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The survivors' stories leave no doubt: Guantánamo makes us all less safe
Official accounts reveal with chilling clarity that acts carried out in
the name of the war on terror have backfired dreadfully
by George Monbiot
The Guardian
Tuesday May 13 2008.
When we learned last week that Abdallah Salih al-Ajmi had blown himself
up in Mosul in northern Iraq, the US government presented this as a
vindication of its policies. Al-Ajmi was a former inmate of the
detention camp at Guantánamo Bay. The Pentagon says his attack on Iraqi
soldiers shows both that it was right to have detained him and that it
is dangerous ever to release the camp's prisoners. On the contrary, it
shows how dangerous it was to put them there in the first place.
Al-Ajmi, according to the Pentagon, was one of at least 30 former
Guantánamo detainees who have "taken part in anti-coalition militant
activities after leaving US detention". Given that the majority of the
inmates appear to have been innocent of such crimes before they were
detained, that's one hell of a recidivism rate. In reality, it turns out
that "anti-coalition militant activities" include talking to the media
about their captivity. The Pentagon lists the Tipton Three in its
catalogue of recidivists, on the grounds that they collaborated with
Michael Winterbottom's film The Road to Guantánamo. But it also names
seven former prisoners, aside from al-Ajmi, who have fought with the
Taliban or Chechen rebels, kidnapped foreigners or planted bombs after
their release. One of two conclusions can be drawn from this evidence,
and neither reflects well on the US government.
The first is that, as the Pentagon claims, these men "successfully lied
to US officials, sometimes for over three years". The US government's
intelligence gathering and questioning were ineffective, and people who
would otherwise have been identified as terrorists or resistance
fighters were allowed to walk free, despite years of intense and often
brutal interrogation. Should this be surprising? Without a presumption
of innocence, without charges, representation, trials, or due process of
any kind, there is no reliable means of determining whether or not a man
is guilty. The abuses at Guantánamo not only deny justice to the
inmates, they also deny justice to the world.
Al-Ajmi, the authorities say, initially confessed in the prison camp to
deserting the Kuwaiti army to join the jihad in Afghanistan. He admitted
that he fought with Taliban forces against the Northern Alliance. He
later retracted this confession, which had been made "under pressure and
threats". When the Americans released him from Guantánamo, they handed
him over to the Kuwaiti government for trial, but without the admissible
evidence required to convict him. Among his defences was that neither he
nor his interrogators had signed his supposed testimony. The Kuwaiti
courts, without reliable evidence to the contrary, found him innocent.
All evidence obtained in Guantánamo, and in the CIA's other detention
centres and secret prisons, is by definition unreliable, because it is
extracted with the help of coercion and torture. Torture is notorious
for producing false confessions, as people will say anything to make it
stop. Both official accounts and the testimonies of former detainees
show that a wide range of coercive techniques - devised or approved at
the highest levels in Wa****ngton - have been used to make inmates tell
the questioners what they want to hear.
In his book Torture Team, Philippe Sands describes the treatment of
Mohammed al-Qahtani, held in Guantánamo and described by the authorities
(like half a dozen other suspects) as "the 20th hijacker". By the time
his interrogators started using "enhanced techniques" to extract
information from him, al-Qahtani had been kept in isolation for three
months in a cell permanently flooded with light. An official memo shows
that he "was talking to nonexistent people, re****ting hearing voices,
[and] crouching in a corner of the cell covered with a sheet for hours
on end". He was abused, exposed to extreme cold and deprived of sleep
for a further 54 days of torture and questioning. What useful testimony
could be extracted from a man in this state?
The other possibility is that the men who became involved in armed
conflict after their release had not in fact been involved in any prior
fighting, but were radicalised by their detention. In the video he made
before blowing himself up, al-Ajmi maintained that he was motivated by
his ill-treatment in Guantánamo. "Twelve thousand kilometres away from
Mecca, I realised the reality of the Americans and what those infidels
want," he said. He claimed he was beaten, drugged and "used for
experiments" and that "the Americans delighted in insulting our prayer
and Islam and they insulted the Qur'an and threw it in dirty places."
Al-Ajmi's lawyer revealed that his arm had been broken by guards at the
camp, who beat him up to stop him from praying.
The accounts of people released from Guantánamo describe treatment that
would radicalise almost anyone. In his book Five Years of My Life,
published a fortnight ago, Murat Kurnaz maintains that one of the guards
greeted him on his arrival with these words. "Do you know what the
Germans did to the Jews? That's exactly what we're going to do with
you." There were certain similarities. "I knew a man from Morocco,"
Kurnaz writes, "who used to be a ****p captain. He couldn't move one of
his little fingers because of frostbite. The rest of his fingers were
all right. They told him they would amputate the little finger. They
brought him to the doctor, and when he came back, he had no fingers
left. They had amputated everything but his thumbs." The young man -
scarcely more than a boy - in the cage next to Kurnaz's had just had his
legs amputated by American doctors after getting frostbite in a
coalition prison in Afghanistan. The stumps were still bleeding and
covered in pus. He received no further treatment or new dressings. Every
time he tried to hoist himself up to sit on his pot by clinging to the
wire, a guard would come and hit his hands with a billy-club. Like every
other prisoner, he was routinely beaten by the camp's Immediate Reaction
Force, and taken away to interrogation cells to be beaten up some more.
Fathers were clubbed in front of their sons, sons in front of their
fathers. The prisoners were repeatedly forced into stress positions,
deprived of sleep and threatened with execution. As a senior official at
the US Defense Intelligence Agency says, "maybe the guy who goes into
Guantánamo was a farmer who got swept along and did very little. He's
going to come out a fully fledged jihadist."
In reading the histories of Guantánamo, and of the kidnappings,
extrajudicial detention and torture the US government (helped by the
United Kingdom) has pursued around the world, two things become clear.
The first is that these practices do not supplement effective
investigation and prosecution; they replace them. Instead of a process
which generates evidence, *****ses it and uses it to prosecute, the US
has deployed a process that generates nonsense and is incapable of
separating the guilty from the innocent. The second is that far from
protecting innocent lives, this process is likely to deliver further
atrocities. Even if you put the ethics of such treatment to one side, it
is surely evident that it makes the world more dangerous.
http://monbiot.com
--
Dan Clore
My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
http://tinyurl.com/2gcoqt
Lord We˙rdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
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Skipper: Professor, will you tell these people who is
in charge on this island?
Professor: Why, no one.
Skipper: No one?
Thurston Howell III: No one? Good heavens, this is anarchy!
-- _Gilligan's Island_, episode #6, "President Gilligan"
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