbaha, sheets, soap, an outfit as well as sandals. »» The call to prayer is announced five times a day by speaker and “The guards (who would be copiously insulted by the prisoners) can only communicate with them by gestures” ^{[ 39 ]} .

The June 10, 2006 , for the first time since the opening of the Delta camp in 2002 and after numerous suicide attempts, three detainees from Guantánamo (two Saudis and one Yemeni) were found dead, hanged in their cell. This event revives calls to close Guantánamo and questions about the status of prisoners. The counter-admiral Harris, commander of the base, said that “it is not an act of despair, but an asymmetrical act of war against us”. The families of the two Saudis doubt the suicide thesis all the more since according to their lawyer “the base exercises close and continuous control over prisoners by individual surveillance or by cameras operating 24 hours a day” ^{[ 40 ]} .

In 2013, an American judge ordered the end of the search of the private parts of the prisoners, including the genitals; She was able to resume in August 2014 following a decision of a panel of American federal judges. They estimated that eating the intimate parts of duties dressed was “a reasonable safety precaution” which made it possible to improve “the safety of the guards and other prisoners by effectively preventing the concealment of drugs or the fraudulent passage of dangerous materials” , however “at no time be the prisoners’ genitals will be exhibited at the sight of the guards” ^{[ 41 ]} .

Tortures [ modifier | Modifier and code ]

Demonstration in Washington against the conditions of detention of Guantánamo.

According to several testimonies ^{[ 42 ] , [ 43 ]} Et Documents ^{[ 44 ]} , detainees are subject to degrading treatments and various tortures within the prison and during their interrogations.

Following the American law on freedom of information, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the most important organization of defense of human rights in the United States, has been able to obtain several emails than FBI agent sent to the director, Robert Mueller. These emails date from 2003 and 2004. This agent describes several scenes of torture of which he witnessed. Shortly after their disclosure, the US military announced the opening of an investigation. THE July 11, 2003 , the spokesperson for the White House, Tony Snow, assured that the prisoners have always been treated humanly ^{[ 18 ]} .

The July 22, 2008 , military judge Keith J. Allred decided not to retain the confessions of Salim Hamdan, whose trial opened the day before Guantánamo, considering that they had been obtained “under a strong constraint” on the basis of Bagram , in Afghanistan, after his capture at the end of 2001: he established that the accused had his feet and hands linked 24 hours a day, was in full isolation and that a soldier had put a knee between the shoulder blades and had him ordered to “speak”. The military judge, on the other hand, considered that confinement in Guantánamo did not constitute an “inherent constraint”. By creating the military commissions at the end of 2006, the US Congress had refused the confessions obtained under torture but had not prohibited those obtained after muscular or humiliating interrogations ^{[ 45 ]} . Other decisions invalidating the confessions obtained under torture followed, for example with regard to Mohammed Jawad, who was 12 years old at the time when he was captured ^{[ forty six ]} .

In July 2008, the press published a document from the American army, from the Sere program ( Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape ) giving instructions of torture, inspired by an article by sociologist Albert D. Biderman of 1957 describing those used by Chinese interrogators during the Korean War ^{[ 47 ] , [ 48 ]} .

The Affaire du Koran desecrated [ modifier | Modifier and code ]

The April 30, 2005 , the magazine Newsweek announces that an American soldier would have thrown a copy of the Koran in the toilet ^{[ 49 ]} . This announcement creates violent anti-American demonstrations in the Muslim world, especially in Afghanistan where there are about fifteen deaths following bloody demonstrations. The Pentagon immediately denied this information. THE May 15, 2005 , Newsweek returns to his information and declares that his anonymous source would have been wrong ^{[ 50 ]} . For its part, the Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan who was detained from 2002 to 2005, reveals that such a desecration took place in 2002 at the Kandahar airport camp, where prisoners were grouped before to leave for Guantánamo ^{[ 51 ]} .

Hunger-strike [ modifier | Modifier and code ]

The first ^is September 2005 , according to lawyers, at least 210 detainees (76 according to the US military) were on hunger strike to protest against their unlimited detention. An army spokesperson said that “the number of strikers is changing every day”, without wanting to specify for how long the 76 detainees taken by the army had started not to eat. “They are treated as well as possible” , she added.

Since the July 21, 2005 , an army spokesman had been forced to admit that around fifty detainees had stopped feeding. He also said that the strikers had been placed under infusions and fed against their will, by nasal probe (probe introduced in the stomach by the nose), to prevent their dehydration.

The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), whose lawyers defend several dozen detainees, said that this whole case could immediately cease if the army authorized lawyers to meet their customers.

In April 2013 , the 130 detainees who would still be on hunger strike for several weeks are forceful by naso-guastrical survey, and their transfer remains blocked ^{[ 52 ] , [ 53 ]} .

Cancellation of the UN visit and its report [ modifier | Modifier and code ]

Friday November 18, 2005 , the UN cancels its visit to the Guantánamo bay camp which was planned for the December 6, 2005 , because Washington refuses that the three members of the UN (the Austrian Manfred Nowak, special rapporteur on the torture in charge of the file, the Pakistaniaise Asma Jahangir, taking care of respect for religion in prison and the Algerian Leila Zerrougui , in charge of questions about arbitrary detention), speak freely and without witnesses to prisoners.

