Lawyers representing detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, say that there still may be as many as six prisoners who were captured before their 18th birthday and that the military has sought to conceal the precise number of juveniles at the prison camp.
One lawyer said that his client, a Saudi of Chadian descent, was not yet 15 when he was captured and has told him that he was beaten regularly in his early days at Guantanamo, hanged by his wrists for hours at a time and that an interrogator pressed a burning cigarette into his arm.
The lawyer, Clive A. Stafford Smith, of London, said in an interview that the prisoner, who is now 18 and is identified by the initials M.C. in public documents, told him in a recent interview at Guantanamo that he was seized by local authorities in Pakistan about Oct. 21, 2001, a few months shy of his 15th birthday, and taken to Guantánamo at the beginning of 2002.
Barbara Olshansky, a senior lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, which is coordinating a program to match volunteer lawyers with detainees, said she believed he may be one of six current detainees who were imprisoned at Guantanamo before their 18th birthday.
The above is from Neil A. Lewis' "Some Held at Guantanamo Are Minors, Lawyers Say" in this morning's New York Times. This story is being spotlighted because it's the one that Lynda, Eli, Robbie, Wally, Zach, Keesha, Elaine, Susan, Liang and Jordan all e-mailed about this morning.
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