U.S. President Joe Biden’s avowed intention to close the Guantanamo detention camp offers hope to end an embarrassing episode in the most recent history of the United States. The abuses committed at Guantanamo have been criticized by many countries around the globe and condemned by all leading human rights organizations.
The Constitution Project, a Washington-based nonpartisan research and advocacy group, stated that “U.S. forces, in many instances, used interrogation techniques on detainees that constitute torture. American personnel conducted an even larger number of interrogations that involved ‘cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. Both categories of actions violate U.S. laws and international treaties. Such conduct was directly counter to values of the Constitution and our nation.”
Equally appalling has been the involvement of medical personnel who supervised the interrogation of detainees, as denounced by Open Society and the Institute of Medicine as a Profession (IMAP) to the point that the U.S. Department of Defense considered those health professionals “safety officers” rather than doctors. In its report “Deprivation and Despair: The Crisis of Medical Care at Guantanamo,” Physicians for Human Rights (USA) gives a detailed account of the abuses that detainees were subjected to in Guantanamo.
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