Obama to close Guantanamo within a year?

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I just read this over at msn.com but they only had the headline, no story. Does anyone know about this?

He had his Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel circulate a memo yesterday that asked that all trials at Gitmo be halted for 120 days and today a judge granted that order. It is presumed as well that this will make provisions for the closing of Guantanamo Bay as soon as possible, thank God.
 
yeah and what are we going to do with all these guys, throw them into the regular justice system? :lol:

Remember Zaccarias Moussawi? Since we were able to give him a lawyer, it took 4 years for a final verdict, and clogged up the justice system unbelievably. Not to mention, there wasn't a lot of evidence against him, he had to plead guilty himself...:angry:
 
yeah and what are we going to do with all these guys, throw them into the regular justice system? :lol:

Remember Zaccarias Moussawi? Since we were able to give him a lawyer, it took 4 years for a final verdict, and clogged up the justice system unbelievably. Not to mention, there wasn't a lot of evidence against him, he had to plead guilty himself...:angry:

So not having real evidence is a reason for holding them indefinately for you?

Wow, I love the conservative logic...
 
yeah and what are we going to do with all these guys, throw them into the regular justice system? :lol:

Remember Zaccarias Moussawi? Since we were able to give him a lawyer, it took 4 years for a final verdict, and clogged up the justice system unbelievably. Not to mention, there wasn't a lot of evidence against him, he had to plead guilty himself...:angry:
You are not making a good case here, the problems which Obama will have to deal with are the same ones that Bush did with those captured in Afghanistan; although now the Bush hatred is gone there should be a little more nuance.
 
By BEN FELLER, Associated Press Writer 2 mins ago

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama began overhauling U.S. treatment of terror suspects Thursday, signing orders to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center, review military trials of suspects and ban the harshest interrogation methods.

With three executive orders and a presidential directive signed in the Oval Office, Obama started reshaping how the United States prosecutes and questions al-Qaida, Taliban or other foreign fighters who pose a threat to Americans.

The centerpiece order would close the much-maligned U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, within a year, a complicated process with many unanswered questions that was nonetheless a key campaign promise of Obama's. The administration already has suspended trials for terrorist suspects at Guantanamo for 120 days pending a review of the military tribunals.

"We intend to win this fight. We're going to win it on our terms," Obama said of the war on terrorism. But he also said he didn't want to have to make a "false choice" between successfully waging war against terrorist organizations and hewing to U.S. human rights ideals in the process.

"This is following through not just on a commitment I made during the campaign but an understanding that dates back to our Founding Fathers, that we are willing to observe core standards of conduct — not just when it's easy but also when it's hard," the president said.

"We will be setting up a process" to figure out the logistics of closing down Guantanamo, Obama told reporters gathered in the Oval Office of the White House.

In other actions, Obama:

_Created a task force that would have 30 days to recommend policies on handling terror suspects who are detained in the future. Specifically, the group would look at where those detainees should be housed since Guantanamo is closing.

_Required all U.S. personnel to follow the U.S. Army Field Manual while interrogating detainees. The manual explicitly prohibits threats, coercion, physical abuse and waterboarding, a technique that creates the sensation of drowning and has been termed a form of torture by critics. However, a Capitol Hill aide says that the administration also is planning a study of more aggressive interrogation methods that could be added to the Army manual — which would create a significant loophole to Obama's action Thursday.

_Directed the Justice Department to review the case of Qatar native Ali al-Marri, who is the only enemy combatant currently being held on U.S. soil. The review will look at whether al-Marri has the right to sue the government for his freedom, a right the Supreme Court already has given to Guantanamo detainees. The directive will ask the high court for a stay in al-Marri's appeals case while the review is ongoing. The government says al-Marri is an al-Qaida sleeper agent.

An estimated 245 men are being held at the U.S. naval base in Cuba, most of whom have been detained for years without being charged with a crime. Among the sticky issues the Obama administration has to resolve are where to put those detainees — whether back in their home countries or at other federal detention centers — and how to prosecute some of them for war crimes.
 
