Guantanamo attorney says his clients were tortured

The lead attorney for Guantanamo detainees spoke Wednesday about torture and injustice… The lead attorney for Guantanamo detainees spoke Wednesday about torture and injustice committed by American citizens upon prisoners suspected of posing a threat to U.S. national security.

Gitanjali Gutierrez, the lead counsel for the Center of Constitutional Rights and an adjunct professor of international human rights law and terrorism at Cornell University Law School, presented a lecture titled “Guantanamo: the Fight for Human Rights” in the Teplitz Memorial Courtroom in the Barco Law Building Wednesday night.

“I have clients who have been tortured both psychologically and physically,” Gutierrez said. “Abuse of executive power in Guantanamo has led to a plethora of human rights violations,” she added.

Gutierrez, the first civilian attorney to visit a client at Guantanamo Bay Prison in Cuba, has made more than 10 trips to the military base. She spoke about her high-profile clients who allegedly suffer along with roughly 750 Muslim and Arab men ranging from eight to 80 years old who were not seized solely from war zones, but in many cases, swept off of the streets to be jailed and brutally interrogated with no trial or screening process.

Gutierrez said the worst human rights violation committed at Guantanamo is the enforcement of indefinite detention outside the law, and the U.S. government has attempted to prevent detainees from contesting their detention resulting in unnecessary costs.

“We are exhausting a tremendous amount of intelligence resources on people who have little intelligence value,” Gutierrez said. “Of the 760 men, there might be one or two dozen who actually pose a threat to national security,” she added.

Gutierrez described the case of her client, Mohammad Al Qahtani, whose inhumane interrogations were documented by Time Magazine. Allegedly, Qahtani was subjected to severe sleep deprivation for 50 days, sexual humiliation at the hands of female interrogators, severe isolation and was forbidden to practice any sort of religion.

“We now have sanctioned official torture, although we want to call it ‘aggressive interrogation,'” Gutierrez said.

According to Gutierrez, these torture practices were created by people who have never served in the government or military.

Gutierrez has been denied access to another client of hers, an American citizen named Majid Kahn, on the grounds that Kahn may disclose confidential information regarding his interrogations. She added that Kahn is by no means a radical Islamist or any sort of criminal.

Gutierrez published a report in 2005 chronicling major hunger strikes by Guantanamo prisoners prompted by the torture and unwarranted incarceration they suffer.

“We are certainly not stopping this encroachment of authority,” Gutierrez said.

At the end of the program, various petitions to be signed and sent to the U.S. government circulated around the audience to shut down Guantanamo Bay Prison and give the prisoners fair trials.

The event was sponsored by Pitt’s School of Law, the Center for Constitutional Rights and the United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers of America. Fliers for an anti-war demonstration Saturday, March 24, as well as various pamphlets from Amnesty International were handed out to audience members at the conclusion of the event.