U.S. NAVAL AIR STATION, Guantánamo Bay, Cuba — Fifteen months after the first hooded and shackled detainees arrived at a primitive tent facility known as Camp X-Ray, some 664 prisoners seized after the Afghan war remain here in a legal, political and geographical limbo. (snip)
With the United States on the verge of releasing 7,000 prisoners seized during the war in Iraq, lawyers and human rights advocates say they hope the contrast with the long detentions here will put more pressure on the administration to deal with the people captured in Afghanistan and other countries in the campaign against terrorism.
(snip)
Capt. Albert Shimkus, the chief medical officer, said in an interview that for the most part, those prisoners arrived already suffering from mental illness. Some outside experts disagree and say depression is a logical consequence of being imprisoned with no certainty about the future.
Dr. Nauimi said the most serious suicide attempt involved one of his clients, a Saudi schoolteacher named Mish al-Hahrbi. He said the teacher became desperate over not knowing what his future held and tried to hang himself. He was resuscitated but is unlikely to recover from a severe hemorrhage, the lawyer said.
BERLIN.- The Council of Europe Committee for Legal Affairs and Human Rights condemned the United States on Tuesday (April 29) for the "illegality" with which they are holding more than 600 persons in Afghanistan and the Guantánamo naval base (Cuba) and demanded that these prisoners be charged or set free, reported EFE.
The denunciation appears in the resolution entitled "Rights of persons held in the custody of the United States in Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay," approved on Tuesday by the majority of the committee’s members meeting in Berlin.
The resolution, to be presented to the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly in June, particularly condemns and laments the fact that the Guantánamo prisoners include minors aged between 13-15 years old.
This constitutes a "flagrant breach of the UN convention on the Rights of the Child" according to the text. The resolution comes with an extensive report on the detention conditions in Guantánamo and their record of the international conventions that the United States has failed to fulfill by keeping these hundreds of individuals in legal limbo.
Group Blasts Guantanamo Release Plan By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:45 a.m. ET
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The planned release of more than a dozen terrorist suspects out of 660 held at the Pentagon's prison in Cuba is too little and too late, a prison rights group says.
``All of the prisoners held at Guantanamo should be charged or released,'' said Vienna Colucci, international justice specialist with Amnesty International USA.
Colucci was responding to news the Defense Department will transfer prisoners out of its high-security Guantanamo Bay jail, where some have been held a year and a half and all are held without charges or lawyers.
It was unclear whether the prisoners would go free or merely be returned to their countries for continued detention or charges.
