WASHINGTON: A panel of federal judges has upheld a new policy allowing guards at the US “war on terror” prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to search the groin areas of suspects meeting with their lawyers.
The US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit ruled unanimously on Friday that such searches of clothed inmates were “reasonable security precautions” that promote “the safety of the guards and inmates by more effectively preventing the hoarding of medication and the smuggling of dangerous contraband.”
In the 14-page ruling Judge Thomas Griffith overturned a 2013 ruling by District Judge Royce Lamberth ordering a halt to the intrusive searches.
“It has long been Guantanamo policy that detainees are searched both before and after any meeting with a visitor. Standard protocol in military prisons calls for a non-invasive search of the genital area of a prisoner. In the past, searches at Guantanamo departed from that element of the protocol in an effort to accommodate the religious sensibilities of the detainees,” Griffith wrote.
“Concerns arose that not searching the genital area was posing a security threat. Those concerns escalated with the suicide of a detainee who took an overdose of medication that he had smuggled into his cell and the discovery of shanks, a wrench, and other weapons in the housing camps that had evaded the searches.”
AFP
