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Guantánamo Bay is killing people thousands of miles away
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 Washington -- 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, reporting 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 ship 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, assesses 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.
monbiot.com
© Guardian News and Media Limited 2008
18 Comments so far
Show AllAs an antiwar activist in Buffalo, I came across a sticker on a car bumber that said ``We are creating new terrorist faster than we can kill them''. I think this is a very very true saying.
What you see is the incompetence of the Bush administration years later long after they arrogantly began doing this at Guantanamo and Abu Gharib. They had their way but we see the results now.
What needs be asked is when you treat human beings who might have been innocent but now would not be... then do you say keep them there forever without trial?
Edgar Allen Poe?
How cruel are we now? How insane will we get?
Shall we rationalize imprisoning an innocent person because we afraid to let them go after how badly they were treated? We will keep them knowing they were innocent? That is evil.
Bush incompetence and being given a free hand brought about this.
He should be impeached.
GITMO may close but the other 'Detainee Center' on the other side, opposite GITMO, that is being built will blow it away. Just see what will imprison us so we behave. Keep in mind I have had this article since January.
LITTLE BROTHER: Excellent post.
This situation is one that the Buddhists have a prescription for: it is extending an understanding of the LAW of karma. Those who believe they will suffer no consequences for putting other human beings through these unspeakable trials do not realize they are setting up their own scripts for future lives.
Whereas the belief in a "personal god," acts as concept to fuel the U.S Air Force and its enthusiastic willingness to drop bombs on innocent civilians (the greater statistical casualties of recent wars). The Muslim suicide bomber is another version of the same plot line, and the zionist version of Judaism also seems to take impunity for granted when it comes to the foul treatment of their Palestinian "neighbors."
The understanding of karma puts into pragmatic practice the teaching that truly "whatsoever you do unto other will be done unto you." Maybe it's selfish, but it makes sense to me to treat others with kindness and respect, or otherwise walk away.
The scar tissue the US has created for itself, and around the world cannot NOT rebound back at us. It's very painful to watch this week's weather events and the vast suffering these have given rise to. Asia brought the world Buddhism (I believe) because in facing nature's gruesome calamities the belief that "god" could deliver such pain to children seemed impossible. Thus a less personal concept of a LIFE STREAM everlasting that spawns all kinds of creatures made more metaphysical sense.
We can never know established answers for that which must remain as mystery. What counts is do our beliefs make us better persons, or give us a false license to dehumanize others in the name of some deity?
This is what our government is doing
http://www.counterpunch.org/rosen05132008.html
Don't even think the Dems are not complicit.
WHere is the impeachment, Madam Pelosi - and yes, John Conyers (remember him)?
Why has W, the son of a Bush, not been impeached, and prosecuted for war crimes?
Because both parties are complicit and because my fellow Americans are either too ignorant to understand what's happening (and as such continue supporting one of the two parties), or they outright support what our government is doing.
Either way, I am not one of them.
Or they will figure out that the people who used them were no better than the people who abused them.
Please Mr. Custer, I don't wanna go
Hey, Mr. Custer, please don't make me go
I had a dream last night about the comin' fight
I think that everything I have to say about the topic was said by Dallaire today.
Canada losing moral standing over treatment of Omar Khadr: Dallaire
"The minute you start playing with human rights, with conventions, with civil liberties in order to say you are doing it to protect yourself … you are no better than the guy who doesn't believe in them at all," he said.
"We are slipping down the slope of going down that same route." ...
"Is it your testimony that al-Qaeda strapping up a 14-year-old girl with Down Syndrome and sending her into a pet market to be remotely detonated is the moral equivalent to Canada's not making extraordinary political efforts for a transfer of Omar Khadr to this country?" asked Kenney.
"If you want a black and white [response] … I am only too prepared to give it to you: absolutely," said Dallaire. "You are either with the law or you are against the law. You're either a child soldier or you're not. You're either guilty or you're not."
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2008/05/13/dallaire-khadr.html
. 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."
That about sums it up exactly doesn't it. I doubt anyone who was kidnapped by the United States, flown to Guantanamo, tortured, mistreated and abused, witnessing mistreatment and abuse of fellow human beings, would come away from that 'loving America'... ANYONE would come away hating the Americans and what they stand for. Is it any surprise that they'd want vengeance?
