Starvation, Suicide, Torture, Not Terrorism, Is the Legacy of Guantanamo

From almost the moment that Camp X-Ray opened, prisoners embarked on hunger strikes as the only means available to protest about the conditions of their detention: specifically, their day-to-day treatment, the treatment of the Koran, and the crushing uncertainty of their fate, as they remained imprisoned without charge and without trial, with the ever-present possibility that they would be held for the rest of their lives.

Andy Worthington has released the results of an important investigation he undertook on treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo, Guantanamo’s Hidden History: Shocking Statistics Of Starvation (his article introducing it is here).

Worthington shows how the ban on pictures of Guantanamo prisoners, many of them "from January 2002, when the prison opened, until February 2007, when these particular records came to an end, one in ten of the total population — 80 prisoners in total — weighed, at some point, less than 112 pounds (eight stone, or 50 kg), and 20 of these prisoners weighed less than 98 pounds (seven stone, or 44 kg)." Andy believes that if the world had clear evidence of the pain and suffering these men have endured by their illegal imprisonment and torture, the calls to shut down Gitmo would have prevailed long ago. -- It's hard to say, the world has become so brutalized, the American population so numbed. But I think Worthington makes a powerful point.

The report comes on the heels of the first death at the prison camp under President Obama's watch:

A military statement said 31-year-old Muhammad Ahmad Abdallah Salih, also known as Al Hanashi, "died of an apparent suicide" on Monday night, but did not say specifically how he died.

Human rights groups condemned the death and said it underlined the need to end the system of "indefinite detention" at the prison camp that opened in 2002 under the Bush administration to hold terrorism suspects after the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States that killed 3,000 people.

Salih's death comes two years after the death of Saudi prisoner and another hunger-striker, Abdul Rahman al-Amri.

Salih's death coincides also with the retraction by the New York Times of their “1 In 7 Detainees Rejoined Jihad, Pentagon Finds” article, which fueled the right-wing assertion that closing Guantanamo or freeing prisoners, even sending them to trial in the U.S., would somehow be like sending legions of terrorists to join anti-American jihad. Even though the recidivism rate from Guantanamo is something closer to 4% (not 14%), the Times didn't get around to setting the story straight until last week.

Of course the whole Pentagon study upon which the Times reporter relied is bogus. As Bill Van Auken noted the other day, that in an earlier, similar study by the Pentagon "eight of the 15 described as resuming terrorism were accused of nothing more than condemning their treatment at Guantánamo, an act that the Pentagon portrayed as terrorist propaganda."

Also included were five Uighurs -— ethnic Chinese Muslims -— who were released in 2006 after three years in Guantánamo and sent to a refugee camp in Albania. The Pentagon itself acknowledged that they had been improperly classified as "enemy combatants" and there is no evidence whatsoever that they engaged in terrorist activity either before or after their incarceration at Guantánamo. The reason they were included among those accused of carrying out "anti-coalition militant activity" is that one of them wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times urging the US Congress to protect habeas corpus.

Btw, the follow-up to the tragicomedy of the NY Times semi-retraction concers the Uighurs, with a report that Obama is paying the small South Seas island country Palau $200 million dollars to settle these stateless people. While the Uighurs settle on their putative St. Helena, I suppose the citizens of Peoria (symbolically speaking) can sleep better in their beds tonight.

Beyond this latest circus, the only image left from the U.S. experiment of opening a gulag at Guantanamo is one of tragedy and human misery. If Obama gets his way, it will be closed. But the show will only move even further off-shore, to Bagram prison in Afghanistan, or other foreign prisons, where now the U.S. says it will send more and more of its "War on Terror" prisoners -- just like "the good old days," as Alfred McCoy points out in an excellent article over at TomDispatch, "Confronting the CIA's Mind Maze":

In retrospect, it may become ever more apparent that the real aberration of the Bush years lay not in torture policies per se, but in the President's order that the CIA should operate its own torture prisons. The advantage of the bipartisan torture consensus of the Cold War era was, of course, that it did a remarkably good job most of the time of insulating Washington from the taint of torture, which was sometimes remarkably widely practiced.

There are already some clear signs of a policy shift in this direction in the Obama era. Since mid-2008, U.S. intelligence has captured a half-dozen al-Qaeda suspects and, instead of shipping them to Guantanamo or to CIA secret prisons, has had them interrogated by allied Middle Eastern intelligence agencies. Showing that this policy is again bipartisan, Obama's new CIA director Leon Panetta announced that the Agency would continue to engage in the rendition of terror suspects to allies like Libya, Pakistan, or Saudi Arabia where we can, as he put it, "rely on diplomatic assurances of good treatment." Showing the quality of such treatment, Time magazine reported on May 24th that Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, who famously confessed under torture that Saddam Hussein had provided al-Qaeda with chemical weapons and later admitted his lie to Senate investigators, had committed "suicide" in a Libyan cell....

