Amy Goodman: Guantanamo at 10: The Prisoner and the Prosecutor

[marmar]

from truthdig:



Guantanamo at 10: The Prisoner and the Prosecutor

Posted on Jan 12, 2012
By Amy Goodman


Ten years ago, Omar Deghayes and Morris Davis would have struck anyone as an odd pair. While they have never met, they now share a profound connection, cemented through their time at the notorious U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Deghayes was a prisoner there. Air Force Col. Morris Davis was chief prosecutor of the military commissions there from 2005 to 2007.

Deghayes was arrested in Pakistan and handed over to the U.S. military. He told me: “There was a payment made for every person who was handed to the Americans. ... We were chained, head covered, then sent to Bagram [Afghanistan]—we were tortured in Bagram—and then from Bagram to Guantanamo.”

At Guantanamo, Deghayes, one of close to 800 men who have been sent there since January 2002, received the standard treatment: “People were subjected to beatings, daily fear ... without being convicted of any crime.”

While Deghayes and his fellow inmates were suffering in their cages, the Bush administration was erecting a controversial legal framework to prosecute the Guantanamo prisoners. It labeled those rounded up “enemy combatants,” argued they had no protections under the U.S. Constitution, nor under the Geneva Conventions, no rights whatsoever. Guantanamo became a legal black hole. ..................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/guantanamo_at_10_the_prisoner_and_the_prosecutor_20120112/