The Independent reports: Over half of all detainees at the US-run Guantanamo Bay military prison are now taking part in a hunger strike, with many being force-fed, a US military spokesman confirmed today.

The number of prisoners on hunger strike has risen to 84, an increase of 32 since last Wednesday, with 16 now receiving “enteral feedings,” a process involving being force-fed via tubes.

Inmates at the facility, which houses 166 detainees, have been refusing food since 6 February, when they claim prison officials searched their Korans for contraband, an act they considered to be religious desecration. Officials denied mishandling the Islamic holy book. Some prisoners, including Shaker Aamer, the last British inmate being held there, have since said they are continuing the strike in protest against their incarceration at Guantanamo for 11 years without charge or trial.

The Observer reports: The last British resident being held in Guantánamo Bay may never be allowed to return to his family in London because of an alleged “secret deal” between US authorities, Saudi Arabia and the British security services.

Shaker Aamer, 46, has been in the Cuban detention centre for more than 11 years without charge or trial, and has been cleared for release since 2007.

This month, two Metropolitan police detectives interviewed Aamer, gathering an estimated 150 pages of testimony and allegations that MI5 and MI6 were complicit in his torture. These included claims that a British officer was present while US soldiers tortured him and that MI6 officers made allegations to the CIA they knew to be false, including that Aamer was a member of al-Qaida. His legal team alleges that the US, Saudi Arabia – where Aamer was born – and the UK security services are trying to ensure that he never goes home.

Were he to return, he would almost certainly become a key witness in Scotland Yard’s investigation into allegations of British complicity in torture in the post 9/11 era. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: Weeks of mounting tensions between the military and detainees at the wartime prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, escalated into violence on Saturday during a raid in which guards forced prisoners living in communal housing to move to individual cells.

“Some detainees resisted with improvised weapons, and in response, four less-than-lethal rounds were fired,” the military said in a statement. “There were no serious injuries to guards or detainees.”

Capt. Robert Durand, a military spokesman at the base, said the improvised weapons included “batons and broomsticks.” Another military official said that at least one detainee had been hit by a rubber bullet, but that there were no further details about any minor injuries or how the prisoners had resisted.

The raid came shortly after a delegation from the International Committee of the Red Cross completed a three-week visit to examine the prisoners and study the circumstances of a hunger strike that has been roiling the camp for weeks. The Red Cross visit concluded on Friday, and most of the delegation left that same day, though a few flew out Saturday morning, said Simon Schorno, a Red Cross spokesman.

Mr. Schorno declined to comment on the raid, saying that no one from the Red Cross delegation had witnessed it. But he did say that the Red Cross believed the hunger strike was the result of how legal uncertainty has affected their mental and emotional health. Most of the detainees have been held without trial for more than a decade, and the outward flow of detainees has essentially ceased amid Congressional restrictions on further transfers. [Continue reading…]

The Miami Herald reports: Confronted with claims that a portion of the Pentagon computer system used by defense lawyers is not secure, the chief Guantánamo judge Thursday postponed until June next week’s hearings in an ongoing death penalty trial at the war court in Cuba.

Army Col. James L. Pohl, the judge, agreed to delay the proceedings in the USS Cole conspiracy trial “in the interest of justice” hours after the chief defense counsel, Air Force Col. Karen Mayberry, ordered all war court defense counsels to stop using their computers for confidential email and court documents.

At issue has been the disappearance recently of certain defense documents off what was thought to be a secure hard drive at the Office of Military Commissions. Technicians were creating a mirror of the war court’s server, so lawyers could work on their documents between the Pentagon region and the crude war court compound at the remote Navy base in Cuba, and documents on both the Cole and Sept. 11 death penalty cases simply vanished.

“I honestly don’t know how bad it is. All I know is that the information systems have been impacted, corrupted, lost,” Mayberry said, describing the lost work product by 9/11 defense lawyers as of a greater magnitude than the Cole case.

Plus, the information was on a server that held both defense and prosecution documents, Mayberry said, something that in light of the problems can no longer be tolerated. Had Pohl not issued the delay, she added, she was prepared to ask Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel to freeze the commissions.

The postponement is the latest blow to the Obama administration’s version of the war court that President George W. Bush created in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. The last round of hearings revealed other confidentiality issues, including an eavesdropping system hidden in what looked like a smoke detector at the attorney-client meeting rooms at the prison camps and the existence of an intelligence censor who until recently had the capability to mute conversation at Guantánamo’s maximum-security courtroom.

