[North-NV-Greens] Fwd: A global gulag to hide the war on terror's dirty secrets

Sat Jan 15 22:13:40 PST 2005

>
>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
>
>Jonathan Steele
>Friday January 14, 2005
>The Guardian
><http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1390317,00.html>
>
>The promise of imminent release for four British
>detainees held at the notorious US prison at Guant·namo
>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.
>
>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.
>
>Since its establishment after 9/11, the US camp for
>foreigners at Guant·namo 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.
>
>The Guant·namo 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.
>
>The 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 Guant·namo
>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.
>
>j.steele at guardian.co.uk
>_______________________________________________________
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-- 
Paul Etxeberri

"Forests precede civilizations and deserts follow"   ---Chateaubriand