Wikileaks Releases DoD Procedure Manual for Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib
October 26, 2012 1 Comment
By LUIS MIRANDA | THE REAL AGENDA | OCTOBER 26, 2012
WikiLeaks published early this morning hundreds of documents from the Department of Defense that describe the procedures established by the US government to be used with suspects detained by the American government who were sent to the prison Guantanamo Bay.
The first document to be put out is the manual of military procedures at Camp Delta in Guantanamo Bay which applied to both civilian and military personnel beginning in November 2002. This manual established administrative rules, regulations and code of confinement behavior for officials.
The organization founded by Julian Assange announced through a press release that, over the next month, the website will disseminate files about the detention policy in chronological order with the directions followed by military officials for more than a decade. Today, the founder of Wikileaks is under political asylum at the Ecuadorian Embassy and is seeking his extradition to South America in order to avoid persecution from the United States, Sweden and other nations that publicly seek revenge.
The documents released by Wikileaks include standard operating procedures of the detention camps Bucca and Abu Ghraib in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay and the manuals for interrogation and fragmentary orders (Fragos) on changes in detention policies.
These documents “show the anatomy of the monster created to conduct arrests after the attacks on September 11, which created a dark hole in which the law and the rights do not exist and where people can be detained without a trace and be treated at will by DoD and intelligence personnel,” said Assange in a statement.
“It shows the excesses of the early days of the war against an unknown ‘enemy’ and how these policies matured and evolved” resulting, he said, “in a permanent state of exception in which the United States is now a decade later “. That exception includes but is not limited to, the effective elimination of significant portions of the Constitution, through the partial or total suppression of the First, Second and Fourth Amendments, for example, which is now business as usual in North America.
Assange, who is in a complicated situation of asylum in the Embassy of Ecuador in London to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he is wanted for alleged sexual offenses, notes the historical importance of these documents, as “Guantanamo has become an example for the systematic abuse of human rights, “he added.
The organization issued several policy documents on interrogation of detainees in Iraq for the years 2004, 2005 and 2008, which revealed techniques to instill fear or emotional pressure to detainees. WikiLeaks said that “although physical violence is prohibited, in writing, a consistent policy of terrorizing prisoners, combined with a policy of destroying records, has caused abuse and impunity”.
Also due out is the “Fragmentary Order”, released after the torture scandal at Abu Ghraib (Iraq) that “eliminates the requirement to keep a record of the interrogation sessions” in certain areas of the prison.
Furthermore, while noting that interrogations carried out in the Division and Brigade Internment should be recorded, it also states that the files should “disappear within 30 days.” A policy that has been overturned by the Obama administration.
The administration of President George W. Bush (2001-2009) enabled the military base of Guantanamo (Cuba) to detain suspected terrorists — without trial — after the attacks of September 11, 2001.
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