Incitement of Islamic terrorism has a long history in the US. It is clearly a strategy here, just like it is for Israel.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_chris_ri_080513_bring_bush_to_justic.htm
Wrong! Guantánamo Bay has been an overwhelming success according to US Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, who tells us that "the recidivism rate ... those who return to the battlefield, is probably somewhere between 5 and 10 percent -- maybe 6, 7 percent, something like that." In contrast, two US DOJ studies that come closest to providing "national" recidivism rates for the United States indicate that over two-thirds (67.5%) of prisoners released from US jails were rearrested within three years.
CONCLUSION: The methodologies of the "War on Terror" should be applied to a parallel "War on Crime" within the US itself.
COROLLARY 1: - All Americans who may, at any time, be suspected of engaging in any type of activity that the state may deem to be criminal behaviour should be locked away indefinitely pending a "tribunal" hearing to determine their guilt based on "confessions" obtained by "enhanced interrogation" methods.
COROLLARY 2: - The citzenry of the United States should be offered monetary rewards (the local equivalent of many times the average annual wage) for denouncing their neighbors as being worthy of suspicion by the state's enforcement apparatus.
When I first heard of the alleged "ex-Guantanamo suicide bomber", I expected the corrupt and depraved US leadership, civilian and military, to spin this circumstance as a justification for the extra-legal and egregiously immoral detention of Middle Eastern citizens in Gitmo and elsewhere.
This rationalization will be accepted and echoed by credulous, weak-witted wingnut True Believers lacking necessary critical thinking skills to perceive that this argument reverses cause and effect.
Far from "proving" that the US was "right" to incarcerate such men in the first place, this event (if true) exemplifies what happens to a person's state of mind when he is kidnapped without due process by military authorities and ruthlessly imprisoned indefinitely under execrable conditions.
In short, the criminal invaders from "The Coalition of the Willing" cast a wide dragnet and incarcerated thousands in Gitmo and Iraq who may or may not have been "enemies" of the US. But those who are fortunate enough to escape the belly of this tiger the US is holding by the tail are certainly enemies of the US, thanks to our legendary hospitality.
After all, as the bigoted architects of our military adventures are wont to remind us, your Basic Muslim Mind isn't capable of the bonhomie and good-sportsmanship we Amerikans possess. Those ingrates will go away mad, in spite of all of the fresh fruit and two kinds of chicken their keepers plied them with over the long months! So naturally one might expect Hard Feelings.
I think this is a BS sell from the Pentagon to justify keeping the Guantanamo concentration camp open. Abdallah Salih al-Ajmi didn't 'blow himself up'. (If he existed at all) Show me a source from Al-Jazeera or from a country aside from US or England regarding this 'angry terrorist' and I'll believe it.
We always create our enemies. Always. We need them like we need "economic growth forever". Like infinite growth, without "enemies" America would collapse upon itself. We manufacture enemies at home (Black Nationalists, AIM, MLK et al). We make them abroad, like mujahadin in '88-'89. Gotta have'em, always will. Nobody is going to change any of it. It's who we are. We are the conquering power, the anointed ones of the flat-earth blood god Yahweh. Can't do it without enemies.
If you torture, starve, beat, discriminate against, kill their children of any people long enough they will turn on you just like any other animal would.
I doubt very much that the use of torture in Guantanamo Bay is in order to extract information - as GM points out, whatever a tortured suspect says is clearly highly unreliable. There are simply better ways of acquiring information than torturing people. Rather, I suspect that torture is used to send a message to enemies and potential enemies, and perhaps even critics: don't fuck with me; I am prepared to do terrible things to get my way. Noam Chomsky describes this as "maintaining credibility". The question is, given that the use of torture (even the perceived use) will undoubtedly radicalize some members of the "enemy" population, and thus result in greater risk to US and western citizens, what shred of credibility can the Bush-Cheney administration still claim?
Any and every citizen of the US, male, female, Republican, Democrat, whatever - would admit to being a terrorist under torture. You would. I would. Your mom would. Shall we commence preemptive self-prosecution now?
I guess this is what Rev. Wright meant about America's chickens coming home to roost...