Do Gitmo Abuses Still Continue?

July 22, 2009 — -- Lakhdar Boumediene's own children didn't recognize him when he stepped off the military aircraft, looking gaunt and out of place. His 8-year-old daughter, who had only seen him in photos, said to her mother: "This monsieur is not my father. He's too old to be my dad." The man experienced a similar confusion. He felt old, too, and he didn't recognize the little girl and her 13-year-old sister as his own children.

Boumediene, a 43-year-old Algerian, spent the last seven and a half years in Guantanamo. He was held there because he was suspected of being a terrorist and a follower of Osama bin Laden. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, he was seen as one of those dangerous people the United States wanted to keep locked behind bars for as long as possible. This would be done without charges and without a trial, under a set of special laws that ignored the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war.

But the Algerian stood out among the many prisoners that passed through the gates of the US Army detention camps at Guantanamo Bay over the years. In June 2008, he became a part of contemporary history when the US Supreme Court handed down a historic decision in his favor in a case with his name on it: Boumediene vs. George W. Bush.

The decision invalidated the special laws of the Bush administration, a period marked by its disregard for the rule of law. Since then, like ordinary prisoners, Guantanamo detainees have enjoyed a right to habeas corpus, which allows them to petition a US federal court to review the grounds for their detention.

Today, Boumediene is a free man who can talk about his years in prison. What he has told SPIEGEL is likely to trigger controversy in the United States: Boumediene claims that the abuse and humiliation of prisoners continues in Guantanamo and that detainees there are still harassed and tortured. According to Boumediene, a special guard unit continues to beat prisoners to get them out of their cells, and any official claims that such treatment has stopped are untrue.