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<font size=3>Seven Years of Guantánamo, Seven Years of Torture and
Lies<br><br>
<a href="http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/20229" eudora="autourl">
http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/20229<br>
</a>January 12, 2009 By Andy Worthington <br><br>
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
<a href="http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=2254">
stating</a> that it was "probably unfortunate" that the photos
were released.<br>
<br>
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 <i>Daily Mail</i>, 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.<br>
<br>
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
<a href="http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2008/12/23/will-the-bush-administration-be-held-accountable-for-war-crimes/">
Senate Armed Services Committee report</a> concluded last month --
subjected to Chinese torture techniques, taught in US military schools to
train American personnel to resist interrogation if captured.<br>
<br>
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
<a href="http://www.defenselink.mil/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=43817">
called the prisoners</a> "among the most dangerous, best-trained,
vicious killers on the face of the earth."<br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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
<a href="http://law.shu.edu/aaafinal.pdf">86 percent</a> 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. <br>
<br>
Moreover, it also emerged that the military had been ordered not to hold
battlefield tribunals (known as "competent tribunals") under
<a href="http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/91.htm">Article 5 of the Third
Geneva Convention</a>, 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
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Interrogators-Inside-Secret-Against-Qaeda/dp/0316871125">
ordered</a> that every Arab who came into US custody was to be sent to
Guantánamo.<br>
<br>
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 17<sup>th</sup> 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
<a href="http://www.mcclatchydc.com/100/story/38776.html">trained to
resist interrogation</a>.<br>
<br>
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
<a href="http://www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/detainees/csrt_arb/index.html">
supposed evidence</a> against the prisoners, but as recent reports by the
<a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/015/845xcgce.asp">
<i>Weekly Standard</a></i> and the
<a href="http://www.brookings.edu/reports/2008/1216_detainees_wittes.aspx">
Brookings Institution</a> 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.<br>
<br>
These include the intelligence officials who
<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/aug/20/usa.pakistan">
explained</a> 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
<a href="http://www.latimes.com/la-na-gitmo22dec22,0,2294365.story">
complain</a> that too many "Mickey Mouse" prisoners were being
sent to Guantánamo. <br>
<br>
On Guantánamo's seventh anniversary, the challenge facing Barack Obama,
as he prepares to fulfill his promise to
<a href="http://zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/19672">close the
prison</a>, 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
<a href="http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2008/12/26/the-ten-lies-of-dick-cheney-part-two/">
Dick Cheney</a> 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. <br>
<br>
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
<a href="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</a> at Guantánamo. They are, understandably, incensed that
<a href="http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2008/08/06/a-critical-overview-of-salim-hamdans-guantanamo-trial-and-the-dubious-verdict/">
Salim Hamdan</a>, a driver for Osama bin Laden, was
<a href="http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2008/11/27/the-end-of-guantanamo/">
repatriated</a> in November, to serve out the last month of the
<a href="http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2008/08/07/salim-hamdans-sentence-signals-the-end-of-guantanamo/">
meager sentence</a> 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.<br>
<br>
With the
<a href="http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iiPQXWj1dgITLNJKniNeNKJNosSAD95KD1FG0">
Associated Press</a> 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. <br>
<br>
Andy is the author of
<a href="http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/the-guantanamo-files/">The
Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America's Illegal
Prison</a>. His website is:
<a href="http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/">
http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/</a> <br>
<br><br>
<br><br>
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