This time around, however, a long-distance torture policy may not provide the same insulation as in the past for Washington. Any retreat into torture by remote-control is, in fact, only likely to produce the next scandal that will do yet more damage to America's international standing.

D.C. Court: No Judicial Appeal on Torture Transfer for Uighurs, Other Gitmo "Detainees"

Center for Constitutional Rights reports today that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia overruled a district court ruling, in Kiyemba et al. v. Barack Obama (PDF), that prisoners at Guantanamo must get 30 days notice of any pending transfer to another nation. The Court said that the judiciary cannot "second-guess" the Executive regarding its assertion that prisoners would not be transferred to a country that would torture them.

According to the ruling, the decision arose from the Uighurs case, which has been much in the news in past months, as the U.S. has already said these prisoners are not "enemy combatants", and are not being charged with any crime (even as they remain at Guantanamo, where they have been held for over seven years, many of them in windowless cells 22 hours a day). The Circuit Court notes:

Nine Uighurs held at Guantanamo Bay, in order to challenge their detention, petitioned the district court for a writ of habeas corpus. Asserting that they feared being transferred to a country where they might be tortured or further detained, they also sought interim relief requiring the Government to provide 30 days’ notice to the district court and to counsel before transferring them from Guantanamo.

CCR attorney, Emi MacLean, said in a press release today:

Today, the court has abdicated its role in safeguarding individuals in U.S. custody from transfers to torture.

Egregiously, the court has done so based upon nothing more than the Executive’s promise not to send an individual to a place where he will be tortured. In the long ugly history of U.S. detention at Guantánamo, the Executive has made repeated hollow promises that “we do not torture.” “Trust the President” is not enough in 2009 to prevent U.S. complicity in torture and to protect an individual’s rights.

Despite its contention that the judiciary has no role in determining the safety of prisoners transferred out of custody, Circuit Judge Ginsbug said the majority decision was based on the Munaf v. Geren Supreme Court decision last year. Ginsberg quickly dismissed the argument regarding release to torture (emphasis added).

Like the detainees here, the petitioners in Munaf asked the district court to enjoin their transfer because they feared they would be tortured in the recipient country. The Court recognized the petitioners’ fear of torture was “of course a matter of serious concern,” but held “in the present context that concern is to be addressed by the political branches, not the judiciary.” Id. at 2225. The context to which the Court referred was one in which – as here – the record documents the policy of the United States not to transfer a detainee to a country where he is likely to be tortured. Id. at 2226. Indeed, as the present record shows, the Government does everything in its power to determine whether a particular country is likely to torture a particular detainee. Decl. of Pierre-Richard Prosper, United States Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues ¶¶ 4, 7-8, Mar. 8, 2005.

What better evidence could one ask for than the declaration (which one can read here) of Bush and Cheney's War Crimes Ambassador -- not! Pierre-Richard Prosper was a Bush flunky who most recently was a supporter of Mitt Romney, who famously announced during the last election, "My view is we ought to double Guantanamo.".

Moreover, the United States has conducted a program of extraordinary rendition when it routinely sent prisoners to other countries to be tortured, with collaboration from both United Kingdom and U.S. intelligence officers.

CCR presents another instance of U.S. motives in its transfer policies:

CCR’s client Abdul Ra’ouf Qassim was told he could leave Guantánamo years ago. Yet he is Libyan and had nowhere safe to go. The U.S. government twice tried to transfer him to Libya where he would have disappeared into a Libyan jail and been subjected to torture. It was only the court’s intervention which prevented Abdul Ra’ouf’s disappearance.

Like many other Guantánamo detainees, Abdul Ra’ouf has made the difficult “choice” to remain imprisoned in Guantánamo rather than face persecution or torture in his home country because his fear was so strong. He has reached out to the Swiss government to come to his aid and allow him to restart his life.

Writing in partial dissent in the Kiyemba decision, Circuit Judge Griffiths noted that the prisoners had no guarantee under current law and decision that they would not be transferred to another state where, as at Guantanamo, they would be held in "indefinite detention." This would go against the Supreme Court ruling in Boumediene. (Note: this is the same court whose ruling about habeas rights of Guantanamo prisoners was overruled by SCOTUS in Boumediene.)

From the Judge's dissent:

The stakes of unlawful custody, which led the Court in Boumediene to extend habeas protections to the detainees in the first place, are no higher than the stakes of unlawful transfer. Indeed, because an unlawful transfer will deny the detainees any prospect of judicial relief, protecting their habeas rights in this context is vital.

