On 20 February, a US Court of Appeal ruled that hundreds of detainees held at Guantanamo Bay concentration camp had no right to habeas corpus under the US Constitution, as ‘non-citizens held outside the sovereign territory of the US’.
On 13 March, a British court cleared the final two out of seven British soldiers charged with the abuse of nine Iraqi prisoners in Basra in 2003, which resulted in the death of one man. In February, four other soldiers were cleared due to lack of evidence.
These cases represent the triumph of barbarism over justice. Where once the US and Britain had to hide their war crimes, today they flaunt them, casually brushing aside international human rights legislation, including the Geneva Conventions, as an inconvenience. CAT WIENER reports.
Legal limbo
‘Cuba – not the United States – has sovereignty over Guantanamo Bay’, wrote Appeals Court Judge Raymond Randolph. In fact, the Platt Amendment of 1903 gives the US ‘complete jurisdiction and control’ over the territory. To all intents and purposes, Guantanamo Bay is part of the US. It is occupied territory. US federal law applies to all US personnel stationed there. Cuba has regularly denounced the illegality of the interrogation camp based on its land. Can the Cuban courts now demand the release of the detainees?
The US has deliberately created this legal no-man’s land by side-stepping the laws that govern warfare, where necessary simply redefining the rules of the game. The court ruling upholds the Military Commissions Act passed by Congress in 2006, which states that ‘enemy combatants’ may not file claims in US courts. But, as US civil rights lawyer Michael Ratner explains in his excellent book about Guantanamo:*
‘The administration is using the term enemy combatants for combatants captured in Afghanistan and Iraq who should be classified as prisoners of war. That is what the Geneva Conventions require…Enemy combatant is a sort of catch-all phrase, to which no status or rights apply under international or domestic law and which the administration thus believes it can use to treat people as it wants’.
The Geneva Conventions cover everyone captured in the arena of war. Those operating outside the strict framework of a war between nations – ‘terrorists’ – are provided for under domestic criminal law. No one, however heinous their crime, is outside the law. By defining the events of 11 September 2001 as a declaration of war rather than a terrorist act, and launching its global ‘war on terrorism’, the administration can claim that the entire world is a battlefield and anyone picked up in that battlefield is an enemy combatant and therefore comes under military legislation. If classed as POWs, those captured in Afghanistan would have had to be freed once that war was over. But the war on terrorism is a perpetual war, with no end in sight – and thus the administration justifies keeping the Guantanamo detainees locked up indefinitely with no possibility of legal redress other than military tribunals, where they never see the evidence and where confessions extracted by torture are admissible.
Britain, covertly, is taking steps down the same road. There are non-British citizens swept up as alleged suspected terrorists and illegally detained without charge. One, Reda Dendani, who is Algerian, broke through the secrecy surrounding these cases, to write from Long Lartin prison: ‘[The Home Office] has trespassed its limits by ordering my detention in a high security prison against my will without any charge… I’m not allowed to know and therefore to cross-examine what is held against me…I’m fighting a ghost…I’m in the UK’s version of Guantanamo’. He has been held almost continuously for four years.
Torture
As early as January 2002, Alberto Gonzalez, then Counsel to the President and now Attorney General, wrote to President Bush arguing that the Geneva Conventions should not apply to Taliban or Al Qaida prisoners for three reasons:
• not applying them would eliminate ‘any argument regarding…POW status’;
• the war on terror ‘renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on the questioning of enemy combatants’;
• not applying the Conventions would ‘substantially reduce the threat of domestic criminal prosecutions… under the War Crimes Act’.
In other words, the administration planned to use, or was already using, brutal and inhumane methods to extract information from detainees and wanted to be sure it could continue to do so with impunity.
Guantanamo is an interrogation camp, something absolutely banned by the Geneva Conventions. The use of stress positions, short-shackling, withholding of food and medical care, sleep deprivation, exposure to extremes of temperature, beatings and psychological torture are all routine. All constitute degrading or cruel treatment prohibited by international law. Detainees are questioned for up to 18 hours at a time, sometimes chained to iron rings on the floor, and refused food or water or toilet breaks. The FBI, CIA and US Department of Defense have all taken part in interrogations, as have Britain’s MI5 and Israel’s Mossad.
In 2003, Guantanamo camp commander Major General Geoffrey D Miller was sent to Iraq to ‘Gitmoise’ Abu Ghraib prison, in particular to teach techniques to ‘facilitate’ interrogation by ‘softening up’ prisoners. By the spring of 2004 the whole world saw what such techniques involved
as horrific pictures of sadistic and sexual torture of Iraqi prisoners by US and British troops were broadcast around the world. Serving soldiers from the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment told British newspapers that such practices were widespread. By 2005, militias trained by the US and Britain, as well as private contractors involved in running jails throughout Iraq, were discovered routinely torturing prisoners, including wholesale starvation, beatings and the use of electric drills.
Green light for torture
‘What I saw in that cell wasn’t interrogation…it was torture as far as I’m concerned. It was barbaric.’ (unidentified soldier, Panorama, ‘A Good Kicking’, BBC1 13 March 2007)
The court case held in February and March concerned the brutal treatment meted out to nine Iraqi hotel workers captured by the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment in 2003, One of the men, receptionist Baha Mousa, died after 36 hours of beatings with his head shoved down a latrine and 93 separate injuries on his body. The men’s jailer, Corporal Donald Payne, admitted the war crime of treating the nine men ‘inhumanely’ but was cleared of manslaughter. This means that no one will now be held to account for the murder of Baha Mousa. According to Panorama, the army and investigators colluded to ensure those responsible were never even charged. Lieutenant Craig Rodgers and his men, who, the programme alleges, were responsible for the worst of the brutality, did not appear in the dock. Over the six months of the £20m trial, soldiers replied ‘I do not remember’ to more than 650 questions. Lt Rodgers has since been promoted to captain and is now in Germany training troops for Iraq and Afghanistan.
At their trial, the defendants claimed that beating, hooding, forced stress positions and sleep deprivation were used as ‘conditioning’ to ‘soften up’ prisoners ahead of ‘tactical questioning’. The court heard that this was in contravention of the Geneva Conventions and the laws of armed conflict but was ‘accepted practice’ and sanctioned by top officers. In fact, under the Geneva Conventions, a command to mistreat a prisoner is an illegal command and carrying it out constitutes a war crime.
Panorama’s harrowing reconstruction of the Iraqis’ ordeal was shocking, not only in its portrayal of casual, routine brutality, but also in exposing what a travesty the claim of ‘interrogation’ is. After just a day and half the men would have said or signed anything to make the torture stop. Two days after the broadcast, the Pentagon trumpeted the confession of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed whom they claim is the ‘Al Qaida No 3’. He admitted his absolute responsibility ‘from A to Z’ for every attack ever planned or carried out by Al Qaida. He had been held by the FBI and CIA for four years and tortured – including the use of ‘water-boarding’ (partial drowning) – in secret interrogation camps before being flown to Guantanamo in September 2006.
This is imperialism unrestrained by laws or morals, operating as it knows best – with a bloodied and iron first. Britain and the US are guilty of crimes against humanity. They must be brought to justice.
* Guantanamo: what the world should know, Michael Ratner and Ellen Ray, Arris Books 2004, £8.99
FRFI 196 April / May 2007
