Nowadays, Rekawka has a popular, folk character. If the weather is warm and sunny, it can be an occasion for a pleasant family outing. There are stalls selling sweets and toys, merry-go-rounds, and street musicians. More recently, the festival has been featuring medieval knights fighting each other in mock duels,and medieval craftsmen at work. There is also an opportunity to taste traditional dishes such as kołacze.
Guantanamo Bay detention camp
The Guantanamo Bay detention camp (which is also called Guantanamo or Gitmo) is a United States military prison in Guantanamo Bay Naval Base on the coast of Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. The prison is said to be breaking international human rights laws, as prisoners have been held without trial , and there have been reports of prisoners being tortured.
The prison was established under the presidency of George W. Bush, in 2002 during the War on Terror. The Secretary of Defense at the time was Donald Rumsfeld, who said that the prison was built to hold dangerous people, question them, and charge them with war crimes: "These men are particularly dangerous... at least one detainee now in Cuba has been threatening to kill Americans. Another has bitten a guard... To stop future terrorist attacks, we have detained these people, and we have and will be questioning them to gather additional intelligence information...The reality is that they have been charged with something. They have been found to be engaging on the behalf of Al-Qaeda or the Taliban and have been captured."
Since January 2002, 779 men have been kept in Guantanamo. These men have been from over 50 countries. Nearly 200 were released in mid 2004.
Although the Bush govenrnment said that most of the men had been captured at war, a 2006 report found that over 80% of the prisoners were captured by Pakistanis and Afghans for bounty payments. The US had offered $5,000 for each prisoner.
In 2012, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson said that US officials (including president Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld) had known that most of the original prisoners were innocent, but kept them to make themselves look better
A report by the "Institute on Medicine as a Profession" in 2013 said that health professionals in Guantanamo "designed and participated in cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment and torture of detainees." This involved:
Morris Davis (former chief prosecutor for the terrorism trials at Guantanamo Bay), began an e-petition to close Guantanamo. The e-petition got over 72,000 signatures, and called attention to the huger strikes that 'involves more than 100 prisoners, including come 21 who are being force-fed to keep them from starving to death."
On 12 December 2013, retired US marine Major General Micheal R Lehnert (who oversaw the building of the Guantanamo prison camp) published a piece in the Detroit Free Press. He called Guantanamo "out nation's most notorious prison - a prison that should never have been opened", and provided a short description of its history:
"Our nation created Guantanamo because we were legitimately angry and frightened by an unprovoked attack on our soil on September 11, 2001. We thought that the detainees would provide would provide a treasure trove of information and intelligence.
"I was ordered to construct the first 100 cells at Guantanamo within 96 hours [4 days]. The first group of 20 prisoners arrived 7 days after the order was given. We were told that the prisoners were the 'worst of the worst', a common refrain for every set of detainees sent to Guantanamo. The US has held 779 men there, most of them cleared for transfer, but stuck by politics.
"Even in the earliest days of Guantanamo, I became more and more convinced that many of the detainees should never have been sent in the first place. They had little intelligence value, and there was insufficient evidence linking them to war crime [they didn't know anything, and there was little proof they had committed war crimes]. That the remains the case for many, if not most, of the detainees."
In his 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama described Guantanamo bay as a sad chapter in America's history and promised to close the prison in 2009. He changed this statement after he was elected. President Obama was not able to close Guantanamo before he left office, but he did reduce the prison's population to 41.
President Trump has promised to keep the prison open, and to use it keep "bad dudes". He also wants to bring back waterboarding and "worse".
On 31st January 2018, Trump signed an order to keep the prison open.
In court filings made public in 2007, FBI agents said that they saw prisoners:
Other claims include:
On 10 June 2006, three prisoners (Mani al-Utaybi, Yasser al-Zahrani, Ali Abdullah Ahmed died in Guantanamo Bay. The Pentagon told the media that the prisoners had been hanged with clothing and bedsheets.
"[The detainees] were found unresponsive and not breathing in their cells by guards.
"Medical teams responded quickly and all three detainees were provided immediate emergency medical treatment in attempts to revive them. The three detainees were pronounced dead by a physician after all life saving measures were exhausted."
- Statement issued by Joint Task Force Guantanamo
Families of all three detainees doubted the post mortems and wanted second post mortems done. Patrice Malign (the pathologist who re-examined al-Zahrani's body) said that the organs of al-Zahrani's throat were missing. His team could not find if al-Zahrani had hanged himself or died of another form of asphyxiation. The team said that there is no reason for there organs to have been removed. The US government has never given the missing organs back to the family.
On 14th September 2001, Congress pushed for the "Authorisation for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists", which would have given the President broad powers to start The War on Terror in response to the 9/11 attacks. However, Secretary of State Colin Powell and State Department Legal Advisor William Howard Taft IV said that the president must observe the Geneva conventions.
On 13th November 2001, President Bush signed a military order titled "Detention, Treatment and Trial of Certain Non-Citizens in the War Against Terrorism".
On 19th February 2002, Guantanamo detainees petitioned to review their detentions and the reasons for them. US District Judge Collen Kollar-Kotelly rejected the petition, finding that non-US citizens in Cuba could not access or use US courts.
On 28th June 2004, the Supreme Court of the United States decided against this in "Rasul v Bush" (UK prisoner in Guantanamo petitioning against Judge Kollar-Kotelly's decision in 2002). Justice John Paul Stevens said that the prisoners had the right to petition the court to review their cases.
The Bush government said that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to the prisoners. Supreme Court decisions since 2004 have said different: it decided in the "Hamden v Rumfeld" trial that Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions (which sets rules for the treatment of prisoners of war) applies to the prisoners
In 2006, Deputy Defense Scretary Paul Wolfowitz created 'Combatant Status Review Tribunals' (CSRTs) to decide if prisoners were war criminals
The CSRTs were completed in March 2005. Thirty-eight of the prisoners were found innocent. After the autobiography of Murnat Kurnaz (Turk-German held in Guantanamo 2002-2007) was published, military lawyer Eugene R. Fidell said that the book "suggested the [CSRT] procedure is a sham; if a case like that can get through then the [smallest trace] of evidence against someone would [win over] for the governments, even if there's a mountain [of evidence] on the other side."
On 15 July 2005, a panel on the Court of Appeals threw out all of the prisoners' petitions. On 7 November 2005 Supreme Court agreed to review that decision.