We shouldn’t be surprised to hear that George Bush dined with a group ofhistorians on Sunday night(1). The president has spent much of his second termpleading with history. But however hard he lobbies the gatekeepers of memory, hewill surely be judged the worst president the United States has ever had.
Even if historians were somehow to forget the illegal war, the mangling ofinternational law, the trashing of the environment and social welfare, thebanking crisis, the transfer of wealth from poor to rich, one image is stampedindelibly on this presidency: the trussed automata in orange jumpsuits. Itportrays a superpower prepared to dehumanise its prisoners, to wrap, blind anddeafen them, to reduce them to mannequins in a place as stark and industrial asa chicken-packing plant. Worse, the government was proud of what it had done. Itwas parading its impunity. It wanted us to know that nothing would stand in itsway: its power was both sovereign and unaccountable.
Three days before Bush arrived in Britain, the US Supreme Court ruled that theinmates at Guantanamo Bay were entitled to contest their detention in thecivilian courts. This is the third time the supreme court has ruled against theprison camp, but on this occasion Bush cannot change the law: the court hasruled that the prisoners’ rights are constitutional.
Symbolically the decision could scarcely be more important. Practically it couldscarcely be less. The Department of Defense can transfer its prisoners to anoubliette in another country, where the Constitution’s writ does not run. Thepublic atrocity of Guantanamo Bay has provided a useful distraction fromsomething even worse: the sprawling system of secret detention camps the US runsaround the world.
We don’t, of course, know much about this programme. Bush first acknowledgedit in September 2006. "Of the thousands of terrorists captured across theworld, only about 770 have ever been sent to Guantanamo."(2) Othersuspects, he said, were being "held secretly" by the CIA. "Manyspecifics of this program, including where these detainees have been held andthe details of their confinement, cannot be divulged." He went on to claimthat all the secret prisoners had now been transferred to Guantanamo Bay.
Several lines of evidence suggest that this claim was false. The CIA appears tohave overseen or controlled, and in some cases still to be running, black sitesin Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, Macedonia, Kosovo, Morocco, Libya, Egypt,Djibouti, Somalia, Ethiopia, Iraq, Jordan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Thailand andpossibly Diego Garcia(3,4,5,6). The US currently appears to be using ships assecret prisons(7). In just two years the CIA ran 283 flights - which the Councilof Europe believes were used for transporting secret prisoners - out of Germanyalone(8). It admits that it possesses 7000 documents about its ghost detentionprogramme(9). Are we really to believe that all this was done for the 14 mentransferred to Guantanamo Bay? In Iraq, the US now admits to holding 22,000prisoners without charge in its own facilities(10), some of whom are known to bekept away from the Red Cross and other visitors(11).
Apart from those moved to Cuba, hardly anyone, so far, has come out of thissystem. At the end of last year, salon.com interviewed Mohamed Bashmilah, whowas arrested and tortured by Jordanian police, handed to the Americans, thenflown to an unknown country in autumn 2003, and held secretly by the CIA untilhe was transferred to Yemeni custody in May 2005(12). He reports that he waskept in a cell about the size of a transit van throughout the 19 months of hisconfinement, without any human contact except during interrogation. The lightsand a source of white noise were left on permanently. Driven mad by isolationand sensory deprivation, he tried to kill himself several times. Eventually,when it became obvious even to the CIA that he had nothing to do with terrorism,he was handed over to the Yemeni government, who held him for another year untilhe was released without charge.
