A global gulag to hide the
war on terror's dirty secrets
The Guardian
Jonathan Steele
Friday January 14, 2005
The promise of imminent release for four British detainees
held at the notorious US prison at Guantánamo Bay is
obviously welcome, but it is only a tiny exception in the surge
of bad news from the Bush team on the human rights front. The
first few days of the new year have produced two shocking
exposures already.
One is the revelation that the administration sees the US not
just as a self-appointed global policeman, but also as the
world's prison warder. It is thinking of building jails in
foreign countries, mainly ones with grim human rights records, to
which it can secretly transfer detainees (unconvicted by any
court) for the rest of their lives - a kind of global gulag
beyond the scrutiny of the International Committee of the Red
Cross, or any other independent observers or lawyers.
The other horror is the light shone on the views of Alberto
Gonzales, the White House nominee to be the chief law officer,
the attorney general. At his Senate confirmation hearings last
week he was revealed to be a man who not only refuses to rule out
torture under any circumstances but also, in his capacity as
White House counsel over the past few years, chaired several
meetings at which specific interrogation techniques were
discussed. As Edward Kennedy pointed out, and Gonzales did not
deny, they included the threat of burial alive and
water-boarding, under which the detainee is strapped to a board,
forcibly pushed under water, wrapped in a wet towel, and made to
believe he could drown.
Since its establishment after 9/11, the US camp for foreigners
at Guantánamo Bay has become a beacon of unfreedom, a kind
of grisly competitor to the Statue of Liberty in the shopfront of
authentic American images. The trickle of releases of prisoners
from its cages has brought direct testimony of the horrors which
go on there. So it is no wonder that the Bush administration
would like to find less visible places to hold prisoners, and
keep them there for ever so that they cannot tell the world.
The Guantánamo prisoners are held by the department of
defence, but under the new scheme most foreign detainees are
expected to be in the hands of the CIA, which submits to less
congressional scrutiny and offers the Red Cross no access. They
include hundreds of people who have been arrested in recent weeks
in Falluja and other Iraqi cities.
According to the Washington Post, which broke the story last
week, one proposal is to have the US build new prisons in
Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen. Officials of those countries
would run the prisons, and would have to allow the state
department to "monitor human rights compliance".
It is a laughable proposition, since the whole purpose of the
exercise is to minimise scrutiny. CIA agents would have the right
to question the detainees, with or without the aid of foreign
interrogators, as they already do at other off-limits prisons at
Bagram air base in Afghanistan, on ships at sea, in Jordan and
Egypt, and at Diego Garcia.
The US policy of lending detainees to other countries' jailers
and torturers, known as "rendition", began during the "war on
drugs" as a way of arresting alleged Latin American narco-barons
and softening them up for trial in the US. It has expanded
enormously under the "war on terror". As one CIA officer told the
Washington Post, "the whole idea has become a corruption of
renditions. It's not rendering to justice. It's kidnapping."
He could have added that it's kidnapping for life. A senior US
official told the New York Times last week that three-quarters of
the 550 prisoners at Guantánamo Bay no longer have any
intelligence of value. But they will not be released out of
concern that they pose a continuing threat to the US. "You're
basically keeping them off the battlefield, and, unfortunately in
the war on terrorism, the battlefield is everywhere," he
said.
Since the attack on Falluja, the US holds 325 non-Iraqis in
custody, many of them Syrians and Saudis. Questioned by the
Senate's judiciary committee, Gonzales said that the justice
depart ment believes that non-Iraqis captured in Iraq are not
protected by the Geneva conventions, which prevent prisoners
being transferred out of the country in which they are held.
It was revealed last year that Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence
secretary, had approved the secret holding of "ghost detainees"
in Iraq. They were kept off the registers that were shown to the
Red Cross and therefore lost the chance of being visited or
having other rights. Now many new prisoners will be candidates
for a deeper category of invisibility by being sent for detention
in secret locations abroad.
While making bland statements during his Senate appearance
that he found torture abhorrent, Gonzales gave no clear
assurances that its practice would stop. As White House counsel
he approved an administration memorandum against torture in
August 2002 which was so narrow that it appeared to define it
only as treatment that led to "dying under torment". In other
words, if a victim survived, he could not have been tortured.
The memo also claimed that torture only occurs when the intent
is to cause pain. If pain is intentionally used to gain
information or a confession, that is not torture. Thanks to this
narrow definition of what is forbidden, US officials have been
systematically using inhumane treatment on prisoners - far beyond
the few so-called bad apples exposed by the photographs from Abu
Ghraib - while saying it did not amount to torture.
A few days before Gonzales's Senate hearings, the justice
department hastily rewrote the memo so that a wider category of
techniques are defined as torture, and thereby prohibited. But at
the hearings Gonzales refused to give a clear negative answer to
the question whether, in his view, American troops or
interrogators could legally engage in torture under any
circumstances.
One of the glories of the hearings was the appearance of
Douglas Johnson, director of the Centre for Victims of Torture.
He argued that the new memo fails to give clear guidance on what
the appropriate standards for interrogation and detention are. He
also pointed out that torture does not yield reliable information
and corrupts its perpetrators.
Psychological torture was more damaging than physical torture,
he said. Interviews with victims show that depression and
recurrent nightmares decades later more often relate to memories
of mock executions (of the "water-boarding" type) and scenarios
of humiliation than to actual physical abuse.
That these points might have impressed the man Bush wants to
have as America's top law officer is not to be expected. Nor does
anyone in Washington expect the Senate to refuse to confirm him
for the job. Happy New War on Terror 2005.
j.steele@guardian.co.uk
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