Mustafa Al-Aziz Al-Shamiri was 24 years old when he was arrested in 2002 and thrown into a detention facility many consider a legal black hole. But the officials concerned conceded on Tuesday that the Yemeni who has already spent 13 years in a prison camp was arrested on a mistaken identity. US State Department issues annual reports on human rights practices in each country.
But you will not find Yemen pulled up or threatened with economic sanctions for gross abuse of human rights over Al-Shamiri's arrest in the State Department's report. The reason is very simple: The country that stole the best part of his youth happens to be America which operates by a different set of rules and the prison facility which is holding him is the notorious Guantanamo.
Al-Shamiri's case has close parallel with that of Shaker Aamer, a British citizen of Arab origin, who was released in October this year after being in US custody for nearly a decade and a half though he was never charged with any crime. All this once again raises troubling questions not only about the continuing operation of the Guantanamo but about US commitment to the values of justice, which it claims to hold so dear.
President Barack Obama, we are told, is still committed to closing the Guantanamo and is willing “to use all of the elements of his authority” for this purpose. But there is very little time (he will leave office in January 2017) and no plan, which the US lawmakers will accept. The question is whether Obama can do now what he failed to do at a time when his popularity was at its peak and Americans were willing to shed all vestiges of a discredited Bush era.
When President George Bush opened the Gitmo in 2002, there were 779 inmates. Many were held without specific charges being brought; evidence against many others would be inadmissible in a normal civilian court. They are being held in solitary confinement. Inmates were subject to all forms of torture including sexual abuses and water boarding. Whenever some prisoners went on hunger strike to protest the torture and humiliation, they were force-fed using very coercive restraint chairs in a way that violates the ethical standards of the World Medical Association and American medical groups. Three doctors writing in the New England Journal of Medicine (the June 2013 issue) called Guantanamo a “medical ethics-free zone.”
Of the 779 prisoners held at Guantanamo since its opening on Jan. 11, 2002, 662 have been released (130 under Obama) or transferred. One was transferred to the US to be tried, and nine have died, the most recent being Adnan Latif in September 2012.
Some 107 men are still languishing in the camp, down from 242 when Obama came into office. Obama's dilly-dallying on the issue makes one wonder whether the US will ever close the Gitmo. Will some of the detainees have to remain there for the rest of their lives?
Right now, the White House is working on new steps it hopes will reduce the number of detainees enough within a year to make closing the prison politically and logistically easier. There are also reports that Obama will seek to have the last prisoners moved to another remote location such as the large US base on the British Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia and similar remote US military facilities. But that will be exchanging one hell for another.
One unanswered question is why the prisoners can't be brought to maximum security prions in the US despite the fact that a president has the constitutional power to do so. It beggars belief that the very thought of relocating some inmates, too weak and exhausted after years of incarceration, to US soil sends shivers down the spine of a superpower that has taken upon itself the role of a full-fledged global policeman.
