Wikileaks has just released the Guantanamo Bay SOP manual from 2004 which highlights policies that have been changed and those which remain as they were in the previous version from 2003.
As previously reported by various media outlets the Bush administration has held that those detained at Guantanamo Bay’s Camp Delta do not fall under the auspices of the Geneva Conventions. There by denying these prisoners any legal protections.
1. Non-compliance with the Geneva Conventions remains official US Policy,
according to leading Habeas Corpus lawyers from the Center for Constitutional Rights. Systematic denial of Red Cross access to prisoners remains. The use of dogs remains. Segregation and isolation are still used routinely and systematically – including an initial period of at least 4 weeks “to enhance and exploit the disorientation and disorganization felt by a newly arrived detainee”, only terminated at the behest of interrogators. Both manuals assert that detainees will be treated in accordance with the “spirit” of the Geneva conventions “to the degree consistent with military needs”, but never assert that the conventions are actually being followed at Guantanamo. Put into practice, neither manual complies with the Geneva conventions.
James Yee served at Guantanamo Bay, ministering to Muslim detainees – and did not like what he saw. Yee spoke out, alleging serious mistreatment of prisoners, and argued from first-hand experience that “The people down in Guántanamo probably know as much about Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida as any private in the military would know what’s going on inside the Pentagon.”
In September 2003, Yee was found in possession of a list of Guantanamo detainees among his belongings at an airport in Florida: for this, he was charged with offenses including sedition and espionage, and kept in solitary confinement for 76 days. The charges were eventually dropped.
Yee was stirring up trouble at Guantanamo by reporting abuses – abuses that have been further confirmed by detainee testimonies and government documents, including two secret Camp Delta SOP manuals released by Wikileaks in the last three weeks.
As stated all charges were dropped against Captain Yee. In October 2005 Yee published his book, For God and Country: Faith and Patriotism Under Fire. [4] In it Yee writes that he was kept in solitary confinement for seventy-six days, and that he was forced to undergo sensory deprivation. He also wrote that General Geoffrey Miller routinely incited the guards to hate the detainees. He alleges serious mistreatment of prisoners [3] [4]. Yee argues that most of the detainees had little or no intelligence value:
Military Working Dogs
Between The SOP Manual from 2003 includes a whole chapter on Military Working Dogs – chapter 26. MWD teams are to be deployed for “psychological deterrence”, walking the “Main Street” of Camp Delta during shift “to demonstrate physical presence to detainees”. That is, menacing dogs are required to be a constant presence.
In the 2004 manual, chapter 26 is substantially unchanged, and the policy remains. MWDs were regularly used at Guantanamo, while WMDs remained undetected in Iraq.
7. Pervasive spin via language control ‘
‘hunger strike’ becomes VTF – ‘voluntary total fasting’. The word “suicide” is virtually removed from the document. Even an attempted hanging requiring someone to cut down is categorized as “self-harm”, despite “self-harm” elsewhere being defined as actions that could not be fatal