Female guards file discrimination complaints against Guantánamo judges

[unhappycamper]

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/guantanamo/article8155056.html



Female guards file discrimination complaints against Guantánamo judges
By Carol Rosenberg
01/26/2015 10:55 AM

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba

Some female soldiers at the prison’s secret lockup for former CIA captives have filed gender discrimination complaints against two military judges who are forbidding women from handling prisoners to and from legal meetings.

One of the judges, Navy Capt. J.K. Waits, announced the development Monday at a hearing in the case of Abd al Hadi al Iraqi, accused of committing war crimes as commander of al-Qaida’s Army in Afghanistan after the 2001 U.S. invasion.

It’s the latest wrinkle in an ongoing tug-of-war over an apparent new assignment of female guards to escort duty moving so-called high value captives to legal appointments from Camp 7, the secret lockup at Guantanamo where the U.S. keeps former captives of the spy agency’s so-called Black Site program. The prisoners say that, for years, only male soldiers moved them out of respect for their religious and cultural belief that only women in their family can touch them.

The prison defends the male-female shackling and escort duty as consistent with the Pentagon’s commitment to gender neutrality. It says, however, that only men still supervise Guantánamo prisoners’ showers and conduct genital searches.

[bemildred]

1. "male-female shackling and escort duty"