Protests mark Guantanamo six years

Friday, January 11, 2008 : Six years ago today, one of the most depressing icons of the 21st century opened for business. On January 11, 2002, the first of nearly 800 prisoners arrived at a hastily erected prison in the United States naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which was specifically chosen because it was presumed to be beyond the reach of American courts.

It was there that the Bush administration unveiled its novel approach to justice in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Declaring that the prisoners were the "worst of the worst," President George W. Bush insisted that he had the right to hold them not as prisoners of war protected by the Geneva Conventions, but as "unlawful enemy combatants," who could be imprisoned indefinitely without charge or trial.

If trials were deemed necessary, these too would be innovative proceedings that owed nothing to international or domestic law. Under the terms of a military order signed by Bush in November 2001, the trials, known as Military Commissions, were empowered to draw on secret evidence obtained through torture, coercion or hearsay, which could be withheld from the detainee and his lawyers.

As hundreds of detainees arrived at Guantanamo in early 2002, the government's rhetoric was undermined when Brigadier General Mike Lehnert, the prison's first commander, admitted, "A large number claim to be Taliban, a smaller number we have been able to confirm as Al-Qaeda, and a rather large number in the middle we have not been able to determine their status." In August 2002, a senior intelligence official also confirmed that all was not well, explaining that the authorities had netted "no big fish" in Guantanamo, and that some of the prisoners "literally don't know the world is round."

Despite this, the administration was adamant that the reason that its offshore interrogation center was not providing a wealth of information about Al-Qaeda and its operations was because the detainees had been trained to resist interrogation, and not because most of them had no information to offer

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KHARTOUM — As the world marks the sixth anniversary of the first detainee to be thrown into the notorious Guantanamo, Aljazeera journalist Sami al-Haj completes five years of isolation from the world inside the detention center.

"We do not know what was done to him," 'Asim al-Haj, his younger brother, told IslamOnline.net in the Sudanese capital.

"We do not wish this upon anyone."

Sami, 38, was working as cameraman for the Doha-based Al-Jazeera news channel when seized at the Pakistan-Afghanistan border in December 2001.

He was flown to Guantanamo on January 7, 2003, and has since been detained without trial.

'Asim, a librarian and journalist, remembers when his brother said he is going to Afghanistan to report the US-led invasion for the popular Arab news channel.

"We did not want him to go," he recalls. "But Sami insisted, saying that he would become a staff employee if he went and that the pay was very good."

Only days before his detention, Sami called his family from Pakistan.

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