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Documents say detainee near insanity in US jails
(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-10-08 10:56 WASHINGTON -- A US military officer warned Defense Department officials that American detainee Yaser Esam Hamdi was being driven nearly insane by months of punishing isolation and sensory deprivation in a US military brig, according to documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union and provided to The Associated Press.
While the treatment of prisoners at detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and in Afghanistan and Iraq have long been the subject of human rights complaints and court scrutiny, the documents shed new light on how Hamdi and Jose Padilla, also an American, and Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, a legal US resident, were treated in military jails inside the United States. The Bush administration ordered the men to be held in military jails as "enemy combatants" for years of interrogations without criminal charges, which would not have been allowed in civilian jails. The men were interrogated by agents of the CIA and the US Defense Intelligence Agency, repeatedly denied access to attorneys and mail from home and contact with anyone other than guards or their interrogators. They were deprived of natural light for months and for years were forbidden even minor distractions such as a soccer ball or a dictionary. "I will continue to do what I can to help this individual maintain his sanity, but in my opinion we're working with borrowed time," an unidentified Navy brig official wrote of Hamdi in 2002. "I would like to have some form of an incentive program in place to reward him for his continued good behavior, but more so, to keep him from whacking out on me." Yale Law School's Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic received the documents through a federal Freedom of Information Act request filed by two of Padilla's attorneys, Jonathan Freiman and Tahlia Townsend. The civil liberties group said the papers are evidence that the Bush administration violated the protections guaranteed in the 5th Amendment of the US Constitution against cruel treatment. The US military had been ordered to treat the American prisoners the way prisoners were treated at Guantanamo, according to the documents. However, the Guantanamo jail was created by the Bush administration specifically to avoid allowing detainees any constitutional rights. Administration lawyers contended the Constitution did not apply outside the country. "These documents are the first clear confirmation of what we've suspected all along, that the brig was run as a prison beyond the law. There was an effort to create a Gitmo inside the United States," Jonathan Hafetz of the ACLU's National Security Project in New York said, using the slang word for the US naval facility on Cuba. The 91 pages of e-mails and documents produced by US Fleet Forces Command, which runs the military brigs in Norfolk, Virginia, and Charleston, South Carolina, detail daily decisions made about the treatment of Hamdi and Padilla, then both American citizens, and legal resident al-Marri. All were designated by Bush administration officials as "illegal enemy combatants." |