Lawyers for some of the men transferred to Guantanamo Bay claim that, while insecret detention, their clients were left hanging from the ceiling by theirwrists, beaten with electric cables, yanked around on a dog’s leash, chainednaked in a freezing cell and doused with cold water. "The CIA worked peopleday and night for months," one prisoner reports. "Plenty lost theirminds. I could hear people knocking their heads against the walls and doors,screaming their heads off."(13)
Could it be worse than this? Yes. In 2003, a US official admitted to the SundayTelegraph that the CIA was detaining and interrogating children. Discussing twoboys aged seven and nine held in secret detention by the CIA, the officialexplained, "we are handling them with kid gloves. After all, they are onlylittle children, but we need to know as much about their father’s recentactivities as possible. We have child psychologists on hand at all times andthey are given the best of care."(14) According to another prisoner, theboys had already been tortured by Pakistani guards(15). A former CIA officialtold the New Yorker that "every single plan [in the secret detentionprogramme] is drawn up by interrogators, and then submitted for approval to thehighest possible level - meaning the director of the CIA. Any change in the plan- even if an extra day of a certain treatment was added - was signed off by theCIA director."(16)
Never mind detention without trial; this is detention without acknowledgement.When men and women disappear into this system, neither they nor their familiesknow where they are. The Red Cross cannot reach them; they are beyond the scopeof the law. They have been disappeared in the Latin American sense of that word.
Do I need to explain that this treatment breaks just about every article in theGeneva Conventions? Do I need to tell you that - without charges, trials,lawyers, scrutiny or even recognition - it is just as likely to net the innocentas the guilty? In 2006, George Bush maintained that "these aren’t commoncriminals, or bystanders accidentally swept up on the battlefield - we have inplace a rigorous process to ensure those held at Guantanamo Bay belong atGuantanamo."(17) But a new and detailed investigation by the McClatchynewspaper group has found that many of them were indeed either common criminalsor bystanders, or men sold to the authorities in order to settle a feud(18). Whoknows how many innocent people are going out of their minds in the CIA’ssecret prisons today?
Along with its innocent victims, the US government has locked itself into thissystem. As the Justice Department has argued, these prisoners cannot be releasedin case they describe the "alternative interrogation methods" (theeuphemism it uses for torture) the CIA used on them, which could"reasonably be expected to cause extremely grave damage."(19) Likealmost everything Bush has done, this programme promises to backfire. GeorgeBush will be remembered not only for the lives he has broken, but also forsmashing everything he claimed to defend.
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References:
1. Sam Coates and Tom Baldwin, 16th June 2008. Leading historians offerPresident Bush food for thought on writing legacy. The Times.
2. The White House, 6th September 2006. President Discusses Creation of MilitaryCommissions to Try Suspected Terrorists.
3. Dick Marty, 22nd January 2006. Alleged secret detentions in Council of Europemember states. Committeeon Legal Affairs and Human Rights, Council of Europe.
4. Amnesty International, 1st January 2006. "Rendition"and secret detention: A global system of human rights violations.
5. Reprieve and Cageprisoners, 22 March 2007. MassRendition, Incommunicado Detention and Possible Torture of Foreign Nationals inKenya, Somalia and Ethiopia.
6. Dana Priest, 2nd November 2005. CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons. WashingtonPost.
7. Duncan Campbell and Richard Norton-Taylor, 2nd June 2008. US accused ofholding terror suspects on prison ships. The Guardian.
8. Dick Marty, ibid.
9. The Center for Constitutional Rights, 23rd April 2008. CIAAcknowledges It Has More than 7,000 Documents Relating to Secret DetentionProgram, Rendition, and Torture
10. Jim Michaels, 28th May 2008. Military retools detainee releases. USAToday.
11. Amnesty International, 6th March 2006.Iraq: Beyond Abu Ghraib: Detention and torture in Iraq.
12. Mark Benjamin, 14th December 2007. Insidethe CIA’s notorious "black sites".
13. Jane Mayer, 13th August 2007. TheBlack Sites.
14. Olga Craig, 10th March 2003. We have your sons: CIA. Sunday Telegraph.
15. Amnesty International et al, 7th June 2007. Offthe Record: US Responsibility for Enforced Disappearances in the "War onTerror".
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16. Jane Mayer, ibid.
17. The White House, ibid.
18. Tom Lasseter, 15th June 2008. America’sprison for terrorists often held the wrong men.
19. Jane Mayer, ibid.
