Guantanamo decade anniversary marked by rights groups

By Matthew Rusling (dpa) Jan 11, 2012, 0:02 GMT

Washington - Wednesday marks ten years after the first terrorist suspects were placed in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, but the date has been overshadowed by more pressing issues such as high unemployment, the mounting US debt and next year's presidential elections.

While protests are scheduled to take place in front of the White House, crowds are unlikely to swell to the size of other demonstrations Washington has seen before, based on the current level of public interest.

Still, a coalition of human rights groups including Witness Against Torture and Amnesty International aims to bring 2,700 demonstrators from across the US - a number that pales compared to political protests in recent years, especially against the Iraq war that drew hundreds of thousands of demonstrators.

Amnesty International released a 60-page report to mark the anniversary, detailing the history of Guantanamo under former president George W Bush and laying out what it says are the daily and blatant violation of human rights that occur there.

It calls the Obama administration's failure to close the facility a 'toxic legacy' for human rights and recites details of some individual detainees, 11 of whom have been held since opening day without charges brought or trials held.

It is perhaps a sign of the times that there is not more interest in the remaining 171 inmates: Osama bin Laden is dead, the Iraq war is over and the conflict in Afghanistan is drawing to a close. Americans are now concerned about jobs, in an economy were Labour Department figures tag the number of unemployed people at 13.1 million.

In the years just after the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, the US fight against terrorism dominated the headlines and Guantanamo was a hotly-debated topic.

Rights groups still bill the institution as a blight on the US international reputation and the US legal system that guarantees rights to suspects of a speedy trial and assumption of innocence. Supporters of Guantanamo detention say the facility is needed due to security concerns over bringing detainees to the US mainland for trial.

The Amnesty report highlights what the group calls a decade of unlawful treatment of detainees, including the Obama administration's January 2010 decision that four dozen Guantanamo inmates will neither be prosecuted nor released and will remain in indefinite military detention.

Ten years after it opened on January 11, 2002, the detention facility, housed in the US Guantanamo Bay naval base on a corner of Cuba, operates a multi-level security regime for the 171 prisoners still there.

Over the past decade, at least 780 suspects have been held in Guantanamo. The facility, which is operated by a joint task force of the various US military branches, was set up by the George W Bush administration to hold suspected members of al-Qaeda and others picked up on battlefields in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere who were not members of a state sponsored army.