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Guantanamo crimes made world less safe
Comment
George Monbiot
WHEN we learned last week that Abdallah Salih Al-Ajmi had blown
himself up in Mosul in northern Iraq, the US government presented
this as a vindication of its policies. Al-Ajmi was a former inmate
of the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay. The Pentagon says his
attack on Iraqi soldiers shows both that it was right to have
detained him and that it is dangerous ever to release the camp’s
prisoners. On the contrary, it shows how dangerous it was to put
them there in the first place.
Al-Ajmi, according to the Pentagon, was one of at least 30 former
Guantanamo detainees who have “taken part in anti-coalition militant
activities after leaving US detention”. Given that the majority of
the inmates appear to have been innocent of such crimes before they
were detained, that’s one hell of a recidivism rate. In reality, it
turns out that “anti-coalition militant activities” include talking
to the media about their captivity. The Pentagon lists the Tipton
Three in its catalogue of recidivists, on the grounds that they
collaborated with Michael Winterbottom’s film The Road to Guantanamo.
But it also names seven former prisoners, aside from Al-Ajmi, who
have fought with the Taleban or Chechen rebels, kidnapped foreigners
or planted bombs after their release. One of two conclusions can be
drawn from this evidence, and neither reflects well on the US
government.
The first is that, as the Pentagon claims, these men “successfully
lied to US officials, sometimes for over three years”. The US
government’s intelligence gathering and questioning were
ineffective, and people who would otherwise have been identified as
terrorists or resistance fighters were allowed to walk free, despite
years of intense and often brutal interrogation. Should this be
surprising? Without a presumption of innocence, without charges,
representation, trials, or due process of any kind, there is no
reliable means of determining whether or not a man is guilty. The
abuses at Guantanamo not only deny justice to the inmates, they also
deny justice to the world.
Al-Ajmi, the authorities say, initially confessed in the prison camp
to deserting the Kuwaiti Army to join the jihad in Afghanistan. He
admitted that he fought with Taleban forces against the Northern
Alliance. He later retracted this confession, which had been made
“under pressure and threats”. When the Americans released him from
Guantanamo, they handed him over to the Kuwaiti government for
trial, but without the admissible evidence required to convict him.
Among his defenses was that neither he nor his interrogators had
signed his supposed testimony. The Kuwaiti courts, without reliable
evidence to the contrary, found him innocent.
All evidence obtained in Guantanamo, and in the CIA’s other
detention centers and secret prisons, is by definition unreliable,
because it is extracted with the help of coercion and torture.
Torture is notorious for producing false confessions, as people will
say anything to make it stop. Both official accounts and the
testimonies of former detainees show that a wide range of coercive
techniques — devised or approved at the highest levels in Washington
— have been used to make inmates tell the questioners what they want
to hear.
In his book Torture Team, Philippe Sands describes the treatment of
Mohammed Al-Qahtani, held in Guantanamo and described by the
authorities (like half a dozen other suspects) as “the 20th
hijacker”. By the time his interrogators started using “enhanced
techniques” to extract information from him, Al-Qahtani had been
kept in isolation for three months in a cell permanently flooded
with light. An official memo shows that he “was talking to
nonexistent people, reporting hearing voices, [and] crouching in a
corner of the cell covered with a sheet for hours on end”. He was
abused, exposed to extreme cold and deprived of sleep for a further
54 days of torture and questioning. What useful testimony could be
extracted from a man in this state?
The other possibility is that the men who became involved in armed
conflict after their release had not in fact been involved in any
prior fighting, but were radicalized by their detention. In the
video he made before blowing himself up, Al-Ajmi maintained that he
was motivated by his ill-treatment in Guantanamo. “Twelve thousand
kilometers away from Makkah, I realized the reality of the Americans
and what those infidels want,” he said.
He claimed he was beaten, drugged and “used for experiments” and
that “the Americans delighted in insulting our prayer and Islam and
they insulted the Qur’an and threw it in dirty places.” His lawyer
revealed that his arm had been broken by guards at the camp, who
beat him up to stop him from praying.
The accounts of people released from Guantanamo describe treatment
that would radicalize almost anyone. In his book Five Years of My
Life, published a fortnight ago, Murat Kurnaz maintains that one of
the guards greeted him on his arrival with these words. “Do you know
what the Germans did to the Jews? That’s exactly what we’re going to
do with you.” There were certain similarities.
“I knew a man from Morocco,” Kurnaz writes, “who used to be a ship
captain. He couldn’t move one of his little fingers because of
frostbite. The rest of his fingers were all right. They told him
they would amputate the little finger.
They brought him to the doctor, and when he came back, he had no
fingers left. They had amputated everything but his thumbs.” The
young man — scarcely more than a boy — in the cage next to Kurnaz’s
had just had his legs amputated by American doctors after getting
frostbite in a coalition prison in Afghanistan. The stumps were
still bleeding and covered in pus.
He received no further treatment or new dressings. Every time he
tried to hoist himself up to sit on his pot by clinging to the wire,
a guard would come and hit his hands with a billy-club. Like every
other prisoner, he was routinely beaten by the camp’s Immediate
Reaction Force, and taken away to interrogation cells to be beaten
up some more. Fathers were clubbed in front of their sons, sons in
front of their fathers. The prisoners were repeatedly forced into
stress positions, deprived of sleep and threatened with execution.
As a senior official at the US Defense Intelligence Agency says,
“maybe the guy who goes into Guantanamo was a farmer who got swept
along and did very little. He’s going to come out a fully fledged
jihadist.”
In reading the histories of Guantanamo, and of the kidnappings,
extrajudicial detention and torture the US government (helped by the
United Kingdom) has pursued around the world, two things become
clear. The first is that these practices do not supplement effective
investigation and prosecution; they replace them.
Instead of a process which generates evidence, assesses it and uses
it to prosecute, the US has deployed a process that generates
nonsense and is incapable of separating the guilty from the
innocent. The second is that far from protecting innocent lives,
this process is likely to deliver further atrocities. Even if you
put the ethics of such treatment to one side, it is surely evident
that it makes the world more dangerous.
— The Guardian
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