In its latest annual report, which covers the year 2012, Amnesty International listed US indefinite detention of 166 prisoners at Guantanamo as the country’s primary human rights concern.
It states that the majority of Gitmo’s 166 detainees, who have been on hunger strike since February, were kept at the facility without charge or criminal trial, “nearly three years after President Obama’s deadline for closure of the Guantanamo detention facility.”
A source at Amnesty told RT that the only solution to the current hunger strike at Guantanamo is its closure and that they had no information on the current conditions of detainees at the camp.
The source added that they are doing a lot of campaigning on Guantanamo and that last week Amnesty International USA held a big event in order to increase pressure on the US government to close the facility.
The human rights group also keeps count of the death toll at Guantanamo: “Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif, a Yemeni national who repeatedly expressed distress at his indefinite detention without charge or trial, died during the year, bringing to nine the number of detainees known to have died at Guantanamo since January 2002 ,” the report said.
The Amnesty International report recounts the 2012 trials – or rather, “attempts at trials” – for the Gitmo detainees. Five Gitmo prisoners allegedly accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks were arraigned for a capital trial last year that did not take place.
The report states that before being sent to Guantanamo, those five and another detainee “had been held incommunicado for up to four years in secret US custody, during which time at least two of them had been tortured.”
Another detainee who was allegedly tortured, Pakistani national Majid Khan, pleaded guilty in December 2012. He became the seventh prisoner convicted by a military commission at Guantanamo, and one of the five who had pleaded guilty in return for the possibility of early release from US custody.
The report also raised the issue of the 600 detainees in US custody at the US Military base in Afghanistan’s Bagram. Fifty of the inmates are non-Afghan nationals, some also held without charge or trial.
The paper also denounced drone strikes and uninvestigated deaths from secret CIA detentions.
The ongoing US program of targeted killings of suspected terrorists in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen –as well as the questionable legal grounds of the practice – was the basis of another lengthy entry.
“Available information, limited by secrecy, indicated the US policy permitted extrajudicial executions in violation of international human rights law under the USA’s theory of a ‘global war’ against Al-Qaeda and associated groups,” the report said.
Drone strikes have increased sevenfold under Obama, Bloomberg reported in April. The US covert program to allegedly target Al-Qaeda militants saw 35 strikes in Pakistan in 2008, the last year President Bush was in office, the Long War Journal reported. That figure grew in the following years, reaching a peak of 117 attacks in 2010. Last year, 46 US drones strikes against civilians took place in Pakistan.
A high court in Pakistan recently ruled that US drone strikes in the country should be considered war crimes. It also recommended that the Pakistani government address the issue in the United Nations, saying the strikes violated the organization’s charter and the country’s laws, but the growing uproar in Pakistan has done little to change Washington’s drone war.