The US government continues to subject the 30 men held at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba to “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment”, the first UN human rights investigator allowed to visit the camp since it was set up 20 years ago has concluded.
Fionnuala Ní Aoláin was granted unprecedented access as an independent UN monitor, spending four days at Guantánamo in February and meeting a range of the 34 prisoners who were then detained. The number held has now fallen to 30, including the five prisoners accused of plotting the attacks on New York and Washington on 9/11.
In a 23-page report of her visit, Ní Aoláin praises the Biden administration for opening up the camp to her inspection and for being prepared to “address the hardest human rights issues”. But she had searing words for the treatment of detainees, and for what she described as the continued failure to face up to the US torture program unleashed in the wake of the 2001 terror attacks.
Ní Aoláin, a law professor at the University of Minnesota and at Queens University in Belfast, told a press conference on Monday that “after two decades of custody, the suffering of those detained is profound, and it’s ongoing. Every single detainee I met with lives with the unrelenting harms that follow from systematic practices of rendition, torture and arbitrary detention.”
During her visit, the UN special rapporteur on human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism met with the families of 9/11 victims. In Guantánamo, she was granted access to both Camp 5 where the “high-value” 9/11 accused are held as well as Camp 6 which houses the “non-high value” detainees.
Living conditions in the camps have been brought up to international standards in many regards, she found, including sleeping accommodation, sanitation, food and communal prayer. But detainees continued to be vulnerable to “human rights abuses”.
Those ranged from labelling of detainees – who are still referred to by all Guantánamo personnel by their internment serial numbers and not by name – to near-constant surveillance and restraints being imposed on them when being transported to all attorney and other meetings.
The UN inspector reserved some of her harshest criticism for the fact that 19 of the 30 detainees have never been charged with any crime, some of whom have been held in the military camp for two decades. She said their situation was a matter of “profound concern”.
The problem was compounded by the post-9/11 CIA torture program, which has become a roadblock for some of the detainees going to trial. Ní Aoláin said that continued internment of some men flowed from the “unwillingness of the authorities to face the consequences of the torture and other ill-treatment to which the detainees were subjected and not from any ongoing threat they are believed to pose”.
The UN inspector said that the use of torture had also been “a betrayal of the rights of victims” and called for an apology and guarantees that the abuses would not happen again.
In May the Guardian published a series of detailed drawings and writings by Abu Zubaydah which give the most comprehensive account yet seen of the torture to which he and other detainees were subjected by the CIA. Zubaydah is known as a “forever prisoner” – he is being held at Guantánamo having never been charged and with no prospect of release.
Many of the at least 119 individuals who were tortured under the CIA program have endured severe ongoing psychological and physical damage and trauma as a result. Ní Aoláin criticized the US government for failing to provide the intensive treatment needed to help tortured Guantánamo detainees cope with the fallout.
She said that the psychological and psychiatric support offered at Guantánamo “does not amount to the requisite holistic, independent, fully resourced and designated torture rehabilitation” that was needed. She said many of the detainees were suffering from “complex and urgent mental and physical health issues” including traumatic brain injuries, PTSD and other untreated consequences of torture.
The US government gave its response to the UN report in a one-page letter from the ambassador to the human rights council, Michele Taylor. It said that the US believed that all UN member states should be “willing to open themselves to the scrutiny of outside observers”.
But Taylor added that the US was confident that the “conditions of confinement at Guantánamo Bay are humane and reflect the United States’ respect for and protection of human rights for all who are within our custody”.
The statement went on: “Detainees live communally and prepare meals together; receive specialized medical and psychiatric care; are given full access to legal counsel; and communicate regularly with family members.”
