A senior US military officer at Guantánamo Bay told a detainee that he did not care about international law and that the Geneva conventions did not apply to proceedings at the military prison, according to thousands of Pentagon documents released over the weekend by the US government after a court action by the Associated Press news agency.
The outburst by the air force colonel came during a hearing to determine the status of Feroz Abbasi, a Briton held for more than two years without charge or trial, and who was released last year. The officer was presiding over a tribunal convened to decide whether detainees were enemy combatants, as alleged by the Bush administration. Critics dismissed the hearings, called combatant status review tribunals, as kangaroo courts.