I was reading through this morning the small - but nevertheless, important - moves he's already made in his first day, and I must say I'm impressed. He's obviously keen to get things moving fast :up:
 
"Pentagon: 61 ex-Guantanamo inmates return to terrorism"

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Pentagon said on Tuesday that 61 former detainees from its military prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, appear to have returned to terrorism since their release from custody.

Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said 18 former detainees are confirmed as "returning to the fight" and 43 are suspected of having done in a report issued late in December by the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Morrell declined to provide details such as the identity of the former detainees, why and where they were released or what actions they have taken since leaving U.S. custody.

"This is acts of terrorism. It could be Iraq, Afghanistan, it could be acts of terrorism around the world," he told reporters.

Morrell said the latest figures, current through December 24, showed an 11 percent recidivism rate, up from 7 percent in a March 2008 report that counted 37 former detainees as suspected or confirmed active militants.

Rights advocates said the lack of details should call the Pentagon's assertions into question.

"Until enough information is provided to allow the press and the public to verify these claims, they need to be viewed with a healthy degree of skepticism," said Jennifer Daskal, a Washington-based lawyer for Human Rights Watch.

Rights advocates contend that many Guantanamo detainees have never taken up arms against the United States and say the Defense Department in the past has described former detainees as rejoining "the fight" because they spoke out against the U.S. government.

"The Defense Department sees that the Guantanamo detention operation has failed and they are trying to launch another fear mongering campaign to justify the indefinite detention of detainees there," said Jamil Dakwar, human rights director at the American Civil Liberties Union.

President-elect Barack Obama, who takes office next Tuesday, is expected to issue an executive order to close the Guantanamo Bay prison. Defense Secretary Robert Gates also favors shuttering Guantanamo.

But the prison is unlikely to shut until after U.S. officials settle a myriad of legal and logistic issues, including a solution on where to house its occupants.

About 255 men are still held at the U.S.-run naval base in Cuba, a symbol of aggressive interrogation methods that exposed the United States to allegations of torture.

Pentagon officials say that about 110 detainees should never be released because of the potential danger they pose to U.S. interests.

Washington has cleared 50 of the detainees for release but cannot return them to their home countries because of the risk they would be tortured or persecuted there.

The Pentagon said it considers a former detainee's return to terrorism "confirmed" when evidence shows direct involvement in terrorist activities. U.S. officials see a "suspected" terrorism links when intelligence shows a plausible link with terrorist activities.

"Propaganda does not qualify as a terrorist activity," the Pentagon said in a statement.

(Additional reporting by Andrew Gray, editing by David Alexander and David Wiessler)
 
"Pentagon: 61 ex-Guantanamo inmates return to terrorism"

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Pentagon said on Tuesday that 61 former detainees from its military prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, appear to have returned to terrorism since their release from custody.

Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said 18 former detainees are confirmed as "returning to the fight" and 43 are suspected of having done in a report issued late in December by the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Morrell declined to provide details such as the identity of the former detainees, why and where they were released or what actions they have taken since leaving U.S. custody.

"This is acts of terrorism. It could be Iraq, Afghanistan, it could be acts of terrorism around the world," he told reporters.

Morrell said the latest figures, current through December 24, showed an 11 percent recidivism rate, up from 7 percent in a March 2008 report that counted 37 former detainees as suspected or confirmed active militants.

Rights advocates said the lack of details should call the Pentagon's assertions into question.

"Until enough information is provided to allow the press and the public to verify these claims, they need to be viewed with a healthy degree of skepticism," said Jennifer Daskal, a Washington-based lawyer for Human Rights Watch.

Rights advocates contend that many Guantanamo detainees have never taken up arms against the United States and say the Defense Department in the past has described former detainees as rejoining "the fight" because they spoke out against the U.S. government.