Six months earlier, Manfred Nowak said: “The fact that access to prisoners has been refused for so long to the UN investigators is a sign that they wish to hide certain things in view of the public” .

Published on February 15, 2006 , a report ^{[ 54 ]} of the UN asks for “Close Guantánamo detention facilities without additional delay” and “Be quickly judged all the prisoners of Guantánamo” or “Released immediately” . Critics of the conditions of detention relate mainly to the vague limits between certain interrogation techniques which can be assimilated to torture and therefore, it is requested that “All special interrogation techniques authorized by the Department of Defense are immediately revoked” . This report was immediately denounced by the American administration, which accuses it of based solely on rumors. It has also been recalled that the conditions of detention requested in the report are those valid in peacetime, while the United States government considers prisoners as prisoners of war.

Publication of audience reports by the Department of Defense [ modifier | Modifier and code ]

At the end of a legal battle of eighteen months with the Associated Press (AP) press agency, the Pentagon is forced to publish prisoners’ audience reports on its official website. Federal justice has acceded to the agency’s request based on the Freedom of Information Act (Foia).

The documents have 5,000 pages of report. 317 Names of detainees are revealed (out of around 760 detainees passed by Guantánamo and 490 remaining at the end of March 2006), as well as many details on the interrogation methods of the jailers. THE 3 mars 2006 , the magazine Time publishes the full report of the “detainee 063”.

The hearings of the Military Commission, in the presence of prisoners appearing before the judges take place at “Camp Justice” in specific reception conditions, including for foreign journalists ^{[ 55 ]} .

Bibliography [ modifier | Modifier and code ]

• Mohamed Oul Slahi ( trad. from English), Les Cardás de Guantanamo , Neuilly-sur-Seine, Éditions Michel Lafon, January 21, 2015 , 448 p. (ISBN  978-2-7499-2420-5 )
• Murat Kurnaz, In the hell of Guantanamo . Paris, Fayard, 2007.
• Mollah Abdul Salam Zaeef et jean-michel caradec’h, Prinner in Guantanamo
• Mourad Benchelleli, Travel at the end of hell
• Collective, Poèmes of drama (Poems written by prisoners from Guantánamo) University of Iowa Press, 2007 and Biliki, 2009 (French version by Pierre Guéry and Keyvan Sayar) ( Poèmes of drama – Amnesty International, December 12, 2007)
• (in) John Hickman, Selling Guantánamo : exploding the propaganda surrounding America’s most notorious military prison , University Press of Florida, Gainesville, 2013, 279 p. (ISBN  978-0-8130-4455-2 )
• Anne-Marie Lizin (et al.), Guantanamo: Obama’s error , La Boîte à Pandore, Paris, 2014, 171 p. (ISBN  978-2-87557-062-8 )
• (is) Emma reverse, Guantanamo, ten years , Editorial Roca, Barcelona, ​​2012, 158 p. (ISBN  978-84-9918-394-7 )
• Mohammed El-Gorani (scenario), Jérôme Tubiana (scenario) and Alexandre Franc, Guantánamo Kid: the true story of Mohammed el-Gorani , Paris/Barcelona/Brussels/Impr. In Italy, Dargaud, 2018 , 178 p. (ISBN  978-2-205-07768-1 ) .

Documentaries [ modifier | Modifier and code ]

• (in) GITMO-The New Rules of War of Atmo Films, January 2006
• (in) The Road to Guantánamo de Michael Winterbottom
• (in) The Guantánamo Guidebook is a reconstruction of Guantánamo in the United Kingdom which was broadcast on Channel 4 in 2005
• (in) This Is Camp X-Ray Damien Mahoney, 2004
• Camp Delta, Guantanamo 2006 , a radio documentary by Frank Smith ( Camp Delta, Guantanamo 2006 , France Culture, April 30, 2006)
• Under the hood: a trip to the end of torture , Documentary film by Patricio Henríquez, Les Films du Paradox, Bois-Colombes, 2010, 1 h 23 min (DVD)

external links [ modifier | Modifier and code ]

• Notice in a generalist dictionary or encyclopedia :
• (in) Camp database , built by The New York Times (November 2016).
• [PDF] Guantánamo: a decade of human rights abuses , Amnesty International, December 16, 2011
• “Two survivors of Guantanamo claim to have been tortured” , Testimonials , August 2, 2004
• “Violence and resistance to Guantánamo” , Marie-Agnès Combesque, The diplomatic world , February 2006
• [PDF] (in) Full text of the judgment of the United States Supreme Court of June 29, 2006 in the Hamdan v. RUMSFELD, Secretary of Defense, et al.
• (in) Prisoner abuse in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere – Center for Cooperative Research
• Chronologie du Camp De Guantanamo , The world , updated since June 19, 2006 (last update on May 25, 2009)
• Marc Hecker, Good use of terror , French Institute of International Relations, coll. “Strategic focus” ( n ^O 6), April 2008 , thirty first p. (ISBN  978-2-86592-297-0 , read online [PDF] )
• (in) « Anti-war activist’s works banned at prison camps » , The Miami Herald , October 13, 2009
• Communication Management Units  (in) , also called “Galtámos and Anglophone Wikipedia, Wikipedia