Indefinite detention policy and the suicides at Guantanamo Bay

Marking the one year anniversary of Obama's executive order to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, a Justice Task Force has recommended that 50 prisoners be held indefinitely without trial. Obama first spoke out in support of  a policy of "indefinite detention" on May 22, 2009.

Scott Horton, in his groundbreaking Harper's Magazine story about the cover-up of three murders at Gitmo, suggested that the US government's primary motive for holding certain prisoners indefinitely may have been to prevent these inmates from implicating US government officials in crimes.   Horton reports:

The fate of a fourth prisoner, a forty-two-year-old Saudi Arabian named Shaker Aamer, may be related to that of the three prisoners who died on June 9....

The United Kingdom has pressed aggressively for the return of British subjects and persons of interest. Every individual requested by the British has been turned over, with one exception: Shaker Aamer. In denying this request, U.S. authorities have cited unelaborated “security” concerns. There is no suggestion that the Americans intend to charge him before a military commission, or in a federal criminal court, and, indeed, they have no meaningful evidence linking him to any crime. American authorities may be concerned that Aamer, if released, could provide evidence against them in criminal investigations. This evidence would include what he experienced on June 9, 2006, and during his 2002 detention in Afghanistan at Bagram Airfield, where he says he was subjected to a procedure in which his head was smashed repeatedly against a wall. This torture technique, called “walling” in CIA documents, was expressly approved at a later date by the Department of Justice.

The outright refusal of the Obama Justice Department to open new investigations into the suicides at Guantanamo renders the recommendation of the Justice Task Force all the more unsettling.