It is significant that the government has submitted sworn declarations assuring the court that any transfer will result in release from U.S. authority. If the government’s representations are accurate, each transfer will be lawful, for in habeas the only relevant judicial inquiry about a transfer is whether it will result in continued detention on behalf of the United States in a place where the writ does not run. But as we recently noted in another case involving the scope of habeas protections for detainees at Guantanamo Bay, a “naked declaration cannot simply resolve the issue.” Al-Odah v. United States....

CCR's MacLean put today's ruling into perspective (emphasis added):

Today’s decision creates a crisis for the sixty men in Guantánamo who cannot return to their home countries and seek humanitarian protection. It is urgent that countries intervene to provide safe haven for these men. Guantánamo can no longer be seen as purely a U.S. problem. It is an international dilemma demanding an international solution. Closing Guantánamo cannot result in disappearing people into countries where they fear torture or persecution. Guantánamo detainees seeking safe haven are from Algeria, Azerbaijan, China, Libya, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Russia, Syria, Tajikistan, Tunisia, and Uzbekistan.

The past Administration created a lawless zone that damaged our Nation’s reputation and harmed countless lives, and the new Administration promised to return the United States to the rule of law. If President Obama intends to close Guantanamo legally and humanely, he must commit to not transfer people to torture — as a matter of law, not hollow promises.

The blunt truth is that the United States is a torturing country. Covering up for torture, by refusing to prosecute malefactors, as required by the Geneva Conventions, guarantees that the torture apparatus will remain intact. The veil of secrecy thrown over ongoing U.S. and CIA interrogations at Bagram also argues that torture is still going on, despite promises by President Obama. So, too, is the convergent evidence from stated policy of continuing the rendition program, and from the support given to the interrogation guidelines in the current Army Field Manual, which includes abusive use of solitary confinement, sleep deprivation, partial sensory deprivation, use of drugs, manipulation of fears, no ban on stress positions, etc.

There are those -- and they may be in the majority, I don't know -- who believe that taking on the U.S. government over its torture policies would be impolitic, and in any case can wait until other, more pressing business over, say, the economy, is taken care of. This is a terrible mistake, for which all of us will pay, and not least enlisted men and women in the United States military, who will find themselves fair game for the enemy, who have every reason to believe that U.S. torture continues, and that the torturers are above punishment or control. To date, not one captured soldier has been returned alive in Iraq since the Abu Ghraib scandal broke.

Battle Over Habeas -- Torture Inc. Comes to America

The decision today by the D.C. Court of Appeals to reverse Judge Ricardo Urbina's decision yesterday to release 17 Uighur Muslim prisoners held indefinitely at Guantanamo Naval Base prison can best be understood in the light of an important related news story.

Over at Associated Press, Pamela Hess has an exclusive regarding revelations around the torture of U.S. citizens and residents at the U.S. naval brigs at Charleston, South Carolina and Norfolk, Virginia. According to documents obtained via FOIA by the ACLU, the Pentagon was warned that a prisoner in the naval brig, Yaser Hamdi, "was being driven nearly insane by months of punishing isolation and sensory deprivation." Hamdi was a U.S. citizen, as were two other prisoners held incommunicado, tortured, and interrogated by the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency officials. (Hamdi renounced his U.S. citizenship as a condition of his release from custody.)

The other prisoners held were Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen, and Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, a legal resident. Both are still in custody: Padilla convicted of supporting terrorism, and al-Marri still appealing his detention.

What the ACLU documents reveal is that military facilities on U.S. soil adopted the Standard Operating Procedure at Guantanamo prison, with its emphasis on isolation, painful stress positions, sleep deprivation, threats, and indefinite detention, among other indignities and forms of psychological torture.

As has so often been the case, some members of the military blanched at being drawn into Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld's Torture Inc. Per the AP story:

The documents show that some officials at the Charleston brig were deeply skeptical about the mandate that Guantanamo rules should apply in the United States, a decision made by the defense secretary's office, according to the documents.

"You have every right to question the 'lash-up' between GTMO and Charleston — it was the first thing I ask (sic) about a year ago when I checked on board," wrote one official to another in 2006. "In a nutshell, they gave the Charleston detainee mission to (Joint Forces Command) who promptly gave it to (Fleet Forces Command) with a 'lots of luck' and nothing else."

One "frustrated officer" wrote to unnamed government officials in June 2003 that replicating the Gitmo SOP at the naval brig actually made conditions worse there than at Guantanamo because of the near-total isolation of the brig detainees from any other prisoners. (One wonders, if the fact they were legal U.S. citizens or residents, held as "enemy combatants" in total disregard of their constitutional rights, may have also contributed to their complete sense of hopelessness and breakdown.)

