Gitmo detainees allowed phone calls

Gitmo detainees allowed phone calls

By MICHAEL MELIA, Associated Press Writer2 hours, 28 minutes ago

The U.S. military said Tuesday that it will allow detainees to make regular phone calls to their families from Guantanamo Bay prison, where many have been confined in extreme isolation for as long as six years.

The new policy by the Defense Department, which previously said security concerns prevented such calls, is part of a strategy to ease conditions for frustrated prisoners at the U.S. Navy base in southeast Cuba.

Critics suggest the move aims to improve the image of the prison, which has been a flash point for criticism of Bush administration policies at home and abroad since it opened in January 2002.

A Pentagon spokesman, Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, said the telephone policy reflects a commitment to maintaining the health and well-being of Guantanamo detainees. No start date has been set for the program.

It was not clear how the military plans to monitor the calls. A spokesman for the detention center, Army Lt. Col. Ed Bush, said it is working out procedures and has no timeline for starting the program. He declined to provide details about which detainees would be eligible and how often calls would be permitted.

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Inmates' contact with the outside world generally has been limited to mail delivered by the International Committee of the Red Cross and meetings with their lawyers. The military has allowed a small number of detainees to speak with their families, but typically only on "humanitarian" grounds such as following a death in the family.

Detainees' attorneys welcomed the phone calls but said reconnecting with family could make life more painful for those at Guantanamo, where the U.S. military holds about 275 men on suspicion of links to terrorism, al-Qaida or the Taliban.

Human rights advocates and foreign leaders have repeatedly called for its shutdown, raising complaints about the duration of detentions and the U.S. decision to classify detainees as "enemy combatants" without the same protections as traditional prisoners of war.

Marc Falkoff, a Northern Illinois University law professor who represents 17 detainees, said one of his Yemeni clients has a 6-year-old daughter with whom he has never spoken.

"To be honest, I don't know whether speaking with her will lift him from his depression or simply shatter him," said Falkoff, who added that the man has grown so hopeless he has asked his lawyers to stop meeting with him.

He also suggested the policy aimed to cast a better light on the prison ahead of a U.S. Supreme Court decision on detainee rights.

Chicago lawyer H. Candace Gorman, who represents a Guantanamo detainee, said she learned on a recent visit with her client that prisoners will be allowed to speak with their families for one hour every six months.

Some attorneys are skeptical the calls will ever happen.

"I will believe it when I see it," said Wells Dixon, a lawyer with the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents many Guantanamo detainees.

In an attempt to reduce hostility inside the detention center, military commanders have recently pursued plans for humanities courses and more open communal areas for men held in isolation 22 hours a day. Attorneys for detainees say the assaults against guards are partly triggered by frustration among men with no real chance to confront accusations that they are enemy combatants.

Romney on Iraq: Doesn't know the facts - and insanely wants to double Guantanamo

Republican Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney on Iraq: Doesn't know the facts - and insanely wants to double Guantanamo

Tom Fahey of the New Hampshire Union Leader led off one of the Republican the debates by asking Romney if the United States had made a mistake in invading Iraq:

FAHEY: Governor Romney, I wanted to start by asking you a question on which every American has formed an opinion. We have lost 3,400 troops, civilian casualties are even higher, and the Iraqi government does not appear ready to provide for the security of its own country. Knowing everything you know right now, was it a mistake for us to invade Iraq?

ROMNEY: Well, the question is kind of a non sequitur, if you will. And what I mean by that -- or a null set -- and that is that if you're saying, let's turn back the clock and Saddam Hussein had opened up his country to IAEA inspectors and they'd come in and they'd found that there were no weapons of mass destruction -- had Saddam Hussein therefore not violated United Nations resolutions -- we wouldn't be in the conflict we're in. But he didn't do those things, and we knew what we knew at the point we made the decision to get in.

Analyzing the debate on CNN's Anderson Cooper 360, CNN political contributor Paul Begala said that Romney had made a "huge mistake" and that "if this were a general election debate, [it] would be a disqualifier." Begala then went on to correct Romney's "gaffe":

COOPER: You say that Romney made a big mistake tonight on Iraq.

BEGALA: A huge mistake, a gaffe that -- that's, if this were a general election debate, would be a disqualifier. He said -- we just heard the bite -- he said that, if Saddam Hussein had allowed IAEA, International Atomic Energy Agency, inspectors into his country to ascertain whether he'd had weapons, we wouldn't have had this war. He did.

On September 17 of 2002, the Iraqi government, under Saddam Hussein, allowed IAEA weapons inspectors into their country. Over 250 of them went, led by Hans Blix. They searched the whole countryside and found nothing. While they were still searching, on March 17 of 2003, George W. Bush told them to get out 'cause he was starting a war. And, on March 20th, we started the war.

You can't get something like that wrong. I mean, that's like -- that's like saying the Mexicans bombed Pearl Harbor. (1)

Debating the treatment of foreign detainees at Tuesday night's debate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney said he thought the US should "double" the number of prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay Cuba.



In the same exchange, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani noted again his service in New York following the Sept. 11 attacks and said he would support interrogators using a wide range of means to elicit confessions from suspected terrorists. Moderator Chris Wallace asked if Giuliani would support the use of waterboarding -- a controversial interrogation tactic some say is torture because it makes detainees believe they are drowning.

"Whatever they can think of," Giuliani said.

Romney said suspected terrorists need to be kept off American soil and he supported the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques" with the approval of the president.

Critics say too many detainees are in Guantanamo without trial and some have called for shutting down the facility, Romney noted. A report conducted last year based on an analysis of defense department data found that 55 percent of Guantanamo detainees were not found to have participated in hostilities against the US and only 8 percent were found to be al Qaeda members.

Romney's solution called for ramping up detention efforts at the military base on Cuba's coast.

"We ought to double Guantanamo," he said.

1. Media Matters http://mediamatters.org/items/200706060013

2. Raw Story http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Romney_calls_for_doubling_Guantanamo_population_0515.html