A federal appeals court is allowing the US government to continue genital searches of Guantanamo Bay detainees — at least temporarily.
A three-judge panel of the court Wednesday granted the Obama administration’s emergency motion for a temporary delay in enforcing US District Court Judge Royce Lamberth’s order banning the practice.
Detainee lawyers say the searches began after prisoners were told they would have to travel from their resident camp to another site at the base to meet with or talk on the telephone with their lawyers. The lawyers say some detainees had refused to make the trip because of the new searches.
The Justice Department had asked the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to rule by 1pm Wednesday — an hour before a scheduled telephone call between a detainee and his lawyer that the government wanted conducted under rules Lamberth had banned — including searching the detainee’s groin area for contraband.
But the appeals court didn’t rule until after 2:15pm, and the lawyer, Jennifer Cowan, said that prior to the appeals court ruling, the government agreed not to conduct the genital searches in connection with that call.
Cowan said in an interview after the 90-minute call that her client told her through a translator that he was “delighted” not to have his genitals searched on the way to the call — but was disappointed when she told him about the appeals court order. The three appeals court judges made their decision in a short order, without elaboration.
In court papers, the government argued that Lamberth’s order would weaken security at the US Navy base in Cuba by making it harder to prevent smuggling of contraband. And it said that the ruling went where no other court has gone before.
The filings included a declaration from the head of US Southern Command, Gen John Kelly, who wrote that the military decided searching the groin areas of detainees was necessary after the suicide of a detainee who had hoarded medications and died of an overdose. Kelly said that a report on the suicide concluded that the ban on genital searches created opportunities for detainees to conceal contraband.
Kelly said he fully concurred with the decision to search detainees’ groin areas before or after any movements outside their resident camps. He said that no one ever discussed the idea of limiting the detainees’ access to lawyers, which Lamberth had said was the real reason for the new searches.
Kelly said that contraband items discovered in the camps include nails, shanks, ballpoint pens and MP3 players. The filing includes photos of some of these and other objects.
In his ruling last week, Lamberth, an appointee of President Ronald Reagan, ordered prison commanders to return to the old search method: grasping the waistband of a detainee’s trousers and shaking the pants to dislodge any contraband.
