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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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 unrighteou
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.
Of course that may be incorrect. Perhaps most are committed anti-Ameri
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?
The real motive is FEAR. Torture is the kind of terrorism that government
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 Afghanista
P.S., Render Cheney.
The Bush team was not a group of newbies without expertise. They are men and women well acquainted with internatio
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
It may take many years to bring these adept criminals to justice, but take heart. There is no statute of limitation
I, (NAME), do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and DEFEND THE CONSTITUTI
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
Bully tactics at the NATIONAL level, IMPERIALIS
1. The legal status of the water-boar
http://cro
2. Coerced confession
..........
Cool beans
quote:
The administra
/quote
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 Constituti
http://www
I have noticed that one of the tools in the progressiv
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-ameri
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 experience
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 overwhelmi
A journalist
Good article, Andy. Here's my small reminder for Obama: http://www
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.