11 January 2007 marked a shameful anniversary: it is five years since the first detainees, hooded and shackled, were transferred from Afghanistan to the US naval base at Guantanamo in occupied Cuba. They were the first of more than 750 to pass through what has been described by human rights lawyers and activists as ‘a US Devil’s Island’ and ‘the gulag of our times’. The US immediately designated the detainees ‘enemy combatants’ outside US jurisdiction, to whom the provisions of the Geneva Convention and the laws of habeas corpus did not apply. Five years on, the name Guantanamo is synonymous with the annihilation of human and legal rights.
In May 2006 the United Nations demanded the immediate closure of Guantanamo. In June, the US Supreme Court ruled that military commissions (kangaroo courts set up to try the detainees) violate US and international law and that the Geneva Conventions do apply. But Guantanamo remains open for business and in December 2006, the US military started transferring its 400 remaining prisoners – at least four of them children – to its brand-new $30m concrete-and-steel high security facility, Camp 6. In November, President Bush signed into law the Military Commissions Act, stripping US courts of jurisdiction to hear appeals from any foreign national held as an ‘enemy combatant’ in US custody anywhere in the world and authorising the President to establish new military commissions. The administration is also taking action to have all pending habeas corpus petitions filed on behalf of the Guantanamo detainees thrown out.
Those transferred to Guantanamo enter a legal black hole, where habeas corpus is suspended, access to legal representation scant and psychological and physical abuse – described by the Red Cross as ‘tantamount to torture’ – routine. Detainees may be held for years – as one US official remarked, ‘When we get to “forever” we’ll argue the case in court’ – sleeping on concrete floors in cells infested with scorpions and rats, in temperatures that can soar to 110F; only the most privileged and ‘co-operative’ get accorded such luxuries as a toothbrush. Despite being labelled by Rumsfeld as ‘among the most dangerous, well-trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth’, and despite hundreds of hours of ‘interrogation’ and forced confessions, not one Guantanamo detainee has ever been convicted of a criminal offence by the US.
Yet these horrors are merely the tip of the iceberg, as the Council of Europe investigation, published in December 2006, into ‘extraordinary rendition’ makes clear. It uncovered a ‘global spider’s web’ of secret prisons and rendition flights, where, without regard to due process or extradition laws, detainees were simply shuttled between US detention facilities in Afghanistan and Guantanamo to secret locations run by the CIA in Europe, or to countries where torture is routine. Since 2003, up to 14,000 people are believed to have been ‘disappeared’ into what Amnesty International describes as ‘an archipelago of secret prisons’ where they are ‘mistreated, tortured and even killed’. The Council accuses 20 countries, including Britain, of collusion by allowing the CIA’s Gulfstream jets to overfly European airspace and refuel at European airports on more than 1,200 occasions. It is believed that detainees are being held and tortured on behalf of the US in coun tries all over the world including Thailand, Morocco, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, even a prison ship in the Indian Ocean, as well as in Afghanistan and Iraq. When not present during interrogation, CIA operatives prepare the questions and debrief immediately afterwards, with the information fed into a central database, codenamed Harmony. Britain is party to such ‘intelligence’. The US claims it has no responsibility for torture carried out by countries outside its jurisdiction.
Of the roughly 360 Guantanamo detainees who have been released to their countries of origin, Associated Press tracked 245. They found:
• 205 freed without charge or cleared of all charges.
• In Afghanistan, the reconciliation commission found that all those sent back had been victims of personal or tribal vendettas. In Pakistan at least 70 had been ‘sold’ to the US authorities by bounty-hunters.
• 14 tried, with eight acquittals and six awaiting a verdict.
• All those returned to Europe released without charge.
Many of these men had been held for three or four years. Eight British residents are still held in Guantanamo. The British government refuses to call for their release. It lied when it denied all knowledge of rendition flights. Its intelligence forces continue to cooperate with the US at Guantanamo and other torture centres. As a bastion of the fear, brutality and contempt for human rights that are the hallmarks of the so-called ‘war on terror’, Guantanamo suits our legislators of repression very well. It is the Orwellian symbol of a boot smashing into a human face, writ large.
Cat Alison
FRFI 195 February / March 2007