"The Defense Department sees that the Guantanamo detention operation has failed and they are trying to launch another fear mongering campaign to justify the indefinite detention of detainees there," said Jamil Dakwar, human rights director at the American Civil Liberties Union.

President-elect Barack Obama, who takes office next Tuesday, is expected to issue an executive order to close the Guantanamo Bay prison. Defense Secretary Robert Gates also favors shuttering Guantanamo.

But the prison is unlikely to shut until after U.S. officials settle a myriad of legal and logistic issues, including a solution on where to house its occupants.

About 255 men are still held at the U.S.-run naval base in Cuba, a symbol of aggressive interrogation methods that exposed the United States to allegations of torture.

Pentagon officials say that about 110 detainees should never be released because of the potential danger they pose to U.S. interests.

Washington has cleared 50 of the detainees for release but cannot return them to their home countries because of the risk they would be tortured or persecuted there.

The Pentagon said it considers a former detainee's return to terrorism "confirmed" when evidence shows direct involvement in terrorist activities. U.S. officials see a "suspected" terrorism links when intelligence shows a plausible link with terrorist activities.

"Propaganda does not qualify as a terrorist activity," the Pentagon said in a statement.

(Additional reporting by Andrew Gray, editing by David Alexander and David Wiessler)




so what do you propose we do? can you agree that holding people in a legal purgatory where they aren't accused of crimes is not a good thing?
 
"This is following through not just on a commitment I made during the campaign but an understanding that dates back to our Founding Fathers, that we are willing to observe core standards of conduct — not just when it's easy but also when it's hard," the president said.

Thank you, Mr. President. :up:
 
edit: found it!

Link

Yesterday, a Pentagon spokesman said:

"I can disclose with you the fact that we have a new -- we have updated recidivism numbers of people who have been at Guantanamo, and these are the latest numbers we have as of the end of December. And it shows a pretty substantial increase in recidivism. I think prior to this report, I think the rate had been about 7 percent of those who had been held at Guantanamo and released who have been confirmed or suspected of returning to the fight. At that time we suspected that 30 -- confirmed or suspected that 37 former detainees had returned to the fight. We now believe that that number has increased and that the overall known terrorist reengagement rate has increased to 11 percent. The new numbers are, we believe, 18 confirmed and 43 suspected of returning to the fight. So 61 in all former Guantanamo detainees are confirmed or suspected of returning to the fight.

So there clearly, Barbara, are people who are being held at Guantanamo who are still bent on doing harm to America, Americans, and our allies. So there will have to be some solution for the likes of them, and those are among -- that is among the thorny issues that the president-elect and his new team are carefully considering."

Reuters helpfully wrote a story on this headlined "Pentagon: 61 ex-Guantanamo Detainees Return To Terrorism", and CNN headlined its piece: "Pentagon: Ex-Gitmo Detainees Resume Terror Acts". So I suppose it's no surprise that some bloggers on the right described these detainees as having "returned to their terror-waging ways", "returned to jihad", or (from the Heritage Foundation's Foundry) "returned to the battlefield to fight the United States".

The Pentagon spokesman did not say which detainees he was talking about, or what constituted "returning to the fight". However, the last time the Pentagon released figures like these, Mark Denbeaux at the Seton Hall Center for Policy and Research examined their claims (pdf). At that point, the Pentagon claimed that thirty detainees had "returned to the fight". Based on the DoD's own evidence, he concluded (p. 5) that "There appears to be a single individual who is alleged to have both been detained in Guantanamo and later killed or captured on some battlefield."

Among the people the Pentagon counted as having "returned to the fight" were the Tipton Three -- three British citizens who were thought, wrongly, to have belonged to al Qaeda.
They were subsequently cleared by British intelligence (one of them was working at an electronics store in Birmingham when he was supposed to have been at an al Qaeda rally in Afghanistan), and released to the UK. Since they were not in "the fight" to begin with, they can hardly be said to have "returned" to it. But even if they had, their "return" consisted in participating in a documentary about their experiences.

