[News] US’s expanding empire of prisons and torture chambers

[Anti-Imperialist News]

The US’s expanding empire of prisons and torture
chambers

12 September 2005. A World to Win News Service.

Four years after the US launched a global rampage in
supposed retaliation for the 9/11 attacks, its global
empire of prison camps and torture chambers continues
to swell.

The best known is Guantánamo, Cuba, where the US
military says it is now holding about 520 men, most
seized shortly after the US invasion of Afghanistan in
October 2001. They have been imprisoned without
charges for what is now going on four years. According
to lawyers in New York and London, since last 8 August
210 prisoners have been on what they vow will be a
hunger strike to the death. They are demanding that
they either be charged with a crime or released, and,
in the meantime, that they be treated according to the
Geneva Conventions governing prisoners of war,
including an end to torture and punitive conditions.

Although about 70 people have been released from
Guantánamo over the last year, construction is now
underway on a sixth camp in the prison complex,
designed for “long-term detention”.

In Afghanistan itself, the US is still keeping 350
prisoners at its Bagram airport military base near
Kabul. Rather than shutting this jail down, American
authorities have said they may expand it so that they
can send prisoners there from Guantánamo. If these
facilities were rebranded as Afghani ­ supposedly
under the authority of the government the US installed
in Afghanistan ­ lawyers would no longer be able to
file suit in American courts. The Pentagon has
particularly objected to judicial orders that
prisoners be allowed contact with attorneys. Similar
arrangements to turn over legal responsibility for
prisoners now at Guantánamo are under negotiation with
Saudi Arabia and Yemen.

Last June a 2,000-page secret US Army document on an
investigation of torture at Bagram was leaked to the
media. The resulting uproar forced even the US’s
Afghanistan president Hamid Karzai to mouth criticisms
of his masters, but the US defied UN calls to let
Afghanistan’s human rights commission have access to
the base. The US Army did, however, feel obliged to
try four GIs for the deaths of two Afghans whose
murder was described in terrible detail in that
report. American soldiers had grabbed a young taxi
driver known as Dilawar in December 2002. They hung
him from the ceiling with wrist shackles and beat him
over four days. More than a hundred times, they
applied special, “scientific” blows to the sides of
his knees with metal rods to cause maximum pain while
leaving no external marks. This technique is similar
to ones used at Guantánamo and perhaps developed
there. The secret report mentioned that interrogators
believed Dilawar never really had any information to
give them. The base coroner wrote that his knees had
been “pulpified”, as if he had been run over by a
heavy vehicle.

Two soldiers tried for killing Dilawar and another man
were convicted but given no jail time. In late August,
two more were given a two and three-month sentence,
respectively.

The US prison at Abu Ghraib, infamous for the torture
photos that shocked the world in April 2004, has also
been expanded. It now holds 4,000 people. Currently
the US is holding nearly 11,000 captives in Iraq,
double the number of a year ago, in three military
prisons, with a new one under construction. Recently
the US government announced plans to expand the
capacity of its prisons in Iraq to 16,000.

At the same time, the number of people being held in
the prison system run by the Iraqi puppet government
is exploding. An article in the British Observer (3
July 2005) describes what happens on the seventh floor
of the Ministry of the Interior: “Hanging by the arms
in cuffs, scorching of the body with something like an
iron and knee-capping [using an electric drill to make
holes in the knees] are claimed to be increasingly
prevalent in the new Iraq. Now evidence is emerging
that appears to substantiate those claims. Not only
Iraqis make the allegations. International officials
describe the methods in disgusted but hushed tones...”


The newspaper points out, “British and US police and
military officials act as advisers to Iraq's security
forces. Foreign troops support Iraqi policing
missions. What is extraordinary is that despite the
increasingly widespread evidence of torture,
governments have remained silent. It is all the more
extraordinary on the British side, as embassy
officials have been briefed by senior Iraqi officials
over the allegations on a number of occasions, and
individual cases of abuse have been raised with
British diplomats.”

Actually, this isn’t surprising at all since these
things are being carried out under the authority, and
for the benefit, of the US/UK-led occupation. The Wolf
Brigade, an “Iraqi government” security force the
Observer cited as one of the most vicious, made up
largely of former members of Saddam’s secret police
and Republican Guard, works under US Special Forces
officer James Steele, whose background includes
training American-backed death squads in El Salvador
during the 1980s, according to Counterpunch (10/12
June 2005).

There are other such centres in official buildings in
the capital and other cities. Alongside them exists a
chain of unofficial dungeons and killing rooms run by
the Shia and Kurdish parties allied with the US.
Sources such as the Washington Post’s Anthony Shadid
(15 June and 21 August) report that US-seized captives
are routinely delivered to these facilities for
disposal.

Many of those being held in the US’s worldwide network
of military prisons are children. US investigative
journalist Seymour Hersh wrote in the UK Guardian that
a memo addressed to Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
shortly after the 2001 invasion noted “800-900
Pakistani boys 13-15 years of age in custody”. In
Iraq, sociology professor Arlie Hochschild wrote in
The New York Times  (29 June), “The International
Committee of the Red Cross reported registering 107
detainees under 18 during visits to six prisons
controlled by coalition troops. Some detainees were as
young as 8. Since that time, Human Rights Watch
reports that the number has risen.” Some Guantánamo
prisoners ­ it’s not clear exactly how many ­ were
captured at the age of 15, 14 or even younger, and the
US says that about half a dozen are still under 16.

