Seven Years of Guantanamo, Seven Years of Torture and Lies
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 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 Senate Armed Services Committee report concluded last month -- subjected to Chinese torture techniques, taught in U.S. 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 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 U.S. 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 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 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 ordered that every Arab who came into U.S. 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 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 supposed evidence against the prisoners, but as recent reports by the Weekly Standard and the 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 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 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 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 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 U.S. 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 hunger strikes at Guantánamo. They are, understandably, incensed that Salim Hamdan, a driver for Osama bin Laden, was repatriated in November, to serve out the last month of the 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 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 Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press), and maintains a blog here.
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This is a great article, I would add to your statements "but Anything less, and America's moral standing will remain tarnished"
We should not be interested that we did not get the Nobel Peace Price for human rights. But that are actions were not write in the standard of the laws of our country. Living our law and principal will of the founding fathers will create no more attacks on America, etc. and gain the respect of our actions and not our words.
Depriving Al Quida from Life, Liberty and Happiness without Due Process under that law, speaks for our unrighteous behavior. We should not forgive our actions, we should ask for forgiveness of our actions
Yes, surely these poor sould should not be subjected to sensory deprivation or waterboarding or anything remotely unpleasant. They should be returned to their countrymen.
There are some who fear being returned to their country of origin, and those should be adopted into US sites of course. I would nominate the dsitricts of Ms Pelosi or Mr. Reid perhaps.
Years ago a serial killer escaped from California into Canada. THe Canadians refused to extradite him because of their opposition to the death penalty. The judge in that case said "fine, but in that case you have to keep him-he will not be allowed back into the US".
He was returned within 24 hours.
You all want these folks in your back yard? Put your money where your mouth is then.
Your slew of false choices is too much to parse.
The article makes the point that most of those at Guantanamo are not a threat to America. They are an embarrasment, people who should never have been held in the first place but who are now being held because what has been done to them is too despicable to be revealed.
Of course that may be incorrect. Perhaps most are committed anti-American terrorists - even before we gave them cause to feel that way.
So figure out who is a threat and charge these within the American legal system and hold them on our soil, in our jails. If our legal system is not equal to the task then it needs to be brought up to speed - after all, we are told that this conflict is going to be with us for some time.
If some of them are, as the article suggests, not true terrorists but victims of America's terrorist purchasing scheme then this farce has gone on long enough. If any of these have been broken then how can we expect any other country to nurse them back to health or to recompense them for what has been done to them by us?
If they weren't 'anti-American' before, they sure as hell are now.
Being taken from your country, and held in Gitmo indefinitely without trial or maybe without even knowing why you're there, is pretty unpleasant. I'm not sure how we can also justify the sensory deprivation and waterboarding and all the other inhumane things that have gone on there. Maybe, MAYBE if these blatant forms of torture got us intelligence that was actually helpful, we could somehow sleep at night, but unfortunately torture doesnt work. It's a well known fact, and its absolutely bass ackwards that we use it at all. Given the reality that information from interrogations involving torture is notoriously unreliable, I don't see how what you characterize as "unpleasantries" (known the rest of the world over as torture) is anything short of blatant, arrogant, inhumane cruelty.
Moreover, no one reasonable has suggested that all detainees at Gitmo are innocent and should be freed immediately. However, there is serious evidence that a lot of them are there without cause - the primary peice of this evidence is that the US government can't even make up a reason why they are there. And if they are guilty, fine, they should be tried and sentenced. The point of this article is not that we should just pat the bad guys on the head and tell them to be on their way; it is that we have to have a reason to keep them, and whatever that reason is, we should NOT be torturing anyone - it is flat out inhumane, not to
MacQ claims a US murder convict escaped to Canada, and that Canada chose to ignore its moratorium on the death penalty, and returned him within 24 hours, when told he Canada would "have to keep him".
How many US murder convicts have escaped to Canada? I don't know. Tthe most famous was Charles Ng. He was not "returned within 24 hours". His extradition battle stretched over years.
http://en.
I would encourage MacQ to purge his comments of far-fetched apocryphal anecdotes.
Mr. Worthington, your series on Guantanamo has been outstanding. Thanks for not forgetting the values that we Americans are supposed to stand for and for not forgetting the anonymous prisoners who have been held without trial in humiliating conditions.
The dirty secret about torture, even as employed by the bush adminsitration, is that investigation is rarely the motive.
The real motive is FEAR. Torture is the kind of terrorism that governments use against the governed, especially when, as in Abu Ghraib, its used indiscriminately by untrained, low ranking soldiers in ways that ensure that the governed WILL hear about it.
That's precisely the way that torture was used in the various dirty wars in latin america, and allegedly taught at the school of the americas.
Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo have to be seen in this light. The real 'high value' targets were all in black CIA run sites elsewhere. Guantanamo was a show, designed to frighten the people of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq. The message was "screw with us, and we'll eff you up!".
Great comment.
P.S., Render Cheney.
Absolutely right and true. These guys KNOW that torture produces little actionable intelligence, even when you're torturing the right people. In terms of fear and coercion, however...
