By Michael Doyle And Carol Rosenberg
crosenberg@miamiherald.com
http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/07/11/v-print/3495804/judge-orders-halt-to-guantanamo.html
crosenberg@miamiherald.com
http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/07/11/v-print/3495804/judge-orders-halt-to-guantanamo.html
In a sharply worded rebuke, U.S. District Judge Royce
Lamberth said the intrusive search policy “flagrantly disregards the
need for a light touch on religious and cultural matters.”
Lamberth added that the searches undermine President
Barack Obama’s own declarations. “The search procedures discourage
meetings with counsel and so stand in stark contrast to the president’s
insistence on judicial review for every detainee,” Lamberth wrote. “The
court, whose duty it is to call the jailer to account, will not
countenance the jailer’s interference with detainees’ access to
counsel.”
Lamberth’s 35-page opinion also will allow detainees
who are weak due to hunger strikes to meet with their attorneys in
their housing camps, instead of being transported to a central
facility. It mandates that detainees who are transported must be given
enough space to sit upright.
The ruling came as a surprise at U.S. Southern Command
in Miami, where Marine Gen. John F. Kelly has oversight of the
Guantánamo prison. Army Col. Greg Julian, a spokesman, said the “chain
of command including Gen. Kelly will review the procedures to figure
out how to accommodate the ruling.”
Julian defended the searches as a necessary security
measure following last year’s suicide by overdose of a Yemeni detainee,
Adnan Latif. From Dubai, Latif’s attorney, David Remes, said the
judge's order was “a great opinion. The government didn't just lose but
actually lost ground.” He was on his return to the United States from
meeting families of Guantánamo detainees in Yemen.
“It will certainly ease the burdens we’ve been facing
on access,” said Pardiss Kebriaei, a senior staff attorney with the
Center for Constitutional Rights, which is among the groups
representing Guantánamo detainees.
Lamberth’s ruling was the second judicial decision this
week to spotlight the president’s role in keeping Guantánamo open.
On Monday, in a separate case, U.S. District Judge
Gladys Kessler called the force-feeding of hunger-striking Guantánamo
detainees a “painful, humiliating and degrading process.” While Kessler
said she was powerless to take action, she pinpointed Obama as “the one
individual who does have the authority to address the issue.”
Lamberth, likewise, put Obama front and center
Thursday, as the 69-year-old Vietnam War veteran led off by citing the
president’s assertion May 23 that “judicial review be available for
every detainee.”
“This matter concerns whether the president’s
insistence on judicial review may be squared with the actions of his
commanders in charge of the military prison at Guantánamo Bay,”
Lamberth wrote. “Currently, it cannot.”
The ruling came as the prison described things as
settling down into a peaceful Ramadan routine after a long period of
turmoil.
Two captives quit their hunger strike, according to the
military on Thursday, reporting the first decline this year in the
prison camps food strike. No detainee threw bodily fluids at a guard
for at least 24 hours, said Navy Capt. Robert Durand, and no soldiers
tackled and shackled a captive to force him out of cell during the same
time period.
Army commanders this week released 75 captives from
22-hour lockdown in their solitary cells, allowing them communal time
to eat and pray together. And some did share a meal of lamb and rice in
the week, said Durand, predicting the hunger-strike and forced-feeding
figures would come down. Navy doctors designated 45 of the captives for
twice daily nasogastric feedings, if they didn't voluntarily drink two
cans of Ensure on their own — and listed 104 captives as hunger
strikers, down from an all-time high of 106.
Kebriaei said Thursday that she suspected the new
genital pat-downs were “part of the campaign of the camp to break the
hunger strike.”
Under previous Guantánamo commanders, Lamberth
recounted, guards searching the detainees had avoided touching their
genital areas. This was designed to avoid showing religious or cultural
disrespect. Search procedures changed in May with the arrival of a new
commander.
“The guard will search the detainee’s groin area ‘by
placing the guard’s hand as a wedge between the scrotum and thigh … and
using flat hand to press against the groin to detect anything foreign
attached to the body,’ ” Lamberth said, quoting the new policy. “The
guard uses a flat hand to frisk the detainee’s buttocks to ensure no
contraband is hidden there.”
Each detainee, already guarded and shackled, has been
searched this way up to four times each time he’s met with an attorney,
Lamberth noted. No contraband has been found.
“Searching detainees up to four times in this manner
for every movement, meeting or phone call belies any legitimate
interest in security given the clear and predictable effects of the new
searches,” Lamberth wrote. “The motivation for the searches is not to
enhance security, but to deter counsel access.”
As they successfully argued in the earlier
force-feeding case before Kessler, Obama administration attorneys said
Lamberth didn’t have legal jurisdiction over the “conditions of
confinement” at Guantánamo. Lamberth, though, sidestepped this by
reasoning that he was ruling on the separate, narrower question of
whether detainees’ legal rights were being impeded.
Julian, the U.S. Southern Command spokesman, wondered
how one federal judge could conclude that he had the authority to
intervene just days after another federal judge had concluded the
opposite.
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