The Uighurs in Afghanistan were also supposed to have also "returned to the fight". Since the DoD found that they were not enemy combatants, it is, again, hard to see how anything they did could count as "returning". What the DoD actually counted as their "return to the fight" was-- I hope you're sitting down -- the fact that one of them published an op-ed in the New York Times. Here is part of his act of war column:
"I learned my respect for American institutions the hard way. When I was growing up as a Uighur in China, there were no independent courts to review the imprisonment and oppression of people who, like me, peacefully opposed the Communists. But I learned my hardest lesson from the United States: I spent four long years behind the razor wire of its prison in Cuba.

I was locked up and mistreated for being in the wrong place at the wrong time during America’s war in Afghanistan. Like hundreds of Guantanamo detainees, I was never a terrorist or a soldier. I was never even on a battlefield. Pakistani bounty hunters sold me and 17 other Uighurs to the United States military like animals for $5,000 a head. The Americans made a terrible mistake.

It was only the country’s centuries-old commitment to allowing habeas corpus challenges that put that mistake right — or began to. (...) Without my American lawyers and habeas corpus, my situation and that of the other Uighurs would still be a secret. I would be sitting in a metal cage today. Habeas corpus helped me to tell the world that Uighurs are not a threat to the United States or the West, but an ally. Habeas corpus cleared my name — and most important, it let my family know that I was still alive.

Like my fellow Uighurs, I am a great admirer of the American legal and political systems. I have the utmost respect for the United States Congress. So I respectfully ask American lawmakers to protect habeas corpus and let justice prevail. Continuing to permit habeas rights to the detainees in Guantanamo will not set the guilty free. It will prove to the world that American democracy is safe and well."


Well, that's an act of terror if ever I saw one! I hope you weren't injured by any of the incoming shells on the battlefield to which Abu Bakker Qassim returned by writing that op-ed. Another Uighur's "return to terrorism" consisted of giving an interview. I thought of excerpting it too, but there are limits to the perils to which I am willing to expose my readers.

I'm not trying to argue that no Guantanamo detainees have ever taken up arms against the US. I imagine that some have. I do think that it's important to be clear about how many of them there are, and what the Pentagon is counting as a "return to the fight". Claims about detainees "returning to the fight" figure in arguments about whether we should release those who remain. It matters how many of them have actually taken up arms, and how many have just exercised their rights to free speech in ways our government doesn't care for.
 
so what do you propose we do? can you agree that holding people in a legal purgatory where they aren't accused of crimes is not a good thing?

first off, its not as bad as everyone seems to think it is. Its a prison, people go to prisons. Its certainly a lot better than how they've been living before.. but anyways..

However it would be nice to convict them of a crime, since everyone seems to think they deserve a fair trial, which I guess they do, except we never gave a trial to every german soldier we captured in WW2..:hmm:
 
first off, its not as bad as everyone seems to think it is. Its a prison, people go to prisons. Its certainly a lot better than how they've been living before.. but anyways..

However it would be nice to convict them of a crime, since everyone seems to think they deserve a fair trial, which I guess they do, except we never gave a trial to every german soldier we captured in WW2..:hmm:

Germans not on the battlefield (in this case conducting espionage) were given trials:

Link
On January 2, 1942, 33 members of a German spy ring headed by Frederick or Fritz Joubert Duquesne were sentenced to serve a total of over 300 years in prison. They were brought to justice after a lengthy espionage investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Of those arrested on the charge of espionage, 19 pleaded guilty. The 14 men who entered pleas of not guilty were brought to jury trial in Federal District Court, Brooklyn, New York, on September 3, 1941; and they were all found guilty on December 13, 1941.

But we didn't give captured Germans on the battlefield trials, so why give captured terrorists trials?

Link
Thus, only four percent (4%) of Guantánamo Bay detainees for whom a CSRT had been convened were ever alleged by the United States Government to have been on a battlefield to which they might return. The report further revealed that only twenty-four (24) detainees—just five percent (5%)—were alleged to have been captured by United States forces.