ObjectiveRealist and tbone99 are spot-on. The Bush apologists believe torture is somehow an American right, while the rest of us stand astonished they would consider such a tactic viable or legal.
The Bush team was not a group of newbies without expertise. They are men and women well acquainted with international law and our obligations and limitations under it. Deciding to torture, whatever the excuse, is a violation of U.S. and international law. Those who engaged in it, authorized it, or failed to speak out against it when they became aware of its practice are pariahs.
Closing facilities is a start, but not the end. For we've somehow allowed our military and CIA to become complicit, even eager, torturers without conscience. Eradicating this cancer will encompass creating a different mentality and sensibility in our institutions - which is not reasonable to expect come January 20. Obama may be a wise man, but he wields no magic wand where the attitudes of insensitive men are concerned. It's up to all of us to right this ship through eternal vigilence. Your voices matter much more than you think they do.
It may take many years to bring these adept criminals to justice, but take heart. There is no statute of limitations for war crimes and no place on earth where they can hide forever from the cells awaiting them. Justice may not always be swift, but given the egregious nature of these war crimes, it most certainly will happen.
In addition, it will take good men and women in the military to speak up about the abuses they witness, about the criminal orders they are given, about the rank corruption in procurement, before this change is made. But the whole question of these men held without justice by the American military has to be resolved immediately: free them or try them, but do it it now.
The best place to start would be for each GI to read the OATH they swore to uphold
I, (NAME), do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and DEFEND THE CONSTITUTION of the United States and the State of (STATE NAME) against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the Governor of (STATE NAME) and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to law and regulations OR according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.. So help me God.
Again, thank you Mr. Worthington, for standing for everything we still believe in.
Even if Guantánamo closes, the controversial U.S. practice of jailing suspected al-Qaeda militants and other terrorists indefinitely won't end, because such detentions continue on an even greater scale at the U.S. military base at Bagram, Afghanistan, 40 miles north of Kabul. Approximately 250 detainees are currently being held at Guantánamo; an estimated 670 are locked up under similar conditions at Bagram.
Too bad we became a TYRANT nation with 9/11. Torturing, attacking unprovoled.
FEAR is no excuse for not executing Justice and the Rule of Law. SHAME for locking up Taliban for defending their country and labeling them illegal combatants. Then turn BLACKWATER and other discharged GI's and MERCANERIES on the world as the best illegal combatants. With immunity of course.
Bully tactics at the NATIONAL level, IMPERIALISM
I'm always glad to see these war crimes getting attention, but I think two issues deserve greater attention.
1. The legal status of the water-boarding was not ambiguous on 10 September, 2001. The United States has prosecuted, convicted, and sent convicts to prison for water-boarding as recently as the Vietnam War, and when Japanese were found to have water-boarded US soldiers in World War 2 we convicted them of a "war crime." Retired Navy Judge Advocates General explain:
http://cro
2. Coerced confessions are not reliable. Khalid Sheikh Muhammad eventually confessed to what another captive, Abu Zubaydah said KSM did; his confession may as well have been read from a script. When torturers do *not* have a previous informant, ie assuming they are actually pursuing information not coercing a confession, they have no reason to expect that what they are told is true. An unprovable lie about a secretive organization is not difficult to make up, so the claim that CIA might need to torture somebody, who is willing to die for their cause by they way, in order to learn the *truth* about an imminent attack is utterly vacuous and dishonest.
Huzzah.
We are a christian nation....
..........
Cool beans
We're supposed to be a Constitutional nation, a nation of laws. Where a lot of the citizens happen to be Christian, but not a theocracy. And one does not need to refer to Christ to know torture is evil. The UN is a secular organization, composed of member states of varying levels of religiosity. On secular, humanist grounds it condemns water-boarding as torture.
This is hilarious. It looks like a commercial for Friday 13th. BO is finding out that it is hard to resolve issues surrounding people who what to kill us in accordance with the US constitution. A person on the field of battle is not entitled to due process before you shoot him especially if he is trying to kill you. Just because he is not good at his job and we capture his ass, we get stuck with the problem. Too many people in this country worry more about a terrorist’s rights in captivity but don’t mind shooting them on the battle field. I know the Libs disagree with this but I believe the constitution should pertain to US Citizens only. Then we can argue exceptions if necessary.
Your tune would change if one of those thugs decided to accuse you of being a terrorist.
quote:
The administration did all in its power to prevent anyone outside the U.S. 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 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.
/quote
I am 65 years old and do not have the social consciousness that causes me to be concerned about who may tap my phone calls or read my mail or accuse me of being a terrorist. First of all I don't talk about anything on the phone that would be more than embarrassing certainly not a threat to my country. My mail would be very boring. Would I like the idea of arbitrary phone taps and mail intercepts; no. But I am certainly not going to lose any sleep over it. Do you realize that soldiers in a combat zone are legally subject to those so called intrusions and I don't know of anyone who experienced a problem other than an occasional thought of "what a waste of time” Emails and phone conversations at work in many places are monitored. No great disaster. I just try to apply my energy to problems that really positively or adversely affect me and mine. I don’t have a problem if you want to see the boogie man behind every tree. That is your business. An all of that comes from a man that has zero trust in the folks running our government.
