Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Human Rights Law Blogs -> Never In Our Names

Human Rights Law

: Never In Our Names

Gitmo INSIDE the U.S. - Documents Detail Detainee Being Held Was Near Insanity

By Dreaming of Better Days

(I'm not good with this type of thing, but I thought it needed to be noticed.)

Pentagon officials were warned in 2002 that an American detainee was on the brink of insanity due to months of isolation and sensory deprivation in a U.S. military brig, according to documents obtained by the AP.

"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 prisoner Yaser Esam 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."

Driven to the point of insanity?  Note that this is not in Cuba, folks, but right here in the continental U.S.  In military brigs in Norfolk, VA and Charleston, SC to be exact.

(This can also be found at Daily Kos)

Yale Law School's Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic received the documents through a Freedom of Information Act request filed by two attorneys Jonathan Freiman and Tahlia Townsend, representing another detainee, Jose Padilla. The Lowenstein group and the American Civil Liberties Union said the papers were evidence that the Bush administration violated the 5th Amendment's protections against cruel treatment. The U.S. military was ordered to treat the American prisoners the same way prisoners at Guantanamo were treated, according to the documents.

(Emphasis mine.)

The jail at Gitmo was created by BushCo specifically to deny detainees Constitutional rights.  Their lawyers continue to contend that Constitutional rights don't apply outside of the U.S.

"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 U.S. naval facility in Cuba.

The 91 pages of e-mails and documents produced by U.S. Fleet Forces Command, which runs the military brigs in Norfolk, Va., and Charleston, S.C., detail daily decisions made about the treatment of Hamdi and Padilla, then both American citizens, and Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, a legal resident. All were designated as by the White House as "illegal enemy combatants."

(Emphasis mine.)

The paperwork details that military officials had gone from being uncomfortable to being alarmed that they were being directed to handle detainees at these facilities under the same rules that governed Gitmo, a decision made by the defense secretary's office.

An officer was expressing concerns about detainee Hamdi after emprisoning him for 14 months without contact with family, attorneys or even other prisoners.  He was held for 3 years without being charged and was released to Saudi Arabia after having to give up his U.S. citizenship when, in 2004, the Supreme Court rejected the administrations attempt to hold him indefinitely.

Full post as published by Never In Our Names on October 08, 2008 (boomark / email).