A comparison of the two data sets reveals that exactly one detainee was alleged to have been captured on a battlefield by United States forces. That lone detainee is Omar Khadr (ISN5 66), a Canadian citizen who was captured when he was fifteen (15) years old.

Sucks for that 15 year old!
 
first off, its not as bad as everyone seems to think it is. Its a prison, people go to prisons. Its certainly a lot better than how they've been living before.. but anyways..

However it would be nice to convict them of a crime, since everyone seems to think they deserve a fair trial, which I guess they do, except we never gave a trial to every german soldier we captured in WW2..:hmm:

Once again I just have to say your mind is already freed...
 
I'm all for closing Gitmo if it helps our "image" as a country, but what will happen to the inmates? Their home countries don't want them, we can't let them go--so they will probably go to some military prison and sit in there just like they were sitting in Gitmo. I see this as a rather ceremonial thing. If you are simply against the sort of techniques that were used at Gitmo--Obama claimed he was going to stop those anyway. I hope nobody is under the illusion that all of the sudden these people are going to get fair and expedient trials.
 
This is excellent news. This will go a long way towards restoring our moral high ground and credibility around the world. Obviously there are a lot of issues that still need to be worked out (Where do the inmates go? How do we try them?), but this sends a strong symbolic signal that the immoral and un-American tactics used by the Bush administration in the last 8 years are finished. :applaud:
 
It was a great recruiting tool wasn't it? No good came out of this. We tarnished our image to the world and gave extremist one reason to go back even angrier and recruit even more...

maybe if the media didn't blow everything out of proportion...I like how the media talks about all these things that are supposed to be classified...terrorists dont need a satellite, all they need to do is turn on the 6 oclock news
 
maybe if the media didn't blow everything out of proportion...I like how the media talks about all these things that are supposed to be classified...terrorists dont need a satellite, all they need to do is turn on the 6 oclock news


Oh the famous "librul media" defense...:drool:
 
politico.com



Cheney warns of new attacks

By: John F. Harris and Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei
February 4, 2009 05:56 AM EST

Former Vice President Dick Cheney warned that there is a “high probability” that terrorists will attempt a catastrophic nuclear or biological attack in coming years, and said he fears the Obama administration’s policies will make it more likely the attempt will succeed.

In an interview Tuesday with Politico, Cheney unyieldingly defended the Bush administration’s support for the Guantanamo Bay prison and coercive interrogation of terrorism suspects.

And he asserted that President Obama will either backtrack on his stated intentions to end those policies or put the country at risk in ways more severe than most Americans — and, he charged, many members of Obama’s own team — understand.

“When we get people who are more concerned about reading the rights to an Al Qaeda terrorist than they are with protecting the United States against people who are absolutely committed to do anything they can to kill Americans, then I worry,” Cheney said.

Protecting the country’s security is “a tough, mean, dirty, nasty business,” he said. “These are evil people. And we’re not going to win this fight by turning the other cheek.”

Citing intelligence reports, Cheney said at least 61 of the inmates who were released from Guantanamo during the Bush administration — “that’s about 11 or 12 percent” — have “gone back into the business of being terrorists.”

The 200 or so inmates still there, he claimed, are “the hard core” whose “recidivism rate would be much higher.” (Lawyers for Guantanamo detainees have strongly disputed the recidivism figures, asserting that the Pentagon data have inconsistencies and omissions.) Cheney called Guantanamo a “first-class program,” and “a necessary facility” that is operated legally and with better food and treatment than the jails in inmates' native countries.

But he said he worried that “instead of sitting down and carefully evaluating the policies,” Obama officials are unwisely following “campaign rhetoric” and preparing to release terrorism suspects or afford them legal protections granted to more conventional defendants in crime cases.

The choice, he alleged, reflects a naive mindset among the new team in Washington: “The United States needs to be not so much loved as it needs to be respected. Sometimes, that requires us to take actions that generate controversy. I’m not at all sure that that’s what the Obama administration believes.”

