Secret Orcon
Throughout The Lady Liberty Blues we perform dramatized excerpts from a leaked government document. It is introduced thusly:
On the 23rd of November in 2002, a man named Mohammed al-Kahtani was arrested in the Orlando airport and brought to Camp X-Ray at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He was accused of being an accomplice to the September 11th hijackers.
In March of 2006, TIME Magazine published a classified, 84-page log detailing a minute-by-minute account of al-Kahtani’s interrogation at Camp X-Ray over the course of 49 days.
You can read the TIME Magazine article and download the entire interrogation log as a pdf at this link.
All charges against Mohammed al-Kahtani have been dropped by the Pentagon.
Mohammed al-Kahtani is only one of hundreds of detainees at Guantanamo Bay. None have access to the court system that you and I have access to, as they are tried via military tribunal according to the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which eliminates the right of habeus corpus and grants the President the power to unilaterally declare someone an “enemy combatant.”
It was determined in 2002 that at least one-third of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay were wrongly imprisoned. The White House was given this information, and chose not to review the detention status of prisoners.
The International Committee of the Red Cross has reportedly determined that abuse of detainees by the U.S. Government was “categorically torture” and “constituted war crimes.” It has also been reported that these “coercive management techniques” were reverse-engineered from Communist Chinese methods of extracting false confessions from American soldiers during the Korean War.
To take action against government-sponsored torture, please visit the American Civil Liberties Union or Amnesty International.