Jonathan Freiman, an attorney with the Lowenstein Clinic at Yale, described the importance of the new revelations:

"The application of Guantánamo protocols on U.S. soil is incredibly significant and indicates how far the administration has gone in terms of suspending the law.... The Bush administration has long argued that detainees held in Guantánamo are not entitled to any constitutional protections – an argument the Supreme Court has recently rejected. But this is not even Guantánamo – we are talking about creating prisons beyond the law right here in America."

Legal Battle Over Habeas Corpus

The administration was "deeply concerned" about the decision the other day by Judge Urbina to release the Uighurs. Not because it believes the Uighurs are "enemy combatants" any more. (Smintheus over at Never In Our Names has written an excellent article on the history of the Uighurs case.) The New York Times reports (emphasis added):

The White House press secretary, Dana Perino, said the administration was “deeply concerned by, and strongly disagrees with” the decision. She added that the ruling, “if allowed to stand, could be used as precedent for other detainees held at Guantánamo Bay, including sworn enemies of the United States suspected of planning the attacks of 9/11, who may also seek release into our country.”

The importance to the government of maintaining the suspension of habeas corpus -- the right of a prisoner to seek legal redress for his or her imprisonment, and to demand what charges under which they are held -- is rarely discussed in terms of its importance to the U.S. torture protocols. The use of isolation and the inculcation of helplessness and fear is key to the "success" of the U.S. version of psychological torture. I elaborated on this last August when discussing the verdict in the Hamdan military commission trial:

Demonstrating omnipotence and total control, by the way, is why the military, CIA and Bush are so insistent in denying detainee rights, especially habeas corpus. As Jane Mayer reports in her new book, The Dark Side, administration stalwarts Dick Cheney and David Addington were incensed by 2004 Supreme Court rulings granting "enemy combatants" due process rights, such as having an attorney, or challenging their detention in court, convinced by "CIA arguments that any outside contact might jeopardize the psychological control necessary to interrogate terror suspects" (p. 302, emphasis added).

Bringing Bush to Runnymede

Bush's lackey attorney general, Mukasey, had a spokesman express the pleasure the government took in the DC courts issuance of a temporary stay in Urbina's decision. When making his decision, Judge Urbina had said, denying the executive branch had the right to suspend the centuries-long practice of habeas corpus, "I think the moment has arrived for the court to shine the light of constitutionality on the reasons for detention."

It's hard to believe the DC court thought it had any leg to stand on, given that the Supreme Court last June ruled unconstitutional the provision of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 that suspended the use of habeas corpus by detainees in Bush's "war on terror." Passage of the MCA is one of the great shames of this nation. The bill was passed with the support of presidential candidate John McCain, who voted for it despite the fact it endorsed torture and suspension of habeas corpus. Repeal of this law should be one of the first priorities of the next Congress. The new ACLU documents, revealing how torture treatment abroad migrated to the United States, and then its use on U.S. citizens, demonstrate how slippery is the slope that leads from so-called national security exigency to the destruction of basic domestic civil liberties.

Here's the link to the Supreme Court decision -- BOUMEDIENE ET AL. v. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, ET AL. -- provided here for befuddled appeals court judges. Speaking for the majority, Justice Kennedy wrote:

Security depends upon a sophisticated intelligence apparatus and the ability of our Armed Forces to act and to interdict. There are further considerations, however. Security subsists, too, in fidelity to freedom’s first principles. Chief among these are freedom from arbitrary and unlawful restraint and the personal liberty that is secured by adherence to the separation of powers. It is from these principles that the judicial authority to consider petitions for habeas corpus relief derives....

"Chief among these..." The stay of Urbina's decision is a setback, but the tide is turning against Torture Inc. Their business is widely exposed as a barbaric and reprehensible practice, and the day is coming when its proponents and practitioners will themselves have to stand before the bar of justice to answer for their crimes against humanity, against freedom, and against democracy.

"Torturing Democracy"

Speaking of democracy... an award-winning documentary maker, Sherry Jones, has made a new documentary that examines America's detention and interrogation practices in the "war on terror." Torturing Democracy, premiers Thursday, October 16 at 9 p.m. on Thirteen/WNET. It will also be available to view -- free -- online at torturingdemocracy.org, a website the producers are running in tandem with the amazing folks at National Security Archive (George Washington University).

The documentary details how the secret U.S. military interrogation program - "Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape" - or SERE - became the basis for many of the harshest methods used in interrogating prisoners in U.S custody. Besides the streaming of the film, the website will include a timeline of key events; extended interviews; and the memos, legal opinions and other documents featured in the film.

Visiting the site and viewing the professionally made film is highly recommended.