At Abu Ghraib, Hochschild cites cases of children as
young as 14 being tortured by setting dogs to bite
them. Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, formerly in
charge of that prison, told military investigators
“about visiting a weeping 11-year-old detainee in the
prison's notorious Cellblock 1B, which housed
prisoners designated high risk. ‘He told me he was
almost 12,’ General Karpinski recalled, and that ‘he
really wanted to see his mother, could he please call
his mother.’ Children like this 11 year old held at
Abu Ghraib have been denied the right to see their
parents, a lawyer, or anyone else. They were not told
why they were detained, let alone for how long.”

Karpinski was the only officer to even so much as lose
their job because of the torture recorded in soldiers’
photos at Abu Ghraib ­ not for her responsibility in
the crimes committed there, but for failing to defend
them to the media. Testimony in the trials of several
soldiers given prison terms last June in relation to
the scandal brought out that the “interrogation”
techniques used there were developed at Guantánamo and
brought to Iraq first by a special training team and
then by the head of the Cuban prison himself, Major
General Geoffrey Miller, who was put in charge of
prisoners in Iraq and, after the military
investigation of Abu Ghraib, given a promotion.

The fact that Guantánamo remains the flagship and
research and development laboratory for the US’s
global torture network gives the hunger strike there
even more significance.

Prisoner statements written at the start of the
current hunger strike were recently released by
British civil rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, who
represents 40 detainees. Binyan Mohammed, a former
London schoolboy, wrote, “I do not plan to stop until
either I die or we are respected. People will
definitely die.” He compared their action to the
hunger strike at Maze prison in the UK led by Bobby
Sands in 1981, when eight accused Irish Republican
Army members died in a fast to protest their
internment without trial. “He had the courage of his
convictions and he starved himself to death. Nobody
should believe that my brothers here have less
courage.”

Apparently there have been quite a few protests at
Guantánamo, although for the first few years the
prisoners were so completely isolated that little word
got out. The New York-based Center for Constitutional
Rights, which represents many prisoners there,
documents these actions in their recent pamphlet The
Guantánamo Prisoner Hunger Strikes and Protest:
February 2002 ­ August 2005 (www.ccr-ny.org). A hunger
strike that began in June called for better access to
books, bottled water (prisoners say they are
deliberately given repulsive drinking water), medical
care, mail contact with their families and other basic
human needs. Prisoners also demanded that they all be
treated equally. Currently, the small number of
prisoners who cooperate with interrogators are housed
in a special unit, camp four, with relatively better
conditions and privileges. This is the unit visiting
US Congressmen were taken to see (although even they
were forbidden to talk to prisoners). The harshest
unit is the newest, camp five, with about 100 inmates,
who haven’t been told why they were sent there. That
protest ended 28 July when the authorities promised to
meet at least some of the detainees’ demands. The
military would “bring the prison into compliance with
the Geneva Conventions. They said this had been
approved by Donald Rumsfeld himself in Washington,
DC,” explained the British prisoner Mohammed.

But apparently these promises were a trick. In August,
a Tunisian prisoner was severely beaten with a metal
chair during interrogation. A Kuwaiti was violently
assaulted by the military’s “Extreme Reaction Force”
when he refused to return to interrogation after being
sexually abused. This triggered a second hunger
strike. In retaliation, the Prisoners Council
representative was put in isolation. Contact with
lawyers was forbidden, contrary to a court order. On
12 September, the US Defence Department announced that
128 prisoners were “fasting” and 18 had been
hospitalised for force-feeding. The government
declined to give out a list of hunger strikers or
notify their families. Attorneys warn that the purpose
of hiding the real number of people involved and their
names ­ like the US government’s continuing refusal to
make known the exact number and identity of Guantánamo
prisoners overall ­ may be to cover up deaths. The US
is still refusing to allow UN officials to inspect the
prison complex.

In addition to these prisons, there is also reason to
believe that the US has secret detention centres
located, among other places, on American naval ships
in the Indian Ocean, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture
Manfred Nowak told BBC 28 June, adding his weight to a
regularly repeated charge. He said that the UN has
been demanding that the US provide a comprehensive
list of detention centres for over a year ­ in vain.

International law and institutions clearly cannot stop
what the US is doing, and American law as well is not
allowed to be an obstacle. In the US, the Democratic
Party has refused to make an issue of the torture
network. A few months ago, during an upsurge of
criticism of Guantánamo, ex-president Bill Clinton put
forward the slogan “Clean it up or shut it down” ­ as
if a “clean” concentration camp is acceptable. This
one seems as “scientifically” administered as any Nazi
could wish, with doctors and other professionals
intimately involved in developing torture techniques
ranging from psychological manoeuvres to the use of
thorax pressure points to cause extreme pain and
unconsciousness with no traces. After a few days,
Clinton and his party just dropped the whole thing.

Further, while it’s not surprising that the UK and the
other “coalition” members go along with Guantánamo and
the other military camps, it seems that so far, at
least, no government is willing to go against the US
on this.

People who find these outrages intolerable will either
have to learn to live with them, or take mass action
themselves to end this situation and all that lies
behind it.



The Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
(415) 863-9977
www.freedomarchives.org 
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