No evidence had been uncovered that the problem was a result of an unseen intelligence agency interference, Mayberry said, adding “I suppose anything’s possible. I don’t have any reason to think that’s what’s going on. But I know that we didn’t have any reason to think that smoke detectors weren’t smoke detectors.” [Continue reading…]

New York Times editorial: The hunger strike that has spread since early February among the 166 detainees still at Guantánamo Bay is again exposing the lawlessness of the system that marooned them there. The government claims that around 40 detainees are taking part. Lawyers for detainees report that their clients say around 130 detainees in one part of the prison have taken part.

The number matters less than the nature of the protest, however: this is a collective act of despair. Prisoners on the hunger strike say that they would rather die than remain in the purgatory of indefinite detention. Only three prisoners now at Guantánamo have been found guilty of any crime, yet the others also are locked away, with dwindling hope of ever being released.

Detainees there have gone on hunger strikes many times since the facility opened in 2002. A major strike in 2005 involved more than 200 detainees. But those earlier actions were largely about the brutality of treatment the detainees received. The protest this time seems more fundamental. Gen. John Kelly of the Marines, whose Southern Command oversees Guantánamo Bay, explained the motivation of the detainees at a Congressional hearing last month by saying, “They had great optimism that Guantánamo would be closed” based on President Obama’s pledge in his first campaign, but they are now “devastated” that nothing has changed.

For 86 detainees, this is a particular outrage. They were approved for release three years ago by a government task force, which included civilian and military agencies responsible for national security.

But Congress outrageously has limited the president’s options in releasing them, through a statute that makes it very difficult to use federal money to transfer Guantánamo prisoners anywhere. Fifty-six of those approved for release are Yemenis. The government, however, has said it will not release them to Yemen for the “foreseeable future,” apparently because they might fall under the influence of people antagonistic to the United States. That false logic would mean that no Yemenis could ever travel to this country, but that is not the case.

The other 30 detainees approved for release are from different countries, though the government will not say where they are from. Over the past decade, the government has sent detainees to at least 52 countries, The Times and NPR have determined, so it surely can find countries to take detainees who cannot be returned home.

As for the remaining 80 prisoners, the three who have been convicted and the 30 or so who are subjects of active cases or investigations can be transferred to a military or civilian prison. The rest are in indefinite detention — a legal limbo in which they are considered by the government to be too dangerous to release and too difficult to prosecute. Such detention is the essence of what has been wrong with Guantánamo from the start. The cases of these detainees must be reviewed and resolved according to the rule of law.

The government is force-feeding at least 10 of the hunger strikers. International agreements among doctors say doctors must respect a striker’s decision if he makes “an informed and voluntary refusal” to eat. But under American policy, Guantánamo doctors cannot adhere to those principles. The Obama administration justifies the force-feeding of detainees as protecting their safety and welfare. But the truly humane response to this crisis is to free prisoners who have been approved for release, end indefinite detention and close the prison at Guantánamo.

RT.com interviewed federal public defender Carlos Warner who read a statement from one of the prisoners, Faiz al-Kandari.

CW: He said:

“I scare myself when I look in the mirror. Let them kill us as we have nothing to lose. We died when Obama indefinitely detained us. Respect us or kill us. It is your choice. The US must take off its mask and kill us.”

That was his statement as of today. I saw him last week. I have many clients there but I did see him last week and it was a shock to see what I saw. He was a man who was down more than 30 pounds less than a month ago. He refused all nourishment. His cheeks were sunk in. He was exhausted, weak, he could not stand. It was a scary, scary meeting for me.

RT: And his message is respect us or kill us. Will his wish come true or will he now be prepared to die?

CW: Well, I think many of the men, the ones that are indefinitely detained have zero hope. They have no hope because of the administration. I think many of them are ready die. The question is how and when will they die? They have no hope of being released from that place and unless a human being has some hope, it is very difficult to live. And many of them are prepared to die.

RT: Has this man been cleared for release years ago, and if so why hasn’t he been released?

CW: Faiz is not on the list of 86 innocent men who are cleared for release and those 86 men, it was unanimous decision by the US government, our government to release them. But Faiz is not on that list. But let’s be clear, everyone in Guantanamo is indefinitely detained. No one is being released – cleared for release or not.

