Legal meetings cancelled at Guantanamo Bay as prisoners catch COVID-19

Commanders at the prison at Guantanamo Bay abruptly canceled all legal meetings this week after at least two prisoners contracted the coronavirus, among them Abu Zubaydah, the first prisoner to be waterboarded by the CIA in the war on terrorism, according to legal staff members. Lawyers for prisoners accused of plotting terrorist attacks, including 9/11 and the 2002 Bali bombing, reached the island Saturday on the first military commissions flight of 2023. Some managed to see their clients before the prison halted meetings Wednesday morning, without explanation. Military spokespeople did not respond to questions about the outbreak. But people with knowledge of operations said Abu Zubaydah, 51, whose real name is Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Husayn, had become ill with the virus in the maximum-security prison called Camp 5. None of the legal staff members agreed to be identified because of the classified nature of Camp 5. Since 2021, it has housed 13 prisoners who were previously held by the CIA, including the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and detainees who have never been charged, including Abu Zubaydah. Several prisoners in Camp 5 have serious health issues, among them Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, a former commander of insurgents in wartime Afghanistan who was scheduled to meet with his lawyers for the first time since he underwent emergency spine surgery in November. Hadi, who says his true name is Nashwan al Tamir, is in his 60s. He pleaded guilty in a war crimes case last year and has a presentencing hearing scheduled for 13 February. It was not immediately known what measures the prison took to safeguard the other men on the prisoner’s cellblock. Abu Zubaydah was the original captive in the secret CIA prison network that the Bush administration set up after the 9/11 attacks. He was waterboarded 83 times and has been held for more than 20 years without charge. US intelligence mistakenly profiled him as a top leader of al-Qaida after his capture in Pakistan in 2002, and psychologists on contract to the CIA created a torture program to question him with “enhanced interrogation techniques” that would be used on other “high-value detainees” in the agency’s secret overseas prison network. His lawyer, Lt Col Chantell Higgins, declined to comment Thursday. James Hodes, the lead lawyer for an Indonesian prisoner known as Hambali, said the prison was wrong to cancel all legal meetings. Hodes said that he and Hambali were fully vaccinated and that he traveled to the base this week for his first meeting with the client this year and tested negative on arrival. “We’ve all been vaccinated over and over,” Hodes said. “We all tested negative over and over. We make the time commitment and the effort to come down here because they decided to put a trial down here. “If you and I went into a federal prison or jail, we’d be able to see our clients because they’d be separated by glass,” he said. “Why can’t they make some accommodation?” The other detainee who caught the virus was among the 20 general-population prisoners in the adjacent Camp 6, but it was not possible to determine his identity. None face war crimes charges, and all have been approved for repatriation or resettlement in another country, if US diplomats can reach safe-transfer agreements. Although there have been periodic reports of detainees coming down with the coronavirus, none have died from it. The US Southern Command, which runs the prison, said in April 2021 that all but eight detainees at the prison had received a dose of the COVID vaccine, then stopped responding to questions about how many were fully vaccinated. Read all the Latest News, Trending News, Cricket News, Bollywood News, India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.