A global gulag to hide the war on terror's dirty secrets

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Fri, 14 Jan 2005 12:36:48 -0500 (EST)

A global gulag to hide the war on terror's dirty secrets

 

 

 

Bush is now thinking of building jails abroad to hold suspects for life

 

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A global gulag to hide the war on terror's dirty secrets

Jonathan Steele

Friday January 14, 2005

 

http://mparent7777.blog-city.com/read/1007191.htm

 

The promise of imminent release for four British detainees held at the

notorious US prison at Guantánamo Bay is obviously welcome, but it is

only a tiny exception in the surge of bad news from the Bush team on

the human rights front. The first few days of the new year have

produced two shocking exposures already. Since its establishment after

9/11, the US camp for foreigners at Guantánamo Bay has become a beacon

of unfreedom, a kind of grisly competitor to the Statue of Liberty in

the shopfront of authentic American images. The trickle of releases of

prisoners from its cages has brought direct testimony of the horrors

which go on there. So it is no wonder that the Bush administration

would like to find less visible places to hold prisoners, and keep

them there for ever so that they cannot tell the world.

 

One is the revelation that the administration sees the US not just as

a self-appointed global policeman, but also as the world's prison

warder. It is thinking of building jails in foreign countries, mainly

ones with grim human rights records, to which it can secretly transfer

detainees (unconvicted by any court) for the rest of their lives - a

kind of global gulag beyond the scrutiny of the International

Committee of the Red Cross, or any other independent observers or lawyers.

 

The other horror is the light shone on the views of Alberto Gonzales,

the White House nominee to be the chief law officer, the attorney

general. At his Senate confirmation hearings last week he was revealed

to be a man who not only refuses to rule out torture under any

circumstances but also, in his capacity as White House counsel over

the past few years, chaired several meetings at which specific

interrogation techniques were discussed. As Edward Kennedy pointed

out, and Gonzales did not deny, they included the threat of burial

alive and water-boarding, under which the detainee is strapped to a

board, forcibly pushed under water, wrapped in a wet towel, and made

to believe he could drown.

 

The Guantánamo prisoners are held by the department of defence, but

under the new scheme most foreign detainees are expected to be in the

hands of the CIA, which submits to less congressional scrutiny and

offers the Red Cross no access. They include hundreds of people who

have been arrested in recent weeks in Falluja and other Iraqi cities.

According to the Washington Post, which broke the story last week, one

proposal is to have the US build new prisons in Afghanistan, Saudi

Arabia and Yemen. Officials of those countries would run the prisons,

and would have to allow the state department to " monitor human rights

compliance " .

 

It is a laughable proposition, since the whole purpose of the exercise

is to minimise scrutiny. CIA agents would have the right to question

the detainees, with or without the aid of foreign interrogators, as

they already do at other off-limits prisons at Bagram air base in

Afghanistan, on ships at sea, in Jordan and Egypt, and at Diego Garcia.

T

he US policy of lending detainees to other countries' jailers and

torturers, known as " rendition " , began during the " war on drugs " as a

way of arresting alleged Latin American narco-barons and softening

them up for trial in the US. It has expanded enormously under the " war

on terror " . As one CIA officer told the Washington Post, " the whole

idea has become a corruption of renditions. It's not rendering to

justice. It's kidnapping. "

 

He could have added that it's kidnapping for life. A senior US

official told the New York Times last week that three-quarters of the

550 prisoners at Guantánamo Bay no longer have any intelligence of

value. But they will not be released out of concern that they pose a

continuing threat to the US. " You're basically keeping them off the

battlefield, and, unfortunately in the war on terrorism, the

battlefield is everywhere, " he said.

 

Since the attack on Falluja, the US holds 325 non-Iraqis in custody,

many of them Syrians and Saudis. Questioned by the Senate's judiciary

committee, Gonzales said that the justice depart ment believes that

non-Iraqis captured in Iraq are not protected by the Geneva

conventions, which prevent prisoners being transferred out of the

country in which they are held.

 

It was revealed last year that Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence

secretary, had approved the secret holding of " ghost detainees " in

Iraq. They were kept off the registers that were shown to the Red

Cross and therefore lost the chance of being visited or having other

rights. Now many new prisoners will be candidates for a deeper

category of invisibility by being sent for detention in secret

locations abroad.

 

While making bland statements during his Senate appearance that he

found torture abhorrent, Gonzales gave no clear assurances that its

practice would stop. As White House counsel he approved an

administration memorandum against torture in August 2002 which was so

narrow that it appeared to define it only as treatment that led to

" dying under torment " . In other words, if a victim survived, he could

not have been tortured.

 

The memo also claimed that torture only occurs when the intent is to

cause pain. If pain is intentionally used to gain information or a

confession, that is not torture. Thanks to this narrow definition of

what is forbidden, US officials have been systematically using

inhumane treatment on prisoners - far beyond the few so-called bad

apples exposed by the photographs from Abu Ghraib - while saying it

did not amount to torture.

 

A few days before Gonzales's Senate hearings, the justice department

hastily rewrote the memo so that a wider category of techniques are

defined as torture, and thereby prohibited. But at the hearings

Gonzales refused to give a clear negative answer to the question

whether, in his view, American troops or interrogators could legally

engage in torture under any circumstances.

 

One of the glories of the hearings was the appearance of Douglas

Johnson, director of the Centre for Victims of Torture. He argued that

the new memo fails to give clear guidance on what the appropriate

standards for interrogation and detention are. He also pointed out

that torture does not yield reliable information and corrupts its

perpetrators.

 

Psychological torture was more damaging than physical torture, he

said. Interviews with victims show that depression and recurrent

nightmares decades later more often relate to memories of mock

executions (of the " water-boarding " type) and scenarios of humiliation

than to actual physical abuse.

 

That these points might have impressed the man Bush wants to have as

America's top law officer is not to be expected. Nor does anyone in

Washington expect the Senate to refuse to confirm him for the job.

Happy New War on Terror 2005.

 

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MARC PARENT

 

 

Political tags—such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist,

fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth—are never basic criteria.

The human race divides politically into those who want people to be

controlled and those who have no such desire.

 

- Robert A Heinlein

 

 

 

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