[Ppnews] Seven Years of Guantánamo, Seven Years of Torture and Lies
Political Prisoner News
ppnews at freedomarchives.org
Mon Jan 12 12:11:05 EST 2009
Seven Years of Guantánamo, Seven Years of Torture and Lies
http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/20229
January 12, 2009 By Andy Worthington
Seven years ago, on January 11, 2002, when photos
of the first orange-clad detainees to arrive at a
hastily-erected prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba
were made available to the world's press, defense
secretary Donald Rumsfeld reacted to the
widespread uproar that greeted the images of the
kneeling, shackled men, wearing masks and
blacked-out goggles and with earphones completing
their sensory deprivation, by
<http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=2254>stating
that it was "probably unfortunate" that the photos were released.
As so often with Rumsfeld's pronouncements, it
was difficult to work out quite what he meant. He
appeared to be conceding that newspapers like
Britain's right-wing Daily Mail, which emblazoned
its front page with the word "torture," had a
valid point to make, but what he actually meant
was that it was unfortunate that the photos had
been released because they had led to criticism
of the administration's anti-terror policies.
Rumsfeld proceeded to make it clear that he had
no doubts about the significance of the prisoners
transferred to Guantánamo, even though their
treatment was unprecedented. They were, in
essence, part of a novel experiment in detention
and interrogation, which involved being held
neither as prisoners of war nor as criminal
suspects but as "enemy combatants" who could be
imprisoned without charge or trial. In addition,
they were deprived of the protections of the
Geneva Conventions so that they could be
coercively interrogated, and then, when they did
not produce the intelligence that the
administration thought they should have produced,
they were -- as a highly critical
<http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2008/12/23/will-the-bush-administration-be-held-accountable-for-war-crimes/>Senate
Armed Services Committee report concluded last
month -- subjected to Chinese torture techniques,
taught in US military schools to train American
personnel to resist interrogation if captured.
But none of this mattered to Donald Rumsfeld.
"These people are committed terrorists," he
declared on January 22, 2002, in the same press
conference at which he spoke about the photos.
"We are keeping them off the street and out of
the airlines and out of nuclear power plants and
out of ports across this country and across other
countries." On a visit to Guantánamo five days
later, he
<http://www.defenselink.mil/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=43817>called
the prisoners "among the most dangerous,
best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth."
Seven years after Guantánamo opened, it should be
abundantly clear that neither Rumsfeld nor Vice
President Dick Cheney, President Bush or any of
the other defenders of Guantánamo who indulged in
similarly hysterical rhetoric, had any idea what they were talking about.
The administration did all in its power to
prevent anyone outside the US military and the
intelligence services from examining the stories
of the men (or even knowing who they were) to see
if there was any truth to their assertions, but
as details emerged in the long years that
followed, it became clear that at least
<http://law.shu.edu/aaafinal.pdf>86 percent of
the prisoners were not captured on the
battlefields of Afghanistan, as the government
alleged, but were seized by the Americans' allies
in Afghanistan -- and also in Pakistan -- at a
time when bounty payments, averaging $5000 a head, were widespread.
Moreover, it also emerged that the military had
been ordered not to hold battlefield tribunals
(known as "competent tribunals") under
<http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/91.htm>Article
5 of the Third Geneva Convention, which had been
held close to the time and place of capture in
every military conflict since Vietnam, to
separate soldiers from civilians caught up in the
fog of war, and that senior figures in the
military and the intelligence services, who
oversaw the prisoner lists from a base in Kuwait,
with input from the Pentagon, had
<http://www.amazon.com/Interrogators-Inside-Secret-Against-Qaeda/dp/0316871125>ordered
that every Arab who came into US custody was to be sent to Guantánamo.
No wonder, then, that many of these men had no
useful or "actionable" intelligence to offer to
their interrogators at Guantánamo, and how
distressing, therefore, to discover that torture
techniques were introduced because, in a horrific
resuscitation of the witch hunts of the 17th
century, prisoners who claimed to have no
knowledge of al-Qaeda or the whereabouts of Osama
bin Laden were regarded not as innocent men
captured by mistake, or foot soldiers recruited
to help the Taliban fight an inter-Muslim civil
war that began long before the 9/11 attacks and
had nothing to do with bin Laden's small and
secretive terror network, but as al-Qaeda
operatives who had been
<http://www.mcclatchydc.com/100/story/38776.html>trained
to resist interrogation.
The fruits of this torture are plain to see, in
the copious number of unsubstantiated -- and
often contradictory or illogical -- allegations
that litter the government's
<http://www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/detainees/csrt_arb/index.html>supposed
evidence against the prisoners, but as recent
reports by the
<http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/015/845xcgce.asp>Weekly
Standard and the
<http://www.brookings.edu/reports/2008/1216_detainees_wittes.aspx>Brookings
Institution have shown, those who take the
government's claims at face value end up
endorsing the kind of rhetoric spouted by Donald
Rumsfeld when the prison opened, and ignoring
other commentators whose opinions are considerably less shrill.
These include the intelligence officials who
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/aug/20/usa.pakistan>explained
in August 2002 that the authorities had netted
"no big fish" in Guantánamo, that the prisoners
were not "the big-time guys" who might know
enough about al-Qaeda to help counter-terrorism
officials unravel its secrets, and that some of
them "literally don't know the world is round,"
and Maj. Gen. Michael E. Dunlavey, the prison's
operational commander in 2002, who traveled to
Afghanistan to
<http://www.latimes.com/la-na-gitmo22dec22,0,2294365.story>complain
that too many "Mickey Mouse" prisoners were being sent to Guantánamo.
On Guantánamo's seventh anniversary, the
challenge facing Barack Obama, as he prepares to
fulfill his promise to
<http://zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/19672>close
the prison, is to untangle this web of false
confessions, separate innocent men and Taliban
foot soldiers from genuine terrorists, scrap the
reviled system of trials by Military Commission
that was established by
<http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2008/12/26/the-ten-lies-of-dick-cheney-part-two/>Dick
Cheney and his legal counsel (and now chief of
staff) David Addington, and transfer those
suspected of genuine links to al-Qaeda to the US
mainland, to face trials in federal courts.
Anything less, and America's moral standing will
remain tarnished. It is, moreover, a mission that
must not be subjected to unnecessary delays. As
has become apparent in the last few days, at
least 30 prisoners -- mostly Yemenis, who now
comprise 40 percent of the prison's population --
have recently embarked on
<http://news.bostonherald.com/news/national/south/view/2009_01_08_Hunger_strikers_surge_to_10_percent_at_Guantanamo/srvc=home&position=recent>hunger
strikes at Guantánamo. They are, understandably,
incensed that
<http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2008/08/06/a-critical-overview-of-salim-hamdans-guantanamo-trial-and-the-dubious-verdict/>Salim
Hamdan, a driver for Osama bin Laden, was
<http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2008/11/27/the-end-of-guantanamo/>repatriated
in November, to serve out the last month of the
<http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2008/08/07/salim-hamdans-sentence-signals-the-end-of-guantanamo/>meager
sentence he received after a trial by Military
Commission last summer, while they, who have
never been charged with anything, remain
imprisoned with no way of knowing if they will ever be released.
With the
<http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iiPQXWj1dgITLNJKniNeNKJNosSAD95KD1FG0>Associated
Press announcing that Hamdan has now been
released and is reunited with his family, it must
surely be conceded that the hunger strikers have
a valid point, and that seven years without justice is far too long.
Andy is the author of
<http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/the-guantanamo-files/>The
Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774
Detainees in America's Illegal Prison. His
website is:
<http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/>http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/
Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863-9977
www.Freedomarchives.org
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