Bay Good News

Bay Good News

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President Obama released four top-secret memos which gave bracing details about enhanced interrogation techniques used on terrorist suspects during the Bush administration.

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Exceptional circumstances surround these memos and require their release, the president said. "Withholding these memos would only serve to deny facts that have been in the public domain for some time. This could contribute to an inaccurate accounting of the past, and fuel erroneous and inflammatory assumptions about actions taken by the United States."

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The 126 page document include massive amounts of detail never before divulged by the government, including clinical explanations of how interrogation techniques were performed and the intended effects on detainees.

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Guantanamo Bay history:

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• On February 16, 1903, a lease agreement was signed by President Theodore Roosevelt with Cuba's new government granted the U.S. "the right to use and occupy the waters adjacent to said areas of land and water... and generally to do any and all things necessary to fit the premises for use as coaling or naval stations only, and for no other purpose."

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• The U.S. Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay is the oldest existing U.S. military base outside U.S. territory, and sits on a 45-square-mile area.

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• When the Revolution triumphed in 1959, the U.S. banned its soldiers stationed at the bay from entering Cuban territory. The Cuban government asserts that Guantánamo should have been returned to Cuba at this time.

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• In January, 2002, Guantanamo Bay turned into the controversial detention center.

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• If you recall, late 2001 through 2002 was a fearful period in America. After the 9/11 attacks, almost everyone was braced for another follow-up attack. Public awareness of al Queda and Osama bin Laden was becoming wide-spread in the U.S., and letters containing the anthrax virus appeared randomly, killing 5 people and temporarily closing down the House of Congress, US Postal facilities, and terrified the public.

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According to the Brookings Institution, a non-profit public policy organization based out of Washington, D.C., the population rose to 558 in 2004, when the Pentagon instituted a review system and the number began to decline. It was only in February of 2004 that the first of the Guantanamo detainees were charged. In all, 779 detainees had passed through the facility by late 2008.

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By the time President Barack Obama signed an executive order on Jan. 22, 2009, to close the center within a year, the number of detainees at Guantanamo had fallen to 245 men.

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Surfacing of Mistreatment:

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May 2005, Newsweek magazine ran a story about U.S. interrogators at Guantanamo Bay desecrating the Qur'an to get inmates to talk, including placing the holy book on a toilet and, in one case, flushing it down the toilet. The report sparked anti-American riots in Afghanistan in which 17 people died. The magazine later retracted the story, saying it was based on a U.S. government source whose story was in doubt. In June 2005, the Pentagon confirmed a list of abuses to the Qur'an, calling them relatively minor.

The abuses included:

• Splashing urine on a prisoner and his Qur'an.

• Stepping on and kicking the Qur'an, throwing water on it, and scratching an obscenity on the inside cover.

Call for Rights and Closure:

Lawyers continued to challenge the Bush administration policy in Guantanamo. In January 2005, one U.S. district judge ruled that the prisoners should be covered by the U.S. Constitution, noting, "the right not to be deprived of liberty without due process of law is one of the most fundamental rights of the U.S. Constitution." The administration appealed the ruling. Britain's third most senior judge, Judge Johan Steyn, criticized the U.S. for holding terror suspects in Guantanamo, calling it a "monstrous failure of justice." "By denying the prisoners the right to raise challenges in a court about their alleged status and treatment, the United States government is in breach of the minimum standards of customary international law," he said.