For twenty years, the US military has tightly controlled what the world can see or hear around the world detainees in Guantanamo BayThere are no pictures of prisoners wrestling with the guards, and there is no documentation of the way the hunger strikers were dealt with by handcuffing and forcibly feeding them. There were few numbers of US forces accompanying the prisoners in prisons, and the photos of the detainees or their guards have since disappeared, according to an investigation published by the New York Times. New York Times American.
In 2011, WikiLeaks published secret photos of some prisoners from leaked intelligence files, and lawyers provided some of their clients’ photos taken by the International Committee of the Red Cross. But it was posted Few other scandalous photos of prisoners Since they began arriving at Guantanamo just months after the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Now, using the Freedom of Information Act, the newspaper has obtained from the National Archives original photographs of the first prisoners brought from Afghanistan to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
These photos were taken by military photographers to transfer them to senior military leaders, led by Donald Rumsfeld, to show the arrest and interrogation process in its early stages.
The process of blackouts and preventing leakage of images began from the first day the detainees arrived at the camp. Initially, the military prevented news photographers from CNN and the Miami Herald from taking pictures of the moment the prisoners arrived and had to leave their cameras behind.
Instead, about a week later, the Defense Department distributed a photo of the first 20 kneeling prisoners at Camp X-Ray, a temporary prison camp where prisoners of war were held in the early months of the operation. The historic photos were taken by a Navy photographer and were initially intended for the eyes of Pentagon commanders only.
The Geneva Conventions require states that hold prisoners of war to protect them from “public curiosity”. But the photo released of the first 20 prisoners also reinforced the Pentagon’s message that the men and young men that were brought to Guantanamo, about 780, were all “the worst of the worst” and so they are there.
Over time, records showed that this was not true, according to the report, as charges were brought against only 18 detainees, only 5 of whom were detainees who were convicted by a military court. Ten detainees remain on trial, including the men accused of the September 11 attacks.
President Barack Obama promised to close the prison, but opposition from Republicans on Capitol Hill prevented that effort.
Successive administrations sought to reduce the number of men held there, and all detainees were deported except for 37 people, and some of them were released after they were arrested through false information that put them in the network of the American army and intelligence, according to the newspaper.