The dire portrait Cheney painted of the country’s security situation was made even grimmer by his comments agreeing with analysts who believe this recession may be a once-in-a-century disaster.
“It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen,” Cheney said. “The combination of the financial crisis that started last year, coupled now with, obviously, a major recession, I think we’re a long way from having solved these problems.”

The interview, less than two weeks after the Bush administration ceded power to Obama, found the man who is arguably the most controversial — and almost surely the most influential — vice president in U.S. history in a self-vindicating mood.

He expressed confidence that files will some day be publicly accessible offering specific evidence that waterboarding and other policies he promoted — over sharp internal dissent from colleagues and harsh public criticism — were directly responsible for averting new Sept. 11-style attacks.

Not content to wait for a historical verdict, Cheney said he is set to plunge into his own memoirs, feeling liberated to describe behind-the-scenes roles over several decades in government now that the “statute of limitations has expired” on many of the most sensitive episodes.

His comments made unmistakable that Cheney — likely more than former President Bush, who has not yet given post-White House interviews — is willing and even eager to spar with the new administration and its supporters over the issues he cares most about.

His standing in this public debate is beset by contradictions. Cheney for years has had intimate access to the sort of highly classified national security intelligence that Obama and his teams are only recently seeing.

But many of the top Democratic legal and national security players have long viewed Cheney as a man who became unhinged by his fears, responsible for major misjudgments in Iraq and Afghanistan, willing to bend or break legal precedents and constitutional principles to advance his aims. Polls show he is one of the most unpopular people in national life.

In the interview, Cheney revealed no doubts about his own course — and many about the new administration’s.

“If it hadn’t been for what we did — with respect to the terrorist surveillance program, or enhanced interrogation techniques for high-value detainees, the Patriot Act, and so forth — then we would have been attacked again,” he said. “Those policies we put in place, in my opinion, were absolutely crucial to getting us through the last seven-plus years without a major-casualty attack on the U.S.”

Cheney said “the ultimate threat to the country” is “a 9/11-type event where the terrorists are armed with something much more dangerous than an airline ticket and a box cutter – a nuclear weapon or a biological agent of some kind” that is deployed in the middle of an American city.

“That’s the one that would involve the deaths of perhaps hundreds of thousands of people, and the one you have to spend a hell of a lot of time guarding against,” he said.

“I think there’s a high probability of such an attempt. Whether or not they can pull it off depends whether or not we keep in place policies that have allowed us to defeat all further attempts, since 9/11, to launch mass-casualty attacks against the United States.”


If Cheney’s language was dramatic, the setting for the comments was almost bizarrely pedestrian. His office is in a non-descript suburban office building in McLean, Va., in a suite that could just as easily house a dental clinic. The office is across the hall from a quick-copy store. The door is marked by nothing except a paper sign, held up by tape, saying the unit is occupied by the General Services Administration.

At several points, Cheney resisted singling out Obama personally for criticism, at one point saying he wants to give him a break after just two weeks in office. He said he admires Obama’s choice to keep Defense Secretary Robert Gates on the job.

But if he treated Obama gingerly, Cheney was eager to engage in the broader philosophical debate he was accustomed to with Democrats and even many in his own party about the right way to navigate a dangerous planet. He said he fears the people populating Obama’s ranks put too much faith in negotiation, persuasion, and good intentions.

“I think there are some who probably actually believe that if we just go talk nice to these folks, everything’s going to be okay,” he said.

He said his own experience tempers his belief in diplomacy.

“I think they’re optimistic. All new administrations are optimistic. We were,” he said.

“They may be able, in some cases, to make progress diplomatically that we weren’t,” Cheney said. “But, on the other hand, I think they’re likely to find — just as we did — that lots of times the diplomacy doesn’t work. Or diplomacy doesn’t work without there being an implied threat of something more serious if it fails.”

