Congratulations I suppose to Biden for being the first president to at least allow a UN inspector in at last. There are still 30 men detained there, as they have been for over 20 years now. 19 of the 30 have never been charged with any crime. The inspector sent was from Ireland. A lady called Fionnuala Ní Aoláin who is a professor of law. She was not impressed it's fair to say. "I observed that after two decades of custody, the suffering of those detained is profound, and it's ongoing," she said. "Every single detainee I met with lives with the unrelenting harms that follow from systematic practices of rendition, torture and arbitrary detention." The continuing detention of some of them "follows from the unwillingness of the authorities to face the consequences of the torture and other ill-treatment to which the detainees were subjected and not from any ongoing threat they are believed to pose" Professor Ní Aoláin said the prison should be immediately closed and that the United States "must urgently provide judicial resolution, apology and guarantees of non-repetition". She made a long series of recommendations, the key among them being to provide all detainees with specialised rehabilitation from torture and trauma, at least one phone call every month with their family, and equal access to legal counsel. We all know that the United States is a self-professed great champion of human rights. We have heard a great deal about how its worry and concern for the human rights of Cubans in the rest of the island means it is forced to maintain a strangling economic blockade. So what do you think their response was? "The United States disagrees in significant respects" https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/6/26/un-expert-urges-us-to-apologise-for-guantanamo-abuses
Unfortunately there has been no space to report anything at all about the UN inspector's visit in any British news or media outlets apart from the Grauniad and Al Jazeera. Nothing at all on the BBC website, tv or radio. They lead with 3 articles about the billionaires' submarine - including some ghoulish photos of the wreckage and an article containing the astonishing 'news' that the young lad on the sub took a rubiks cube with him. You can suppose that if it were Cuba that had been found guilty of a fraction of the torture and human rights abuses like this, it would be the top story.
