Dr Aafia Siddiqui – The Prisoner 650

By Andy Worthington
On Sunday 11 January, just nine days before the administration of George W. Bush hands over the reins of power to Barack Obama, the “War on Terror” prison at Guantánamo — perhaps the most bleakly iconic symbol of the outgoing administration’s hubris — marks its seventh anniversary.

A lawless experiment

The facts about the prison make for grim reading. A lawless experiment in arbitrary detention and coercive interrogations, Guantánamo was deliberately chosen as the location for the prison because it was presumed to be beyond the reach of the US courts.

The authorities decided that they needed complete freedom to interrogate the prisoners as they saw fit, even though they did not know who they actually had in their custody. The warnings that emerged from the mouths of President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld in the days and weeks following the opening of Guantánamo — in which they described the prisoners as “the worst of the worst,” who were “among the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth”  — were in fact hollow rhetoric.

As a study of Pentagon documents by the Seton Hall Law School demonstrated (PDF) — and as I can confirm from my own research for The Guantánamo Files — at least 86 percent of the prisoners were captured not by US forces, but by their Afghan and Pakistani allies, at a time when bounty payments for “al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects,” averaging $5000 a head, were widespread, and the US authorities compounded the baleful effects of this essentially indiscriminate dragnet by refusing to grant the prisoners battlefield tribunals under Article 5 of the Geneva Conventions. Held close to the time and place of capture, these had been implemented in every US war since Vietnam, and allowed witnesses to come forward to help the military separate combatants from civilians caught up in the fog of war.

Further compounding these omissions, those in overall charge of the lists of prisoners held for processing at prisons in Kandahar and Bagram (senior figures from the Pentagon, the military and the intelligence services, who were based in Kuwait) ordered that ever Arab who came into US hands was to be transferred to Guantánamo. As a result, not a single prisoner was ever adequately screened to ascertain if they actually constituted a threat to the US, or were innocent men seized by mistake, but the Bush administration insisted that they were all “enemy combatants” without rights, and deliberately stripped them of the protections of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit “cruel or inhuman treatment,” to facilitate their interrogation.

Approving torture

The true horror of Guantánamo — and, it should be noted, of the “War on Terror” detention policies in general — became apparent when the administration responded to the meagre flow of intelligence from the Guantánamo prisoners by deciding that this was because they had been trained to resist interrogation by al-Qaeda, and not because, as innocent men and simple Taliban recruits, they had no intelligence to offer. As a highly critical Senate Armed Services Committee inquiry made clear last month (PDF), the authorities’ response was to find new ways to “break” the prisoners psychologically, which they did by reverse engineering Chinese torture techniques taught in US military schools to train American personnel to resist interrogation if captured.

These techniques, known by the acronym SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape), include “stripping detainees of their clothing, placing them in stress positions, putting hoods over their heads, disrupting their sleep, treating them like animals, subjecting them to loud music and flashing lights, and exposing them to extreme temperatures.” In some circumstances, they also include waterboarding, a notorious torture technique, which involves controlled drowning.

The members of the Senate Committee were outraged that techniques that are illegal under the Geneva Conventions and the UN Convention Against Torture, and that are designed to enable US personnel to produce false confessions, formed the basis of the Bush administration’s approach to intelligence gathering in the “War on Terror,” but the policy’s many critics (including the FBI, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, and the Defense Department’s own Criminal Investigative Task Force) were brushed aside.

Moreover, when the administration felt that even harsher techniques were required for a smaller number of prisoners regarded as particularly significant (both in Guantánamo and in secret prisons established by the CIA), lawyers close to Vice President Dick Cheney — led by David Addington, Cheney’s former legal counsel, and now his chief of staff — attempted to redefine torture as the infliction of pain “equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death,” as a replacement for its definition under the UN Convention Against Torture, to which the US is a signatory, in which torture is correctly recognized as “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person.”

In terms of producing “actionable intelligence,” of course, the administration’s policy was an unmitigated disaster, as even the most cursory study of the history of torture reveals that it yields inaccurate information, and in Guantánamo this steady flow of coerced falsehoods was supplemented by further lies produced by bribery, as other prisoners took advantage of the promise of better living conditions to tell lies about their fellow inmates. It was, however, sufficient for the administration to claim to the world that the prison was full of dangerous “enemy combatants,” who could be held without charge or trial until the end of a “War on Terror” that the government itself admitted may last for generations.

Guantánamo now

For the prisoners still held at Guantánamo — 248 out of a total of 779 — conditions have improved to the extent that the SERE-derived torture techniques came to an end in the summer of 2004, when the US Supreme Court granted the prisoners habeas corpus rights (the right to challenge the basis of their detention before an impartial judge), and lawyers were finally allowed access to the prison. In other ways, however, Guantánamo remains an affront to all notions of decency.

The majority of the prisoners are now held in almost complete isolation in state-of-the-art cellblocks modelled on maximum-security prisons on the US mainland, their opportunities to socialize or indulge in any of the leisure activities that convicted criminals on the mainland take for granted remain minimal or non-existent, and even the most minor infringements of the prison’s rules are punished with brutal assaults by armoured response teams, and imprisonment –- for a month or more –- in total solitary confinement.

In addition, those who embark on hunger strikes as their only means of protesting their conditions of confinement are force-fed against their will, an experience that is both horribly painful and illegal. Disturbingly, the latest reports indicate that 30 prisoners are currently on hunger strike, complaining about the fact that they remain imprisoned without charge or trial while Salim Hamdan, a driver for Osama bin Laden who was convicted of providing material support for terrorism after a trial by Military Commission last summer, was repatriated in November to serve out the last month of his sentence.

SOURCE: freedetainees.org