As examples of the dangerous world he sees — and one he predicted Obama and aides would find “sobering” — were Russia’s backsliding into authoritarianism and away from democracy, and the ongoing showdowns over the nuclear intentions of Iran and North Korea.

But it was the choice over Guantanamo that most dominated Cheney’s comments.

“If you release the hard-core Al Qaeda terrorists that are held at Guantanamo, I think they go back into the business of trying to kill more Americans and mount further mass-casualty attacks,” he said. “If you turn ’em loose and they go kill more Americans, who’s responsible for that?”

Of one alternative — moving prisoners to the U.S. prisons — Cheney said he has heard from few members of Congress eager for Guantanamo transfers to their home-state prisons, and asked: “Is that really a good idea to take hardened Al Qaeda terrorists who’ve already killed thousands of Americans and put ’em in San Quentin or some other prison facility where they can spread their venom even more widely than it already is?”
 
Courthouse News Service July 10

Female FBI Agent at Guantanamo Blasts 'Animal House' Behavior
By TIM HULL


BOSTON (CN) - The first full-time female FBI agent to be stationed at Guantanamo says she was made to bunk with vermin that gave her a tropical disease and was ostracized because she refused to join in a "spring break" atmosphere in which agents were encouraged to drink, date, and frolic when not interrogating alleged terrorists. She says FBI agents attended parties dressed in "mocking imitation of Arab or Afghan attire" and in orange detainee jumpsuits. And she says she has photos to prove it.
Theresa A. Foley, 43, requested a transfer to Camp Delta at Guantanamo Bay in 2003, and says that from the moment she arrived she found a "generally sexist, discriminatory and 'boys club' atmosphere" at the island prison.
In her federal complaint, Foley says that because she is a woman she was assigned to filthy, rat-infested quarters where she contracted Leptospirosis, a tropical disease that causes swelling in the joints and other symptoms that left her completely disabled and forced to live with her parents.
In her claim against Attorney General Eric Holder and the Department of Justice, Foley says she has photographs depicting "personnel at Guantanamo engaged in drunken carousing in a sexually charged atmosphere, day and night," including shots of "female employees in bathing suits or revealing attire sitting on the laps of male employees, and female employees being hugged, kissed and likely groped by male employees."
Her complaint states: "Other photographs reveal, among other things, what appear to be intoxicated FBI employees wearing some type of mocking imitation of Arab or Afghan attire, and personnel at a Halloween party dressed in orange detainee jumpsuits (apparently as a joke). Still other employees appear to be completely intoxicated and engaged in various activities which indicate both a pervasive discriminatory atmosphere toward women, as well as behavior inappropriate for employees stationed at a detention facility for terrorists. Some of the behavior resembles stereotypical 'spring break' behavior. This highly inappropriate behavior by FBI personnel and other U.S. Government personnel working at Guantanamo, was known by the FBI, was encouraged by the FBI, and was tolerated by the FBI."
She adds, "This pervasive sexually discriminatory and harassing atmosphere was at such an extreme, that it is accurate to describe the prevalent atmosphere as an 'animal house' atmosphere. When FBI agents were not busy interrogating terrorists held at Guantanamo, they were expected and encouraged by their managers and supervisors to be sun bathing, snorkeling, fishing, drinking, carousing and engaging in romantic relationships with each other. Over the course of her stay at Guantanamo, once it became clear that SA Foley did not believe this conduct was appropriate for an FBI Special Agent, and refused to engage in this conduct, SA Foley was ostracized and maligned."
Foley says she was sexually harassed by male FBI agents, called a lesbian, and told that her "nipples were leaking."
Foley says she has undergone numerous surgeries for Leptospirosis, a disease made worse, she claims, by the FBI's unwillingness to allow her to stand - rather than the traditional kneeling pose - during firearms qualification. She has had a hysterectomy, her spine has collapsed, and she is constantly fighting off infections because of a compromised autoimmune system, the lawsuit claims.
 
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