In April, Britain, along with the rest of the EU, supported a US-led motion at the UN Commission for Human Rights condemning Cuba for so called ‘human rights abuses’, yet refused to support Cuba’s motion demanding an investigation into the ‘flagrant, systemic human rights violations’ committed by the US in Guantanamo. We should not be surprised at Britain’s role – any investigation of Guantanamo would reveal the sordid complicity of the British Foreign Office and MI5 in the atrocities being committed there. The ‘deep, dark hole that is Guantanamo’, as constitutional rights expert Michael Ratner, described it, exposes the US administration and its allies as hypocrites, war criminals and torturers.
Guantanamo Bay, in eastern Cuba, has been occupied by the United States since 1903, in a deal between the US government and its then stooge Cuban President Estrada, granting use of the deep water bay to the US in perpetuity. In November 2001 US President Bush declared a military order authorising the unlimited secret detention of any non-citizens (swiftly extended to citizens) on the grounds of mere ‘suspicion’ of involvement in terrorism and trials without the right to legal representation, using secret evidence and to be held by military tribunals. Secret execution would be possible and no right of appeal to civilian courts would be allowed. Meanwhile, those captured in imperialism’s war on Afghanistan, or deemed in some way to be connected with Al Qaida – or, indeed, as it appeared, any Muslim randomly selected by US security forces – were designated ‘illegal combatants’, a semantic trick designed to strip them of any protection offered under international treaties for the protection of prisoners of war.
And so the legal no-man’s land of Guantanamo Bay became the site for the concentration camps X-Ray and Delta, where today up to 600 prisoners are held in a shadowy, Kafkaesque nightmare completely outside the reach of any national or international convention or treaty, without charge or release date, and where confessions of guilt are routinely extracted through brutal interrogations which the Red Cross has described as ‘tantamount to torture’.
However, in another neat sleight of hand, the United States – which had already derogated from the Geneva Convention on torture, describing it as ‘quaint’ and outdated – has redefined torture. The Geneva Convention banned any act ‘by which severe pain or suffering… physical or mental… is inflicted to obtain information’. Counsel for President Bush has declared torture will henceforth be: ‘the intent to inflict suffering equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury such as organ failure, the impairment of bodily function or even death’ – a torturer’s charter.
So beating an inmate with blunt objects, standing him in water within sight of an electric switch and threatening him with rape by trained dogs if he doesn’t confess to being a member of Al Qaida, as happened to Australian Mamdouh Habib, is not torture.
Inflicting electric shocks on Omar Deghayes, sodomising him, smearing him with excrement? ‘Hog-tying’ British citizen Moazzam Begg, putting a hood over his head, punching him and leaving him lying that way for hours? Not torture.
‘Strangulation, beatings, placement of lit cigarettes into detainees’ ear openings and unauthorised interrogations’ – as witnessed by FBI agents? Not torture either.
Beating a prisoner, smashing his head into the floor until he’s unconscious, bending thumbs back, leaving inmates chained in a foetal position, letting them urinate or defecate on themselves and leaving them like that for 18-24 hours? Turning off ventilation so temperatures soar to 40C, or turning it up so inmates shiver in their underwear in freezing conditions, playing white noise or loud music non-stop, flashing strobe light, sleep deprivation, replacing prayer oil with caustic floor cleaner, sexual humiliation, gagging prisoners with duct tape, all this is not torture? Recently CIA agents have been given permission to use ‘waterboarding’ – tying an inmate to a board and submerging him in water until he thinks he is going to be drowned.
These methods are used throughout the US’s extensive network of secret prisons. A leaked report has revealed that in 2003 at Bagram Airbase, Afghanistan, two detainees were literally beaten to a pulp by their US torturers. We can be sure their deaths are only the tip of an iceberg. By continuing to ‘outsource’ prisoners to countries such as Egypt, Syria and Uzbekistan, where torture is legal, the US clearly hopes to avoid such incrimination in future.
Let us be clear: this hideous suffering, this obscene trampling on human rights, is not about information. Even the FBI and CIA admit that torture is an unreliable method of information-gathering. After all these years and all these ‘interrogations’, only four prisoners have been charged. As journalist Naomi Klein put it, ‘torture is a machine designed to break the will to resist – the individual prisoner’s will and the collective will’. It is about terror and control. As Klein points out, this involves just enough information getting out about what is happening in Guantanamo to terrorise others, in particular Muslims, but not to inflame further resistance. We can know about pain and fear – but allegations that the Koran had been dishonoured were swiftly quashed.
Now the Pentagon has announced it will be building a new $25m prison at Guantanamo, including a $1.7m psychiatric base. As US courts look into the ‘legality’ of the detention of Guantanamo’s inmates, the US military has already declared some prisoners are so ‘evil’ they will continue to be held in Guantanamo whatever the courts decide. Guantanamo embodies the Orwellian vision of the future – ‘a boot stamping on a human face, forever’.
The revolutionary Franz Fanon, writing of French brutality during the war with Algeria, described a man who came to him for psychiatric treatment because he could not stop hearing screaming; he would shut all the doors, stop up the windows, put his head under the pillow – still he could not sleep for the screaming. It turned out he had been involved in torturing Algerian prisoners of war and the screaming he could hear was now inside his own head – he could never shut it out. The British government has been complicit in the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo. We need to bring their crimes back to haunt them.
End the torture!
Close down Guantanamo!
US out of Cuba!
Cat Alison
FRFI 185 June / July 2005
