Guantanamo may soon close, to avoid court defeat

Many Yemeni prisoners still languish in detention

Yemen’s government must prioritize the repatriation of Yemeni detainees. says U.S. lawyer.

The United States government may close down the Guantanamo detention center before the end of this year, in order to avoid a court decision incriminating it for holding hundreds of men in the detention, said an American lawyer this week. “We believe that the Supreme Court will declare that the government has acted unlawfully in holding the men in Guantanamo, and order the government to give the men a fair judicial hearing,” said lawyer David Remes in exclusive statements to Yemen Observer at the end of his visit to the detention center in Cuba early this week. 

Remes made it clear that the Bush administration wants to close down the detention before the Supreme Court listens to the lawyers’ arguments about the center’s constitutionality late this year.  “The government might even close Guantanamo before the Supreme Court hears argument from the lawyers in early December, and it will probably issue its decision between April and the end of June. That is the last thing the government wants, and I predict that the government will close the detention to avoid having to do so,” said Remes, who works with the Covington and Burling law firm, and represents 15 Yemeni detainees.

The US government, the lawyer added, is also facing an unsettling decision from a lower federal court, which will put more pressure on the officials to close the detention center. However, Remes ruled out the possibility of sending all the Yemeni detainees to Yemen if the detention center is closed.

“The Yemeni prisoners at Guantanamo will never be sent home unless President Saleh makes it a high priority to bring them home.  Otherwise, there is no telling where the US will send the Yemenis when it closes Guantanamo,” he said.

Out of 107 Yemeni prisoners at the detention center, only 12 were released between the middle of 2004 and the middle of 2007. The last four men to arrive in Yemen, one of whom is among Remes’ clients, were released last June, but security authorities are still holding them in prison here.  To this end, President Ali Abdullah Saleh said early this week that his government would keep in contact with the US government regarding the detainees until all of them are handed over to Yemen.  During Remes’ two-day visit to Guantanamo, which ended last Saturday, he met only two of his 15 Yemeni clients. He briefed them on their cases and told them some news from their families and relatives whom he visited six times in Yemen. His last visit was in May. 

The two clients, Yasin Qasem Muhammad Ismail and Abdul Malik Abdul Wahab Al Rahabi, cousins from Jeblah, in Ibb governorate, have been languishing in the detention center for about six years now.  

“On Thursday afternoon, I met with Yasin Qasem Muhammad Ismail.  It was the first time I had seen him in a year-and-a-half, because he refused to see us for a long time.  This time he saw me.  He was friendly during this visit, which made me feel good, and we had a pleasant time together,” said Remes immediately after he returned from Guantanamo to Washington on Saturday.   

“Yasin doesn’t strike me as the type of person who is full of giggles when he is free, but he seemed to enjoy our visit.  He especially enjoyed hearing the details of my visit with Jamil and Rashad with Laura Poitras several weeks ago,” said Remes in reference to the relatives he met on May in presence of an American film maker who has been shooting a documentary to depict the sufferings of the Guantanamo detainees and their families. 

“He has some aches and pains, but he seemed basically okay.  He is a little thin, but he did not appear to be on a hunger strike. It made me very, very sad to realize that Yasin has spent one-quarter of his whole life at Guantanamo.” 

About the second detainee, the lawyer said he was extremely happy when he heard the name of his 8-year old daughter Aisha, who lives with his mother in Ibb and does not know her father.    "Yesterday, Friday, I spent the morning and afternoon with Abdulmalik Abdul Wahab. His face lit up when his daughter's name Aisha was mentioned," Remes said.      

The authorities of Guantanamo allow lawyers to see their clients for about two and a half hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon.   

"We brought him a personal pizza with "hot, hot sauce," which he especially wanted, a large pastry cake with icing and walnuts on top and dried apricots, raisins, and dates.  We talked about many things in life as though we were having lunch together in Abdulmalik's village outside of Ibb," the lawyer said.
  
"Finally, when we were too full to eat anymore, I knew that he shared my feeling that it would have been a perfect afternoon, under the circumstances, if only we could have chewed qat together and speculated about the mysteries of the universe.”   

Then the lawyer described the circumstances in which his clients are living in the detention center. He said, like most of the prisoners, Yasin and Abdulmalik are kept in solitary confinement.   The solitary cells are in Camp 5 and Camp 6.  

Yasin is apparently in Camp 5, and Abdulmalik is in Camp 6.    The camp authorities keep the men isolated in solitary confinement to make it more difficult for them to communicate among themselves and hatch "plots."  

Each man in Camp 5 and Camp 6 is kept in a small cell.  Each cell has solid white concrete walls and a door with a narrow, vertical window slit, which looks into a concrete corridor and across to a cell on the other side of the corridor.   

The cell door is heavy and is painted a dark reddish-brown rust color.  The door has a small horizontal opening slat, about waist-high, through which meals are given to the prisoner.    

There is no natural light in the cell and no furniture except a metal toilet and sink, which are connected so they can use a single drain pipe, and a raised concrete area where the prisoner sleeps on a thin mattress with a plastic blanket. 

“The blanket is plastic (something I cannot even visualize) to keep prisoners from using them to commit suicide, which they could do with cotton sheets and cloth blankets,” said Remes.  

The cell is lit with a long bright fluorescent ceiling light, which is kept on 24 hours a day.  There is constant loud noise outside the cells, with heavy metal doors constantly banging open and shut, as prisoners are taken to have "recreation" at all hours of the day and night, making sleep very difficult.   

Sometimes the guards sadistically bang the cell doors at night simply to wake up the prisoners.  To punish even small infractions, the authorities may confiscate a man's prayer mat or shave his beard.   

Many men no longer keep Quran in their cells because they are worried that to do so would expose the Holy Book to desecration by the guards, said Remes.

When a prisoner is being punished, food is handed to him on a napkin instead of on a tray.   
And for all prisoners, freedom still feels impossible far away.

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