A global Gulag
For You
By Jonathan Steele
14 January, 2005
The
Guardian
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
© Guardian
Newspapers Limited 2005