Guantánamo Exclusive: Former Chief Prosecutor, Ex-Detainee Call on Obama to Close Prison

[The Northerner]

www.democracynow.org - On the tenth anniversary of when the United States began detaining terror suspects at its Guantánamo Bay military base in Cuba, we speak with a former prisoner and the ex-chief U.S. prosecutor — who both call for the Obama administration to close the base. "People are locked up in isolation camps ... People lost their hands, lost their eyes, lost their limbs," says Omar Deghayes, who was arrested in Pakistan as a terror suspect and held in U.S. custody from May 2002 until December 2007, most of that time at Guantánamo. "Some people were subjected to sleep deprivation. They weren't allowed to sleep ... and they had to live under those conditions for six years... without being convicted of any crime, which is the most unacceptable thing." Asked if prisoners were tortured at Guantánamo, Air Force Colonel Morris Davis, the former chief prosecutor at the military prison, answers, "I don't think there is any doubt." Davis resigned his position in 2007 in protest of what he called political interference in the military commissions of Guantánamo prisoners. "In many cases we had evidence independent of that [torture] that was sufficient to establish guilt. But to use torture to gain intelligence, and then also to turn around and use that as evidence in an American court, is just not consistent with American principles," Davis says.

[lsewpershad]

1. It is about time Mr President

FIND A WAY.....is during recess a posibility?????