SInce when did this country stand for justice for its own only?
Ironic, doncha think, that we went INTO Iraq out of a sense of BRINGING "justice" to Iraqis.
Then we "Abu Ghraib"-ed 'em?
Next, we can debate to whom the Constitution applies, and we can debate to whom the Geneva Conventions apply, but it is beyond debate that the Bush administration invented a legal black hole. On purpose.
http://www
So you think abu ghraib cancels out their constitution and their elections then.
I have noticed that one of the tools in the progressive debater's toolchest is to find an outlier and state it as if it were the general rule. I guess it works for you, but it's not terribly effective to a logical thinker.
If any of your article is true ... Why won't Barack commit to closing before 3 = months and the fact that this in part has made the USA safe from terrorist attacks gthese past 7.5 years ...( no, the anthrax does not count )
There's a really good reason why he can't (not won't) commit to closing gitmo within less than three mos : it's impossible. There's serious bureacracy surrounding it, not to mention something has to be done with the detainees who are released (many of the countries they were taken from are refusing to take them back). They can't just open the gates and let them out - it doesn't work like that.
Also, show me any evidence that torturing detainees at Gitmo and elsewhere has made the US safer from terrorist attacks - there's absolutely no evidence of this. The bottom line is that torture doesn't work - if they know nothing, they'll lie to you to make you stop. If they do know something, they can also just lie to you to make you stop. It's a pointless shot in the dark. In fact, there is a really good argument to be made that the publicized torture at gitmo has greatly increased anti-american sentiment abroad, fueling the creation of and recruitment to new terrorist cells - as opposed to making us safer.
You are walking down the street minding your own bussiness and someone makes $5000 dollars turning you in . After 7 years of abuse and torture in Gitmo even if you were ambivilant toward the USA before you were imprisoned you will be violently anti american afterward . I know i would be and anyone honest would say the same. So now that we have CREATED new terrorists what country wants these terrorists back , especially if the local government supported the USA in the captures . to start with i think we should sue Bush and Cheney to the tune of 7 million each for the PRISONERS TO BE GIVEN TO EACH OF THEM ON RELEASE. which would solve them being able to find a place to live and hit Bush and Cheney where it would hurt them the most, in their wallet.
I am sick and tired of the claim "torture made us safe". President Bush's policies did not keep America safe. No one should allow the Bush administration, or its apologists, to claim that since the Continental USA has not had a terrorist attack since Bush trashed the rule of law that it was the trashing of the rule of law that kept the USA safe.
When I was a teenager I read a bunch of books on military strategy, so I could be a better player of strategy board games. And those books spelled out a well-known principle when one faces a coalition -- attack the weaker members of the coalition first. If you can either knock them out, or cause them to go neutral or change sides, the coalition you face is much weaker than if you attack the most powerful member of the coalition first.
Spain, Indonesia, Britain have all experienced serious attacks. And Spain did, in fact, drop from the coalition.
Believing the false claim that torture made the public safer -- repeating and advancing this false claim makes the public less safe -- even though it may make George Bush's "legacy" slightly more safe.
I think if the public were to choose between preserving George Bush's legacy, or abandoning failed tactics in favor of tactics more likely to preserve public safety, they would overwhelming choose public safety. If Bush and his apologists were real patriots they would choose public safety too.
With the Bush Admin.The media is always labeled as "liberal" when thier work reveal the sad truth. Expertise is looked down upon unless they agree with Bush and the Boys and then they are hailed as "Insightful" and quoted endlessly. Like it or not the truth always has a liberal slant to it. Always has, always will.
A journalist's job should be to tell the truth as it stands. If you are reporting on the actions of people who lie and hide thier actions of course when the truth is revealed it will be disputed and dismissed by the offenders. They would never admit what has been revealed as correct. It is only natural that they react with disparaging accusations of bias and partisonship. When your job for the last eight years is to cover the actions of liars and crimminals of course you will get an unflattering and critical view. If Bush and Cheney wanted to be seen as good leaders by any journalist they should have acted as good leaders would.
Gitmo provided the Bush administration with the perfect cover for their imperial wars. The detainees fitted the stereotype terrorist profile and their existence convinced those members of the public in denial taht a threat existed. Just for good measure the inmates were silenced and stripped of their human rights. A circular policy.
Good article, Andy. Here's my small reminder for Obama: http://www
...it must surely be conceded that the hunger strikers have a valid point, and that seven years without justice is far too long...
And yet, so many freedom loving "good" Americans defend this malevolent creation of Bush and Cheney. Basically, in this two-party government we have, one side promotes torture and the other rails against it.
I remember how it felt to have friends and family lost as POW's in Vietnam. The big difference here is that North Vietnam never claimed to follow Geneva Convention rules, while Cheney (and by allowing this we are all at fault for inaction) learned well from their methods. At least in Vietnam the vast majority of prisoners were admitted soldiers.
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