Andrew Cohen writes: “It’s a very tricky theme to play out politically,” law professor and longtime Obama devotee Geoffrey Stone is quoted saying without a trace of irony or regret near the end of The Terror Courts: Rough Justice at Guantanamo Bay, Jess Bravin’s excellent new book. The book focuses on the epic and continuing failure of America’s military tribunals to process suspects following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. “You are asking people to be better than they have to be.”

It’s a quote that could be the epitaph for the whole disgraceful affair. At nearly every step of the way, for more than 11 years, our elected officials, military leaders, and judges have failed or refused to be “better than they have to be” when it comes to the treatment of the detainees. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” then-Attorney General John Ashcroft says prophetically, early in Bravin’s book. When Ashcroft comes off as a Wise Man you know something is terribly amiss.

Indeed, over and over, when faced with a moral or legal choice as to how to proceed, our government officials chose poorly– violating foreign and domestic law, precluding civilian trials, sabotaging our own national security, stifling internal dissent, confounding our allies, rewarding bureaucratic mindlessness, and setting up the vaunted military tribunals to fail in a hundred different ways which, of course, they have in the 4,212 days since the Twin Towers fell.

Which is why you should read this book now, while the hunger strike at Guantanamo Bay is growing. You should read it now, while there is a pending request by the Pentagon to spend another $49 million for a new prison on Cuba. You should read it now, while John Yoo is still the go-to guy for quotes about interrogations, and while Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, crows on a wire, are still offering up terrible advice about prosecuting detainees. [Continue reading…]

McClatchy reports: It’s lunchtime on the communal cellblocks for cooperative captives, and detainees dressed in tan and white camp uniforms are steadfastly refusing the guards’ offer to wheel in food carts.

Only if a prisoner pulls shut a gate to a chute called a sally port can a soldier lock it remotely and send in the meals. And one by one, every block but Delta Block refuses. Some captives call out that they don’t want the food.

Over at Charlie Block, an angular looking detainee is stubbornly ignoring his guards, sitting at an empty, stainless-steel picnic table, watching footage from Mecca on Saudi TV.

Within an hour, the guards systematically trash a lunch that looks like it could feed 100. Unopened juice bottles go in the garbage first, then Styrofoam boxes of pita bread and special dietary meals. Buffet tins of stewed tomatoes, rice and sweet-and-sour stir-fried beef follow.

It’s hunger-strike time at Guantánamo. And while the military and their captives dispute when it started and how widespread it is, it was clear from a three-day visit to the prison-camp compound this past week that the guard force is confronted with its most complex challenge in years. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: The United States Southern Command has requested $49 million to build a new prison building at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, for “special” detainees on top of other renovations it says are necessary since Congress has decided to keep it open indefinitely. That brings the potential taxpayer bill for upgrading the deteriorating facilities to an estimated $195.7 million, the military said on Thursday.

That overall price tag is significantly higher than the estimate of $150 million to $170 million that General John F. Kelly, the Southcom commander, gave in Congressional testimony on Wednesday. The special detainee facility was not included on the list of requested construction projects released by Southcom on Wednesday when reporters asked for details.

The project appears to be a proposed replacement for Camp 7, where so-called high-value detainees who were formerly held by the Central Intelligence Agency – like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-described architect of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 – are housed. While the existence of Camp 7 is widely known, the military generally refuses to discuss it. [Continue reading…]

Amy Goodman writes: Reports are emerging from the US military prison at Guantánamo Bay that a majority of the prisoners are on a hunger strike. Of the detainees, 166 remain locked up, although more than half have been cleared by the Obama administration for release. Yet, there they languish – in some cases, now in their second decade – in a hellish legal limbo, uncharged yet imprisoned.

President Barack Obama’s failure to close Guantánamo, as he boldly promised to do with an executive order signed on 22 January 2009, and the deterioration of conditions at the prison under his watch will remain a lasting stain on his legacy. From Guantánamo, Yemeni prisoner Bashir al-Marwalah wrote to his lawyer:

“We are in danger. One of the soldiers fired on one of the brothers a month ago. Before that, they send the emergency forces with M-16 weapons into one of the brothers’ cell blocks … Now they want to return us to the darkest days under Bush. They said this to us. Please do something.”

Al-Marwalah was referring to the first recorded use of rubber bullets being fired at a Guantanamo prisoner by the US military guards there. [Continue reading…]