Obama aide, top senators to visit Gitmo

KABUL): White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough and two leading senators will visit the US detention facility at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, where a number of inmates are being force-fed, a media report said on Friday.

Dianne Feinstein, the Senate Intelligence Committee chairperson, and John McCain, a member of the Armed Services Committee, joined McDonough on the trip, the Associated Press reported

The visit comes a week after President Barack Obama reiterated his campaign pledge to shut down the notorious prison, but Congress has vowed to keep the naval open facility, where a number of Afghans are being held.

More than 100 of the 166 prisoners are said to be on hunger strike that began in early February at Camp VI, where journalists and other visitors are taken on tours.

In many ways, according to Al-Jazeera, Camp VI was America’s Potemkin Village, meant to mask Guantanamo’s defining and ugly truth: that it is a dungeon where men languish without fair process, hostages to US partisan politics.

PAN Monitor/mud

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